Spotlight on … Laura Riding Progress of Stories (1935)

‘…one of the most important works of twentieth century fiction… When the history of modern literature is written some years from now, it will have to take [Progress of Stories] into account…’ — John Ashbery

‘Laura Riding’s Progress of Stories is something of a litmus test for readers. For some, it is a neglected masterpiece, a revolutionary work in the development of fiction, a book like no other. For others, it a book like no other … in its pretentiousness, its relentless interruptions to remind the reader that he/she is reading a piece of fiction, and its refusal, in many stories, to follow any conventional narrative pattern.

‘Riding first published Progress of Stories in 1935, when she was living with the poet Robert Graves on Majorca and running the Seizin Press. She had already made a name as a modernist poet in the U.S., divorced her first husband, had an affair with the poet Allen Tate, attempted suicide and broken up Graves’ first marriage–although she cut off sexual relations with Graves early in their time as a couple. If Riding comes across as a woman inclined to take things to extremes, that comes across in her fiction.

‘In the words of Graves’ nephew and biographer Richard Perceval Graves, “Her plenipotent intellect and personality swept away all resistance, reducing to discipleship, abject servility, or virtual madness anyone who could not manage to shake him/herself free from her mesmerizing, tyrannical influence. Her most subjective responses to experience were translated (by her as well as her followers) into world-historical imperatives and aesthetic universals, while her insight into the multiple layers of human personality enabled her to manipulate everyone around her intellectually, emotionally, and sexually.” (There is a striking resemblance between accounts of Riding by people who knew her–and her responses to them–and those of another litmus-like figure, Ayn Rand.)

‘I must confess defeat through exhaustion in dealing with Riding’s life and a good deal of her opinions. This is a woman who, in her eighties, could chastise Harry Mathews over four lengthy paragraphs for referring to her in a New York Review of Books article of the 1982 of Progress of Stories as “Laura” rather than “Laura (Riding) Jackson” (her preferred name after her 1941 marriage to critic Schuyler Jackson). She also made sure to note that “my work and myself” were subjects “which no professional literary man or woman can afford to disregard in his or her position-taking.” And I nearly surrendered before even reaching the stories in Progress of Stories thanks to 33 pages of prefaces (the one to the 1935 edition, followed by a second for the 1982 edition).

‘From the start, Riding draws a stark line between her work and those of virtually all her predecessors: “There is a quaint cult of story-writing which practises what is called ‘the short story’; pompous little fragments in whose very triviality, obscurity and shabbiness some significant principle of being is meant to be read.” Instead, it is time, she declares, that “we should be telling one another stories of ideas.” This is no earth-shaking assertion, but soon after it, Riding challenges the reader to digest the following sentence: “Thus the story-telling model of human speaking, or, as speaking recorded for silent apprehending is literarily named, ‘writing’, persists, in its natural casting of speaking or writing as reduplicating the live processes of happening, into the open areas of knowledge and understanding that all minds share as the world of intelligent being—partaking, in their unitary reality as minds, of the identity of mind.”

‘I balked for a moment, but plowed on (write me if you can explain what she meant). Or rather, detoured past the rest of the preface material and headed into the stories themselves. The book is organized in three major sections: the stories from the 1935 edition, followed by a selection of stories from Riding’s first two fiction collections, Anarchism is Not Enough (1928) and Experts Are Puzzled (1930). It concludes with “Christmastime,” a story she wrote in 1966 and her own reflections on some of the preceding stories.

‘The Progress of Stories section represents something of a journey out of conventional story-telling into the new territory Riding proposes to discover. The seven stories in Part One, “Stories of Lives”, a written in a very spare style but still somewhat represent other short stories one might be familiar with, although rather as if being viewed under a microscope like a specimen.
In Part Two, “Stories of Ideas,” however, Riding sets the reader down in wholly unfamiliar material. “Reality as Port Huntlady” opens with a simple, traditional narrative sentence: “Dan the Dog came to the town of Port Huntlady with two friends, Baby and Slick.” OK, no problem there. But then Riding tells us that, “Port Huntlady was not a town as other towns are towns. It was rather like a place where one felt a town might one day be, or where one felt that perhaps there had once been a town.” Port Huntlady, in other words, is not your usual seaside resort town. No, it is a town that–like the story itself–hovers between life in the real world and life in a world of ideas: “Port Huntlady was a place where things might happen; not the things that happened in the world proper, which were personal experiences, but universal experiences, such as the end of the world, or great turning-points in the course of human events.”

