Still looking for the perfect airplane book --

Suitcase is packed, and it will even close. Carryon also packed - but I'm still looking for the perfect airplane book.

I can always fall back on Lonely Planet - a long flight is a perfect time to read guidebooks. In the carryon I also have the latest issues of two or three magazines (good because they can be discarded when finished.)

Tonight I considered a paperback history of the period 1789 - 1848 -- Europe's years of revolution. It relates to many of the places we're going, but I'm not sure I want to carry it through airport security. A dense, leisurely 19th-century novel may be the best choice.

Or the most portable entertainment of all - crosswords!

We leave for Amsterdam in about 12 hours. Sparky is asleep on my bed, for the first time in several days. I think she knows i'm about to go away.

Departure countdown...

Suddenly there is very little time before we leave for the trip down the Danube. Holland comes first - we fly to Amsterdam on Saturday, then spend a few days in Zwolle and Dordrecht before moving on to Prague to link up with the tour group.

In Europe the name of the blog may change temporarily to "Julie and Nancy float down the Danube." Nancy is bringing a new, super-light, super-elegant computer (ok, it's a MacBook Air - and I can't wait to use it!) which I get to share in return for keeping up the blog.

Ever since going on line, I've been very good at finding internet cafes in Europe, and reasonably proficient at dealing with strange keyboards. While it's probably good brain exercise to deal with extra letters (Denmark and Hungary, for example) or letters that fall in unexpected - and frustrating - places (France!) it's a great treat to find an internet station large enough or new enough to offer an English keyboard.

Having a computer as part of the traveling equipment will be a wonderful luxury.

I'm bringing a new camera - a digital single-lens reflex instead of the tiny point-and-shoot I've used for the past 4 years. Tradeoff for the larger size and weight is more depth & definition for pictures.

Sunday in the Park with JPS...

Sousa Band drew an enthusiastic audience at Folklife yesterday. We rolled out plenty of warhorses and chestnuts, just what everyone expects at an outdoor Sunday band concert. Even after a set that was longer than originally scheduled, we heard calls for "encore, encore!"

Always leave them wanting more ...

We had a good venue - the Mural Amphitheater, a stage large enough to accommodate the band AND the world's only sedentary majorette. ("And now our Medentary Sajorette," the director began - then she laughed and said, "Now I'll never be able to say it right again!")

When the sajorette - majorette's - baton landed a few inches in front of our music stands, those of us in the front row neither flinched nor missed a note.

"Spring training was rough this year," she said at the end of her routine.

Although it's nice to have a canvas shelter over the amphitheater stage, it does block the view of the Paul Horiuchi mural (worked in bright mosaic tiles) that gives the Mural Amphitheater its name. Designed for the 1962 Century 21 World's Fair, the mural remains beautiful, eye-catching, and not at all dated.

Memorial Day Weekend

Suddenly it's the official beginning of summer, and for a change the weather is cooperating. Today we had sun and warm temperatures (70's and 80's.) Tomorrow is supposed to be a little more cloudy, but still warm.

Because the holiday weekend is so early this year some May events - the Ballard Syttende Mai parade (Norwegian Independence Day, for all you non-Scandinavians) and the opening of the Seattle International Film Festival, for two, seem to have been telescoped into a very short time period. By the 27th, Memorial Day 2008 will be history, with four more days of May to go.

I am old enough to remember when Memorial Day was May 30th. Period. Never mind if the day fell on Sunday or Tuesday or Thursday. We never went away, because my father was buried in end-of-term tasks at the end of the University year. If the weather happened to be good, there might be a picnic in someone's back yard, with the Indy 500 in the background, pushing the sound capabilities of a kitchen radio.

Northwest Folklife is the other major May Seattle event. Now 37 years old, the festival packs in a multitude of events over the three days of the weekend, rain or shine. This year a friend who loves to dance is staying with me, enjoying the chance to go from blues to swing to tango to waltz, or just watch costumed folk dancers from all over. She is a beautiful dancer, who never sits out a number unless she wants to rest!

My son and daughter-in-law, both Wesleyan graduates, are in Middletown this weekend for Reunion events. Here's the latest from his blog: "Ted Kennedy was supposed to be the commencement speaker at Wesleyan this Sunday, which is where I'm typing this. He called in a favor, so to replace him we're getting Barack Obama. Should be a madhouse, but fun."

Meanwhile, back in Seattle, the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band plays at Folklife tomorrow, 11:55 a.m. at the Mural Amphitheater. Be there or be square!

Eat like a bird?

Yesterday I ate lunch at Txori, a new (six months old) restaurant in Belltown. Specialties of the house include pintxos, the tapas of the Basque country in Spain. Good wine, too. The space is tiny - about 900 square feet - and you can watch as two cooks prepare your meal, in a compact kitchen behind a long counter. Behind them open shelves go up to the ceiling, stacked with supplies and the myriad of small dishes used to serve up the pintxos.

"Txori" means "Bird" in Basque (Euskara) and everything here comes in small bites, perfect for sampling a variety of tastes and textures. If you have never tried octopus, this is the place to do it. On an earlier visit I tried the dish pictured here, a piece of perfectly-cooked - NOT rubbery! - octopus skewered to a round of boiled potato. The sauce is olive oil, garlic & chili, among other things.

