1.03 Veritably Foul Day

Most of today was long and tedious. Cataloguing can only hold one's interest for so long when one reaches a series. Collection of inscriptions in Attic Greek, volume this, number that, series such.

It rained yesterday. No, now it rained the day before yesterday.

I forget that we're living in a drought here; I spend most of my days indoors in one place or another, and it only really strikes me when I go outside with friends or have oddly exciting thoughts such as the elation of rain. I love the sound of rain, its thuds and shudders on open glass windows. How it dances a staccato beat on a rooftop while simultaneously collapsing exhausted with soft yawns on the grass; how it laughs at the solid and stagnant man-made lakes of this city and throws handfuls of confetti-like drops down at them.

I've finished The Historian, which has highly improved my opinion of at least one dark and gloomy creature of the night. That he had to enlist someone else to catalogue the stuff, in the end, was a bit less awesome.

I've started reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond as a workmate who studied anthropology and classics reccomended it. I have to say that his ideas of our society - at its most base level concerning our complete impossibilty of being - are striking a chord within me. I haven't read enough to determine whether his theories are what I would consider solid, but the tone of his prose and his views on religion are bringing out wry sympathetic laughter from my mouth.

He does misuse the word "history", however in the prologue. By definition, History is a term used for the human past that has been recorded in some form of text. When he addresses the lack of attention to prehistory, he should have known enough to call it prehistory rather than "History before the emergence of writing". He also claims that not enough attention has been shown to prehistoric societies, where any archaeology or anthropology student will vehemently argue that there are nowhere near enough records or physical evidence to argue for any prehistoric social organisation; it is all extrapolation.

Aside from that, I think that I will be able to read this book at least without cringing nearly as much as I do with most.

I wonder why our literate society keeps evolving culturally away from competent editors. Why, when science fiction was young and novels were still novel, any editor worth his or her water content would be cutting whole passages and shifting chapters and paragraphs around; in essence rewriting the entire text. Today we're luck if they convert the document to Word and run it through the American spellchecking program, with its horrific attempt at grammar analysis.

I'm going to see if I make it to the renaissance in this book before I have to close it in anguish. I hope that everyone else enjoys their "let's-put-a-holiday-between-Christmas-and-Valentine's-day" weekend.