travel reading - Amtrak

[OT from cottage renovations]

Liza Dalby: The Tale of Murasaki (ISBN 0-385-49794-6)

finally finished this, it was too good to just rush through it.  two aspects of it have stayed with me:

• a communications protocol based on dispatching a messenger bearing a branch with blossoms or buds, accompanied by a note or small scroll on which is inscribed waka [traditional verse form predating haiku] chosen from classical sources and highly metaphorical and allusory.  an interesting contrast to, say, Sherlock Holmes' telegraph messenger boys, my late mother's fax machine, and contemporary methods such as email or this journal. 
   
• letting go of the world and taking up a contemplative and reclusive existence.  though I have not the basis of Bhuddist or other faith, it is in effect what for a variety of reasons I have already been doing, though not in a conscious way.  reading of it in Dalby's novel brought it to my attention. 

it's time to Taunton to claim his gift (see entry for 1 May). 

travel reading - Amtrak

[OT from cottage renovations]

Laura Hostetler: Quing Colonial Enterprise (ISBN 0-226-35421-0)

ethnology and cartograph in early modern China. 
on loan from Taunton, and what I have read so far is way cool. 

( and now the inevitable travel whining )

bioluminesence

[OT from cottage renovations]

I have long been in the habit of watching carefully each year for the season's first fireflies.  here in the Grove we haven't yet had a long enough run of hot and humid days to bring them out, but come they will some time really soon now. 

though the southern California family members to whom I always reported the initial sighting are no longer alive, I continue to maintain the annual vigil.  I was taken completely by surprise to spot three of them in the disturbed area to the W of the platform tracks in Baltimore's Penn Station, where the B&P helpers used to stand by on tracks since removed in case some train got stuck in the tunnel and needed a push or pull.  I watched for the duration of our stop there, looking behind for them as the train pulled S into the darkness.  on getting to the Grove while walking back from the bus stop I kept a lookout, but ours still aren't out yet.