This time I ordered the octopus salad. That's a spoonful of octopus chopped with vegetables and seasonings, placed on a small thick slice of grilled bread, and topped with a perfectly fried egg. (Don't knock it if you haven't tried it!)

After that I had half a small eggplant, roasted, then returned to the oven long enough to melt a topping of house-made tomato sauce and cheese.

It's a bit like an eggplant pizza, but seems healthier. Mine was topped with an anchovy because the cook (my daughter, as a matter of fact) knows I like them.

Desserts are two-bite servings of a deeply chocolate mousse, or a coffee/caramel flan that is among the best I've had.

Of course I want to go back! By the time real summer comes to Seattle, a tiny deck opening off the left rear corner of the restaurant will be ready. Look for me under a big hat.

More about those dresses ...

And "L'Allegro..." of course! Check here for a review of the performance. The scene pictured shows Orpheus in his unfortunate encounter with the maenads.

For another take on things that sparkle and glitter, consider this post, from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site.

I'm just back from the last poetry class, where almost everyone seemed to regret that we could not simply go on every Monday for the foreseeable future! While I'm sure our teacher is happy to have some evenings free for his other work, he graciously acknowledged our thanks for a class well-taught.

One member of the class will be in a reading next week. Another shared stories of her grandson, teaching English in Chengdu, who rode out the earthquake on the top floor of a seven-story building. Later in the week, he and several friends (one of them a BBC stringer) made their way to a village at the epicenter of the quake, where they offered to help. Authorities turned them back because they were not Chinese, a story they were happy to tell the BBC!

Reunion information is coming in steadily. By offering to compile the reunion book, I get all the news first. Some of it is good - out of a class that numbered around 90, we have heard from more than 40 classmates. While not all can make it to the celebration, they seem happy to share news and memories. Thanks to the internet, we've found several classmates who have been out of touch for decades.

90 Degrees - but winter hasn't entirely gone away.

This week we skipped spring entirely, going straight to summer for a day or two. After a few cold, wet, gray days came a small heat wave, in which the temperature did indeed go to 90 on Saturday afternoon.


Meanwhile, as a reminder that winter is still not entirely over, the Seattle Times featured this picture, of the newly-refurbished Paradise Inn at Mt. Rainier, still surrounded by snow drifts.

Many mountain roads (some opened only a few weeks ago) are closed again because of avalanche danger from the rapidly melting snow. Down here at sea level, sunburn is everywhere.

Saturday night I was lucky enough to have a ticket for "L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Il Moderato," Mark Morris' athletic, inventive, exciting 1982 ballet, performed at the Paramount Theater with musicians from the Seattle Symphony, the Seattle Symphony Chorale, and four splendid soloists. Fabulous experience - and I want a dress just like the simple but elegant costumes the women on stage were wearing. Dresses were cut to fit the upper body and swirl away into a flared skirt, and appeared to be made of double layers of chiffon, in colors that blended or contrasted, depending on the dress.

The Paramount, one of Seattle's few remaining grand early 20th century theaters, was the perfect venue for this performance. Several years ago an early Microsoft employee/investor, who retired with enough money to do anything she wanted, took on the restoration of this building. It's now the location of choice for touring musical theater and dance companies. From its ornate lobby to its high-ceilinged main theater and heavily-ornamented proscenium arch, it's a setting that adds immeasurably to every performance.

Poets as Packrats

Every piece I've taken to poetry class this spring has been a rewrite. I hoped to come up with something entirely new, but so far the drafts folder has been my best source of material.

Every poet has a drafts folder. Even after multiple rewrites, you hesitate to throw away jottings, scraps, or neatly printed but hopelessly banal efforts, because there might just be a phrase or turn of phrase or an idea you can use later.

Arthur Sze, a breathtakingly original poet who has taught several times at Centrum, often cuts printed poems apart and tacks individual lines to the wall, to study or to rearrange.

"Save the cut out lines in a file," is his advice - especially for those lines you love the best, the ones that almost always HAVE to come out of the poem.

Partway through this class I realized I wasn't the only one mining the files for overlooked treasure. Several classmates have brought rewrites to class, and our teacher told us one evening that he is now working on a couple of poems he had consigned to his "notes" years ago.

Here's something that hasn't made it out of my "scraps" file yet - but there is one more class! (And it will disappear from this page soon.)

(Vanished)

And for another take on fascinating fragments of many past lives, try this website.

Mother's Day

Very happily spent, thank you. This morning the family all came over here, and while some of us in the living room growled about the frustrations of our volunteer commitments, the two chefs quietly produced a delicious feast. A mimosa or two effectively mellowed the growlers.

Weather still feels like winter, except that it doesn't get dark until 8:30 p.m., and everything is greening and growing. It is quite possible to go for a walk, in a heavy jacket, and smell newly-cut grass.

Found out today that my daughter-in-law owns all the unexpurgated Anaïs Nin diaries. This should make for some interesting summer reading - reports to come!

