Eating and reading: A report

The eating begins in earnest just before Halloween and continues through December. Meanwhile, the northern hemisphere cools. One becomes sluggish.

I gained five pounds over Thanksgiving. Seven, the last two weeks.

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Having fallen behind in my reading, I’m trying to get back on pace by reading these short books:

• Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (I read this in high school and again in college)
• John Hersey, Hiroshima (I read this in high school, too)
• C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (I don’t know how many times I’ve read this; I’d forgotten how odd it is when Aslan, Susan, and Lucy frolic with Greek mythic figures – Bacchus, Silenus, and the Maenads – while the chaps are at war)
• Joyce Carol Oates, First Love: A Gothic Tale
• Georges Simenon, The Yellow Dog (my first Maigret novel – only seventy-four to go after this one)

You’d think I’d polish ’em off in one sitting, but that’s not how I do it: I like to drag ’em out.

Shakespeare-wise, I rolled my dice, counted down my table of contents, and landed upon The Winter’s Tale to read next. Doubly appropriate because (a) ’tis (almost) the season and (b) I need something somber after The Merry Wives of Windsor and Much Ado about Nothing.

This is the third straight play in which the fear of being cuckolded fuels the plot. I am beginning to understand, dimly but surely, that this was a big concern in Shakespeare’s time (and in Molière’s, not long after).

Incidentally, here is Sam Bankman-Fried’s notorious criticism of Shakespeare (with special mention of Much Ado). It’s forgivable. He wrote this when he was twenty years old; I believe he was a college sophomore.

And here, the polemical philosopher Michael Huemer takes Bankman-Fried’s side. I do like Huemer, but this isn’t his best moment. He puts too much stock in what he thought of the plays when he read them in high school. (Fashioning my objection after Bankman-Fried: What do the priors tell us about one’s highschool or college self arriving at one’s most judicious possible evaluation of Shakespeare?)

Stay gold, Michael Huemer, stay gold.

To each his own

The chicken-and-beer diet: lose 15 lbs. in 40 days.

I’m not surprised. A half-chicken + Pit-Tatoes® (from Nelson’s) < 400 kcals.

Do you know what else is good? Pollo Gus.

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I read another great little Sciascia novel: To Each His Own (1966), which is as Chronicle-of-a-Death-Foretold-ish as The Day of the Owl. On the evidence of these two shrimpy works I’d say this guy should have been given the Nobel Prize.

“To each his own” is unicuique suum in Latin and a ciascuno il suo in Italian. Reading the book, it helps to know these phrases.

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These volumes aren’t supposed to rest on the same shelf, but Samuel decided to line them up together. They do belong to the same series. (He must not have been able to reach the Locke book.)

I wish he’d organize his books.

Feliz cumple to Pervis Estupiñán who twice assisted Brighton & Hove Albion’s goalscorers today.

In praise of Venus shoes

Well, the goal drought has ended; but, in a way, it continues. I still haven’t scored with the new cleats that I bought this summer. But I did make a rather complicated golazo almost as soon as I took off the cleats and put on Venus shoes, some ten or fifteen minutes before the game’s conclusion. So, my record this summer is: four goals with Venus shoes, in less than one hour; zero goals with cleats worn for hours and hours. I could tell immediately that with Venus shoes I was three times better as a footballer.

Of course, it made all the difference that we were on artificial grass and not on the slippery mud-grass of previous weeks.

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I finished reading the shortest item on my book list: Leonardo Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl. Friends, this author oozes intelligence. This book is on a par with, if not better than, García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. A man is killed by the mafia; the subsequent investigation is narrated not only with logical exactitude – this is a police procedural, after all – but also, occasionally, by means of wry dialog between shadowy, unnamed men of power. Sicily is a morass of subservience and paranoia, with inhabitants (one hardly can call them citizens) who nonetheless make their meanings clear through innuendo. Hilariously, they adorn this innuendo with affirmations of Catholic piety. This book is what I wish I were clever enough to write.