Maybe it's hallucinating you!

Seoul

Coming back from Seoul, a city of 20 million frantics, a fair proportion of whom seem at any given time to be riding a motorbike on a footpath, to Umeå, a quiet town where after such a short and frequently interrupted residence as I've had here so far, I can randomly meet two friends in a five minute trip across the street to the supermarket on the afternoon of my arrival, is very calming.

I went to swedish class yesterday, and having missed a month I was swimming behind the curl a bit. But it did strike me that our teacher now speaks at her natural speed, rather than clearly separating each word, and I can understand almost all of it. I'm still slow to call up words as I speak, but I think a critical point has been passed. I can now watch the news, read the paper, listen to conversations with enough comprehension that the gaps are subconsciously filling up at an exponentially increasing rate. If this trend continues, within a finite time I'll be able to understand more swedish words than actually exist, which will be exciting!

While in Stockholm I bought Against the Day, as it was released the day I arrived, and I guessed it would be hard to find in Umeå. It's over a thousand pages long, and bigger than my first-year calculus textbook, and I actually struggled to fit it into my carry-on bag. Despite its length, it surprisingly easy to read, and so far I haven't got to any point where I'm unsure of which characters are present, or who is saying what, or what they (at least ostensibly) mean, which is a relief after Gravity's Rainbow. It seems to be mostly about anarchist bomb-throwers in the American mid-to-actual west in the late 19th century (surely at least partly as a metaphor for the terrorism craze currently sweeping the world). But it's the hilarious, wonderful style of writing that really gets me. As the spiel on Amazon says, "Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides". So far (in my reading) only Kerouac has matched his ability to knock me flat with amazement.

Trouble is, I have barely a second to devote to it, what with all the things I have to get done before I head back to San Diego for a conference at the end of next week. I've also had barely a second to think about what that trip holds in store, but there are three shining lights to look forward to (in order of appearance): diving with sea lions before the conference starts; talking to my old supervisor at the conference; canning on with KT and Mat in NYC on the way back home (will be strange without LB and Paul, but times change, people move).

Then its Christmas, bugger me, gotta send some presents. Rumours abound of a London soiree for the chrissy/NYE period, and beyond that numerous ski trips to different parts of Europe are already being imagined. Australia remains too far away for my exhausted bones to manage anytime soon.