First of all, I’d like to plug the paintings of a friend, Geoff Farnsworth http://www.geoff-farnsworth.com/, a dedicated professional artist. I am a dedicated amateur, and probably without his encouragement I would be painting next to nothing.

From several friends, independently of one another, I have started reading Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” — the story of a man who visits his cousin at a sanatorium, only to discover that he has tuberculosis. I am less than halfway through because I read rather slowly. Sometimes my attention flags when I read fiction, and then I retrieve it by forcing myself to parse and translate sentences in my head, or I stop reading. My days of speed reading ended long ago. In university we had to read many classical works of literature, sometimes three books a week, and I resolved to revisit those books to read them at a leisurely pace when I got old. Well, I got old.

The “Magic Mountain” seems mainly to be about the subjective passage of time. It also lingers on details of tuberculosis, and the author can write with plasticity on the sound of a cough.

Following some advice from Gerry Seinfeld, I am keeping a little calendar, and for particular things that I want to practice I mark the calendar with certain letters, M for Music, P for Painting, H for the study of Hebrew, W for writing, C for cleaning. (I earn a “W” today for writing on this blog — “nulla dies sine linea” — the reward comes when you can look back at the calendar and see a long chain without interruption of a particular activity. I suppose this is good, because of all the things I do, only translation has brought me any money, whereas the other activities will bear fruit only if I persevere.

At present my painting is mostly practice. I make small oil-paintings that are copies of photographs or old painters. The copies are on primed paper (hardware store oil-based primer), which seems to work -- the oil does not soak all the way through and eat at the paper. I have a number of good panels, but out of stage fright I have been sticking with small pictures on paper. When I think I have a good original idea, then I will take it to the large panels.

Musically, I have been putting new things on reverbnation.com and soundcloud.com (search for “hyoomik”). I have stepped up my game as it were. I have a kit of samples called Philharmonik based on recordings of the Prague philharmonik, using a wide variety of notes from orchestral instruments. I am also using Melodyne, which allows me to take sound samples and create new melodies out of them (and it can do much more). In the past, I used to record a song from beginning to end in one fell swoop. Now (in part thanks to the calendar system) I take my time. If I make up music for only four beats, that can be a “day’s work” for me.

The Hebrew language is a matter of curiosity. When I read the Old Testament in English many years ago, I realized from the footnotes that I would understand more if I learned Hebrew. As Led Zeppelin taught us, “sometimes words have two meanings.” At present (in order of knowledge), my foreign languages are Polish, French, Latin, German, Greek, other Romance languages, other Slavic languages. Sometimes it is just enough knowledge to know how to look things up in a dictionary. However, Hebrew is a much greater challenge, because it is a Semitic language, not an Indo-European language. So, the only way for me to approach it is to inch my way along.

Spring finally seems to have arrived. Although the temperature may still fall below freezing at night, the snow seems to be almost melted away.

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So far, today, April 4, 2014 HPW and later M. I made abundant pancakes around 3 pm, as the result of which I slumbered like Adam when he had his rib removed, or Jonah in the hold, or Ulysses in Lotus-land, or perhaps a scene from the Wizard of Oz. I didn’t do any of my regular work, but I am far ahead anyways, so no matter. I read about 100 pages of The Magic Mountain and have reached the conversations of Settembrini and Naphta, and now I am getting quite interested. Earlier, Castorp declared his love to Madamoiselle Chauchat, but it was left mostly in French. I could deal with this until Castorp started speaking of anatomy, where I mostly had to guess. I have 250 pages left to go.