Last night V showed me some site pictures he took for a new renovation project. They are dark monochrome images, taken with ToyCamera in the crisp pm light after yesterday’s short snowstorm, of austere empty rooms and close crumbling surfaces. On a few walls, someone has drawn dense, creeping vignettes of leaves and flowers. Others depict life sized sketches of weirdly foreshortened Botticelli figures, including an uncertain Venus on the half shell with a great vertical line of sutures over her heart.

The baby’s growling tantrums amused me so much I started singing Puttin on the Ritz along with his throaty groans because it reminded me of the monster in Young Frankenstein. Now he goes around humming to himself (sort of) and groaning like the monster.

Yesterday on the train at midday I was watching people’s hands. You can study a person’s hands in a concentrated way it’s impossible to do with a face, where one’s own part in the scripted etiquette of face to face communication gets distracting. It’s not a trivial thing to initiate that and it feels treacherous to do it without having something specific to say. With hands, it’s okay to just observe. But everything I see seems like a symbol or a clue to something else, like a set of dream objects. A constellation of dream symbols that I imagine fit perfectly atop an image I will probably never see:

- He has wide, toughened hands, palms down, very still on denim knees. Dark skin touched by a fine white dust that settles on ashy knuckles and around the cuticles of tightly bitten fingernails with deep blueish lunulae.
- Her narrow, long fingered hands are folded, though not as still. Her skin is badly chapped and beneath the red, her knuckles and palms have a faint orange cast. Her perfectly clean nails are thin and unpolished, with fine vertical ridges.

Speaking of appendages, I realized the other day that I still have a lot of the red dirt from the Sacred Valley adhering to my combat boots. I am starting to be fond of it. It’s like one of my souvenirs. Yesterday I was dressed disappointingly (As usual these days. I can’t manage to stay warm, carry the baby in a reasonable way, and be fashionable. It’s like the construction rule of thumb. I only get two out of three. I’m looking forward to summer. I will be splendid! Diaphanous frocks and golden sandals and probably some falling down off tall shoes.), but was able to console myself with the secret origins of my more or less monotone ensemble: boot dirt, Cusco; aviator hat obscuring my vision and making the world seem a lot quieter, a flea market in Tallinn; scarf, the City Wide Garbage Sale in Austin. Everything else courtesy of the Gap, Glamourmom (a wildly useful item if you happen to be breastfeeding), and the Salvation Army near my house, where last week I found a silver seventies gown with a wide frill around the neck that cleaned up admirably in the wash. Splendid, I will be, dammit. I will have a dinner party. Except it just doesn’t seem to work here. I have been complaining recently to anyone who will listen that New York is as pathetically deficient in dinner and cocktail party culture as it is in cafes. And by New York, I guess I mean not Brooklyn. Fine, you guys can have your little backyard dinner parties, beekeeping, cafes, fancypants art… Where was I going with this? I got distracted picturing everyone sitting outside and getting cheerfully drunk around a very long dinner table in a back yard garden full of fireflies and orange paper lanterns. Maybe we should put bees on the roof. After years of perseverance, we’ve finally got the fireflies, or at least we did last summer. I just worry about the neighbors. Bees are still illegal here and everyone on our street already thinks we are a bunch of rowdy teens. One summer evening a few years ago we brought our tiny grill to the roof for a mild hour or two of slightly burnt eggplant and zucchini. By the end of the week, word on the (literal) street was that we’d been running the length of the houses on the block, leaping barbed wire fences from one structure to the next with a forty in either hand. Everyone could hear us screaming and drunkenly pounding on their roofs (Why not rooves?). We may even have broken a few windows and we certainly knocked down at least one chimney. The point is, the neighbors are watching. So the garden will have to do without bees until we get an lawyer on retainer and can do whatever we want without fear of being sued; because if we actually had a lawyer on retainer, I imagine we’d be panting to be sued, just to make the expense worthwhile and give a sense of meaning to his existence. If he were around all the time, we’d get kind of fond of him and start worrying that if he sat around feeling useless he’d eventually want to leave and be retained elsewhere under more fulfilling circumstances.

I think I’ve finally finished my Miranda July phase. I’m replete. I rewatched the movie and I enjoyed the short stories a lot, though I’d already read several of them elsewhere. It had something to do with timing. I was just in the perfect mood to be the beneficiary of everything she’s ever made.

On the other hand, I picked up the Nick Adams stories again for some interim middle of the night reading and this time I can barely stop rolling my eyes. I guess I’m not in the mood for a tree stump as a protagonist. Huh. Talk about timing. Those stories were hitting the spot perfectly so recently. I actually had to climb out of  bed at three am to retrieve the more endearingly macho Philip Marlowe from the pile of bedtime books under the tin cans full of pencils and scrubby paint brushes behind the printer. I tried to be quiet but I wasn’t… Is The Little Sister out of print in paperback again? Too bad, it’s a good one. Chandler’s novels aren’t very consistent. For example, what the hell happened in Playback? Don’t read Playback. I think Marlowe got old and lecherous and cynical instead of perfectly hardboiled like an egg you bring to a boil then cover for twelve minutes and plunge into ice water for a moment. Seriously, they are perfect that way. Cooked all the way through but never grey. I learned it from my extremely scientific and methodical mother-in-law who makes a mean (but gentle and nostalgic) creamed egg on toast. Anyhow Playback reads as though Chandler couldn’t quite remember how to write and, like Roger Wade in The Long Goodbye, was reduced to rereading his own stuff for inspiration.

Moby Dick is slowing down to a glacial pace because I don’t want it to end and if the number of pages left are any indication, it seems like it’s going to. Also because I started The Worst Hard Time, which has been on my to read list since it came out. So far, it’s pretty exciting. Also I found someone who’s going through and exploring bits of the book. A number of his entries correspond with things on my own list. How nice for me. Thanks, mister!

Excepts from the journal of Zebulon Pike, mostly on his experiences with the Spanish in Chihuahua and Texas.