There is the reading_genji community at LiveJournal... I'm actually fascinated with it. I love the Royall Tyler translation of Genji, and of course I love both Liza Dalby's "Tale of Murasaki" and Ivan Morris'World of the Shining Prince". I need to spend time this summer looking at the Tale of Genji again...and re-reading both the Dalby novel and the Penguin edition of Lady Murasaki's diary.

The lovely Ioana at winterbymorning wants to do a group devoted to Nabokov's "Ada, or Ardor". I'd love re-reading "Ada" and talking about it--- and finding maps of the world, the Anti-Terra, Nabokov created for the novel. "Ada" is one of my favourite sibling-incest novels, after all... And I love alternate-reality novels, of course. "Ada" coils in on itself amidst a galaxy of literary jokes and citations and references. Ioana is right, of course: "Ada" is worth reading not only for sibling-incest games, but for the literary games. I would like to see a group form devoted to the novel.

Yes-- someone needs to film Dalby's "Tale of Murasaki". And both Ioana and ginny_mccoo need to go to the premiere in Kyoto with me.

I want to hear a voice reading poetry from Lady Murasaki's diary:

The dark sky dulls my dreamy mind,
The down-dripping rain lingers–
O my tears down falling, longing after thee!

Or---

Like two wild ducks
Floating with unrestful slumber,
Yet even those nights I would recall–
Feathers wet and cold–
But colder tears!

There's a New Zealand website devoted to "Ada, or Ardor"--- the whole of the novel on line. A good thing--- one can go over a history of Anti-Terra. I remember being fifteen or sixteen and finding an old magazine with a article on "10 Best Novels of the 1960s" where both "Ada" and Fowles' "French Lieutenant's Woman" were given five stars. I love both novels--- and I keep thinking not only of Fowles but of a world where Russian zeppelins were flying from Alaska to upstate New York.

I did see the running of the Belmont today at the Zeppelin Pilots' Club... I sat at the bar and ordered Aberlour single-malt and talked with Mister Smylie. The bar itself was filled with leggy girls in spaghetti-strap summery minidresses, just as the coffeeshop across the street had been filled earlier this morning with tall, dark-tanned co-eds in too-short denim minidresses and boat shoes or cheap flip-flops. I sat and read "Beautiful and the Damned" and "Professor Martens' Departure" and drank iced Viennese coffee and wondered if the lovely Debauchette will ever turn her website essays into a book...

ginny_mccoo writes:

I was reading another journal about a girl who liked to lie in sheets sweat-stained from her lovers. That is something where I think my idealism vs. materialism comes in...I could imagine doing that but I could not actually do 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...

Ginny also writes:

The light is filtering through my white curtains. My Smith-Corona typewriter sits next to my laptop. I should be using that typewriter more often. Typewriters are comforting. I should've been a male writer in a certain period. The one with the devoted wife. The one who retreats into his study at 8.00 in the morning with coffee and cigarettes and has a rigid schedule of writing. Tap tap tap until noon. Wife brings tray of something or other. Moroccan mint tea, perhaps.

I love the image of the Smith-Corona... It is all very Paul Bowles. I do want Ginny to read Bowles, and I hope she'll rent "Naked Lunch" and "Sheltering Sky" as well.

All beautiful girls should sleep naked. Let's take that for granted. And the idea of the beautiful girl naked on Egyptian cotton sheets with something like a 400-plus thread count is such a lovely image for a rainy summer night...

Myself--- I'll drink martinis tonight and read Eve Babitz's "Sex and Rage" and listen to Loscil and wonder where Lissy at emigree and ginny_mccoo and Tiff at vanity_overkill and Selena at AtWoWayDream are tonight... Eve Babitz's short stories are small forgotten gems--- vur' much recommended.

I wish I could know more about AndWeBreathe--- _manufactured ---and about eyelines. I wish I could know so much more about their Stories... Just as I wish I knew more about the girl at Longitude at D-Land...

Reading about Genji's Kyoto or Ada Veen's Anti-Terra... Both lovely worlds. ginny_mccoo has an Older Admirer who's been offering her a free trip to Shanghai. That's a lovely wicked thought--- though a zeppelin flight to Estoty or a townhouse in Heian-Kyo would still I think be better for her...

I do hope Ioana will tell me more about Anti-Terra... And I suppose I could listen to Slow Children's "Springtime in Fialta" while she does...