Today is the day I will learn how to take the bus into downtown. Having no car is a great way to quit procrastinating about such things. And I've worked out a ride to Sunday's reading, so for the moment I'm managing without too much trouble. It's a whole lot easier in town than it was in the country, that's for sure. Rural dependency on machines: I know I wrote about that in my Milton memoir. It's one of the many ironies of the bucolic.

Yesterday I learned that Vox Populi will publish my essay "Lost Time," so that was much better news than transmission failure. I haven't been sending many things out lately, so maybe this will encourage me to start doing so again. Or maybe not. I don't seem to be full of enthusiasm about submitting, though I am planning to read some new work on Sunday.

I'm getting more and more attached to Johnson's Tree of Smoke. I still can't get over how good he is at capturing the nuances of individual voices in dialogue. Great novelists amaze me.