Pen and Paper

A couple days ago, while in the garden on the first of our progressively warmer spring days, I finished reading Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). What a great book to re-visit, particularly now that we have some distance from the British postwar period it attempts to unravel -- the late-1970s, when certain dialecticians and semioticians began to cohabitate. Highlights include Chapter Eight --"Style as homology," "Style as signifying practice" -- with insights by Piccone, Lefebvre, Kristeva, Barthes and Genet.

After a delicious cheese plate of Footnotes and Bibliography I noticed on the last page (interior back cover) a hurricane, what looks like someone trying to get a pen started after years of inactivity. I found the first faint lines where the hurricane began, then its concluding eye. Was it my hand that did this? It could have been, though it doesn't look like it. Not sure I would have used a book this way, even in those days. A second-hand book, I think, purchased in Victoria, where I did my undergrad (1981-1986).