Weekend Update (Sunday Edition): Upgrade
We had a perfect weekend, but I am not thinking about that now. What I am thinking about is the WordPress updgrade that was installed over the weekend. That it should be as difficult to decipher as the latest Microsoft Word in, say, 1991 is not surprising. But it insults me by remembering nothing. No autofills, no recollections of image folders. I have to click through or type from scratch quite as though I had never been here before.
When we went out to sit on the balcony at about one, Kathleen proposed going to Mass at St Thomas More at 5:45, and my joining her afterward for a walk up to the Conservatory Gardens, where we might photograph roses in the dusk. That sounded appealing but unlikely. If we are going to do something on a Sunday afternoon, we must do it early, before we’ve settled into domestic pastimes. Sunday is always a rather anxious day for me, because it’s a holiday, and without the benefit of a schedule I’m pretty sure that I will waste the day. I did not, in fact, waste the day — except insofar as I worried abut dooing so more or less constantly, and that was certainly a waste. As for Mass and photography, Kathleen went to 7:30 at St Iggy’s, and I took my camera on its tripod down to Carl Schurz.
I had meant to leave when she did, but I couldn’t — because I couldn’t find my camera. Where was it? I blamed the WordPress upgrade. And why not? In fact, however, I had “misplaced’ the camera by leaving it screwed on to the tripod. Since the tripod spent the day standing in the blue room, where, coming and going, I never failed to notice it, you’d think &c. But there was a cognitive thing going on. The last time I used a tripod, as I said the other day, the camera that I screwed onto it was a Canon AE-1. My Nikon Coolpix, which is just a three-dimensional credit card, simply didn’t “read” as a camera.
I set out for the park, and it began to rain. Correction: it began to sprinkle: the water dots remained discrete on the sidewalk. The day had been gloriously sunny and clear; but at some point toward five or six, I looked up from the novel that I was reading because the light had dimmed. The first clouds were crossing the sun, and erasing shadows of building on other buildings. These shadows are almost as material as the brick façades that they fall upon, and it is startling to watch them melt away so utterly that it is hard to believe that they ever existed. Then the sun flashes them back, in chiseled high definition. Â
The novel that I am reading has not yet been published. I found a galley on the M86 bus — this is a very literary town! The principal draw of reading a galley does not (trust me!) consist in reading a book ahead of the general public. It’s a matter rather of not having to wait to read a book until long after all of one’s literary friends have read it (or have had the chance to do so). The delight of reading a galley lies, however, in the typos.
“Another thing that kills me,” she said with deceptive clamness…
Not a typo. If you knew the character who “commits” this solecism, you’d see how just it is. Deceptive clamness is so — her. My task now is to work the mistake into an appealing witticism that I can try out on the author when I ask her to sign my copy of the novel. When it’s published.