Today is the day when two separate editorial projects are scheduled to come crashing down on my peacefully unemployed head. Fortunately, however, UPS never arrives in Harmony until it's too late to start working, so I have one more day to bumble around among my own books and manuscripts. The Millbank essay is done (for the moment), so now I must turn my thoughts to the next couple of essays on the list.

Topic 1: books I reread even though I don't like them

Possible authorial exemplars: Ivy Compton-Burnett, Philip Roth, Malcolm X

Topic 2: books I reread because the setting matters so much to me

Possible authorial exemplars: Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Alice Munro

I'd also like to undertake another copying project, which is a good spar to cling to when I'm drowning in other people's manuscripts. I'm thinking of a small foray into the alarming world of Victorian poetry. It's not that I haven't already read a great deal of this stuff, but it's always been secondary to the novels. Moreover, it's quite unfashionable at the moment, which is always an attraction. I think I will start with Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I'll let you know what transpires.

Finally, I learned this morning that poet Peggy Rabb has died. I studied with Peggy at one of the two Frost Place seminars I attended. Peggy was a formalist who used form in ways that seemed natural and inevitable, which is not too common among contemporary poets. Here's a link to a couple of her poems. I'm sad that she's gone.