My body is yet to get used to the shift from the Florida heat to the fall cold. It needs to be pumped up with caffine, to be kept awake from hibernating. And books have to be dumped into its grouchy (why is it so grouchy even as the sun shines, and leaves crunch underfoot as it walks up and down the avenues, I wonder?) maw. So last night I made the pilgrimage again, this time seeking very specifically a beat-up copy of Banville's "The Sea" (I should succumb to my newly found prosperity, and buy the hardcover edition).

I couldn't find one. So instead I bought his previous novel (whose first fifty pages are as jewelled as those other fifty pages I consumed in an airport) called "The Ghosts". Very appropriate I thought, buying a book that has ghosts in its title on All Hallow's Eve (or Halloween). I also bought a bilingual edition of Lorca's "Poet in New York" (I think this was under the influence of playing Sting's "An Englishman in New York", on repeat, through the afternoon*), and Allan Bloom's tart disquisitions on "Love and Friendship" in the light of the Great Books.

I read some pages from "The Ghosts" this morning in the smallest room of the house, and have the words, and lines (underlined in blue ink) running through my head such as:

canted - as in 'canted to starboard'; also as in 'seeing Felix's silhouette on the ruby glass of the door, an intent and eerily motionless, canted form' 'the cat-smell of the sand' 'a flat place of dark-green sward' 'Light is her medium, she moves through it as through some fine, shining fluid, bearing aloft out of the world's reach, the precious phial of her self'

* The refrains of this song cut in many ways - I am an alien, Sting chant-sings, a legal alien, walking through an snow bound Nyooo Yooork City - that precise legal definition which bills one as an alien, and the more subtle definitions, by the way of speech inflections and odd personal habits and tics, which pin one down as an alien; these can be alienating as they are liberating (one can also find happiness in that mistaken thought that he or she is different from the others).