Other recommended reading - the piece in the current New Yorker about Ted Sorenson's forthcoming memoirs. He is an Obama supporter - says all the comments about Obama's "youth" and "lack of experience" and "background" are exactly the same things people said about JFK in 1960.

Anaïs Nin would be a blogger.

This not particularly startling idea came to me a day or two ago, after I had spent far too much time surfing through some of the millions of blogs out there.

(Easiest way to jump into that ocean is to go to the bar at the top of this blog and click on the box that says "Next Blog." Then be prepared for anything. Some of the blogs from Asia are such beautiful pieces of text that it matters not at all that you will have no idea what they are about.)

Back to Anaïs. If the secret desire of every writer is to have an audience for even those pieces that are supposedly private, she hit the jackpot, publishing six or seven (expurgated) volumes of her diaries in her own lifetime. Of course I owned all the books - I still do, although I haven't opened them in years. Only while looking up references for this post did I learn that unexpurgated versions of some of the diaries are now in print, thanks to the efforts of a widower.

Publication of the diaries coincided with the burgeoning feminist movement and its literature and scholarship. Later came Nin's novels, her childhood diaries, and the erotica she wrote (for $1/page, supposedly for "a collector,") when short of money in the 40's.

I tried a couple of the novels, but they seemed thin, mannered and bloodless after the diaries, which spill over with characters and incidents and fascinating pictures of the vie des artistes in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Running all through the books is Nin's determination to live life as she chose, and the fierce energy and egotism that made it all possible. If she manipulated the supposed record of her days, does it actually matter?

(I sometimes wonder if Nicole Hollander is thinking of Anaïs when she draws the "Sylvia"panels called "The Woman Who Lies in her Personal Journal.")

If she had lived into the Internet age (Nin died in 1977) I'm sure she would have spun millions of words into a blog - perhaps into mulitiple blogs, reflecting her different preoccupations.

Reading

From my son's Live Journal page, I picked up the newest "meme" circulating on the Internet, a list of the 100 books most likely to be returned - unread - to the library. Books One Ought to Read, in other words.

The list is a mix of classics (The Iliad, Vanity Fair, Tom Jones, Moby Dick, Ulysses, As I Lay Dying) and a lot of contemporary fiction (The Historian, Oryx & Crake, Beloved.)

My list would be different - for example, I would certainly leave off 100 Years of Solitude, which I found unreadable, and would probably add all 12 volumes of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, arguably an acquired taste. (And then there's our family's collective guilty pleasure, a French potboiler called The Lady in the Car with the Glasses and the Gun.)

My daughter-in-law thinks a more interesting list would be the books you have thrown across the room (with or without finishing.) I think she is on to something. (See "100 Years of Solitude.")

Recently, thanks to the UU World, I came across a delightful article called "Why I'm sticking with classics." The author, a Unitarian minister, said when he realized he could not possibly read everything, he gave up on contemporary fiction completely, and reverted to classics. (To keep up with cocktail party conversations, he relies on his "cliff notes" -- the NY Times Book Review.)

His first classic was The Scarlet Letter, which he had read - and hated - in high school. Coming to it in middle age was an entirely different experience.

My first joyous rediscovery of a previously slighted classic was The Wind in the Willows, which I first read well into middle age, wondering how I could have missed it.

Just this week I finished A Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert, a writer who has been on my own list of Authors One Ought to Read for many years. I recommend it enthusiastically, as much for its startling contemporaneity as anything else. Who knew that France in the 1840's (the tumultuous period leading up to the revolutionary year of 1848 and its repressive aftermath) was so much like our own chaotic world?

And the other day I treated myself to this, just to have all of Emily in one place. Next thing I may have to read is a book by Ann Fadiman called Rereadings, in which she says classics have to be re-read in order to be properly appreciated. I'm seriously considering beginning A Sentimental Education again soon, because I am sure there is much in it I failed to slow down and appreciate while eagerly turning pages.

Happy (Gray) May Day.

We've been saying "spring is just around the corner" for so long that it MUST be true. Still, winter jackets feel good (never mind that every time the sun comes out, the warm-blooded young immediately shed half a dozen layers!)

Now that it's May, I look forward to travel. On the 31st, a friend and I leave to spend a few days in Holland before moving on to Prague to join a tour that will take us all the way to the Black Sea, via "deluxe motor coach" and a river boat. Stops include Bratislava, Vienna, Budapest and finally Constanta and Bucharest. Also on the itinerary is Melk, where I took this picture a few years ago. The abbey church has a spectacular setting above the Danube.

A film I hope to watch again, perhaps after we return, is "Donau, Duna, Dunaj, Dunav, Dunarea,", which I saw at a film festival two or three years ago. It's a road movie, set on the Danube, and the film it most closely resembles is "L'Atalante," that hypnotically beautiful 1934 Jean Vigo film.

The title of the film is simply five ways to name the river we call the Danube - in German, Hungarian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Romanian. Its setting, a battered river steamer, is far different from the sleek river boat on which we will be traveling, but memories of the movie will certainly crop up during the trip.

Perhaps I'll do my own double bill later in the summer. With chocolate instead of popcorn.