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 I'm finishing up a reread of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, a novel that I truly love. The novel tells the story of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a professor searching for the actual stuffed parrot that sat on Flaubert's desk, but the book is really a love letter to Flaubert. Barnes is such a brilliant writer. Last year I reread his nonfiction work The Man in the Red Coat and reread The Sense of an Ending, and was blown away once again. This makes me want to go through a massive Barnes reading - and also reread (for who knows how many times) Flaubert's Sentimental Education (ne of my all-time favorite novels). 

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 Last year I bought all three of my friend and office-mate Erik Esckilsen's novels. A couple nights ago I finished his first novel, The Last Mall Rat, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Technically, I guess it falls in the young adult fiction category, except that's awfully reductionist for a thoughtful and knowing novel. I asked Erik if he was actually Mitch, the main protagonist, who set up a sort of protection racket at a mall to mildly terrorize horrible customers; he said only mildly and indirectly, which I took to be yes. On a deeper level I think the novel is also about the tension between a small town and corporate America - and between a younger and older generation. As I said, I liked it a lot, and it's definitely recommended. I think me reading his novel made Erik slightly uneasy - and Janet was when I read her - and which I will doubtless be if my book is ever published (happily, that will never happen, so I'll avoid that uncomfortable moment). I'm looking forward to reading Erik's other two novels, which are on my nightstand.

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 Yesterday I finished Albert Camus's The Stranger, which is another book that definitely calls for a reread before too much time has passed. I didn't like it as much as The Plague, which I loved a few months ago when I reread it for the first time in decades. Somehow, and I blame growing up in the intellectual wasteland that is Indiana, I had never read The Stranger. I'm also looking forward to reading Camus's The Fall and The Myth of Sisyphus, which have found their way into my queue. 

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 I've tried to be completely honest in regards to chronicling my readings this year (after all, I did discuss my cryptid picture book), so I'll go ahead and talk about my reread of Marvel Masterworks collection of Avengers comic books. The key above is the word "reread." What led to me delving into the early Avengers comic books is that I am using it in a chapter in the Epics books. In the seventh chapter, which deals with women and gender, I have a section about gender roles and expectations and norms in the Iliad, etc. In the last paragraph I provide a little late context for the discussion by focusing on this frame - and also some egregiously misogynistic passages - to show that if this was so routine in the early 1960s in the US we shouldn't be too hard on a series of epics that were written hundreds if not thousands of years ago. The point is not to give them a pass, but rather to problematize the issue. The funny thing about all this is that I was looking for this frame, but also one in when I remember Ant Man telling the Wasp why she, as a woman, much like the Hulk and Captain America's teenage friend Rick Jones, couldn't be a full-time, official member of the Avengers. However, apparently that was just a fever dream of mine because I can't find it. This may also be moved up a little further into the chapter to a section on the nature of the patriarchy - or maybe both. Anyway, getting back to the "reread" part of this: I already have the first six collections of the Avengers Masterworks on my Kindle, so I can't simply rack this up as the demands of the epics book. They were on sale a few years ago so I grabbed several of them. What amazed me was how bad they were. Granted, they were created in the early 1960s and I read them not much later, but still, they're pretty bad, and not simply the inherent misogyny of their universe, but also the language and the plots. Still, I had fun rereading them, even if they were far clunkier than I remembered. That said, I also plan to reference that utterly cringeworthy five minute section in the last Avengers movie when the female heroes get to run around with the Infinity Gauntlet for a highly compartmentalized scene, before the dudes step back to the forefront to save the day (some things never change).

"SPOKEN WITH HONOR, AND WITH DIGNITY, LIKE A MAN!" Many people have commented on Trump's odd insistence on typing in all caps, but I wonder if anyone has researched whether this is because all he's ever read are comic books? Lord knows he's apparently never read a novel.

