Monday October 8, 2007 5:50 am Lennox Head, NSW Australia
A. Morning Musings
5:50 am
My birding database is now up to date. But I would still like to add some photos to these web pages. I will need to sip on my coffee as I begin to think about the day in front of me.
One idea would be to keep my Moleskin notebook near me and make a note of each bird I see during the day.
| Immediate |
Description |
Time |
| Literature |
Complete "The Untouchable" by John Banville |
2 hr |
| Literature |
Read "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" |
1 hr |
| Literature |
Read "First Love" by Ivan Turgenev |
1 hr |
C. Actual Learning Activities
9:00 am
I sat outside on the balcony and simply watched the ocean and the birds for an hour. A truly great way to begin the day. Here is my tally of the birds:
- Crested Pigeon - >5
- Red-backed Fairy-wren - 1
- Australian White Ibis - 1
- Laughing Kookaburra - 1
- Noisy Miner - >5
- Australian Magpie - 2
These were all birds that I have seen regularly while here.
2:00 PM
I have completed reading "The Untouchable" by John Banville. The man can write. It is a fascinating read where very little actually happens, but it does give a nice sense of what it really was like to be a spy in England in the 1950's to the 1980's. Here are a few passages that I particularly enjoyed:
- "... they had some ... blurred photographs of me ... cannot even remember them being taken - apt verb that, applied to photography: the savages are right, it is part of one's soul that is being taken away." [p. 6]
- and so I continue to take photos ...
- "In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind." [p. 28]
- I have often said this very thing over the last 20 years (but not often before then)
- "It was all selfishness, of course; we did not care a damn about the world, much as we might shout about freedom and justice and the plight of the masses. All selfishness." [p. 47]
- "Why should there not be order in human affairs? Throughout history the tyranny of the individual had brought nothing but chaos and butchery." [p. 48]
- "Anyway, of all our idealogical exemplars, I always secretely preferred Bakunin, so impetuous, disreputable, fierce and irresonsible compared to stolid, hairy-handed Marx." [p. 48]
- Now to find out more about Bakunin
- "I always admired in particular his intellectual annihilation of Proudhon, whose petit-bourgeois post-Hegelianism and country-bumbkin faith in the essential goodness of the little man Marx held up to cruel and exhaustive ridicule." [p. 49]
- I will try to find this. I have always maintained that same principle of the essential goodness of the little man. It is only those who wish to dominate that concern me.
- "I must not attempt to impose retrospective significance on what we were and did." [p. 56]
- I bought a book last week, "Dylan on Dylan", that contains interviews taken over the span of Dylan's life. That is surely one way to avoid falling into the trap that Banville notes.
- "I do not think I can continue to call this a journal, for it is certainly more than a record of my days, which, anyway, now that the furore has died down, are hardly distinquishable one from another. Call it a memoir, then; a scrapbook of memories. Or go the whole hog and call it an autobiography." [p. 57]
- And what should I call this web site?
- "There is a stage of drunkenness when all at once one seems to step with startling, with laughable, ease through a door that all night one had been struggling in vain to open. On the other side all is light and definition and the calm of certitude." [p. 86]
- "What have I done, to be so reviled, in a nation of traitors, who daily betray friends, wives, children tax inspectors?" [p. 104]
- Is it the guilty who are most upset to see others who are also guilty?
- "An aphorism: Kitsch is to art as physics is to mathematics - its technology." [p. 124]
- "I have always been fascinated by the hunger for documentation shared by all great institutions, especially those run by supposed men of action ..." [p. 208]
- "boeuf en daube" [p. 210]
- I recall this recipe from "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf. I also feel strangely motivated to begin trying a few new recipes while in Australia.
- "This is the fundamental fact of artistic creation, the putting in place of something where otherwise there would be nothing. (Why did he paint it? - Because it was not there.)" [p. 343]
- "... reciting Blake aloud ... The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." [p. 401]
I really do enjoy going back over the passages that I have noted with a mark in the margin. For me this is much more satisfying than trying to write a brief synopsis or an analysis of the story.
8:00 PM
We are having a fairly good thunderstorm at the moment. Time to shut down the electrical outlets until the morning.
