I am almost always the last to find out...

While "browsing" Amazon, I ran across a blurb for a new (to me) book by Mickey Spillane, but actually written by Spillane and some other fellow. My curiosity piqued - I assumed, for some reason, that Spillane had joined the ranks of writers like Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler, who seem to have transitioned to producing books jointly with other authors.

I was wrong. Spillane apparently died about 4 years ago, and the news sort of ruined my mood for a while, for although he was not as productive in recent years as, say, Robert B. Parker, he was one of my favorite writers.

And it occurred to me - duh! - that this kind of feeling is more the result of not liking to be reminded of my own mortality than of sorrow at the passing of someone I am a "fan" of, because it occurs to me that I never experienced such funks when I was younger.

Enough of that.

Progeny of the Next Big Job™ calls, but before that, I need to tickle the ol' gray cells with another dose of French conversation, so I better get to it.

Cheers...

Autojinx?

If yesterday's session was trouble-free and smooth, then today I seemed to have trouble correctly striking two keys in a row. Add a couple of Word hangs and fairly convoluted style on the part of the Russian original, and the past 9 hours have not been conducive to achieving satori. (Not that my state of mind normally wanders anywhere in its neighborhood, for whatever that's worth.)

In the end, though, I have wrestled about 4,300 source words into the liquid crystals of my display, leaving almost 21,000 source words in the Progeny of the Next Big Job™

* * *It becomes clearer to me why I missed the news of Mickey Spillane's passing back in July of 2006. I was in Baikonur for a launch campaign and not only do I watch less television while working these campaigns than I do while I'm in the States, there have been campaigns during which I haven't even turned on the set in my room!

* * *Pushkin's Eugene Onegin keeps me humble, as it underscores the sad fact that while I can walk a cosmonaut through just about any emergency procedure aboard the International Space Station, my knowledge of more pedestrian words is limited, particularly in the field of "lit-ra-chure."

As I read through the Russian version, there are not just lines, but very nearly entire stanzas early on in the first canto that I can read (in the sense that I can pronounce the words and place the stresses in the right spots, which is no big deal considering how each line is written in iambic tetrameter), but whose meaning largely escapes me.

This may explain why I view Nabokov's translation in such a positive light: the words are painted literally, which affords me a better grip on what's going on, and should I wish an additional challenge, I can always visit his annotations.

Cheers...