September 8th, 2010

Books in Motion #7

I refuse to be lugubrious about reading’s great decline, mostly because I ride public transport with riders who live to refute such an assessment of the state of literary things. And now I doubly refuse to be lugubrious about reading’s great decline, because riders are reading poetry, even. So nothing is so bad. Said rider was a strange-faced, gorgeous woman of about twenty three, whose fashion savvy stirred my envy. That high waisted, ruffly look whose origins I’ve never been able to trace– people just woke up one morning and started dressing like that, but how did they know?? High heels with short shorts, if you know what I mean. Her hair gathered messily into into the kind of scarf I would have once thought hideous, but now sort of love. She was travelling east on the Bloor-Danforth line, and reading Mockingbird Wish Me Luck by Charles Bukowski, and maybe the whole thing was a set-up. Desperate to impress, she wanted everyone to think that she was awesome, but whether or not her intentions were pure, she had certainly succeeded.