I did a little bit of shopping today—at Borders—to which I have a gift card that I’ve had long enough that it might start slowly losing its value, as most will.
I bought a great, great birthday card for my friend Suzanne, whose birthday was yesterday, but whose card I will give her on Sunday, January 20, when our book club next convenes. I also bought a classical CD of choral music with 35 selections on it.
I spent the afternoon at Helios, where I wrote two articles for the next Technically Speaking. One was about our STC Student/Faculty Roundtable event that we sponsored at the end of November, and the other was about how it feels to be a graduated graduate student.
I thoroughly enjoyed writing both of them. Ah, to write!
Just before leaving the coffee shop, an interesting juxtaposition of table neighbors materialized: to my left—the hottest, sexiest hunk of man; to my right—a table of four pubescent girls giggling interminably about the most girlie of things.
One of the girls was in my direct line of view, and once, out of the corner of my eye, I saw that she was looking at me looking at him looking at them.
I had some more Christmas dinner leftovers for dinner tonight, and then settled in to read more of The Turn of the Screw.
I read for about 30 minutes and then woke up 2 hours after that. I’d had an “Away” message on AIM that, when checked, indicated that I missed Robert by 24 seconds! Dang it.
I read some more of The Turn of the Screw, and this line in chapter eighteen, “David playing to Saul could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion,” led me to resolve an allusion with which I was not familiar.
While Googling the book (for the umpteenth time to create a link to it in my blog), I came across an online version of this entire novella. Because the font is so small in the copy of the book I have, I read the last 10 chapters there—in my browser, after clicking on View > Text Size > Increase Ctrl++ a couple of times. Here’s to an instant magnifying glass.
I finished the book at 1:00 AM. What I love about this book is that, due to the increasing unreliability of the governess narrator, Henry James makes it impossible to discern whether she is insane or that the ghosts she sees are “real.” Love it.