Who are the people setting life up as a competition? They shouldn't. I mean, how can you tell if one life is superior to another? After mutual deaths you can draw a line between Nelson and a powder monkey on the Victory but how can you compare? Who is to say who had the better life? Who is to say that Horatio, in his discreet and hastily grabbed clinches with Lady Hamilton reached higher slopes of joy than the boy who ran barefoot along low decks with the leather pouches around his neck? We cannot know, we cannot tell...who had the more pleasurable life?
We can point to Nelson's victories, his excellence, his escalation of the ladder in front of him, but what do we know of the powder monkey? The happiness of his home, his family, his youth, his life?
There's no basepoint, no foundation for us to judge...so how can we know the same about ourselves?
How's my living? Call...
I'm still inviting those of a graphical inclination to have a crack at producing the next Autoblography Banner.
700x125 (pixels) is all the limitation you have - everything else is up to you. As they come in I shall keep the latest up at top until another comes in, and then we can have a big lovely vote-a-thon and decide the winner.
And then, after democracy has had its day, I'll choose which one I like the best.
Tra la.
I'm reading a lot at the moment. I've run through Forever, The Tailor Of Panama, and had a go at starting Nabokov's Lolita, but laid off for the time being because of the looks I get in the park at lunchtime as the kids play frisbee and I sit, munching my sandwich, reading a novel about paedophilia. I'm currently a couple of hundred pages into John Le Carre's 'Smiley's People', and enjoying it a lot.
I sometimes think about my critical sensibility as a reader. I can tell after reading a book if I enjoyed the experience, but I am blissfully uncritical during the passing of the pages. If I'm interested, I'm happy, even if I'm having to read some sentences twice for clarity's sake. So I think I'd be a terrible literary critic, because my perennial cry would be, 'Yeah...it's all right!'. However. The missus is another matter entirely, and she has just jaunted into the Gothamist fold as a literary critic and all-round book related bod.
Which is pretty good, no?
