This morning I finished reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson — all twelve hundred pages of it, which I’ve consumed in chunks between other books. The last five hundred pages I read in a long push. I have a nice old hardback Modern Library edition, bought in a used book store in Gold Beach last summer and now covered with my notes in blue pen. It has no index, so I’ve been tagging important pages with the relevant information, phrases and names running along the book’s upper margin. If the paper weren’t so thin you could read those notes like a flip-book: the scribbled stick-figure version of the Life.

Now I’m trying to imagine what a stick figure with a dropsy would look like. Bah.

Next I have about three half-finished Woolf-related books awaiting me; I went on something of a binge at Powell’s. And I still haven’t decided what to do with Louise’s memoir; or, rather, how to plan what to do with it, so I don’t end up with an even greater mess. I did manage to edit one academic paper into shape for submission as a conference paper. Two others — longer, of course, but in better condition — need the same treatment.

I feel as though I’ve swallowed down summer in a gulp, and now fall comes racing closer. I’m not ready yet.

A view from Cape Perpetua

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

This is the view from the rock shelter built by the CCC atop Cape Perpetua, near Yachats, on the coast. We sat and read here for an hour or so, after walking up to it. (Other photos of the Eugene trip are up at flickr; I tried to post links here before I left for Portland, but dreamhost was having something of a conniption fit.)

Things we did in Portland:

–Went to the main Powell’s four times in four days, plus visits to the technical books store, the cookbook store, and the Hawthorne branch. My stack of books is taller than T.’s. Damn the c18 history section and its collection of Boswell- and Johnson-related items.

–Walked a lot, including a long trek around the west hills after missing the turn-off for the Japanese garden. Note to self: look at the map.

–Ate lots of good cheap food: the lunch buffet at Swagat on NW 21st; sushi happy hour at the Dragonfish bar; pizza and crepes and beer around Hawthorne; and a five-course lunch at the Western Culinary Institute’s Bleu, which is formal dining, but staffed by charming culinary students who function at varying levels of formality. Some of the dishes were only good; most of them were spectacular. The vanilla pot de créme with pink peppercorn flavoring was the best.

–Ogled neighborhoods: we liked the older brick apartments around Northwest near Macleay Park, but Hawthorne has a lively warm scruffiness that I liked more than the upscale blah-ness of 23rd St.

–Walked around the Reed campus, which is pretty and congenial.

–Saw A Scanner Darkly. I can’t remember the last time I was so bored during a movie.

I have no pictures from Portland, though I had my camera with me — I forgot to haul it out. Maybe I’ll take a picture of my stack of Powell’s loot — as it towers over T.’s, mwahahaha.

1. Chasing deer out of the backyard: a picaresque adventure, full of entertaining incidents, naughty language, and large-gauge plastic mesh fencing.
2. Briefly touring the coast of Oregon (between Reedsport and Newport) and spending two days in Eugene. If you’re wondering why I spent two days in Eugene — well, so am I. The actual town part of it isn’t much larger than Ashland, nor is it half as charming. Yachats, however, has one of the most wonderful coffeeshops in the world, a strange little wood-paneled place called Ye Olde Green Salmon, where we had the following lunch: egg, tomato, and mushroom sandwich; cream of onion and potato soup; raspberries, mascarpone, honey, and powdered sugar on little baguette slices; and a maté cocoa.
3. Reading A Room of One’s Own, and then Moll Flanders, which was rather like eating a tart lemon ice and following it with a huge sticky-sweet cloying cinnamon roll bought from a Cinnabon in a regional airport. I loved the Woolf unreservedly (more later on this, I hope), and pestered T. with sections read aloud; I loved Moll too, but it left my mental fingers sticky.
4. Finishing the text correction of my grandmother’s memoir. Now I need to figure out how to revise or alter it to make it work. Expect more posts on this front later. Other things to expect soon: photos from our coast trip and my presence in Portland some time in the next 2.5 weeks.

Today I’m down at the local university library with a pile of art books, as I’ve just started a small data entry project for a professor, labeling eighteenth-century-related images to be used in lectures at UT.

What have you been doing lately?