I LOVE PERFUME

Lucy wears a crisp clean perfume called M#2 Black March. Twigs and new leaves on a path through a birch forest, cold windy weather, the sound of someone friendly in a white clapboard house and dark trees rising beyond a deep green hillside. She gets these bottled aromatic dioramas from a little boutique off Whyte Ave, one of those shops with deep-set creamy doorways ribbed with crown moulding and dark glass and which sells thin purple leather belts and cardigans sewn with delicate epaulettes and white blowzy tops with crimpled tuxedo collars and also glass conch shells and pencil skirts and square-cut topaz rings, peridot, glamourine. Sometimes she wears a different scent called At The Beach 1966. The owner of the shop is a brisk business woman with honey-coloured hair falling smoothly over one eye and she imports these plain glass minikins from a perfumer out of Brooklyn or maybe he lives somewhere in Pennsylvania. His name, delightfully, is Christopher Brosius and he used to work for agencies and companies from Manhattan and London and Bangkok. The woman showed me a photograph of the perfumerie once, a small sweating brick front on a wide street in a deserted section of the city, a white sandwich board propped in front and stencilled with navy blue letters reading

I HATE PERFUME.
You smell good, I said. I can smell you from here. I wish there was a more elegant way to say that. Smell. You smell good. Sounds so harsh, doesn’t it?

That’s the Old English for you, she smiled. I think those old one syllable words are perfect. They mean what they mean. Sincere words. Not like you. Lucy rolled over and spread her arms wide on the bed, the late afternoon sunlight through the white lace curtains pooling across her dark hair and the white pillows.

Sincerely, you smell good, I said.

She smiled. Sincerely?

You know you do.

Sincerely?

Okay, sure, I said.

Sincerely, she said and laughed and flung her arms around me and pressed her face into the crook of my neck.

Sincerely, I said.

Photograph taken by ebergcanada

TAKE MY BLOG, PLEASE

I have a new blog. Very simple.

DREAMWEAVERING

Is for chumps who think they can use Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 to get ahead in life—or at least come up with a not-the-worst blog.

More, later.

Sequel To The Prequel—Or Vice Versa

This is the new look for this blog—sweet Jesu save me—until I can figure things out. Proper code in proper places. Grafting in the new template still saved the archives—though comments are killed—which is important-ish to me. Although, let's face it, archives are for personal reference, something the writer can point to and say, "See, I said that!"

See, I just said that.

Expect fairly constant changes in the layout, I suppose. Leastwise, for the next while.

TRYING TO FIX THIS #%!@ BLOG

It'll Rain A Sunny Day, I Know, Shining Down Like Water

The man is saying that he does not believe in God, that he believes in the usual omelette of evolution theory and The Big Bang, and he says, therefore, that he believes in other galaxies, forms of sentience, an infinite evolution of universes. "Infinite universes?" I say. Exactly. "Don't be foolish," I say. "If the universe is infinite, does it hold infinite possibilities? Are there possible versions of you and I out there?" Certainly a possibility. "Infinite variations?" Yes. "Well, if there is infinite variation, and infinite versions of you and I, and infinite versions of this unprovably best of all possible worlds, then, by the same reasoning, there is a world and an earth created by God. So your belief against God is no more than the argument for the possibility of His existence. You live in a contradictory world, then, a world that both is and is not formed by the God of the Christian faith and of the Jews."

Later, alone, I think that words mean nothing without belief, but that belief cannot fit into simple words. Everything is a contradiction and justification. Everything is belief.

