Autem ("however" in Latin, but looks like Autumn in English)

Today I received a suspicion--not a confirmation, but a suspicion--that my character Donovan Din has curly hair. I'd always assumed it was straight, but as a writer you have to keep your antennae up for stuff like that.

So I doodled him with wavy hair, but then he looked not enough like Beethoven and too much like my sister Clair's character Blitzen Coves. And if you were to know Blitzen Coves and Donovan Din, you'd know that they'd work just fine together on a rap collaboration, but on a personal basis not at all.

It being Friday the 13th, we had to read some of Something Wicked This Way Comes, which we began last year and never finished. I wish I was Ray Bradbury. I come close to crying sometimes that I'm not him. And then I thought I'd invented Autumn People when I tried to put them as antagonists in my story, but it turned out that not only had he invented Autumn People, but written them so much scarier than I could ever hope to do that it made me despair. Ye gods, Ray, you dearly-departed writers really rip my skies. And when I think, when we began Something Wicked you were safely on the other side of the grave. Funny how life is.

And with all this happening I have to study for midterms. Cruel world, in it? But with second winds and pumpkin-spice lattes (which are everywhere, Clair says, this time of year) and the shrug of shoulders and the side of Latin that I like (more language and fewer smudges) and the fever of presidential debates in the air and the idea that I might be able to write a little something for NaNoWriMo after all--who knows, maybe turn out some halfway decent Autumn people?--I think I'll make it after all.

Disco, discere, didici

Veterans who had been in the form for terms said afterwards that there had been nothing to touch it, in their experience of the orator, since the glorious day when Dunster, that prince of raggers . . . had introduced three lively grass-snakes into the room during a Latin lesson. 

- P.G. Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith 

I'm taking a composition class at college, which feels like a waste of time to me. If there's one thing I truly believe I can do decently, it's slap a paper together. But there's a word the teacher likes to repeat, and I apply it here: kairos, the supreme moment. 

About one week into college, when I was walking around on the grounds, eyeing a metal statue, I realized something, which was that I no longer wished I'd saved the Psmith series for when I was a new student. It wouldn't have been the moment for it. 

I have a weird way of relating books to whatever I do, and I wanted, at college, to find a friend like Psmith. I spent the whole summer in happy daydreams of gaining the sort of companion who would help me toss interlopers out the back windows of studies. Granted, that type died with the English school, but there's always hope.

But the main reason I wanted a Psmith was that Psmith exists to ease a person into Sedleigh, and I was certain that my school would be a Sedleigh--pleasantly, decently dull. (I guess it is, though more on the pleasantly side at the moment. And if wearing loafers around the school grounds doesn't drive that home, nothing does, really.)

Scratch that. I thought the school would start out a Sedleigh and morph, as the nights lengthened, into that bank in Psmith in the City, just an endless drudgery and coldness. It never did. I like it still. Maybe I forgot that Mike, the main character, adjusts quite quickly to such settings, and it's only Psmith who turns his discontent into a disco and dances in it. (No, not really. Disco is deader than Psmith, but you know.)

So college, if you enjoy it, is not necessarily the time to be reading Psmith. I read it exactly when I should have read it, because the time to be reading Psmith is the spring and summer before, when you're anticipating college with a Mike-like groan, not super into the idea and worried it will cut into your cricket-playing time. Or, in my case, my reader time.

I feel almost like I'm violating a certain readerly privacy, writing this post. I love my Kindle, admittedly, and when mine broke again this past week I cradled it like Clara with her injured nutcracker, but I hate all this stuff with the Amazon company tracking your bookmarks and plastering your screen with ads. Used to be you'd duck behind a book and flip the pages if you wanted to go unseen, and now look at me, writing posts about what I read. I was going to do a series of posts detailing my short-lived love affair with the college library. I might even do it now, and have this be the first. 

But even if it isn't the moment for Psmith, and even if I should be putting him aside and studying, I find myself thinking of him and his antics in the middle of my classes and having to stifle a smile. He's the lively grass snakes in my Latin lesson.