Perry is going to be in a world of heck. As an offshoot of learning French, I've become interested in French cooking. There's a butcher shop less than a half a mile from where we live and they carry everything ! Sweetbreads, brains, tongue, heart... so I've started reworking some of the recipes I've found for one, because organ meats aren't really Perry's thing. But he's going to live with the smell, and I'm going to make sure he's going to watch me eat,
It occurred to me today, listening to someone complain about GRRMs publishing schedule for A Song of Ice and Fire, we've been waiting for the third book in a trilogy, The Art Trilogy, from Clive Barker since 1994. Yeah, he's come out with other books since then, but we want to see how it ends. (I didn't realize Jean Auel had finished her series in '11 with The Land of Painted Caves, a nine year gap since The Shelters of Stone, which came twelve years after The Plains of Passage.)
So last week Perry and I stopped in a new bookstore in the area, a bookstore with a genre specific name and, for the most part, selection. My tongue still has bite marks from where I restrained my suggestions... but I still need to vent. So here goes- bookstore critique:
It was quiet. No other customers, so it would have benefitted from some music. As they'd just opened, the walls were bare, a sterile, clinical white- they would have benefitted from some artwork, which would have been easy enough to come by- blown up cover art, framed. (As they sold mostly genre fiction, there was a abundance of covers to choose from.).
The bookshelves were cubby hole style book cases, chest height. These were plain wood, sturdily built, but they were too close together to get a good view of the stock. The tops were unused, prime display space that needed something in it- spotlighting an author or a cover artist, for example. Even a plant, real or otherwise, would have been nice.
The proprietor was friendly enough, greeting us when we came in, letting us know if we saw multiple copies of the same book it was reflecting condition and edition. He then left us alone to browse, until we were ready to leave when he shared a tidbit about a pseudonymous author- whose book he just happened to have on the counter .
We thanked him for letting us browse, but left without buying anything. Sadly, I don't think we'll be back, we saw all we needed to see.
I hope he does well, but as he's focused on a very narrow portion of the market, I applaud his efforts but worry he won't be around this time next.
I was in a school auditorium, based on the one from my high school. i was parked in the white van up front, the van facing the back of the auditorium, tail gate up, sitting on the bumper. on the stage there are about dozen girls in light lavender almost gray dresses, singing and performing, instruments and everything, Tori Amos's song Raspberry Swirl.
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I dreamed I was
in a production of The Cradle Will Rock in the black box theater at ODU. It was only a chorus role, but something had happened to one of the principles and since I was so familiar with the show via the movie, I got the part.
--
How odd. I never had acting desires in college, preferring to help with house management, though The Cradle Will Rock would not have been out of place at the Stables, with its Brechtian influences- they did Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan as well as Sophie Treadwell's expressionistic drama Machinal while I was there. The funny thing about the dream is I got my role because of my familiarity with the movie, which wasn't released until nine years after I'd left ODU.
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Despite the vivid dreams, I slept poorly- restless and apnea like choking when I would drift off, real rest didn't come til 9:30-10ish, and even that sleep was preoccupied with dreaming. I blame late night Reese's Cups. (again)
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I'm Archie, from the comics. Jughead is in a multiplex theater thats on fire. I have to find him. when I do, he doesn't seem to be concerned about the smoke.
then I wake up.
--
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Another thing in the box yesterday was this small plaque, marked Новосибирск, Novosibirsk. It's another Siberian city, another industrial center; it's also the third most populous city in Russia.
Because it's a place name, I was able to translate the name without looking it up after doing the transliteration.
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I picked up several pins in a boxlot at auction today, all Soviet era. I'm going to try and research them and post what I can find. This on is marked Tюмень, Russian for Tyumen, a city in Siberia. The trellis design is from the region's petrochemical industry.
The picture isn't as good as I'd like, due to the reflectivity of the pin and it's size- smaller than a dime.
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iPods have the capability of many different keyboards, which is cool because it allows me to type in Russian. Девочка means girl- see?
What's really amazed me is the fact that when using a regular keyboard, on which I've become a pretty competent touch typist, I can get the Russian letters right 90% of the time. I occasionally ponder getting keyboard stickers but I think that would be a crutch in the long term.
