I slept late this morning and then drove up to the little coffeehouse by the university gates. Chocolate cappucino and a croissant, then a bit later a glass of black currant iced tea. I didn't do brunch at the Zeppelin Pilots' Club today. I didn't quite feel like spending the money; I didn't feel like talking to anyone. I sat at the coffeehouse and read--- Eve Babitz's "Sex and Rage, Being Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time" (New York, 1979). I had my copy of Jaan Kross' "Professor Martens' Departure" there with me, too--- a book I want to recommend to Ginny at ginny_mccoo rather a lot. But "Sex and Rage" held my attention this morning. I'd love to hear what Ms. Flox at besideserato and Alessandra at bel_ebat have to say about it.

"Slow Days, Fast Company" remains my favourite Eve Babitz: excellent short stories, a cold eye underneath the charm. Again--- someone did say that Babitz's short stories were like Joan Didion masquerading as Cynthia Heimel. I wish I could talk to Ms. Flox or to Ms. Chang about Joan Didion's classic essays-- "The White Album" and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem". I'd like to hear what Alessandra at bel_ebat would have to say about Didion, too.

I miss grad school and academia with a vur' fierce longing. I miss a world where people talk about books and ideas. I hate being separated from a world where people pursue new books and where people make time to talk about books and ideas. Ginny at ginny_mccoo has just finished the first year of her PhD program. I envy her that world. I envy her spending days where she can read and explore and talk with colleagues about books.

I suppose that it something I've always hoped for here: messages and comments and notes about books and films and thoughts. I hope for notes and comments that are transmission belts for ideas and recommendations as well as Stories. I miss what there used to be at WorldCrossing--- an ongoing set of conversations.

I fill up notebooks with book lists. I still have notebooks and legal pads that go all the way back to New Haven and my undergraduate days and before with lists of books. I wrote long ago about finding a list of books I must've drawn up at fifteen or sixteen, a list of titles supposed to make be Educated and Polished and Decadent. There's something to raise at refinement sometime--- did anyone else have a list of Books for Educated Dandies, a how-to list for Decadence? I have read the books on the list--- I've read all of them over the years. The real question is--- at fifteen or sixteen, how did I even know about many of those titles? Where would I have read about them?

Whenever I post here about books, I do hope for exchanges and recommendations and commentary. It is an illiberal thing, Dr. Maturin tells us, to proceed by question and answer. Of course--- as an intelligence agent, he had to beware inquisitive strangers. Nonetheless, I always hope for Stories--- and for recommendations and commentary about ideas and films and books. I always hope to have worlds open to me when I read.

The lovely _manufactured writes about a lover leaving her to go to Tokyo, about a last rainy night together in NYC. She describes the parting at her alternate journal:

Two nights before you left it rained so hard and you woke me up and it was 4 a.m. and you said, "Come with me," and you took me into the kitchen and opened the window and said, "put your hand outside" and so I sat on the sill and put my hand into the rain and felt it crashing down on my palm like tiny, weak punches and you knew how much it meant to me that you would wake me for it, and you kissed me quietly while standing and it felt for a very brief moment like that thing we promised we wouldn't allow ourselves to feel.

Oh, but you are gone, and I am already looking at others to take your place, to fill my head, to cup their hands around my shoulders.

I can promise you, I will miss you. Don't think your time was wasted. Your thumbprints coat my back. There will be thought energy sizzling into darkness for you, here.

Drink an extra bowl of miso soup for me in Japan.

That's heartbreakingly lovely. And it does make me all-too-aware that in all my life, there's never been a romantic parting. There's never been a parting that was gentle and sad and suffused with love. People leave without telling me, without warning, without looking back. Voices go silent, lights on a map go dark. Worse--- there are too many memories of harsh and hostile partings, of accusations and contempt.

There at her alternate journal, _manufactured writes:

He will find another lover, I know. He will be good to them, too. He will steal their kisses and close his eyes when they give him affection. He will lay his head in their lap. He will provide for them: brunch, attention, thoughtful gestures.

And I will find other lovers, I am fairly certain. I will be sweet to them, I will look at them with all of the intensity I know how. I will be pained to know another has gone away, that he might even be in the arms of another at that very moment, and in this knowledge I will pretend my new lover is him, once or twice.

Out there past the high desert, out there in other cities, no one thinks things like that about me. I'm a good little long-eared desert hedgehog. I am. But I'm not a lover who inspires memories or longing. I invoke nothing like mono-no-aware or saudade in lovers. I'm easily forgotten. I think I've known that for years.

