jaeleslie

China Mieville was at Borders tonight for a reading. I thought it would be a good chance to see Julie Z whose life has gotten unspeakably busier. The parking lot was full, and most all of the chairs on the second floor. He was of course tremendously interesting and entertaining and thoughtful as a speaker, and the audience questions were not bad either. The line for signing formed very neatly around the music section and I went to sit on the windowsill and visit with people, and later sat around and talked. It seems I don't get out much in town lately.

I was telling olivia_circe about the campus the calligraphy conference was on. It was a very new campus, SIU at Edwardsville in Illinois across the river from St Louis, and the grounds went on and on like a small city and in our driving around we actually found a sign for a Chamber of Commerce on one of the buildings scattered among athletic fields. The dorm where we were housed was even further away from the student center than the last time we used this campus in 1997. And the hill we had to walk up was bigger. No, it wasn't my imagination. I heard the old dorm was being treated for a mold problem, so this was actually a different one. It took a few days to work that out, and I had a histamine reaction going on every morning anyway, so this was probably a sick building too or at least coming down with something. Our rooms were on the third floor, way at the end of a long hall that kind of bent and then around a corner down another long hall. This made it a very long way for me to walk to the refrigerator we found on the other end of the first floor where I could put my ice packs. Everything was very clean and spiffy, and we only had to share the bathroom with Chris & Mary Jo who were in the next room. We had the Kafka view out of our window, of a lawn surrounded by identical wings of the dorm. And we had to walk up this very big hill, a third of a mile (Marcia measured it with her pedometer) at least twice a day. And back. I tried going back to the room for a lie down one day during lunch break, but by the time I walked down and back it was a completely pointless exercise so after that I just found a comfy sofa in the student commons area near my classroom and lay down there on breaks.

Unfortunately I was still unable to do all the activities I wanted to in the evenings. I missed the lecture on Islamic calligraphy that I particularly wanted to see, and the multimedia play about Esther Inglis who was a 17th century Huguenot calligrapher, and the very long slide presentation about the progress of work on the St John's Bible which is nearing completion. I also missed the entire exhibit of the Oregon Book Artists Guild which was in the library building. Later I will have to tell about all the stuff I did do.

I breakfasted in my room, as I have always found breakfast with 400 people kind of overwhelming, and then walked up the hill for my class. Lunch was in the same building. After class (which invariably lasted an extra half hour) I walked down the hill, picked up my ice pack, and went upstairs to lie down with it against my back for an hour. My roommate gave me a glass of wine (which was strictly speaking not allowed in the dorm) and we had a little goat cheese and rice crackers and all talked talked talked about everything that had happened that day, and then I had to walk up the hill again for dinner. The food service was not as bad as we had feared. There was usually a reasonable salad or two, plenty of somewhat overcooked vegetables, slabs of protien in various nonobjectionable sauces, and an occasional rice pilaf. I managed to refrain from the desserts every day except for that one square of chocolate cake.