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I've just got back from the library, and it is the first time in months that I have walked, not run, there and back, braced and bundled against fierce cold. Yes: we're having a warm spot! I am giddy with it! I have worn skirts two days in the row, almost the first skirts I've worn in two months! My dresses have been hanging forlornly in the closet feeling lonely and abandoned, and I find that months of trousers leave me feeling not entirely like myself (and the combined efforts of work and winter have forced upon me a self not only perpetually trouser-clad, but in flat shoes).

The air doesn't quite smell like spring -- it's mostly only the warm-ness of it, and the smell of mud, because spring has a sharp green growing-things edge to it, and of course it is February, a dead month if there ever was one. But the scent is heady enough that I was taking great hungry gulps of it, walking through mud and slush to the library in my favourite high-heeled boots. If only it would last!

Today is a nice respite, or I hope it is, because lately I have been a mess, in every way I don't like, and I am tired of being kept up late with existensial angst, and brooding over failures both real and imagined, and having to bully myself out of bed in the morning, and all sorts of other things which do not belong in this entry.

Hmm. Have just woken up from mostly intentional short nap after forgetting to post this. Interesting experience: listening to NPR while drifting in and out of wakefulness. This is not really a new experience, because for the last year and a half I have been switching on the radio on waking in the morning, whether or not I am actually awake. However, this morning waking and dreaming understandings created a strange, fey conconction of story. A man was being interviewed -- was he actually Asian, or was that my dream? No, I think he was, though his voice wasn't, and his name wasn't; I'm fairly certain the anecdote about his great-great grandfather (or close to) choosing an English name upon reaching America was real. Beyond that, I don't know which of the things I remember actually has any counterpart in reality: he lived in a strange house-restaurant on the shore of a beach, there was something about not wanting anyone to recognise anything as coming from the Old Country (Japan? was this the 1940s?), and having to leave one's home very quickly, with a minute's warning in which to gather your things, which seemed to be more of a bizarre custom than anything else. There was some odd imagery of the house-restaurant on the beach, curiously open -- doors, windows, outlay -- full of shells and odd things, standing there abandoned on the shore. Eventually I swam upwards out of the sleep-waves, and whoever-was-the-interviewer was telling everyone that they had just interviewed Someone Or Other, novelist. How very curious.
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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.

September 2009

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