Journal of a Sabbatical

July 16, 1999

another heat wave

Today's Starting Pitcher: Bret Saberhagen

Days to Konishiki live and in person: 8

Days to Budapest: 15

Today's Reading: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, Before the Dawn by Shimazaki Toson

The heat and humidity are back. So is my headache. And the fatigue hasn't left yet. Every time I hear the weatherman say tomorrow's temperature will be between 95 F and 100 F I shudder.

It's 93 F out there now (about 8:00 PM) and Pajama Woman is outside working on her yard. Yesterday she dug up all the hideous weeds that grew up in the space in front of my kitchen window when she had the beautiful rose bush and the scotch pine tree taken down. Then she dug a four inch trench the width of the yard and hauled the dirt to the dumpster in shopping bags. Now she's watering the dirt and picking out stones in preparation for putting in a white flagstone patio. She told me yesterday that she's going to put a grill right under my kitchen window and have family barbecues. This would only be moderately frightening were it not for the fact that she is one of 15 siblings. Even assuming only half of them are married and only half of those have children, that's one heck of a family barbecue. I asked her to give me advance notice of these events so I can plan to be in Rhode Island or Hungary or Nova Scotia or someplace when hordes of her relatives are gathered outside my window.

Me, I ain't gonna do no yard work today. Nosirree. It's too hot, we're having an ozone alert, and the mold spore count is off the charts. My metamorphosis into a mold spore is nearing completion.

So what did I do all day? I read many more pages of Before the Dawn and yet still feel like I will never finish it. I'm up to page 493. Only 266 pages to go! The imperial army has taken Edo (Tokyo) and the shogunate has been thoroughly defeated. Change is sweeping through the lonely post station where the main character toils away longing to join his fellow scholars in restoring antiquity but stuck there by loyalty to his family. I'm back to enjoying the story again instead of laboring to understand all the historical details, of which there are many. This novel is at its best when it focuses on the daily lives of the main characters and how the sweep of historical events affects them, and it drags when explaining the relationships among all the forces of history, philosophy, and diplomacy that drove the events. Shimazaki Toson does manage to create a complete world that absorbs me some of the time, but I haven't been sucked in enough to pull an allnighter because I couldn't put the book down. It's eminently put-down-able. That said, I do want to finish it to find out whether Hanzo (the main character) ever gets to join his fellow National Scholars working for the emperor or whether he lives out his life frustrated by family obligations in the mountains. And I want recipes for some of the foods his wife is always cooking for visiting dignitaries - roasted walnut dumplings just sound soooo good.

I tackled a few more pages of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon too, but found reading about the ruined state of Old Serbia (Kosovo) on the Eve of W.W.II too much to deal with while hearing on the radio about the ongoing conflicts in Kosovo (Old Serbia) on the eve of the millennium. I think I need "Kosovo for Dummies" or the "Idiot's Guide to the Balkans". I noticed that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is on the list of 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century, which I guess means whoever decides such things thinks highly of it. When I told QI that I was reading it he said "she's a Serbophile you know". He's right. A lot of it is a hymn of praise to Serb culture but it's also an amazing portrait of a place and time I'm curious about.

Oh, and I spent a lot of time fooling with the TV and found that I can sort of get WB56 to come in if I turn it toward the wall and then fine tune the power antenna. Of course I'd need a mirror to watch it at that angle, but this is progress.