year 26, day 229: "There is no night darker than a night of fires," from Italo Calvino, A King Listens

After an indeterminate hiatus, the lady is back. I've re-jigged my numbering system. With the artist-husband home I've lost count of the days since he left. Lord knows I could never keep a pattern.


I started reading John Cheever today. He kept coming up in other books I would read, mentions of short stories or the Cheeveresque style. I can't converse on what that is, but I'm a little taken with the nostalgia of the preface. Some people play sentimental so sweetly.


After eating a burrito, and then some Apple Jacks, and then falling asleep for a few disorienting minutes, I finished Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino. I didn't realize until the postscript that he died before finishing the book. Esther Calvino wrote that she would prefer readers to consider Under the Jaguar Sun "not as something Calvino started and left unfinished but simply as three stories written in different periods of his life." Three stories written in Paris, Rome, and Paris. Calvino has this burrowing, repetitious style that somehow obscures and then haunts my patterns of thinking. The writing is brilliant, but it's never immediately clear to me; it sort of descends on me somewhere between the beginning and the end of the story...


A little bit like Denis Johnson. I didn't think I liked Jesus' Son until I got to the end of the first story: "And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you." It just burrows in.


It's been a strange summer. I've spent half of August and most of July thinking about the boxes of cotton talking back, thinking about Lou Reed (via Youtube) singing on a stage in Paris, thinking about year 26 and all the things I couldn't predict.