Powerless

Going home, I could see the phone was out, a giant dead poplar had parted the line on Mackletree, and then, when I got home, the power was out. Came to the museum early, to enjoy some creature comforts, read, watch some TV on Hulu. My taste for discomfort has dwindled. Spent most of the day reading "Defining The World" by Henry Hitchings, a decent book about Samuel Johnson and his dictionary. Forecast is for rain the next couple of days, changing over to the first snow of the season before we see the sun again. I brought some clothes to work, for when I get trapped there. The vacuities of life and its vacancies. Johnson was an odd duck, and I do have a copy of the (Johnson) revised fourth edition, but I read in it for pleasure rather than for insight into etymologies. Especially after reading books about Murray and the OED, and having spent most of my adult life with five or six unabridged American English dictionaries within an arm's reach. Language. I love it. I spend hours a day with it. Words are weapons, among other things, freighted with meaning. Johnson's reflect not only a wide-ranging intelligence, but open a window on the mid-eighteenth century. Some of his, that I enjoyed today: Rant, high sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought; a Coquette is a female who endeavors to attrach notice; an Uxorius man is infected with connubial dotage; Obsession is the act of besieging, or the first attack of Satan, antecedent to possesion; effumability is the quality of flying or vaporing in fumes. That last is the perfect word to describe the way the lake bleeds off heat into the atmosphere. I'll never see it any other way. The lake's effumable today. The effumibility index is high. I watch the lake effume, as I consume a sandwich, sitting on a table in a shelter hut, watching the napp over the spillway. Edward Gorey once told me that he read everything as if it were a Victorian novel. The attic of his house on Cape Cod was floor to ceiling bookcases of Victorian novels. That's where all those funny little characters came from. Rain, rain, more rain, the ground is saturated and the flood-plain is under water. Not a good time for this, because if the ground freezes when it's saturated, in the spring, when the rains are supposed to fall, there won't be anyplace for the water to go. The Army Corp has failed us, the Mississippi will change course, they standardly blow out levees and flood areas they were protecting; in their defense, it's an impossible job, there's no way you can protect against Mother Nature. Consider a house-boat.