Monday, March 30, 2009

flagrant, exhausted

I've been a baaaaaad blogger yet again, but I'm finding time slipping away from me like most other people I know. Even though the days are longer now, there's so much catching up to do.

Let's see. It's too early in the morning for me to blog on a coherent theme, so here are some random bits and bytes:

Got highlights put in my hair a few months back (first time in decades - the stylist was all, "Your hair. It's so virginal."), because it was the heart of winter and something needed to be done to lighten the mood. Anyway, they needed to be touched up recently, so I went back to the salon last week. I emerged a few hours later looking like a Vegas showgirl (my hair, anyway - not anything below it). I tried to just sort of roll with the platinum look - I really did. But after enough people took one look at me and said things like, "WHOA. Blonde," I got the picture. So, I went back for some "low lights," and it's all better now.

What else...Um, in doing some research for a potential upcoming project, I'm back to reading Marguerite Duras. Anais Nin and Milan Kundera will be coming up soon on the reading list, I figure, but here are some lines from The Lover that caught my eye: "At the age of fifteen I had the face of pleasure, and yet I had no knowledge of pleasure. There was no mistaking that face. Even my mother must have seen it. My brothers did. That was how everything started for me - with that flagrant, exhausted face, those rings around the eyes, in advance of time and experience."

It's very sparse prose, this book about a young girl's "awakening" in prewar Indochina, very chopped off in chunks and blocks, short paragraphs here and there, a complete jumping around in time. "Digressions within digressions" was how one of my beta readers described a manuscript I wrote a couple years ago. So, I suppose I didn't handle that time jumping as well as Ms. Duras.

Okay, here's one more quote, totally unrelated (but I like it): "Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." - Hellen Keller

4 comments:

  1. "We should not look a gift universe in the mouth."—GK Chesterton

    ReplyDelete
  2. ...because, Lord knows, it might just swallow us in one gulp.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Heck yes, and it is the only one we have...and we are part of it, the best of all possible universes...Hmmm

    ReplyDelete
  4. And have you seen those pics (all over the news) of the exploding stars? Hard not to see them as the hand and eye of God.

    ReplyDelete