Sunday, Sunday

This last was a week of general horror at work. And on Wednesday, I acquired a weird comes-and-goes cold that has me saying, "I'll just lay down for ten minutes," and then waking up 12 hours later. As a result, I have done little more than show-up as mandated, and such periods of inactivity (writing-and-reading-wise) make me nervous. On top of this, our weather (which has been chillish but sunny) took a turn for the worse when I was out with the dogs this morning. We now have an inch of snow on the ground and the promise of somewhat more to come. A bit of snow is not the end of the world, but the crappy weather has me discouraged at the moment. No big worry, just a tiny, little crisis in confidence.



I did pick up a few books yesterday, including David Gram's The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (Doubleday, 2009), a well-reviewed book on the lost expedition of the British explorer Percy Fawcett, and Blake Bailey's biography of John Cheever, Cheever: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). I have been looking forward to both books and I hardly know where to start. I also bought several more books about the CIA in Central America, which I am reading for background on my beloved (if now slowly progressing) Project X. I also have several new and exciting poetry collections I will be writing about here, so stay tuned.



There is not much that interests me in this morning's New York Times Book Review. A better read may be the April 9, 2009, New York Review of Books, which has a review by Joyce Carol Oates of Brad Gooch's biography of Flannery O'Connor and an essay by Ingrid Rowland on the painter-illustrator Maria Sibylla Merien.

On the cover of The Spring 2009, American Scholar, Brian Boyd asks the rhetorical question, Did This Man [Charles Darwin] Drain Our Lives of Meaning? To which I offer the rhetorical answer, "Not my life, only the lives of stupid people." But then, I haven't read the article yet. Perhaps I have been rendered a soulless wreck by The Voyage of the Beagle––a possibility that, if true, explains much.