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can you croon 09:15 After yet another colorless sad sunrise, I am listening to Sarah Shannon sing. Whoa, I seriously abused the "S" sound in that last sentence, but I didn't mean for that to happen. Getting back to Sarah, she sounds just as fresh as Morrissey did last night and I have to wonder how many people under the age of twenty five could even recognize him and or her. Of course she was part of Velocity Girl, so her name is more obscure than his among modern listeners. To put it another way, he was a presence and she was just the lead vocals of a band. There is a difference in there somewhere. ... Class is three and a half hours away and I have yet to eat and or shower. Sigh. ... They keep throwing the word snow into the weather forecast, but I have yet to see a single flake fall from the sky. ... 15:30 They had started last week already, but I forgot to mention it here. A snow fence is being put up on the beach. The sand had been raked free of any remaining debris and metal posts were staggered along the beach. Today there were thin wooden slats joining said posts. Winter is coming or at least people are starting to think about it. Nature is letting us know that we can't avoid it. Half the leaves are on the trees and the rest are on the ground swept into piles at the edge of the street. 16:15 After a meal from a can, my thinking has come into focus again. Now maybe I can say something more than bad poetry posing as a comment on the weather. Class went well enough. Before things got started I made small talk with Heidi and Greg, then sat back for a discussion led by the charming girl from Spain. Her home, the Basque region of Spain and its language, was her topic of choice. ... I thought that I had the concept of layering as a means of keeping warm perfected, but my crush in class was even better in that department. At first I thought that she wasn't going to be in class, but she walked in as the professor was passing out some handouts for discussion. Bundled in scarf and corduroy jacket, she took the seat in front of me and I couldn't have been happier. The multi colored scarf didn't quite go with the rest of the earth tones that kept her warm, but I didn't mind. I almost reached out to help her put her coat on the back of her chair but she got it into place before I could help. ... In a remarkable piece of timing, the audio version of The Blind Assassin ended four blocks from the library. I had thought that I'd be sitting in the parking lot waiting for the last cassette to reach its end. I was wrong. Not too surprisingly the book didn't paint men in a very good light, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it. Atwood has a way with words that need to be heard if not read to one's self. Plus she says things about men and women that are brutal and true. Not everyone may agree, but I get the impression from her that women need men to cast them in a good light just as the angels need demons. Satanism is nothing without Christ. Forgetting about the gender issue, Atwood is able to weave a family history through a number of generations and keep it understandable at the same time. It doesn't feel like a litany of characters that amount to nothing. What they do and say makes sense no matter how dysfunctional Atwood makes them. Fifteen minutes later I walked out with what for me are two new audio books. The dust and grit of Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain has replaced the sad Canadian women of Atwood. Sadly it's an abridged version, the Atwood book hadn't been truncated. Sigh. Waiting in the wings after Cities is Anita Shreve's Fortune's Rocks. Yes, I know that the last book is clearly a romance, but the cover illustrations of her books really appeal to me. They have a John Singer Sargent quality about them that I love. |