Today I have not a narrative nor a diatribe, nor even a pondering essay, but only
a collection of random musings.
Blame it on lack of sleep; our power
kept going off and coming back on last night. Amazing how much noise a clock can
make coming back on, not to mention the resumption of the usual background drone
of refrigerators, air conditioners, and street lights.
The
interrupted sleep may also explain why when the alarm went off, I was dreaming
that I was George Weasley, hiking up a snowy mountain in company with my mother
and three other people, one male and two female. It may be the truncated REM
cycles, as I say, though I'm more likely to blame
href="http://fanfiction.net/index.fic?action=directory-
authorProfile&userid=4446">Rebecca Bohner, myself, for her vivid portrayal of
George in her fanfic trilogy-in-progress.
The power outage in
combination with my still-
dead cable makes me wonder if anything sinister is going on.
NPR
announced this morning that Eudora Welty had died. I didn't actually know she was
still alive,
actually.
I've actually gotten around to reading one of the issues of
the Atlantic Monthly that I'm being sent
to complete my subscription to the Library of Congress's defunct Civilization
magazine (yes, Civilization as I knew it is dead) and I'm quite impressed. Though
they are a bit slow -- the current issue has a story
href="http://www.theatlantic.com/cgi-bin/o/unbound/flashbks/twain.htm">Mark Twain
wrote for them -- for this very periodical -- 125 years ago, and they're just
now publishing it.
The impressive thing is that that wasn't even the
most newsworthy item in the magazine. I'd already read or heard , without
realizing where they came from, articles responding to B. R. Myers Reader's
Manifesto, in which he attacks current lit'ritchure for being unreadable, and
Brooke Allen's Two -
- Make That Three -- Cheers for the Chain Bookstores, in which she points out
that those often-lamented independent bookstores, especially outside big cities,
weren't really all that good at providing readers with the books they wanted. I
agree with both essays, which is why the books I read tend not to be gushed over
by highbrow critics and why I have a fondness for Borders that I never felt for
the probably-dead-by-now Marlo's book store, whose puny treasures could never hope
to match the richness that was the local public library. And the library was
closer to my house, at a time when crossing major street was a fairly new
skill.
I need to write about that library sometime; it was wonderful,
though it looks much smaller now, on my rare visits to the
neighborhood.
Someone at work made the coolest comment yesterday --
he told me I looked like the bass player for the Go-Gos. The resemblance is mostly
superficial, I think (short dark hair, dark eyes), but still.
Yet
another of our smartest people just sent out an email to say he's leaving. What
does that say about those of us who are still here?