We skipped the Taylor Swift concert last night to attend evensong at Trinity Cathedral, where the Anglican Chorale of Southeast Florida and the Miami Collegium Musicum sang the works of, among others, William Boyd, Herbert Howells, and Anton Bruckner. Evensong is not only a beautiful service, held once a month at the cathedral, but also, in my mind, the most beautiful word in the English language.
Wherever, and whenever, I travel, temperatures are unseasonably chilly. In Warsaw a few Septembers ago I bought a scarf the day I arrived and wore it every day for the next four weeks. I remember complaining, at the beginning, that it was still summer. Last year we went to Philadelphia right after Thanksgiving and ended up buying new winter coats – with hoods. This year, we went to Washington, DC, at the end of April and it was surprisingly (though not really) cool and damp. I am a one-man defense against global warming.
Today I’m flying to Chicago and, it seems, my streak will be broken. Today is to be cool but Friday, the one day I’ll have time to walk around, temperatures are expected to be in the mid-60s. Not a heat wave, but for Chicago in late October pretty nice. Back when I planned the trip I half-expected a snowstorm.
I’ll be back here on Monday.
I was honored to be a guest on Ryan Murdock's excellent podcast Personal Landscapes. For a delightful hour we talked about Poland, the Cold War, travel books, travel writing, and even movies, including the usefulness of screenplays in learning a second language.
The sports columnist for The Spectator, Roger Alton, ended his Oct. 2 column with a note about Kris Kristofferson. He recalled, as a young man, coming home with the singer’s latest album. His father – whom Alton described as “a cricket-loving don involved with the Rhodes Scholarship committee" – noticed the cover and said warmly, “Ah, Kristofferson, a very fine left-arm bowler, as I recall.”
At the Old Florida Bookshop the other day I learned that I had just missed the former owner of Gene’s Books on Sanibel Island. Before it was destroyed by hurricane Ian in 2022, Gene’s was probably the best bookstore in the state, housing its extensive collection in a series of small cottages. One was devoted entirely to mysteries, and had them shelved geographically: English, Scandinavian, etc. The literature section was just as impressive. I would have liked to have told Gene how much I enjoyed his bookstore, and asked him what he was up to now. Clearly, he is still buying books, even if he’s no longer selling them.
Before leaving, I took a picture of the store cat, a lovely tabby, who had made himself comfortable on one of the shelves next to a copy of the Vladimir Nabokov-Edmund Wilson letters.
My friend from St. Pete had a couple free hours yesterday afternoon so I showed him around Fort Lauderdale. Our first stop was the Old Florida Bookshop on Griffin Road. Dave is also a writer, and I knew he’d enjoy seeing the store’s high, book-lined walls inside a nondescript strip mall. William the owner told me that business was booming; apparently, someone had posted about the store on Instagram and people were now flocking to it. (My article about his shop a few years ago didn’t have quite the same effect.) And, to William’s surprise, the majority of new customers were young women. I mentioned that the majority of readers were women, but he said that, traditionally, they were not frequenters of used bookstores. As someone who is, I knew exactly what he meant. Years ago, visiting Larry McMurtry’s used bookstore in Archer City, Texas, I had noted the “asocial, middle-aged men on a mission,” adding that “you find few giggly girls in the stacks of secondhand bookstores.”
I bought a slim volume of poems by Edgar Lee Masters and we got in the car and drove to Holiday Park, as I wanted to show Dave the new Iceplex. Quite a few cars sat in the parking lot, which surprised me, as I had checked the website and seen that no Panthers practice was scheduled. Entering the chill, we saw a handful of young women practicing figure skating on the first rink, one of them tethered to a kind a harness that connected to a short pole that her coach held to keep her from falling during jumps. We walked upstairs and found the second rink filled with children while sweatered mothers sat chatting in the stands. The sight of South Florida kids ice skating on their day off from school for a hurricane was as rich as the thought of young women haunting secondhand bookstores.