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 A couple days ago I finished Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, which I had somehow never read. I was inspired to tackle it after my recent reread of Heart of Darkness. The Secret Agent was quite good - in fact, I think that I liked it better than Heart of Darkness - and I'm disappointed that I had not read it previously. I make up for it because I can already sense a pretty quick reread. I don't think it's necessarily a fair criticism to state that the ending went a little off the rails, but it is suddenly and unexpectedly dominated by a couple characters who had played minor roles up until that moment. It's not that it doesn't work, because I think it does, but it spins off in a way that I don't think I've processed yet. Maybe I'll add to this post after my reread. Anyway, The Secret Agent is definitely recommended.

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 Last night I finished George B. Kirsch's Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime During the Civil War, which is part of my recent run of baseball books. As I was telling my cousin Nick this morning, by the end of the CFL season I will have gone to at least three games - which is three more MLB or NFL games than I've gone to in the last twenty years. However, I've also gone to a boatload of minor league and college summer league games during the same period, which shows that I still love baseball in its purest form. I'm also fascinating by the early history of baseball, which led to me thinking about baseball during the Civil War (the Reds are baseball's first professional team, starting in 1869, so it was a short skip to the war). Here's one of my favorite passages:

In America's National Game Spalding recounted a rumor "that in Virginia, in the long campaign before Richmond, at periods when active hostilities were in abeyance, a series of games was played between picked nine from Federal and Confederate forces." Although Spalding reported no direct evidence of those contests, he did cite "cases where good-natured badinage was been exchanged between Union and Confederate soldiers on the outposts of opposing armies in the field." John G. B. Adams of the Nineteenth Massachusetts recalled that early in 1863 several men of the Union army encamped at Falmouth played baseball and also watched Confederates play games across a river. He wrote: "We would sit on the bank and watch their games, and the distance was so short we could understand every movement and would applaud good plays." (p. 40)

I immediately swiped this section and used it in my Epics books, in a chapter that discusses violence and warfare. It reminded me of that famous story of English and German troops exchanging presents during the first Christmas of the war, getting at the sense of war as sport before the overall horror destroyed that notion.

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 Recently I listened to the Why Evil Exist Great Course, for, seriously, probably the fourth time. And even when I'm no longer teaching my Nature of Evil class I suspect I'll continue to come back to this Great Course for a long time. Professor Mathewes clearly has a serious academic man crush on Joseph Conrad,  which inspired me to go back and reread Heart of Darkness. Unbelievably, I don't think I've read Heart of Darkness since before the first time I saw Apocalypse Now, which means it's going on something like fifty years (which is, obviously, another shameful admission on my part in a lifetime of shameful admissions). It really is a great now - and I may have to go back and listen to Professor Mathewes's talk on Conrad and Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent (which I'm listening to right now, and, even more shamefully, it's the first time that I've tackle The Secret Agent (more on that shortly). Here's an all-time "duh" statement, but Heart of Darkness if wonderful. It's powerful but also more than a bit maddingly oblique, and purposely so. So, after re-listening to the lecture on Conrad I suspect I'll dive back into Heart of Darkness again (but don't worry, I won't count it). Truthfully, it's better than I remember it being, although I'm sure I was in no emotional shape to make sense of it as a teenager. "The horror, the horror."

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 I just finished a reread of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. I had read it a couple of times before, but this time I listened to, based on my son's suggestion of a really good recording. He was right, the one that pops up on Audible was really well-done. Thankfully, he told me to avoid the recorded Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which he says is terrible. My best memory of Kafka on the Shore was using it in a Rhetoric of the Self class that I was tagged at the last moment to teach at Champlain. I also had the students read the Overture to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, the combination of which I'm pretty sure broke them. Despite the high quality of the recording, I'd also have to admit that I didn't like the novel as much as I did previously, and I'm not certain why exactly. If you research lists of best Murakami novels, Kafka on the Shore often comes out on top, which, truthfully, I've never agreed with. All of that said, the private library where Kafka retreats to, and which launches his true adventure, always carries a special place in my heart, and it would make the short list of literary locations where I could settle.

