In the background--- "Leonard Cohen: Live in London" on DVD. Excellent music for an autumn Friday night.

The lovely Caitie at kissmecaitlin sent me a postcard from...Camden ME. Home, she writes, of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and where "Peyton Place" was filmed. Just maybe my first postcard from Maine. Caitie is a lovely friend--- I always appreciate her postcards. And, yes: she has free drinks whenever we're in the same city. One day, now, one day...I do want Caitie to use her blog to write about her Past, to tell Stories about what she was like as a teen, about her adventures at Bi Slut High and as an undergrad.

I know that Marina at prettyuniverse and the Other Melissa at kraftig_bewegt aren't having the best weeks. So I do want to offer them both support and kind thoughts.

I do need someone to recommend a couple of post-Soviet Russian writers... Viktor Pelevin is the last Russian writer I've read. There must be someone new who's been translated into English. Russian, Ukrainian, Baltic, Kazakh, Turkmen--- the new century must have produced someone worth reading...

Sat outside earlier this evening, drinking Baltika beer and listening to the Decemberists. "O Valencia" and "I Dreamed I Was an Architect"... Songs I do like. I saw them here a few years ago, at a little hipster bar down by the river. Whenever I hear the Decemberists I think about the Russian Decembrists--- too many years in grad school not to. Petersburg on a grey, grim, snowy morning just after Christmas 1825, troops and crowds in Senate Square, the Guards regiments raising a cheer for Constantine and Constitution. Konstantin i Konstitutsiya---the story goes that the rank-and-file thought Constitution was the Grand Duke Constantine's wife. Cannon fire in the evening, and bodies crashing through the ice on the canals. Nothing at all to do with listening to the Decemberists sing, just...well: Russian history has always been a favourite thing for me. Edmund Wilson's "To the Finland Station"--- reading it in high school, finding out about Russian history for the first time. God, I remember that, remember the red-and-yellow paperback copy of "To the Finland Station".

I suppose that is one thing I can't quite forgive Lissy at emigree: Vanishing just when she could've been there to talk history and politics with me. Ms. Chang is doing grad school in Russian Lit, but she's not really into history and politics.

I miss academia. You know that, of course. I'm really hopeless as a Rechtsanwalt. I suppose I wouldn't mind doing human rights law, or international public law, or even some kind of NGO advocacy. But I hate where I am and what I do at work. I miss teaching. The one thing in my life I was good at. Well--- teaching History and debauching Bookish Reclusive Dangerously-Younger Train Wreck-y co-eds.

Reading Henning Mankell's "Before the Frost"--- Swedish detective novel. Not bad, actually. I'd only read one other Swedish mystery series--- the Martin Beck novels from the 1960s and 1970s. It isn't bad at all. Worth recommending as a weekend cold-season read.

Leonard Cohen is in his seventies now. The figure singing on stage in London is...seventy-three? Weathered and grey, but still elegant in a tailored pinstripe suit, still with that striking profile. (Did Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo ever read his "The Favourite Game" or "Death of a Ladies' Man"?) It's easy to imagine Cohen in NYC in the 1960s or Montreal in the 1970s, with co-eds wet and breathless in his presence.

Expat novels set in Sapporo... I can't stop thinking about that. I really need to talk to Cynthia Gralla about the idea. And, damn it--- I do need to finally read Miss Ginny's fiction.

I've always loved girls in just a boy's shirt. A girl standing there barefoot in a doorway in just one of my dress shirts with a bottle of Estonian vodka--- that's always been a key thing for me. Yet another thing--- besides the keffiyehs and the room at the Pod Hotel in NYC that I can't forgive Laura-Ashlee at bladeoftheknife: that I'll never see her in just one of my French blue buttondowns, standing on the deck of a rented beach cottage with me on an autumn night.

No rain today. Maybe sixty-two out, clear and the afternoon light that deep gold that I love. Autumn light and liminal seasons. I do want Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo there with me somewhere on an autumn campus, the sounds of a lawn party in the background, bonfires not yet lit, and Miss Ginny biting her lip and unzipping her McGill hoodie--- obviously nothing it ---while we kiss... Miss Ginny tells me that she likes being my Obsession en titre (or...amour fou en titre?) and want to spend autumn afternoons with her.

Arthur Bonner went to Afghanistan in the mid-1980s when he was already in his mid-sixties. If he can do that and write "Among the Afghans", there may be hope for me yet.

And, yes---Rosanne Klass' "Land of the High Flags", a travel memoir of Afghanistan in the 1950s. Everyone who went there in the 1950s and 1960s fell in love with the country. Thirty years and more of war now--- even the best current travel lit (e.g., Jason Elliot and Rory Stewart) is about horror and ruin. Worse than...what? The Rhineland in the 1640s? Paraguay in the 1870s? But...I wish I could've seen it in the mid-1960s, just as I wish I could've seen Tangier and Marrakech in the early 1950s.

Someone--- Rory Stewart? ---wrote about drinking endless cups of green tea in Afghanistan and noted that one reason everyone in the villages seemed so lethargic was a lack of protein in the diet--- even the tea, he noted, was so low in caffeine that you couldn't get any boost out of it. Is that true? Is my memory even halfway close?

Yes--- Kelsey at clush in just an Army ACU shirt... I really like that image. Just as I'd like Jill at pacificlolita in just one of my desert camo BDU shirts... She's deliciously cachexical and blonde--- worth seeing in just a desert camo shirt on my balcony.

Leonard Cohen singing... I look at his face and eyes and all I can hope is that when I'm his age I'll be able to live on my memories the way Cohen can, and that I'll have something like his sense of grace and style.

I'll be in my hooded navy Yale sweatshirt tonight, drinking Bushmills Black on the upper deck with a cigarillo. It won't be smoking a hookah with Miss Ginny--- alas. And it still won't be as good as whatever Lissy and the Other Melissa are doing in their hooded Columbia sweatshirts there on the Skinny Island.

I watched "The Governess" a few days ago. Maybe I'll watch "The Horsemen" again tonight. Or Parker Posey in "Broken English". Or maybe I'll just listen to Leonard Cohen sing "Alexandra Leaving" and stare at a silent phone.