sovay: (Default)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2011-07-22 05:18 pm

And the subject's no Venus

I keep feeling that I have forgotten how to say anything. I should be used to it by now, but I also keep feeling that doesn't mean I have to like it.

The heat outside is stunning, both in the sense that it is impressive and that it makes you feel poleaxed. I sat on the front steps for a while with Puck of Pook's Hill and so long as I didn't move, I could remain in bare equilibrium with the hundred and one degrees Fahrenheit. When I walked ten feet to meet the postman (I got paid for a poem), I started to overheat.

[livejournal.com profile] teenybuffalo found this photo of me from the Rhysling Slan on Saturday. Speaking of stunned, I look like a case of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. My hair is not, in most lights, actually that color. (Naturally, I think everyone else looks fine.)

On Mass. Ave., there is a bus stop near the Arlington-Cambridge line whose name, thanks to the prerecorded quality of the speakers on the 77, always sounds like "Carhouse Yates." It's not, but I have decided this must be a character's name. You should wonder whether the first part is given or a colorful story and no one, including his biographers, should ever be able to find out.

I wish I were in the sea.

[identity profile] nineweaving.livejournal.com 2011-07-23 03:44 pm (UTC)(link)
As I recall, I first encountered "carhouse" for "garage" in To KIll a Mockingbird.

Yes: "Jem picked up a rock and threw it jubilantly at the carhouse. Running after it, he called back: 'Atticus is a gentleman, just like me!'"

Nine

[identity profile] ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com 2011-07-23 11:39 pm (UTC)(link)
Interesting. I'd not remembered that bit. Thanks!

Asked my mother about the usage--she spent the better part of her childhood in Mobile and in Baldwin County, not far away from Harper Lee's homeplace. She doesn't remember having heard it, but it may well be one of the differences between Monroe County and its neighbours.

I still think Carhouse Gates deserves a novel of his own. Couldn't begin to write it for him, unfortunately.