24/01/2010
The first post in a week or so, then. I’ve been trying to rest the injury and now things are slowly but surely on the up. The sling came off today and I can straighten my arm perhaps 85-90%. The muscles still feel pretty weak and I get shooting pains if I rotate anything to fast. My doctor tells me that it’ll be another a couple of weeks until it’s completely functional again.
Went out properly today for only about the second time in a week and a half, couldn’t decide whether wear the parka or go with the red zip-up. It looks cold out there, I reasoned, but it doesn’t look that cold. So I went for the zip-up. It was freezing. I’d forgotten that you couldn’t measure the temperature outside using your eyes alone. I mean actually I’d actually forgotten. I’m out of practice with this sort of thing.
Then at the supermarket I reached up to the top shelf of the chiller to get some orange juice. Using my right arm. I made it, too. I’m in the big boy’s league now.
Fortunately I’ve still been able to hold a book, and I read Kobo Abe’s ‘The Box Man’ over the course of last week. I read ‘The Face Of Another’ back in 2007 and was enthralled and bewildered in equal measure by it’s integration of a thriller plot with all sorts of jumbled, obtuse philosophical pearls of wisdom about the nature of identity. Well, ‘The Box Man’ is pretty much more of the same, albeit packaged in a slightly less thriller-type, erm… box. It looks into the personal and occaionally social implications of becoming a homeless guy who wanders around the streets with a modified cardboard box covering the top part of his body. For real. It’s not an easy book to read: the analogies are tenuous, the language is awkward and a tiny bit archaic, the relationships between the characters aren’t particularly consistant and the narrative viewpoint swerves all over the place. But behind all that there’s a surprising amount of method behind this novel. It’s an ideas book. Long sentances. Blotchy, indistinguishable photographic inserts. Rather nice to read after spending ages pawing over the structural formalities of one of your own short stories from your sick-bed. Someone’s even seen fit to make it into a film. I take it that this is the trailer, but since all the text is in Japanese I can’t be certain.
