Author: Ridley

I’ve been struggling to fill this space of late. What’s the word for “when things are good but they don’t feel good?” Yes. That. That is exactly the word I’m looking for. Anyway, I haven’t been wanting for ideas so much as failing to turn them into anything but ideas. My notebook is full of little half-stories or bits and pieces to use in something larger, but that’s the extent of my production right now. Well…that’s not strictly true. I did complete a little something for a contest. I’ve no clue if it’s good enough to win, but when I compare it to the other things I’ve submitted, I think it’s easily my best effort yet. The trajectory is good, and that’s very satisfying. It turns out that A Confederacy of Dunces* is every bit as good as its reputation. Writing comedy is so rarely done well, but this one has more than its share of laugh out loud bits. The funny thing is that I remember first becoming aware of this book in high school and, as it was an “instant classic,” I assumed it was much older than it was.  I doubt I’m giving anything away when I say that the book does a marvelous job skewering the worldview of every character in it. Sure, there’s one primary target, but no one gets a free ride, and this is doubly true of any character who takes themselves seriously. What’s funny is that I find myself more sympathetic towards the characters whose views are closer to my own, regardless of how brutally they’re portrayed in the novel. That’s odd, isn’t it? From a political standpoint, I’d think that I’d judge more harshly the people who poorly represent my values than someone who is obviously a buffoon but doesn’t claim to believe as I do.  Or maybe not. It’s tough to say, and maybe I’m just trying to draw too broad a conclusion from a single reference point. I’ll file that one away in the notebook.  I’m currently listening to “Divenire” by Ludovico Einaudi. It’s an incredibly soaring work which constitutes part of the soundtrack for the Netflix version of a short film called Moving Art: Flowers. Weirdly, the non-Netflix versions have a different soundtrack. I’d never heard of Einaudi before, but apparently, he’s quite well known in Europe. He reminds me of George Winston, another solo pianist. It’s melodic and probably too “pop” to be properly classical, but it’s gorgeous and it’ll get stuck in your head if you’re not careful. Check it out: It’s the kind of music that’s often described as “sentimental,” but I unabashedly adore sentimental music and this is the most sentimental of seasons, so it seems appropriate. I hope you enjoy it. -RK   * I’m too lazy to Google this right now, but what is the best way to indicate the title of a book when your text editor doesn’t permit underlining? I’ve seen people use underscores before and after the title and I hate the way it looks, regardless of whether or not it’s correct. I’ll look it up later.  

I’m currently out of town visiting family and the weather has suddenly become exactly the sort of weather which encourages snuggling and my snuggle-ee is a couple of hundred miles away.  Bother. It turns out that it’s possible to enjoy visiting and to seriously miss someone at the same time. It’s just that, right now, the “missing” part is winning the tug-of-war.  Anyway, after an unseasonably warm Thanksgiving, Winter seems to have happened all at once. In this neck of the woods, that means hours of rain just above the freezing point. My mother always said that this was lovely weather for ducks, but I give ducks more credit than that.  I finally finished The King In Yellow. It took me quite a while longer than I expected because Victorian fiction is kind of verbose and obtuse. Maybe not all of it, but this example certainly is. The first four stories in the collection are proto-Lovecraftian tales of glimpsed horrors and madness that lies just beyond our ability to comprehend it. They range from riveting to just interesting, but they’re well worth reading. The remaining six stories are more conventional romantic tales.  I have to question the decision to print the stories in descending order of strangeness. Most of the appeal comes from the The King In Yellow stories. I can’t really recommend spending too much time on the rest of it. It’s not bad, but it’s relatively ordinary and not what I imagine most people are looking for when they pick up the book.  I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. I have more to be thankful for than I have energy to write right now. I want to write more about that, but I think I want to sleep even more. G’night, all.

