Opua: DON JUAN
Opua: DON JUAN
That I finished DON JUAN is a weather report.
I have been here a month today, spent several thousand dollars on the boat, and have sailed for one hour. The photo is my view of the world, taken through the Plexiglas companionway insert. I actually have two. This is the one piece version used in port. At sea I have two pieces because I often want to let some air in or reach out for the lines controlling the Monitor self-steering vane or climb into the cockpit without letting water in at the bottom.
I’m not sure if today was worse than yesterday. It certainly was no better.
The toasts I offered at the end of yesterday’s posting were in vain. I came across them while trying to find how to spell L’Chaim, which is Hebrew for “To Life”. They are, in order, toasts in English, Spanish, Hebrew, French, Polish, Brazilian, Japanese, German, and Zulu.
No sooner had I offered them than heavy rain resumed. It continued most of the night. However I had successfully secured the anchor during the day so sleep was less interrupted.
I did go ashore today between passing showers. I needed to shower myself and I had run out of crackers.
While ashore I stopped by the sailmaker, who has completed the modification of my cruising spinnaker for the gennaker furling gear. If it were possible for me to want to go sailing more, which it isn’t, this would be reason. However, the prospect is not promising. As this low moves off, another is forming just north of us. That it rains in New Zealand is not a surprise; there is a reason why the country is green; but a few sunny days with 10 to 15 knot wind would be appreciated.
I don’t want to make this sound like more than it is. We are not talking great storms here, just a succession of rainy days. Enough so that the bay has turned brown from the runoff.
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I was glad to finish DON JUAN. I think Byron was too because he didn’t finish it. Although he died young, he stopped working on DON JUAN a year before his death.
It is undeniably a great poem. An attack on the establishment: politicians, his fellow poets--he is particularly hard on Wordsworth--the aristocracy, including the Duke of Wellington, by one who was by birth a member of it. Witty and amusing. Shocking in its day, but hardly so now, with many great passages, including some fine battle scenes. Had I not recently read Ovid’s METAMORPHOSIS, I would say that it is the most amusing of the epics.
Don Juan has affairs with a friend of his mother, the daughter of a pirate, a harem girl, Catherine The Great of Russia, and the wife of an English noble. In each, curiously, the woman seduces him.
I was repeatedly impressed by Byron’s cleverness and inventiveness, but this was my third time through DON JUAN and it might have been my last.
Friday, September 21, 2007