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 I've often commented on my relationship with baseball, which I used to have such a childlike love. It's also true that I simply don't care much about it anymore, at least major league baseball. I haven't gone to a big league game in years, and even though I have the baseball package I might watch a few games a year. Recently Janet and I watched a series of Toronto Blue Jays games, but that was entirely her doing. Now, I'm perfectly happy to go to a Vermont Lake Monsters or Vermont Mountaineers game, which, I would argue, shows that I still love the game in its purest form. I still think it's the perfect sport, or at least the perfect sport that doesn't feature a rouge. Real baseball has become a metaphor for everything that's wrong with America, just as I think for the longest time it was a metaphor for everything that was right about America. In this case, it's the gross inequality of American life, which we happily accept as the price that one pays for "freedom." So, a small market team like the Reds can compete, if they're lucky, for a couple times in the space of a decade before they have to trade away all the young talent they picked up during their years of dumping. In that way it's much like the impossibility of anyone poor actually benefitting from the American  dream anymore (and don't get me started on the sport's promoting and celebrating of gambling, even on Reds games, which shows an extraordinary lack of awareness of its own history). Having said all that, again, I like the idea of baseball. With that in mind, I just finished Brian Mulligan's The 1940 Cincinnati Reds: A World Championship and Baseball's Only In-Season Suicide. In their long history the Reds have won five championships, which isn't many in a history that stretches back a century and a half, but it's better than no championships (I'm looking at you, Vikings). Of the five, even Reds fans tend to forget about the 1940 champions. Everyone remembers the 1919 Black Sox championship season (I still think the Reds would have won, that was a very good team) - and of course the 1975 and 1976 Big Red Machine teams (which, as all right-thinking individuals know, was the great team of all-time), and the inexplicable wire to wire, sweep the mighty Oakland A's, 1990 team. However, most folks, including me, don't really know much about the 1940 team. It's a pity, because it's a great story. They had made the series in 1939, but were swept by a great Yankees team, and clawed their way back the next year, coming back from a 3-2 deficit, and being trailing late in game 7, to win their first championship in over twenty years. It's also the only one of their five championships that they actually won in Cincinnati. Plus, the team faced the tragedy of catcher Willard Hershberger committing suicide in the middle of the season. Anyway, it's a fascinating story, and Mulligan does a nice job telling it. I'd definitely recommend it, even if you aren't a Reds fan.

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 Here's another book that I ended up reading because of the never-ending demands of the Epics book. I was looking for one particular passage in Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, and, of course, ended up reading the entire book for the first time in around thirty years. As part of the buildup to explaining his famous proposal that it is better to be feared than loved, Machiavelli ended up quoting something that Virgil has Dido say in the Aeneid. So, essentially, I was looking for verification for something that constituted half a paragraph, and this led me to rereading an entire book (and this is why the Epics project has stretched on for years; any writer would nod knowingly). Actually, I'm glad for the reread because The Prince is an extraordinary (and grossly misunderstood) book. The line that really jumped out at me dramatically, although I've paraphrased it so often over the last decade, is: "For this is an infallible rule: a prince who is not himself wise cannot be well advised." It's one of many, many reasons why our current dictator is, has been, and will always be, a terrible ruler. It also helps us understand, in a non-princely fashion, why the rabid followers in his cult can't be made to see their astonishing error. 

