I'm not sure whether it can properly be called an antique store, or how I could possibly have forgotten to mention it, but just off the Plaza in Taos is a fantastically creepy roomful of oddities, like rusty nineteenth-century medical tools and books hot off the invention of the printing press, and a box filled with glass eyeballs, complete with veins. The two highlights were, of course, open books: a pictorial collection of skin and venereal diseases, featuring a photograph of a syphilitic child with rotting teeth and one wistful, downcast eye, and some religious tome involving imagery I can't possibly do justice with words. Seriously, Siddhartha Gautama with visible large intestine, only it's really a labyrinth, or a smaller version of himself, or a microcosmic solar system, or God. I wanted to take photos but was suitably intimidated by the elderly Germanic man creaking in his chair and casting suspicious glances my way. The whole thing reminded me of the Discovery Health Channel. But that's another can of worms.
I totally caved and bought True Religion jeans. You can take the girl out of Orange County, but...
Day five of the apparently two-week cold means that my voice has opted to desert me. About half an hour ago I told my half-sister over the phone that Chris and I want to take her to dinner when we're in California next month. Then I managed to squeak out a question regarding what restaurants she likes. Because day five also means deafness, I inadvertently forced her to admit twice that she likes eating at some sort of buffet chain. It was a mental moment of what the fuck. I suspect we'll wind up at Ichibiri. Later on she mentioned that her class is going on a field trip tomorrow. "Oh, really?" I tried to say. "Where?" "A field trip," she replied. To the field, I guess.
Speaking of Chris, how great is being in love? It makes me want to... buy cute underwear. But I guess that's filtered entry material. Whoops.
My reading goal this year was one per week. Thankfully I reached fifty-two a couple months ago, because I love John Crowley's prose more than I have the energy to articulate right now, but he writes the longest five hundred-page books I've ever read. Love & Sleep was due back yesterday, and there are still a hundred pages left to turn. At least the county library has no late fees!
By way of background, Crowley's Aegypt sequence is a series of four books inhabiting three astrological houses apiece. That takes care of the structure. What makes them interesting is their premise: What if the world was not as it always has been? What if there have been various shifts throughout the ages during which the fundamental laws of the universe changed? In essence, what if Isaac Newton wasn't so crazy to devote the bulk of his time to the study of alchemy? What if John Dee and Edward Kelley really did communicate with angels by means of crystal balls? In typical Crowley fashion, the stories are layered beyond belief, less fantastical than they sound, and ploddingly plotted. The first two books are out of print, and the fourth has yet to be published. What a mess! And what intrigues (and frustrates) me most is the lack of attention his writing gets simply because it's been pigeonholed as genre fiction. There's a lot of poorly written 'literature' out there, so quality fantasy shouldn't possess oxymoronic connotations. Especially not in a reality that allows Tolstoy on the bestseller list solely on account of one woman's blessing.
Anyway, the very readily available Little, Big is arguably his masterpiece. It's the story of Smoky Barnable and Daily Alice Drinkwater, past and future, the infundibular world of faeries alongside which their house rests, foundlings, memory palaces, and the realization that sometimes a stork isn't simply a stork, but also a story.
Now that I've exhausted books - for the time being, but soon enough I'll get to Philip Pullman's brilliant but sadly out-of-print second novel, Galatea - how about television? More importantly, how about my hatred for the A&E adaptation of Pride and Prejudice at fifteen? At this point I don't know whether I'm more smitten with Colin Firth's portrayal or Jennifer Ehle's. My memory palace clearly has walls of hypocrisy. I may learn to like Austen yet.
But not Dickinson.
Art? Remedios Varo. And Kaplan's biography. And just knowing that she and Leonora Carrington were friends.
Did I mention I figured out what I want to do with my life?