The Trouble Always Begins Tomorrow

There are good days in writing and, because opposites tend to come in pairs, there are bad days. You enter the picture with full awareness of both kinds of days, having experienced both.  Being who you are, you bring into the calculus an in-between or so-so writing day , which in deconstruction is neither good nor bad.

In some cases, a good writing day is one in which you discover the name of a character you've been working with, discover being the appropriate verb because your discovery relied upon you listening to the character.  Hi, my name is Frank.  

In other cases, a good writing day is one in which you get the vision of a scene you knew had to be written because the story would wobble without it.  Still other good days call their attention to you because of the sheer amount of pages and scope are such that even if half or more is to be discarded, there are the remnants of vital and valuable details.

Conversely, bad days are days when the output consists of a dreary stream of declarative sentences, all of about the same length, with nary a semicolon to separate the clauses.  Semicolons are always risky because many editors do not like them and some readers tend to think of them as affected or, worse, show-off.  Bad days are also cays in which you press the delete key as often as you press the return key, sending inflated paragraphs and squiggly explanations to the limbo they deserve.

In-between days are those in which you have to overcome some sort of mental or emotional freeze in order to get words to come out, and then, the material from those hours in which you were able to compose does not hold the promise for you of something vital, explosive, threatening to a relationship or a sense of confidence.

The trouble always begins tomorrow, when you start your day reading through what you did yesterday.  Tomorrow you discover what you thought was a pretty good day yesterday was in fact a bad day, with no possibility to write it off as a so-so day.  You make coffee or drink glasses of ice water or read The London Review of Books, or write a letter to the editor of Lapham's Quarterly, to which you subscribed because of an offer of a price so low, you had to try it for a year.  

The letter you write uses the word fuck and the gerund form, fucking, as in, Are you out of your fucking mind, thinking I would re-subscribe at any price much less adjusted, second-year subscription prices.  Because you know you will not send the letter, you reach for metaphor and rhetoric that could possibly cause you tomorrow to think today's output was pretty good.

Bad writing days have a way of sneaking up on you when you discover, perhaps tomorrow or possibly as far into the future as next week that what you wrote yesterday, seemingly a sentence at a time, the metaphor of tweezing hairs vivid in your mind as you write, will turn out to be true keepers, pages you not only like but can say of them that they taught you something you didn't think you knew.

You realize how judgmental a person you are when you read the results of previous days of writing or when you have more or less fulfilled a to-do point on your outline--Chapter Three:  Explanation of How You See X Working, with examples from relevant sources.  You consult the entire chapter outline and all the chapters you've written before, then make coffee to mull over the reasons you got into writing this particular project.  Surely any attempt to work on this project for the rest of the day will enhance your sense of being dispirited.  Surely.  But nevertheless, there are hours left in this day, so you start thinking about how you're going to approach Chapter four.

Tomorrow, you're convinced that the only way to write is to save the material from your bad days and either outright delete or hide the stuff from your good and so-so days.  This is the equivalent of a phrase you hill, Kill your darlings, by which is meant get rid of fancy writing, contrived figures of speech.  In fiction, it can also mean killing off a favored character or two, which gets you to thinking of the carnage in Hamlet and did Shakespeare have any second thoughts about killing off pretty much everyone in this play except Horatio and Fortinbras.

The substance is that you don't know and, in many ways, you can't know, even though you have to admit that there is something special about the days you think of as good days from the beginning,  Such days bring the sense to your brain, as it spirals into sleep wavelengths, that you've made some small advances, which were worth trying for.

True enough, bad days and awful days that turn out to have been good days being a sense of nobility and purpose to your addled goals. They allow you the sophistry that there is some good stuff in the bad, that all is not lost or without purpose.  And here's the kicker; if a so-so day can turn out to be even worse than not so hot, actually awful, there's still the potential for it to turn out all right.

The trick is to keep on, no matter what.  Plenty of time to assess keepers after you've got an awful draft that might turn out pretty well, or a smoking draft that later proves you were off your game.

Sidewalk Lemonade Stands of Enthusiasm

Words beginning with the prefix syllable dis- often send you scrambling to your own inner dictionary of preferred meanings, in a hasty attempt to discover if you're going to come down on the rest of the word with a negative or positive approach to what follows.  

If left to itself, the prefix dis- can have a range of possibilities, starting at apart or away, but not precluding no or yet another prefix, non.  There are many dis- words in common and regular use, disabuse, disable, disarm, disarray, and disapprove among them, meaning you become alert to dis- words when reading or editing your own composition.  You're alerted to the need to pause in order to assign a now value for the word, relative to the way it is being used now and, of course, by whom.