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 For a person who loves the Aeneid, it's sort of amazing that I never managed to read Virgil's Eclogues or Georgics. Happily, I found a lovely Oxford University copy that included both. In this case I suppose I was finally driven to do it by the endless and exhausting demands of the Epics book (a very cruel mistress). There was a great passage in one of the Eclogues that fit in beautifully with my Aeneid chapter; it discussed how much better the world would be under Roman leadership. It served my purpose because I was trying to discuss that what Virgil was celebrating in the Aeneid was not Roman power, but instead the role that Rome would serve in bringing order and light to the world. So, I may have finally read it for selfish reasons, but in the end I loved it for the beauty of Virgil's words. There are many beautiful passages, but let me just include one, right at the end of the Georgics Book I:

   "Surely the time will come when a farmer on these frontiers 

Forcing through earth his curved plough 

Shall find old spears eaten away with flaky rust, 

Or hit upon helmets as he wields the weight of his mattock 

And marvel at the heroic bones he as disinterred. 

O Gods of our fathers . . ."

I think I must have been moved by it so much because it reminded me of what I hope the Epics book accomplishes, waking people to these extraordinary works that are sadly ignored yet existing right beneath the surface.

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 A while back I finished Dino Buzzati's The Singularity, which I remember saying I definitely needed to read again because I wasn't quite certain what happened at the end. Last night I completed Buzzati's The Stronghold, which I'll also certainly again, although this time more surely because I liked it so much. This was another in the New York Review Books Classics series, which features works which simply haven't been given been given - or are no longer being given - the attention they deserve. I'm very happy to have stumbled across this series, as I've liked most of them immensely. The Stronghold (originally released as The Tartar Steppes) tells the story of Giovanni Drogo, an ambitious soldier sent to Fortezza Bastiani, a remote fortification  in the mountains. He initially plans to leave immediately, then agrees to stay for four months for bureaucratic reasons, but then never actually leaves. Drogo keeps waiting for heroism to find him in the form of an expected invasion, which never arrives (at least the heroism). As a man whose career is drawing to a close, with far more of a whimper than a bang, I can appreciate the metaphor. However, it much more than a metaphorical one trick pony, and the images that Buzzati painted of the Fortezza Bastiani will stay with me. Recommended.

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 Early in this year of reading I made my way through Proustian Uncertainties, and now I've followed it up with Roger Shattuck's wonderful Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. Essentially, I figure that if I read Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past - eventually I'll train myself to use ISLT) enough times - and read enough books about Proust - I'll eventually understand it/him. Shattuck's work is a classic, and while I don't completely understand some of his more murky literary analysis, I also learned a lot about the subcurrents that run throughout Proust's masterpiece. As I've mentioned previously, last year I purchased all seven volumes of the new translation, so I guess I do have at least one more reading in me. If you've read In Search of Lost Time once, I suppose it just be that you're pretentious, but if you've read it four times (soon to be five) then you clearly love the story. 

Here's a lovely section where Shattuck is helping the reader understand the relation between the novel and the actual life of Proust:

     This fission-fusion process explains why it is so unsatisfactory to keep asking if Marcel or the Narrator represents Proust. There can be no doubt that the Search embodies a version - both revelation and disguise - of Proust's life. The links are too evident to discount, from the setting and action to details like the Narrator having translated Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies. But Proust's disclaimers are equally powerful. He insists that his book be read as a self-contained story and not as autobiography masquerading as fiction. It would be foolish to insist on one of these approaches to the exclusion of the other. Toward the end of the novel one comes upon an odd passage that makes a tiny step toward reconciliation. There is nothing like it elsewhere in the Search.

"In this book, in which every fact is fictional and in which not a single character is based on a living person, in which everything has been invented by me according to the needs of my demonstration, I must state to the credit of my country that only Francoise's millionaire relatives, whop interrupted their retirement in order to bring their needy niece, are real people, existing in the world." (III 846/vi 225)

Here, I believe, Proust is pointing out to us a kind of vestigial navel cord, a detail which proves that his vast work does not coincide with actuality but was born from it. Images of slow gestation and final parturition do greater justice to the novel's origins than concepts of literal imitation or of complete autonomy. (Shattuck, 17-18)

These observations from a true scholar of Proust (as compared to a pseudo-scholar of Proust such as myself) are invaluable. Shattuck's work might not appeal to everyone, but if you're one of that small legion of true Proust-lovers then it is essential.

