Mallory's Camera

Heard from various sources that Alpha Male has died.

No official announcement (which is odd), but he hasn't been seen in any of the old familiar places, and this morning, I noticed that his FB has been deactivated.

Alpha Male was not what you would call a personal friend, but he chose me to be second-in-command of the Seekrit Private Political Group he started back when Trump was first elected, and I had a lot of affection & respect for him. He was very smart and very jolly. What you might call an old-school Republican—big capitalism fanboy but with a heart, always looking for solutions to social problems that would empower the marginalized so they wouldn't need to be caught by safety nets.

Also, he was younger than me, so you know—there was that.

Alpha Male was always talking about hosting a camp at his farm in Virginia to teach us all to shoot.

I shall miss him.

###

Other than that...

Some younger people I know had a falling out about Zionism.

The history here is interesting.

Zionism is an Ashkenazi phenomenon. Sephardic Jews had been living more or less peaceably in Palestine for hundreds of years, but it was the German death camps and the cry "Never again!" that crystallized the push for a Jewish homeland and the formation of the state of Israel.

Can you dislike Israel and still be a good Jew? Is rejection of Israel, or indeed any criticism at all, a form of antisemitism?

There are a lot of Jews who are not crazy about Israel—most notably, the Haredi who number about 2.1 million worldwide and who take the Biblical dictate that only the Messiah will establish a homeland for the Jews ver-r-ry seriously.

There are also many Jews who are so disgusted by Israel's political behavior, specifically with respect to Gaza, that they have come to question its existence.

The young person I know falls into that latter camp.

He had a very close friend who is religious in that strange way that people who reject their religious upbringing but then gradually find their way back to it are religious.

The two friends fell out over Israel and will probably never speak again. Friendship severed!

Anyway, this narrative imbued me with a deep desire to reread Chaim Potok's The Chosen, which I did yesterday since my knee was acting achey breaky once again. I also watched the movie.

The only reason I am at all interested in living forever is that I am very interested in how these political situations are gonna work themselves out.

Will Israel even be around in 50 years?

I kinda doubt it.

Temperatures dropped back to seasonal norms last night. Thank the Lord! Because I was able to sleep, deeply, lavishly, and because the swelling in my feet went away.

That's right! Swelling in my feet.

Oh, the weirdness of being old!

For the past couple of days, in the 90°+ temperatures, my feet had mild edema! My toes felt like little sausages in casings that were a tad too tight.

And this was upsetting because pedal edema is a symptom of congestive heart failure, and I wondered, How can I have congestive heart failure? I just had a perfectly normal EKG at the cardiologist's three months ago!

As I've said many times, I don't mind dying (I think), but I do mind a long, drawn-out process in which one by one, the systems falter.

###

Anyway, because of the heat and worries that my health was collapsing in a new, completely unexpected way, I did not have a good day yesterday. All day long, I kept applying the tips of my fingers to my ankles to time the fractional discoloration. Are they gonna have to replace my mitral valve? I wondered. How long have I got?

Irrational panic is not good for productivity.

Forced myself out for retail therapy. I actually don't like to shop, so I don't know why I thought retail therapy would improve my mood—maybe because it seems to work for everyone else? Dunno.

Went to the Ulster County version of a Deep Discounter I had frequented in Dutchess County, and that, even though I don't like to shop, had surprised me pleasantly in the past with the abundance of its reasonably priced hyaluronic acid face creams and surprisingly attractive leggings.

Place is ug-lee! Hideous overhead fluorescents. Wares crammed onto warehouse shelves with no effort at making stuff pretty. The employees, chatting with one another beside their mops and pails, didn't move out of the way for customers, and I got stalked by a guy in a wheelchair!

Left in a quasi-panic. Raced back to the casa and applied a full face of makeup, even foundation, which is something I have not done in months.

Throughout most of my life, I've been one of those people who look very, very different with and without makeup. Without makeup: typical Southern Italian features, very gaunt, big nose, cranial caverns. With makeup: a veritable Sophia Loren, exotic, exquisite, lovely!

