I will be out on the upstairs patio tonight with a cigarillo and a vodka-lime. I want to look across at the blue stucco house and see if the mysterious blonde girl is meeting clients. It's not quite "Rear Window". I'd never take photos. And binoculars would be desperately wrong. I'll just stand and drink and light a cigarillo and watch the life across the way, the life down there on the narrow street. I'd like to know more about the blonde girl--- is she a call girl, or just in keeping? She seems to be about thirty--- what are her own skills and specialties, what market niche does she occupy? The house itself isn't built for entertaining; it's purely a place to sleep in a slightly raffish part of town. She'd meet her clients or keeper elsewhere--- McMansions, the big casino hotels, gated communities. But I like it that she can step out of a novel and onto the street.

Three small packages arrived at my office this afternoon--- three different used books I'd ordered. One is an old favourite, a book I first read long ago. It's Barry Gifford's "Landscape With Traveler"--- as different as one can imagine from his Sailor and Lula stories. "Landscape With Traveler"--- the subtitle is "The Pillow Book of Francis Reeves". It's a clever conceit: the brief observations and recollections of a fifty-year old gay Southern man in NYC c. 1980. The model for the book is of course Sei Shonagon's "Pillow Book". I think I had my first copy of "Landscape"--- a Patrick Nagel knock-off cover, I remember: an elegant male figure in a kimono, all very Art Deco ---from Atticus Books in New Haven. I read it in my apartment on Court Street one spring. I'm not sure I'd have picked up the Sei Shonagon references in those days. I'd read Arthur Waley's extracts from the Genji, but I hadn't read the "Pillow Book". I liked the idea of the book, and I liked the voice of Gifford's main character. I was vur' young, but even in junior high I'd liked novels constructed like that: looking back to a lost youth, to a Land of Lost Content. I was part of that tribe of bookish young males who were lost in nostalgia and melancholy even in their teens.

Gifford's Francis Reeves was fifty and elegant and Southern-gay. I was thirty years younger and only Southern-born. But I liked the character's voice. It wasn't just that I'd read Ivan Morris' "World of the Shining Prince" and learned about mono-no-aware. It was that Francis Reeves was born in the Deepest South, and grew up in a small town between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. I loved the references to places I vur' dimly remembered from my childhood. Francis Reeves as a boy rides the old ferries across the Mississippi and drinks Delaware Punch there on the trip across. I'd taken the same trip. My father took me on ferry rides on Saturdays when I was four or five, in the last years of the ferries. You could buy Delaware Punch in a bottle from an antique soft drink machine--- put in six cents, a nickel and a penny and push down on a big heavy handle. You can always tell someone Southern-born when buying soft drinks. No one in Mobile or New Orleans or Ole Miss drinks a pop or a soda. Soda is soda water, something you put with whiskey. A soft drink is always and ever a coke. It's a generic term--- "You want a coke?" "Sure, give me a 7-Up." Some Saturdays my father and I would get off the ferry on the west bank and walk into the little town there. There were little streets up from the levee that led out to the town square and a courthouse. There was a drugstore with a lunch counter--- not something anybody sees any more. You'd sit on revolving stools and order a fountain Coke and a ten-cent hamburger done on a grill in front of you. The town itself on the west bank--- Port Allen ---gets a mention in Kerouac's "On The Road". The main character hitchhikes through and gets a five-cent hamburger.

The ferries are mostly gone now. There's still one at Donaldsonville that carries plant workers from bedroom communities over to the big chemical plants. There's one between St.-Francisville and New Roads still. A new bridge is going in across the river there. The ferry will be gone in three or four years. I was on it a couple of years ago. I'd gone over to get a client of the firm to sign documents in a little town in the center of the state. (He was in jail there--- my first visit to a parish prison.) I stopped in New Roads for lunch on my way back, and then took the ferry out of sheer nostalgia. I'd never driven onto it before. I'd been there, riding back and forth once long ago, with a lovely girl whose family were from New Roads. We boarded it on foot and giggled and made out while we watched the river swirl past. I remember her--- dark, dark tan, long light-brown hair, short shorts. Susan, her name was. Susan Tomlin. Sharp hipbones, a slow, syrupy voice. She was a Spanish major; I remember that. It was summer---one of those long, warm, late afternoons. Twilight all the way to 2100 hours. I know we'd been drinking; there may have been mescaline involved. She kissed the way she spoke--- soft, slow, yielding. We were eighteen or nineteen. I wish I could do that again. I do remember the sound of the engine and the bits of debris--- tree branches ---sweeping downriver. Kissing in wind in across a river, kissing in seabreeze--- two things that you need to do whenever possible.

I do want to recommend Gifford's "Landscape With Traveler" to Alessandra at bel_ebat and to Ginny at ginny_mccoo and Rachel at sirena73. I'd recommend it to CloverSt at Diaryland, too. And I think to Selena at Atwowaydream and AndWeBreathe (_manufactured) as well. It's a small gem of a book--- worth ferreting out at libraries and used bookstores.

Alessandra at bel_ebat tells me that she has a new pseudonym: Evelyn McHale. She's had other pseudonyms before: names for use when abroad, names to use when talking to boys in bars, names to use when being introduced to strangers at parties in strange cities. Evelyn McHale... I will have to ask Alessandra what biography she's created for Ms. McHale. Evelyn McHale sounds like...a Connecticut girl, a Westport girl. Or maybe a Chagrin Falls girl. Evelyn McHale wears tailored skirts and pearls. She uses "summer" as a verb. She's been to Paris and Florence on spring semesters abroad. I'd like to meet Evelyn, to buy her a drink at a college town pub. I know what Alessandra drinks, but I do wonder what Ms. McHale drinks. Cape Cods? Sea Breezes? And I must get Alessandra to read "The Dud Avocado"...

It seems to be a difficult thing this summer to get lovely readers and correspondents to send me postcards from abroad. I'd love cards from cities I'll never see. This card is the Burj Dubai, this one is Shanghai. This card is Barcelona, this one is Tallinn. I won't be flying again, and I may never make it back to Vienna or Budapest or Venice. I may never see Sapporo or Ulan Bataar. But I do hope for postcards. I'd take cards from Lissy at emigree: cards from Montauk or Helsinki, or from Delighted in Greece. Postcards can be anonymous--- I just need to know that there's still a world out there, that I'm worth the cost of a postcard airmail stamp. Postcards from lovely readers and correspondents are all appreciated.

The vur' charming steeping sent me a new Tare Panda userpic. She does get my thanks. I don't know to use icon communities, and I don't know how to make my own. But I do need more Tare Panda icons, and new Psyduck icons, and certainly a icon or two of little Gir from "Invader Zim"... The most-pettable little K-dot at citydress says that I need a few icons that present me as a Dandy or a romantic Academic. The little K-dot knows me better than almost anyone, and I do trust her. I'll need someone to tell me about icons--- where to find them , how to use them.

Ginny at ginny_mccoo wrote a bit about Catherine Hanrahan's "Lost Girls and Love Hotels". I'd like to hear more from her about the book, just as I want to hear from her (and from Selena at Atwowaydream) about Cynthia Gralla's "The Floating World". I'd like to know if Ginny identifies with the heroine of the novel, if she'd want to have debauched nights in Tokyo. Ginny is a reasonably quiet and bookish girl--- cigarettes and wine and reading late into the night there in her rooms. I do have to wonder if she wants to be a Lost Girl in Roppongi...

It's starting to rain outside: wind, rain, thunder. I should go outside and have a drink and light a cigarillo and see if the porch light is on across the street. And I'll strike a pose and write Sei Shonagon-esque passages in my head.