Hello darling. Up in the aerie. Peaceful hour, blank and still outside. Muggy. Dishwasher is running. It sounds like a B52 bomber. But the thing works so I'm not complaining. Drinking rosé. Cream-colored sweater is draped on my shoulders. My hair is down. I look through my reading glasses. I type fast. The desk lamp is on. A hardcover edition of Roget's International Thesaurus, Third Edition (copyright 1962) sits on my desk. Pounced on it at the library booksale this afternoon, used but in great condition for $1. I am happy to have a replacement for my brittle paperback which has split into several pieces held together with a rubber band that I'm constantly misplacing. I'm happy for the larger print in this new copy, also.
My old version was arranged in alphabetical order like a dictionary. I like the ur-organization of my new version (which predates my old "21st Century Thesaurus," published 1993), the logical numerical categorization of every idea. I found that daunting in my youth for some reason, but now I'm grooving on it. Have already gone back to change a word from a post earlier today - white to alabaster. I'm going to have quite a productive relationship with this book, more so perhaps than did the original owner, a G.S. Vance who inscribed it 1-27-75. I think he may not have been a wordsmith because the book is hardly used. (Or perhaps he too, if a young lad, was intimidated by the complex format.) I have politely but firmly put a few lines through his name and inscribed my own, with today's date.
Roget's International Thesaurus. My new best friend, I believe. It is really fun to gambol from 848.5 to 934.13, to 930.13 - all in the name of love, my darling 929.12.
What else today. Went to the library, came back with an armload of E.D. books that were waiting for me on reserve, including Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds. Even with my proneness to distraction it has instantly seized me, a real page turner, so immediate and well told. Now this is an exciting biography, or a precisely aimed angle to biography. I am often discouraged by biographies that begin with the birth of the subject's great-great-grandparents ever so far from the action of which I am excited to read. This book Gets Right Down To It. I had a brief chat with the head librarian this afternoon who told me she'd ordered a book I'd requested for the regional system, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, by Judith Farr. Today I suggested to her a good volume of E.D.'s letters, along with Richard Sewall's biography of E.D., which back in the 70s won a National Book Award. Having started the Lyndall Gordon, I'm regretting now that I mentioned the Sewall and noted it on a scrap of paper for her. Gordon writes, on page 8, "Richard B. Sewall... filled in a detailed background in his two-volume Life of Emily Dickinson (1974), where the poet is not born until the second volume." OMG. Please head librarian, maybe just acquire Volume 2. Or skip it altogether. It's okay.
Darling, I'm going to miss you, as nutty as that sounds. Perhaps why I'm being so prolix today (591.12, though I hope not 882.8).
So very many....
osculations? no way (unless glabrous)
very very many 930.3's, as always my darling love. Have a delightful evening.
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