Went to Cheltenham this weekend to visit a friend after he finished his prelims. We met A at the bus-stop, red carnation still in his breast pocket for the coach to Gloucestershire. After a night well-spent with the best Shiraz I've ever had, admiring the almighty Aga in A's kitchen, we put on wellies, plaid scarves and November colours, grabbed the dog and headed off for a ramble in the Cotswolds. If it sounds idyllic, it's because it was - the only thing disturbing the picture was my dripping nose. A showed us where he used to live: a stone house undefended by border or fence from the woods, exposed to the late winter hills. We walked through the hawthorns and brambles to an abandoned farm where there was no sign of the promised owl, only scattered bones. A showed us his childhood swing, a leathery strap overgrown with moss, and the pheasant keep. The woods were entirely still, broken only now and then by a screaming kestrel or a startled pheasant. We walked in silence and did not grow uncomfortable.
Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man is nothing less than a modern masterpiece and, I have no doubt, will turn out to be one of my favorite books of 2010. The novel follows George as he struggles through a single day in 1960’s Los Angeles following the death of his lover. George wakes up, goes to the university where he teaches literature, goes to the gym, has dinner with a friend, gets drunk at a dive bar, swims in the ocean, and arrives at the end. George is “three quarters human,” a machine trying to keep himself alive until it is time not to be. Like an actor, he is absent from humanity. When he looks at his neighbors, at the suburban families, he thinks "They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flash-lamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gordon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinki...
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