Saturday 8:37 p.m.
I suppose everything this year will be much the same as ever. I will try to give everything up and fail. I will try to pay off my debts and fail. I will try not to hope that the secret agent will get me a book published and he won't.
This should be imagined with the Jaw theme in the background. That's the bliss creeping up. The bliss is always a banker. The meditations are going to keep working.
Had a intimation of mortality when the Domestic Bliss got me a David Attenborough box set collection for Xmas. My deathbed fantasy has been lying in the bed, smacked out of my brain, staring at David Attenborough on the telly, and doing whatever bliss I can under the circumstances. The telly arrived about a year or so ago. Now, the David Attenborough DVDs. When she says she's going to buy a sofa that folds down into a bed for the living room (where the giant telly is!), then I'll know the jig's up. Bound to be soon enough.
I went out for a short run today, the first since we ran down to Cramond. A wee blizzard hit me as I came back through Inverleith Park. What a wonderful climate we have here in Chilly Jockoland! Obviously, if it's a beautiful bloody day every morning when you open up the curtains, you are going to suffer from soft belly moral malaise like they do downunder and in the bongo bongo. Ice warriors, so we are, Jack! Ice warriors!
10:09 p.m.
In response to a comment, here's a bit of Charles Lamb. There's an internety typo certainly after "exlaimed". Do we need some punctuation there? Here's a bit of Charles Lamb from about 1812 or so.
Of all sounds of all bells--(bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven)--most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected--in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal colour; nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary, when he exclaimed
I saw the skirts of the departing Year.
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5 comments:
I say!
I think it's a case of: try, try, and try again. Or possibly: try, try and try again. What's you opinion about the second comma? Could you check with Alison?
In your previous-but-one post, the new gulag certainly looks like something from the Eastern Block before the Wall came down. I presume the architect was sacked?
MM III
Mingin'! Of course, the architect was given some award. That's what always happens! It's a cover up! The establishment ... then gives itself an award!As far as the comma is concerned, even in my day after 17 years of education, I couldn't figure this out when I started off in my career of being a famous author. Do you put a comma before an "and", I asked my wee brother? (He got an A for his English!) He said you could, but you probably shouldn't. Now, I surmise that if you know all the rules and how it should be done, you can fung around in there and become Ernest Hemingway, who probably invented modern writing. You can start sentences with "But" now and that might be because of Ernest. There are two schools maybe here. The one that says you should punctuate properly ... but no one knows how to do that anymore. Christopher Isherwood was probably the last flowering of that. It think it might be called ... I can't remember now. But you use everything and have huge, beautifully balanced sentences. God, I wish I could get educated again. We got Charles Lamb at school. Augustinian punctuation? I can't remember the name. With that kind of punctuation, you don't have computers. You have a lot of time to think. You've got to get out of a sentence of maybe sixty words in the middle of a perfectly balanced paragraph, which is a great paragraph followed by many, many more. So we don't do that anymore. When we got more paper, you could do it easier and didn't have to ruminate so much. The other school, and it's really the same as the first school, is about breath. When do you have to breathe? Or stop? Or hold? How long for? So you can do punctuation with that, I think. Breathing. If you can combine the first school with the second school... you've got another school! But it's all the same. It's about rhythm and heartbeat. Also, about hypnotising folk. So that they can't stop. If you have to stop because of the punctuation and re-read, that's no good. It shouldn't all that clever either. Just clever enough. Fight Club. Lullaby. Kurt Vonnegut. So, in summary, I would say that whether or not you put in a comma will not affect the universe as such, but may impact on your happiness a little. So put in the second comma because some folk notice if it's not there. Hope this helps. Hotboy
Rather a soft belly moral malaise than a soft whatsit.
PS As a boarding school bavarian, I usually punctuate perfectly, but Mingers' question has me stumped.
Albert? Don't you start going on about creekit! Hotboy
Sorry about that, it's infectious.
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