Culture Vulture

I felt a bit like a vulture yesterday, swooping down and into a local Borders bookstore that is closing and had a big sale on its remaining merchandise. I wandered the fiction and poetry aisles, lured by the 30%-50% off signs, and picked up copies of Yeats' The Tower, Gary Snyder's Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, and Lucille Clifton's Voices. Then I walked across the street and ate crispy onion rings dipped in barbecue sauce at The Waffle while reading Anne Roiphe's memoir Art and Madness on my Kindle (another blow to local bookstores) and then I walked across the street again to see the Danish movie In a Better World. I did all of this after breaking down in my house and running out the door in tears, leaving my children (one disabled, one covered in pox and the other just a pain) with the babysitter who had come to watch Sophie. I gunned my car to Hollywood with the accompaniment of violins, and after four or five hours came home, feeling only slightly chagrined and much relieved.