urban haiku III

front lawn tulip leaves

sloping to downhill sidewalk

corabell spits fire

urban haiku II

scimitar moonlight

Maxfield Parrish skyview

zigzag bat vespers

urban haiku

morning drizzle halts

tires slap on commuters' road

distant siren moans

Lush Life

The other night (more accurately, morning) a strange addiction took hold of me, something called reading, but not just any ol' bedstand reading, because the cliche "a real page-turner" took hold of me, became incarnate, as I kept helplessly fighting the common-sense and body-demanding notion of cease and desist, turn off the light and sink deeper into the pillow, into the wee hours, sometime around 5 a.m., the birds not yet on speaking terms, and me afraid to know how bright it might really be on the other side of the bedroom shades, even figuring that I'm going to feel dreadfully bad if I go to sleep now and wake up at 6:20 when my daughter jauntily answers her alarm (I didn't; felt okay but jet-lagged).

What book would keep you riveted like that, you ask?

Lush Life by Richard Price (a requested birthday or Christmas book I am just getting round to; each book in its rightful time).

Yes, a real tribute to an author, that he or she could have such sway and magnetic force.

Either that or the coffee I drank before the Vestry meeting had mega-doses of Caffeine Plus.

Or just something weird going on in me and my brain (I love reading the latest stuff on neurology, realizing we are pretty darn hard-wired in compelling but just-beginning-to-understand ways).

Tip of my San Francisco Giants' baseball cap to Richard Price and Lush Life anyway.

going Global

"They" can say what they want about the dearth or death of newspapers as we know them, but let me tell you, you electronic readers (we co-conspirators, if you will):

The (Toronto) Globe and Mail is as bright and shiny an example of journalism as you are likely to find anywhere, either in the tactile medium of tree-originated, new-fashioned paper or the tap-tapping medium of click-click-keyboarding.

The Globe and [no ampersand, folks] Mail has lively writing, superb international coverage, and sit-and-read-for-a-week comprehensiveness. Essays abound. And The Globe and Mail devotes a reverential amount of space to books. Books!

I rediscovered this fact this past weekend in Kingston, Ontario, when I was treated to the luxury of idly reading the paper at one of Kingston's fine coffee shops in the aftermath of the Leonard Cohen concert. (Americans may not know this, but Canada's Sunday papers come out on Saturday. Sort of. In other words, the Saturday paper is the big one; getting the Sunday New York Times-like paper on Saturday is kind of like celebrating the vigil of a feast in the Roman Catholic Church the eve before the feast, or like going to church on Saturday, for the same reason.)

The Globe and Mail is truly world-class.

He's Our Man

Last Friday, attended a Leonard Cohen concert in Kingston, Ontario.

A cathedral chapel cabaret connection.

This online reviewer captures the evening well.

Worth the trip.

And then some.

Back to the Pluperfect Present, Tense

Back to the present, be it pluperfect or tense or neither or both.

Pluperfect, a quintessentially mysterious concept.

As Merriam-Webster informs us:

Late Latin plusquamperfectus, literally, more than perfect

Date: 15th century

A steady rain.

Late evening, May, cool.

Hypnotic tapping of raindrops on the pavement.

Breathing in and out.

Pluperfect, by any other definition.