Ruminatrix
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Thursday, Apr 24, 2003
Life Gets in the Way Sometimes
Interruptions galore prevent posting: I got a job offer out of the blue. It involves wine sales and there's a lot of backgound research to do. That and other real-world commitments have sharply reduced the time left for posting and reading alike -- it's usually late when I get home. Plus my internal doctor ordered a break from mideast coverage. My hunch is no war with Syria but President Chavez of Venezuela may want to stay on his toes.
I do need to write, so I'll get back to looking outside my window once the film company's giant tractor-trailers move out of the parking lot outside and give me back the view of the five-storey brick wall that lies behind.Then I'll try to keep up with the changing seasons.
Reading Gunter Grass' Crabwalk late at night. The plot has a web hook: revanchist youths post coded messages online, while the real-life holocaust denier Ernst Zundel stirs the pot. But it's the wry Grass humor that keeps me reading, his endless tragi-comedy of the Pomeranian coast. At its heart is the torpedoing of a refugee-laden German liner in January 1945 by a Russian sub. It was by far the worst maritime disaster ever (with over 9000 dead in the ice-cold Baltic). Due to poorly designed life-preservers, corpses floated upside down, an image that haunts one of the few survivors. Yet as a character observes "it still seems as though nothing can top the Titanic, as if the Wilhelm Gustloff had never existed, as if there were no room for another maritime disaster..." Ah, the sweet Godardian victory of Hollywood over history.
Gotta go work. Will lurk even when I can't post.