This duality stayed with me most of my life.

But it kind of petered out last year.

Now, with makeup or without makeup, I just look like an old lady.

Aging! Not easy. I mean, sure, easy, in that all you have to do to achieve it is to remain Not Dead. But all the mental adjustments involved in accepting your new limitations? Very, very difficult.

###

Still reading Elizabeth Strout. Lucy Barton picks up toward the middle, though the ending falls apart. Now I'm on to Anything Is Possible. Elizabeth Strout has written a lot of books, so my reading is set till June.

Deep feeling of lassitude throughout yesterday, like my bones were made of rubber bands or something. I was tired, but there was no reason for me to be tired.

Naturally, I took this to mean I have some lethal disease. Maybe multiple myeloma—Ben had multiple myeloma, it was one of the two diagnoses that may have killed him (the other being liver cancer).

Ben's multiple myeloma announced itself in a weird way.

For months & months, he'd been limping around with sciatica, which is basically one of those wait-and-heal things. His "sciatica," though, just kept growing more & more painful until eventually he went to see a doctor for X-rays—and lo & behold, his left pelvis was fractured. But he didn't remember injuring it!

They ran a slew of tests and found the malignant plasma cells that had eaten away his bones.

Multiple myeloma is not an automatic death sentence if it's managed.

But, of course, Ben's multiple myeloma had never been managed.

Between diagnosis and death rattle, it was something like seven short weeks.

I've had that on-again, off-again ache in my right shoulder for many weeks now.

It's gotta be multiple myeloma, right?

###

Since I was dying, I decided to treat myself.

Cruised into New Paltz and had eggs Benedict at my favorite Main Street café. (Breakfast is actually my favorite meal to eat out.)

Bought books. This actually turned out to be a bust: There was an author, David Liss, whom Ben & I had both liked. He wrote serious historical novels (meaning neither Regency romances nor Forever Amber). So, I plucked his latest off the Used Books shelf, something called The Twelfth Enchantment, which turned out to be a rather clunkily written adult fantasy novel. Terrible! I guess this is something that happens to people who make their living writing; at a certain point, you run out of ideas and interest in beautifully crafted sentences and just write for word count since you have a contract to fulfill.

Spent a couple of hours weeding but did not have the stamina to climb Mt. Dirt and cart away buckets of soil. Plus I ran into Phil, and he told me, the soil was great—but you have to sift it. How the hell do you sift soil?

I guess I'll find out when I'm back from Ithaca next week.

For my birthday, I gave myself a fabulous gift: I called Schlock and told them I would not be finishing out the tax season.

I've spent the past four days decompressing.

Any job where you sit on your ass for eight plus hours a day without any opportunity to move is a bad job, but this was a particularly bad job, combined as it was with eye strain from computers and multiple documents that use tiny font, listless coworkers, and relentless pressure to service as many tense and anxious customers in as short a period of time as possible.

###

I came out of the experience with what I've self-diagnosed as mild PTSD. Writing is actually kind of a chore. (I'm used to nobody having the slightest interest in anything I have to say.) Walking two and a half miles winds me, and my lumbar muscles keep twinging because I've lost my core strength. It's difficult to concentrate because nothing really interests me.

I didn't burn any bridges when I resigned.

Who knows, right? I might be kidnapped by terrorists wielding cattle prods! Alhamdulillah! You MUST do our taxes—or else!

I might be yanked backward in time to a Nazi death camp, where the only thing standing between me and the showers is my ability to decode a W2 under corporate supervision.

In other words, there might be circumstances under which I would consent to work again at Schlock.

Might.

So my tone over the phone, as I was subsequently contacted by each and every one of the bureaucratic overlords, was regretful: Gosh! I love you guys! Everyone is so great! I just burned myself out!

And who knows? Maybe that's true.

Well, next year, you'll only work a few days a week, said one of the bureaucratic overlords.

