I called my dermatologist this morning. The person who answered the phone said there were no cancelations before my Nov 12 appointment but encouraged me to call back later today to check. This I will do. I hope that I have reached the peak of this rash. I did drink last night. But I changed my pattern and drank more slowly as Eileen and I stayed up watching Downtown Abbey. I slept in accordingly. My weight and BP are creeping up but I attribute that to my own behavior patterns of increased caloric intake combined with a possible change in my metabolism due to not exercising. The latter will change this Wednesday when I will free to gradually reintroduce exercises to my old body.

I made bread this morning despite rising late. Eileen noticed my last batch was more moist. This was probably because I made a batch simply using up all the flour in the house which was mostly white bread flour. I tried to do something like that today and only used 1 C of whole wheat flour and 6 C of bread flour. This seems to have worked.

Again I benefited from having an extensive collection of unread books yesterday. I read Jacque Barzun’s essay, “”As Uncomfortable as a Modern Self: On Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary” in , the collection of essays I mentioned yesterday, A Company of Readers. I went upstairs and found a copy of the book and started reading it yesterday.

I have been reading Woolf since I was a young man. She has had a huge influence on me. This book is a posthumous selection by her widower, Leonard Woolf, from her 26 diaries. He went through them and culled any mention of her writings, any practicing she did in her diary for her other work, and passages where she comments on the works of others. I have read many of her books and essays and have been able to follow her diary entries with pleasure. They beginning in 1918 and I up to 1921.

Apparently this is about the time that the TV series Downtown Abbey takes place.

Another thing I noticed about the series is that the beauty of old houses and the scenery they use in it. I have noticed this in other BBC series. The setting is practically one of the characters of story. This is fitting when I think of the popularity of public access to buildings the English call National Trusts.

We have visited one or two of these when we see Sarah in England. I know that she regularly goes to these and enjoys the grounds when she visits. They are usually beautiful mansions with gardens and shops for visitors.

Another correlation is in my reading. I am finishing the final volume of J. G. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy, The Siege of Krishnapur. Farrell wrote these books as bitter indictments of England’s colonialism. The Siege of Krishnapur takes place in India around 1857. Troubles is also in this series and takes place in 1919 which is very near the time of Downtown Abbey. These two volumes provide background for the story being told by Downtown Abbey and Virginia Woolf’s diaries. We’re at the point in the TV series when a character (Shrimpie) is being re-assigned to an Indian outpost. Knowing what a dire situation England was in at this point with the Empire crumbling casts light on the both Shrimpie’s future and the bigoted statements of the Anglican clergy about empire as he tries to dissuade a Irish character from raising his child in the Catholic church.

Fun stuff.

I am hoping that my body rash has somewhat abated. My legs were not as swollen this morning as they were last evening. I decided to skip the last vestige of my daily exercise and not do my “old-man-running-in-place” this morning in the hopes that my legs will not swell again. Eileen has since observed they are still swollen, but if that is so they are not near as uncomfortable as they were last night. I am hoping to resume my exercising gradually beginning sometime this week. My doctor advised no strenuous lifting for two weeks after my last eye surgery. This precluded most of my daily exercising.

As usual, Eileen asked me if I would stay up for the Halloween Trick or Treaters so she would not have to face them alone. I had planned to make a jack-o-lantern, but there were no pumpkins at Meijer and my physical discomfort increased enough in the afternoon so that I skipped what is usually my annual pleasure at carving up a pumpkin.

I knew that Eileen had been watching Downtown Abbey so I suggested we continue with that while she waited for the doorbell to ring. I generally am not that interested in TV and movies but I had some curiosity about the music for this series. My hopes that the music might be interesting were quickly dashed. I found the music as insipid as the plotting was cynical and emotionally manipulative. But it served the purpose to keep me awake. In fact I sat up later than usual. TV and movies are usually no better than this, at least for me. But this doesn’t mean I won’t continue to watch with Eileen and enjoy.

One of the benefits of surrounding myself with books is the fun of picking up something that interested me enough to purchase and put on the shelf a while back. This morning I spent time with two books that I have had my eye on for a while.

I know that the title of Lionel Trilling’s posthumous collection of essays, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: selected essays made it an irresistible purchase at some point. I filed in my downstairs books under T for Trilling where I would not forget it. This morning I read Leon Wieseltier’s witty and excellent introduction.

In it he writes, “[I]n a withering commentary on Dreiser …. Trilling wrote in 1946: ‘But with us it is always too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little late for understanding, never too late for righteousness, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing.” Trilling is almost certainly referring to America in general if not specifically of its intellectuals. If you’ve ever waded through Dreiser you can see how he would inspire these observations.

Writing about New York intellectuals in the mid-Century, again Wieseltier quotes Trilling: “[I]n their worship of ‘ideas’ they often failed to observe the difference between an idea and an opinion.'”

Also filed under “T” in my downstairs not to be forgotten collection was A Company of Readers: Uncollected writings of W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling From the Readers’ Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs.

Amazingly these three men got together every two weeks and examined books and each other’s review of them. I read the introduction by Barzun this morning.

The art of Aphantasia: how ‘mind blind’ artists create without being able to visualise

Bookmarked to read. Mary Dora Russell shared this link on Facemetabook mentioned that she herself has this condition.