Photo by Eva Rinaldi
Absolutely fabulous (yes, I know I’ve stolen those words, homage, homage) day here today—sun, blue sky, more than the tops of snow-capped volcanoes visible 100 miles off in the Cascades. Dryness is…well, amazing…after months of excessive rain, sodden ground, mud that rises up to meet and greet you even when you do something as simple as take the garbage out, toss the bag into the flat bed of the pickup truck. All day, the noise of my outdoor music returned, reminder that weather was present, active, a presence, and likely changing. So far, it’s still dry out there. Blessed event. The sun buoys my soul.
Yoga at noon. We look at, worry about, fret and fête our feet. After that, I buy French jelly jars for next to nothing at the Oregon State University thrift store, check out poetry at the library, make photocopies of everything and anything orange at Kinko’s: the True Colors collaborative journal project has seeped into my pores.
Now, it is a night of mostly nothing. Sorting through books, which ones to try and trade downtown, which ones to keep, shelve, hopefully stay alive long enough to read. Did read about Anatole Broyard in Henry Gates’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man this eve. I seem to remember reading somewhere that Broyard—and his passing as white for nearly all of his professional, book reviewing life—was inspiration for the character Silk (sorry, first name forgotten) in Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain. Fascinating, if a tad New York publishing world/literary universe gossipy. Oh but that’s to be expected from those East Coast sycophants. They haven’t had the benefit of the Pacific salt air, the New Age testimonials, the West Coast trust funds, and real estate windfalls that buy one and all liberation from having to vie for positions of prestige in the glitterati’s version of the 9 to 5. Still, this one essay does make me curious about the rest of the book. I could start at the beginning with James Baldwin. Maybe this one isn’t ready for the barter banter yet.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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