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This installment is a product of my recent completion of Forever Calais. Yesterday I finished Mark Bushnell's Hidden History of Vermont. As I begin to more and more consider life after-Vermont, it's not at all surprising that I begin to reflect upon  my time in Vermont. All of the chapters are four pages long, and they provide an amusing introduction to a number of peculiarities related to this decidedly peculiar state. Some of the stories I knew, but many I didn't. For instance, I knew that someone had "finished" The Mystery of Edwin Drood by channeling the spirit of Charles Dickens, I just didn't know, or didn't make the connection because I first heard about it before I moved to Vermont, that it was Thomas P. James from Brattleboro. I'd also forgotten the Vermont connection to the stories of William and Horatio Eddy and their spiritualism. The story of the rich and famous who frequented Neshobe Island was kookier than I realized. Anyway, it didn't change my life for the better, but Bushnell's Hidden History of Vermont was definitely a fun summer book to read.

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 As you know, I've been including Great Courses in my list of readings this year, which, considering their length and complexity, is a valid addition. Now, I guess the one objection might be if it was a repeat listen, however, I'm including them anyway. A couple days ago I finished - for the fourth time - Professor Charles Matthewes's course on Why Evil Exists. It's a thirty-six lecture series, and it's absolutely wonderful. As is the case with a great novel or film, it seems like I get something new from it every time I revisit it. And, yes, it was the inspiration for my Nature of Evil class. His Great Course is absolutely and enthusiastically recommended. I wish he'd written a corresponding book, although I did purchase his book on Saint Augustine and listened to his Great Course on the great thinker. He's one of those professors that I've written emails to thanking them for their work.

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 As we've discussed, as part of this year of reading I'm picking up all sorts of books that I wouldn't normally read. I say this a lot, but what do I mean when I say books that I normally read? First, I guess, would be the eternal rereads: any number of Dickens's novels, but especially Bleak House or David Copperfield or Great Expectations; Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (yes, I know, I've read it four times, which is worthy of abuse I receive for it) and books about ROTP; Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet (and I've started giving presentation on it, FFK) or books about Pessoa; books on Islam specifically or faith in general; novels by Murakami, especially The Windup-Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore or Norwegian Wood, etc. I guess I should include the Iliad and the Aeneid and the Ramayana and the Shahnameh and Journey to the West, or books about the Iliad or the Aeneid or the Ramayana or the Shahnameh or Journey to the West, although that's also related to my massive writing project, so they seem more, at least at this particular moment, completely necessary. Seriously, do you really need to read Bleak House or Swann's Way or The Book of Disquiet for a fifth time? Obviously, that's a trick question, because the answer is obviously yes. Duh.

Anyway, this year, beyond merely chronicling what I'm reading, I'm also throwing a broader net. Sometimes they work out, and sometimes they don't. Last night I finished a book that falls into the latter category: Kim Ho-Yeon's The Second Chance Convenience Store. I think I read a good employee review of it at Northshire or maybe I just thought I'd read a popular South Korean novel (or maybe I was trying to balance out the Squid Game). It's pleasant enough, and you might like it if you specialize in "pleasant enough" readings, but there's not a lot going on here. The ending is clumsy enough to fall into the egregious category with Chris Pavone's Two Nights in Lisbon, although the crime is more silliness as compared to breaking the agreement with the reader.

Anyway, I wouldn't recommend it, although I wouldn't stop speaking to you if you read it.

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 "To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same."

Yesterday I started, and today I finished, Anne Michaels's Held, which probably gives you a pretty good idea of how much I loved the novel. Oddly, I had never read any of her work before, but I'll definitely be reading more of it. Her writing is beautiful, and she doesn't go out of her way to make things easy for the reader, which I almost universally admire. Each chapter jumps forward and backward in time, and she's clever in how she shows, subtly, the relationship between the different characters. It's definitely not a book that you'd have success with if you set it aside and picked up after a while; rather, you need to be more inside the story or you'd missed the not always obvious connections between the different characters. I don't think it worked brilliantly and consistently throughout the novel (especially an appearance late in the novel of someone who just doesn't seem to fit at all, but maybe at my next reading I'll understand the logic more clearly). 