Enter upon the scene one of the dis- words giving you the most concern, dispassionate.Hearing or seeing the word dispassionate reminds you of the joke about the man in a cheap hotel, awakened from a comfortable sleep by the sound of an individual in the room above taking off a shoe and then allowing it to drop to the floor. At length, awake and unable to get back to sleep, the man phones the desk to complain. "Will you please tell the tenant in the room above me to drop the other shoe so I can get back to sleep."

Dispassionate has you waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Is its intended use the meaning most repugnant to you, lacking in passion?  Or does the meaning intend a more balanced approach to objectivity.  You can relate to, even live with a balanced approach to objectivity, which you interpret to mean a balanced picture of someone, which is to say person, place, or thing.  There are times when it is political, even desirable to take a dispassionate approach, saving the passion for the larger, more  fertile details.

Passion is a great source of energy in reality and in the metaphor and hyperbole of story. Your entire spectrum of behavior depends on your relative passion for a thing out of hand, the major example being your passion for a rapid shift from sleeping to awakening, then acting on your eagerness to dress and be at the note pad, computer, or book you're eager to return to.  

A good index of this first-thing passion can be seen in the decision to peek in at what was composed last night, or to get a sentence down before it is forgotten, then approach the matter of breakfast.  If you are awake at six or six thirty of a morning and at your note pad or computer until you notice the presence of hunger pangs and the need for breakfast, you may with justification consider yourself passionate about the project.

If you are up because of dreams of steaming cups of coffee with a foamy layer of milk, a bowl of fresh fruit, some toast and cheese or almond butter, your passion for breakfast as a first cause is clear.  Your idea of a good day is a day in which passions outweigh dispassion, when the need for dispassion, such as grocery shopping or correspondence of routine necessity, is something you can inject with a measure of enthusiasm that could well turn into passion.

You understand the inherent danger of the last aspect.  Sometimes grocery shopping or routine correspondence, or such one-off things as going for a tuberculosis test which is required if you are to give your classes at the city college, will trigger a discovery of some passion which is revealed much like an unveiling, with the sense of a shroud being lifted from this occult intrigue, whereupon you are passionate about it and throw yourself directly in front of it, to be flattened by its impact and challenge.

Suppose you find yourself neither passionate or in a dispassionate state, neither enthused and intrigued nor mildly curious or in search of an attitude?  Experience has taught you to regard this intermediate state is the perfect time to read from the pile of unread books or magazines in your reading area or decide on a particular bit of music, then settle back to listen in the certainty that this will put you in a form of passion-driven energy.  If your first reaction at scanning your available music is one of indecision, you switch to your default, which is any unaccompanied piano or violin work from J. S. Bach.

Passion means a focused admiration at once strong enough to occupy your full attention and energizing to the point of enhancing all your senses.  You are looking for things to remember, understand, converse with, and become.  Passion is the openness of self that causes you to see yourself as an unlimited resource, nourishing itself on all it sees and becoming eager to set up sidewalk lemonade stands of enthusiasm to share with passersby.

True enough, passion is hard work, often draining work, but if you are not here to do this, what are you here for?

Music for Dinosaurs

Most of the ways in which you think of yourself do not consider the possibility of qualities such as conservative or even traditional. When occasions arise for you to list your age or supply year of birth on some document, you find yourself a bit surprised, looking at the numbers.

Years spent in graduate and undergraduate classrooms provide an ongoing reminder of the possibilities of generation gaps between you and them, making it possible for you to approach the phenomenon you have in mind with a greater sense of amazement than from denial.

Your tastes in art and music run what you consider eclectic paths from formality to spirited expressionism, where horizons, perspectives, and textures seem to be at a party where they've had more than one drink too many.  

The same applies to tastes in music, where, for example, on one of your portable player gadgets, Sidney Bechet performing "Rose of the Rio Grande" is a close neighbor of Sviatasov Richter, rendering Ravel's "Waltzes Sacred and Profane."  Bix Beiderbecke and Clifford Brown.  Meade Lux Lewis and Bill Evans.

The trouble of which you are about to speak begins in your clothes closet, where, with the possible exception of certain denim jeans cut and assembled in California, most of your shirts, jackets, shoes, and ties have begun their life in England, the Eastern U.S. in general, and that great American icon in Maine, L.L. Bean.  The jeans are done in California from a denim woven in Japan.  

