34 degrees this morning: not nearly our coldest temperature of the season, but when I cracked the door to let the cat out, the gust that rattled in felt like the bones of winter.

I spent five minutes writing the above sentence, and it's still clumsy.

Yesterday was a mostly screen-free day: lots of laundry, groceries, a surprise visit with diaspora friends, an hour-and-a-half walk with my neighbor, leaf raking . . . altogether, a much needed face-to-face-with-the-living-world day. So now I am refreshed, and much less squinty, and ready to return to my desk and its exigencies.

I've been rereading Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicles, which for some reason made no impression on me the last time I read it. At this try I am bowled over,  in an amnesiac sort of way, by the gorgeousness of the prose. What a book! I've always thought of Updike and Cheever in the way I think of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: you fall into one camp or the other, and I've been Tolstoy and Updike all the way. But now I see I was wrong, which I guess means I'll have to try reading Fyodor D. again too . . .

In closing, here's a taste of the great and unregenerate Gregory Corso to make you laugh and sigh--

I reached heaven and it was syrupy.

It was oppressively sweet.

Croaking substances stuck to my knees.

Of all substances St. Michael was stickiest.

I grabbed him and pasted him on my head.   

I found God a gigantic fly paper.

I stayed out of his way.

--from "Transformation and Escape," 1960