Chemistry.

"Louisa sang as she came over the crest of the hill from the white folks' kitchen. Her skin was the colour of oak leaves on young trees in fall. Her breasts, firm and up-pointed like ripe acorns. And her singing had the low murmur of winds in fig tress. Bob Stone, younger son of the people she worked for, loved her. By the way the world reckons things, he had won her. By measure of that warm glow which came into her mind at thought of him, he had won her. [...] A strange stir was in her."

Jean Toomer, Cane (1923), New York: Perennial Classic, 1969, pp.51-52.

2010

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams
William Faulkner, The Unvanquished
James Agee & Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
Joan Didion, The White Album

the historical pursuit.

looking for the source that will - change - everything. that will explain the fullness of the then in the vibrancy of the now. (this is a pipe dream.)

film

i am sitting in my room at my computer writing a music review. lara just came in, i showed her something, she made a cryptic comment, i asked her what she meant, she wouldn't tell me, i asked her again, she wouldn't answer, she went to leave my room. i tried to stop her from leaving by holding onto her arm. but i am sitting in a rolly chair so it wasn't all that effective...i just ended up rolling along behind her on my chair.

we laughed about it for about five minutes.

writing an essay on shakespeare.

hmm my ideas are everywhere. some are in my head and some are written on paper and some are typed in Word but i swear there are some that are floating out the door of my room right now and others that are balancing precariously on my bookshelves, light fixtures, piles of clothes and cds, etc...

Typing Sunday.

Today has not been a particularly enjoyable day, apart from a sneaked spoonful of Nutella and some funny messages from friends, but I am up and yes and full. Jittery. If I were into bad analogies, I would liken it to popcorn with its salty smell of promise. Actually let's be honest, I am into bad analogies.

I am writing an essay explaining how the development of the spa and then the beach-side resort in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reflected changing attitudes to the body and society. It is interesting but remote to me today.

I didn't enjoy church tonight.

speaking across the suburbs

I made a phone call to speed sleep.

Last week in history I learnt about liminality: a doorway, a threshold, an in-between space of both liberty and risk. Travelers are said to absent themselves from normal life; to step outside society and to thrust themselves into this unregulated, uncertain space.

I know that we are still just friends, and I will continue to know this until you tell me otherwise.

Some hand-written speech in my notebook, from around me today. Politely interrupting myself, shelving some errant thoughts in rough alphabetical order. I may borrow them out later.

Time? As slow as we make it, right now. A messy clock, almost marking the dates.