At one point in your career, when you were into suits as well as sports jackets and trousers (as opposed to jeans), your main source of purchase was from the traveling seasonal exhibitions of J. Press, which is still to Yale as Brooks Brothers is to Harvard.

The closest you've come to an Ivy League school was living on the same block as Brown University in Providence, yet from the way you dressed, you were frequently taken for an Easterner, an image you were (and still are) at great pains to avoid.  

Added background: although were (and still are) a Westerner in mind and attitude, it never occurred to you to wear Western boots.  Horses, for a long while, were things to bet on.  Although you've ridden more than a few horses, their nobility in your opinion is visual.  In your early years teaching graduate level at USC, you wore suits, but were given the collegial hint that at USC, wearing a suit was something a dean or assistant dean was likely to wear, and by then, you'd had enough with executive levels.

The worst of the trouble, and the crux of these notes, can be found in your present day bookshelves and, in fact, all the bookshelves you've had during your lifetime.  These shelves contain classics and a number of contemporary and near contemporary writers, but your tastes in reading stop short of such modernists as Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover,Jonathan S. Foer, Hedwig Gorski, William Gass, and Roland Barthes leave you not merely cold but unmoved.  

One of your academic clients, pursuing a lovely study of the effects of feminism on American history, made frequent reference to Jaques Derrida, which you persuaded her to cut back on, removing him in effect from the text to the back matter, where, in one long note, she described his critical vision.

This places you in a position of having read any number of works for which you had no chemistry the way you'd have with a work by a writer such as Louise Erdrich or Carson McCullers or Eudora Welty, yet felt the need to be able to discuss with students who admired such post-moderns and wished to be influenced by them.  To your added sense of discomfort, some of these modernists were in executive positions in major writing programs.

In your view, modernist critical theory is attacking the text, making it less important than the time, place, or circumstances in which it was written, in other cases doing a masterful job of taking on the literary equivalent of the quantum physicist's search for how "it" all began.

For the umpteenth time in your attempts to enter the literary party, you find yourself in the role of arriving late, meaning in the long run even greater senses of surprise and time lapse when you are asked your age or to fill in your date of birth.  More books to read closely, interpret beyond the landscape of their plot.  More books of your own to write as a consequences of the books you've read, the arguments you've had, the thoughts you've thought, the feelings you've absorbed, and the close editing of them all to make sure you've articulated them to yourself on as many levels as you can find. 

He thinks writing a story is hard; wait til he tries to writer a letter

When you are not engaged with thoughts of how to execute what you think of as chores or daily activities such as which market to shop in for the household and your cat as opposed to which market to shop at for your own groceries, your thoughts often turn to projects on which you can expect to spend a good deal of time.

Around the time you achieved advancement to executive editorial stages with most of the publishers who employed you, a chunk of your day was spent with correspondence, where your ideal letter was one sentence.  After a time, you recognized that such letters more often than not bewildered their recipients, necessitating a second letter addressed to the same recipient about the same matter.  

One such exchange of the one-sentence letter stays with you.  Thank you, you wrote, for inviting me to speak before your organization (name here) on (date here) at (place) here, which I am pleased to accept.

The response was telling.  We're glad to see that you received our invitation, the response said. We wonder if you intend to accept it.  From this and subsequent exchanges, you got the notion that a one-sentence letter might well seem to take less time, but in fact did not.  You could have at least asked if they had a particular subject in mind for you to discuss and at what length they might like you to discuss it.

You revised your approach to the single paragraph, which said as much as the one-sentence letter, but accomplished its ends by using more words.  In your judgement, recipients of letters want more words, but not too many.  An added aspect of your experience:  good idea to embed a question your correspondent will have a difficult time answering and as a consequence will forebear any added conversation.

You learned this last gambit before you became an employee, craving the companionship of long letters to persons you knew and liked.  But long letters from you brought significant responses, all of which were short.  You might well enjoy writing long letters, but in your experience, the persons you knew did not like to read them.  As for short letters, their brevity had to carry with it the appearance of chattiness.

These times, before you worked as a salaried editor and later, when you did, had the effect of nudging you toward the discovery of your true narrative voice.  Letters, you discovered, were as difficult to write as the stories you'd written and were attempting to write on your evening hours, after the publishing day was complete.  Time was an issue, but so was word choice, attitude, and desired effect.

How, you asked one of your mentors, the splendid mystery writer, Dorothy B. Hughes, does one make the time for writing beyond getting up early or staying up late, and please don't tell me both, getting up earlier and staying up later.

