October 14, 2020

Monteverdi on CD.

The bulb in the elephant lamp that lights my writing desk was out this morning, after having burned day and night without ceasing since the day I moved in. 

Long walks beside the river, to take in the autumn loveliness, but also to keep the step counter happy. The swirls and upwellings of just the French Broad are so various and  unaccountable I wonder if anyone could form an image of the whole and actual surface of the Earth. How to measure the surface of an eddy? The river has been near flood stage most of these weeks, the sad artificial wetlands brimming and alive with mallards. 

Gene at Moonshine Cove was serious about bringing out The One with the Beautiful Necklaces on November 7. Chose cover art done by my old studio mate Elizabeth. Would have done it myself, but–. They sent me their corrected version, complaining that my quotation marks had been backwards and that my speech attributions were overdone. They claimed to have made changes, but I didn’t notice them, so they must be well. Corrected it again myself through a long Saturday, finding mistakes which had eluded us, and noticing cruelly my habitually elliptical sentence structure. My guess is that I rewrote 1000 helping verbs and variations on “be”: Why my impulse is to write “She was going” rather than “She went” I don’t know, except that I wish to indicate a process begun in the past and ongoing, an indication which is almost never necessary. I saved that corrected manuscript weirdly somehow, and they couldn’t read it and I couldn’t retrieve it, so on Monday afternoon I took a deep breath and began again. I’m keeping to myself the truth that I was delighted–at least relieved– to have another crack at it. The second revision was far better and more thorough than the first. Delivered it all Tuesday afternoon and they said it was well. We’ll see.