Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Signs of spring?
It's coming, really. I know it is. Despite the snowstorm predicted for later this week. I took a two-hour walk on Sunday in the warm sun, up the hill to the highest point in Bangor (a park with a historic shingled wooden/metal watertower, the Standpipe - to get the scale of this thing, look at the arched entry door at the bottom left) then through various neighborhoods out to our local golf course (great view out to the horizon in several directions). I staggered out through the deep snow to sit on the dry top of a picnic bench and listen to the crazy-happy songbirds in the trees nearby. I couldn't see them so I don't know what they were, but they were happily heralding something, that's for sure. Besides getting outdoors now that the temperature is above twenty degrees, I've been busy painting - three good paintings in the last three days, after not getting much done at all for a month (besides stretching canvases and feeling grumpy that I wasn't painting), so hope is running high. If I had a digital camera right now, I'd share the images, but I don't, so I can't. More good news: I seem to be selling books again at the shop. It had gotten to the point where I felt shocked if someone came up with a generous pile of books to buy, shocked. Every winter I've always had a few new patrons who discovered my shop and came in over and over to buy a lot of books, often buying enough to pay my shop rent, all at one time - they helped me get through the winter - but not this year, for some reason. Well, now I find I can get by anyway, with a squeak.
Last night I read a goofy little novel, A Nest of Ninnies, by John Ashbery and Jimmy Schuyler (Ecco hardcover reprint). I'd classify it as almost meaningless, and nearly undreadable. But entertaining, nonetheless. At one point, Fabia, one of the characters, is reading a book called Six Characters in Search of a Novel. (p.60) Which could be an apt description of this very book. I get the feeling that the entire book is one long in-joke, bits of which I can pick up on, and the rest zooms by and I say Wait a sec, what was that? but it's long gone. Now the only book left on my bedside table is the Odyssey. With a bookmark in it reminding me that I read the first hundred pages in January then covered the book up with many other books. I am also tempting fate by having several books out of the library (I know I've chronicled my troubles with library fines for overdue books here before), but those are in a pile on the kitchen table, for breakfast reading. Big difference.
Last night I read a goofy little novel, A Nest of Ninnies, by John Ashbery and Jimmy Schuyler (Ecco hardcover reprint). I'd classify it as almost meaningless, and nearly undreadable. But entertaining, nonetheless. At one point, Fabia, one of the characters, is reading a book called Six Characters in Search of a Novel. (p.60) Which could be an apt description of this very book. I get the feeling that the entire book is one long in-joke, bits of which I can pick up on, and the rest zooms by and I say Wait a sec, what was that? but it's long gone. Now the only book left on my bedside table is the Odyssey. With a bookmark in it reminding me that I read the first hundred pages in January then covered the book up with many other books. I am also tempting fate by having several books out of the library (I know I've chronicled my troubles with library fines for overdue books here before), but those are in a pile on the kitchen table, for breakfast reading. Big difference.