Ha, ha, ha. Right.

For the most part, the clients I worked with loved me. I got all five-star reviews.

###

Talk about your dysfunctional business models: Schlock is like a Halloween Superstore dedicated to Uncle Sam's payday.

Will Schlock even be around in five years? I kinda doubt it.

There's a lot of competition for those IRS hostages. Chiefly from TurboTax (and if Schlock is Blockbuster, TurboTax is Netflix). But also from the dwindling number of other in-person tax prep services like Jackson Hewitt, multiple free online sites, high-end accountants, and, of course, my own alma mater, TaxBwana, which does 1.7 million returns a year.

TurboTax doesn't do in-person consultations, so no competition there. (Though one must wonder whether the operational costs of maintaining bricks and mortar are that much more than the revenue stream it yields.) And TurboTax is actually a bit more expensive for comparable online and downloadable products. But it's rooted in that ever-popular DIY ethos. And it's going after a more sustainable market.

Just contrast and compare the television commercials in which Schlock tax preparers, always depicted in identical green crew-neck sweaters, interact with middle-of-the-road Americans. Sure, there are such things as middle-of-the-road Americans, but that's an externally applied label; most Americans prefer to think of themselves as exceptional. Meanwhile, TurboTax preparers wear edgy black blazers and magenta button-down shirts as if they're dressing down for an elegant dinner party while catering to youthful folk with tattoos, piercings, and anime dance moves.

###

I haven't done very much since I stopped working. Talking to other people is an effort. What, after all, could I possibly have to say that other people might want to hear?

I make myself walk the two and a half miles I'm capable of walking. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll be able to walk three miles! Or, at least, two and three-quarters.

I forced myself to finish The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. If you look at the novel as a meditation on the aftermath of colonialism, it actually kinda works—particularly with its minor characters: the unlucky Mina Foi, the vain, self-involved Babita, the West-obsessed Dadaji. The status details and textures of everyday Indian life really sparkle.

But the main characters—the two lovers and Sonia's evil magus lover, Ilan—are mere paperweights used to keep pieces of the plot from flying away. Ilan's characterization, in particular, is irritating: Sonia's point of view is not established compellingly enough to determine why she would find this man the least bit attractive.

Plus, Kiran Desai uses Ilan to introduce a deeply lame magical realism arc—this despite bashing magical realism as a literary conceit in earlier pages of the book. (Sonia is a literature major and a writer, so the character is used as a conduit for many of Desai's theories on literature.) Was the author aiming for irony? If so, it was badly executed.

And the prose style felt syrupy. It never shifted rhythm. Momentum never built around important moments, so every moment was equally important and unimportant. Perhaps that was a deliberate choice on the author's part. I dunno.

###

I sit and read in a chair in the backyard, so I can let the two surviving chickens out of their dark little coop. Perhaps my human presence counts as vigilance. Maybe my presence will keep the predators off.

The chicken gurlZ come out greedy for tortilla treats. But then they take off and hide in the bushes. Do they have any specific memory of Grey Chicken's death? Who knows? Some birds (parrots) have excellent memories, so maybe they do. The chicken gurlZ sense something, and whatever that is, it's enough to make them cower. No more strutting around the acreage! Every animal would rather be safe than free, I suppose.

Night before last, I couldn't sleep. I lay all night in that strange hypnagogic state where you're completely aware of the external world beyond your closed eyelids, but the passage of time is very distorted.

I hadn't had any caffeine since 8 am the previous morning.

I hadn't had any alcohol.

I was anxious, but anxiety is the matrix in which all of us humans live nowadays. Being alive right now is anxiety-provoking! Nothing is going unusually wrong in my little life, & there was no Horrible Thing awaiting me the very next day that I wanted to avoid.

So, my sleeplessness was a great mystery.

When the first light broke around 6 am, I got up from my bed.

You will simply call them at 9 & tell them you can't come in today, I told myself.

