Good Riddance, Summer

Hello blog autumn

We are grateful to good friend of the blog Haley Mlotek for correctly condemning August in The Paris Review.

Against August

“There is much to enjoy about hating a month so completely.”

The Paris ReviewHaley Mlotek

Especially I loved the lines she quotes from the start of Marge Piercy’s 1984 poem “Blue Tuesday in August”:

The world smelled like a mattress you find
on the street and leave there,
or like a humid house reciting yesterday’s
dinner menu and the day before’s.

This has been my August to a tee, wet old nasty dinner mattress. I've been writing all summer but it hasn't been the kind that comes with the promise of publication and relief and payment. It's just the same old book, the ol' millstone I carry around my neck and stroke and whisper promises to about never exposing it to the horrid light of day.

But today is the first day of the new academic year and, thank god, I'm teaching again. At the first faculty meeting I saw not one but two people I actually know from real life, and now it turns out a novelist who is a genius is in the writing department, and that's all great. A million years ago I wrote a short piece for The Awl about the shape of the year, but I wrote it at June, which is the opposite of September.

What a terrible summer it's been. Or has it just been a big ouch of transformation—a yogic stretch that will improve things momentarily? I have no idea! It's all kind of hard to explain. "It's a good thing," I have chirped to all my friends, which is true, but then I also feel like a Loony Toon who has windmilled off the cliff and is contentedly hovering there in the air, unaware of whatever is going to happen next. It's sort of exciting to be so totally unsure but I haven't totally forgotten about gravity.

Thank god, thank god and actually myself too for the fact of teaching and the fact this blog is still here, happily dormant throughout August, just waiting for us to come back to life. I can't tell you how happy it made me to read Danny's latest installment of his Divine Comedy translation:

SO NOW WERE GETTING FURTHER INTO HELL,

good Virgil said. NEXT UP IS THE WORST EVER BEACH YOU SAW. BUT TAKE YOUR TIME FOR NOW AND LOOK AROUND.

Dante’s Inferno, Canto XIII

IM NOT WITH HIM. WELL – ONLY JUST FOR WORK.

The StopgapDaniel Lavery

Or maybe I can: very. He's not in New York right now and I miss him loads but what a mind with whom to share a url. Privilege is me.

I've got no pieces coming out soon, no real plans to do anything in particular except make a modest crust, and the dog is still extremely sweet. As soon as I can get "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" out of my head things will be just fine.