I have to edit, I have to wash the floors, I have to dig up garden, I have to hang laundry and take down laundry and make dinner and pick up a kid at baseball practice and go to a wretched school consolidation meeting. Clearly I am not doing any of those things at the moment. Instead I've been eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich and reading Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and Forster's Aspects of the Novel. I'd forgotten Forster doesn't much care for Dickens. He does, however--and somewhat reluctantly, I might add--appreciate Tolstoy. My feeling is that Forster doesn't like a mess. Myself, I love a mess, at least in literature and actually sort of in real life too, now that I think about it.

E. M. Forster, writing about Tolstoy's War and Peace in Aspects of the Novel:

Such an untidy book. Yet, as we read it, do not great chords begin to sound behind us, and when we have finished does not every item--even the catalogue of strategies--lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?

Dinner tonight: classic 1950s-style meatloaf-with-ketchup. I wish I could say that the ketchup is homemade, but my shady northern garden can't grow enough tomatoes. It takes an extraordinary number of tomatoes to make a pint of ketchup. Which, now that this paragraph has traveled several lines away from from the word meatloaf, I will begin spelling as catsup. Meatloaf-n-catsup just looks silly.