"To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same. War has ever redefined the battlefield; we no longer pretend to fight on designated ground, instead recognize the essential substratum where war has always been fought: exactly where we live, exactly where we have always believed we were sheltered, even sacredly so, the places we sleep and wake, feed ourselves, love each other - the apartment block, the school, the nursing home - citizens ingesting the blast and instantly cast in micronised concrete, rigid as ancient Pompeiians in volcanic ash. The strategic bombing of hospitals, to prove how senseless it is to save lives in a war zone, senseless as stopping up a hole in the hull of a ship at the bottom of the sea. What history is war writing in our bodies now? War fought by citizens whose muscles have never before held a gun or passed a child overhead, hand to hand, to a mother in a train car crammed immobile with refugees. The war being written in these bodies, in this child's body, will be read as war has always been read: stranger to stranger, parent to child, lover to lover. And, even if it is possible to return to one's city, even if one has never left, it will be a history told as it has always been told: far from home.

What was Alan's task? To write what no one could bear to read. What was anyone's task? To endure the truth. To act upon it. But even empathy, compassion, was to feel and think in terms of separation. And Alan could only feel and think now in terms of entirety, or humanity as a single organism, a single entity of cause and consequence, the human union of breathing and being we are born to. A man's brain spraying across your face. A baby in the womb. a bullet hole in its forehead. Exsanguination. Decapitation. The physics of ballistics in human bone and tissue. Soldiers praying for a successful massacre."

Living in an age where Trump callously supports Putin's slaughter of Ukrainians and Netanyahu's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as a shield for his own crimes, these words seems almost painfully prescient.

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 This morning I finished Weston Cate's Forever Calais: A History of Calais, Vermont. Janet gave me a copy of this book when I moved in with her three years ago, and to my shame it took me this long to get around to reading it. I'm sure it benefitted from my decision this year to read a variety of books that I usually wouldn't, which is not to say it's not a good book, but, instead, it's more a commentary on me getting into a rut. It's interesting/odd to think that it wasn't that long ago that Calais had a much bigger population, at exactly the time when it would have been much harder to live out here in the wilderness. There are some much larger socio-economic factors that you can't fight, although the good folks of Calais do a pretty good job trying to not only keep the town going but make things better. One of my favorite section was the final chapter where Cate focused on a few of the really interesting personalities who came from Calais. I especially liked the story of Sleeping Lucy Cooke.

Lucy Ainsworth, better known throughout most of her lifetime as "Sleeping Lucy," was born in Calais May 4, 1819. She was one of nine children, and it is therefore not surprising that the family was poor. When the older children were forced to go to work to help support the family, Lucy learned to braid straw and make bonnets. She later became a tailor's apprentice for a time, but her work led to a sickness, which confined her to bed for two years.

Doctors agreed that there was no hope for her recovery. The family, however, sent for a brother living in New York state who seemed to have mastered Mesmerism sleep. The brother came home and help Lucy to fall into Mesmerismic sleep. Shortly thereafter it is said that Lucy spoke clearly saying she would get well if someone would put together a collection of special herbs and give them to her. This the family did, and Lucy gradually returned to good health.

Lucy first appeared to have powers that allowed her to help people find missing objects. Her reputation spread throughout the countryside. While she was not always successful, she was right often enough to maintain her reputation.

In 1846 Lucy married Charles R. Cooke, a native of Morristown. It appears that Coke was a Mesmerist though little is known about him. With the help of her husband Lucy became a professional clairvoyant physician. Her psychic powers seemed to grow. The couple moved to Reading, Vermont, where Charles died in 1855. Shortly thereafter she moved to Montpelier where she lived for 16 years. She had retained Everett William Raddin as a secretary following Cooke's death.

