Winter \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0First Moon of the New Year<\/p>\n
Had to have our business meeting this morning because I was gone yesterday. \u00a0After that, a nap and I started Murakami’s 1Q84. \u00a0Just a bit of the way into it, but I’m liking it already. \u00a0It’s set in 1984 Japan and seems headed in a surrealistic or magic realism direction.<\/p>\n
At the moment I’m reading more literary books. \u00a0I like them, too, though my leisure reading tends more toward horror and fantasy, thriller and mystery. \u00a0Reading has raised me, given me mentors when I rejected them in the waking world. \u00a0Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and Leo Tolstoy in particular helped shape the lens through which I view the world, what I have chosen as important and unimportant.<\/p>\n
When I read them, I read almost exclusively literary books and then only classics. \u00a0That was my 20’s and early 30’s. \u00a0Isaac Bashevis Singer, too. \u00a0 These men, of northern European and Russian roots, have a somewhat bleak and hard-nosed view of life. \u00a0While a life is nothing to trifle with, it also reaches into the dimensions of the mystical, the supernatural. \u00a0How you get there may differ from others, but those realms are real, too.<\/p>\n
Those realms can transform this one, make it new and at least different, perhaps even better.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Winter \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0First Moon of the New Year Had to have our business meeting this morning because I was gone yesterday. \u00a0After that, a nap and I started Murakami’s 1Q84. \u00a0Just a bit of the way into it, but … Continue reading 1Q84<\/span>