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gaudy night

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The thing about reading a Dorothy Sayers' mystery is that you can enjoy it on different levels: the charm of Lord Peter, the moments of well crafted description, the overwrought but equally entertaining literary quotations, and then there's the Latin.  The Latin that lies at the crux of crucial moments in this novel that can serve only to remind those of us who, while overeducated (is there such a thing?), still, did not go to Oxford and do not use Latin in our every day speech. I for one, enjoy it when my "light" reading has a bit of heft to it.  And while I'm not the biggest Harriet Vane fan (the whole resistance/submission thing is annoying), still this book makes for a good afternoon read.  It certainly has its misogynist elements and certainly there's both an anti and pro-academic theme running throughout, still, Lord Peter shows up before it all gets too annoying and the brief moments of madness counterpointed against the calm of punting in the river make it a worthwhile read.


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on 9.19.12 I was struck by a van while crossing 5th avenue on my way to work.  to say my life has been turned upside down is not only a cliche but a severe understatement.
some things I've learned since that morning:
it's never the people you think you can count on who step up when needed.
I have some truly awesome friends.  I have a couple of truly selfish friends.
it is very hard to get things done in NYC when you can't really walk.
I do like fuzzy slippers. and animal cookies. and stuffed animals.
I no longer like vegetables or most chocolate (at least not right now).
there is nothing more painful than fractured ribs.
most people would rather tell me about their friend, neighbor, cousin, ex-whatever who once had a car accident/broken ribs/broken hip/fell off a cliff/broke a hand skydiving than actually hear how I'm doing.
NYC streets are scary as f**k to cross. even with the light.
If I use a cane, 3/4 of pedestrians will give me room to walk & most cars will wait for me to cross.
Daytime TV is mostly truly awful & most commercials are for accident or disability lawyers.
I can no longer watch any TV that involves dead bodies, car accidents, most kinds of violence or love stories. Especially love stories.
I can no longer listen to 99% of the music I love.  Classical music seems okay as long as it's not too loud. or complex. or depressing. or upbeat. and opera is totally out.
I can't seem to read anything more complex than an email. And I can't seem to write poetry. at all.
But still, as so many people have found a need to tell me in the past 10 days, I'm "really lucky" and "it could be a lot worse."  Yep, I could be dead. Or have lost limbs. Or be permanently disfigured. And I'm not any of those things. Though really, fractured ribs are really really really painful.

9.11.12

art is good.

today, seeing as we were no longer under a tornado watch, I headed to brooklyn with a friend who had mapped out the studios of several artists taking part in Go art brooklyn or Go brooklyn art...anyway, this painting is called Empire and was in Jennifer Delilah's studio along with some very cool drawings of crows and very odd paintings of half-bird/half-humans doing nasty S&M type things to each other. All very cool. We visited 10 studios total before we were just too tired. It was my first extended trip to W'burg in ages that didn't involve a rock show or someone's party.  Lots of glass/ugly modern buildings going up (same as the E.V.) and lots of cool spaces for making art.  I could never live there - can't imagine what it would be like there at night or in winter. Some of the art we saw was wonderful, some not.  I really liked Gary Mellon's wood work (garymellon.com), Lynda White's masks arts.lyndawhite.com & her VERY cool skeleton king sculpture, Ryan Scully's paintings (ryanscully.net), and Clark Goolsby's  big puppet man (clarkgoolsby.com). Overall it was a great "field trip" and it was good to see so many people making things in this city full of people who mostly seem to just be about how much money they can make and how much stuff they can amass.  Last weekend a friend described me as a "stuff" person & looking around my tiny apartment I guess that's true. The stuff in my life though is made up mostly of books, things people have given me (rattlesnake skin, horse skull, hand made pottery, pieces of art), and then I have some shoes and some clothes (though not many for a woman living in NYC), and lots of cups to put tea in.  Most other things are in storage or sold or given away.  Seeing all these artist's spaces I see how much different and how similar my little space is - lots of odds & ends & photographs & stones from hikes & shells from the ocean & whatever else will help me make stories.  I'm not a painter so I don't have all their tools but that same need to have more than the basics, more than bare walls and a few pieces of furniture.  Of course, if I had a house, it would seem very empty indeed.  These are the things all this viewing of art has made me think about.  That and the description (somewhat inaccurate) of me as a "stuff" person.  Most of the artists we met were very nice people - some awkwardly charming, some trying hard to be hip, and some just nice people making good art.