Carolina on my mind

I started to write a post about stuff in my head this morning, but then I realized that I had already written some of this before. I had trouble sleeping last night, partly because it's getting warmer - too hot in my apartment, like SC - but also because I've been trying out new recipes (even though I don't like my kitchen), and some of what I was thinking about was when I first started cooking Indian food. Also, I'm anticipating moving again, which is both exciting and intimidating. 

But I was also thinking about books. If you'd asked me what books I liked when I was living back in Columbia (besides philosophy, where I was mostly reading Foucault and the Frankfurt School) - but, I was also reading fiction at the time. I might have referred to something vaguely contemporary and international - Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in Time of Cholera (I think these are the books John Cusack's character mentions in High Fidelity, which is either embarrassing for me, or shows that Nick Hornby really captured the zeitgeist, or both). Or something vaguely pretentious, like Tom Stoppard's play Travesties, or John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. Or something more classic, like Stendhal's Red and Black; and I had spent a semester devouring most of Kafka (not Amerika, but everything else) - and that's continued to have a big impact on me. I hadn't yet read Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, although I knew about it from listening to Laurie Anderson. 

I hadn't yet heard of Michael Chabon, and he was years away from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I still name as my favorite book. But the book he'd already published at that time - The Mysteries of Pittsburgh - makes me think of Portland (as does Lucky Jim). And that's something for another post, maybe.