In a café with a Hotspot that supposedly closes at 5. It's 3am. Someone is going around putting chairs upside down on tables.
How this happened.
I went to my gym at 12.30. The guy said the strom was kaput. (Roughly.) My gym has machines and also Internet access. Deprived of access to my cross-trainer I went to Kleisther, a café which advertises itself as closing, as I say, at 5.
And NOW look.
But I did catch the latest xkcd.
I am not getting as much work done as I thought because, as Maureen Howard once said, life gets in the way, but I have been reading a shockingly slipshod book on Durkheim on suicide and rereading Orlando Paterson's brilliant Slavery and Social Death. SSD came out in something like 1982, roughly the publication date of other books that dazzled me (Riddley Walker, Hawksmoor, An Insular Possession, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller), but I only discovered it in 1998 and now can't live without it. And I am not linking to anything, obviously, because someone is going around putting chairs upside down on tables.
I am not wanted. They want to close up. They want to go home.
4 comments:
ARGHHHH!
Nothing in particular to say, other than general commiseration on internet cafes. I went the other day to the fancy Chelsea Piers gym with a friend & had it illuminated to me why a fancy gym membership in Manhattan with wireless internet, cafe areas and locker potential would be well worth it to a young person who lives in Brooklyn but works and often socializes in Manhattan... Riddley Walker and Hawksmoor were exactly two books that blew my mind in the mid-80s! But can it really be that there is such a short list of dazzling things? Having just moved to new apt, and got rid of SLEWS of books, my first Amazon book purchase to new address has arrived - Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind...
As far as 1982 goes: I, unfortunately, was not aware of the existence of these books at the time. I was a little preoccupied with my birth and becoming self-aware of my own existence.
I did finally read If on a winter's night a traveler-- thanks to Helen's recommendation--this past year. Riddley Walker has been on my Amazon shopping list for some time now, and I'm gonna have to check out the others soon.
And as far as the latest xkcd goes: I like to see myself as the "strange kid". (That's not me being conceited, just slightly self-aware.) lol. <---eww, i just lol'd on your blog. sorry 'bout that.
Sorry about the cafe; that's a really annoying experience.
I still remember the impact reading SSD had on me when it came out, and I just went and scanned the shelves to make sure I still had it after (*counts*) four moves. (I seem to have lost almost all my Cecil Taylor CDs, but I still have Patterson.) Great book, and I urge everyone with an interest in the subject to read it.
Ms. HD:
regarding suicide:
you've probably been asked this before
but
do you think a women needs money and a room of her own in order to write fiction?
- a loyal reader and owner of 4 copies of TLS
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