How we grew each other's hearts and schemes of home

[sovay]

I got up early this morning for a COVID-19 test so that I can make my doctor's appointment on Friday. I would prefer not to have to see a doctor at all, but once again it turns out that being kept from regular access to medical care is bad for me. I am still not exactly sleeping and it means I'm not doing much of anything else except working, although I did eat some very nice Taiwanese food this afternoon and discover to my surprise that a pair of jeans I bought off the internet actually more or less fit. I have moved on to watching the 2005 BBC Bleak House, which I remember my father highly recommending to me at a point in time when I just couldn't picture anyone but Denholm Elliott as John Jarndyce. I am in fact enjoying it. I may also be maxing out my capacity to watch TV. I'm treating it as an experiment. While visiting my mother for purposes of honeycake-baking earlier this week, I ran into the neighbor with whom I had discussed the radio telescope I built in high school and Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud (1957); this time he wanted to know if I had read Edwin Abbott Abbott's Flatland (1884) and then he asked what sort of science I did nowadays. I had to explain that I am not professionally a scientist any more than I am professionally a classicist or professionally a musician or any of the other things I seem to look like to people until they get close enough, although I did at least remember to tell him that I am professionally a writer. I know part of it is the beginning of the academic year, which I am starting to feel I will have to be actually dead not to feel like a ghost-shiver from the wrong universe over. (I hope that one is less plague-ridden and/or on fire. Somebody should get to be.) I know the sleeplessness never helps and I have been rummaging around in parts of my head that were likely to produce this reaction. I think I'd feel a lot better if I could write a poem about it. But for that I would have to be healthier and sleep more, which is where we came in.

Comments

[skygiants]

I will also be curious about your response to 2005 Bleak House! The book is one of my favorite Dickenses, for my sins, but I tried to watch the miniseries in 2005 with a friend and we didn't have the attention span for it -- I might do better with it now.

[sovay]

The book is one of my favorite Dickenses, for my sins, but I tried to watch the miniseries in 2005 with a friend and we didn't have the attention span for it -- I might do better with it now.

I can't promise how you'll feel about it as a version of one of your favorite books, but in terms of attention span, I think if you can handle kdramas, you can totally handle a 15-episode Bleak House. (I am seven episodes in and only prevented from binge-watching by the technological bottleneck between me and my generous greymarket source.) I am happy to give opinions on random things that have struck me so far, so long as you keep in mind that I have not read the novel or seen the earlier version in ten years. In terms of where we are in the narrative, Johnny Vegas just spontaneously combusted.