Thursday, September 20, 2007
Senior moments
Very into various oral slips at the moment. Word transpositions are the most common. Called spoonerisms, I believe, after some Oxford don who had the same complaint, so maybe I am in good company. More worryingly, starting to find it takes a noticeable time to generate a sentence. One knows what one wants to say in some sense, but turning it into a speech act is taking a bit of time. One sometimes gives up and says something else, something else which is more accessible for one reason or another. Not something I was aware of when younger - lets see how much worse it gets before I stop noticing!
Into Joyce this week, at least at one remove. That is to say I am reading about Joyce rather than reading the man himself. Perhaps by way of a warm up act. Prompted by the purchase of what turns out to be the standard biography (by one Ellmann) of the man from a charity shop in Kingston for the princely sum of £2.49. Well made book from the US - where the standards in such matters seem to be rather higher than here. Same with their clothes so maybe it is just a matter of their being a lot richer than us. But I am also skimming a book about books about Joyce - which tells me that Ellmann commits the crime of passing off stories about Joyce as fact when in fact he has just adapted the relevant incident from one of Joyce's books - which it seems are packed full of recognisable material from his own life and times. So he rehashes a anecdote from one of Joyce's books and serves it up as if it came from some independant source. This might be a good way of achieving a coherent vision of the man, but is it the right way to the truth? Clearly plenty of life left yet in the Joyce industry. When you get tired of chewing over the man himself, there are plenty of chewers to get your teeth into. Shakespeare seems to be a magnet for the same sort of thing. Price of fame I suppose.
Invented a new soup yesterday which went down very well. Take two pints of water and add a chicken stock cube (Knorr). Add some butter. Add some coarsely sliced organic carrots, washed not peeled. Boil for a bit. Add some finely sliced white cabbage. Boil for a bit. Add some sliced mushrooms - fresh ones rather than the ones on the discount shelf after the weekend. Result was very good. The catch would be that it would not stand very well. The vegetables would go soggy and the whole thing would go a bit flat.
Bicycle gears starting to pay the price of being so cunning and so numerous. That is to say the gear changing is not quite as miraculously smooth as it was when the bike was new a year ago. And I can't get onto the third drive wheel at all. If any more is involved than fiddling with the tension of the two gear change cables at the gear end I shall be in deep water. Haven't got a clue how to do anything to the cunning gear levers which have been built into the brakes. I haven't even found a way in yet. Bring back 5 gear bikes with a gear stick on the frame which one can get at - out of my 21 gears I use three on a regular basis and two more on an occasional basis - three plus two making five.
Into Joyce this week, at least at one remove. That is to say I am reading about Joyce rather than reading the man himself. Perhaps by way of a warm up act. Prompted by the purchase of what turns out to be the standard biography (by one Ellmann) of the man from a charity shop in Kingston for the princely sum of £2.49. Well made book from the US - where the standards in such matters seem to be rather higher than here. Same with their clothes so maybe it is just a matter of their being a lot richer than us. But I am also skimming a book about books about Joyce - which tells me that Ellmann commits the crime of passing off stories about Joyce as fact when in fact he has just adapted the relevant incident from one of Joyce's books - which it seems are packed full of recognisable material from his own life and times. So he rehashes a anecdote from one of Joyce's books and serves it up as if it came from some independant source. This might be a good way of achieving a coherent vision of the man, but is it the right way to the truth? Clearly plenty of life left yet in the Joyce industry. When you get tired of chewing over the man himself, there are plenty of chewers to get your teeth into. Shakespeare seems to be a magnet for the same sort of thing. Price of fame I suppose.
Invented a new soup yesterday which went down very well. Take two pints of water and add a chicken stock cube (Knorr). Add some butter. Add some coarsely sliced organic carrots, washed not peeled. Boil for a bit. Add some finely sliced white cabbage. Boil for a bit. Add some sliced mushrooms - fresh ones rather than the ones on the discount shelf after the weekend. Result was very good. The catch would be that it would not stand very well. The vegetables would go soggy and the whole thing would go a bit flat.
Bicycle gears starting to pay the price of being so cunning and so numerous. That is to say the gear changing is not quite as miraculously smooth as it was when the bike was new a year ago. And I can't get onto the third drive wheel at all. If any more is involved than fiddling with the tension of the two gear change cables at the gear end I shall be in deep water. Haven't got a clue how to do anything to the cunning gear levers which have been built into the brakes. I haven't even found a way in yet. Bring back 5 gear bikes with a gear stick on the frame which one can get at - out of my 21 gears I use three on a regular basis and two more on an occasional basis - three plus two making five.
# posted by Jim @ 4:25 AM 