Warning: This post is mostly about sports. Well, really one sport. Specifically, football. The sort of football one plays with one’s feet. I just wanted to make that clear from the beginning. In the extremely unlikely event that you’re not already aware of this fact, I’ve been a supporter of Leicester City Football Club for almost two decades now. I’ve listened to or watched nearly every match this century, I’ve seen the team win cups and beat top clubs, and I’ve seen them relegated several times. I believe in demi-divinity of Martin O’Neill, that the midfield of Izzet, Savage and Lennon was as good as any in England, that Matt Elliott made a fine makeshift striker, that Jermaine Beckford had no business wearing the LCFC badge, that it was a mistake to let Nigel go the first time but probably not the second, and that no matter how great the King Power stadium is, that it’ll never be Filbert Street. I am, in short, a Very Serious Fan. I’ve never had so much fun following the team as I have the last eight months. Going in to April of 2015, we were about as doomed as a Premiership team could be. We played reasonably well up to that point, but we were unable to turn performance into points.  With only 19 points from 29 matches and only 9 more matches to play and in 20th place since November, the outlook was beyond bleak.  I was mentally preparing for another relegation. If you don’t follow football of this sort, you may not appreciate what relegation means. The bottom three teams in the Premier League, the 18th, 19th, and 20th place finishers, are demoted from the league and replaced by the top teams from the next-lower league. Imagine your last place baseball team having to play in AAA the next year. Leicester weren’t merely in last place; unless they climbed to 17th, they would be out of the league.  Of course, as you might have guessed, the nigh-impossible happened. Andy King scored a late winner against West Ham to give us a hint of hope. Then, Jamie Vardy (more on him later), scored a last-minute winner at West Brom and suddenly, we started to feel a glimmer of hope. This is what a man who scores a goal to take his team out of last place looks like. We beat Swansea and Burnley to win four on the trot before losing to eventual champions Chelesa. By this point,we were in 17th place and appeared to be poised for a dramatic finish. Instead, we beat Southampton and Newcastle, then drew with Sunderland to secure survival, then walloped Queen’s Park Rangers on the last day of the season and wound up in the most 14th place. It was, by a huge margin, the most exciting 14th place finish I’d ever experienced. The summer, however, went…badly. Three of our youth players decided to record their visit to a brothel in Thailand, the home country of the club’s owners. The three players, including manager Nigel Pearson’s son, were sacked. The relationship between Pearson and the owners never recovered and Pearson was removed shortly thereafter. Bookies made us favorites for relegation as Pearson received a huge amount of credit for our survival the previous year. We hired former Chelsea manager Claudio Ranieri and it was hard to know exactly what he’d bring to the table. He was successful, but perhaps not successful enough, at Chelsea ten years ago. Most recently, he’d managed the national team of Greece and resigned after losing to the Faroe Islands.  We really needn’t have worried. It’s mid-November and, somehow, we’ve only lost one match and we’re third in all of England, one point behind Manchester City and Arsenal. I can’t explain it. Well, ok, I can. We’ve had some good fortune with the referees, we’ve played a fairly weak schedule thus far, and we’re winning all the close ones. It feels like a bubble that could burst any moment, but I cannot tell you just how much fun it is to support Leicester City right now.   The table as of 18 November, 2015. Not a misprint. It’s not just that we’re winning; it’s that we’re playing exciting, attacking football and we seem to be able to come from behind every single match. Jamie Vardy, who was playing essentially semi-professional football until a few years ago, is the leading scorer in England and has scored in nine straight matches in a single season, something no one else has accomplished in the Premiership. He’s our talisman. He chases lost causes and runs himself into the ground every match and never gives an opponent a moment’s rest. It now looks very likely that he will be in the England squad next summer in the European championships. I’m getting a great deal of pleasure out of all of this. As I mentioned, I’m a long-time fan, and there have been as many, if not more, down times over the years I’ve followed the club. I almost never miss a match. I have a closet full of blue replica shirts. I’ve even had my photo in the Leicester Mercury, even though I’ve never been to England.  Some of you might ask a very reasonable question at this point: “Why?” I’ll tell you why I let myself care so much about a team playing a sport I didn’t care about as a kid in a country I’ve never visited: I find it incredibly useful to have something objectively unimportant I can pour emotion into and care about deeply. I won’t make he argument that this team’s fortunes are provably important. I can’t. I’m ok with that. I can let myself get worked up and yell and scream and question the existence of justice in the universe and when it’s done, I can walk away and life is pretty much the way it was before the match started. Except, of course, these days, you may see me smiling a little more often than usual…