Ginny at ginny_mccoo collects novels and memoirs about Western girls in Japan. I want her to read Cynthia Gralla's "The Floating World" and track down Gralla's articles at Salon.com about working as a hostess in Tokyo in the late 1990s. And I want her to read a vur' clever Western girl-in-Cathay memoir as well: Rachel DeWoskin's "Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of the New China" (New York, 2005). The book is being filmed, by the way. The film version of "Foreign Babes in Beijing" should be out later this year, I'm told. I do want to get Ginny's take on it--- and hear from Siobhan in Adelaide and Emily at iminhell about it, too. There's also Annie Wang's "The People's Republic of Desire" (New York, 2006). I'd like to get comments on that, too--- it's a fun account of being young, beautiful, and moneyed in xingui, nouveau-riche, China. Quaere: when will Wm. Gibson's stories move from Tokyo to Shanghai? When will Shanghai be the capital of noir?

The little K-dot at citydress called me yesterday to watch the Noggin channel with her. We watched "Wonder Pets" and "Oobi" and cheered the brave little Wonder Pets. The K-dot always makes me feel like a good little long-eared desert hedgehog, and she understands that I'll always and ever be Three Years Old.

Debauchette writes about carrying Moleskines and Lamy fountain pens with her when she travels. She also carries flash drives for her laptop. My question is always--- does she use the little flash drives for a digital camera, too? How many does she carry? Does she favour 2gb or 4gb drives? I have such an Accessories Fetish... I'd almost rather know about Debauchette's accessories than about her sexual adventures.

Ginny at ginny_mccoo has been reading "The Golden Bowl" for her doctoral program. I wrote to ask her if she'd ever seen the film--- I rather liked it, though that's a minority view. Uma Thurman did well in the film, I thought. Ginny wrote me this morning to recommend an LJ site--- may_kasahara. The site is fascinating: dream-haunted memories and fiction by a lovely Eurasian girl at Princeton. Lovely writing, lovely photos. She calls herself Madison--- a name I've always liked for girls. It's been a while since she's updated, though. I just hope she hasn't vanished. She's vur' much someone--- like AndWeBreathe at D-Land or stelladellasera or subtexts ---whose writing and whose Stories I want to follow over the years...

Too much sunlight outside. The Vanished soft_melodies wrote once of standing naked in her Paris window, watching late-night rain. ginny_mccoo writes that Above all else I love freshly laundered sheets. I love sleeping naked, alone, on freshly laundered sheets on a hot summer night whilst it rains outside... There are bikini girls in the pool outside, but I do wish for clouds and wind and rain, for quick hard rains that would sweep in over the river and cool everything off. A socialite girl in Charleston told me once that any sheets with a thread count above 300 demanded that a girl sleep naked with open windows and the scent of offshore rains. She was a Genevieve, too, and she did live in one of those old Charleston harbourside townhouses with French windows and wrought-iron balconies...

I do wonder what Alessandra at bel_ebat and Lissy at emigree would say about Babitz's "Sex and Rage" and "Slow Days, Fast Company"... Maegan at _missingpiece wrote a few summers ago of spending a couple of weeks in a rented bungalow on the California coast at Santa Monica. I've never seen California, never seen the Pacific. My ocean has always been the Atlantic-- plus of course the Gulf of Mexico and the Adriatic. The Small Pika is in Huntington Beach now. She spends her Saturdays there on a local pier. I've never driven PCH at night like apparitional / CloverSt, and that whole surf 'n' California Deco world Babitz grew up in is utterly beyond my experience.

I miss the Chinese takee-outee in my old suburb, miss getting Mongolian chicken on Sunday mornings.

This evening I may go out to the pool. I'll certainly finish re-reading "Sex and Rage" and maybe finish "Professor Martens' Departure" as well. Too hot to go to my office--- no a/c in the building on weekends. I can sleep and see if I can be less milk-white and read outdoors. Ioana at winterbymorning tells me she'll be going to afternoon concerts in Montreal with her Older Lover, that she has a short, summery, off-the-shoulder dress to be worn with no underwear to concerts. Ginny at ginny_mccoo will be walking barefoot in a bikini through a lakefront cottage, drinking chilled white wine and listening to trip-hop and remembering herself at sixteen. Summers for me are never about romance--- though they can be about books about romance.

I will be thinking of the grey seas past the Sakhalin shore. I will be hoping for evening rains, and for comments and notes about books and dreams.