I got into town today, went to the Union, had lunch there, and enjoyed the general grayness that was outside from within the bright confines of the Lakefront Cafe while I ate a burger and worked on my computer.
Later in the afternoon I took a break, walked up State Street, and ended up, as usual, at Fair Trade, where I took a seat in the back corner, plugged in, and let the laptop do its thing while I finished reading The Egyptologist by Arther Phillips. The Egyptologist follows two narratives, that of Ralph Trilipush, a young, dandy-ish egyptologist engaged to the daughter of an American businessman and working on an excavation in the fall of 1922 near Luxor, and, thirty years later, the letters/memoirs of an Australian private eye, Harry Ferrell, whose old paternity case turns into a murder mystery, which leads him, back in 1922, to Trilipush, and these two first person narratives, told through letters and journals, have distinctive voices, conflict, and in the end say more about their narrators than they do about the events unfolding around them. For that one must read between the lines; much of what one might call “the plot” is implicit.
After Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which I read late last fall after getting it for my birthday, this is the most entertaining book I’ve read in recent memory. Especially in the abstract, at times in reality. “Special Topics …” I couldn’t put down; as for The Egyptologist, I should have treated it such, but I did put it down, a lot, reading it only on the bus or in coffee shops, and so until yesterday I hadn’t developed much of a flow or rhythm with it.
Afterward I doodled a bit (and doodled while drawing as a diversion) and then walked toward the Overture Center, from which I caught a #6 home. Tim Schaab was onboard; I said hello.
At home I watched episode 9, season 3, of Doctor Who, “Family of the Blood” or such, the conclusion to a two-parter that has the Doctor and Martha Jones holing up in 1913 England at a small boys’ military preparatory school, hiding from this “Family,” which the Doctor can’t outright kill. But the members of the Family have a short lifespan, and if they don’t eat a Time Lord soon they’ll die, etc., so Martha and the Doctor decide to wait them out. But to do so they put the Doctor’s “Doctorness” in a “watch” and turn his body completely human, and while in this new identity as John Smith he falls in love with a human woman … it’s a sad story, and at the end we see the power of the Doctor mythically portrayed.
Now I’ll watch the next two episode, “Blink” and “Utopia.”
As for music … very little accomplished today. A bit of The Police. Nothing remarkable.
