Serial Phrases

Cicada-shrill wakes me, dressed and outside quickly, to beat the heat, another day over 95 and already warm before 7. Brush work for a couple of hours, drenched with sweat, belt wet (the real parakeet for working outdoors in hot weather), I pack it in, strip, pour water over and drip dry, spread a towel on the sofa, and, naked, read for an hour. Finishing the new Fradkin biography of Stegner: "Wallace Stegner and the American West". Good book, and as I've explained to B, I was not a Lit or even English major, and I never much read biographies or criticism. I still hold the work itself to be primary, but the people are interesting and now I enjoy reading about the controversies. Stegner is a good example, "Angle Of Repose" is a great novel (I prefer him in non-fiction, "Beyond The Hundredth Meridian" is sublime) and there is the issue of how much he used the Foote papers (a lot) in the composition. I myself have trouble with the fiction/non-fiction line. I don't know where it falls. In the maps of criticism, which vary with schools, the line is nowhere defined. It's talked about a lot but never etched. This is always an indicator of confusion. The next time someone asks, and there's always a next time, my answer to the question -what do you write?- is -serial phrases-. Stegner used it to mean how he honed down on something, the disparate threads coming together. With the bugs and the fans I can't be expected to think, but he was correct, in terms of how we now know what we think, how we do it. He preceded the knowledge, adumbrated a course of study: look at things closely, consider where you are. Pure Olson from the other side of the continent. Stegner is the western Olson. He started it there, the best writers of this generation pay him homage, every time they take up a pen. That what we say must be honest, that what we say must be true, but memory is a strange function, not subject to the laws of nature, carving its' own path. I didn't mean I was capable of that, just that I had thought you might have thought I might have been capable of closing the deal. I can't. I'm really just the janitor.