Day 2 of writing residency -

Day 2 of writing residency - rainy and grey.  Scooped doggy poop and housekeeper (included with residency) says to take glucosomine, oil fish (fish oil) and vitamin B12 and tumeric - Her 92 year old sponsor does this.  This will stop leaking and her sponsor no longer needs to use poise pads.

She went to her home country and arranged for her mother's funeral stone.

Read Amedeo Modigliani's life story on Wikipedia, researched Pere Lachais cemetery, Paris Commune.  Need to find out how Les Miserables and Victor Hugo and his son connected to 1848 Revolution and Paris Commune - I know they are connected.

Building up strength to order proof of Black Rice --

The late Bruce Chatwin's wonderful books are printed on such poor quality paper.  I don't want that.

In 1990s, I would go to Penn's Lippincourt (sp?) Lippincott Library and go into the carrels among the stacks where the Burma books are all kept.

Penn had converted the shelves so that they can collapse closed to each other - The ascension numbers holding the Burma books had not been opened for ages. 

You press a button and the shelves slide open.  Open sesame.

You're not supposed to fold down the edges of pages - but I did out of habit, and the paper on one of the books broke and fell away.

When I closed the shelves I was afraid I would be crushed between them, James Bond style.  But they stopped, like elevator doors, a few inches from my body.  Now subway doors are not like that and you need to be very careful.

When I arrived at Penn, my friend Zarine who was Parsi or Zoroastrian from then-Bombay said, "We worship fire.  Zubin Mehta is a Parsi."

Z. used to work in the stacks. 

She told me how scared she was -- how she stuck her head in and shouted out at 12 midnight "Stacks are closing!  Stacks are closing!"

How an exhibitionist was arrested by campus police for exposing himself in the stacks.

Which led me to remember the stacks in the Ford Foundation donated Social Science Library at the Institute of Economics in Rangoon, where the American wife of a Burmese professor had hung herself.

Maybe I will just write notes like this during this summer's residency.

This prevents me from writing a full memoir which I hate to do.

I only like writing fake memoirs.

copyright - Kyi May Kaung