"I can't sit at the high tables -- it makes me angry"

Books bought this past week include:

• the next two volumes of Marmalade Boy
  
• the next two volumes of Tuxedo Gin
  
• Pierre Louÿs's Songs of Bilitis
  
• Robert Lang's Origami Design Secrets
  
• a collection of Inuit folktales
  
• a collection of George Crabbe

A set of acquisitions that actually makes my head hurt. Not for the genre clashes, though they are mighty -- but because I've started working through Lang's magnum opus. It is, essentially, a course in training yourself to be an advanced origami folder. I'm up to the (early) chapter on splitting points, and struggling with the instructions on figuring out how turn a flap into five toes. I managed splitting one into four points, though I don't yet have it down to a reproducible set of steps. The actual model instructions are works of beauty, which start easy but by chapter three are already taxing my digital ingenuity. Especially the hummingbird with a white throat and a curved, uncreased belly.

The doofiness of romance manga is something of a relief from this. The fin de siecle pseudo-poetry, however, is just weird.

---L.