Started reading Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives last night. So far this is what it has to say to me:

"We were nervous. . . . For a minute I thought something might have happened at the university, that maybe there'd been a campus shooting I hadn't heard about, or a surprise strike, or that the dean had been assassinated, or they'd kidnapped one of the philosophy professors. But nothing like that was true, and there was no reason to be nervous. No objective reason anyway. But poetry (real poetry) is like that: you can sense it, you can feel it in the air, the way they say certain highly attuned animals (snakes, worms, rats, and some birds) can detect an earthquake."

"I'd obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me)."

And now I must drive away into the snowy morning to buy trois lapins pour le stewpot et more Christmas lights, per order of my elder son ("This year, our house is going to look tacky!").