In a lodge on the edge of the New Mexico wilderness, that a hundred years ago was a boys school. A busy breakfast room of tables of women in their seventies and eighties talking politics with each other at their various tables. Impossible not eavesdrop. I appreciate the insight into world of thought so foreign to me.
In the main room, comfortable soft arm chairs around a fireplace with a pleasant fire inside behind the glass. I sit by myself, with the other chairs empty. Light snow outside. I could sit here all day writing, but we are heading to the farmer's market in downtown. There are bookstores there. Maybe postcards.
Later...farmer's market excursion called off for now. Too cozy here with the snow coming down. I go back out to the fire and find all the chairs colonized by the Boomers from breakfast. I wait my turn until a chair opens up.
The title of this piece--I learned it from The Name of the Rose, a novel by Umberto Eco that I read off the paperback rack in the 7-Eleven on Harmony Road in Fort Collins during the summer of 1984, while I worked as the night clerk there. The story truly captivated with me. When the translation to Eco's followup novel Foucault's Pendulum came out in the early 1990s, I eagerly sought it out and devoured it. There is a hilarious passage in it in the first few chapters about a person trying to figure out the password to log intoa computer that still cracks me up to this day. As a novel, I think it was far ahead of its time in describing the kind of social discourse into which we have descended in our current era. Yet I never hear anyone mention this.
That was the last "new" book by an author I sought out, after spending the first thirty years of my life obsessed with literature--even going through the list of Nobel Prize winners in high school thinking I should read something by each one. Somewhere along the way I coplletely lost interest in that. Then they gave the Nobel Prize to Bob Dylan for his "poetry." But song lyrics, including especially rap, are not poetry, despite what people say. There is no replacement for the real thing.
I just learned that Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translation of the title phrase of this piece, we get the word "yesteryear" in English.
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