The sounds of things in the world

There are many elements of my childhood that I find it almost impossible to abandon. Some of them I even enjoy - reading aloud, or being read to is definitely at the top of the list.

Winter evenings my father read to us from Tom Sawyer and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (in the living room by the fireplace as we sat on the floor in our pajamas with the dog and our stuffed animals (you may now gag, but remember - this is my reality)) (also, hot cocoa). In the third grade, our teacher read Caddie Woodlawn to us, and my young adulthood holds afternoons spent with friends and The Phantom Tollbooth and The Princess Bride floating around in words that landed on the walls and the chairs and our hearts more real than laughter.

I loved La Lectrice (The Reader) almost instantly because of the whimsical nature of the serious business of reading aloud from the page to someone else in the room. Also, it's just funny. (aside: I saw a lot of really good movies one spring. Just a thought.)

Knitting and crochet and macrame and all of those crafts that end in -ay or something like it are enjoyable and productive and creative and kind of quiet. I am not so enamoured of my own voice that I have to be surrounded by it at all times, but I do like the sound of someone's voice. Music is almost too intense to hear while creating, but learning or landscape or mystery or magic, these are welcome to my home - not through earbuds, but played out to fill the space.

O Jerusalem turned the futon on which I knitted my poncho into a goat-skin tent with cups of gritty coffee and air thick with stories so layered no one knows where one tradition could even begin to begin.

Inkspell is sheer ear candy. The story is dark and difficult and weighty with storytelling matters and yarn turns to lace very easily to Brendan Fraser's voice.

I'd been reading the Lectures volume of the Harvard Classics out loud in the house in Maryville. The cats were not so fond of it, but I liked the exercise of speaking well turned sentences and different rhythms. My writing got better and my voice started finding more creative ways of interpreting the words on the page. I miss it.

It is a very grounding experience, something that cannot be pretended away: the sound of a voice, a human voice, making human sounds out of humanly created letters and words and sentences. It is always around a fire/kitchen table/hearth.There is a magic to the noises made, to the act of making them - I am not alone when I am reading out loud the words of someone I will never meet.

I am excited to try to participate in the BYOB events at Subterranean Books once I get to St. Louis. I loved the day long reading of Paradise Lost at UNL to commemorate Milton's 400th birthday. One of these days, I will find the time and resources to read for Librivox. The last time I checked, there were still very many titles in the public domain without recordings in the archive.


We read silently. We read publicly. We read dispassionately. There is difficulty reading aloud, it is a thing to be practiced. Fortunately, even though the cats don't like hearing me read aloud, I can always scratch that up to a deficiency in feline nature. :)

The cat, she makes me nervous with her calm

First and foremost: please be safe in the path of bad weather!

The Beat has an article about the hurricane with useful sorts of links.

In other news, Ali Ferzat, a Syrian cartoonist, was attacked by thugs who beat him and broke his hands. As stated in The Beat's article: "Ferzat is recovering. In the meantime, please visit his website, and do what you can to promote and protect freedom of speech, even in countries where the government actively suppresses this freedom."

Artist stuff: My friend Christopher Wilson's photographs are now available for purchase through his Capture My Chicago page. Go there! Buy some! Send me one!

Today I write more cover letters. I've decided to write one to my potential future landlord as well. I think it smacks of over-doing it. Which is a thing at which I excel.

Researching where I want to work (not who is hiring, where I want to work) has fired my enthusiasm for my not-yet-city.

Subterranean Books! Their events are worth the drool I dripped, and I haven't even been there yet. BYOB is inspired. I am so jazzed to explore this place.

These days are going to be tense ones. I've just eaten the leftover Hamburger Pie. Out of the dish in which my mother cooked it. At the computer. Shameless, I know. Planning forays into the outer world and reading of the possible joys and horrors I may find there do not help to end the tension, but they do help spend the time less unwisely.

Speaking of unwise: I am Still Not Done with the damn book*. I have like 20 pages to go and just can't get there - it's like there's this sense that once this is finished, everything changes. Which is so silly, because everything changes all the time no matter what, so what the hell do 30 pages mean more or less? Anyway, I have another book to finish after that, so the cycle remains, as ever: unbroken.

The British Library maintains a number of blogs through its website. One of them speaks of science fiction. Today, specifically, of library and science fiction. Through the magical realism of Borges. And it gives me this beautiful parting line:

... there is no higher life form than a librarian."
THE SCIENCE OF DISCWORLD: Terry Pratchett, Jack Cohen, and Ian Stewart, p. 10.

*just Vol. 3 of the set.