Wow! I just listened to this interview of Putin on the radio. I'm not well informed about politics, so my comments will be wide of the mark, too personal. B...but he reads Tolstoy and Chekhov and Gogol and he had a black belt in judo at age 18 and he replied ever so charmingly to the councilwoman from Moscow, Idaho, saying that he had heard there is a St. Petersburg in Florida and that he had a special desire to visit such places, St. Petersburg cos it was his birthplace, not the one in Florida mind! And he clarified his invitation to Bush to visit Russia during the White Nights: one can say that the nights are white when everything is covered with snow but that is not the Russian meaning of the term, no; it's reserved for those nights from late May to mid-June when the sun hardly even sets before it's back 'round again. And they're especially beautiful in a beautiful city like St. Petersburg! This kind of natural intelligence, to which I am hardly doing justice, is only part of what makes a great statesman, but don't you want to go looking for Renaissance men and women? Even Proust, who seems so apolitical, had the inclination to admire M. de Norpois (yes, it's slow going for me), his antiquated turns of phrase, his promptness in answering letters, his preference for his father - "a reflection of the completely individual standpoint which each of us adopts for himself in making his choice of friends." (Are we really that unpredictable?) I have to take my dog out earlier and earlier now. At least there aren't soccer moms to contend with on the school grounds. In October there were rare days of high skies, the expanse marked by wisps of cloud (it must have been soon after my post about wedding veils cos the next day I set out to look for just the right one), and perfect clarity, an accord struck between summer and winter - they surrendered their weapons so that all I could think of was the vitality of one and the tranquility of the other. Now we treasure the contrast of blue and orange tints behind the row of houses and the smell of lush lawns. But I still sing to myself, "the sky is paper white." At the nursery, they had paper white narcissi again in terra cotta pots. I got some for my sister last Christmas. This time she was looking for flowers to plant around the tree in front of her house. As we walked past, the fragrance wafted up and I wondered just how it would figure in the rest. The headache you get from eating ice cream, actually feeling somewhat faint from the intensity of the cold, but elated, intoxicated by skies into which that fragrance had vaporized so that it could be apprehended by all the senses. After we left the record store, my sister made fun of me, my frantic searching. It's just that it's been such a long time since I actually shopped for records in a store! My sister got lots of good things: Pink Moon, TBWTAS, Songs From A Room, and Grace, to replace a stolen copy. I got a best of Simon and Garfunkel. Of the songs that are new to me, my favorites are 'I Am A Rock', 'The Dangling Conversation', and 'The Only Living Boy In New York'. I love the introduction to 'I Am A Rock' and this image in these words - "a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow." +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+