Un coeur en hiver

Winter in Maine requires forbearance. It is beautiful, but often cold, gray and windy and it lasts well into March and even April. The forecast says we'll be back in the sub-zero temperatures by the end of this weekend. These photos of State Street were taken last weekend after a big storm dropped over seven inches.




Even Longfellow was enshrouded.




It's not the best time of year for bicycling.

Without books, music and movies, I for one would go mad. I moved to a new apartment in December, which was traumatic, but it's nice to be in a cozy warm apartment that does not leak or have a bar downstairs. Plus I have a nice view:



Haven't been doing too much artwork, but I've been reading and working on a big writing project. One thing I'm reading is a set of four books called "The Aegypt Cycle" by John Crowley. There are four books in the cycle: The Solitudes, Love and Sleep (I'm halfway through this one), Demonomania and Endless Things. I got the first volume for a couple of dollars at The Portland Public Library book cart and ordered the second from a local bookstore, determined to read the entire quartet. The books are dense and intriguing. They center around an historian named Pierce, with a narrative that shifts back and forth in time. Pierce Moffett lives in New York but has moved to the country, where an author named Fellowes Kraft lived. Excerpts from Kraft's novels about Shakespeare, the Shakespearean doctor John Dee, and a visionary Italian monk/astrologer named Giordano Bruno are woven throughout the books, which are also about magic, lost worlds and the ways in which childhood becomes translated into the adult world. I'm not usually obsessive enough to read four dense volumes by one writer, but I got hooked by passages like this:

"He told her how, in Kraft's scheme, between the old world of things as they used to be, and the new world of things as they would be instead, there has always fallen a sort of passage time, a chaos of unformed possibility in which all sorts of manifestations could be witnessed. Then safe old theurgies and charms have suddenly turned on their practitioners and destroyed them; then huge celestial beings have been formed, born out of the assembling of smaller ones, who became the larger ones' parts and organs; then great Aegypt has been revealed again, and her children have recognized one another, by signs no one before understand."

And there's plenty of colorful narrative to hold all this together.

Speaking of the Portland Public Library, it's the greatest. Just today I picked up a free New Yorker from last fall on the free shelf outside the inner doors, a copy of The Prestige, a DVD I heard was very good that I ordered from another library branch, and a mystery novel. I don't usually read those, but am doing research and some of them aren't too bad. Perfect for winter. All that bounty for free.

Another thing that helps with the forbearance of winter are animal friends.


Rickey is sixteen.


Lord Byron is an astonishing twenty years old!