Not Wearing Spandex

It has been a long day. One punctuated with rays of compassion and hope. Perhaps these will soon be forgotten, buried underneath contentious thoughts? I don't know. My reading menu has recently been enhanced by the generosity of my friends: as noted previously Ed's loan of Overthrow has become my bedside book while Joel bought me the complete text of a relatively new (1995) translation of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. The text is staggering not only in terms of girth, it is over 2200 pages, but is a hurricane of philosophy of and literature, profiling not only an outsider, but the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the prism of decadent Vienna. The other day I recalled that Joel bought me a collection of three novella by Thomas Bernhard three years ago for my birthday, not that such deserves any analysis beyond the humane.I have thought of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth while immersed in the Musil, it measures the pulse of both and then plunges deeper, weaving through song, mathematics and drunkeness to some murky spring of crime. It promises to be quite the ride.