Instead of books about western Pennsylvania, yesterday's mail brought me literary journals, although one, the Southern Review, includes my essay "The Mysteries of Millbank," which is itself kind of about western Pennsylvania, at least by way of a nineteenth-century women's dime-store novel. This is yet another of the pieces in my manuscript of essays about books I obsessively reread. Journals seem to like them, and book publishers seem to lose them. The case is puzzling.

The other journal contains nothing by me. It's the latest issue of New Walk, a new British journal, and on the cover is an excerpt from J. S. Coetzee's essay on the work of Zbigniew Herbert: "Poetry may tell a higher truth, but that does not mean it is exempted from having to tell the elementary truths too, the truths that stare us in the face." It is a remark that, for some reason, is giving me the early-morning shudders. Not that I'm denying its truth.

At 1 p.m. I might go outside and begin cutting the detritus out of the single thawed flowerbed in my yard. At 2 p.m. I might make a pie and listen to the Red Sox lose to the Yankees. So far this season, they have lost every single game. Given that they've been predicted to be this year's World Series winners, the situation is beginning to move beyond cranky fist shaking into existential confusion.

This leads me to wonder what Edmund Spenser would say. A quick glance at Canto X of The Faerie Queen reveals:

What man is he that boasts of fleshly might

And vain assurance of mortality,

Which all so soon as it doth come to fight

Against spiritual foes, yields by and by,

Or from the field most cowardly doth fly?

Hmm. I highly doubt this would help a struggling second baseman feel better about himself.