September 1, 2013

Early, the night crickety but otherwise silent. It’s my birthday and I try to think of everything as portentous, either summarizing or prophetic. I hurry to my Facebook page to see how many birthday greetings I’ve gotten, and from whom.

Interesting muscle cramps after yesterday’s garden exertions.

So much energy has gone into understanding my life in the last few years that I do, to some degree, to a degree unknowable until I understand it better. Understanding doesn’t lead to happiness, I suppose, but it does lead to a more simplified confusion.
     
         here follows material which must not be blogged. . .

Two students want me to help them with senior papers on books I have not read. For tall Max I’m reading Ron Rash’s The World Made Straight. It is both good and not. I think of Toni Morrison’s last book and compare it to Rash, and realize one of the styles of the time is to write of horrible people at the bottom edge, so debased that the least human gesture may be taken as a moral victory. Once the formula is down, it's the easiest thing in the world to write, building not very far because you started at nothing, making no useful discovery because your character has three hundred pages to get to the level of human. It’s a variety of science fiction: put people in a ghetto or a swamp with everything human taken away, and see what happens.  We cheer when they arrive at the point we passed at thirteen. For chesty Ryan I’m reading Vonnegut’s Mother Night. That’s another thing altogether; I’m not deep enough in to figure out what. I have always liked Vonnegut.