Negative capability

I've been experiencing some pain in my mouth lately. Not all the time but intermittently. A dull aching throb on the lower left side of the jaw. Sometimes it's felt like a tooth thing, and other times like a jaw thing. Happily I have good dental coverage at my place of employment. I think it's a great thing to have teeth, and I would like to keep mine as long as possible.

Well, I went into to see Buzz today. Yes, my dentist's name really is Buzz. X-rays did not show any decay inside the tooth, no withering of the root. Yay. A day without a root canal is my kind of day.

There didn't seem to be any problem with nearby or neighboring fillings, either. Some of my fillings are getting up there in age - a lot of them would be elegible to the President of the United States, say. I've been told that in a few years I should expect to have to get a number of them replaced. Which is just another reason for me to keep working, I suppose.

Buzz's diagnosis was that I clenching my jaw, which seems a little peculiar because I'm not generally a clenched-jaw kind of guy. But I believed him. An upper molar and a lower molar on the back left side were grating against one another - just enough, just frequently enough to cause me noticeable discomfortable on an occasional basis. The situation called for a minor of drilling, he said: just enough to even the bite and relieve the stress. And that's what he did in my mouth this afternoon. Just a few seconds of BZZZZZZZZZZZZ with one of those peculiar instruments. No anaesthetic! "This won't hurt at all." And I told myself it didn't. More like polishing with an abrasive cloth than drilling, really. Strange sensation though, feeling those little tidbits of enamel being scraped away.

I hope that it works!

We had our Snowbound Book Group meeting this week, Wednesday night, this month's book being Nikolai Gogol's classic "Dead Souls" (which incidentally has absolutely nothing to do with vampires).

Although most of our book group selections are contemporary, occasionally we dip into the masters, which I enjoy. I hardly ever read 19th century literature these days.

Admittedly, I was enormously "into" the 19th century when I was younger: i.e. a teenager and early twentyer. In high school, I was more into Tolstoy than the Bee Gees. I think that's one of the reasons why I'm so warped in the 21st century.

I'd read "Dead Souls" when I was 16, but I'd forgotten most things about it. It's not a bad idea to revisit a classic book every thirty years or so.

We read the book in the new version by the translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. They seem to be good at getting at the sensuous richness of Gogol's prose. I liked being about to taste the food at the banquets, to smell the sweat on the horses, to hear the clatter-clatter of boots on parquet floors.
The novel is a snapshot of rural Russian society in the early 19th century, after the shock of Napoleonic invasion, but before the Alexandrian era of "glasnost" (reform) brought about through Russia's defeat in the Crimean War and epitomized by the abolition of serfdom in 1861.

The characters are Dickensian in their mixture of passions and foibles. Incidentally, Gogol wrote the book while he was living in Italy. He intended to write a massive three-volume tome that would be a kind of Russian "Divine Comedy," but it was only the first of three planned "Books" that was published in 1842. He did finish the manuscript for Book II, but he destroyed it in a fit of anger over the censor's desire to mute his satire. It's never been easy to be an author in Russia.

I'm going to stay in Russia, reading-wise, for the moment. I picked up a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita," which has an image of a satanic cat on its cover. It's a book I heard about first when I was in high school, so I suppose it's about time that I got around to reading it.

I saw this window display at a general store on Sheldon Ave in Houghton this week. Very practical! Nothing there that's not a necessity. General stores are good that way.
I was over on the campus of the techie/engineering university on Thursday; part of their MLK Week events. ("Civil rights and the GLBT community.") It's just a two hour drive, so it's quite close, and I was honored to be invited. Nice to be on the poster,and they even spelled my name right!

Bayard Rustin, 1912-1987

"Indeed, if you want to know whether today people believe in democracy, if you want to know whether they are true democrats, if you want to know whether they are human rights activists, the question to ask is, ‘What about gay people?’ Because that is now the litmus paper by which this democracy is to be judged.” (Bayard Rustin, 1985)

Brought this to Nashini's pot-luck dinner last weekend - it was a big success. (sorry no photo)

3 pears, cut into cubes
1 package spinach salad greens
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/3 cup chopped walnuts, toasted
1 zucchini sliced

1/2 cup salad dressing of choice

Toss pears with 1/4 cup of dressing in a large bowl; let stand for 15 minutes.

Add greens, cranberries, toasted walnuts, zucchini and remaining dressing. Toss lightly and serve.

Can't get much easier than that!

This is the third in a series of McCall Smith's Edinburgh-based novels, and although I read the first two in the unfolding series with sufficient pleasure, I think I've had about enough. Certainly the premise - a 21st century newspaper serial - is excellent, and Edinburgh is a beautiful and interesting setting. I still enjoyed reading about the sufferings of poor genius boy Bertie, the victim of an overbearing and controlling mother. And in this installment, Angus Lordie's dog Cyril has an interesting adventure that reveals new depths to his canine character. However, this interesting episode unforunately is cut short much too soon.

In "Love Over Scotland," the "twee" factor seems to be greater than in the others, as many of the characters revel in what appears to be a boring and bland provincialism. One of the major "plots" - the one involving the romantic life of a young art student - takes a regrettable turn toward dull predictability. Moreover, the episodes that do involve foreign travel (Domenica's sojourn in the Malacca Straits, and Bertie's orchestra visit to Paris) were just not complelling to me. Finally, McCall Smith's little moralistic bromides that show up every few chapters became quite annoying. McCall has made an enormous success of his "series fictions," and he has continued with his Edinburgh stories, but I don't think I'll be following up on the fourth volume.