The Monday Morning Review (May 29, 2006)

The temperatures this week ranged from 26 through 29 degrees Celsius. I turned on the air-conditioning, installed only last September.

Panos’s book order arrived in the post. He’ll be reading the following books in this order:
1. Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse
2. Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister
3. Patricia Highsmith’s The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder
4. Georges Simenon’s The Blue Room

I received London Magazine in the post. Inside is a story written by my friend Jai Clare. The story, set on a Greek island, is called “With Phantoms Still.” It is typical brilliant Jai: luscious, raw, magical, dangerous.

At first I thought Peter the boatman was you. I could barely breathe for thinking it but why would you be here far from your inner-city high living excitement. For a second I dreamed you’d come for me but as I got closer and saw by the falling sullen line of the mouth, but his taller height, but the slightly receding hairline, that it wasn’t you. An approximation of you. A facsimile, a dream of you.

Perhaps he is your proxy? If so I am shadowed by them. Proxies of you. Half in substance, in voice, or manners. All shadows. All ghostly. As if someone were practising to get you right. Or someone liked the prototype so much they thought they’d overpopulate my world with shadows.

~Jai Clare, “With Phantoms Still,” London Magazine, February/March 2006, pages 57-8.

I heard the rumour that See You Next Tuesday, an anthology of short sex-themed stories, will finally be born into print. Soon. Bookmark the Better Non Sequitor site. My story, “A Silly Little Thing,” will be included amongst others by Donald Capone, Steve Almond, Stewart Sumner, Mark Yakich, Steven Coy, H. A. Fleming, Alicia Gifford, Charles Lambert, and Lee Klein.

I enjoyed reading Sarah Crown’s account of Margaret Atwood’s reading from her Penelopiad at the Hay Festival:

She begins with a brief, witty dissection of the Odyssey myth. “He spent many years trying to get back to Ithaca - or that’s his story” she tells us, “meeting with lots of beautiful goddesses along the way, most of whom he was forced to sleep with. Poor man.”

Heh.