From Cabot Plains, Vermont

Literary naturalism best describes my current condition. The wind has shifted. Now we smell the spruce stand beyond the pond instead of the shit from the horse field. These horses here are nothing but trouble. They escape - who ever hear of such a thing! Then people from all up and down the road call to say There are some horses in my field, are they yours? There is a horse on my front porch, do you know anything about it? But the horses are not ours, they are only renting. The dog is a wild animal. It tries to round up the horses. It tries to round up the cars passing. The dog is no help to anyone and one day it is going to get itself killed. The cat, on the other hand, is a great proponent of literary naturalism: it climbs on me while I am writing, is on me right now in fact, and is useful for knocking over the great stacks of used books I've collected in Boston and Montpellier - the cat thinks I'm thinking too much about the order I'm reading things in and has dedicated itself to shaking things up. Yesterday: Hrabal, Too Long a Solitude (or too Loud? I've forgotten already) and Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte (again, I am paraphrasing with titles and spelling in general). Today: Beckett and or Lish. Have to see what the cat says. Trying to tidy up the MIT paper for a call for final submissions for possible publication in a book on the conference. No way my paper will get in with all the brainiac essays, but what the heck. But I can only stand an hour or two of footnote tweeking before I dive right back into the novel. And then at night I drink and eat and talk with my friends. Last night Marge uncovered a stack of first edition autographed limited print run books by Anis Nin, with hand printed images by Ian Hugo from 1944. I've long known that this whole house is a library. The fiction section spans two floors. There are walls of all German books down in the basement, and stack of periodicals dating back to before I was born. But I did not know there was a rare book section. Okay, the cat suggests I should get back to work.
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