Yearning

Kelpy

Highland Park is a rather kelpy whisky.

Distilled in the Orkney Islands--a place I long to visit--so the kelpiness makes sense.

Fictional Identikit

There's a game going about to identify one's self via three or four literary characters.

Here's my submission from the four quarters of my soul, or some such:

Jim Hawkins, from Stevenson's Treasure Island;
Ishmael, from Melville's Moby Dick;
Frank Bascombe, from Ford's The Sportswriter;
and
Robert Walton, from Shelley's Frankenstein.

Memories: Bullish By Night

Old sculpture:
30-40 minute exercise with model?
Years ago, so I am not sure.
Sculpture mix--and overglazed, but I like how that came out.

My stubborn side, you know?

Catching ZZZZZs with the Captain

Feeling ill's upside.

Clay-Gray Friday

Ill at home, waiting out the fever and fret.

McIlvanney: "The Language of My Living"

Here's a passage from one of William McIlvanney's novels that I've always liked.  The juxtaposition of humility and arrogance, the mix of what others think versus what the narrator knows, has stuck with me, has resonated over the years.  I recall giving this passage to a colleague, for I felt that the passage conveyed both his affect and his self-understanding, but he just smiled as he read, so I wasn't given a full commentary.  I relate and don't quite relate to what's voiced here, but it always resonates.

Here, read for yourself:

'Well,' she said.  'I'd better be going.'

I looked at her and nodded.  She smiled and pointed to the ground behind the cars.  There were tread-marks on the grass.

'Those,' she said.  'They'll always remind me of Scott.  Him and me here.  I wonder how long they'll last.  What is all this about for you really?  I mean.  What is it you're doing exactly?'

'I don't know exactly.  I suppose I'm trying to make my own peace with Scott's death.  I suppose this is how I do it.'

'How do I do it?'

She started suddenly to cry.

'Damn,' she said.  'Will you hold me one time for him?'

I crossed and held her.  It was a small, chaste ceremony of mutual loss.  Her hair in my face gave off a melancholy sweetness.  Clenched to her, I felt the tremors of her body, how the edifice of beauty was undermined from within with deep forebodings.  In the embrace I experienced our shared nature--so much questionable confidence containing so much undeniable panic.  That was me, too.  Some of my colleagues and bosses liked to say I was completely arrogant.  They misunderstood the language of my living.  Arrogance should be comparative.  Humility was total.  Faced with simplistic responses to life that tried to fit my living into themselves, I was arrogant.  I seemed to meet them every day and I knew I was more than they said I was.  But when I sat down inside myself in the darkness of a night, I knew nothing but my smallness.  I knew it now and shared it with hers.

--William McIlvanney,
Strange Loyalties,
A Harvest Book,
Harcourt Brace and Company,
1991

This is the third Laidlaw book, and the other two are worth looking for.  This one shifts the narration from third-person to first-person (and for excellent reasons).

Walking in York

Summer ambling.

After Second Breakfast

Hobbit-cats.

"The Other Worlds": Life's Largest Riddle

The Other Worlds is an excellent mythopoeic novel by a dear friend, Christoph Greger.  Christoph's own humble way of introducing the book to the world is worth quoting: "Hey all you cystic fibrosis lit fans, Ren fair geeks, and/or mythopoeic/modernist bildungsroman junkies -- here's something that might be of interest."

This fine novel deserves deep interest, presenting classic character-in-crisis; entertaining and evoking in the tradition of Yeats, Morris, Dunsany, de Lint, and Windling; and offering entry into multiple worlds, this one we share and those others 'beyond the fields we know'.  The setting and the style are distinctly contemporary; the themes and dilemmas, definitely timeless.  Life's largest riddle--mortality--met by mystery, measured by memory, and beset--or aided?--by magic waits at the heart of The Other Worlds.

Read this book.