Last night was a beastly night for sleeping, in more ways than one. Not only was the weather intensely humid, not only did hairy, hot Ruckus the Cat insist on curling up next to my head, not only did the bedroom fan sound like a small but powerful mid-twentieth-century aeroplane, but I had two highly annoying items stuck in my head: first, the lyrics to Peter, Paul, and Mary's "I Dig Rock-and-Roll Music," which has to be one of the worst songs ever written, possibly even rivaling the Eagles' "Hotel California" in my pantheon of loathing; and, second, Edward Shevardnadze's name, which my brain kept spelling out to itself: "S-H-E-V-A-R-D? . . . is D right? . . . D-N-A . . . " Ugh.

Thank goodness it's all over now (except for the humidity) and I am awake and boiling water for coffee and not thinking about how to spell anything. If I've left any typos in this post, be assured that I don't care.

Here in Harmony, the air is freighted with wet. The sky, gray as a wing, hovers twenty feet over the green and sodden earth. The humidity is so intense that my skin has difficulty telling if the weather is chilly or torrid. In the woods an unknown bird chatters: chewka, chewka, chewka, pause; chewka, chewka, chewka, pause. In the house the refrigerator grumbles and sweats. This is the sort of weather that tempts tomato plants to grow a foot taller every night. Meanwhile, slugs consume rows of lettuce, and bullfrogs bubble and grunt in the vernal pools.

I have started reading a book I bought in Brooklyn: James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It is a very odd book; imagine a mishmash of Walter Scott, Jonathan Edwards, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Laurence Sterne. Here is Hogg's bio, which may give you a sense of his oddity.

James Hogg (1770-1835) was born in the Ettrick Valley in the Scottish Borders. When he was seven, his father, a sheep farmer, went bankrupt and Hogg left school hardly able to read; he could only shape letters "nearly an inch in length," he wrote later in his autobiography. For many years, he worked as a cowherd and later as a shepherd. His mother, however, steeped him in ballads and folklore, and his grandfather was apparently the last man to talk with the fairies. Only in his twenties, when Hogg was exposed to books once more, did he begin to write, his first creations being "songs and ballads made up for the lassies to sing in chorus." At forty, he set out for Edinburgh and, after starting the short-lived satirical magazine The Spy, he wrote poems and stories for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, first published in 1824, has long been considered his masterpiece.

He was also an ancestor of Alice Munro's, and she writes about him in The View from Castle Rock.

I wish my grandfather had been "the last man to talk with the fairies."

A poignant half-hour at Coney Island:

I'm sitting on a curb in the shade beneath the boardwalk with my friend Steve, who is recovering from a sudden dizzy fit, while the rest of the boys hie off to the Wonder Wheel. We're talking in a desultory way. Above us, on the boardwalk, the people of Coney Island trudge and trundle by: women in summer dresses, women in bikinis, men with tattoos, men in wheelchairs, women in cargo shorts, men in work pants, children in flippers, children in flipflops, children in carriages, children in tears, drunken soccer fans, sober soccer fans, teenagers eating fried clams, teenagers shrieking in fake terror, teenagers pushing strollers, teenagers embracing, teenagers flipping each other the bird.

Beside us, in our shady hideaway, which reeks of urine and seawater and carnival grease and the detritus of Nathan's Famous Hotdogs, sits a grandmother. She is a tiny, tiny grandmother, dressed neatly in a go-to-church dress and saggy stockings and sensible go-to-church shoes, and she is sitting in a tiny, tiny folding chair, the kind of chair made for four-year-olds, but it fits her because she is so extremely little. The grandmother is surrounded by beach bags and blankets and playthings; clearly she has been left to watch the belongings while the rest of her family has rushed off to ride the rides. She sits up very straight in her tiny, tiny chair and looks intently into the crowd, longing for some member of her family to come back and see how she is doing.