She probably practiced self-mesmerism after her husband died, for she was only able to find missing articles or prescribe medicines when she was in a mesmeric state. Further, when she awoke, she had no memory of what she had said during the trance. Her medical practice included the ability to set broken bones mesmerically and help those with dislocated limbs. She also did a considerable mail order business in herbal medicines.

In 1876 Lucy and Raddin moved to Boston. Her later years were not always pleasant. She was estranged from her only daughter, and family members felt that Raddin had taken advantage of her financially and otherwise. She died in 1896 and was buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, far from her early beginnings in Calais.

The story sounded familiar, although I'm not certain where I would have heard it before. It led to a shallow rabbit hole (I'm too busy writing to give too much time to anything at the moment). Apparently Lucy was involved in a couple famous events when she helped locate missing bodies, and she later married Raddin, although she was decades older than him (hence the note above on why her family felt he had "taken advantage of her financially and otherwise.") 

I'd definitely recommend Forever Calais, and not simply if you live here in the wilderness, but also for folks interested in Vermont or more generally a glimpse into life in a very different time.

Sleeping Lucy Cooke

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 I just blew through Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection in two days. Granted, it's a short novel, but mainly this is a testament to what a great novel it is. I picked it up several weeks ago at Northshire, another one of the books I  grabbed from their New York Review Books display. So, it was already in the queue, but then I read a BBC article singing its praises as books to read this summer, so it jumped the queue. It tells the story of Anna and Tom, an expat couple living in Berlin and the life that they think they're living. Essentially, they're the couple that Janet and I do not want to be when we head overseas. Yesterday I shared this section with several of my friends.

They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them.

Those images would be on the phone that woke them up. An astronaut singing in outer space. A girl riding a wrecking ball. They would light up their pillows as they roused from sleep, and parade, one after the other, beneath their fingertips while they used the bathroom. They would be there in the kitchen on the tablet as Anna and Tom waited for their coffee to brew, then reappear seamlessly on their monitors in the home office. A jealous husband's threats graffitied across the front of a house. Goats teetering on a cliffside or at the edge of a highway overpass. Whenever they went out for lunch, the images would shrink to the size of the rectangular screen, and hover, midair, a foot above their plates. A tornado of sharks in the sky. While they waited for the U8 or the M29. While they took a piss. A famous woman spraying an arc of champagne backwards over her head into a wineglass balanced on her tailbone. Those images lit up their faces in the dark bedroom when they went to set the alarm. The faces of strangers. The faces of handsome criminals. Avocado slices.

Granted, millions of people live that "double life" here, without ever bothering to move overseas, but for some reason it seems so much worse if you've made the break with your home country and you're throwing away your time in your new dream. If you're living that double life in Kansas I guess that's just a form of self-medication, but if you're doing it in Italy or Portugal it seems almost criminal.

Latronico's Perfection is very highly recommended.

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 This morning I finished Miranda July's All Fours. I came to it in a strange way, in that I read an article in the BBC which discussed how the novel was single-handedly tearing book clubs down the middle. I talked to Janet about it, but she didn't seem impressed, but then she picked up a copy at a local bookstore and thought it sounded interesting. So, as part of my year of reading things that I normally don't read, I took a gamble. I don't know if I loved it, but I think I liked it quite a bit, and lord knows I finished it in just a few days. I didn't know that she was 1) born in Barre, right down the road, and 2) that it's, as hard to believe as it might seem, is at least partially autobiographical. If nothing else I give her a ton of credit for courage, and I'm definitely going to check out her other books and films. Some of it, at least to me, clearly didn't work, and only made sense if it was designed to be purely metaphorical tools (the idiotic young dancer and the decorated room in the rundown hotel, both of which, I guess, are also unbelievable enough to be completely believable).