L.A.

It's cold, and the traffic has disappeared since the last time I was here. Instead: empty shopping malls, empty parking lots, and the feel of a recession. Actually, everything looks like a scene from Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. I'd quote from it, but it's back in my apartment in Brooklyn. Suffice to say: mismatched houses, imported exotic plants and construction materials, the occasional turret, and a plethora of pets and track pants. (Those last may not have been in the book.) Oh, my home is magical.

Mating

I am only 100 pages into this immense novel by Norman Rush.  It is his Important Book.  I read another of his books - Mortals - a few years ago, and it was extraordinary but also such a feverish, intense experience that I guess I had a hangover that kept me from reading this book until now.  I'm grateful, because this is one of those fortuitous moments when they right book happens to your life at just the right time.  Not that I am considering a move to Botswana, or a return to fieldwork, or keeping a chronicle of my love affair with a utopian guru, but I have some free time right now and what I really need is a brilliant & confident female narrator.  Which we get here.  I don't think she's actually been named yet, but she's witty and depressed, an excellent observer of the weird social rituals of white expatriates in Botswana.  For a while she dates an ANC revolutionary.  This is how she describes him:

He was myopic and wore glasses, which like his weight had an effect on me.  I have a certain inordinate feeling toward revolutionaries who wear glasses, because there is the sense of how easily they could be unhorsed in the slightest physical confrontation with the enemy just by someone flicking their glasses to the ground and stepping on them.  So you assume such people have unusual amounts of courage.

Please read this book.

Mugsefjun (a.k.a. my preferred buff)

I wish, however, that this was Buff.

A band called Mugsefjun playing a birthday party in a backyard in Reyjavik:

More on Buff

I present to you: Buff. It feels like I'm coming home after five years on the hunt.

buff

I grabbed this poster from the wall next to the bathroom in a Reykjavik cafe. I brought it back, and hug myself when I look at it. Sarah, you might have been pouring coffee from a French press at the time.

Apparently Buff is an Icelandic candy. That aside, I suspect it is a band but haven't been able to confirm.

bookshelf

do you guys know about this bookshelf blog?

what a forlorn, stunning young thing

I hope we the people never get rid of coke machines.

waterfalls

So I was prepared to be impressed by Olafur Eliasson's waterfalls, but they were actually pretty disappointing. Partly, it was that the vantage points didn't actually give you very good vantage (the best option was probably to get on the boat that literally went past them). But it was also because the bridges were still more impressive than the waterfalls beneath them (a definitive win for steel over water) and because the waterfalls would have to be three times as big and tall and wide to make people FEEL them. And that would've killed even more riverside plant life.

ask a librarian

Sarah, how bad is it for books to stack them horizontally like this? I've been doing it off and on for a few years now, and I'm always fearful that one day I'll take an O'Neill play out and its pages will be completely and utterly stuck together.

wreath

I made this wreath from extra paper, magazines, and images from some art book catalogues.  There is also a picture of Henry James.  I may add a ribbon.

snow

Cinderella

I don't know if I ever mentioned that I write book reviews.  

Also, last night I went to Compline, which was relaxing, and today as I walked about I saw tons of people I like on their way to one place or another, and everyone was happy.  It was the stereotypical college town experience that I never seem to have.

And the weather is amazing, and I keep seeing hawks.

So things are pretty good here.  

winter

It's cold here - the kind of cold that sticks to you, that makes inhaling difficult, that freezes your eyelashes together - and so I woke up this morning glad that I finally invested in a 600-fill down jacket. It's a black, three-quarter length coat, the kind that keeps your warm from your head to your knees - imagine wearing a sleeping bag, and being grateful for the insulation. This type of outerwear is expensive, and cost more than I've ever spent on one item of clothing -perhaps more than I've ever spent on one item of anything, save for a computer. I justified the purchase because a) I live in Canada and b) if I didn't get it this winter I would just need to get it next winter, so I might as well get it now and get more seasons out of it.

In any case, I was wearing it this morning and my mum saw me in it and made the following comment:

"The government should buy everyone one of those coats."

I smiled a little bit as I thought of the entire Canadian public wearing poofy, matching coats for five months. My mum's right, of course - I get so many government cheques each year that I know they could have purchased me this coat and still sent me a certain amount of tax-rebate and living allowance money. I'm pretty certain, too, that if the Canadian government put in an order for 30 million North Face winter coats, they could get wholesale pricing. We'd all be happy, warm, little citizens who might be more apt to vote and not end up with the disaster we have right now in parliament.

And so I conclude: government-issued outerwear would be good for democracy (or if nothing else, some sort of national cohesion, which we're in need of right now).

pre-subway

similarly, i find myself in something of a forlorn december daze. have put my feet into black heels today for the first time in awhile, and hope both that i don't trip on the subway and that wearing them will do something for my general outlook.

exhaustion.

exhausted. everyone at my office has the flu. i am going to bed, with books in hands.