A lovely and pensive girl whom I've known almost since the first month I had an online journal wrote me from law school at Georgetown to say---

your entry made me wish for a fort of my very own again... my sophomore year of college i had a double room to myself, pushed the two lofted beds together & made a fort palace with ralph lauren bedding & so many jersey, cableknit, and generally fluffy and soft pillows. my friends could come in my room through my window, and we would languish there, so many autumn trees, smoking cigarettes that would make me sick if i smoked them now, watching the sun set. oh memories. we're never too old for forts, i think. stay warm this winter. x.

We're never too old for Forts. Never. And I loved the images in her note. I've been reading her for seven years now, and I'm glad she's out there. She does have a standing invitation to my own small Fort there on the Aomori shore.

Last night I watched "The Governess" on my little Tare Panda Laptop. That probably means nothing at all to you, but it was my first time to load a DVD onto Toshi Tare Panda and watch a film. I had to download a DVD decoder first. I felt...competent.

"The Governess"... I hadn't seen the film in years and years. My architect friend reminded me about it last weekend. I think it was the Lost Liz Farrell who told me about the film back in the Year Zero. But--- it's a film I do like rather a lot. I sat there on the couch with the Tare Panda Laptop on a little lap desk and was utterly taken by the visuals. Beautiful composition, great images--- Sephardic townhouse interiors in mid-Victorian London, the Isle of Skye, such vivid colours.

The story is simple enough. Minnie Driver is the daughter of a Sephardic Jewish family in 1850s London. No money after her father's death, and she poses as a "Christian gentlewoman" and takes a position as a governess up on the Isle of Skye with a "scientific gentleman" and his family. Her employer obsesses over the new art of photography, over daguerrotypes and huge box cameras. She becomes his assistant, and an affair develops. I've always been fascinated with Sephardic culture--- I read Stephen Birmingham's "The Grandees" once at New Haven and fell in love with the idea of the "other" Jews of Spain and Portugal and the Netherlands. The film is a visual delight--- painterly in the way Peter Greenaway's films are, but far more full of life. And of course I loved the daguerrotypes and the landscapes. I do want to ask Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo and Artemis at artemislives if they've seen "The Governess". I think I'd want to recommend it to Meredith at thelittleriddle and Tiffany at vanity_overkill, too.

I did like being to watch it on my laptop. Not a black 15-inch MacBook Pro, true. But it is my little Tare Panda Laptop. And I like the idea of taking Toshi Tare Panda and headphones and a DVD or two to the coffeeshop and watching films. I used to take my little portable DVD player and headphones over to the library and do that--- get library DVDs and sit in the Comfy Chairs in the atrium and watch films all afternoon.

Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo wrote somewhere once that she doesn't own a television there in her Montreal flat. So--- does she watch films on her own laptop? I need to ask her about her own film-viewing habits? I wonder if she misses having access to cable and a house with TVs in different rooms. I wonder if she ever thinks of getting a small flat-screen TV and a DVD player and having a bigger screen there in her living room.

Only three more episodes of "Mad Men" this season, and maybe...six or seven of "Dexter". As much as I love watching the Travel Channel and Discovery Science... I just may give up cable at the start of the Year Ten. It's expensive, and I can watch films on the laptop. Anything I might find worth watching--- "True Blood" or "The Tudors", say ---will be on-line soon enough, or available on DVD. I'd miss some things, true. But the money could go toward the obsessional MacBook Pro. And I could spend more time reading or writing.

Listening to Kim Wilde sing "Water on Glass". A song from my Lost Youth. One I've always loved.

I sat on the upper deck this afternoon with a glass of malbec and read Caroline Weber's "Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution". It's a fun book. The kind of history that does intrigue me--- looking at events through a hermeneutical eye, looking at the way popular images and cultural codes form and shift.

I wish I could find that long-ago interview (1999? 2000?) with Robert D. Kaplan where he talked about what he packed to take with him on his travels when he wrote "Eastward to Tartary" and "The Ends of the Earth". I do wish I had that List.

I found a Travel List that the journalist Peter Maass did--- things he took to Iraq in the Year Three and the Year Four. Odd thing--- it's a list that hasn't aged well. The electronic gadgetry that he thought so key is just all so outmoded even five or six years later. Peregrine Hodson's list of what he took to Afghanistan in 1984 (or Radek Sikorski's list for Afghanistan in 1989) holds up so much better--- maybe because there's nothing on it that's high-tech and likely to be outmoded. I did like Maass' suggestion that anyone taking a laptop to the desert should coat the screen and keyboard in Saran wrap. Aren't there "travel" kits for laptops now--- rubber armour sheathing? Last year when I wrote Christian-and-Marissa stories, I had Marissa look at Christian's laptop when they rendezvous in an airport bar at JFK--- he's back from Baku, she's in from London and Moscow ---and remark that it's rubber-sheathed like hers, their laptops armoured for a nomadic life. Is there anyone out there reading this who's ever seen that or had it done?

My lovely friend at Georgetown writes:

i once wrote an imagined conversation between you and me.

when i was young and in love with possibility.

i asked questions and you answered. this was characteristic of the extent of our entanglement - we had every conversation, hours upon hours, years upon years, and i could hear you speaking to me even when you were many miles away.

we married briefly, you were already across the country, hoping to tie me down electronically, but 24 hours later i was ill, sick of you, sick of all of it, divorced you without a word, we didn't speak for weeks, or maybe we did, i was so busy back then i could have left you in the dust easily. you crawled back in my life and then you just stuck. a year later we were speaking of marrying again, how we would build a home for us, cats for you, dogs for both of us but mainly me. i could see it then, too, in twenty years we'd be magically living in the same city and we would build this life we used to talk about.

i once wrote an imagined conversation between you and me.

i have it dog-eared in my journal, and i flip to it and remember the sound of your voice.

That's wonderful. I do admire her writing. She's someone whose Stories I'd love to hear over drinks late night at a rooftop bar on an autumn night.

The Small Pika is in Brooklyn now. She's at Pratt, doing a graduate program in Archives. I really do find her classes fascinating--- she's learning about restoring and maintaining documents and photos. I've known the Small Pika for just over ten years now. She's a wonderful little friend, and someone who's been supportive and affectionate and kind to me: Rutgers to Temple to Tokyo to Huntington Beach to Brooklyn. She and I have promised to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge together one day, and to walk along the piers at Red Hook in the fog.

Every time I hear the line "living la vida loca" I giggle and sing it as "being a chicken choker". Or "sodomising her like the Joker". Or "with a poker". I really never will be more than twelve years old. Though I'd rather be Three. Always.

For the record: Schroedinger's kitty is a small Russian Blue named Bauhaus. Make a note in your Moleskines about that.

Listening to Kill Hannah doing "Lips Like Morphine". I like them rather a lot. But was it Miss Ginny or Britt-Nicole who recommended them to me?

I would like to run away. Dharamsala is likely to be crowded, and Tokyo is expensive. But...Ulan Bataar is always there. And Lisbon. Tallinn, of course. I just need a lovely clever wicked girl to come with me.

And there's always that Big Cardboard Box to be made into a Fort on the Aomori shore. Everyone needs a Fort. We always do.