my heart is a glorious machine;

Fairly often, when I am at my job and having to entertain myself by people-watching (which is not as interesting as it could be, in a town of this size and location and culture: nearly everyone looks the same, and sometimes their clothing is very depressing, what with the pyjama trousers and sweats and horrible horrible shoes), there is a an attractive young bloke wandering about looking resplendent in a long black leather duster. He has extremely nice hair. I mention this because he looks so very much like someone who ought to be in a story that I am trying to find one he goes to. The last time I saw him he had a dress shirt and tie under his black t-shirt. It was pleasing unto my sight. Of course someday I will find out that he has some horrible name like Ryan or Jared and can't carry on an intelligent conversation, and anyway I suspect that he is some sort of evil fey creature stalking about the mall looking for souls to eat, though he seems fairly amiable. (Despite this, the Phouka from War for the Oaks will insist on springing to mind although the coat bloke looks nothing like him except for the dark hair and eccentric dress sense.) 

Work has been absolutely as usual, though perhaps even slower, and the weather has been dismal: no, the weather is extremely pretty, and I would love it if I had a warmer house and didn't have to go out in it. Lately I have been driven to and from work, though, which is good, especially as supervisors and co-workers keep looking at me very concerned-like, and saying things like, "you didn't bicycle here, did you?" and "YOU ARE NOT BICYCLING HOME TONIGHT I MEAN IT." One of the girls quit (?! why would you quit with no notice when you only have a week and a half left anyway?), so shifts have been shifted around -- so to speak! -- and I have the evening shift on Friday, and the morning shift on Saturday; the latter in particular makes me happy, because that leaves most of the daylight hours free. You get up, do your work, and the rest of the day is ready to be used as you will.

Last night I did find my magic, almost by accident. I went upstairs and lit the candelabra on my desk and put on a new album -- Liam O Maonlai, To Be Tender, which I was attracted to because apparently Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova funded this album out of the proceeds from the last Swell Season tour (as if they didn't need another way to be awesome), and Mar sings on some of the tracks -- I think Glen sings on one, too? -- and anyway it was stunning. Otherworldly and heady with story -- story is the only word I can come up with for that feeling of being tangled up in some strange and wondrous tapestry of love and grief and joy, human experiences and textures and windows and street corners and the motions of hands. Vienna Teng does this to me; Over the Rhine; Patty Griffin; Sarah Slean; Lisa Hannigan; Richard Shindell. And sometimes I'd get a dizzying glimpse of Ireland in its ancientness and strangeness. And I wanted to do something while I listened, because I wasn't ready to go to sleep yet, and when I opened up the short story I am trying to write the mood was all wrong for the mood I was in and the music, so -- somehow I started re-writing the Evangeline story. I've got two pages into the first chapter, which is very satisfying now that I know most of the primary characters -- Lottie and Mr Caruthers are introduced straight off, and the library, and it actually feels like it's going in a direction, which a first chapter ought to do, and I think the vampire will come in very soon, as a sort of foreshadowing.

And then I played Crooked Still's new album, which I finally nicked out of Dad's office, and it is gloriousl. I had been dubious about them getting a fiddler in, because I loved that their particular flavour of newgrass was the low raw grinding moan of cello and upright bass, and fiddles are hit-and-miss with me, especially in roots music: often they are too shrill, or too -- they don't have enough huskiness. They sound too narrow. It's hard to describe because I can mostly only put it in synaesthetic terms, dear me. I love string instruments that creak and moan like ship's timbers. And Britanny Haas is fantastic and very raw and old-timey in her fiddling! And the new cellist is not a disappointment either! (He will probably not crowdsurf or dress as a pirate as Rushad Eggleston did when I saw the band at Grey Fox in 2007, but one cannot have everything. Anyway I love his name: Tristan Clarridge. Delicious. It sounds exactly like a name I would concoct.) And the album is so full of textures and going interesting places with melodies, and gorblimey, Aoife O'Donovan has a truly extraordinary voice.(She went to school for it, so it is good that it worked out, but wow.) It was all wrong for what I was writing -- very very American music (though very much part of the genre I like to think of as folkasmagoria) for a very very British story -- but it fit the mood and the candles and the late nightness.

Now I have cocoa with a stick of peppermint in, and the candles are on again, and somehow the internet has come back on on the laptop, which is very cheering. And the lovely Aoife's low lonesome sound is reminding me that I want very much to make up a sampler of my favourite female vocalists.