Habit

I get a note from Aralee. a writer of distinction, Ms. Strange, and she says she has 1,733 pages of my writing, but that this recent post, "Too Many Lines", is very good. I don't have a copy of that post, my filing system is inept, I just pile things up. So I go online, to read the posting. I don't even have a copy, but it's posted online. One thing you can be sure of, if you're writing at three or four in the morning, is that no one will interrupt that particular session. Of course, even an undisturbed body of water shakes, as the plates shift. A ripple. But for the most part, nothing, as usual. I needed a small fire, to chase away the chill, so I burned junk mail and a pallet. Kim is correct, I could heat my house burning pallets. Big three-week push coming up, 2 exhibits, the huge fund-raiser, so I spend the day reading about the OED. Mesmerizing story. Took 51 years and Murray didn't live to see the end of it. What an eccentric and weird group of mostly guys (at the beginning), polymaths. A lot of these guys could speak 15 or 20 languages, one James Platt, said that the first dozen tongues were difficult, but the next hundred were easy. He learned Russian in 18 days. J. R. R. Tolkien worked there, in 1919, on the letter W; his work on the word walrus is legendary in dictionary circles. Funny that he had just come up in another context. He taught Anglo-Saxon at the University of Kentucky, where Guy Davenport had him as a professor, and explained to Davenport that most of the names for characters in "Lord Of The Rings" came from Kentucky hollows. I use the OED just once or twice a week, consulting, usually, an unabridged American dictionary for my particular needs; and besides, when I dip into the OED I'm completely gone. It's the consummate dictionary. The format, the text, the quotations, it sets the bar. 'Set' is the longest single entry. It's endless, pages and pages, a year of combined effort. I keep removing myself from any kind of combined art, then find myself back in the middle again. A silence descends, palpable. B comes over for a drink. We square up the book situation, no small feat with the two of us, then talk about recent fiction. Ten books came in this weekend, and I've foolishly started a pile on the dining room table; I didn't have time to sort, then B comes in with the ten most recent issues of the London Review of Books. Printed matter, I'm sinking here. It's not a bad feeling, I love the way paper smells, but lord god, the piles are over my head. Don't panic is the mantra. Read your way out of this situation. Which I can do, give me a couple of days, my undivided attention. I'm good at hollowing a burrow, those that know me know. I lived for several months under a dead truck in Utah, don't talk to me about what could have been. Pretty sure that's pluperfect. Past Pluperfect, but none the less. I parse myself as if it might be important. It's not, of course, just a bunch of keystrokes, as if anything meant something.