Her answer was the same as the one another mystery writer, Joseph Wambaugh.  Writing is a difficult craft.  If you attempt to do it in combination with something else, you'll probably achieve a degree of competence in both, but the world is already filled with competent writers and mid-level editors, struggling to maintain their mid-level status.  

One afternoon, during your downward spiral at a publishing company at which you'd risen through the ranks to become editor-in-chief, you found yourself well along the road of so many others who were nearing the end of their tenure.  Your budget for a personal secretary had already been withdrawn.  You'd been given the option of using one of the departmental pool secretaries or writing your own letters and doing your own filing.  This particular afternoon, you were struggling with the content of the letter you were typing yourself, thinking how clever of you it was to use the initials ae as a suggestion that you still had a secretary when, in fact, ae was your ironic joke for alter ego.

On this particular afternoon, you understood how difficult letter writing was, and your understanding took in the awareness that writing fiction was also difficult; so was writing reviews or essays.  You stopped by the president and vice-president of operations offices, thinking it time to schedule your farewell lunch.  The fact that you could not schedule this farewell lunch for another two weeks spoke volumes to you.  

You're reminded of this concatenation of events because of a recent event in which a student, hearing class and your responses to a story, took the approach that writers were geniuses and he was not.  Sure, there were some things wrong with his story.  Sure, there was a dated quality about it.  Sure, there were some anomalies.  But this was a damned good story and, in a way reminding you of Huck Finn's comments about not realizing how difficult it was to write a book, said there was no more to say and he was rotten glad of it.

While the student was having his say, you found yourself thinking things you knew better to say to him.  Wait, you thought, until he tries to write his second story and his third if he thinks this was hard.  Wait until he becomes so successful he is given an editorial position, and has to write letters.

All of it is difficult, gut-wrenching and frustrating in the way it flattens us out like the lump of masa that has been patted, pressed, and moulded into a tortilla before being plopped onto the grill to warm.  Within the difficulty, the joy is embedded.  If experienced enough, the process pushes us beyond masochism and sadism into the closest approximations of happiness we will experience.  We will have erected a universe, a planet, a sun, and an entire cast of characters, each of whom nourishes the fervent self-absorption of being so right that thoughts of compromise or accommodation are unthinkable.

It All Comes Back to Me Now

When you come upon the abbreviation o.s., which may also be rendered os, your default response is to go with it standing for off stage.  Makes perfect sense even in the face of o.s. standing for a term within a graphic arts meaning, old style, referring to a style of type face.  

A few of your friends who make much of their living either in designing web sites or as computer geeks are wont to use o.s. in reference to operating system, such as the likes of Microsoft Office, or the current version 10.10.2 of the Mac operating system X, also known as Yosemite.

There are still more uses for o.s.; when you go for an eye exam, for instance.  For much of your life, until your recent cataract surgery, your concerns were for o.s., meaning an abbreviation for the Latin translation of left eye, which was along for the ride, but not in the same league as right eye.  If anything, os is the king of the hill, even though right eye had always been and still is close to 20/20.

Off stage is a theater term, and for that magical summer when you worked live TV dramas as an extra, it served as well for TV scripts.  Os means one or more characters is no longer on stage, where the audience can see, rather waiting in the wings for a cue to come forth, lines and action at the ready to be a specific character with a particular goal and personality.  For reasons you will doubtless never understand, you were once cast for a Western story on the old Playhouse 90. At the time, you wore horn rimmed glasses.  Nothing was said about you taking them off.

Depending on the approach to acting craft by an individual actor, o.s. meant you were off stage, waiting for your cue to come on, deliver your lines, and use your body to convey the sense and intent of the character.  You probably kept in mind where, in terms of the story, you'd just been, and to the extent any of us has about the schedule of places to be and things to do during the course of the day, what was on your agenda after your next scene.  

To overstate the case, at one point when you were being Macbeth off stage, you knew that, later in the day, you were going to kill King Duncan.  As you waited os, you also knew at one point that you were going to lose your nerve, then report said fact to your wife, Lady Macbeth.  You also know that she is far more ambitious than you, less troubled by conscience than you.

This is all well and good for dramatic presentation, where the characters are interpreted by actors or, to use a term from the days of Macbeth's creator, players, as in individuals playing roles.  In books and journals, characters take their ease in the writer's mind, from which they are cued to go on, for the most part, at the author's will.  Should the writer lose contact with that character, in comes a potential for some brilliant improvisation or a disaster of performance art, in which nothing of the character's quirks and personality are set free.