For most of the half-hour that Steve and I sit on the curb, no one comes back to check on her. So she sits there, still and silent and attentive, surrounded by bags and playthings, doing everything she can to retain her reserve and her dignity. And this is difficult, because on the other side of her sits a man in the throes of an opium dream. He laughs and orates; he lifts his arms regally toward the boardwalk; he speak in tongues to invisible listeners. Occasionally he returns to this small corner of Coney Island. When a beach ball bounces against his leg, he tosses it neatly to a running child. He opens a bag and pours a small amount of soda into a paper cup. But such moments are brief: he sinks back almost immediately into his dream; he smiles at his invisible acquaintance; he brandishes his hands like a Shakespearean actor; "Yes, yes!" he cries. "Actually, yes!"

The tiny, tiny grandmother refuses to turn her head in his direction, though he is no more than six feet away from her. She refuses to turn her head in my direction, though I am sitting no more than six feet away on her other side. She sits alone, her back as straight as a fencepost, her tiny hands clasped in her lap, and stares into the crowd, waiting, waiting, for her family to come back to her.

More snapshots from Brooklyn and its Manhattan suburbs:

We spent the Fourth of July in that bastion of capitalism, the Morgan Library, during which time we embraced our democratic freedom to speak scornfully of an emperor of finance while simultaneously gawking at his loot.

Here, for instance, is an original manuscript showing how 17-year-old Mozart revised the first bars of one of his symphonies.

And here is a manuscript of a Whitman poem.

As a change of pace, here is the label of an extremely fine bottle of French hard cider, served ice cold, with excellent Vermont cheese.

And this morning, I saw these two patriotic cats, snoring on an awning after an exciting holiday evening. 

Snapshot from Brooklyn

9 a.m., Gowanus Canal, quiet warehouses, greasy water, vines and metal piles, small snuffly dogs, leafy street, record store that also sells excellent coffee, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, me singing to myself, laughing with Tom at the cover of Jethro Tull: A Passion Play, sidewalk shrine for a smiling faded dead man, metal doors clattering up, subway roaring over the 9th Street bridge, smoking woman still smoking outside the hotel, boys still sleeping, air conditioner rumbling. No hurricane yet.

from The Way of Life according to Laotzu [born c. 640 B.C.], translated by Witter Bynner

The less a leader does and says
The happier his people,
The more a leader struts and brags
The sorrier his people.
Often what appears to be unhappiness is happiness
And what appears to be happiness is unhappiness.
Who can see what leads to what
When happiness appears and yet is not,
When what should be is nothing but a mask
Disguising what should not be? Who can but ask
An end to such a stupid plot!
Therefore a sound man shall so square the circle
And circle the square as not to injure, not to impede:
The glow of his life shall not daze,
It shall lead.

I am thinking that this is as good a definition as any of the way in which I try to guide the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. Of course I often fail, sometimes miserably. But I keep trying.

Such heat here in Harmony, Maine! Last winter, I never thought we'd see summer again, and now we're enveloped in dense humidity, 90-degree temperatures, sweating drink glasses, warm ponds. . . . All my blog posts will be late because early morning is my only chance to work or exercise outside. On Sunday Tom and I got up at dawn and went canoeing on the lake here in town: watched the mists rise from still waters, listened to loons, floated among reeds and water lilies, ate a picnic breakfast on a granite island, capsized the canoe, had a run-in with said granite island (right leg is now quite ugly in a non-medical-emergency sort of way), laughed, drove home, and fell asleep for much of the afternoon. Yesterday morning I reamed out a vetch-infested iris bed; this morning I weeded, transplanted sunflowers, and mowed around the gardens. Tomorrow I turn my attention to the vegetable garden, and Thursday we're off to New York for a bacchanal wedding party. And next week, at long last, my life retreats to the pedestrian.

In the meantime, I am reading Iris Murdoch and Rilke, wearing linen, drinking unsweetened ice tea made with Twinings Lady Grey teabags (a fine and delicate flavor: recommended), eating Indian black-pepper rice (a lovely cold side dish: recommended), watching World Cup soccer (a waste of time but sort of recommended), and arguing with the cat (not recommended).