Tonight on IFC there's a documentary about the making of "Four Weddings and a Funeral". I rather liked the film. I have no idea what that says about me.

I have a documentary about Leonard Cohen to watch tonight. I've always been a major fan. I remember hearing "Suzanne" and "Sisters of Mercy" when I was very young, hearing the songs on a radio station that became "alternative" at 21.00 every night. I remember Cohen's "Spice-Box of Earth" poetry collection--- when I was in high school, everyone who wanted to be hip had a copy. Rumour held that the one clear way to get a girl to bed was to read to her from those poems. Cohen's "The Favourite Game" was something I read at New Haven, one of the first books I checked out from Sterling Library. It's a novel I would like to recommend to Alessandra at bel_ebat and (of course) Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo.

"First We Take Manhattan" and "Alexandra Leaving"--- I hope Cohen will sing those in the documentary. I wish I could hear them with Miss Ginny at some tiny Montreal venue (and last week's New Yorker did have a good article on Cohen). And I wish I could know what Lissy at emigree thinks of Leonard Cohen.

I have "Genghis Blues" coming from Netflix. A chance to hear Tuvan throat singing paired with American blues and jazz. I do hope Miss Ginny will look up the film.

My little LG keitai is there on the bookshelf by my desk. It's sitting atop a faded paperback copy of the 1995 translation of "The Master and Margarita". My keitai has been silent for almost a week: no texts, no Voices on the aether late at night. I had that copy of Bulgakov with me at the coffeeshop yesterday morning. I've owned copies of "The Master and Margarita" since I was in high school. A favourite novel, and I wish someone would do a new film version. And I wish that there would be Voices out there on the aether, that I could be worth texts from 514 or 917 or 646 numbers.

Sat outside this afternoon reading Sybille Bedford's "Jigsaw". Bedford writes so appealingly about living at Sanary-sur-mer there in the South of France in the 1920s. She spent time later in life writing about food and wine, and I have to admire that. I think Miss Ginny and I exchanged notes at the beginning of summer about wine journalism. I do love wine writing, and I've been known to like food/travel books. (Yes, I'm an Anthony Bourdain fan) Reading "Jigsaw" did make me think about M.F.K. Fisher's "Two Towns in Provence". I really hope both Alessandra at bel_ebat and Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo will look at Fisher's books--- "Two Towns in Provence", "With Bold Knife and Fork", "How to Cook a Wolf", "A Map of Another Town". (Would Artemis at artemislives enjoy Fisher?) "Two Towns in Provence"--- a book I read one summer working some strange job that kept me inside a museum from 23.00 'til 07.00 the next morning pretending to catalog stored artifacts. I do remember books by where I read them, by the things happening around me while I read them. "Two Towns in Provence" will always be the book I read sitting at a desk in a silent msueum, surrounded by boxed acquisitions and stacks of ledgers.

Reading "Jigsaw"...I wanted bouillabaisse. When I read about Morocco and Iran I wanted stews and kebabs. This afternoon I wanted bouillabaisse. I can't think when last I had it. I suppose tomorrow at lunch the best I can do would be chicken-and-sausage gumbo. Not even close to bouillabaisse, mind you. But the only thing I can think of that comes from a great simmering cauldron. No garlic, alas, and no rascasse.

Sybille Bedford writes, too, about love affairs there in the southern France of her youth. She writes about the love affairs of family and neighbours and makes an interesting point:

Nineteen-twenties Montparnasse-South of France attitudes were good-natured: antipodal to the chilling, cruel and ultimately anti-human permissiveness of the eighteenth-century French aristocracy as reflected in 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses'. There pleasure was a means to subjugation and humiliation, the ends of conquest were vainglory, power, revenge. One might give a thought to the fact that Choderlos de Laclos' libertines preceded the French Revolution, while those I am talking about followed the First World War.

Well, certainly chagrin d'amour is there in Bloomsbury and St.-Tropez both, but there is still something attractive about the attitudes Bedford's teenaged self adopts and admires in her circle. Her heroine in "A Compass Error" does run up against the darker side of love, but there is still something in those 'civilised' attitudes that I do like.

I really do want Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo and Alessandra at bel_ebat to talk to me about "A Compass Error". It's one of those books--- like "The Floating World" and "Low Tide" and "Failing Paris" ---that I recommend to girls I like, one of those books I'd love to discuss over the aether late at night.

Drinking instant Cafe Vienna right now. No gin-and-tonics or Reyka-and-Red Bull tonight. No bottle of pinot gris finished off while watching a DVD. I want bouillabaisse, true. I want doner kebab and hot lamb curry. But it's time to starve a bit. I want to have cheekbones and hipbones of my own. Even if no girl is likely ever to see them again.

The Daily Telegraph obituary for Sybille Bedford remarks that Bedford "conducted" a long-term love affair with an American socialite. I do like the verb. "Conducted" has a lovely mannered feel to it. I like the stateliness of it: something as formalised as a pavane. I need passion. I do. But I do want to be able to conduct a love affair, to have a beautiful girl willing to do the forms of romance with me.

I'm very much alone tonight. No voices, no kisses, no soft breathless laughter, no sense of anticipation and travel. No bouillabaisse, no sense of companionship. No texts from a 514 number. I can read Bedford and listen to Pizzicato Five or The Get Up Kids. I can dream about sitting at a cafe in Morocco or Montreal or Marseille with a lovely companion. I'll never have that, I know. I won't even have Manhattan again.