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Welfare Day at the Library
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Conversations
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Today, a seasonal blip in an otherwise unseasonable winter, cold, and not so much the cold as the wind that tears up the sand from dry roads, spews grit into your face, eyes, turning your back to it circles and finds you again, another direction for this assault, it's only today, and yesterday, but tomorrow it will be fine.
Only it's today, and the library is filled with the homeless and their backpacks, sleeping bags, and every one of them is talking to their welfare case worker on their cell-phone, updating them as to their job search, housing applications, etc.
And so I bear it for an hour, but these voices, loud attempts at being quiet, it's maddening and you can't blame them, you can't be outside in this, but - I can't be here either.
Buy time at a quiet café, then head home to finish my book, 150 pages left, it's a masterpiece for sure, but I'll review it when I'm done.
...the treasures of Aladdin
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Images
- Hits: 691
Well, no, but a couple of the more interesting finds from the last few weeks. The first, an old "commemorative" newspaper from Nelson, Circa 1961.
the second I spotted on a walk about the store, odd, I know, I usually don't walk around the shop so once in a blue moon there's a surprise.
This was it. An erotic carving of two naked women embracing, one, by the helmet some sort of Spartan, the other? Well, curious, and it's out of an old cow's shinbone.
Which makes it doubly curious. Currently priced at $20.00 in the silent auction, I might just have to bid...
...because, really, how have I lived this long without one?
Family Day
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: People
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Cold, raining, and of course the Library's closed and the cafe's are overflowing, the best you can hope to do is to rent a table for twenty or so minutes.
To stay longer would be rude, there's always someone hovering nearby checking the status of your coffee, that jealous green eye-on-your-table, "here, let me help you with that..."...
SO, open the laptop and do some eavesdropping.
There's an older couple beside me, 60's I'm guessing, the man is very earnestly clutching his dates hands, she's catching my eye, not quite an eye-roll or "rescue me" but...listening to their conversation, it's a first date...!!!? The conversation gives it away, they don't know each other, not at all. Then why, I'm wondering, is he clutching her hands over the end of the table? They must have met on one of those dating sites...."My Time" or "Our Time" or "Frisky Seniors" for divorcees & widows making merry, apparently these are the days my friend, these are the days, I can believe it looking at them but am so on the down-low that there's been no time to partake, and this hostage-taking happening at the table next to me, it's not inspiring...not at all.
The date ends, my coffee's finished, wait until they leave before folding up the laptop and disappearing. Sundays, Days off, at the moment they're the worst. Soon enough there will be none...
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 868
Reading Vasily Aksyonov's "The Burn" - which places it's comic heroes in a dystopian society (early 70's Russia), - a relentless drunken stream-of-consciousness tirade that pits the narrator - and his American friend "Patrick Thunderjet" - against the State, the World, and recalls me to reread "The Master and Margarita".
I will come back to "The Burn" in another review, I promise.
Now this is a book that I actively proselytize, along with "Confederacy of Dunces", "Lolita", and "The Discovery of New Spain", Herodotus, a few dozen others, that I place joyfully in another's hands to have them read and discuss, only to discover the book again not a day later in a thrift shop or curbside library.
So goes literacy.
In any event, while looking for it online I came across this translation:
Online Translation: https://www.weblitera.com/book/?id=205&lng=1
Which I took a few hours to reread. I'm not certain this is a translation by either Mira Ginsberg or Michael Glenny, but - aside from typos, this was not so bad. And yet again I found myself - after the Ball - both laughing and crying on the same page, the circumstance, characters, the details - forgotten, or perhaps never in the editions I recalled.
Anyways, a joy once again.
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