I always enjoy plundering the local free library boxes during my morning walks, and yesterday I was pleased to find two nearly mint-condition copies of Life from 1969: one a special issue about the moon landing, the other titled "The Incredible Year '68." Both contain many cigarette and cheap liquor ads. One encourages me to buy a Toyota because it comes with "backup lights." Both, oddly, include long poems by James Dickey. But in my view, the piece-de-resistance is a poetry review by someone named Charles Elliott, which opens like this:

When Judgment Day arrives in the seminars of Elysium, Elizabeth Bishop stands a pretty fair chance of being put down as a minor poet.

It then touches on the superiorities of Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Marianne Moore before spending two columns grudgingly admitting that EB has something going for her, though it can't possibly be lasting.

It's the oddest review--one essentially saying "Here's a book I like but I refuse to believe that people in the future will care about such things," as if legacy should be the prime mover in any discussion of art, as if simple present-tense pleasure is a lesser experience.

Of course the comedy, nearly 60 years later, lies in the Judgment Day that's already arrived: in our own fashionable pantheon, Bishop's star floats higher than any of the other names that Elliott chose to taunt her with. Lowell has been reduced to "crazy guy," Moore to "technician," Jarrell to nothing at all . . . who remembers Jarrell? This is just as unfair as Elliott's original review was, but so go "the seminars of Elysium."

**

Sea fog rolled into the little northern city last night, and it lingers this morning. The neighborhood is green and misty and freighted with wet, and the air smells of brine. But the air, though humid, is pleasantly cool, and I am wrapped in my red bathrobe by the open window, happy to be drinking hot black coffee, happy to be listening to a robin who seems to be pretending to be a thrush--those long liquid sad remarks, the music of a forest evening suddenly reenacted on a city morning.

I worked on a couple of poem drafts yesterday, finished the Erdrich novel, started rereading Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen, made garlicky pappardelle with shrimp, scallions, and chard, listened to some of the Sox game, stared out into the fog. Next week I'll start the move back into work life . . . it's time, and I'm ready, but my little early summer hiatus has been sweet, and I'll miss it.

Meanwhile today I suppose we'll do something or other about car shopping. The credit union still hasn't decided how much money to lend us, and T has been working out various scenarios which he has yet to share with me, but Saturday is our only window to visit a dealership, so I expect we will gird on our swords and stride into the fray at some point today. (Though why aren't dealerships open on Sundays? That seems like a stupid decision for a capitalist to make.)