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Tonight's movie will be the first half of Tarkovsky's солярис Solaris. I'm going to pace myself on it because, and I feel like a goon admitting it, it relaxes me to the point of narcolepsy. I know the story, having seen the George Clooney remake a couple of times, but I feel that I owe it to myself, as both a Russian student and a scifi fan, to see the original.
But since I've used the original's slow dreamy pace and quiet alien cadences of a foreign language too often as something to lull myself to sleep, Solaris has a Pavlovian effect on me- almost like NyQuil.
So I'm watching it with lights and subtitles on, sitting up, brain engaged.
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I bought this book at an auction- someone had bought several boxes of books and instead of bidding against him to get it, I approached him after the sale. Because it is a military issue phrase book, there's some things in it you wouldn't find in a Berlitz guide. Like gas mask (противогаа) or Смотрй у меня, беа штук! (according to the book "don't try any tricks!)
Any spelling errors are mine since I'm using an iPod to post this.
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After five years together, Perry and I finally have a Christmas tree. I hope all my lj friends had as good a Christmas as we did.
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I'm trying to learn Russian on my own. It engages my brain in a way work doesn't. My primary resource is a copy of Rosetta Stone we picked up at auction.
It's a fun program and I like the way you learn at you own pace and then it re-enforces what you have problems with.
Russian in 10 Minutes A Day is my text book. It's from Cliffs Notes and is just as info dense as those old yellow guides. This edition is fun because its copyright 1984- pre breakup of the Soviet Union.
I've been supplementing these with movies online, last night we watched The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel, a Russian scifi movie from the seventies, based on the novel by the Strugatsky brothers.
I'm going to use lj as a workspace for this, I need to have a mental demarcation between work and life; I guess it'll be Russian.
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30 minutes on the treadmill
5 minutes on stationary bike type 1
12 minutes on stationary bike type 2
I need to explore the exercise machines better- I realized the other day that they've got two different kinds of stationary bikes and one has a softer seat; it doesn't ride as well as my usual one, which they referred to as a spinning bike- there's hookups for an iPod. That was the one I was on when I realized that my version of Disco Inferno was 10 minutes long.
The one with the softer seat I discovered in the Cardio Cinema room- exercise while watching a movie- but it's... I don't quite have the words- the controls are different, it handles differently. In so far as a stationary bike can handle.
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Dream: I was at the indy bookstore and there was a David Baldacci reading about to start and despite the fact that excoworker Mary was actually working there nothing had been set up. For after the reading, he had brought a tray of chicken fingers parmesan.
After everything was over, Mary was no where to be seen, so I started to clean up. When my old boss came in to check on things, she was more annoyed to see me than anything. I walked out and the streets were deserted and several buildings had been demolished.
--
Mary lost her mother recently and posted something about it on Facebook- that put her back on my mental radar. I had issues with her - and my boss- over time off. My elementary school had a one time only reunion that I had to miss so Mary could go fishing (drinking). The boss pointed out that I went to scifi conventions so I had to remind her that when I did go to conventions I scheduled them around a 40 hour work week. For some reason I was moronically loyal to the company and this incident was a turning point for me. So when the chain bookstore in the mall CALLED me to see if I'd be interested in jumping ship.
I jumped and stayed til the company closed the location.
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Still reading The American Gun Mystery. It's an early one- part of the formula title series (the nationality item mystery)- featuring Queen as the too too clever fellow written by the too too clever boys. Less than a hundred pages in he's already quoted something in German and made a reference to some obscure essay - "do you remember what John Doe said in "to the field mouse"?" or some such thing.
The murder is a pretty clever setup- at the Madison Square Garden stand in, there's a Wild West Show and the lead in the show, a retired Western movie lead- is trying to make a comeback and is killed, shot, during a exhibition shooting demonstration.
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Reading Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery, published in 1933. Ballistics plays a part in the novel and there's discussion of of the striations on the recovered bullet versus those on a test bullet- even matching the lines under a microscope. To the 1933 crowd, that must have seemed cutting edged. To someone who has the first three seasons of CSI Vegas on DVD, it just seems...cute. Like kittens.
That said, Ellery Queen is still my favorite tv detective- even more so than Columbo.
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