Some Words

Thanksgiving came and went in a long drawn out night of wine and turkey. It was a good time, though the girlfriend was in Iowa. In the two days since, I’ve felt, not entirely hungover, but as if my body wasn’t good at putting itself together anymore. No headache, though there was that stupid feeling you get when you drank a lot, the one where you just know you’re about two steps behind where you normally would be. Muscles have been knotting up though, in weird ways. Yesterday my left side had that tingly pinched nerve feeling that starts around your collar bone and seems to radiate out, all the way to your eye. Today I had more or less the same feeling on my right side. It’s a little uncomfortable bringing my arm up to the height of my computer. I think I must have slept on one side wrong, and then slept wrong on the other side the next night to compensate.

I finished reading Hermit in Paris today. It’s a collection of Calvino interviews and musings. He never got around to writing an autobiography, and this was put out by his wife as a stand in. I think it could have been shorter, indeed should have been shorter. About half of it was worth reading, with the other half either being repetitious, or tedious. She says in the introduction that it is not meant as literature, but as a way for the average reader to get closer to Calvino. Even if it’s not literature, he would have been better served by not printing everything he’d written about his trip to America. It’s pretty clear that large portions of the book were not meant to be read by others, and some of it might not have even been used for an autobiography had Calvino gotten around to it. Near the end is some nice material, and a few things scattered here and there, but overall it was dissatisfying, thought I don’t entirely know what would have satisfied me.

Replacing it among the books I am reading, is Norwegian Wood, by Murakami. Reading the opening of the book created in my a weird mangled memory. I recall my friend Brad, who speaks and reads Japanese, reading it on a plane, but I am pretty sure that we were never on a plane when he was talking about the book with me. The book, however, starts on a plane, with the main character wearily flying into Germany. Given that the novel, at least as far into it as I have gotten, deals with how memories are fleeting and unreliable, I thought that this was an appropriate opening to my reading experience.