a belief in words

David Foster Wallace is a brilliant Rabelaisian fount, but lacks that belief in words, a strong emotional instinct akin to superstition that many perhaps lesser intellectual lights tend toward. Makes him undiscriminating in the way of the "mot juste", the shrine of Hemingway, and why perhaps perceiving the lack he deifies someone like Paula Fox, a believer in beauty and precision, a real lover of the word who for that reason has probably written fewer in the last 50 years than he has in 10. It's the immovable thing in her versus the restless questing. Bellow is more of Wallace's camp, but brilliantly also turns words with such feeling and fluency and deep personal "history" that it's like getting swept up in a personal current. And then again Bellow fell over himself in admiration of the spare and precise Cormac McCarthy, whom he he said wrote "death dealing sentences."

blue m&ms

A mendicant curbside picking out the blue M&Ms from his palm and shaking them back into the bag. Superstition? Distrust of blue food?

god stopping time

"You ask, 'How can he attend to me and everyone else?' That's easy. God can stop Time. Time is has nothin' on God. It was just an idea he threw in here to make life interesting. Time. So, take that out of the equation and anything's possible. There isn't any friggin' cause and effect unlessen he wants there to be."

Sevi invented a food called "Cracky Go-nuts" which are "cracky on the outside, like a shell, and gooey on the inside like chocolate"

a little more bleeding last night. Seems that by evening, whenever she's not resting, the blood comes.

a little more bleeding before her nap at 1:30pm today

a little bleeding again last night before bedtime ~10:30

Driving down to NYC from VT yesterday for her doctor's appointment, Rebecca had bleeding in the car at Bennington. Came back. The bleeding continued, but stopped as of this morning. We still do not know if it was a miscarriage.

the sex couple

Striding through the Champlain Festival Grounds in bikini thong bathing suits, a man and woman in their early 60s, bulging in all the right places but over-ample and jiggly to the point where, proud feet pounding the grass and parading in unison, they relied on sag as a bold strategy of contrast to the bounce they could still command. Still they broadcast this: what we're good at is SEX, and have been since before you were born.

317-LIE

I came upon a mailbox 317, but for some reason I reversed it upside down and read it first as LIE.

at the swimming hole

The old man, white and topheavy, moving at a measured stagger into green water. His clamshell white legs still told of ridged socks removed within the hour, his terry-cloth robe, his sad dugs, his grimace and gritting refusal to take a hand. His final launch into the pool, like a glacier calving, irrevocable, and the second or two of his downturned body on the water, grey hairs fanned on the surface--did he stop moving? Then rolling like a log up he came with a rueful triumphant smile, free of gravity, but too chilled to remain submerged, and groped for the arm of his lady friend. She, big with frosted hair and pepperoni tan, and still just enough in command of her own movements to exhibit grace, to be infinitely patient and giving to one who wanted to be helped without betraying the need to be.

act her way out of a paper bag

A twist on that, where an actress is forced contractually to take on a role that she really objects to playing. So she goes through it resolving to do a kamikase protest--does the most outrageous performing she can imagine--doing emotive nonsense readings of the words, monotone, atonal, screechy, sheer buffoonery. And of course she steals the movie and becomes an international sensation.

Irish Tunes at Champlain Valley Festival

only two of note I remember:

McFadden's Handsome Daughter (Reel)
Dwyer's (or O'Dwyers?) Hornpipe