we have reached the beginning of the high season. in lieu of buggies and parasols taking turns around the park, we have clots of hefty tourists in matching tees, just waiting for me to nudge them down lombard street with the car's snout. gay pride week is in full swing as well - i haven't run across any of the weekend's parades, but i've had the pleasure of walking through some especially robust piles of festivity-garbage downtown. already nostalgic for early summer fog. joe's parents will see the apartment for the first time next weekend, so i'll spend the next several days seesawing between second drafts and coaxing mildew from the ceiling.
vacation reading:
whites, norman rush - a series of tight, fleshy little pieces. i finished a few stories before realizing that minor characters were popping up to narrate later; once i was up to speed, the collection held together like an episodic novel. quite satisfying, though i've grown so fond of rush's confidence with setting that i'm all the more annoyed with his lack of recent work.
lewis carroll: a biography, martin n. cohen - a long, romantic apology for a sad man's habit of photographing nude girl-children, and an exhaustive record of his persnickety/obscure satires and letters. celibacy is a key premise here: unluckily, someone located the missing racy bits of LC's journal shortly after cohen's biography hit the presses. crap - i think we were all ready to set the subject aside.
my war gone by, i miss it so, anthony loyd - i discovered this when loyd materialized in my bookstore wanting to autograph his stuff. it sat on the shelf for a year because i made an asinine comment to him about the cover photograph (it's affecting, but one shouldn't really like it) and i've been trying to heal and forget. he's a very capable and unapologetically personal war correspondent, and he does a fair job of unsnarling bosnian politics. i'm shocked by how young, how normal he seemed last year - reading some of this fucked with my sleep.
