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I write this sitting in the kitchen sink
(This post was written a little before three o'clock.)
This is strange snow. It's the first real storm of the winter, for which I am thankful, but it's peculiarly out of practice—the slightest shift in the temperature swings snow around to rain, hail to sleet, with less warning than a hawk or a handsaw. In the two hours I spent shoveling, everything from Christmas tinsel flakes to stinging seed-beads of ice to what felt like bucketsful of freezing water fell on me, occasionally within the same fifteen minutes. (And then we had a blackout, which was cold. Fortunately the power just flickered back on, because as much as I love fires, the lack of hot water is not my favorite. I had enough of that in my old apartment.) I started this post with the heavy, swirling, stuck-together flurries that pile up into drifts and snowmen. Now it's thin, dryly sifting slants that hiss on the panes. Oh, never mind, it thickened again. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised at snow locusts.
I should post about all the films I've seen recently, like Powell and Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), which was phantasmagorically weird and which I loved, or the books I'm in the middle of, like Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and Ian R. MacLeod's The Light Ages (2003), or even about the onion soup that my mother and I are making from scratch. It's Valentine's Day. She makes cards for everyone in our family out of red construction paper and white and pink foil. I had a cherry cordial chocolate for breakfast, which was a definite improvement on the ways I usually wake up. But I have to shovel the driveway again, and in any case there's no internet because it never came back with the lights and the heat. I'll fix that later. The snow is still strange.
This is strange snow. It's the first real storm of the winter, for which I am thankful, but it's peculiarly out of practice—the slightest shift in the temperature swings snow around to rain, hail to sleet, with less warning than a hawk or a handsaw. In the two hours I spent shoveling, everything from Christmas tinsel flakes to stinging seed-beads of ice to what felt like bucketsful of freezing water fell on me, occasionally within the same fifteen minutes. (And then we had a blackout, which was cold. Fortunately the power just flickered back on, because as much as I love fires, the lack of hot water is not my favorite. I had enough of that in my old apartment.) I started this post with the heavy, swirling, stuck-together flurries that pile up into drifts and snowmen. Now it's thin, dryly sifting slants that hiss on the panes. Oh, never mind, it thickened again. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised at snow locusts.
I should post about all the films I've seen recently, like Powell and Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), which was phantasmagorically weird and which I loved, or the books I'm in the middle of, like Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and Ian R. MacLeod's The Light Ages (2003), or even about the onion soup that my mother and I are making from scratch. It's Valentine's Day. She makes cards for everyone in our family out of red construction paper and white and pink foil. I had a cherry cordial chocolate for breakfast, which was a definite improvement on the ways I usually wake up. But I have to shovel the driveway again, and in any case there's no internet because it never came back with the lights and the heat. I'll fix that later. The snow is still strange.
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In Words of Mercury there is some follow-on to some of the unresolved issues in Between the Woods and the Water.
Fermor is my favorite travel writer. I think he's everybody's favorite really, they just don't know it. Brilliant, brilliant man. And talk about panache...
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I have not: I found Between the Woods and the Water misfiled under children’s literature in the Book Trader Café in New Haven last week and, never having read anything by Patrick Leigh Fermor before, promptly bought it. (That was a good book haul. I also left with a trade paperback of I Capture the Castle and Edith Pargeter's The Heaven Tree.) I am now inclined to read anything he's written.
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Gooood, gooood, another convert.
The difficulty is there's not very much. But those two (the walk to Constantinople) have been reprinted in unattractive but widely-distributed paperbacks and recently.
If you are inclined to firsts, Fermor is still alive therefore still affordable. The firsts are more attractive than any of the reprints thus far. The Mani and Roumeli firsts include photos by Joan which later reviewers have complained were left out of later editions.
So, go forth and seek and read:
A Time for Gifts (you will then want to reread Woods and Water)
Mani
Roumeli (You'll love these too.)
Words of Mercury
Then round up any of the small stuff you can find.
I have The Traveller's Tree, but I am an inveterate author-rationer and have been saving it. So I cannot speak firsthand for it. But Fermor is excellence personified. Note that Time to Keep Silence is about Mt Athos, not a follow-on to the Constantinople stories as such.
He has not completed the third volume, so we don't know what happened on the last half of the journey... after his wife died he had a hard time, I think.
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I actually discovered him through an article in The New Yorker in May: and then recently I found out that Powell and Pressburger had made a movie about him, which my mother has seen. This is awesome.
Then round up any of the small stuff you can find.
I will let you know what I think!