It’s been a rough couple of weeks and I keep trying to say something but everything feels either trivial or boring or just “wrong.” When I don’t feel up to introspection or addressing serious topics, I fall back on my old LiveJournal crutch: Making lists! The majority of them are exactly the sort I would have posted on LJ a decade ago, which is to say, I can’t imagine anyone finding them compelling. For example, while I might be interested in trying to remember every concert I’ve attended, I suspect this might make for less than gripping reading material for anyone else. That’s a long way of saying that I have two weeks worth of drafts which are unlikely to ever see the light of day. You can thank me later.  On an unrelated note, I recently read Frederik Pohl’s short story collection Pohlstars. I’d forgotten just how much I enjoyed his voice. I’ve read and re-read his Heechee books several times, but I’d never read anything else he’d written until this. The thing I love about science fiction short stories is that they give the author an opportunity to take a single, usually weird, idea, and let it play out for as long as it’s interesting. Larry Niven’s at his best when he’s writing short stories. I suspect Warren Ellis would be brilliant at this, or maybe he already is. Global Frequency and Secret Avengers were nothing if not short stories based on strange ideas.  Bah. It’s taken me two hours to write just this bit tonight. My tongue remains pretty knotted. It’s late. Let’s just hit the “publish” button and call it a night.  

Here’s the thing: You see obituaries which cite a “heroic battle with cancer” with some regularity. What you don’t often see is a description of someone losing a heroic battle with depression. I don’t know why that is. Untreated depression kills. Treated depression can still kill, and fighting it is heroic, because it’s a battle every day just to remain functional. I lost another friend to depression and I can tell you with absolute certainty that her struggle was every bit as difficult as that of anyone else afflicted with a chronic and potentially terminal disease. She didn’t take the easy way out; she managed to beat the damned thing for decades.  

I was first exposed to classic literature in high school and, at the time, I didn’t really understand why Dickens, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and their ilk were so highly regarded. My working theory has always been that my high school experience was rich in content but short on discussion of what the content was actually about. We discussed theme and mood and style and plot and things like that, but we never talked about the issues the authors were addressing. I understand that some of the issues might not have been appropriate for discussion in a public school classroom (Brothers Karamazov, I’m looking at you!), but this approach meant that I read a lot of books without properly understanding them.* That’s been my theory for several decades, but I’m wondering if there wasn’t another variable in play. I’m currently reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is a delight to read, or at least, it would be if it were printed well. I picked up a paperback edition at Half Price Books. I’ve seen the cover of this particular edition before. It’s the version of the book in almost every classroom where students are assigned to read this novel.  This is not a fun version of this book to read. The print is tiny, the typeface is squat and wide, a problem which the cheap paper only makes worse, and there are very few pages which aren’t printed at a noticeably skewed angle. If it weren’t such a fabulous book, I don’t think I’d be able to slog through it. This is very much how I remember books in high school being. I assume that they haven’t improved much in the last thirty years, that high school students are still being assigned to read barely legible copies of some of the greatest books they’ll ever read. I doubt this is the sole reason why it’s so hard to instill a love of reading in students, but it can’t be helping.  Putting aside pesky details like school budgets, the idealist in me would love to see if making reading a more pleasant experience would result in more people developing a life-long habit. Maybe I’m blowing this out of proportion due to picking up one very bad copy of a very good book. One conclusion of which I’m completely certain: If you want to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, do yourself a favor and pick any other edition than the one pictured above. * Let’s be honest. The late-teen version of me was very much a factor in this equation. I was not nearly as ready for the challenges of literature as I thought I was.. I was also kind of a doofus.