Reading:
Last week I mentioned I was reading Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. It was first published in 1889 and you can pick up a natty little Collector's Library edition for $15 from your local quality book seller. It's an innocents abroad story of three friends, and Montmorency the fox terrier, incompetently navigating their way along the Thames on a boating holiday. Like the bends and the estuaries of a river, the book takes many amusing little diversions from its course. It's a small tome and a most delightful one; a tonic, if you will to our present day cares and woes.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know - and before I had glanced half down the list of 'premonitory symptoms', it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for a while frozen with horror; and then in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it - wondered what else I had got; turned up St Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that too - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift to the bottom, and so started alphabetically.....There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded that there was nothing else the matter with me.
Top 5 Songs:
I'm Sorry - Hothouse Flowers
I'll Kill Her - Soko
Big Bad John - Jimmy Dean
He's Doing Time in Jail - Wesley Willis
New Bully in the Town - Ed Kuepper
3 comments:
I liked I'll kill her the first time I heard it, but don't you think that if its on high rotation it might affect you? Particularly if you are having a bad day with one of your lecturers? Heading off to a tute with that refrain running through your head could be a slightly damaging career move.
You forget, dear k, that I don't listen to the radio - well not the stations that would play it, anyway. I happened to hear it once on tv and bought it on the strength of that. High rotation, like so many other things, will pass me by.
Like the court of King Karakatas.
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