— छह हज़ार एक सौ चौबीस —
Not much to catch you up on today. I took myself to a movie last night,
Fatherland, which was the kind of movie I could tell was excellent but which I still didn't entirely get. I had no real complaints about it, though, and I kind of loved that it ran all of 82 minutes.
It was also showing at only SIFF Film Center at Seattle Center, so I walked over to Westlake Center after work and took the Monorail. I completely forgot that SIFF Cinema also shifted to discounted ticket prices on Tuesdays, so even though I had budgeted $12 for this, I only had to pay $7. So that was a delightful surprise, and something I really need to keep in mind the next time I need to see something that is only playing at SIFF Cinemas and I cannot use me AMC subscription to see.
The showtime was at 5:15. I worried slightly that it might be sold out, which has happened to me with other movies given a limited run at SIFF Film Center specifically; it's a fairly small theater. But, this movie has been there for several days, and there's a reason they discount tickets on Tuesdays. I'd say the theater was maybe a quarter full.
I took the Monorail back, and transferred over to a #12 on Pike rather than walking the rest of the way home, just to save myself some time and also read my new library book. I wrote the review after eating the dinner Shobhit had prepared (a sambar with tofu and more delicious deep fried puris), and later Shobhit and I watched a couple of episodes of
Curb Your Enthusiasm. We're on season 10 now, which aired in January 2020, just before the pandemic, so there's no reference to it. But I have to say, even though it's still entertaining and making me laugh, this season so far has dipped a bit in quality. Until now I'd say the series got better as it went along, but after eight seasons every one to two years between 2000 and 2011, the series took a six-year break until season 9 aired in 2017; then another three-year break before season 10 in 2020. I'm impressed they retained so many of the same principal actors throughout, but it feels a tiny bit like they lost their groove.
There are two more seasons for us to watch after this, which aired in 2021 and in 2024. By that last one, Larry David was 76 years old; he started
Curb Your Enthusiasm at age 53. (52 if you cound the
Curb Your Enthusiasm TV movie that preceded the series in 1999. He also created
Seinfeld, which premiered in 1989m when he was 42.) Larry David is 79 now, and actually recently aired a new show on HBO, called
Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: an Almost History of America, which Shobhit and I also watched. It's a series of sketches reimagining significant events in early U.S. history, and it was a mixed bag, but we kept watching.
— छह हज़ार एक सौ चौबीस —
— छह हज़ार एक सौ चौबीस —
Speaking of pandemics, I am now reading a novel recommended by Laney, called
the Afterlife Project, by Tim Weed. Much like Ian McEwan's
What We Can Know which I recently finished and was
kind of disappointed by, it has two different narratives, this time regularly switching back and forth rather than in separated Parts. In one, a guy is navigating an Earth wilderness after being sent 10,000 years into the future; in the other, it's 2068 and a small sailing crew are looking for the last women rumored to be capable of giving birth, after a "hyperpandemic" has decimated most of the world's population—but not before climate change has already cause a global mass extinction of other species.
I only mention this because: this book is compelling me way more than the last one did, even though I'm only about 30 pages in so far. But, damn, between these two novels and
Digger, I've about had my fill of dystopian post-climate-cataclysm worlds for the time being. My issue with
What We Can Know was how it strained plausibility, but the idea of climate collapse within the next several decades does not. And I really need to read something with a bit more hope to it next.
There's also the idea of a pandemic wrought not by person to person contact, but by aerosolized microbes, as is what happens in
the Afterlife Project. That idea is a little terrifying, though I have no idea how plausible it is. Let's ask Google!
"Highly improbable" seems to be the verdict. Whew! Okay, so why am I okay with this concept but not the water-covered world in
What We Can Know ostensibly caused by tsunamis? Well, there's a big difference between
improbable and
implausible. They are close, but in one case here, it simply wouldn't happen; in the other, it's improbable but still possible. In the realm of science fiction, I'm willing to go that far. Otherwise why bother reading science fiction at all? (I suppose the plausibility of time travel is another discussion.)
— छह हज़ार एक सौ चौबीस —
[posted 1:21pm]