I was amazed by how guilty this made me feel! I mean, it's not like I owe Schlock anything but my labor while my ass is in their chair.

But I did feel guilty! What a horrible failure you are, said the little voice in my head. What a perpetual disappointment to all & sundry.

###

This sleeplessness has happened before. Not often—but often enough so that I'm familiar with its manifestation. Usually it happens on nights when I'm anxious about performing the next day.

Thus, it happened during a trip to Baltimore a few years back with a person I didn't know very well at the time (but subsequently became a good friend). Thus, it happened in Ithaca last Thanksgiving when I was about to be trotted out on a round of holiday parties.

It's one of the banes of old age.

Old people just don't sleep very well.

###

Anyway, I managed to have a fairly productive day with my ass not in the chair.

In the morning, I polished off Remuneration for one client & got a modest assignment from another. If I'm diligent about husbanding resources, I may actually be in better financial shape this year than I was last.

In the afternoon, I scampered off to the New Paltz Community Garden & puttered. My plot is in surprisingly good shape. Whoever had it before me stayed on top of the weeds, and the soil in those raised boxes looks surprisingly good.

In the late afternoon, I dropped by the Gardiner Bakehouse and spent an hour or so nibbling chocolate chip cookies and reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which is the Big New Novel of the season.

I want to like Sonia and Sunny more than I actually like it. It has some surprisingly good insights:

An arranged marriage story, even one that ended six months later in divorce, felt true and false. True because it happened. False because it was feeding the West what it wanted to consume about the East. The audience made it false. Lifting this one story out of all the others made it false.

But I'm finding Kiran Desai's much-praised writing style a bit banal. Her metaphors are pretty word strings but they don't make much sense. And her non-Indian characters make no sense at all.



Claude sent me an email: Are keeping your garden this year . Hope you fine , spring is rite there . Lmk

Claude's spoken English is very good (though it preserves Gallic word order), but he never saw the slightest utility in learning how to write English.

It made me very sad to write back that no, I would not be coming back. I really love the Hyde Park Community Garden, it's just such a beautiful, serene place, and I really like all my fellow gardeners there:



But it's utterly insane to plan on driving across the bridge multiple times each week. The time sink, sure, but also, I don't like driving.

I still haven't decided where I want to move. Ithaca is attractive, but the problem with Ithaca is that just five miles outside the city limits, you're in Alabama except with snow. The Southern Tier is a Trumpy place & getting to anywhere else I might want to hang out (for which read New York City) is a real ordeal from there. Yes, RTT is there, and RTT loves me—but it's not as though RTT would want to hang out with me.

So, I'm also contemplating maybe moving back to Dutchess County. Where I know people. Where I'll be close to Metro-North train stations that can deposit me in Grand Central Station in just under two hours. My old friend Carl A has told me I can stay overnight in the guest room of his apartment on the upper West Side anytime. I should probably take him up on the offer.

Claude wrote me back: It’s sad that u leavin us but we ll keep u in mind for next year u decide to come back . I don’t ve a à person to replace u right now . Stay in touch

Baaaaad time of year. At this point in my life, I'd rather be savoring the moments, sprinkling them with imagination, stretching them out. But instead, all I can do is hunker down, stare out a window at the pitiless winter landscape, reassure myself, This, too, shall pass.

I'll want those moments back when I'm dying, that's for sure.

###

Meanwhile, it didn't snow all day yesterday, but it might as well have because the part of the day it didn't snow was spent reading the sky, testing the wind, waiting for it to snow.

I did a bit of Useful Work and a useless tax class on Zoom—hey! they're paying me. Played around some with the Work in Progress and unwittingly solved a transition problem before it could turn into awkward prose. Did not exercise, which is possibly why I could not break the gloomy mood.

###

Finished I Have Some Questions for You. Boarding school books must be an actual literary genre! This one is not near the top of the list. The protagonist is a celebrity because she helms a successful podcast. And I'm thinking, Really??? I mean, there are celebrity podcasters, but mostly they were celebrities before they became podcasters; they are leveraging their celebrity to carry the podcast, right?

