Winter Reading

Now that I’m spending quite a bit of time up north where there are actual proper winters with ice and snow, I’m enjoying the feeling of seasons shifting and filling into themselves, feeling like real, complete seasons, rather than mostly one long, extended summer with a few slightly chilly days passing for winter as it goes back home in the south. I’m going to participate in a couple of wintry reading challenges to enhance my enjoyment of the season, and get myself in the cozy, indoorsy mood I’m trying to cultivate.


  For January there’s the Winter’s Respite Readathon, which will be perfect for trying to get through some library books before the end of the month.

 

  For January through March there's the Japanese Literature Challenge, which is a marvelous opportunity for me to read some of the works I’ve been meaning to, more stories from Yukio Mishima, Tales of Moonlight and Rain, Masks by Fumiko Enchi, perhaps some Tanizaki Junichiro and/or Osamu Dazai, some Haruki Murakami (who I always feel the urge to read in February, for personal reasons), and various poetry.

 

It’s gotten warmer here at the start of the year, the snow from a month ago has melted, and I don’t know when there will be more frost and ice. A part of me is hoping for snow, to sit by the window with a book and read, while the world is blanketed outside. Soon enough, I suppose!

Bout of Books 27

I've got a big ole stack of library books I checked out before Christmas, and I'm signing up for Bout of Books for an extra push in my January's reading. Want to get the year started on the right foot!

Some info: The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, January 6th and runs through Sunday, January 12th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, Twitter chats, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 27 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

Stolen Postcards

I am not much of a thief, and it may not exactly be theft anyway, but "Stolen Postcards" sounds nice for a diary entry, doesn't it? If there is theft, it's gentle theft, of something that may not have been too much missed anyway.






Maybe a month or two ago I was at a used bookstore in this place I am staying now, and looking at the area where flyers for local events are kept, often advertisements for exhibits at the museums, sometimes musical shows or showings at art galleries, and there was a plastic bin with a stack of postcards in it, which I pulled out, trying to be discreet, and I liked them, and since no employees were chastising me, I reckoned odds were half as likely in favor that they weren't something being sold, maybe postcards found in the donated books and set aside there by the other bits of paper anyone could take if they're interested. Though I also reckoned odds were equally half that I was committing some small crime, but I wanted the postcards, and I took them, or the ones I liked, anyway. A mess of Klimt, a Monet and a Tissot, Mao is there, Calamity Jane is there, and there are travel cards for Heidelberg and Paris. 





At the free book bank I was flipping through a volume of poetry of Alexander Pope, and found Napoleon. I stole him, and left Pope. He's the patron saint of ostomies. I found the Water Lilies magnetic bookmark on the ground near the return box outside the public library. The two greeting cards came around Christmas from the Yale Center for British Art.







Tonight I returned to the scene of the crime, though not, I promise, with the intention of thieving again (though the secret potential for repeating my crimes lives always in my heart). Looking again for flyers, in the same plastic bin were more postcards, and I stole again. I was so elated at what I found, the first I looked upon was the Torso sculpture (from 1928, Dame Barbara Hepworth), and lately I have been extra fascinated with limbless sculptures, writing about these goddesses and faceless immobile unidentified women who are solid, centralized in the remnants of their bodies, I saw that postcard and knew I was being blessed, then I saw the others, ancient baked clay goddesses, from the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Turkey, and the Pietà (the postcard, from Barcelona), more in the themes that are dear to me and that I am working with right now, these ancient mothers, and there's the Agony in the Garden, and the Sufi saint Ibrahim ibn Adham fed by angels, and there's a painting from the Lascaux grotto, and all of these are perfect things for me to find and think about. Maybe I am a thief but I was called to theft and I claim my wickedness with joy!