‘At the center of Port Huntlady affairs is Lady Port-Huntlady–herself an orphic figure who might well be a fictional counterpart for Riding herself: “Never seeming to say anything—and yet, after one had left her presence, it seemed that she had said a great deal, at least that one had understood a great many things that one did not really understand.” Indeed, a cynic might say the same thing after finishing Progress of Stories

‘But it doesn’t really matter what Lady Port-Huntlady might or might not say during her soirees, since, as Riding soon tells us, “We are all aware that there is no such place as Port Huntlady. It may well be that there is a place to which Port Huntlady stands as a lie stands to the truth. In fact, this is not far from being the case.” The inclusion of details is, for Riding, part of the attempt the story-teller to be believable, but this is ultimately equivalent to hypnotism: “this true-seeming is the power of the story to keep your interest until you have abandoned, quite frankly, those rational standards of interest with which we all prop up our chins when our thoughts scurry between brain and heart and we can do no better than be proud. It is the moral pretence of the story created by our joint vanity in being conscientious, orderly and truthful creatures—before we give ourselves up to its gentle idiocy….”

‘“But, indeed,” she asks further on, “is our story very important? Is any story very important? I assure you that no story is of much importance; and I think you will agree with me. Are we not all agreed that only a few things are really important?” Though she introduces other characters and engages them in various actions, she notes that these matters are both pointless and, therefore, infinite in their possibilities: “… how Lady Port-Huntlady would have consoled the cats by bringing down the remains of their lunch from the lounge; and how Miss Bookworth would have left Port Huntlady soon after to take up a post as secretary to a wealthy invalid whose hobby was corresponding with patients in tuberculosis sanatoria, in which he had spent much of his own life; and how a story may go on indefinitely unless there is perfect understanding at the start of the limitations that keep a story from being anything but a story….” In the end, she writes, driving a last stake through any pretense of honoring the “laws” of fiction, “no amount of ingenuity can save a story from seeming, in the end, just a story–just a piece of verbal luggage, belonging to anybody who cares to be bothered with it.”

‘In an interview, the poet Lisa Samuels, who edited the University of California Press 2001 reprint of Riding’s 1928 collection, Anarchism Is Not Enough, argued that Riding was challenging the very conceptual basis of fiction itself, rather like Brecht breaking the fourth wall between the play and its audience: “Her tone can be crisp in those stories, as you say; but her combinations of the fantastic, fairy tales, interrogating language as power, investigating what it means to draw and disassemble characters, challenging the reader to be aware of their desire for narrative and syntactic seduction, and so on, make for a situation, in my reading, of multiple possibilities (rather than precision) and messy genres (excess – I mean that in a good way).”

‘If you wanted to know whether or not you would get anything out of Progress of Stories, you could actually just go straight to “Reality as Port Huntlady” and draw your conclusions from that. For me, reading it was rather like the experience of looking at a Magic Eye picture, where you can feel your visual perception of the image switching back and forth between what seems like noise and then, a moment later, becomes coherent. It was both disorienting and, in a way, almost thrilling.

‘Continuing on in this manner for another two hundred-plus pages, however, was a like being trapped in a gallery with nothing on the walls except Magic Eye pictures. A little bit is an exciting novelty; dozens of these pictures, one following the other relentlessly, was mind-numbing. Reviewing the 1982 edition in New York magazine, Edith Milton concluded, “All this self-consciousness makes for quite difficult reading, and, despite their formal brilliance, the stories pall.”

‘On the other hand, Harry Mathews–himself a veteran challenger of the conventions of fiction–considered Riding’s venture among the most ambitious in 20th century literature: “Riding’s aim in writing this carefully structured series of stories was to make articulate in the experience of her readers a knowledge of life that is both true and nonconceptual. It was as if she wanted to make the mechanisms of language, usually so approximate and reductive, accurate enough in the effect of their working to initiate the reader willy-nilly into an awareness of what she felt to be the pure, unmediated truth.”’ — The Neglected Books Page

