2025 Disneyland Trip #48 (7/5/25)
Jul. 5th, 2025 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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I have finally successfully got my head around when the local supermarket reduces the prices on its pastries, which means that we are now well-supplied for doing a batch of pistachio croissant strata to get us most of the way through the coming week. It is not going to be a tomorrow (Sunday) morning breakfast, though, because we have half a cherry clafoutis from this morning, made using allotment cherries.
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I am sodden with sleep. I have had two or three bad nights, tossing & turning, and then giving up on the whole idea about five. But last night I slept long, and I slept fathoms deep, without dreaming. It was glorious. Today I have been befuddled with sleep all day, and disinclined to doingness, and about 4pm I surrendered and had a lovely dormouse nap on the sofa. Sleep is such a pleasure.
I am now sitting on the sofa surrounded by a litter of books. I want to tidy up a little (because scattered around we have paint samples, and bike lights, and socks, and charging cables, and shopping lists, and flea treatments for cat, and tea towels, and a tin of black beans) but there's nothing which needs to be done urgently. No shoulds.
Himself is cooking, and I am pleasantly hungry and looking forward to eating. Tomorrow I will go shopping and buy fruit. I have been offered a beachcomber cocktail. Life is sweet.
Is it OK to read Infinite Jest in public? Why the internet hates ‘performative reading’
You know, I was completely unaware that 'The Internet' hated upon this (whatever it is) until I came across this article and I think we are probably well into a realm similar to journo constructing a phenomenon on the basis of '6 people I spoke to in the wine-bar last week'.
Or maybe I just don't do TikTok and am missing this, but in my experience, few forms of social media are entire monoliths, what?
Why shouldn't people read in public? They're not doing it AT other people, honestly.
Can't help thinking that those who get aerated at people reading on public transport or while sitting quietly in a restaurant or coffee-shop are very likely those who think you should 'rawdog' long planeflights, sad gits.
Okay, these days I am pretty much always reading on ereader when out and about, so nobody can see what I'm reading. But back in the day I have read a lot of things that I daresay some miserable so-and-so would have considered 'performative', like Remembrance of Things Past on the Tube.
And among other things Marx and Rousseau on the train when I was commuting in from suburban Surrey.
Which phase of my life I was reminded of by a review headed 'A darker side of Lawrence Durrell' - I was not aware that there was any other side, actually - I habitually got in the same compartment of the same train each morning and there was the same young man making his way veeeeery slowwwwly through the volumes of The Alexandria Quartet. Months and months of Balthazar.
Bonuses (oh hey this practice is working): pink gooseberries -- plus yoghurt and hazelnuts, but also by themselves. tomatoes setting fruit. Murderbot novellas. fiddling with pens as fidget. The Fan made this afternoon's 28°C (or at least the bits of it I was awake for) much less unpleasant. A has just set the bat detector up and it's Detected A Bat!
I have been reading poetry this evening, just skimming, just casual but good and wow such a long time since I've done this. So here's a poem. Source poetry foundation
The Magnificent Frigatebird,
by Ada Limón
What I read
Finished The Islands of Sorrow and it is a bit slight, definitely one for the Simon Raven completist I would say - a number of the tales feel like outtakes from the later novels.
Decided not for me: Someone You Can Build a Nest In.
Started Val McDermid, The Grave Tattoo (2006), a non-series mystery. Alas, I was not grabbed - in terms of present-day people encounter Historical Mystery, this did not ping my buttons - a) could not quite believe that a woman studying at a somewhat grotty-sounding post-92 uni in an unglam part of London would have even considered doing a PhD on Wordsworth (do people anywhere even do this anymore) let alone be publishing a book on him b)a histmyst involving Daffodil Boy and a not so much entirely lost but *concealed unpublished in The Archives* manuscript of Epic Poem, cannot be doing with. (Suspect foul libel upon generations of archivists at Dove Cottage, just saying.) Gave up.
Read in anticipation of book group next week, Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones (1962).
Margery Sharp, Britannia Mews (1946) (query, was there around then a subgenre of books doing Victoria to now via single person or family?). Not a top Sharp, and I am not sure whether she is doing an early instance of Ace Representation, or just a Stunning Example of Victorian Womanhood (who is, credit is due, no mimsy).
Because I discovered it was Quite A Long Time since I had last read it, Helen Wright, A Matter of Oaths (1988).
Also finished first book for essay review, v good.
Finally came down to a price I consider eligible, JD Robb, Bonded in Death (In Death #60) (2025). (We think there were points where she could have done with a Brit-picker.)
On the go
Barbara Hambly, Murder in the Trembling Lands (Benjamin January #21) (2025). (Am now earwormed by 'The Battle of New Orleans' which was in the pop charts in my youth.)
Up next
Very probably, Zen Cho, Behind Frenemy Lines, which I had forgotten was just about due.
***
O Peter Bradshaw, nevairr evairr change:
David Cronenberg’s new film is a contorted sphinx without a secret, an eroticised necrophiliac meditation on grief, longing and loss that returns this director to his now very familiar Ballardian fetishes.