A beautiful sleep-in, a mild rainy morning, and I am feeling much more like myself. I was never absolutely ill from the shot cocktail but I did develop a generalized loopiness that made editing impossible. Nor did I think I should be driving a car. However, a loopy person can scrub bathrooms and do four loads of laundry and cook vegetable stock and peel quinces. So stuff got done.

I'm now on holiday hours: no thoughts of paying work until next weekend. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, and chatter are my entire focus. Today I'll mostly be concentrating on housework; deep-cleaning and reorganizing the downstairs rooms, trying to turn them into a reasonably sensible place for six people to kick around in for most of a week. Little Alcott House will be stuffed to the gills, but she can do a good job, if I encourage her.

So far I've got four quarts of gorgeous bronze vegetable stock ready for use. The quince harvest is precooked and ready for the quince cake I'll make on Monday. Today and tomorrow I'll make baguettes for garlic bread and a batch of cornbread for stuffing.

In the meantime, I'm rereading Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris, one of the most perfectly constructed novels I know. My edition includes an introduction by A. S. Byatt, whose death was announced yesterday. I am a poet who is desperately in love with fiction; I study poems and breathe story. It is an odd trajectory, but there you have it. And both Bowen and Byatt are among my great influences: as women novelists and story writers, they rank with Woolf, Munro, Murdoch, Compton-Burnett, Drabble, Fitzgerald, and Atwood in my private pantheon of female modernism. Byatt was a deeply intellectual writer, immersed in the mores of academic thought. Yet she used that immersion creatively; her canvases were immense. Possession was her most famous novel, and probably her most fun. But the series that encompasses The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman is a tour-de-force--an adventure into the swirling worlds of academia, feminism, religious fervor, artistic change, landscape change, science, public morality, psychosis, and the Cold War between the 1950s and the 1970s, following one volatile brilliant family through this maze. I've never read anything else like it.

So I lift a cup to her memory: thank you, Antonia, for helping me invent my own mind.