In the roads that never saw sun nor sky

cucumberseed drew me a haruspex:



His Autumn War is an extraordinary world.

I spent a portion of this afternoon in Harvard Square with lesser_celery, mostly looking at books neither of us could afford to buy. We did not talk nearly as much as I would have liked (for which I blame the fact that I disappeared first into A.S. Byatt's The Matisse Stories (1993) and then a monograph on Miyazaki's Spirited Away), but at least it was in person rather than pixels. We conversed about the important things, like swine flu and unnatural acts. I should still have brought a camera. He's like spirit photography.

Afterward, I took the bus home. Somewhere between Porter Square and Route 16, two girls got on; I thought at first that one of them had a tattoo above the collar of her T-shirt, but it was a port-wine birthmark that began on her chin and spilled down the left side of her throat where it vanished under the green-and-white cotton. Maybe I still have time_shark and Goblin Fruit on the brain, but I looked at her and thought of maenads. Will you drink out of the blood, the white wine and the red? I don't know if it's fair to steal her face for a story. She was beautiful.

Our like may never, ever be seen again

Next in my ongoing series of attempts to convince myself that not everything that passes through my mind at stray moments is terminally uninteresting to others . . .

For the Fourth of July, I recently re-watched 1776 (1972) with a bunch of friends. Observing the conversational fallout over the next few days—an elevated incidence of aphorisms, tones of amazed frustration, and spontaneous sing-outs of, "Sit down, [X]!"—it struck me, not for the first time, that I imagine most viewers either sympathize with or see themselves as John Adams. He is a wonderfully appealing figure, especially as played by William Daniels; there is a reason a gold dollar coin of him sits on my shelf of accidental talismans between the salt-green fishing float and the four pearls I have found in mussels. By a similar token, I would be surprised if there were no fandom for Franklin, and with any luck even one for Stephen Hopkins. But does anyone watch 1776 and identify with John Dickinson? I confess that while I longed for years to sic the dybbuk of John Adams on the Bush administration just for the fireworks, I'd be kind of curious to see what the ghost of Dickinson—the historical semi-Quaker or the fictionalized antagonist—would have to say about the current trends of political conservatism.

In other news, I am very taken with this statement:

To illustrate: a portrait can be painted without a nose, but the nose will be present, so to speak, through its obvious absence; whereas no one would ever remark that a given still life was missing, say, its banana, or a given landscape its lake.
—Jonathan Kalb, Beckett in Performance (1991)

It makes me want to write "Still Life Without Banana." Bonus points to anyone who can paint one.