Almost on My Way

After I clean and pack and cross an ocean.

The Gates Ajar

The Gates Ajar, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's spiritualist novel of 1868, is about the internet. How so? Allegorically and with a keen foresight. The internet is as desirous of its users' privacy as Phelps's characters are of contact with the dead. Arguing about privacy on the internet and tracing the latest means by which it is being stolen is as pointless, repetitive, and obscure as the religious rhetoric of Phelps's characters.

What this means, at least for me, is that I much prefer to read confounding books than to be confounded by having all my accounts and internet guises inexplicably connected against my wishes.

Since youtube and facebook continually demand to be "merged" with my google/blogspot shenanigans, I'm giving up on keeping the gates ajar, Phelps.

That is, as much as I enjoy discovering new blogs and having visitors drop by here, that pleasure is definitely outweighed by the fear of a Kafkaesque trial at a job interview for accidentally ambiguous wording of a post or for what I did on Thursday, May 20, 2010.

I'm not closing this blog but locking it via the invitations option. If you'd like a key, write a comment under this post in the next two days or email me.

I hate you, evolution of the internet.

Chickadee Sighting and Feeling

Niagara Falls, September 2009.

Thanks to the generosity of a bird lover from Niagara Falls, I fed and touched a few chickadees.

Loving the Terrible

First:

But then:

-- Maria Susanna Cummins, The Lamplighter (1854)

Compulsively readable even though one of my worst nightmares happens in Chapter III.