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Further

Laura Riding Jackson Site
Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation
Laura Riding @ Wikipedia
My Poetic Side
Beyond Poetry
Laura Riding Roughshod
Laura Riding @ Ugly Duckling Press(e)
Telling Laura (Riding) Jackson, reply by Paul Auster
Laura Riding @ goodreads
Looking for (Mrs) Laura (Riding) Jackson, the anti-social people’s poet, from Jamaica (Queens) to Woodruff Avenue (Brooklyn)
‘The Promise of Words’
Against the Commodity of the Poem: The Poetics of Laura (Riding) Jackson
LAURA RIDING TO THE WORLD: “WHAT SHALL WE DO?”
Experts are Puzzled
Laura Riding’s Quarrel with Poetry
Laura Riding’s Extraordinary 1930 Letters to an 8-Year-Old Girl About Being Oneself
Code of Silence: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Refusal to Speak
Diving Deep Into the Letters of Laura Riding and Gertrude Stein
With Thanks to Laura Riding
“I Will Not Give You an Answer”
Laura Riding’s bold plan to stop time

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Extras

Laura (Riding) Jackson gives a lecture for the Poetry Project

Tour of Laura (Riding) Jackson’s House

Laura (Riding) Jackson recorded at University of Florida 1975

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To the Editors

‘Poet, seer, muse, and occasional Fury, Laura (Riding) Jackson is back among us, mercifully and pitilessly, as a writer of fictions. A new edition of her Progress of Stories, first published in 1935, reprints the original text unamended, together with twelve other early stories, one later one, and a new preface and commentary by the author. The book has long been unavailable, and its reappearance is to be welcomed; indeed, in a wiser world, its publication date would be declared a national holiday. There seems no point in trying to conceal my own enthusiasm. … ‘ — Harry Mathews, NYRB

To the Editors:

I am writing to you in special relation to a particular feature of Mr. Harry Mathews’s review of the new edition of my book Progress of Stories, which appeared in your issue of April 29th. This feature is a supposed difficulty Mr. Matthews represents himself as encountering in referring to me by name, and the caper of arguing a necessity of resolving it by referring to me in his review’s developing course as, just, “Laura.” The freedom-taking in this country with first-name calling that has been adopted as a professional necessity in television and newspaper quarters, and doctors’ and dentists’ establishments (I have been met, in the last, in requesting address not automatically intimate, with the query “Are you British?”) has not yet, so far as I know, extended to literary journalism: I feel justified in describing Mr. Mathew’s resorting to it in his review as a caper. His arguing it a necessity is based on a rather cavalier neglect of the facts as to naming data in my regard within easy reach of one as exploratorily energetic as himself. Why, then, this caper? I believe the reason to be in there being a purpose in his writing his review, to write an unqualifiedly good review of the book. This, within the tradition of literary attitudes to my work and myself, which no professional literary man or woman can afford to disregard in his or her position-taking as to these subjects, tempts to conversion of the entire performance into a caper—a procedure for outwitting, with gaiety and deft mobility in critical commentary, the prevailing literary world bestowing on me of the character of a bugbear flouting the normal presumptions of “best” literary-world opinion, a rather unreal but sufficiently present nuisance to require occasional dismissal as non-existent. The incidental caper of calling me “Laura” lends to the caper in-the-whole of the treating of the book under review, and my work and myself all, an effect of enthusiastic involvement of personal acquaintance with and feeling about my writings and their life-history protecting the reviewer from accusations of partisan favoring: he wants to be understood as unashamedly meaning all that he avers as to this particular book, my writings generally, and myself personally.

To consider the familiarity of the first-name calling of me, represented as provoked by my making myself difficult in the matter of names, and Mr. Mathews’s frank will to demonstrate that I can be treated as easy to treat of rather than bugbearishly difficult.—In so far as the matter of my names is concerned, Mr. Mathew’s is weirdly in error. The open bibliographical record has no “Laura Gottschalk” or “Laura Gottschalk Riding.” My first publications bore the name Laura Riding Gottschalk: from 1920 to 1925 I was the wife of Louis Gottschalk. After the publication of my first book in 1926, I divested myself of that surname, “Riding” becoming my authorial and legal personal name.

