I wanted to let you know that I'll be reading with my beloved friend Baron Wormser in Strafford, Vermont, on next Thursday evening, August 11, at 7 p.m. The event is a summer reading series called the Town House Forum, and organizers often book fairly famous writers, so my presence here will certainly be a curiosity. If you're local and like biography, you might also like to know that this Thursday, August 4, the series will feature Jay Parini, author of bios about Frost and Vidal, who will be reading with Wendy Moffat, author of a bio about E. M. Forster. I wish I could be around to listen to that one myself.

Let me see: what else is new? The real estate agent has set up two house showings this week, so apparently someone somewhere has gotten around to reading the advertisements. My green beans and raspberries are thriving despite the drought. I have still been copying out Rilke's Duino Elegies, but I am also rereading Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand, which is all about taking weird drugs that send the protagonist back into the machinations of medieval Cornwall. The novel is not much like Rilke's poems, but it does remind me, as I wrote in one of the chapters of The Vagabond's Bookshelf, that du Maurier is far more sympathetic to landscape than she is to people.

Poetry-group readers seem to have reached a consensus about the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, so let's take Tom's advice and acquire copies of the 1992 edition of the New and Collected, which still seems to be readily available. Then we can work out how we'll manage the conversations. I'm still hoping that we can work out a way to take turns leading the talk.

I suppose I should gather my robes about me and go off to edit a book. No summer holiday for me this year. Oh, well.