The protagonist has this gurgley, chick-lit voice, which is wrong, wrong, wrong for a murder mystery. The basic conceit of the book (actually kinda interesting) is that the real murderer, the figure emerging from the shadows, is the teacher who had an affair with the murder victim, the same sympathetic teacher who devoted energy to bringing the protagonist out of her adolescent shell. Except this proves to be a misfire! So, what we're left with at the end of the book is that the titular You behaved... inappropriately. And those kinds of transgressions are less moral absolutes than violations of au courant cultural imperatives.

###

Speaking of au courant cultural imperatives...

In the evening, I watched multiple episodes of the real estate bling show, Owning Manhattan.

And fell into despair!

How do people end up spending $250 million on an apartment?

The $300 heating oil bill for me this month is gonna be tough to pay!

What kind of an abysmal, absolute failure am I that I can't spend $250 million on an apartment? That I can't even spend 50¢ on an apartment?

Why does money have so many zeroes in it now?

Plus, the Upper West Side that I grew up in is practically unrecognizable now. What did they have to tear down to build the great glass tower at 200 Amsterdam? I was scouring my memory. What used to be there? And suddenly this visual sense memory just rushed in: Annie's old apartment on W. 68th and the little diner next door to it, I could see the breakfast plates now, practically smell them: the sunny-side up eggs floating in a little pool of grease, the crunchy hashbrowns, the thick white china plates...

What will happen to that $250 million apartment in 100 years? Will it still be the apex of luxury living? It can't possibly be, right? The cycle is the Ozymandias Factor, boom then bust, palaces dissolving into tenaments.

But I can't even wrap my head around what comes next.

Shortly, I must toddle off to wildest, wooliest Walker Valley because twice a year, the Shawangunk Dems volunteer to pick up garbage along Highway 52.

I am not looking forward to it: Evidently, I wore the wrong shoes tromping yesterday because I woke up in the middle of the night with shin splints and am insufficiently rested this morning.

Beyond that, naught much to report.

I Remunerated (though, of course, never enough.)

I started reading The Great Believers, an epic novel about the AIDS pandemic. The novel is excellent and, moreover, written in a style that is so outside my personal stylebook, I won't find myself unconsciously plagiarizing from it. (That is an issue for me. Even in my dotage, I have an excellent memory for words, and quite often, I can't remember whether I wrote a sentence, or somebody else did.)

In the evening, I went vox with Ichabod who is getting a promotion in the PD universe which will allow him to defend people facing life sentences. The promotion comes with a hefty raise!

And for once, the kiskas are getting along and acting adorable.

But I didn't work on the Work In Progress yesterday.

Instead, I read around 200 pages of The Hallmarked Man (JK Rowling writing in drag as "Robert Galbraith").

And I felt guilty!

Had I spent the afternoon simultaneously shooting smack, embezzling $10 million from Amnesty International, & fucking the entire basketball team at Wallkill Middle School, I don't think I could have felt more guilty.

So weird how after a lifetime of moral ambiguity and anomie, I've metamorphosed into Marcus Aurelius in my advancing years.

###

Galbraith—Okay, take off that mustache, JK!—Rowling is not a great writer. I only made it through Harry Potter because RTT—now a man of nearly 31!—demanded it as bedtime reading. The Harry Potter movies made me appreciate the impressive scope of Rowling's imagination, but I never got that from her prose because her prose, frankly, bored me. It is very subject->verb->object.

The Cormoran Strike novels, though, are far better written than the Harry Potter novels. And the world-building is just as immersive. The immersion is not into magic but into a highly stylized London where everybody's weird regional accents must be phonetically transliterated: Ah want tae and Ah’ve got people aftae me and an’ you don’t wanna start fuckin’ wiv the geezer ’oo put out the ’it, awright?

