BLOGOSPHERE note 1

BLOGOSPHERE
Note 1

I admit it: I get up at odd hours of the night and check the computer. Indeed it is at these wee hours that I feel my best. This was not always so. I started getting up - with an alarm - while in high school because I often felt too tired at night to do arduous homework like Math or memorizing Biology. The alarm would go off and I would shut it off instantly, but would then often enough not be able to work right away. Early felt bad too, in those days. I had to be truly motivated - read terrorized - to actually crack those books. But then I would and - miraculo - I would learn and achieve in record time. The brain works better when rested, there is no doubt about it. The capacity to gear up at night is serving me well today. It is the best time of the day for me; I am young again and in full command of my powers.

With respect to the computer, it is also the time of day when I feel most adventurous. I will eventually advance with my work but I am not so tired that I will read "the news": there is not that much new in a day but if one just checks in only now and again over a week one misses out. It is modern information slavery. I might glance at a few pages: I won't sink into current unrest in Myanmar or whatever. But I do sometimes venture into unknown terrain, like a new blog.

Blogs are very personal things. A great many are interest - oriented. Some are opinionated, some are journals at least in part. I find myself tempted to write a journal although it is difficult to be interesting to others. Cosima Wagner would write about the children going to the park and it was important, to her, and in the context of living with Wagner probably meant something terrible but we don't know that, from the journal. Jane Austen, I have always felt, was dying to tell us something but wasn't allowed. Her books are is the most domestic of fiction but there is a rumble underneath of British Empire politics. She was fascinated by India but never said a word. (This is why romance fiction is off the mark. They add and retract sexual explicitness and miss the show). So other than checking my e-mail ( I love those numbers changing) I might go blog-ing.

I hit pay-dirt at three A.M. this morning: poster art in the Soviet Union. It is a true wonder to see the world - the historical record - from the other side. Here is how the 1970s are described: the high point of the Cold War. ( The Cold War ended for me with the assassination of Kennedy: that is when we stopped being bombarded with images of what nuclear war would be like). It goes on to say that it was the decade when "civil microelectronics, supersonic avionics and polymeric chemistry were developed". I knew that but I never said it. There is as well a poster for a book fair "And all the sweet serenity of books..." I wish I had said that.
So I will return to this blog at later times, and try to fit pieces of things together for myself. Am I blog-o or what!