What are you doing?

Me? Oh.

I'm watching the entire five seasons of Brothers and Sisters, and while it's devolved into pure soap, it's been a great binge. I thank Carrie Link for the addiction.

I just saw the movie Still Mine with James Cromwell and Genevieve Bujold. I loved it.

I'm reading the last chapters of Transatlantic by my Irish love, Colum McCann. I've savored every word although less so than the ones in Let the Great World Spin. 

I'm also going to start Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings and read that along with Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

I ordered but have not yet received this poetry series. There's stuff in there by Lydia Davis, one of my favorite short story writers. She also translated the edition of Madame Bovary that I noted above.

I'm listening to this by Patty Griffin who also sings the song Heavenly Day, featured on our Extreme Parent Video Project that is almost a year old and has nearly 32,000 hits.

I'm also listening to this. We've been lonely. We've been lonely too long.

I like this poem -- it reminds me of my receding respite week in Canada:

Northwest Passage

That faint line in the dark
might be the shore
of some heretofore unknown
small hour.

This fir-scent on the wind
must be the forests
of the unheard of month
between July and August.

James Richardson

So, Reader. What are you doing?

Reading at The Hotel California

So, summer is in full swing around here, and we're in pajamas until noon and also feeling guilty that we're not at the beach or outside or something. I'm going to have to call the kabosh on reading War and Peace. I just can't. I thought about hauling it to Canada next week, but my hardback copy of Colum McCann's new novel Transatlantic is far more seductive. The thing is, I'm having a very hard time even reading the Russian names in War and Peace, and even harder the vast passages of military -- well -- stuff. I am skimming those vast passages, much as I did the ones about the physiology of the whale in Moby Dick, and I keep waiting for the good stuff to happen, for romance to flourish or for some Russian pathos to evolve. Quitting it nearly two months before my fiftieth birthday gives me time to maybe pick it up again, doesn't it? I am a fickle lover, I suppose, and like I said Colum McCann is crooking his seductive Irish finger at me, as well as Edna O'Brien. I might just want to take the cigarette out of her pretty mouth and take a drag on it myself. I think an Irish menage a trois is far preferable to flying a Russian solo, don't you?

Reader, what are you reading?