Self loves windows. She really, really does.
Other Windows:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Month: September 2017
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Sitting by Window, In Reflective Mode Watertower View, Chelsea District, New York City Home, Redwood City, California -
I picked up a letter again,
read it over and over till the light faded.Then, sad, I went out on the balcony,
went out to change my thoughts at least by seeing
something of this city I love,
a little movement in the streets, in the shops.(1916)
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Paris, 201x:
All of a sudden, as I stood in front of the Rapid ‘Jus (whose concoctions kept getting more and more complicated: they had coconut-passion fruit-guava, mango-lychee-guarana, and a dozen other flavors, all with bewildering vitamin ingredients), I thought of Bruno Deslandes.
Stay tuned.
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- Hidden all day in impenetrable black burqas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of Paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones.
There you have it, folks: Paris in the year 201x.
Stay tuned.
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Self loves windows in general. So she loves this week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge: WINDOWS.
The prompt was to use the window as a frame. But her post uses the windows themselves as objects.
In the first picture, the windows transform a building in New York’s Chelsea Building into a kind of illuminated box. In the second, the airconditioning units sticking out of the windows were what caught her eye. In the third, the window is a wee cut-out in an expanse of grey wall, the only shot of life in a very industrial-looking room.
Night, Chelsea District, New York City: September 2017 
More Windows, Chelsea District, New York City: September 2017 
Minimalist: Window of a Mini-Eichler, Palo Alto, California Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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Submission is self’s third Michel Houellebecq novel (translated from the French by Lorin Stein), and by far the shortest.
What she remembers of the other two is that they had this stream-of-consciousness raunchiness thing going on. So French.
This one is interesting because people actually e-mail and text, there is talk of terrorist attacks around Paris, and the characters seem to know a lot more about mosques, halal, Israel, Dubai, and so forth.
Self’s favorite parts, though, are the ruminations. For example, p. 35:
- Animals live without feeling the least need of justification, as do the crushing majority of men. They live because they live, and then I suppose they die because they die, and for them that’s all there is to it. If only as a Huysmanist, I felt obliged to do a little better.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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Bruins Amphitheatre, Orinda 
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City: The squares are on the ground level, the woman taking the picture is on the 4th? 5th? Floor. 
New York City, View from the Chelsea District -
First Time for Everything
by Marjorie Power
Lights flash
in my rear view
mirror. I pull over
thinking I must be in the way
But no.I’ve done
a lot of things
a little bit wrong, so
I don’t argue. Besides, the cop
is cute.Guilty
or no contest?
I check guilty, start my
written statement. I’ve always loved
to write.Marjorie Power has had poems in Poet Lore, The Atlanta Review, Fault Lines, Living In Storms, and the Random House Treasure of Light Verse. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon.
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You’ll notice from the above post heading that self has moved on from The Elephant Vanishes. She’s currently reading Submission, a Michel Houellebecq novel, translated from the French by Lorin Stein.
She’s read two books by Houellebecq, but that was years ago: Platform and The Elementary Particles. Submission features a more restrained Houellebecq (Platform on the other hand was — WOW!)
The protagonist of Submission is a middle-aged academic who knows a lot of things:
- p. 25: “He laid out these ideas in a short article for the Journal of Nineteenth Century Studies, which, for the several days it took to write it, was much more engaging than the political campaign, but did nothing to keep me from thinking about Myriam.”
Self loves long sentences when done well.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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Even when self isn’t particularly taken by a Murakami story, there is always a take-away.
This story was written in the Jurassic period. Records in jackets? And none of Murakami’s characters use e-mail or text-messaging. Nevertheless:
- The dwarf would take half-played records off the turntable, throw them onto the pile without returning them to their jackets, lose track of which went with which, and afterward put records in jackets at random.
— from “The Dancing Dwarf,” Story # 14 in The Elephant Vanishes
Kanlaon 