I had forgotten how important reading in bed is, particularly during the middle of the day. Today I found a mere 15 minutes to leap, fully clothed, into the bed, and read a few pages of Mrs. Dalloway. I swear that this made me feel more human than I had the entire day up to that point. And it wasn’t solely the excellence of the book itself, but the feeling of that usage of time that was so magical and restorative.

Even better, there’s no particular reason not to do that sort of thing all the time. There’s always a free-floating fifteen minutes or so, multiple times during any given day. So, I hereby vow to spend more time reading in bed.

I’ve been reading Mrs. Dalloway the last couple of days in my slow bid to kind of allow, kind of force myself to be reading fiction again. I stopped reading fiction pretty conclusively about a year ago, perhaps, and focused almost entirely on non-fiction. The premise was that I was going to be writing myself, and that I didn’t want all those other voices in my head etc. Perhaps there was something noble about that, but I actually miss reading novels and so on, so it was kind of stupid, too. Partly, I’m just not quite as obsessed with the notion of being a Writer these days, either.

The book, Mrs. Dalloway, is so far quite excellent. I find it especially lovely that this book, now more than 75 years old, reverberates so strongly with my current feelings about ‘noticing reality’ and so on. So much of the text is about people paying attention to their surroundings, caring about what we frequently don’t even manage to see. The voices of the characters in the book are fantastic, too, very well realised. Hats of to you, Ginny. Eh? Eh?

Today I found myself, as I often do, watching the psychotic violence of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Variously sized mean beat the shit out of each other for extended periods of time. Fights that go the distance are exceedingly rare. Men are choked, submitted, punched, and kicked out.

I like it.

This is a weird thing for me, because I feel that I exist in a cultural context in which it is probably not ‘okay’ to be into this kind of thing. The general idea being that it’s brutish to watch and enjoy the brutes. But I can’t help it, it’s inherently fascinating and enthralling to watch people wanting to hurt each other, hurting each other, bleeding, etc.

At an obvious level, the appeal is ‘natural’: it’s evolution baby, men are totally into violence and dominance – why wouldn’t we want to watch this stuff? And yet, it’s a bit of a cultural no-no. A bit unrefined. A bit grotesque. A bit crass.

(Funnily enough, this all ties in to the sci-fi book I’m reading right now, Black Man by Richard Morgan. The novel revolves around a breed of men who have been genetically engineered to be entirely predatory and violent, the way we used to be pre-civilisation.)