let me tell you that it's in the air. mortality, the literary fall; transience, actual falls and winters past. the culling of the fold. i know why i feel so guilty but i keep asking anyway.

there's at least a smattering of fallen leaves if you look around. fall is here and i hope it starts to feel like it soon.

'It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, as it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay.'

-- Martin Amis, Time's Arrow

i saw sarah for the first time in years today and we had a pleasant conversation; it was all i could do to constantly remind myself that she wasn't alex. the two look so similar and i suppose even are similar in some ways, but it's obviously a different series of memories with each of them, and getting those mixed up would obviously be confusing and awkward. it's that way a lot now: sometimes i slip up. i'm not sure if my memory's as good as it used to be. it's those odd behind-the-scenes-of-a-conversation technical actions; there's probably an art to it but i learned by doing through long sweet nights on the phone with monica. that's how i always explain it to people, my conversational renaissance, my ability to talk to people and apparently be good at it. these days i always feel like i'm on the verge of a severe slip.

actually, i'm noticing that i'm a lot more nervous these days in general. it may be intermediate french or the fact that i have a lot more to lose or driving more or the lingering aftereffects of any number of life's changes and challenges. i get up earlier and go to bed later, living long full days and always getting everything done. somewhere on the edges of this i almost commit some grave and unknown error, pulling myself back from the precipice at the last moment. at least that's what it feels like.

a strong sense of calm overcomes. i was in dracut saturday night and sunday morning for the repair of sasha's ailing muffler (she's running much more quietly now) and got to experience my first good thunderstorm in a while in the early morning hours. the house shook, waking everyone, but i had the downstairs to myself, in smooth dark stretched upon a pull-out bed, interrupted by approaching flashes of lightning. a rain fell at last.

i've been taken up, caught up, taken away, raptured, if you will (and some do), by a series of images today. driving laura home when she needed it after the move, unexpectedly in the night. i put on saltbreakers at one point, the point right when we were off the highway and into the darkness and those long roads and lighted houses/oases of what we figuratively call the 'country,' out there. my fondest memories that don't involve laura are of the stars there, this difficult to articulate search for an absence of light pollution and a clear summer or autumn view of spangled skies; perhaps a winter of frozen stars as in that story i never finished about a conversation with catherine that once took place.

'to the country' came on and due to her upsetness and my concern, it, like all the songs before it, broke a silence hovering all around us as the dark road passed solidly beneath us:

don't recognise my face
everybody knows your game
feel like i’m running in place
everything's changed, everything's changed
i'm gonna move to the country
she's gonna move
so i can see the stars
heavenly stars, the heavenly stars, the heavenly stars

she's gonna move
heavenly stars, the heavenly stars, the heavenly stars

i dove into the night
bathed in the beautiful blue light
sheltered inside a bat cave
me and my baby had a conversation
gonna move to the country
she's gonna move
so i can see the stars
heavenly stars, the heavenly stars, the heavenly stars

i'm gonna move to the country
she's gonna move
so i can see the stars
heavenly stars, the heavenly stars, the heavenly stars

and with that, there it was. the perfect song at the perfect moment, but it was cloudy. but we knew they were there; we knew they were there in a way unlike the way they are in our adopted home here on the north shore, although the ocean is nice.

perfect song, perfect moment, perfect feeling: one of the last things jay atkinson told us in creative writing class last spring involved retelling the story of his answer to a question asked of him regarding how he wanted his writing to make people feel. i should have written it down. this was how i recorded it here back on the actual day:

'driving home late at night after dropping someone off on a pleasant summer evening with all the windows open when the perfect song comes on the radio, and the feeling that comes along with it, the feeling of absolute unity and a flavour of providence...'

i want to write like that, i want to evoke the feeling i'm having right now remembering that night. i'm not setting the bar so high that i seek to evoke the feeling of the moment or series of moments in which the initial feeling, the feeling prime, takes place. it'd end up looking like this, which i suppose is more a record than an evocation, and a confusing one at that. but that night was a good night too.


elizabeth crane's all this heavenly glory is memorable, you think when reading it, mainly for its insanely long sentences (crane's trademark). when you finish you know it is memorable and gift-like for its final chapter, a departure from the rest of the structure in some ways, describing a wished-for next life by the book's protagonist. it is warm, bitter, chilly, tear-jerking; it is home and it is the midwest and you really have to read it to see if you find it as heart-stoppingly meaningful as i do at this or any other time of the year. when you finish the hardcover edition of the book you know it is memorable for the last chapter and the cover. the narrative, i tell people when i show them the book, is a chronologically unordered series of short pieces which put together a complete portrait of crane's character at various stages of her life, represented, brilliantly, on the cover by the points of some stargazer's femme-constellation.

