There is a small Fort on the Aomori shore, made from a Big Cardboard Box. If you come inside, it is Safe. I would sit there with a small kind lovely friend and read quietly and share small Yummy Treats. There would a soothing noise from outside--- the sound of the grey autumn seas. We would be together in a small Fort on the Aomori shore and feel Safe and quietly happy. If you come to the Fort, the password is "corgis!"

Trish at kissingverlaine is reading a Turkish novelist named Ahmet Tapinar. She describes him as "the Turkish Faulkner". Intriguing description--- I was always a major fan of "Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom". I must ask Trish how much of Tapinar's work has been translated into English. There's something called "The Time Regulation Institute", done in the Year Two by...the Turko-Tatar Press...in Madison WI. It does sound an interesting read--- post-Ottoman Turkey, there in the very early 1920s, decayed Ottoman gentry, faded tea-shop gentility... That might be worth tracking down. I'd want to compare it to Miklos Banffy's Transylvanian novels (e.g., "The Writing on the Wall")--- another description of a dying post-1918 social order. I'd offer up the Banffy Transylvanian trilogy to both Trish at kissingverlaine and Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo as something worth reading. And I hope Trish will tell me about Ahmet Tapinar. I know almost nothing about late-Ottoman provincial life or Turkish society in the years between the end of the war and the onset of Ataturk's reforms.

Long ago, back when I was still in my old house, I recommended a Franco-Italian-Turkish film called "Harem" to Trish and Miss Ginny both. It's a rather good film about the relict imperial harem women after the last Ottoman sultan fled Constantinople. I don't know if they ever saw it.

I keep thinking of buying a few oxford-cloth buttondowns in plaid. Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo writes that plaid shirts are the season's look amongst McGill undergrads. But does she mean plaid flannel or cotton or twill? Plaid just on co-eds in tiny shorts, or on undergraduate boys as well? This is one reason why I need girls like Miss Ginny in my life. I have a decent eye for fashion on girls, but I'm hopeless at dressing myself. I do need someone like Miss Ginny to tell me about male fashion. Lissy at emigree used to say that I was meant to wear tweed jackets and classic trenchcoats. You need to dress like someone born in Vienna who went to university at Cambridge and now lives on the Upper West Side: Lissy wrote me that back in the Year Seven. I'm not...exactly...sure what to make of that. But I do need Miss Ginny's fashion suggestions.

Clothing ads on television this season are all featuring cardigans for girls. I've never been a fan of cardigans, and I look at them these days with a hint of bitterness. When Lissy at emigree had her Adulterous Encounter in Stockholm in March of the Year Eight, she was wearing a cardigan that the sideburned d.j. she hooked up with unbuttoned while doing tequila shots with her. I do remember that part of her description: Lissy standing at the sink with her back to him while he reached round inside the cardigan and she brought his hands up to cover her breasts under her thin camisole. I prefer girls in deep-V cashmere pullovers worn next to the skin--- always have. And now cardigans remind me of a scene that I should played out with her.

I always hope to see Miss Ginny in keffiyehs. I love the look--- the keffiyeh worn with a black leather jacket, all very Euro-girl co-ed. And I want her to be able to tie the keffiyeh round her face properly--- call it a Tuareg kind of look. I sent a couple of keffiyehs and a charcoal pashmina to Laura-Ashlee at bladeoftheknife just before she Dismissed me and Vanished. She'd talked about wearing them in Manhattan for me, about coming out of the Pod Hotel in a keffiyeh on an autumn night. I'll never see them on her, never hear from her again. Laura-Ashlee at bladeoftheknife--- like Lissy at emigree or the Other Melissa at kraftig_bewegt ----is someone who has a Life. And someone who never thinks about me or reads here any more.

Though no one else does, either.

I need to re-read Alex Kerr's "Lost Japan". Something to talk about with Ms. Gralla. And I might ask her about something else, too. Expat novels about Japan are set in Tokyo or Kyoto, with maybe the odd outlier set in villages in the Kyushu countryside. Why aren't there expat novels set in Hokkaido or in the mountains of the Ura Nihon in the northwest of Honshu? Hokkaido has wilderness and Ainu and flocks of cranes and Siberian skies. There should be novels about expats in Sapporo--- just as there should be historical novels about the early days of Japanese settlement on Hokkaido.

David Stacton, "Segaki"... A fine and eerie novel about 14th-c. Japan. Something I'd love to talk about with Miss Ginny or Ms. Gralla. Not a novel anyone remembers, but very much worth tracking down. If ever anyone finds "Segaki"--- do let me know what you think.

I am increasingly annoyed with my cable service--- service and cost both. Once the seasons of "Mad Men" and "Dexter" are over, I'll probably cut loose from cable and just watch DVDs. Get rid of my old television and just use the laptop and my little portable DVD player. Miss Ginny tells me that she gets by just watching DVDs on her laptop, and I recall that Lissy's Year Six Minimalist Living List mentioned that in an expat apartment somewhere, she'd watch films and a few television shows on her laptop and not bother with a television. That all makes excellent sense to me. Save the money, anyway--- put it towards the black MacBook Pro I'll never get to have.

A Big Cardboard Box does make a good Fort. And I do want to have one there on the Aomori shore and sit inside with a kind and gentle and lovely friend and just read quietly and listen to the distant hiss of grey seas and just feel...Safe. We could keep a small, pettable corgi with us. And he would be Safe, too. Having a Fort made from a Big Cardboard Box is just a very good thing indeed.