8 January, 2009 | Leave a Comment

The weather here has been arctic for weeks.  It is absolutely freezing, the coldest it’s been in decades.  Even the schools are closed in many places. The temperature right now is 30F, but it doesn’t feel like 30 one bit. I’ve spent most of my life in cold, blizzardy places and it feels more like 0F. It’s so cold that it’s just not comfortable to be outside for any length of time. And now the experts are predicting that this summer will be extremely hot.

I said that this past Monday was when I planned to begin working again…and I have!  I’ve gotten a lot of writing done this week.  In fact, I’ve been writing so much that I’ve been staying up until 4 or 5 a.m.  I am a vampire at heart and like to stay up all night.  I guess this is common for creative types.  Writing at night is just better.  But over the past six months or so I’ve trained myself to go to bed early and get up early with great success, thus putting an end to my torturous sleeping problems.  I think it’s just healthier for me to live that way.  Now, partly due to the jet lag I had last week, I’ve started staying up really late again.  I’ll fall asleep at 5 a.m. and wake up at 1 p.m.  In theory there’s nothing wrong with this – my main task right now is to write write write and I could get away with a schedule like this very easily, aside from on Fridays when I have to teach early.  But today, for example, I woke up at 1 p.m.  It gets dark here around 4:30, so that leaves me just over three hours of sunlight per day.  Not ideal at all!  I think I may have to go back to my old schedule again.

I had to put 2666 aside to start reading the books for the classes I’ll be teaching starting next week. I just now finished Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This book has been on my shelf forever and it’s one of those books I’ve always wanted to read, but could never get past the first page. I’m glad to have finally read it. I know it’s an acclaimed book and all, but I didn’t like it one bit. I guess you may think that I wouldn’t tend to like a book about a womanizer, one that is filled with male sex fantasies and wimpy female characters, but you’d be wrong.  I’m open to liking any kind of book with any kind of characters, as long as the writing is good and the characters are compelling.  I didn’t find this in Kundera’s book.  I thought the writing was bad and the characters weak. The novel takes chances with narrative and structure, which I’m all in favor of, but for me it just didn’t work on any level. There were a few lines here and there that were gorgeous, but the book was filled with cliched language (one character stood “stock still” while another had a “shiver” run down her spine). Perhaps this is due to the translation. I sincerely hope so.  I will admit I’m not a fan of philosophical novels, but this novel just seemed to be trying too hard to be profound. I thought the part at the end where the dog dies was touching, but come on – if you’re going to write about a beloved dog being put to sleep, readers are going to feel sad.  That doesn’t mean the writing is good.  Dead dog = tears.  [I wonder if the movie version with Daniel Day-Lewis is good?]

Anyway, next up it’s more Kundera for me – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.  I’ll try to keep an open mind…

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1. william Says:

   January 11th, 2009 at 5:09 pm

   I enjoyed and own the movie The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Let me know if you’d like me to send it to you. It’s a dvd, so it shouldn’t be difficult to mail.