i have that book on my new bookshelf, turned outward so i can see the cover.

i remember reading jonathan edwards in high school in one of those awful high school literary books, the standard survey of the most boring and terrible of american literature-- you know, our home-grown mediocrity and superstition which always includes 'sinners in the hands of an angry god' and some william bradford. but i also chanced upon 'sarah pierpont' and was momentarily enchanted with a sweet feeling that ended up lingering long afterward, ascending to the fore at odd times. he describes her piety, mainly; the subject matter as such holds little interest, but the style of presentation -- a stylised love-letter to the god-fearing jesus girl of his dreams (underage, we conveniently forget) -- has some appeal as all personal writings do: they may not be meaningful to us in the way they are to the writer, but one can almost picture the fiery calvinist setting these thoughts down on a loose sheaf in a moment of reverie. it concludes:

'she will sometimes go about from place to place, singing sweetly; and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure; and no one knows for what. she loves to be alone, and to wander in the fields and on the mountains, and seems to have someone invisible always conversing with her.'

the imagination of edwards putting together a picture of his beloved as if it were a third-person account leads naturally into our imagination putting together a fictitious picture of her perspective, as a matter of course inverting her wandering days to lingering languorous nights in the congregational wilderness and what heavenly glory she must have seen, what voice may have spoken to her, what life she may have wished to live. immortalised in a paragraph. how she succeeded without even trying in my, our yearning for a better look at the stars; how she couldn't go to the country because it was home and home was already there. sarah pierpont and midnight in early america, some of that queer autumn evening glow still shining out of her pious eyes as she looked up and connected the dots.

ashley: if you still read this, hello. i was telling laura about our xena-as-a-planet disagreement from last year and she seemed to think it was funny. if you didn't hear, the moon of said planet was officially named 'dysnomia,' after the greek daimon of lawlessness. just by way of epilogue is all.

anyway, in the spirit of your entry of september the third, i offer a re-quoting of a passage i quoted back in april:

'friends are lost-- more all the time, it's sad to think about it. all those long conversations in vanished kitchens when for an evening we achieved a perfect understanding that, no matter what happened, we were true comrades and our affection would endure, and now our friendship is gone to pieces and i can't account for it. why don't i see you anymore? did i disappoint you? did you call me one night to say you were in trouble and hear a tone in my voice that made you say you were just fine?'

-- garrison keillor, lake wobegon days

things are kind of sad sometimes.

an ongoing series:
summer 2005 , 05-06 academic year, summer 2006, 06-07 academic year.

Saturday – Ian McEwan
Red Azalea – Anchee Min [re-read]
Wild Ginger – Anchee Min [re-read]
Becoming Madame Mao – Anchee Min [re-read]
No One Belongs Here More Than You – Miranda July
How We Are Hungry – Dave Eggers
The Bad Popes – Russell Chamberlin
Avalon – Anya Seton
The Accidental – Ali Smith
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf [re-read]
Cold Spring Harbor – Richard Yates
It Can’t Happen Here – Sinclair Lewis [re-read]
The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America – Lawrence Goodwyn
The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
The First Sex – Elizabeth Gould Davis
The Basque History of the World – Mark Kurlansky
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy [re-read]
The Knife Thrower and Other Stories – Steven Millhauser
Ann the Word – Richard Francis
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
The Origin of Satan – Elaine Pagels
The Gnostic Gospels – Elaine Pagels [re-read[
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath [re-read]
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov [re-read]
Underworld – Don DeLillo
Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates [re-read]
Russian Journal – Andrea Lee

'In the long summers of my childhood, games flared up suddenly, burned to a brightness, and vanished forever. The summers were so long that they gradually grew longer than the whole year, they stretched out slowly beyond the edges of our lives, but at every moment of their vastness they were drawing to an end, for that's what summers mostly did: they taunted us with endings, marched always into the long shadow thrown backward by the end of vacation. And because our summers were always ending, and because they lasted forever, we grew impatient with our games, we sought new and more intense ones, and as the crickets of August grew louder, and a single red leaf appeared on branches green with summer, we threw ourselves as if desperately into new adventures, while the long days, never changing, grew heavy with boredom and longing.'

-- Steven Millhauser, 'Flying Carpets'