Here is Garrison Keillor in his Writer's Almanac quoting Erdrich:
"We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."
And here, from The Blue Jay's Dance: a Birth Year, (1995) (a rare nonfiction book by Louise Erdrich) she describes trapping a feral cat-
I set my live trap with dry cat food, which he steals easily the first week. The second week, I get more serious and use canned wet cat food which he also gets, scraping it from the trip plate with such prim care that he is able to back out of the trap. I put a little grease on the hinges and try to spread the cat food smoothly as Spam onto the balanced plate. He eats well yet again. Every morning now I eagerly approach my trap...and see immediately that it is empty...[C]hallenged I try to think like a cat, feel cat-hungers...Into my mind float sardines.
A quotidian note from a life more like a galactic circus.
No comments:
Post a Comment