We got four inches of fluffy snow yesterday . . . finally, something to shovel that wasn't a concrete block and didn't take all afternoon to move. As a result, I got many things done that didn't involve snow: more class planning, more editing, a haircut, some reading, a giant pot of chicken stock. Today, with my class plans more or less set, I hope to do some writing as well, and also spend some time with the Inferno. I haven't even looked at my poems since well before Christmas, or copied out a single word of Dante, though I'm still plowing through The Birth of the Modern.

But over the holiday I did reread E. B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan, which was a lovely respite. My son used to have a cassette tape of White reading the book in his New York City drawl, which the boy blasted ad infinitum for a couple of years. We all knew much of it by heart. White's ability to invent a sort of urbanity of nature is completely odd and completely charming. Stuart Little, mouse about town. Louis the Swan, jazz trumpeter and bird of letters. The book was just as good as I'd remembered.