2006-07-11, 9:42 a.m.: It rained here every day, all day, without stopping once, and they bandied about the word 'monsoon.' I like that as it brings to mind beloved scenes from the film version of Duras's 'The Lover' (or even 'The Chinese Lover' - her later title for some reason. I read about 1/4 of this book in actual! French! before giving up, or not really giving up so much as fading away and flaking out ...). It brings to mind the matter of my own birth. Not that I was born in a monsoon .... But I could have been, it being August and Okinawa and al. Actually, I have no idea when monsoon season is. All I know is, it was Sunday and rainy and cold and we drove to Denver. I noted on the way there that the HUGE AMC theater - with enough parking for the apocalypse, normally - was completely clogged. And I saw on the Weather Channel that there was rain across the entire face of the U.S. And that, of all the cities in the entire continental United States, the coldest one of all, by maybe 10 degrees or so, was Denver. It was 54. And I was thinking: What to do here, anywhere, today? In the rain? Because there's nothing for instance to do in all of Boulder or Boulder County if it's raining (besides the usual things, I mean, like staying home and reading books and watching all the Deadwoods you've been saving up for weeks). In Denver we ate barbecue and visited my sister's No. 2 Daughter (my sister is visiting from Virginia). I ate chicken breast for the first time in about two years, and it was good. I was cold. I had an irrational fear of leaving the house beforehand, since I've been stuck in here so long. Hating it but not knowing how to get out. On Thursday it will be three months I've been on crutches. I'm stir crazy and lonesome but also mad and feeling better. I may be walking again soon. I'm sorta mad at everyone right now, though. As usual. I'm starting to read 'Fragrant Palm Leaves,' by Thich Nhat Hanh. We went to The Book Worm in Boulder yesterday, where I always find 20 or so books without even looking (and thus only visit once every two years). Two books on Arthuriana in general, one on The Grail in specific, one I actually don't already own on the history of witchcraft, one on Tai Chi and two on Zen Buddhism. One on lavender (with which I carry on a love/love relationship at all time). I stayed up laaaate one night, till 3:30AM when I knew I would be woken at 7AM by toddler antics, watching 'Wedding Crashers,' which is NO JOKE the worst movie I have seen since 'The Hulk.' Not quite as bad but in some ways much more innappropriate and off the mark. I'm embarassed to say I watched the whole thing but I'm sorta in love with Isla Fisher, who I kept thinking was Amy Allen, who as you all know was a Jedi mown down by Order 66. 0 comments
2006-06-30, 8:03 p.m.: Conducive to writing: Reading. Valium. Brain-freeze-temp, three-shot iced lattes. The pressing need to get something - anything - else done. Non-conducive to writing: Motherhood. Using the Continuous Passive Motion machine on the couch all day. Injury resulting in lethargy resulting in utter prostration before the gods of passive culture consumption. Lipgloss and body glitter. All is vanity. Reading Andre Dubus selected short stories. These are perfectly crafted little gems of stories that I hate with a passion. A cold passion. Spiders crawling on my neck and I must brush them off quickly, quickly so as not to be pricked. I really find these stories appalling and depressing but I keep reading them. (Sorta like Bret Easton Ellis's short stories, way back when, which I later learned to appreciate, grudgingly, against my will. Well, I couldn't forget them.) I keep expecting something Dubus has written here to approach John Cheever or even John Gardiner, but alas. I put down Amsterdam last summer after slogging my way through the first 1/4 of the book and hating it. Now Gini tells me it's her favorite McEwan book, what she considers the best. Not a comfortable read, she assures me, but even so: Best. I reluctantly dug the thing out of my dusty bedside table shelf, buried under unread Star Wars comic books (the 'Empire' series) and Samuel Sewall's diary and the first book of poems published by the almost-famous poet I had the alcoholic indiscretion with. (I don't read this book, on principle, but I feel I must keep it just the same.) There's also Little Dorrit, which I'm a full 5 chapters into. Shame to give up there. BUT, right now, I've got Quicksilver here and my full fan fealty to the living, breathing, walking god of all things cryptically and cryptographically fictionous. Stephenson: The blessed post-Gibsonesque katana-and-pen-wielder. I am thinking of a book, something of a cross between The Blue Flower and Friedrich von Hardenberg AND a shifting-reality scifi potboiler. Something that smacks of the Romantics as well as of Ursula K. LeGuin's gendershifting realities as well as a Matrix-like dystopia. What the hell this means, I don't know. The summer being virtually lost for summertime pursuits and the wearing of pretty pink skirts in public, I am turning my eye to the autumn, to a tour in the autumn of old Salem Village and Cape Cod. I have never been to these places. The journey to the top of the mountain for enlightenment and will-not-be-vanquished-ness must begin somewhere, and why not somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard? 1 comments
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