Ummagumma

For me, 2018 was the year of television.  I sort of picked up where I left off last year with knocking out Breaking Bad .  I have been critical of television as a medium in the past and still am.  I’d rank TV distantly behind books, music, and movies as a form of entertainment and certainly as an art form.  But, for whatever reason, I found myself watching a lot of it this year.  I started out watching The Terror and Season 11 of The X-Files .  As always, one thing led to another and I spent many hours taking in programming mostly on my iPad. Recently, I watched the Netflix original series, Maniac .  I enjoy these 10-episode type seasons.  It is fairly easy to make it through them as long as the show justifies the effort.  Maniac  defies simple description, I've never seen anything quite like it on TV before.  You just have to try it for yourself. I re-watched the excellent first season of True Detective .  That is my fourth time to watch it and it still holds up very well.  I

The modest Proust collection of my library minus a scattered book or two.  Notice the spines on the boxed set in the middle form a gentleman's detachable, stiff collar that was in style at the time Proust's novel was written.   Aiming nebulously, my primary New Year’s Resolution is to reread Marcel Proust’s long novel, In Search of Lost Time .  I last read it back when I started this blog so my previous experiences with the novel can be found in an earlier post .  After many years attempting it, when I finally managed to start and actually finish Proust the first time I became fascinated with the author in my usual obsessive way.  I collected several biographies of Proust, various philosophical and critical studies of his novel, guidebooks, along with Proust’s earlier unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil , all of his short stories, and a few other related books.  I came to know the man and his work very well. It’s been nine years since I last read the novel.  It’s high time I

Jake Fromm on the field after yesterday's loss to Alabama. It is an uncommon tragedy in college football for a team to be beaten by the same team twice in a year.  Yet, that is what happened to my Georgia Bulldogs in 2018.  I didn’t have the voice back in January to blog about our National Championship defeat to the storied Alabama Crimson Tide, the best team in college football over the past decade or so.  I couldn’t find the right words for Jake Fromm’s terrific freshman season, or for the running attack of Nick Chubb and Sony Michel , both now NFL running backs. Yesterday, the Dawgs faced the Tide again in the SEC Championship.  It was #4 in the nation versus #1 respectively, definitely a National Champion caliber game even if it was only for winning the best conference in college football.  The Dawgs soared as high as #2 earlier in the season, but they played poorly on the road against the LSU Tigers and fell to #8 or so.  To their credit, however, Georgia got their moj