Since not-so-recent events unfolded, I've found myself reading only new material. People loaned me books and, contrary to my usual modus operandi, I read them.
I still am. But more and more I find myself longing for the familiar landscapes that lie waiting in the pages of my favourite books. Clay's LA, Richard's Hampden, Betty's Vashon, Pete's lonely Uruguay, Querry's desolate Congo, William's rocky, bitter England.
But perhaps the most pervasive longings at the moment are for Joel's silent southern mansion and Colin's breezy treehouse.
I don't know what it is about Capote. I'd like to have met him. Perhaps he'd have dropped over sometime in summer, on one of those warm days when the dragonflies make flickering shadows on the grass and I spend the afternoon in the hammock with a book and a icy gin, reading and napping and looking through the leaves at the sky.
I'm sure he'd have been out of place in his nice suit and good shoes, but I'd make him a drink and he could sit in the old folding canvas deck chair watching the dragonflies, and we could talk in low voices punctuated by somnolent pauses and the clicking of ice in our glasses. I don't know what we'd talk about; I'm sure I'd mistake him for his own characters.
Other Voices and The Grass Harp make me feel like I'd be happy to live in Capote's head. Sometimes, in parts, they make me feel like I already do. It's not just the sense of being a figment of someone's imagination; it's the deep unspoken parallels that exist between this reality and those stories.
Perhaps that's why they're so alluring: they suggest that things here can be taken in hand, constructed and ordered, operated through introduction and buildup to climax and denouement. That or the simple fact that it's winter here, and Capote's south is ever balmy.
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