in the hall of mirrors

... various

Three in the morning.

It's a painful night – periodically for the past month or two I seem to have some new kind of digestive pains, they were wondering if my pancreas is in trouble or something like that. (Perhaps it's just a matter of endlessly taking mildly toxic medications for decades on end.) At least I seem to be recovering rather faster each time it happens; and I've gotten used to the fact that sleep on such nights is not probable.

Annoying, though, that tomorrow I have seminars to teach, and so won't get to sleep in.

The long bookcase behind the sofa has a lot of miscellaneous and oversized books – collections of stories, parodies; art books, odd experimental things. Tuftes on graphic representation, Hiroshige, and the wonderful Hundertwasser, along with various other oddities (a cartoon version of Proust, for instance). I don't look behind the sofa often enough, and I tend to forget that I even have these books; tonight I (quietly – the women downstairs sleep below this room) sit by these shelves and pull out things to sit up in bed with, pictures, places, stories.

An absolutely wonderful fable by A. S. Byatt, another by Borges. Some Oulipo oddities (but I'm tired of them soon – one has to be fairly alert to enjoy most Oulipo work). Several books that show other people's libraries – admittedly in most cases rich people (sigh) but when the design, or the bookcases, or the collections are particuarly exotic they can be wonderful to just gaze upon.

A minor favorite is this book of photo portraits I bought in Barcelona – nudes of various friends and neighbors of the artist at home, not remarkable or professional models, just everyday people; some of the couples are gay, and it is comforting to see them together in their apartments.

(I thought I had that big book by Hockney on form and structure in Renaissance paintings... perhaps it's in the other room. Another night, then.)

It's a bit hard to focus on anything too repetitive at this point – the entire, admittedly beautiful, book of Hiroshige palls after twenty or forty pages. Perhaps I'll (quietly, don't drop anything) take a pile of the large picture books back and pile them next to the bed....

Mac

My first Macintosh was not the first model made in early 1984, but the second model – the 512K (if you can imagine an entire memory that small) in late 1984.

Since then, I have tended to insist on Apple computers – even, perhaps slightly insanely, while doing my six postgraduate exams, on a Macintosh SE brought in a very large case from home; I traveled through Germany and the Lowlands with that same computer, in that same now-unbelievable case, in 1994-5.

When I arrived here in Newcastle in September 2002, the department secretary told me I couldn't have a Macintosh in my office. I simply refused to accept this; and now our department, and much of our new music building, uses up-to-date Macs.

Some people are at times resentful about the recent size and power of Apple, but I would say that, whatever complications there may be to the story, the reason for their success over the past ten years (after many lean years of dubiety and Microsoft's quasi-illegal operations) is the astoundingly classy quality of their products, ever since they started out: the assumption that our computers reflect our minds and our work, and should therefore be beautiful and easy to manage, easy to use in order to create; so that we can invite them into our imaginations without feeling cheapened or shoddily treated.

I do sometimes feel that I spend too much time at the computer screen: but, at least, I have not been trapped for the past twenty-seven (!) years in front of a junky, ugly, badly constructed system, that resists me, or is undependable. And that is a very good thing.

Jobs died today – he was about a year and a half older than I am; and I know that pancreatic cancer is remarkably painful.

He did good things, he did them strongly; and it is sad to see him go.

Bedazzled

It has obviously been the last night of our four-day 'Indian summer'... and yes, I did rather possessively explain to someone British, who thought it was British slang for something associated with India, that it is American slang for something, well, Native American. But, as has been pointed out, 'Native American Summer' doesn't have the same ring to it.

People have been dazzled by the weather, which has been an easy, uncomplicated, dry mid-70s for four days in a row. If that sounds unremarkable to you, you have never been to northern England – around these parts this is the meteorological equivalent of the seas rising as the land falls away, or perhaps of the Red Sea parting. But all that's clearly over now – by the time we arrived at the bar at 11 pm, a mild, scattered rain was falling, which gradually increased enough to assert the primacy of wet weather in these parts, in case you'd forgotten it.

Michael and Andrew and their friends... and some of my students – including one stunningly cute one – plus various scattered bartenders, Greek and Spanish. (Oh yes and there were some women there too.)

The only difficult part was that several people offered me extended, not particularly focused monologues about their thoughts – the toughest being a young student, charming, sweet, and full of energy, but he kept talking about his experiences this summer (astounding how many things he wanted to tell me, all of which had really the same ultimate point, which was that he found them exciting) and what he felt about ALL of them....

Hmm. Well, there you go: bar life, contact with people, and what Fran Leibovitz used to call the "possibility of meeting your next lover" comes with a certain cost; and that cost is listening to people talk.

I guess I deserve it, considering.