critiquing

My friend and student Ruth has written to amend something I wrote yesterday; apparently, Jordan Peterson is a rather creepy rightwing guy who sees everything as a Marxist conspiracy. I didn't look deeply enough into the whole story, was just using his case - of a hypersensitive person overreacting to a perceived insult - to bolster my own. Look more closely, Kaplan, before you shoot off your mouth. Always something new to learn.

And a disappointment I forgot to tell you about: the last episode of this season's Sherlock on Sunday night. I used to adore this brilliant, always surprising show, but it has become stranger, and Sunday's episode was absolutely horrible, ridiculously far-fetched and grotesquely violent, not remotely like the Sherlock I've come to know and love. That's what success can do to writers. Then Jean-Marc, Richard and I watched Victoria, and that too was disappointing - not bad, certainly entertaining, but not in any way comparable to the sharp, profound excellence of The Crown, though featuring a most beautiful actor with stunning cheekbones, Rufus Sewell, shining through it all.

And something else I forgot to tell you about, on Saturday the National Theatre Live production on screen of No Man's Land, the Pinter play starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. I left at the intermission. These theatre-on-film shows have to be really good to keep me hanging around for twenty minutes in the middle. This one was very Pinter - cryptic, menacing and nearly incomprehensible, and I decided I'd seen enough. I admire Pinter, played the cryptic, menacing Ruth in The Caretaker and directed the cryptic, menacing The Dumbwaiter in university, but sometimes he is like a parody of himself, and this play was like that.

It's good to know that I don't rhapsodize in ecstasy about everything, isn't it? I can be whiny and critical. And it's gloomy outside too.

But it's mild and there's no snow and I'm on my bike. Life is $@#$@ good.