Clerical Terror

[unclef]

Nervous though I may be about my new hospital gig, I'm not that sorry to be bidding adieu to office life and the existential head-scratching it provokes in me; 'business' - the name for that which sheaths our fangs. Yesterday The Da and Bro 2 met up with the Boys, the current sharp-creased dream team, to hatch their latest money-generating scheme.

Comments

[unclef]

Oh, you're welcome. I wish I could have found more evangelical oddities. Subtlety, thy name is Chick.
Hmm...I like being able to get my cyber-hands on some previously difficult or impossible-to-find things through the wonder of Google or whatever but it does take some of the pleasure of successful hunts or chance discoveries from life. The Internet - doing away with serendipitous finds since the late 20th Century.
Hullo then young Mr Westwood. For a frantic moment I thought that was the same name as radio's ageing wigga hip-hop authority but no, he's Tim, aint he?
When I seemed trapped in office hell, the hospital job seemed a perfect escape route. Now that it's more or less in the bag I am crapping myself a bit. But it's true, doing real work with visible, positive results will bale out my foundering self-esteem.

[unclef]

Ooohhh...Watchmen...It's possible to over-praise even a really exceptionally ace and brilliant work, and internet forum-dwellers beyond number have been kicking that book to and fro for years now, so it's impossible to come to it without assumptions...But for me, it's probably still the daddy of em all (though Moore is his own stiff competition with From Hell). I have no idea how many times I've read that book and I may do so again soon and still find something new. But hush my mouth, here I am, assuming it's your first read of it - perhaps not?
I love Bad Bob's child psychologist - chin-stroking do-gooder!

[unclef]

Yeah, just heard about Papa Kurt. I just re-read Slaughterhouse-5 too, so his words were floating around in my head. At least his death at 84 refutes the notion that 'the good die young'.

I first read Watchmen 17 years ago, aged 20, during a strange, booze-sodden couple of weeks between my final exams and graduating from university. Dr Manhattan's speech on Mars moved me.
Thermodynamic miracles...events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiple those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is

[unclef]

I would like to say i had that lot stored in my head but no, I had occasion to swipe it from a site some time ago for another e-correspondence. I did once have a remarkable retentive memory - got an A in my Latin O-Grade cos I was able, in a sense, to 'read' my books in my mind's eye, but 20 years of misbehaviour put paid to that ability. I ramble

[unclef]

Good link. Now I want to read Cat's Cradle again. And Timequake, for that matter. And I think I'd be justified in forking out for A Man Without a Country which was his last book, I believe. A volume of Vonnegut essays/memoirs - it'll be heaven, which is where Kurt is now.

Hospitals and nursing homes got me preoccupied with death to an unhelpful degree. Offices make me think of murder.

[unclef]

Yes, me too. Must read Breakfast of Champions, and a good pal told me Mother Night is a great novel - make that Great - and I've missed that one too.

I dunno, the concensus of critical opinion on a book or a body of work is as prone to suffering from changes of fashion as the cut of yer trousers, and as such is about as worthy of notice too. Depends what you want out of a book I suppose, but Timequake contains more wisdom, humanity, poignancy and laffs in a paragraph than many of the arbiters of literary taste could summon in half a career. A pox on them.