Reading: All the Names

Moving: walked a few miles and did 100 crunches! Stop the presses!

Garden: contemplated the remaining leaves

Watching: "Undercurrent"

Listening: Christmas music

8 December 2002: José Saramago

I read and forgot José Saramago's title Blindness on a list of top world books of the century. I finally read it because its character the Dog of Tears showed up on a list of most memorable characters. And I read it and thought it was really good. His hatred of the simple period and dialogue tags--at least Faulkner divides dialog into individual paragraphs, doesn't he?--makes him a little tough to read, but you just have to roll with it: dialogue as stream instead of give and take.

Apparently I got over that glitch enough to read Baltazar and Blimunda, which was enjoyable. If it's brilliant I didn't see how but I would believe whatever is said in its praise.

And now All the Names. The common theme among the books, as I see it, is that the characters function in worlds they do not understand. In Blindness, well, everyone was blind; Baltazar and Blimunda are peasants playing their roles in a larger drama they do not know; and Senhor Joseé is a bureaucrat in a Kafkaesque Brazil. Was it in Dostoyevsky's "Overcoat" that a copyist brings his work home with him, not because he's behind but for the pleasure of duplicating his effort?

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RDC says "Once More with Feeling" torturous but he doesn't even like "West Side Story" let alone "Moulin Rouge." I've been warming up to Spike as well as Rocket Romano in the past weeks, and his "Let Me Rest in Peace" was almost as good as all those body shots in I think "Smashed." And RDC might deny it, but he's the one who realized that Anya really wouldn't like DIA (bunnies in not just the parking lots but the garages too).

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I've been listening to Christmas music, easily eliminating some stuff and realizing how many carols I still need. I am certain of some: Sting's "Gabriel's Message," Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," Mel Tormé's "Christmas Song," Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," and Judy Garland's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." (Note that these are all pop, Sting's by virtue of his voice if not the song itself: I still need traditional arrangements of traditional songs.) RDC commented on the Rightness of Judy Garland's voice in the first notes of her song and I reminded him that it was the one high point of the chafing "Meet Me in St. Louis" (neither of us is much into musicals, really). That and the little girl declaring "I'm going to bring all my dolls, even the dead ones."

I figured the Revels would have what I wanted, but in their samples their production quality sounds just dreadful. I went through 30 pages, ten or more albums per page, at Amazon today, listening to samples from all over the map.