The smoke detector here in my flat keeps making odd, random, persistent single chirps. Been doing it all weekend--- single chirps every so often all through the day. I have no idea why or how to make it stop. We get tart little bulletin board notes from the landlord about not tampering with the smoke detectors and threatening fines. So I have no intention of trying to take it down and do anything to it. Just one more small, grating thing happening here in my life.

"Mad Men" will be on at 21.00 tonight. Last Sunday I had someone with whom I could talk about the series. I won't hear that voice again. I have no one with whom I can discuss "Dexter" or "The Tudors", either. I hate that kind of silence. I hate having no one with whom I can share things.

I've been reading Sybille Bedford's "Jigsaw" all afternoon--- her autobiography. Well-crafted, of course: Bedford always had a fine eye for scenes and character. And she of courses glosses just how her own real-life family differs from the families her first-person narrators had in her "A Legacy" and "A Compass Error". Faded post-1918 gentility, the edges of bohemian life, life in and out of hotels and pensions, life in railway stations--- I do like the world Bedford sketches out. "Jigsaw" is a book I do wish I could share with Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo, just as I wish I could share Bedford's "A Favourite of the Gods" and "A Compass Error" with her. I like Bedford's amusement at the world of her youth--- looking back from the 1980s, she recounts her life in her middle teens and laughingly asks if people really did live like they were part of E.F. Benson novels. I think that once long ago I recommended "A Compass Error" to Lissy at emigree; I always wondered if she'd read it and identify with the girl who's the narrator. Miss emigree I suppose these days only reads feminist theory, graphic novels, and books on contemporary radical politics. I do wish I could've heard what she thought of Sybille Bedford.

I did want to talk with Miss Ginny about "A Compass Error". There's a small part early on where the narrator at sixteen or seventeen lays out her plans for her life after boarding school--- Cambridge, then living somewhere inexpensive in France, writing, doing occasional literary reviews, having the occasional carefully-delineated affair, devoting herself to her craft. You really could've survived like that in the 1920s and into the early '30s--- the economics were very doable. And it's just the kind of vision that would appeal to both Miss Ginny and me. For the girl in the novel--- as her much-later narrative voice says ---all the darker sides of passion and emotion get in the way. But it's still the kind of life I probably dreamt of myself at seventeen. I need to ask Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo about her own vision of life at seventeen.

Lissy at emigree, though. It's hard to pin down exactly what she wanted at seventeen. To write, yes--- always that. To travel. Well, whatever it was, she has all the accoutrements of a serious Life: the city, the lovers, travel, languages, involvement in human-rights issues, the clear possibility of a major Future. I suppose in ten years she'll look back at the girl she presented herself as in her "Revolver, Dauphin" 'zine and her _iwenthome and emigree journals and see the clear line from her rooms in Wilkes-Barre and Baltimore to an office in Manhattan or London or a project headquarters in Mali or Moscow.

In ten years, I assume Miss Ginny will be teaching and writing. I'd like to have the little orange-covered Penguin edition of her first short story collection. She may not remember me at all, but I'll have my bound LJ archives to look at and wonder whatever her life became. I won't speculate on where I'll be in ten years. That only ends in Japanese Bulimia.

I do have to tell Artemis at artemislives that I saw the BBC "Wide Sargasso Sea" this afternoon--- the one done in the last couple of years. Not as "exotic" as the film from the early 1990s, and probably more true to the novel and to the world of "Jane Eyre". The actress who plays Antoinette is very lovely--- gaunt and intense, with beautifully-visible collarbones and cheekbones. A very different kind of sexiness from Karina Lombard fifteen or so years ago. I liked the film, mind you. I just found it so deeply depressing. After all--- that whole early-Victorian obsession with finances and the strange interplay of guilt and exoticism over the issues of race and West Indies slavery, the ugliness inside the young Rochester...just all too depressing. Rebecca Hall is lovely and ethereal and utterly desirable. I wanted her, wanted to take her away from Edward Rochester, wanted to save her for the kind of darkly elegant wickedness she deserved.

I can dream of Rebecca Hall, just as I can dream of Miss Ginny in Montreal or Marrakech or Savannah or Manhattan. Nothing is ever more empty than dreams of having a lovely girl be anywhere with me. Saving Antoinette Cosway for another life in another century--- that's as empty as staring at my phones and hoping for a lovely gentle seductive clever Voice on the aether late at night.

Well--- do read Bedford's "Jigsaw". Call that a recommendation. I have no ability to have a Life, and I will die trapped and alone and valueless. Book recommendations I can do. Life and love and anything valuable--- not so much.