Housecleaning, grass cutting, harvest work: I made pesto with purple basil (it looks confusingly like olive tapenade), diced two quarts of poblanos for the freezer (my hands were burning), and cooked up a batch of tomato sauce, also destined for the freezer. Then we went out for Chinese food with friends, and now here I am, sitting in the dark, drinking coffee and waiting for the cat to boss me around.

Tonight my poetry group reconvenes after its summer hiatus, and I can't decide whether to share my Otis Redding poem, my Olivia Newton-John poem, or my cow udder poem. I'm leaning toward cow udder.

I have some things to say to you about the Anita Brookner novel I finished yesterday morning, but my copy is upstairs and I don't want to wake anyone. Brookner puzzles me as a writer: she often manages to seem detached and engaged at the same time, and I'm not sure how she constructs that odd tone. But among other things she's very good at talking about how it feels to be a writer: that is, the person who is sitting in the chair doing the lumpish work of clanking together words. Not that annoying stock character, Poet with a Message, who can be hard to stomach.