Sep
18th
Sun
18th
Apr
2nd
Sat
2nd
But can’t be! Without hot tomato soup for lunch on freezing afternoons? Who slept in those putrid pajamas? The owner of all those red rubber thimbles with the angry little spiky projections that he told us drove the girls up the walls of Paris? Smolka, who swam in the pool at Olympic Park, he’s alive too? And a professor at Princeton noch? In what department, classical languages or astrophysics? Ba-ba-lu, you sound like my mother. You must mean plumber, or electrician. Because I will not believe it! I mean down in my kishkas, in my deep emotions and my old beliefs, down beneath the me who knows very well that of course Smolka and Mandel continue to enjoy the ranch houses and the professional opportunities available to men on this planet, I simply cannot believe in the survival, let alone the middle-class success, of these two bad boys. Why, they’re supposed to be in jail—or the gutter. They didn’t do their homework, damn it! Smolka used to cheat off me in Spanish, and Mandel didn’t even give enough of a shit to bother to do that, and as for washing their hands before eating… Don’t you understand, these two boys are supposed to be dead! Like Bubbles. Now there at least is a career that makes some sense. There’s a case of cause and effect that confirms my ideas about human consequence! Bad enough, rotten enough, and you get your cock-sucking head blown off by boogies. Now that’s the way the world’s supposed to be run!
— Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
Aug
11th
Wed
11th
At a lovely secluded café in Cirencester.
Jul
1st
Wed
1st
Snapped this one on our Canada Day bike ride.
May
8th
Fri
8th
Tan’s tulips are comin’ up beautifully.
Apr
26th
Sun
26th
I’ve driven by this house many times, but it wasn’t until I saw this door left standing open that the sadness of it all hit me.
Apr
23rd
Thu
23rd
It is St George’s Day here in England. I’m off to celebrate by gutting some Scotsmen and setting fire to part of Wales.
— Warren Ellis (Say what you will about Twitter, but it bloody well brightens my day!)
Apr
19th
Sun
19th
The back lot of the Bytowne Cinema. I was on my way to see what I thought was The Wrestler; turns out that was playing at the Mayfair Theatre, but I enjoyed the 4 p.m. show of The Reader nonetheless.
Mar
29th
Sun
29th
What sort of woman had written the letter? He tried to picture her by systematically recalling his own lovers, but they merged into a roundelay of fleeting impressions, their eyes, faces, hairdos, clothes, voices, and gestures all blending together. And he knew that none of these women, however enchanting, would ever try rekindling a lost love through a reverie drawn from wilderness.
— A Birch Tree, A White Fox by Elena Arsenieva; translated from the Russian by Michael M. Naydan and Slava I. Yastremski
Mar
24th
Tue
24th
The long change
It’s very strange: daily living against the backdrop of a big change that’s still many months away. There are many things to do, and my motivation ebbs and flows as you might expect; but, frankly, some significant stretches of time bring the movie Groundhog Day strongly to mind.
This feeling is stronger this week, and I think the new paint on the walls and boxes in the rooms are largely to blame. At the risk of revealing how utterly unoriginal my thinking is, I feel like I could close my eyes and open them again on a moment ten minutes in my past, and close and open them again on the same scene three days in my future, just like Doctor Manhattan. Note that I didn’t reference my distant future: I know this will all change dramatically in what is really the very near future; it’s just that this illusion is so heavy sometimes.
My days are full, but it is easy to lose the path that connects them, on this, the long change.