Rowling is worse than Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, & Margaret Mitchell in this regard. (For how many years after I read Gone With the Wind at age 9, did I search dictionaries for the action verb to gwine?) I much prefer the Thomas Hardy method of rendering dialect in misspellings, colloquialisms, and archaic word forms.

(To get around this, I've started listening to the audiobook while I'm reading the book. Robert Glenister is a truly fabulous reader.)

Also, it is actually inadviseable to read more than 50 pages of any Cormoran Strike book in one sitting because there are just so many minor characters to remember, and one keeps losing track of whether they are important to the immediate plot or part of the endlessly expanding & permutating Cormoran Strike backstory.

Cormoran himself is an interesting character. But his foil & love interest, the girl detective Robin, is not. Robin is a blank hole on the page into which words like "plucky", "resilient", "resourceful", are poured like cement. Robin is bor-rr-ing.

The Hallmarked Man is the eighth novel in the Cormoran Strike series, and at this point, any mystery plot is entirely subsidiary to the will they/won't they question, as in When will Cormoran & Robin dew-ww-wwww it, and will Rowling describe it on the page?

Does this make The Hallmarked Man a romance novel maquerading as a mystery-slash-procedural? Or a mystery-slash-procedural cross-dressing as a romance novel?

Hard to say.

I do wonder what male readers make of Cormoran's perpetual mooniness. I don't think men fall in love like that. Though I'm not a man, so what do I know?

Cash infusion made me merry & lazy. Though I did tromp: The weather could not be more perfect. As is my wont, I am simultaneously reading and books-on-taping. The work is Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin biography. (It's nonfiction for me until I either hammer out or give up on this first draft.)

Benjamin Franklin does remind me a bit of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; he had a surprisingly 20th-century mind for an 18th-century-er.

###

Viz that first draft: The next section will be 1,000 words or so on the Memorial.

I have morphed the dead guy sufficiently from Brian so that I can't just use my own recollections of Brian's memorial.

I figured nobody wants to read about the Romantic Life of an Old Guy, so I shifted everybody's age down 30 years. All the characters are now in their early 40s, and that means they all have to have jobs—Brian-cum-Neal is a public defender! 😀—and some people from Neal's job have to turn up at the memorial.

I am thinking one of those people could provide comic relief by being one of Neal's disreputable clients that he saved from a 20-year prison sentence or something.

But, of course, I need a backstory on that one—in addition to the usual peerless prose and scintillating dialogue.

Ichabod takes client confidentiality very seriously, so I can't ask him for public defender backstories.

About six weeks ago, I saw a craigslist posting for a collective household in T-burg: Someone had just bought a Big Old House; they wanted sympatico people to move into it to form a sympatico household. Numerous photos of the house, of the grounds. They liked animals! They wanted people with pets!

I immediately dashed off a reply: Here are my many virtues. Blah, blah, blah.

I was disappointed when I did not hear back.

Okay, I thought. Well, not everyone wants to live with a septuagenarian. Or maybe they had all the residents but one lined up, and I was just not that one.

Three days ago, I saw the listing again and replied again—a tad more plaintively.

And did not hear back.

This irked me.

I mean, my reply had been a masterpiece! Flash fiction of the highest order! Sprightly yet subtle! Informative without the cringe factor!

Maybe I'm just repulsive! I thought. Back in the days of the Little Store, on days when we made practically no sales, I would often wonder about my own repulsiveness. I figured it was sort of like a radio beacon; depending on the weather or the white noise, it would pulse strongly or erratically, but it was always there, and people sensed it, and that's why they didn't flock to the Little Store to buy dozens of bottles of my own trademarked Monterey hot sauces Beast of Eden & The Chilis of Wrath!

Brian was very good at quelling this particular anxiety loop.

"Repeat after me," he'd say. "Say it loud, say it proud: 'I Am a Real Human Girl'."

