And here we are at Monday again. I'm not too regretful, as yesterday was a quiet day. In the morning I made a birthday cake for Tom--Julia Child's Reine de Saba, a perennial favorite. And in the afternoon I watched the Bills game, which was much less traumatic than the last game I tried to watch. Those two activities about summed up the day, with a bit of laundry and reading and meal prep and fresh air and card playing mixed in.

Today I'll step back into harness . . . exercise class, and then diving into plans for upcoming Frost Place sessions--syllabi, readings, brainstorming, meetings, websites, applications, invoices, the whole giant mess of it. I'm glad I've got a finished poem draft to comfort me.

I've been reading Watchmen; also, an essay by Eudora Welty on Henry Green. Somehow I'm always shocked when someone else talks about Green. I love his novels so much, especially Living, but they are strange and difficult and feel like my own private adoration. Yet Welty stacks him up right against Austen. Though she admits that he's very, very odd, she calls him "the most interesting and vital imagination in English fiction in our time." (The essay was published in 1961.) Still, her prose in describing him is likewise odd, and delightful, as if in writing about Green she's been infected by him:

Only a man of reason, we feel, is likely to be so aware of and so fascinated by the irrational in human motive and behavior; only an artist could show the extraordinary aspects of behavior in ordinary people and suggest, without robbing them at all, where they keep the kernel of their singularity, which as in the fairy tales is well guarded but not too well guarded.