In film and stage presentations, a rigorous schedule of rehearsal becomes the fire to drive the forge of creative interpretation from the director and various cast members.  The equivalent for short stories and books is the unlimited time the writer spends in revision, rethinking, improvising, trying to reach a balance of tension, authenticity, plausibility, and some resident emotion the writer hopes to impart to the readership.

Off stage has another meaning to you and the dramatist, often encapsulated in the word backstory, or "things" that happened before the present moment of story.  Backstory is a compendium of forces and events shaping the way the lead characters appear before us, often forces and events involving them when they were in varying degrees of being younger than they are now.

However adept you may be at storytelling, you know that backstory is a vital element, in its way as much a challenge as the moment-to-moment action of the present.  How do you b ring it forth?  How do you let the reader in on the facts from the past, waiting, as it were, in the wings to influence the immediacy of this story?

Why, you merely have the main character see something to remind her or him of the past, then think about it in enough detail for the reader to understand the potential for the lead character losing his or her cool during moments of stress.

All well and good, except that this is bringing the current story to a screeching halt where, if you are not careful, the reader will use the halt to disembark in search of a more direct train ride to a more hospitable terminal.

If you've kept up with your reading, you have alerted yourself that the flashback is a dated device, and so you work on setting the story in a non-chronological way in the first place, so that you'll be able to switch back into the past as opposed to having it all come back to Jack now how, as a little boy, he'd been traumatized by the very sort of confrontation he must face now.

By starting the story about fifteen or twenty minutes from a significant incident of confrontation, decision, or defeat, you begin building the reader's curiosity to a high pitch, wanting backstory which you offer only in the most scanty details.  Then, you'll have achieved what many critics call suspense.  When readers are desperate to know details, then and only then can you begin paying them out a bit at a time.  But not a moment before.

Ventures in the Dramatic Lottery

 Most of the characters you've developed long-lasting relationships with have some memorable flaw, some enormous obstacle to overcome with which, when you first met them, they were still struggling to achieve.  

In the process of becoming acquainted with these characters and learning how to forge your own, you've learned there is some burning desire they wish to achieve.  Indeed, they may have pestered you with the details to the point where you were forced to wonder why you have no such desire at this level of intensity.

More than a few of these characters have another common trait:  they have wished to pursue some career or personal goal that would place them well within the statistical anonymity of the median range.  

Many persons in reality strive for and achieve this goal, but such characters cannot be allowed to do so because of the harsher dicta of story.  Such persons must be yanked, hurled, or duped by random chance into the dramatic martyrdom of victimization.

Small wonder Mary Shelley's memorable novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus made its way into print in 1820, when all about her poets and writers were concocting narratives in which characters were being assembled in much the same way the unnamed creation of Dr. Frankenstein was assembled, a part from an actual person, a trait from another, a goal or attitude from yet another.  Dr. Frankenstein's creature goes so far as to remind his creator, "I am the Adam of your labors."  Your own characters have spoken to you in any number of ways, including one memorable one in which the character, speaking to you in a dream, told you she'd been given the wrong name.

Characters such as these resonate with most readers from the working and upwardly mobile middle classes, many of whom have had experiences with such troglodytes as bureaucracy, random happenstance or accident, or some accidental mistake from which they attempted to extricate themselves with a combination of sincere apology, due diligence, and a willingness to pay to be excused from their error.

On closer inspection, we can see how it is that most skilled writers have in fact experienced all these symptoms, apparent injustices, and random acts of malicious fate, for these are in fact symptoms, apparent or real injustices, and accidents of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  

Many skilled writers of your personal and readership acquaintance began their ventures in the dramatic lottery as a result of some illness beyond the ordinary ones to which we are all subject.  Those, such as yourself, who had no asthma or polio or some illness of that intensity to deal with had instead vast experiences with loneliness, leading them to the recourse of most writers, reading and imagination.

The three-legged stool of the writer's being is loneliness, reading, and imagination, the balance of which has another defining quality, making the individual observant, suspicious, self-sufficient, all to the degree that removes the writer from that removes them from the median of anonymity.  This is not to say writers are anti-social or lacking empathy for their race, rather to suggest a kind of asocial vision through which they are able to detect human foibles, sometimes even their own.

You find yourself floating the possibility here that the writers and characters who appeal most to your own profile of qualities are those who nudge and follow their characters to that hoped for anonymity, where they can observe, make sense of the anomalies, and seek some of the accommodations denied to Dr, Frankenstein's assemblage.

