Skip to main content
To those who have had to put up with me as a morose and touchy and collicky fanatical email-checking credit-obsessed neurotic - my apologies. I've needed your support. I got the email from the British Consulate in L.A. yesterday with the news that my VISA had been approved, on the heels of the news that my loans had come through. This cannot sound miraculous enough.

So: in two weeks today I'll be on the plane to London with all of my possessions in two shabby bags. In the meantime lists are being formed. Movie Bingo Nights, compline, honey mead and Pimm's at the White Horse, museums, the continuing hunt for Raymond Carver, the quest for the perfect sweater, paying bills, seeing friends, Victoriana, and more David Attenborough.



(A still of a bird-of-paradise trying to impress a drab female. Voice over from David: "But sometimes your best just isn't good enough." I just can't stop talking about Planet Earth.)

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Erin said…
Kudos, my friend! I am beyond happy for you...though terribly glum to see you go. Mazel tov on your next great adventure!

PS Some day we should put together an animal preserve with all our favorite Planet Earth animals...especially the poodoo and codcod cat, and the desert fox and the leaping lizards, and of course the birds of paradise!
September 17, 2010 at 9:24 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .
6 comments
Read more
Attention poetry mavens: any suggestions for good contemporary poets (either in general or particular collections)? Have sudden appetite but very little idea where to start. Any advice welcome!
6 comments
Read more

When the Lights Go Out

Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man is nothing less than a modern masterpiece and, I have no doubt, will turn out to be one of my favorite books of 2010. The novel follows George as he struggles through a single day in 1960’s Los Angeles following the death of his lover. George wakes up, goes to the university where he teaches literature, goes to the gym, has dinner with a friend, gets drunk at a dive bar, swims in the ocean, and arrives at the end. George is “three quarters human,” a machine trying to keep himself alive until it is time not to be. Like an actor, he is absent from humanity. When he looks at his neighbors, at the suburban families, he thinks "They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flash-lamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gordon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinki...
2 comments
Read more