Just in case anyone is under the impression that I am using
this enforced seclusion to reconsider the lesser Greeks or finally finish
reading Ὰ la recherche du temps perdu,
let me just say that I have, on this computer, played a total of 6087 games of
FreeCell. I have a winning percentage of
97.4 and for some time I have been striving to raise it to 97.5, but a sacattering of losses has slowed my progress.
Now, back to my lecture for tomorrow on chapters XI-XIV of Capital.
10 comments:
I’m reading Peter Green’s “The Greco-Persian Wars,” a lesser Englishman writing about the greater Greeks. (Green is “lesser” only in the sense that I’m comparing him to Herodotus.) Meanwhile, I have ordered “Middlemarch” from our local bookstore. I keep hearing how great a novel it is, so this may be the time to give it a try. I’ve read very little 19th century English literature. In fact, I think the only things I’ve read in the field since “Silas Marner” and “David Copperfield” in high school are Trollop’s “Barchester” novels. Twenty or 30 years ago, for some reason that I can’t recall, I read the first one and was soon addicted.
As for addiction, that’s Free Cell and Spider Solitaire. I bought a new computer in January and had to start my record all over again. On my old computer I had worked up to 98.8% in Free Cell after concluding that all deals were all solvable. Once I realized that, I never gave up—just deleted multiple moves and tried something else until I solved it. I was aiming at 99%, but the thing died before I got there. On the new computer, I can pick the level I want to play at—and they warn that random deals might not be solvable, so I fluctuate between “hard” and “expert” and have a perfect record for 211 games. Spider Solitaire is something else altogether: I’m only at 44% for 1,043 games.
The time I’ve wasted on those games! I must get back to Mr. Green, and eventually try Middlemarch.
If you've never been able to finish Proust (I never have myself), you're not going to finish him in such an anxiety-ridden situation.
I just read Kate Kirkpatrick's biography of Simone de Beauvoir, Becoming Beauvoir and am now re-reading the Second Sex. Rereading is going back to old friend and that helps in such tense moments.
Kirkpatrick shows that de Beauvoir was not as much Mrs. Sartre, intellectually and in terms of human relationships, as the conventional wisdom assumes.
I've never played computer games. I tried chess with the computer for a while, but I'm too clumsy at it for it to be pleasurable.
@ D Palmeter
'Middlemarch' is indeed great. Once you get into it you'll probably devour it in a couple of days. I originally wrote a longer comment but Blogger ate it so I'll leave it at that.
Proust’s brother once wrote: "The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time." We have our opportunity now. Every cloud ....
Ulysses was Seamus Heaney's desert island book. I've read it several times and was planning on doing so again in mid-May after my OLLI semester ended. (Joyce gets smarter everytime I read it.) I'll probably go ahead with that, but Middlemarch--whenever it arrives--will be first.
In general, I have no use for 19th century British literature. It's too moralistic and hence, false. I prefer the French, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and above all the Russians, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, but if I had to reread one 19th century British novel, I'd pick Middlemarch. I think that you'll enjoy it.
Supposedly it's "believed" but not "known" that every possible hand of freecell can be won. (Or, at least this was so many years ago.) At one point I had delusions of a brute-force proof, by actually winning every hand. That was silly, but I did play a lot. My wife got tired of it, deleted it from my lap top, and I don't think I've played a game since. In a way, that's a good example of how you can get pretty fixated on something and then, for small reasons, just stop.
S. Wallerstein - have you read Gorky at all? I haven't read much - the first volume of his autobiography, and some of his journals. But - it was just shockingly good. For some reason I always thought I'd not like him, but was really interested in him as a person, so when I finally read him, I was blown away. I'd highly recommend him. (His discussion of his interactions with Tolstoy in his journals are amusing.)
Matt,
No, I've never read Gorky. Thanks for the suggestion.
By the way, for those who like Russian literature, I'd recommend Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman. It's a huge, but readable novel centered around the battle of Stalingrad. It shows all the aspects of Soviet life, with so many characters that you need an edition with a list of characters to follow it, ranging from loyal Communists to outright critics of the regime as well as many just struggling to survive the horrors of war and the Nazi occupation. Grossman was Jewish and the book shows not only Jews in Nazi death camps, but also severe, although not letal anti-semitism in the Soviet system.
Grossman was a Soviet war correspondent, so he witnessed the battle of Stalingrad himself.
The book was banned during his lifetime: not only were his manuscripts seized, but the typewriter ribbon which he wrote the book with was confiscated just in case. However, the KGB did not find all the copies and one was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in Switzerland after Grossman's death.
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