The assertion that “Miss Riding” and therefore Laura Riding “no longer exists,” and the implication that “Mrs. Jackson” and therefore Laura (Riding) Jackson have no literarily legitimate indentificatory validity, the name “Jackson” authorially used, he alleges, as a matter of sentiment, are effronteries to which Mr. Mathews feels himself entitled because of the bold gallantry of his undertaking to write a good (!) review of a book of mine (!). All that is proper to his reviewer problem of dealing with these two successive surnames is a decision on the basis of good literary-behavior manners. The second of these, preceded by my first name, and a parenthesized middle element “Riding” to facilitate reader-awareness of continuity of authorial identity for writing extending over six decades, seems the choice of those having some lively awareness of my later writing; the first seems favored by those having mainly, almost exclusively, awareness of the earlier. The best biographical or literary reference-volumes cope with courteous scholarly nicety with the two authorial names; none of them have thrown up their editorial hands in despair and given me alphabetical place in the “L”‘s. Besides a few verse-indecencies by male poets of early century-periods, there has been no “Laura” literary calling of me. A book of scurrilous character of not many years ago engaged in would-be assassinative “Laura”-calling of me thoughout; but this falls outside the category of literary-behavior manners or policy. In all the bad literary-behavior manners to which I have been subjected—Mr. Mathews introducing into his caper-tactics the appeasement of literary-world colleagues who have found bad manners a convenient mode of dealing with the difficulty for them of facing the requirements of intellectual conscience posed by my work, and by my literary principles, with a characterizing of my treatment of bad manners as bad as the behavior of a “Fury,” and an attributing to me the defect of being, also, besides a poet and a “seer” and a “muse,” that weakling phenomenon, a human being—there has been general avoidance of privilege-assuming of first-name calling of me as warranted by an astutely intimate personal knowledge of me. Mr. Mathews has gone farther in pretending to have such knowledge than many without other will towards me than the denigratory. The pretence, with him, entangles him in the denigratory, as in the characterization “muse,” which he snatches from an area of bad-willed, indeed wicked, concocted, pseudo-narrative.

But what of this review, in what relates in it to Progress of Stories itself? I have encountered considerable interest in knowing what I thought of it, as a piece of criticism. It has been impossible for me to separate the critical portion of the review from the introductory portion, in which the capering spirit Mr. Mathews has obviously thought essential for the production of a “good” review takes its start, and impetus is built for the intended conversion of the capering energy into serious effects of critical enthusiasm. The crucial pass-over point is the leap, from the centering of a history of near-oblivion ascribed to my work and myself, as at least in part a consequence of my incivility to literary-world bad-manneredness, in a most poignantly tragic obliteration of Progress of Stories, to a miracle of rejuvenation of my buried work and self in the republication of this collection of stories. The attempt to cast this subsidiary element of my life’s work in the role of a major element, and key of first importance to the purport and potency of the whole, has a certain flippancy in it, a light-weight enthusiasm, for which the bestowal of honors of attributed literary descent from Poe and Flaubert and Mallarmé cannot compensate. The background of derivation of the stories is in the background thought and sensibility of all my writing; and the celebratory isolation of them into a ground for the setting of a national Laura Day is eclipsed in the Harry Day that the “good” review precipitated into actual literary occurrence.

Laura (Riding) Jackson
Wabasso, Florida

Harry Mathews replies:
Mrs. Jackson’s reaction to my review of Progress of Stories seems beyond dispute. I regret the mistake made concerning her name.

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Book

Laura Riding Progress of Stories
Persea

‘This expanded edition of the 1935 classic collection includes the original eighteen stories, which “progress” from “Stories of Lives” to “Stories of Ideas” to “Nearly True Stories,” plus twelve more early stories and one late story, all selected and arranged by Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1982. Though the principle of all her writing is that “words are for truth,” she has said these “made-up” stories are designed to appeal to our universal love of storytelling, “the zest, the yearning, for the true”.’ — Persea

‘…unique and uniquely delightful…. One has to suspect these modern fairy tales of being perhaps quite a lot wiser than the ordinary realistic novel’. — Rebecca West (1935)