Pig Island + Mo Hayder Not a thriller, not really, this is as close as a book can get to being a horror novel without being filed between Steven King and Lovecraft in that shabby little section half-way to the back of most bookstores. Joe Oakes is one of those reporters who deflates the paranormal for a living. He's good at it, so we—his audience—know he is going to come in for some hard knocks pretty soon, and he does, and so, unfortunately, do we. This book is as full of holes as a rusted-out colander. Thirty-one people are killed on Pig Island but only thirty—dum dum dum—can be identified. Great detail, and comes at a harrowing point in the novel, and nothing is ever heard again about who is really the thirty-first victim. Maybe I missed it, I miss a lot of things. The book holds together fairly well until the final crashing scenes, and everything splinters apart. I found no less than six glaring errors, in addition to the one named previously, which any of the policemen in the novel should have been all over before calling the case closed. But even Joe Oakes himself does not seem to spot them, nor the author, making for a heavily contrived ending. The details in this book are great, the set-up is terrific, Pig Island itself is properly ominous. Bestiality, gory deaths, The Island Of Doctor Moreau, a Satanic cult and extreme self-delusion—I'm disappointed this book was not better. The novel might make a good screen-play, but only if a director as sufficiently talented at distracting as Gore Verbinski—I'm thinking The Ring here—was in charge.

"Have You Ever Seen The Rain?" + Bishop Allen By now we have all seen the rain. Been that way for all my time. This is a good version, nothing special, but it would be hard to do a bad version of this classic. Live, yes, a bit muddy, yes, but the crowd is singing along and sometimes you have to make allowances for that. This cover will never be the iconic revision of John Fogarty's massive single that was Cash's cover of NIN or the charming nod that was Ted Leo's cover of "Since U Been Gone". This cover will never fill seats for fans of Bishop Allen or fans of CCR either. But this cover is good, and full of fun, and makes a good moment last a little bit longer, and who would ask more of a song than that? Also, Bishop Allen, right? Cherish them while they're here.

I Might Be Killed By A Criminal, Or By An Idiot, At Any Time

That thick mincing pony of a woman returned to her table in the corner of the bistro, twisting the coarse strands of her rusty mane around her fingers as she trotted back. Her nails were painted a gleaming bright blue—Nicole OPI "Blue Lace"—and when her phone buzzed on the glass table, she had trouble picking it up, her blunt nails chattering against the slick plastic flip. She swore and dropped the phone on the floor and bent down to pick it up, her blazer unfolding like origami to reveal most of a rather large pair of heavily-freckled breasts. Her hair dragged across the plain white plate of spanish rice, cold golden grains flecked with spirals of dark green onion and bright halves of cherry tomatoes. She swore, again, and managed to flip the phone open and cursed the number flickering against the luminous display. A few grains of rice glowed against her brassy hair. Her fingers punched a message into the phone and she bent down again—she should really have considered wearing a different jacket, or maybe a blouse underneath, something white and crisp, with more shadows than light, perhaps—and buried her phone in her purse. The woman straightened up quickly, beckoning the waitress over, and ordered a double vodka with water, no, plain, are you listening, no ice, dammit. And when the waitress stumbled on her way back to the bar, stout blacks heels stuttering double-time on the polished slate, the woman looked up with a quick jerk of her strong neck and met my eyes.

Gaelle + "Give It Back" This is the only song I have ever featured twice on this blog. The Windows Media visual projection of this song is a series of shimmering circles, mostly filled with a pale after-midnight aqua, and what more needs to be said? "Longing for / An empty thought / But I seem to think of you instead." A slow-motion song, smooth hands on a black glass of wine. Low-slung couches pushed against a red wall. Many people in a small room, old gold picture-frames high above our heads. The girl with the porcelain collarbone is swinging her shoulders to the music. That couple in the corner, her with the green eyes, him in the white suit, have been together for years. You slowly walk down the narrow stairs, now, and out into the late-night street, a short walk home in the warm summer's night. Tomorrow night will be even better.

Killing Hitler + Roger Moorhouse What matters, I think, in writing history, and especially niche history, is not so much style as tempo, tension, timing. We all know how this book will end. There will be no surprise on the last page of this book. Moorhouse details eight different conspiracies against the infamous Fuhrer and focuses, time and again, not on why the plans failed, but on how close the plans came to succeeding. This constant sense of what-if, combined with sympathetic portrayals of some not-always-so-sympathetic men, including Chamberlain, give this book a page-turning quality not often found in books of historical record. "How could Hitler NOT have been killed?" is the thought constantly in mind. This book explains.