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Aug. 26th, 2011 01:23 pmOh dear. My ability to get things done today is suffering from a total lack of - is it motivation, or merely energy? I'm not sure, although my body-clock is still badly messed up. My own fault for not being brutal enough with alarms, I suspect - result is I can't get to sleep, or at least not until after hours of tossing and turning, or more reading in an effort to stop trying to sleep. I don't suffer as badly from insomnia as some, but I'm mildly prone to trouble sleeping anyway, and it's always miserable.
Anyway, as a result I rather quickly read Paula Byrne's Mad World, which is about Evelyn Waugh's friendship with the Lygon family and the influence it had on Brideshead. An interesting book and a rather more nuanced view of Waugh than merely as the unpleasant climber, though I have to say I still don't think I'd have found him all that likable (too prone to petulance and jealousy of his friends' time). Had, as happens surprisingly often when reading biographies, the experience of being jolted by something which I know is not quite right - the usual difficulty being that while it looks like fairly obvious to me, that may just be my weird ideas about what constitutes widespread knowledge.
(The mistake is that, when discussing ex-pat homosexuals in Venice, Byrne refers to "Baron Corvo, the noted homosexual ex-priest and writer". He was homosexual and a writer, but in fact he was never a priest*, because he was chucked out of both St Mary's Oscott and the Scots College in Rome for not having a vocation (and also neglect of his studies and probably his tendency to fall spectacularly out with people); "Baron Corvo" was not his real name; he was called Frederick Rolfe and came from Cheapside, where, Wikipedia informs me, his father made pianos. Granted, all this is not particularly relevant to the main thrust of the book, but Rolfe, also an English convert and author of a very Catholic novel (albeit one that's largely a Mary-Sue-becomes-Pope story), might bear interesting comparison with Waugh.
It's raining. Sooner or later I will have to splash out to the shops, and I fear that my cunning 'wait till it's stopped raining' plan won't work, because it shows very little sign of doing so...
* You can't be an ex-priest, anyway, but that's a side matter.
Anyway, as a result I rather quickly read Paula Byrne's Mad World, which is about Evelyn Waugh's friendship with the Lygon family and the influence it had on Brideshead. An interesting book and a rather more nuanced view of Waugh than merely as the unpleasant climber, though I have to say I still don't think I'd have found him all that likable (too prone to petulance and jealousy of his friends' time). Had, as happens surprisingly often when reading biographies, the experience of being jolted by something which I know is not quite right - the usual difficulty being that while it looks like fairly obvious to me, that may just be my weird ideas about what constitutes widespread knowledge.
(The mistake is that, when discussing ex-pat homosexuals in Venice, Byrne refers to "Baron Corvo, the noted homosexual ex-priest and writer". He was homosexual and a writer, but in fact he was never a priest*, because he was chucked out of both St Mary's Oscott and the Scots College in Rome for not having a vocation (and also neglect of his studies and probably his tendency to fall spectacularly out with people); "Baron Corvo" was not his real name; he was called Frederick Rolfe and came from Cheapside, where, Wikipedia informs me, his father made pianos. Granted, all this is not particularly relevant to the main thrust of the book, but Rolfe, also an English convert and author of a very Catholic novel (albeit one that's largely a Mary-Sue-becomes-Pope story), might bear interesting comparison with Waugh.
It's raining. Sooner or later I will have to splash out to the shops, and I fear that my cunning 'wait till it's stopped raining' plan won't work, because it shows very little sign of doing so...
* You can't be an ex-priest, anyway, but that's a side matter.