Just finished Haruki Murakami's After the Quake which seems like very timely reading in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. I first came to Murakami's work in reading his nonfiction project Underground, a series of oral history interviews with survivors of the Tokyo subway gas attacks. I have yet to read the novels and other short story collections for which Murakami is best known, but was very impressed by the stories in After the Quake which follow the thread of several different characters living in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake - witnessing the horrors of the natural disaster through the mediated image of news broadcasts, relief workers traveling to provide on-site aid, and those removed from the situation but with ex-husbands, estranged parents based in Kobe.

It's a been a weird week for passings - my best friend lost her grandmother, and another friend from adolescence, lost her mother to complications from a leg amputation caused by diabetes. All within the same 24 hours.

At work, the lead curator of the Collections finally retired after 13 years on staff, signaling some much needed growth and change, [I hope].

I finished reading Michael Ondaatje's book Anil's Ghost and wonder what it might have been like to read the book, while I was working on writing Adamantine and wonder about how my reading of that novel might now inform any revisions that are made to the collection. There are several wonderful passages in the book that include an exposition on the ritual act of netra mangala, the act of painting in the eyes of a buddha or god, as the last step of activating an idol. Stone is also a theme throughout the book - monuments and their destruction - including the blowing up of religious statuary akin to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. This novel was hauntingly beautiful, political, and deeply interdisciplinary, in its weaving together of poetry, anthropology, history, and religion and I think in some ways triumphs over English Patient.

Happy to report that we officially have cover art for Adamantine, courtesy of the great Keith Carter.