I’m keeping a blog, and keeping the resolution of keeping one. Have you noticed how strange “February” looks and sounds; as if there were a consistent foggy blue stuck in the middle of it? As in a suspense of “brumes,” French for fog, and “blue.”

Tonight I’m going to see Jason Moran at Town Hall, playing a tribute to the famous Thelonious Monk concert. Somehow I always want to call Thelonious Theo. Theo Monk. I don’t think he would like the free familiarity.

And until tomorrow, I have no news. Other than the fact that mahogany, coming largely from Madeira, had a severe impact on Jane Eyre. But now I must finish the article.

I’m preparing myself for the apple-like crisp weekend coming ahead and creating a stilly pool of self-control around me. Nothing will shake my determination to be at peace; I think that’s what this weather is best for. 

But what I really wanted to share, is a quote that I read from Diana Fuss: “In perhaps its simplest formulation, identification is the detour through the other that defines a self.” The simplicity of expression, this being an tortuous idea, struck me as something to be admired. Isn’t it true, though, that identification with another person is actually loopy, coming back straight at you? 

I think that’s why I could never identify with Palin; it’d be too psychically painful to do it, having to be emotionally vulnerable. What if I found myself in her; her in myself?  

Finally, I have things to write about, and so I’m back.

I’m reading Wordsworth’s The Prelude for the second time, and I still don’t “get” it. Let me be blunt: I don’t like Wordsworth, although I like bits of Wordsworth; I don’t empathize, don’t feel, don’t need to read him—and I don’t think he’s that much of a poet philosopher either. 

But then, there are moments, bordering on the absurd. (Book VII):

… Through the night, 

Between the show, and many-headed mass

Of the spectators, and each little nook

That had its fray or brawl, how eagerly 

And with what flashes, as it were, the mind 

Turned this way, that way—sportive and alert

And watchful, as a kitten when at play,

While winds are blowing round her, among grass

And rustling leaves.” 

Isn’t this the strangest description of the mind ever written? Mind as kitten! First, there’s the “many-headed mass/Of the spectators,” which is a gross image that you can carry with you into plays and movie theaters in the future (thanks, Wordsworth), but then, the mind flashes. And then it’s a kitten, transported on the grass, where the winds play? 

Whatever my annoyance with Wordsworth right now, I am totally going to think of my mind tickled by the October breeze, frolicking on a sun-bathed lawn, during the Biden Palin debate.  

Rainy, gray, blue and green. This weather reminds me of beaches in the winter, and cement benches on the sand. If today were a cat, it would be a sphynx; if it were a book, it would resemble passanges of Sebald. In fact, the drizzle outside reminds me of a passage I just read in Austerlitz:

“Adela came to meet me from the misty depths of the garden, muffled up in greenish-brown tweed with millions of tiny drops of water clinging to the fine fuzz of its outline and forming a kind of silvery radiance around her.”

An echo of Nabokov’s most beautiful invocation of his mother gathering mushrooms in the garden: “On overcast afternoons, all alone in the drizzle, my mother, carrying a basket (stained blue on the inside by somebody’s whortleberries), would set out on a long collecting tour. Toward dinnertime, she could be seen emerging from the nebulous depths of a park alley, her small figure cloaked and hooded in greenish-brown wool, on which countless droplets of moisture made a kind of mist all around her.”

All this talk of galucous is fitting, given that I’ve had a most mucuous week (in a snot-green sea).

Today I had biji-tchigue for lunch, with mother; it is made out of soy pulp, also known as Okara, pork, and some chili something (paste, powder? Beats me). It has the texture of the dictionary definition of “crumbly.” Pale yellow in color, rimmed with red. I should have had something glaucuous instead.

Dear “Thanks for Sharing,”

Indeed. Thanks for sharing.

This is a strange thing.

It’s still unclear to me what is bloggable, but here I go.

Do you know what’s an oriflamme? Well, I didn’t until I read this.

Of colors: there’s blush and bloom and flush; cloak and pigment, varnish and veneer.

Catherine de’ Medici’s office in Chenonceau.