He also found it extremely hilarious, which is exactly the right reaction for someone like me. I need to be laughed out of my own psychic contortions. The "Poor you" schtick doesn't work on me because even at my most self-pitying, I am perfectly cognizant of the fact that my life is better than 90% of the lives on this planet.

###

Anyway, the woman who bought the house finally emailed me yesterday, enormously apologetic that she hadn't contacted me sooner: I've been in the process of moving! My mom came to town to help!

We Zoomed this morning. And were amazingly sympatico.

She is an untenured professor at Cornell, proud member of the SDA (Social Democrats of America), writing a book on the history of child care labor in the U.S., how various stakeholders (labor unions, immigrant rights advocacy groups, federal agencies, municipal task forces, nanny and domestic worker placement agencies) value child care labor. She is also drop-dead gorgeous, so naturally, my mamala mind began sizing her up as a potential Ichabod mate. I restrained myself from asking how wide her hips are, though.

Next step will be a meeting with the other house residents and a tour of the house. Conflicting schedules have pushed that meeting into August.

If all goes well, I'll give one month's notice at the beginning of September and move in October.

Fingers crossed!

###

Other than that...

I have been going through the motions simply because one must, but the spark is not there.

I remind myself: Good habits take a long time to make, so it's unwise to break them. If you stop doing all the beneficial things—exercise! self-care! make-up! cooking dinner! laundry!—you fall into a kind of mental swamp from which it becomes increasingly difficult to hoist yourself out. Those little habits are grounding. Grounding is something I have issues with having no earth signs whatsoever in my astrological chart.

###

I harvested my first cucumber from the Hyde Park garden:



The tomatoes still have a month or so before they come in.

###

Yesterday afternoon, I wandered over to the New Paltz garden for the first time in three weeks. The garden was hosting a mid-harvest potluck. I took one look at all the cheerful, earnest, handsome gardeners with their endless variations on cucumbers in yogurt dressing, and thought, Yes! Babbling affably to strangers is my one Great Superpower, but I cannot do this.

And ran away.

But not before I checked out my plot. It is once more overgrown with weeds, but the weeds are not unmanageable—I could get rid of them in a single day now that the heat wave is broken. Plus there is one little tomato plant! I grew it a peat cup from seed and planted it with a bunch of other seedlings, and they all died but this tomato plant survived my neglect! Surely, it deserves other vegetables! Basil, I'm thinking. I didn't plant any basil in the Hyde Park garden this year, and I miss my pesto.

###

However much of a struggle human company and good habits are, I am still able to lose myself if the distraction is right.

I've been speed-reading my way through the complete works of Jennifer Haigh. Finished Baker Towers, her first novel about the small Pennsylvania coal mining town where she grew up.

Kinda interesting to see how Haigh's literary chops have evolved. Baker Towers, written in 2004, is kinda your straight-up Kristin Hannah-style novel, simple declarative sentences, not much in the way of thematic connective tissue between the various characters' POV sections. Heat and Light, on the other hand, written in 2016, is extremely ambitious from a literary point of view with a rather complex figurative subtext and a surprising end point. I sense the Jennifer Egan influence.

###

I also watched Andrea Arnold's American Honey.

American Honey is a road trip film, an odyssey. Eighteen-year-old Texas girl living in squalid conditions with an abusive father runs off with an itinerant magazine crew. High jinx ensue.

It won the Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and though Sean Baker's The Florida Project came out only one year after, it's difficult not to imagine that American Honey didn't have a profound influence on Baker's movie. They are both describing the same phenomenon, how youth transforms otherwise harsh & unforgiving environments where people stuggle for survival into wild adventures filled with promise.

It's a long movie, nearly three hours, but I was transfixed throughout.

Two-thirds of the reviews I read afterwards complained that the movie just went on and on and on, but nothing happened! I think those reviewers have spent too much time in the Marvel Universe. This kind of story best is told by seamless integration of the music, the character acting, the improvised dialogue, the way locations are shot, the vibes in short. It would be poorly served by a linear narrative grid.