December 2017 Review

The month started on a high note. I saw the Basquiat exhibition Boom For Real at the Barbican, followed by lunch at the Cote Brasserie across the road. The exhibition deserves its status as “the one to see” and that many people new to art will remember for a long while. I find the Barbican itself now doesn’t deserve the brickbats that used to get thrown at it. And I had no idea there was an ornamental lake in the middle.

I read Joshua Ferris’ To Rise Again At A Decent Hour; Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project, about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky; Svetlana Katok’s p-adic Analysis Compared With Real, which is very clear, should you want to learn about p-adic numbers; started Charles Hugh Smith’s Money and Work Unchained; and finished Richard Yates’ Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. And I continued my bedtime reading of the first volume of G W F Hegel’s Aesthetics. I read and looked at the pictures in Julian Schnabel’s C.V.J. Nicknames of Maitre D’s and Other Excerpts From Life, and read the book of the Basquiat exhibition, also titled Boom For Real.

I saw S1 of House; 1992, a series about that pivotal year in Italian history; and Suicide Squad and Fandango on DVD.

Sis and I dined at the Marleybone Picture, which was an experience we will be repeating. Sis cooked Christmas lunch and we all fell asleep watching TV.

Then the sickness and fever hit, and I was not really recovered until about the 31st. I made myself go to the gym every morning from the 28th to the 31st, and was pretty darn weak the first couple of days.

Now here’s why I do this. Because in my memory, December was a horrible write-off. But in fact, while I was well, I did a reasonable amount of reading and was not totally inactive. It was a horrible flu, and no consolation that others had it as well.