An unusual book (?) meme

René, my online friend in Mexico City, has tagged me with a most unusual meme.

The text of the meme originates from here:

I now propose a new tag: Things which one has read and has been influenced by which are not confined to those paper-bound vessels of the printed word we refer to as books. Let's call these Non-Books. Or maybe Impossible Books. Or Limen Books? It's up to you. List five.

Great fun, methinks. Below the fold are my replies, along with the people I've tagged:

Las Meninas. For that matter, Baroque art in general (hence the existence of the new blog). The Interstate 10 bridge that crosses the Mississippi at Baton Rouge. A live oak in Mobile so enormous that it shades all or part of three front yards (one of which is across the street from the tree's trunk). Cottonwoods. A black bear sitting by the trail and watching, just watching me and my fellow Boy Scouts as we backpacked at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. Hearing a small girl singing, "Ashes, ashes" over and over at a grocery store. The births of my children. That moment in my college World Literature class when I realized I wanted to be a college professor. The taste of really good pollo en mole. A certain mariachi singer I heard in Durango, whose performance I describe toward the end of this post. A cloudbank at sunset somewhere in northern Mexico, its bottom rust-red and its fringes dark lavender, that was so shaped and situated relative to the road I was on that I could drive around three sides of it. Riding a horse running at full gallop who ignored my increasingly-frantic tugs on the reins. The smell of the slowly-decaying paper in the library at Rice University.

Where do I stop? "Here" will work.

Five people to tag now; of course, you're free to play or not as you see fit: Camille of 327 Market, dejavaboom of Musement Park, Winston of Nobody Asked . . . , Debra of Reflecting, and Gwynn of The Shallow End.