As Expected

Ate early, Mac and Cheese, with bacon and chopped jalapenos, sitting at the island reading the new Ian McEwan, Nutshell, and there's a ruckus outside. I can hear it's the bobcat and a couple of dogs. Ran them off with the back porch light and a couple of marbles from the sling-shot because I had arranged the entire day to be awake when "World Cafe" came on the radio. Bonny Raitt. I love her voice and she do play a mean guitar. An entertainment event. I think I could build a crude composting bin with five pallets, four strips of that perforated metal strapping called 'plumber's tape', and eight screws. I need a compost heap, although need may be too strong a word, because the system I've used for 15 years actually just involves putting my waste in a designated area and letting animals deal with it. They spread it around and dig it in. I can't believe I get the timing correct, but midnight, and listening to Bonny with her slide guitar, It doesn't get much better than that. She interprets songs. I saw her once in New Hampshire, with John Lee Hooker, and it blew me away. An interview and four or five songs in an hour, about all the excitement I can bear. I was back at the island, close to the radio, eating grape tomatoes with an avocado cream dressing, and repeated generous grinds of black pepper. I bought an extra of those self-grinder black pepper units, because there are few things worse than running out of black pepper mid-winter. This latest McEwan is very good, he's a great writer, told from the point of view of a very self-aware fetus in the womb. He hears everything, passed down through the skeleton through the amniotic fluid. It's a great conceit, and carried off perfectly. I love when the narrator discovers a shrimp between his legs and realizes he's male, and when he's finally born, at the end, and sees blue for the first time. After all the excitement (Bonny on the radio) I knew I wouldn't get to sleep. Coming across the word shadowtackle I wished I had picked up some Hopkins at the library, then remembered I had the Norton Anthology; a concise little bio, a decent discussion of the poetry, then a dozen or so poems. A wee dram and I read Hopkins until dawn. I think it's a bit over-the-top, but I enjoy a few hours of immersion, the creation and/or resurrection of words is quite wonderful. Sets the tone of the day, and I go on to read some Eliot and some Auden, then some Pound, then some Olson, then some Dorn. I have piles of manuscripts and books of poets I've known from my publishing days onward, so I read more poetry than most people. Shadowtackle is the shifting pattern of light caused by the stirring of the canopy. We know what some of his words mean because in letters he often explained them. I love the precise explication. Don't remember if I mentioned, but I had the thought, and continue thinking about the fact, that I could write a short story, in English, that anyone would be hard-pressed to understand. I might call it Logan Stone, which is one rock atop another that looks like it could rocked. You see this a lot in Utah. Is Dell just the feminine of Dale? Della? Clearly I have my work cut out for me. The opening of Logan Stone is: "A barf to the beam, and over the bedding plane, bequeen an old oak, hearing the bell of a stag. Keelbam on a kesh, all the luck, the ruts filled with ice. The llvybr, those fucking Welsh, canted and impossible." Reread Beckett's little book on Proust. Bought and read the first time on Nantucket. I always found Nantucket to be beautiful but rather boring, the Vineyard was still country, we lived in a 25 acre woodlot, and I had my own oyster beds. Still, if we had stayed there, life would be very different; I'd probably be making lovely books and selling them for a lot of money, but it was impossible, with the visitors and guests. No time to work. Mississippi was better, but Colorado was close to perfect, we had a guest house, a trout stream, and we raised everything. I actually traded cured pork for fresh game because I loved elk and everyone loved my hams; a very good lawyer once traded an entire antelope for a side of bacon. His family, he said, hated the gamy taste of antelope, but they loved my bacon. God bless them.