Quiet night here--- I may need something 18th-c. playing. Something I could've heard by candlelight in Vienna or Milan when Maria Theresa was still on the throne, when I could've had a girl very like Marisa Berenson in "Barry Lyndon" there with me in an opera box.

Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo was taught to play piano as a girl--- Schubert and Ravel, I recall her writing about playing Schubert and Ravel. Did she ever spend autumn nights practicing Scarlatti?

A girl--- Miss Lissy at emigree ---once wrote that the harpsichord "should be the official instrument of sex". (She did offer up "that hot little viole de gambe" as an alternate) Hmmm... I grew up a bit in love with harpsichord pieces. And of course Glenn Gould doing the Goldberg Variations is...utterly key.

I'll never have Laura-Ashlee at bladeoftheknife send me the Schubert and Debussy mp3s she promised me. That's only a fact. But I would like to have the Other Melissa at kraftig_bewegt make me a mix CD of her favourite Baroque pieces. I'd love that. Though I have a bad record with girls and CDs. Laura-Ashlee at bladeoftheknife and Lissy at emigree both promised me mix CDs just before Vanishing without a word. All I can hope for is that the Other Melissa at kraftig_bewegt would do better. It would mean a lot to me to have her find me valuable enough for a mix CD.

Miss Ginny tells me she's reading Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian". I really do want to talk with her about it. I pulled down my copy this evening and glanced through it. The images of landscape and violence both are just shattering. The Mexican border country there in 1848/49, just after the war with the US--- a landscape outside any world where 'humanity' has any meaning. I keep thinking of other borderlands like that--- trying to think of places that desolate and pitiless. Chinese Turkestan in the 1860s and 1870s, maybe. The Muslim rebellion, General Tso conquering what's now Xinjiang, high desert and steppe, tribal horsemen and marauding Manchu soldiers, lost Han colonists and Russian traders. The same kind of casual brutality and emptiness. Or maybe the Rif--- the setting for Bowles' "The Delicate Prey". I'd be tempted to add the Balkans in the mid-1400s, too, there on the edge of the Ottoman advance. But--- no. Not quite the same. Vlad Dracula's world was harsh enough--- Wallachians and Magyars and Serbs and Turks all of them trying to outdo the others in ruthlessness. But it's not the same as Chinese Turkestan, let alone McCarthy's Mexican frontier. The Balkan landscape is wrong: too many mountain valleys, too many towns and rivers. The landscape there has life in it, has a sense of scale. High desert and steppe--- someplace without limits, without green in it, where everything is open to an endless sky... That's the landscape that lets worlds exists like in "Blood Meridian".

Reading "Blood Meridian", where all the characters carry knives in boot-tops and on cords hung round their necks... Bowie knives and Green River knives. I can remember reading too much Thos. McGuane and Jim Harrison when I was young and wanting knives like that. Never quite had them. I did have knives made for me at Randall-Made Knives: custom survival and fighting knives, stainless-steel blades with my name etched along the top in discreet letters. Caitlin at kissmecaitlin might know what I mean when I say that I have a couple of Randall Model 1 knives somewhere, and a couple of Model 2s as well. I never got a Bowie knife, though. Never did. Of course, whenever I read McCarthy I probably want one. Randall knives are beautiful things; a couple of the designs are in MoMA. But I have no idea at all why I want an Arkansas Toothpick. If I ever have to trek across Nuristan or the northern borders of Tibet, I'd be better off with the Model 1. But, damn it--- reading "Blood Meridian" makes me want one. And it also reminds me always, always to avoid seven-foot albinos who call themselves "Judge" and quote Herakleitos.

I always ask girls like Miss Ginny what they'd pack for travels across exotic and alien lands. I don't quite see Miss Ginny with a Bowie knife. A multi-tool in her backpack, yes. Or maybe a Venetian stiletto on a bedside table. But somehow I don't see her in the Takla Makan or the Altai with a Cormac McCarthy kind of knife. And I have no idea at all what any of that means...

Scarlatti is playing. Always a good thing--- made more so with a glass of Argentine malbec and the sounds of an autumn night beyond my window. Marisa Berenson from...1972? She'd make a lovely addition to the night as well. I don't know if Lissy is quite right about the harpsichord being the official instrument of sex--- or even she's experimenting with Adulterous Encounters to the sound of harpsichords. I might prefer Spanish guitar myself. Though I'd love to listen to Miss Ginny play piano late on an autumn night by open French windows... And I'd hope she'd wear just a McGill t-shirt...