4/1/99 Archival entry:
Lilacs and lavender, honeysuckle and rose, sweet vines of summer times… and, how could I forget, belching diesel, too?
“April Fool, n. The March fool with another month added to his folly.” (The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce)
It may be April’s Fool’s Day but I don’t have any funny observations. I was really feeling rather poetic, and I’ve been enjoying a book by Connie Willis called To Say Nothing of the Dog. It’s perfect low brow, high brow reading for the very end of the tumultuous Mercury period that is about to come to a grinding halt. It’s a classic time travel bit, with enough classical allusions to make any scholar content. Which does bring up another problem — the author, Connie Willis, refers to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) as source material for her novel. I did a quick Net search, and before I could click “cancel” I had downloaded the text for the source novel. But wouldn’t it be more fun to go to a bookstore, hassle the cute clerk, acquire a copy of the actual book? Just reading the text on the screen, where’s the fun in that?