Kevin sent me a pointer to the menu of the cafeteria of the place where he's staying in France. I find it oddly surreal that this information is available on the web. Not that I can understand it, other than to work out that there seems to be a lot of fruit and cheese.
I've been doing a lot of reading. I gobbled down Susan Matthews's Avalanche Soldier yesterday, which was okay, but didn't grab me nearly as much as her other work. It's unclear whether it's a recent book or possibly her first novel -- if it were her first novel, that would explain a lot. Still worth reading, I think. And last night, I started Suzy Charnas's Dorothea Dreams. It's a novel about art and dreams and maybe ghosts and death...so far, I'm liking it a lot. Although I am, at least in part, reading these books in order to *not* think about some things, and it's difficult when you get passages like the following:
"Their basic understanding held and did not need to be remade each time they went to bed together during the week that folowed. It was simple, really: Sometimes they were playful and sometimes not, and sometimes they clung together and rocked each other in silent commiseration like two frightened apes in a laboratory cage. What they did not do was tear at each other."
Two old friends, who have just come together after many years; one of them is dying of cancer. Oof. Some of it just hits me hard. Some of it makes me think. Maybe that's a good thing, whether I enjoy it or not.
"At times she thought, All this should surely be more complex: extremes of rage, grief, withdrawal, rushing together, torment, and desperation. Instead, perhaps because she and Ricky had never imagined a shared future, the present seemed an overwhelming gift."