Appearances: How Would It (You) Look?

Difficult as it now seems to believe, there was a time when you could neither abide the taste of coffee nor countenance its aroma.  The time for this was when you still lived with your parents, and needed at the family breakfast table to request your father to please put cream in his coffee so that its aroma would not waft its way into your immediate presence.

True enough, your mother had no special relationship with coffee in that remarkable chemistry she had with so many other items of cuisine, but this was not a fault you could lay before her, any more than you could explain your deep, abiding aversion toward squash or, for that matter, fried tomatoes, a dish your mother prepared to the delight of your immediate family and any number of guests at what you now think of in fond retrospect as Annie's table.

Perhaps it was a simple matter of the appearance and effect of hormones as you grew beyond larval stage.  Of equal possibility, your flirtations with adventure against the background of boredom and an urge to rebel against targets you could not yet identify.

Through various rites of passage, you have made your peace with coffee, all varieties of squash, and tomatoes in any form.  By the time you'd reached twenty, these anomalies in your pretty near omnivorous approach to food was gone, even forgotten until such times as these when you remember in amused wonderment how you could ever have had issues with coffee, squash, or fried tomatoes.

At the moment, you know at least two individuals who have limiting approaches to food, meaning they in effect have to face boring and limited diets.  You know one or two vegetarians, at least one vegan, and a number who have well-articulated idiosyncrasies related to foodstuffs such as, say, cauliflower, asparagus, or Brussels sprouts that you consider conventional.

For the longest time, say age twenty to  the recent past, a meal without some hint of wine was unthinkable, your preference running to fruity reds but by no means excluding such spectacular whites as Folle blanche, Gewurtztraminier, chardonnay, and a broad spectrum of champagne.  

The corner of your kitchen reserved for wine has remained unchanged for the better part of two years, the bottle of pinot grigio yet chilling in the refrigerator these many months against a luncheon of salmon or salad Nicoise yet to come.  In a shift of taste and temperament, you now seem to prefer a pilsner-type beer or a pale ale, both of which augment another sudden interest, the liverwurst and pickle sandwich, taken on a dark, yeasty pumpernickel, perhaps accompanied with a slice of onion.

The pleasures of the table and the bookshelf occupy your thoughts and time as well as a significant chunk of your disposable income.  Each has some bedrock from which tastes ebb and flow.  You expect this and welcome it, well aware how any number of the bottles on store will taste if and when you get to them, equally aware how certain bookshelf items will offer nuances and experiences to salve expectations, but will also provide surprises you missed on previous trips through.

Through various other rites of passage, including your own awareness of your desire to write, your actual ventures into writing, and your in effect conflating the library with whatever the contents of the refrigerators of your youth, courses of action were set, contents of your own refrigerators and bookshelves underwent strategic reassessments, and you sit before your computer and, have immediate recourse to a refrigerator and book shelves, all reflections of your tastes, curiosities, blind spots, and idiosyncrasies.  

You still very much value the essays of George Orwell.  Your favored short story writer is Deborah Eisenberg.  You have only this evening polished off a bottle of red cabbage slaw and a lone chunk of gefulte fish, sprinkled with pecorino Romano.  Your pile of leisure reading, ready for the interim between teaching quarters, contains the collected short stories of John Cheever, a new collection of essays by Slavoj Zizeck, and the latest Richard Price novel, The Whites.

Also in the pile is Sartor Sartorus, by Carlyle, and an eleven-hundred-page study of the novel by Michael Schmidt, and another go at Richard Schacht's Alienation, while your immediate attention is required by Carson McCullers' haunting The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter for your class on women writers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

There is a pile of things in the larder nearing their use-by date, including a tube of anchovy paste, two cans of Aunt Penny's Hollandaise sauce, a tin of liver pate, and several boxes of brioche toast crackers.

There is a pile of books on the kitchen floor of an entirely eclectic nature, along with some unread Paris Review and Sewanee Review.

There is a photo lying about in which you were captured at a recent reading, wearing reading glasses while holding a book up to eye level.  To your immense joy, you quite look like your father.  For reasons of what you suppose to be sentimentality and nostalgia, you've begun using the shaving brush given you by your pal, Barnaby Conrad.  Watching the nuances of your facial hair in the mirror, you conclude you look different using a shaving brush than you do using an aerosol bomb of foam lather.

Considering all the things about you, including the contents of your refrigerator and book shelves, you would not think straightaway that they are any clue to the way you appear now, would you?

But they are.  And you do.