Today it was Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues. It’s gotten a lot of positive press following multiple literary awards and award nominations. Edugyan’s account of a group of African American and African German jazz musicians in Berlin and Paris in 1939 is compelling but what grabbed me and held me was the language, the beautiful turns of phrase and the shifts in tone as the narrative moves between 1939 and 1992. I’m kicking myself for returning it so quickly since I travelled too quickly over sentences like this one: “A grim little room, more like a closet of ghosts than any joint for music, the cracked heaters lisping steam, empty bottles rolling all over the warped floor.”

A rereading in conjunction with Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter–a novel about Buddy Bolden, New Orleans, art, and loss–would be a fine thing.

Here’s an interview Edugyan gave the morning after she won the Giller.

Found in a nook

I’m cleaning out nooks and crannies in the craft closet and found this pattern.

I’m alternately amazed and appalled by the hair, the headband which I just this moment noticed, the gladiator sandals, and the blousy pants.

I must have bought this sometime in the eighties. The plan was to make the shorter version cause even then I had enough sense to know that a cabled mini-dress knit out of soft cotton would be unflattering on almost every woman and would be a baggy mess after one wearing.

Can’t decide which is more distracting: their hair or their feet?

Wait, it might be that one is in the girlie, crossed leg posture and the other one is in the sporty, wider stance.  Or is it the contrast between the belt-defined waist and the pleat-disguised belly.  Let’s just pass quickly by the buggy and steamboat in the title.

I’m torn: do I keep it as an example of eighties textile design or do I add it to the St. Vinnie’s pile.