Sealion II

1. He has not heard from any Medical Schools.
2. He has read the following book: "On Authority and Revelation", by Soren Kierkegaard.
3. He has neglected his filial duties by not calling his mother this week.
4. He has not engaged in any Romantic Social Activities.
5. He has nothing further to declare at this time.

I will discuss what I have been reading lately. Most lately I have been delving into Gene Wolfe, again; I finished his book "Castleview" today.

The thing about Gene Wolfe is that he doesn't feel obligated to explain anything to the reader. He also tends to jump-cut at precisely the moment when it will create the most confusion; this tendency was very marked in "Castleview", which is one of the things I didn't like about the book. Every time something exciting happens, BANG! You switch to another group of characters. And since there are lots of characters, and since several of them have more than one form, and some of them are occasionally impersonating others...well, you can see the difficulty. This also happened quite often in "Latro in the Mists" (to take only one example), but in that book there was a very good reason for it--presumably, when something exciting happened, Latro was unable to sit down and write about it just as it was happening. Here it's much less palatable.

Gene Wolfe also has the interesting/annoying habit of showing the prelude to an event/appearance, then switching to a point-of-view character observing the event, then recounting the event through the account (and not necessarily an honest account, and usually not a full account) of what happened.

Stylistic tics aside, no-one has an imagination quite like Mr. Wolfe's, and I'll read anything he writes--although his books are far more frustrating than is common for a writer of popular fiction. (Kierkegaard is a walk in the park in comparison.)

Now that I have a blog, where I could actually put my thoughts before a worldwide audience, I find that I have stopped thinking.

Not that I would actually have a worldwide audience, of course, but I could.

So...how 'bout that World Baseball Classic? Somehow, all the sports announcers find it astonishing that the U.S. team is failing to thrive; but really, how surprising is this? The U.S., as a country, isn't (or at least wasn't) taking it seriously, whereas Cuba, Korea, the DR, et al. definitely are. Last night the announcer on ESPN2 was marvelling that the Korean team was positioning its outfielders as different US batters came up; he left implicit the remark "Wow, they've actually prepared for this!"

Yes, yes they have. South Korea 7, USA 3 is the totally unsurprising result.

I have, unfortunately, reserved no grand remarks for the present occasion. All I can say is, welcome to Sealion Land. Many happy returns.