Rain, fog, public library, little girls with their summer dresses on backwards, elderly gentlemen wrestling with library computers, sensible shoes galore. More later.

Moderate yet impressive East Coast crags. Happy dog. An Internet connection that is vacationing elsewhere. Early morning hike up a cliff with the one I love. More later.

A whirlwind trip to Franconia and back. And today? First, Paul's piano recital; then, family-plus-poodle folds itself into the clown car and hits the road yet again, this time for a week with my parents and my sister's family on Mount Desert Island. It's a retirement party for my father, thrown by my father; and since the cottage we're staying in has wonky Internet, you may or may not hear from me very regularly. Sometimes, if you sit at one particular corner of the kitchen table and kind of lean back toward the wall, you can get a signal. But odds are that James will already be hogging that seat.

Since we never go to MDI during tourist season, this will be a strange new land. When I think of Bar Harbor, I think of February fog and the Thirsty Whale, the only place open for lunch. It's a fine place to drink beer during an ice storm while the boys play AC/DC on the jukebox, but I imagine things will be different in August.

Fortunately the cottage is not a strange new land. I already know about the view of Goose Cove from the bed.

A quick post:

I'm rereading Robertson Davies's What's Bred in the Bone and have been thinking about why I like this novel. There's plenty not to like, including an insouciant/flippant/comic/instructive attitude toward art, philosophy, and scholarship that I find rather wearing. But there's also plenty to like. For instance, he is a master at illustrating how one might almost become an artist, and he is also very good at delineating the way in which an artistic temperament can grow from a background of mediocrity. In this case, that background is a hick Ontario lumber town during the Great War. Davies and his fellow Ontarian, Alice Munro, are not much alike in their writing styles; but both are very, very good at comprehending the complications of backwaters.

Now I have to pack my suitcase. Have a lovely couple of days without me. I hope the sun shines for you (unless you'd prefer rain), and the mosquitoes look elsewhere for blood.

Tomorrow I head west again, this time for a brief overnight in Vermont before heading to Franconia and the Frost Place Advanced Seminar. When I last arrived at the seminar, close to a decade ago, I was a participant with two small children and a passel of nerves. This time, I will be a visiting faculty member with two teenage boys and a passel of nerves. So strange.

But this time I'll have John Milton to keep me company, and he is more of a comfort than one might think. Just ask Wordsworth.

London, 1802

William Wordsworth

Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men:

Oh! raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way,

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

This morning I received an acceptance letter from Solstice, which wants to publish my essay "Hated by Literature" in an upcoming issue. In other words, as of today, every single chapter in my unpublishable manuscript, The Vagabond's Bookshelf, has been contracted for individual publication. Perhaps this makes no sense to you. Well, don't ask me to explain because I can't.

Still, I'm grateful to the Solstice editors; very grateful. This has been a difficult piece to place. Its primary subject is my ambiguous relationship with The Autobiography of Malcolm X. My friend Baron has posited that liberal white journal editors don't want to risk publishing a piece that might make them look less than sympathetic to the views of such a charismatic icon. Maybe that's true; I don't know. But I haven't had any more luck with "women's issues" journals, which one might think would be interested in a piece that tries to juggle fascination with the rhetoric and the ideal with disbelief at its casual cruelty to women.

I know that a few of you read versions of this piece as I was writing it, and few others heard me read a section from the essay at the Frost Place in June, so maybe you have some thoughts on the matter. As I've mentioned before, I don't tend to fall into the goddamn-publishers-are-all-against-me mire. We all get rejection letters, but I get fewer of them many writers do; I can only be grateful for that. I do, however, consistently fall into the of-course-this-deserves-to-be-rejected-because-it's-so-stupid mire, which is just as seductive and illusory as the conspiracy-theory mud hole. So when someone suggests that my work is too politically challenging to be published, as Baron did, I sit up straight and say, "What? You must be talking about someone else. I'm the person with the stupid essay, remember?" Ah, isn't easy to fall into every bog you meet?

Among the boy set in my house, Fried Fish Night is a popular occasion, and one they don't get to enjoy all that often. But because fried fish is also an excellent meal to serve in a small kitchen with a rotating and juvenile table population, that's what I'm dishing up to our friends and their three boys tonight.

My approach to Fried Fish Night is to buy firm-fleshed, inexpensive fillets, such as pollack, and cut them into serving portions. Then I make a batter of flour, egg, salt, pepper, and a tiny amount of baking powder: it's a Venetian frying batter I learned from Marcella Hazan, and it works well with vegetables too. When I'm ready to cook, I pour some peanut oil into the wok, enough to come about an inch and a half up the side of the pan. I let the fat get good and hot, which is easy and relatively safe with peanut oil; drop the fish into the batter and then into the pan; and voila. Fried Fish Night.

As long as the weather cooperates for harvesting, we'll also be having roasted green beans, arugula and cucumbers, watermelon, and blueberry and/or raspberry cake. And we'll be having some noise as well. I guarantee that.

In the meantime, I note that it's started to rain. Blueberries are beginning to seem less likely, aren't they?