Oedipa Maas
Another storm this morning. No complaints. Five out of five stars. Good excuse for a lazy morning in bed.
Later I had a 40 minute post-shower zone out, sitting naked on the edge of my bed. Post-coital loose limbs plus the effects of a muscle relaxer (high pain levels all week). I watched the rain fall on my garden; droplets gathering in the web of an orb-weaver. This somehow became reading two chapters of a book while listening to music before finally getting dressed.
I’ve read something like 120 books so far this year. Most of these are ‘vacation reads’ - light, brainless stuff. My doctors have been on me to destress for a while, and apparently this does the trick. Not sure if it’s improving my pain levels, but it helps in other ways, and I figure it’s better than watching tv.
I’m also slowly reading through other things, books that need to be savored and/or thought over. I’m about halfway through The Late Americans. Continuing to work through Planet Funny, which has been incredibly interesting. Not just the history of comedy but the cultural and political impacts. And I’m still in the process re-reading The Marriage Plot.
I purchased a used copy of The Crying of Lot 49 online about a month ago that I keep trying to read, my old copy having gone missing. The new copy was supposed to be “used-in good condition” but it’s marked and annotated beyond recognition, and I can’t make sense of it. It’s become distracting to the point I can’t read the book, and I guess I’ll need to order a different copy. Perhaps I’ll begin to believe that all of the nonsense annotations are part of a large conspiracy and I am destined to become a modern Oedipa Maas.
This reminds me that in Modern Grammar my senior year of college we diagrammed every sentence of The War of the Worlds. Every single sentence. And I loved that class, if for no other reason than there was a definitive system, an absolute right way of doing things, which was very different than sitting through hours of highly subjective art critiques.
I can’t stop thinking about a lyric in the Boygenius song “Leonard Cohen”: I might like you less now that you know me so well. I wish I didn’t relate so much.
This all seems like a divergence from my more recent posts, but I think I felt like rambling a little bit today.
6:30 p.m. - 2023-07-16