A remarkable haul from yesterday's thrifting. A 4.5" high ceramic pot by Charles Fergus Binns; a small pink Royal Art Pottery bowl; the DVD set of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Parsifal (1983), which I saw upon its release at the Oak Bay Theatre in Victoria; Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me (2014), whose required-reading title essay features that distinctly U.S. elephant in the room known as social class; and Anthony Powell's The Acceptance World (1955), a novel that begins with Nicholas telling us about his Uncle Giles, a bachelor "nearing sixty" who lives in the Uflord, a once grand "private hotel" comprised of "two corner houses" just west of Queensway, when 25 years later I lived in a similarly eccentric -- if not decrepit -- private hotel just east of Queensway (at Inverness Terrace).
A bit more on the Uflord:
"... that the two houses were an abode of the dead being increased by the fact that no one was ever to be seen about, even at the reception desk. The floors of the formerly separate buildings, constructed at different levels, were now joined by unexpected steps and narrow, steeply slanted passages. The hall was always wrapped in silence..." (8)
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