The longer the spans between blogs, the longer it seems to find a starting place. So here goes the thirty-day tour-de-force.
The Gulf hackle raisers, Gustav and Ike, the Storms That Will End All Storms, came and went with little fuss. The new job is moving along well and I’ve been doing a great deal of graphic design with some expensive software I know little about. My role is starting to crystallize: everything document related is me—product reviews, sales pitches, savings presentations, business letters, logo creation, tutorials, etcetera. It’s one of the first times in my life I drive to work not really knowing what I will be doing or trying to do that day. That’s not a complaint.
Other news is the purchase of a new house. Here are a couple pics.
Jean and I have historically moved fast on things like this. From first thinking to buying was about a week. We will close on Oct 24th but want to move that up to the 17th.
Between the storms and buying the house, Centenary hosted their annual Book Bizarre, arguably one the main reasons I moved back here. I picked up a collection of Carver, Cheever and three Beckett novels. I grabbed some Faulkner (Light in August, The Unvanquished, Requiem for a Nun, The Wild Palms) to complete my collection. Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, Dubus’ Dancing After Hours, and Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time were some cheap snags on authors I had been on the fence about. Also found an original copy of Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a new staple edition to the toilet library. There were a dozen more I can’t name offhand. All of it came to about $8. One criticism of the Bizarre, though. The sale was at a large gymnasium, chock-full of tables with the bleachers retreated. Around 100 tables and +15,000 books (they estimated)—all of this—and not 1 book of poetry. The books are all donated. This explains the biting sarcasm and overriding anger I notice in every poet I’ve known.
