Aujourd'hui

Noon. My morning's been beset by snappings, poundings, drillings, and such, as Junior (the maintenance man) and a younger man (his son?) reframed the door to my apartment and then refitted it with locks. I stayed in my reading chair the while, drinking Chinese tea and reading: French vocabulary, At Swim, Two Birds, At Swim, Two Boys, and Coveny's The Image of Childhood. Relaxing, but not illuminating. The more recent At Swim, which so captured me at first, has petered off in its final hundred or so pages into a highly conventional (one might even say Hollywood) narrative, and its prose has slackened with it. Still, it's a pleasure, just not the literary pleasure it was to start.

Not much else to report. I've been thinking of travel, of bedrooms, and blogs, but nothing that I care to expand here at present. Otherwise, I'm poor (precisely because my spending indicates otherwise), and I'm slowly establishing something of a routine (though one interminably interrupted - the phone technicians yesterday, my door today, the dentist on Thursday). I rise early to daily morning thunderstorms, and spend an hour at the gym round the corner. I make plans for drinks in the evenings, and watch films or tv shows in French or French subtitles at night. With a slightly larger bank account, I might have the perfect early summer existence.