Error Piles Upon Error

I remember seeing a bumper sticker in San Francisco, touting a union, perhaps it was the AFL CIO, which said: you know “the folks who brought you the weekend.”  This seemed wise and secular and patriotic and ultra-left, at one and the same time.  We all should tip our hats.  Weekends are different from a “day of rest”, which most Abrahamic faiths agree on the need for if not the particular day, for.  Weekends do ‘day of rest’, one day better.  They are something I believe in and would fight for, to a point. 

This morning I read.  To each his or her own, on the weekend.  A weekend morning for me, means I can lay around and read.  “The Inspector General” is easy to get lost within as Gogol effortlessly skewers small town Imperial Russia, where no one is redeemable and error piles upon error. “The greatest play in the Russian language” is the way Nabokov referred to the work.  The time passed in a flash, before the town realizes that Khlestakov was a charlatan, and what’s more one they’ll never see again. 

My wife slept through the whole affair.  She groaned.  She does that sometimes.  It usually means she’s having a bad dream.  I suspect I probably groan as well.  When it’s her that groans I usually find out later that I was the culprit her unconscious mind had grabbed hold of to create some narrative tension. I’m generally doing something wrong.  So, I reach out and rub her shoulder to steady her in the oblivion world.  Ideally, this manages to change the plot.  Ideally, I exonerate myself. 

I think my gal has the right idea.  It’s not time to get up yet.  The little one is on a field trip.  The big one is sleeping in.  I start another book.  Here too, is a man who was not afraid to fight for something, up to a point and beyond.  I’ve had the cover’s photo of the young Trotsky staring at me for some time.  I consider a few different books I could begin, but I settle on Robert Service’ Trotsky biography, which is only one-third as long as the Isaac Deutscher one I’d finished a few weeks back.  Service seems a bit awkward thus far as he praises Trotsky’s Olympiad capacity as a thinker and an orator and a man of action and an intellect on the one hand, while reminding us that he sometimes wasn’t a good father, or wasn’t very filial or was clearly a bit egotistical on the other.  Where Deutscher’s fawning seems justified and discrete, where Service critique seems clumsy and obligatory as he takes his shots.  Still, he's right that Leon wasn't as astute reader nor as skilled a manipulator of other people's characters, as Joseph proved to be.

I plough through quickly as the plot and the characters are all rather familiar, until I realize its nearly noon.  Weekends can only justify so much rest.

Saturday 4/14/18