Thanksgiving

"Tell me something you’re thankful for. It can be as abstract or concrete as you want. (Examples: “My health” or “Reese’s Pieces” or “the way the sunlight hits my office window in the afternoon” or “Dolly Parton.”) If we all say one thing we’ll have a big list of thousands of good things." Quoting https://austinkleon.substack.com/p/open-thread-what-are-you-thankful/comments?publication_id=304543&post_id=85991284&isFreemail=falsehttps://austinkleon.substack.com/p/open-thread-what-are-you-thankful/comments?publication_id=304543&post_id=85991284&isFreemail=false

The sun is shining and I am grateful to have a place to write. Woolf's idea of a room of one's own and $32K is working out fine for me. I noted in the Deborah Levy class with Natalie Serber there were mostly mothers, and single mothers, who railed against the patriarchy. I don't share as much venom against male partners in that mine is more of a feminist than I am. And I have to give thanks for him and the leggy one pictured.

Bookmarks:

I'm grateful for serendipity which makes me smile. Family Friend Rufo sent me the above image. I found a bookmark in a book for Much Ado, an antiquarian book dealer in Marblemount, MA, a town I've never visited where one of my writing group dwells when she's not here scribbling in my living room. My next bookmark moment was finding a Japanese dealer's bookmark which I'd poked into my library copy of Cold Enough for Snow, a novel which relates a vacation trip to Japan. And finally, I'm grateful for the many new friends I've made in the writing community who encourage and spur me on.

Reading Geoff Dyer's Last Days of Roger Federer which is about much more than tennis, as Dyer always ranges widely. He mentions myriad books and poems, quoting some, and says of David Thomson's Dictionary of Film Bio that it is the literary work of our age. I quickly pulled it out and found the particularly touching tribute he mentioned to Thomson's friend K. Hickey with whom he attended films and chatted about them until Hickey's death. And Dyer goes on with references to poetry from Gluck, D.H. Lawrence, even Billy Collins and Tennyson each of which is in my collection. He cites Delacroix's Journal. He refers to memoirs such as Smile, Please by Jean Rhys which I've yet to read or Letters of D. H. Lawrence or bios of Nietzsche, Beethoven, Wagner; plus he cites classical pieces and jazz and R&B artists I've never heard of but found easily enough on Spotify which seems to have all. Interspersed with this, Dyer talks about getting older, about physical challenges to his daily tennis playing and, of course, about Federer and when he might retire (as he has now). The book is about aging, about the idea that just yesterday you were swinging your hair on the dance floor to "Evil Woman" and now that head of hair is short, brittle and unpigmented. He is in his sixties and is just starting to wear a knee support brace. I've had two replacements. But it is still a surprise because you feel the same as you did then.

Happy Thanksgiving you'all.