The Dog Days are Upon Us

I'm sick of sweating. Just plain and simple. So you know.

To make things even sweatier, I have a bike now; or, rather, a friend shoved off to Costa Rica for a year and lent us hers. I bought a lock at Bicycle Therapy and everything. Look forward to my heartrending posts detailing my experiences as a double amputee.

I've just finished Brighton Rock, part of my ongoing attempt to read every single fucking awesome word that Graham Greene ever wrote. This is one of his early masterpieces, made difficult at first because of it's lack of the classic Greene hero - fundamentally good, but driven to damnation by their own basic humanity. Brighton Rock's Pinkie is a vicious gangster and murderer who nevertheless takes the tenets of his Catholic faith for granted; so little of Greene's trademark anxiety exists in this character, whose function seems to be to threaten weak and doubting creatures.

It's not Greene's best book - while it's better than Greene's attempt at stream-of-consciousness prose (England Made Me), it's not a patch on the later masterpieces (The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Comedians). In its own shabby, low-rent kind of way, though, it presages the great themes of faith, sex, and what one character calls "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."