Mid-December
Mid-December, and Christmas is approaching rapidly - I've posted everything that needs to be posted - or I hope I have. Whether they get to the recipients by Christmas… well, I hope they do. Or the parcels, anyway, and most of the cards; the two cards I posted yesterday probably won't, but it's too late to fret about that. I plan to make a gingerbread house again, but have no other cooking plans at all (as yet); it'll be a quiet Christmas.
For Star Wars fans - the story of one fan of the old, un-Special Edition version, and his quest to save them from George Lucas's second thoughts.
It's a story that raises interesting questions. Of course artists have the right to redo earlier works (da Vinci made at least two attempts at painting Madonna of the Rocks, for example) or change them significantly (there are so many examples of authorial rewrites!) or even to attempt to obliterate them (Nathaniel Hawthorne tried hard to make his first novel disappear). Works can be revamped or withdrawn after publication, no question. But it does feel queasily unfair to digitally obliterate actors who were in the first version - or come to that, to remove from public access the work of the pre-CGI special effects artists.
The year's end is approaching, too - and I'm being forced to concede in reviewing the year's reading that I probably never will finish Capital in the Twenty-First Century. On the other hand, I did finally read the Silmarillion and Les Misérables, so that's something. What big book should I read next year, people? Classic or new, fiction or not - I was pondering something about Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad, if I can find it in a bookshop before this year's end. Does that sound good?
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