In the dining-room window, a perfect maple leaf caught in a spider web.
Post-insomnia day today: my fitness tracker, which tracks these things, tells me I got three hours and forty-nine minutes of sleep last night, one hour of which was deep sleep. It didn't feel like that little, but on the other hand, I was aware of lying awake for a long, long time, and eventually getting up and reading for what didn't seem like that long but I guess maybe was. So much for congratulating myself on going to bed with the sun and springing up with it again in the morning, fresh and rested.
So I feel pallid and strung out, and am not really into style, as such, in the least. I did put on my gray Sierra, because she is so insanely comfortable and warm –– it's not that cold out, but I feel chilly in the house. Wearing Ebay-purchased secondhand bamboo leggings, thrifted wool pullover, Birk Madeiras.
Hair bunched up in braid in claw clip.
I'm pegging away at my detective-story essay, hoping to tie it off so that I can edit it down and send it tomorrow. Also emailing with a guy near Raleigh who has a dog he's trying to rehome, who might or might not become our new dog. He does not seem to be tired yet of the questions I keep peppering him with, because if I'm going to drive three hours to see this dog, I want to be reasonably sure of the likelihood of her coming home with me. He also seems to love the dog a lot and be really bonded with her, so that one of my greatest doubts is whether he really wants to get rid of her all that much. He says his cat is terrorizing her, and I guess the cat has seniority, but still. He's invested a huge amount of training work in her, which is one reason why she appeals to us so much. We want a new dog; we want a young dog; we do not want to start from scratch, if we don't have to, with somebody who has never learned to sit or walk on a leash. Anyway, thinking many thoughts about the dog is probably what kept me up half the night. I kept hoping I'd just fall asleep and dream about dogs, but nope. Conscious thought it was.
Finished What Maisie Knew, now reading another Ngaio Marsh: A Surfeit of Lampreys. Marsh's writing just gets better and better with each installment. While her core characters remain consistent, she manages utterly to transcend the level of formula –– increasingly, each novel reads like a literary novel that just happens to tap into a particular genre. She has the actor's ear for human speech, and the way that physical gestures and movements signal something of a character's inner life, even when that inner life remains unrevealed either by exposition or dialogue. Anyway, I have work to do, but really all I want is to read this book. I don't even care whodunnit all that much. I know somebody dunnit, and I know I'll find out who. I have my ideas, though Marsh usually manages to surprise. Sometimes it's the least-likely suspect. Sometimes you think it's going to be the least-likely suspect, and then it isn't. In the last novel I read, it was the most-likely suspect, but everybody, including me, kept going, "No, no, that's too obvious, and anyway, how would he have done it?" But he did done it. So far the murderer has never been a young person in love, but I wouldn't take that to the bank absolutely. Anyway, trying to bang out some words on the essay so that I can put it aside and read myself into a stupor.
ADDENDUM:
I did also keep myself up laughing at something I happened to read on Facebook. People who teach college students were talking, as one does, about ways The Students of Today use written language. I don't actually think it's good form to make fun of student writing, but this conversation was couched in sincere bemusement of a kind I can remember feeling when I taught undergraduates who consistently wrote things like "once upon the time." The first example was of students using the phrase "short and sweet" simply to mean "short," as in "Randall Jarrell's 'The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner' is short and sweet."
But the one that cracked me up –– because I've truly never seen anything like it, but apparently it's a consistent phenomenon as observed by this one instructor –– was the use of "pitch" as a word to intensify any color, as in "pitch red" blood or "pitch white" snow. I began to think about how words get leached of their specific meaning over time. Thing, for example, is a Norse word whose original meaning is highly specialized: the Thing was a yearly legal court, like the Assizes (except I think that happened more frequently?), in which cases were tried and justice dispensed. If you wanted to prosecute a crime or settle a grievance, you had to wait for the Thing to come round, and travel to it. Now that word just means essentially whatever you can't think of the real word for. So I started to think about how "pitch" could erode from the inside to the point where instead of referring to an actual black substance like tar, it just meant something like "really," a generic all-purpose intensifying modifier. You could speak of a dinner as "pitch delicious," or the bride as having looked "pitch radiant." You could pitch, pitch try your best, yet not succeed. And imagine the applications if you wanted to talk about baseball . . .
Anyway, I laughed to myself about this for far too long. Then I went back to thinking about the dog.