HOW TO SOFTEN THE FALL

summer is over. or rather, fall is back in full force. i'm not so sure anyone in town would let me get away with calling what happened here over the last few months a summer. (i for one didn't get nearly the reading done i should have.) but whatever it was it passed, and that was abundantly clear two weekends ago during the three days of downpours. those passed though also, and the light is now very certainly autumn light, and i remember that this season can be really pleasant in portland, specifically in late september and early october -- which is to say the time before the rain won't stop again until our next unenthusiastic summer.

so now i'm looking forward to reading aurorarama. true, that's in large part because the marketing campaign succeeded on me. there was that. but as the days get shorter and the layers come on, i'm also excited for the anticipation of reading a literary adventure about ice and long nights and trash collectors dressed like plague doctors and well dressed night lifers trying to take the long-night-life of their arctic utopia back from the stranglehold of authority. of new venice in 1908 i'm imagining something like orhan pamuk's snow meets "steamboy" meets sin city.

in one of the two excerpted sections that i was able to find online there's a scene in which a character is eating at a street-counter swedish smorgasbord (that word is acceptable as english without the diacritics) when he's interrupted by two dapper thugs from the "gentlemen of the night." to flesh out the image i did a little investigation into the smorgasbord, apparently a something unto itself and not just indicative of a bounty. it turns out that there's something called a chinese smorgasbord as well, which originated in vancouver through the intercourse of scandinavian and chinese immigrants. the loggers and the fishermen wanted the restaurateurs to lay out their (already westernized) food the way it was done in scandinavia, and it was by the sustaining power of that union that a great nation was built. crazy kanucks. gosh. where would we be without books?