We had the weirdest weather yesterday. It poured rain in wind-blown sheets for about two minutes in the morning. Then it cleared up a bit only for a severe thunderstorm (the kind you get warned about on the radio and at the bottom of the TV screen) to strike mid-afternoon with additional torrents of rain. Around 10:00 at night, lightning began soundlessly flashing in the sky. This went on for about a half an hour, followed by yet another severe thunderstorm.
But that is still not weirdest weather I have ever experienced. Several years ago, there was a storm approaching that was supposed to be so bad that all the TV stations actually went off the air and were replaced by these blue warning screens. (This is upstate New York, by the way. I mean, the real upstate New York. Not "an hour north of NYC.") The sky darkened ominously. Then it began to drizzle. And then it stopped. And then the clouds went away. I'm still not sure what the meteorologists expected to happen there. We get some nasty snowstorms, but this was in the summer. We don't get hurricanes and tornadoes, although there was a microburst in the Adirondacks in the mid-90s that took out a bunch of trees. They're always warning about hail, which I've only seen happen once.
So anyway, I received Fan Wu's Beautiful as Yesterday in the mail from Atria Books (a division of Simon & Schuster) on Thursday. That review should be up tomorrow. I would have finished it earlier if only my boss hadn't given me a 15-page lease to retype over the weekend. In other words, I'm going to have to cut this Sunday Salon short. I am also reading Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and will be starting Pascal Mercier's Last Train to Lisbon shortly. From there, I will move on to the short stories of Thomas Mann, including "Death in Venice."
But for now, I need to type this damn lease. Now who the heck writes these things? It's full of made-up words like "therefor" and "therefrom" and "nondisturbance" (a noun) and "attorn." I do not even know what that last one allegedly means. And then "Tenant" and "Landlord," both presumably human, are referred to by the pronoun "it" ("neither Landlord nor its successors . . . ").
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2 comments:
That craptastic lease with its annoying verbiage must seem like it is taunting you as you have all those great reads in front of you. Have been getting to Last Train to Lisbon for a while (wrote about it as a reading possibility for Lost in Translation challenge a while back). And keep eying the Mann on my shelf as well. Good thing I have a lifetime. Happy reading!
Frances: That's actually where I found out about Last Train to Lisbon - from your post on the Lost in Translation blog! Actually, some of the cases the lawyers at our firm deal with are interesting enough to make up for craptastic legalese. I think I could write a really good parody of attorney letter-speak ("Kindly recall that the undersigned represents so-and-so in regard to the above-referenced matter. Pursuant to our last conversation. . .")
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