This was recorded from the verdant overgrown idyll overlooked by my fire escape (which, if you can ignore the fact that you have to climb out a window to get to it, and get over the fact that you’re squatting on metal bars, and that it’s, you know, ILLEGAL, is just like a terrace. A balcony! A rooftop!).

A rare gem at the bookstore after work today: a nice old hardcover copy of Tess D’U for fifty cents. Now, Tess was once on frequent rotation at Miette’s Lending Library, until Miette woke up to see that the Library had become not a Library so much as a Free Book Bonanza, and the unwritten rule of rotation not “you take this sweetheart and read it and I’m sure I’ll get it back someday” as “you take this and I will never see of it again and years from now, when I have a yen for it, god only knows where it may be.”

Here’s just one of the many fine things about reading stories into my iPod to be read to you: I can read a story like Olesha, and stop and get all breathy in the middle because I’ve forgotten that he constructs it that way, or I can catch myself from snickering in the middle because I’m just IN AWE of how someone can be so sharp and funny as to turn an isolationist rant into a beautiful dreamscape

“Nothing but spaces of light and dark…” these peripatetic obstacles of thought made connected. That’s the good stuff, Ginny, that’s the stuff that brings respite from daily restiveness and yes Virginia, this is scant a clause.

The source of one character’s restless despair is another woman’s interlude between the busy minutes of other days. Then again, carried out for too long and it becomes the very same restlessness. A forgotten treasure.

For at least the last five or six minutes of this reading, I was stifling an enormous sneeze, which came out promptly the second I rushed to stop recording (there may or may not have left physical evidence of the sneeze’s disdain for having been ignored for so long… but I’d never tell).

Never you mind the perceived furtive abscondence of Miette these days. I could never leave you in a state of raw list(en)lessness, that just wouldn’t be fair, and if there’s any fairness at all in this world, you can bet it’d be in the form of Miette’s shaky tenor. For now, this is what we’ve got: absurdity, in its most concise form. Better absurd than inconsiderate, at any rate, no?

A longish truancy calls for a longish return, so this one clocks in accordingly on the longish side. Given his penchant for regular oxygen-free plunges into plots and thoughts of strained family relations, self-imposed exile, cultural alienation and melancholia, it’s also counterintuitively uplifting. Enjoy.