I am going to step out of character, so to speak, for just a moment. This feels something like cheating, and also scarily like actually blogging, but I promise not to make a habit of it. I just thought I might add some pictures to break up the visual monotony of this blog. First off, here is a postcard I picked up at a Simon Van Booy reading. (Eloquence and elegance. I'm certain that was the best reading I've ever been to.) It's part of a contest that harpercollins is doing right now. I'm not going to go to detail right now but I might later. The photograph is of date palm trees, which I now know much more about than I ever expected or planned to. All date palms, for example, belong to the phoenix genus. The fruit ripens at varying rates and so must be picked one by one, by hand. There is also a variety of date palms, Phoenix theophrasti, that is found only on Crete. There are very few palm forests on Crete, but one of the few is located at Vai. I might be deluding myself, but this still seems very auspicious as Vai was one of the first places in Europe I ever visited. I think about it often. My trip to Vai involved, among other things, a shady chaffeur named Spyro who dressed like a Nascar racer, an exhilerating but also, frankly, terrifying high-speed trip through the mountains on gravel roads that seemed to be only a few inches wider than the car, a myriad mountain goats, and a mysterious pile of brightly colored cubes abandoned at the side of the road miles from any other sign of human life. All somewhat off-putting at the time, but excellent to have to recall. And Vai itself was very beautiful. I never knew that "seagreen" was a real color-- I thought it was just more cutsy Crayola nonsense-- but it is. At Vai the water is green and so perfect that it makes you wonder why water is ever blue. But I digress.
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