Wednesday's sights are not full of woe.

Today, perfect: sun out, sky blue, air cool but not cold, warm but not hot, perfectly neutral. Students tired but still eager, if you find the right thing to teach them: today, paintings as literary adaptation, and what it looked like when Victorian women fell (at least as far as popular paintings saw it). Now, at the end of the day, insects hurl themselves repeatedly at my lighted living room windows. Their buzzing wings and glass-smacking recall to me the blue glow of the bug zapper that hung outside my bedroom window in East Amherst--its purplish light, its electrified grid, its snap and sizzle. It's an angry buzz I'm listening to tonight, the sound of frenetic frustration.

Today, the walking: up and down the road, again and again. In the last instance, walking up to see what I could see.


With twenty-five more pages about Beast Folk and the sinister taste and taint of blood, I will be done with my semester's reading assignments.

And one of the day's finds: Ryan Adams and the Cardinals' Cold Roses (2005). After a lifetime of disliking country music, for reasons I will expatiate upon some other time but which are not entirely unlike my reasons for having disliked reggae for so long, I find myself gravitating more and more toward things that get labeled "alt-country," which feels like a way of saying "it's country, but I like it, so it can't really be country"--but is also a way of saying "some serious genre-crossing is going on here." This one's the length of a double LP; it came out as two nine-song CDs, which has turned out to mean that it's a ridiculously cheap iTunes purchase. And at any price, it would be perfect for dancing one's way out of the midday sun and into the officehouse in order to keep things interesting for the woman who holds our whole show together.