Reading Isabelle Fonseca's "Bury Me Standing" this afternoon--- I do have to thank my architect friend in San Francisco for the recommendation. Quiet afternoon--- bought a couple of slices of three-meat pizza at the corner deli and sat outside with a Tiger beer and "Bury Me Standing". I've never known much about the Gypsies. I'd seen them all over Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and seen how badly they were treated. That wasn't even something people questioned. It was just a given. So the book is an introduction to a world I know nothing about.

I will put out a call for mp3 assistance... I'm looking for any of these songs on mp3--- can anyone be of help?

Mini Viva, "Left My Heart in Paris"

Lee Hazelwood, "No Train to Stockholm"
"Those Were the Days of Roses"

Eric Anderson, "Ghosts Upon the Road"
"Belgian Bar"

Hawksley Workman, "Your Naked Body On The Beach"

Slow Children, "Vanessa Vacillating"
"Let's Talk About Horses"
"She's Like America"

I called the lovely Laura earlier. Soft, gentle voice there on a Birmingham afternoon. She'll be back at her rooms at university next week--- not so easy to be on the phone 'til dawn every night. But we'll coordinate things. We both need Voices on the aether, both need that sense of being part of an ongoing conversation.

I'd told Laura about Ludovico Einaudi, and she fell in love with his music. She offered me up the Eels and Longwave at LastFM, and I did thank her for them. I really do like Longwave--- excellent indie band. I do love exploring tracklists and exchanging music notes.

My green-eyed opera girl collects vinyl--- she collects vinyl, and she collects antique musical scores. I like that a lot, like the image of her lying on hardwood floors late at night in just one of my buttondowns with a Sixties portable record player and a joint, listening to vinyl. She likes early Dylan and very early Baez: excellent taste. And I like the image of her sitting (again, in one of my buttondowns) on a hotel bed in a Milan backstreet with a cigarette and her MacBook, looking at scanned images of eighteenth-century musical scores.

Holly Beth Vincent is playing--- "Marianne" and "Crush" and "She Transforms". I've been in love with Holly Beth Vincent since ever I heard "Honalu" the first time--- long, long ago, when I was a very small little long-eared desert hedgehog. I always offer up Holly Beth to girls I fall for. I think I told Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo once that "Honalu" and "Samurai and Courtesan" would always play on the soundtrack for seduction/romance scenes in the films-in-my-head. I wanted Miss Ginny to dance to "Honalu" or "Tell That Girl To Shut Up" on a beach in Mexique. And Laura and I do have an appointment to dance to "Honalu" on a midnight beach on the Outer Banks.

I must ask the green-eyed Laura which Dylan songs she likes most. And I must ask her if she's a fan of My Bloody Valentine. "Only Shallow" and "Sometimes" are key songs.

Miss DanceItsTorture at Twitter proclaimed the Summer of the Year Nine to be the Summer of Nas' "Illmatic" back in May. Well, I've been playing it (and the Mos Def tracks she recommended, too). Old-school hip-hop from almost twenty years ago. Summer in Brookyln music. I must tell the green-eyed Laura that I can see her at sixteen, there poolside or dockside in a bikini with Nas' "Illmatic" on her iPod. She does have her own b-on-b fantasies, and Nas would give her soundtrack both for acting on them and for telling her Older Incestuous Sibling about them.

Sat at my desk today and realised that I seriously need to see an eye doctor--- get my eyes checked for the first time in years, get new reading glasses. Real ones, not the $12.98 drugstore reading classes I've been using these last few years. There are things I'd spend money on willingly--- plane tickets to Tallinn or Montreal, a MacBook, always books. It's easier for me to justify running off to NYC with a lover than spending a few hundred dollars on serious eyeglasses.

My Birmingham girl tells me that she sat outside on the porch at her family's house and wrote in her paper diary all afternoon. She tells me that her house is low and long--- not the two-storey house in the Birmingham countryside I'd envisioned. But there is a wrap-around porch and a huge maroon-painted front door. I do like that--- a lot. There's a lovely romantic image of her writing on a summer's afternoon. And she did send me a scenario of her own--- something written the morning after our first late-night conversation. Perfect. Perfect. Lovely fine writing--- and a sense of romance that's...exactly...what we'd both say. There was a text message that came in just as I got to my office today: I adore you, Evil Older Predator. There's only one thing to text back: I adore you, Perfect Co-Ed Victim.

We both live inside our heads, the green-eyed opera girl and I. We live inside books and dreams and the films we create in our heads. The stories mesh--- I think we do mesh our dreams (travel, escape, lives, romance) well. I'm hoping for that.

I have the second season of "Mad Men" to watch this weekend. A stockbroker girl in Dallas--- Missing, now: alas ---had me watch Season One back at New Year's. I'll see what Season Two is like--- and report to Laura, who is a "Mad Men" fan. ("True Blood", too--- another point of convergence)

Yesterday was Hiroshima Day--- sixty-four years since the bombing. I have DVDs both of "Japan's Longest Day" and the 1995 Canadian-Japanese "Hiroshima" docu-drama. I saw "Hiroshima" in 1995 and thought it was well, well done. I've shown it to classes before--- and I will watch it again this weekend. It's become an August ritual.

So--- "Mad Men" and white wine tonight. And a Voice on the aether that's suddenly and unexpectedly swept me away--- the voice of a leggy and passionate girl I'll sweep away myself to hotel rooms in Europe...or at least to the Pod Hotel in NYC.