autumn, celebration, and lunch
posted by soe 11:21 pm
It’s the Thursday before we go to Iceland. Whee!
Ahem…
Sorry about that.
I now return you to our regularly scheduled Thursday feature — three beautiful things from my past week:
1. Fall has arrived in D.C. and the trees are bedecked in lavish costumes of orange and yellow.
2. After my semi-annual dental check-up, I celebrate clean teeth with a raspberry cream milkshake and two macarons from Barracks Row restaurants, which I eat in a park under the setting sun.
3. Two of my coworkers and I — all of us survivors of the pre-launch mania — buy lunch, head to a local plaza, and eat outside on a gorgeous sunny afternoon. We chat and laugh and talk about things that have nothing to do with work. It feels so luxurious not to have to rush right back to the office.
How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world this week?
into the stacks: the physics of imaginary objects
posted by soe 2:57 am
The Physics of Imaginary Objects, by Tina May Hall
From the jacket: “The Physics of Imaginary Objects, in fifteen stories and a novella, offers a very different kind of short fiction, blending story with verse to evoke fantasy, allegory, metaphor, love, body, mind, and nearly every sensory perception. Weaving in and out of the space that connects life and death in mysterious ways, these texts use carefully honed language that suggests a newfound spirituality.”
My take: I picked up this slim volume from the library’s new book shelf by accident, mistaking it for another book whose title I can’t now recall. I kept with it because of its haunting, lyrical use of language. Hard to categorize, it’s probably less stories as the blurb suggests but instead a thematic collection of prose poems focusing on love and loss.
Because many of the pieces were somewhat distressing or disturbing, I can’t say that I liked the book, but I equally can’t say that I did not. I found myself entranced by it, pulled in inextricably as if caught in the book’s gravity, compelled to read page after page as if in a trance. If dark prose compressed into a few pages of lyrical narrative is your thing, I’d recommend this for its beauty.
Pages: 160