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Second verse, same as the last
Jul. 25th, 2006 08:46 pmToday for dinner Daniel and I made salmon (rubbed in garlic and sauteed in olive oil and soy sauce (thank you, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hythlae)), sauteed asparagus and brown mushrooms, made basmati rice, and had a salad of tomatoes, goat cheese, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, sprinkled with basil and oregano from our own basil and oregano plants. We are also making some bread, and are shortly to have earl grey tea with tea-cookies. I say, life doesn't get much better than this!
In other news, I have moved on from The Gulag Archipelago, mostly because I can't find volume II anywhere. I finished volume I yesterday, and the library has volume III, but volume II is missing, and few of the local bookstores even have the first, most famous volume. Therefore, I am now reading Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, which are much shorter and more dispassionate than Solzhenitzen's bitter, sarcastic, polemical treatise, but the subject matter is so much more raw that none of the impact is lost. Some of the tales, usually those featuring instances where people retain some sort of justice, are wonderful (in particular the story called "Magic,*" but also "Handwriting" and "Major Pugachov's Last Battle"), but others featuring the loss of that sort of justice are so excellently constructed that they have an artistic, rather than moral beauty to them. "Berries" is one such. "Esperanto" is less perfectly constructed, but the ending is telling. Some of the stories are too convoluted for me to realize (without help from the forward) what, exactly, they are about, and a significant characteristic that leads to this is the difficulty in figuring out which parts of the stories are current, and which are flashbacks. But the stories are just as engrossing (perhaps mores o, for the voyeur at a traffic accident part of me) as The Gulag Archipelago.
*Which I think is my favorite of the lot so far.
hythlae)), sauteed asparagus and brown mushrooms, made basmati rice, and had a salad of tomatoes, goat cheese, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, sprinkled with basil and oregano from our own basil and oregano plants. We are also making some bread, and are shortly to have earl grey tea with tea-cookies. I say, life doesn't get much better than this!In other news, I have moved on from The Gulag Archipelago, mostly because I can't find volume II anywhere. I finished volume I yesterday, and the library has volume III, but volume II is missing, and few of the local bookstores even have the first, most famous volume. Therefore, I am now reading Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, which are much shorter and more dispassionate than Solzhenitzen's bitter, sarcastic, polemical treatise, but the subject matter is so much more raw that none of the impact is lost. Some of the tales, usually those featuring instances where people retain some sort of justice, are wonderful (in particular the story called "Magic,*" but also "Handwriting" and "Major Pugachov's Last Battle"), but others featuring the loss of that sort of justice are so excellently constructed that they have an artistic, rather than moral beauty to them. "Berries" is one such. "Esperanto" is less perfectly constructed, but the ending is telling. Some of the stories are too convoluted for me to realize (without help from the forward) what, exactly, they are about, and a significant characteristic that leads to this is the difficulty in figuring out which parts of the stories are current, and which are flashbacks. But the stories are just as engrossing (perhaps mores o, for the voyeur at a traffic accident part of me) as The Gulag Archipelago.
*Which I think is my favorite of the lot so far.
