Thursday morning: Work, weather, books, moving.

Yom Kippur was beautiful - the weather was great, the services were inspiring, and I survived the fast. Oh, and I lost a couple of pounds!

Now the rainy season is well and truly upon us. I'm looking forward to spending more time with books, in various formats - audio, Kindle, and (of course) print.

I'm re-"reading" (on audio) Toni Morrison's fourth novel, 'Tar Baby'. It is her only novel to date set mainly outside of the continental US (a pastoral, in genre), and therefore is, georgraphically speaking, literally an outlier. Uniquely among TM novels, the setting is heavily personified, so that the island becomes a 'character'. 'Tar Baby' is Morrison's first novel to be set in contemporary times (the post-Vietnam 70s, contemporary with the time of the book's composition) and her first to include major non-black characters (Valerian Street, the retired candy tycoon, and his wife, the red-headed former Miss Maine, Margaret).

The book has many of the familiar Toni Morrison trademarks: the role of folklore (as in, for example, 'Song of Solomon'), problem mothers, anxiety over skin color (Jadine's, but also Margaret's), and ambivalence toward identity. At the end, as Jadine and Son are drawn inexorably back toward one another, I wonder if the island itself is the 'tar baby' of the title. Anyway, I hope to post a full write-up on the book soon, when I'm finished re-reading it.

Also, I want to get active on Goodreads. (Readers, ping me if you're on Goodreads.)

I'm hopefully close to getting that studio in my old apartment building, which for convenience I'll call the Admiral here.

Okay, now I've got to get to work.

Thursday night: All the world is a very narrow bridge.

I live in South-West Portland and work in South-East Portland. This means that on a clear day - which today clearly was not - I have to contend with sun glare on both ends of my driving commute. It also means that (rain or shine) I cross the Ross Island Bridge. It's a 40-mph zone with two narrow lanes and no median, which means that some part of my brain goes all Rain Man every time I cross the bridge with the traffic zooming past me at 80+ mph in the opposite direction. (Did I mention I have a bit of driver's anxiety?) But I've gotten used to it, so it doesn't bother me like it did at first.

I was planning on working late - to 8 or 8:30, say - but with this storm coming in I knocked off at 6pm and spent an hour watching Finé and Izetta struggle to save Eylstadt.