Tuesday, March 29, 2005

The Usual Hell-Fire Drama

I had several links minimized when I went to bed last night that I was going to post this morning under Jack Aubrey's words above, uttered when Stephen skids in at the last possible moment to make the boat in The Ionian Mission, but due to our own recent hell-fire drama with the computer, I've lost them all due to a necessitated reboot. Somehow looking through yesterday's history to retrieve them does not seem the least bit appealing. Suffice it to say that the people of North Carolina are, as usual, as crackpotty and dramatic as ever, and most of their antics had nothing to do with books, and anyway, Charlotte's own "dirty books" guy doesn't deserve any more attention, especially not after targeting an anthology a few years back that included E.M. Forster.

I'm trying desperately to catch up in Don Quixote. I've read through only chapter 27, and I ought to be through chapter 33 by this point. There's a shift that's taken place in the last few chapters away from the usual hell-fire drama that's gone on before, so the reading is more interesting now. I like the character Cardenio and the story he relates. Sandra's already mentioned how enjoyable the dialogue between Sancho and the Knight of the Sorrowful Face has become. Having to read twice as many chapters this week should not be a chore.

Diana writes about giving up tracking stats for Lent. I am still too new to blogging, too new to setting up a web counter and figuring out how to determine where my visitors are coming from to want to ignore that information, but I can see why its ultimate irrelevancy ought to be the goal at some point. Right now there's too much pleasure to be had in recognizing returning visitors' IP addresses and in getting a bead on what instructors somewhere must be assigning to their classes--I get a lot of hits from people looking for information on Doris Betts' "The Ugliest Pilgrim," Tobias Wolff's "The Rich Brother," and Guy Vanderhaeghe's "Cages." In fact, I read "Cages" Sunday night simply because of the number of people who've searched for it here.

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