Excerpts

Privateness

They have a small bedroom. The bed is small, but they are not fat and they love each other. She sleeps with her knees neatly inside his knees and when they get up they do not get in each other’s way. She says, “Put on the shirt with the blue patterns like little spotted plates,” and he says, “Put on the white skirt that you wear the purple jacket with.” They have no prejudices against colours but like what they have.
—-Their other room is not larger, but it is cleverly arranged, with a table for this and a table for that. He makes the sandwiches at one table while at another she writes a letter to a friend who needs money. She writes promptly to say they have no money and sends their love. It is not true that they have no money; but they are both out of work and must be careful with the little money they have. They are thinking of renting an office and selling advice on all subjects, for they are very intelligent people. The idea seems like a joke, and they talk about it jokingly; but they mean it.
—-They go to a large park. It costs little to get there and they know the very tree they want to sit under. It is more like a business trip than a holiday. They eat their lunch in a methodical way and afterwards look through the grass around them as a mother looks through her child’s hair to see if it is clean. Then they think about their affairs and change their minds many times.
—-They walk about on the grass and feel sensible, but when they walk on paved paths they feel they are wasting their time. Finally they decide to commit suicide. They talk about it in natural tones because they may really do it -and they may not. There is an oval pond in the park with solemn brown ducks paddling in it, and they sit down by it, sorry for the ducks paddling in it, and they sit down by it, sorry for the ducks but not for themselves.
—-They go out of the park at a different entrance from the one they came in by. There are strange restaurants all around they would never think of eating in. It makes them feel lonely, so they speed home in a taxi, though they can ill afford this. At home there is the electric light, which makes them look at each other peculiarly. It is worth going out to be able to come home and look at each other in such a way – not a loving way or a tragic way, but as if to say, “It doesn’t interest us what our story is – that is for other people.”
—-We, then, having complete power, removed all the amusements that did not amuse us. We were then at least not hopelessly amused. We inculcated in ourselves an amusability not qualified by standards developed from amusements that failed to amuse. Our standards, that is, were impossibly high.
—-And yet we were not hopeless. We were ascetically humourous, in fact. And so when Mademoiselle Comet came among us we were somewhat at a loss. For Mademoiselle Comet was a really professional entertainer. She came from where she came to make us look.
—-But Mademoiselle Comet was different. We could not help looking. But she more than amused. She was a perfect oddity. The fact that she was entertaining had no psychological connection with the fact that we were watching her. She was creature of pure pleasure. She was a phenomenon whose humorous slant did not sympathetically attack us; being a slant of independence, not comedy. Her long bright hair was dead. She could not be loved.
—-Therefore Mademoiselle Comet became our sole entertainment. And she more than amused; we loved her. Having complete power, we placed her in a leading position, where we could observe her better. And we were not amused. We were still ascetically humourous. Thus we aged properly. We did not, like mirth-stricken children, die. Rather we could not remember that we had ever been alive. We too had long bright dead hair. Mademoiselle Comet performed, and we looked, always a last time. We too performed, became really professional entertainers. Our ascetically humourous slant became more and more a slant of independence, less and less a slant of rejected comedy. With Mademoiselle Comet we became a troupe, creatures of pure pleasure, more than amused, more than amusing, looker-entertainers, Mademoiselle Comet’s train of cold light. We were the phenomenal word fun, Mademoiselle Comet leading. Fun was our visible property. We appeared, a comet and its tail, with deadly powerfulness to ourselves. We collided. We swallowed and were swallowed, more than amused. Mademoiselle Comet, because of the position we had put her in with our complete power, alone survived. Her long bright dead hair covered her. Our long bright dead hair covered us. Her long bright dead hair alone survived; universe of pure pleasure, never tangled, never combed. She could not be loved. We loved her. Our long bright hair alone survived. We alone survived, having complete power. Our standards, that is, were impossibly high; and the brilliant Mademoiselle Comet, a professional entertainer, satisfied them. Our standards alone survived, being impossibly high.

An Anonymous Book

An anonymous book for children only was published by an anonymous publisher and anonymously praised in an anonymous journal. Moreover, it imitated variously the style of each of the known writers of the time, and this made the responsibility for its authorship all the more impossible to place. For none of the known writers could in the circumstances look guilty. But everyone else did, so this made the responsibility for its authorship all the more difficult to place. The police had instructions to arrest all suspicious-looking persons. But as everyone except the known writers was under suspicion, the department of censorship gave orders that the known authors should be put in prison to separate them from the rest of the population and that everyone else should be regarded as legally committed to freedom. ‘Did you write it?’ everyone was questioned at every street corner. And as the answer was always ‘No’, the questioned person was always remanded as a suspect.
—-The reasons why this book aroused the department of censorship were these. One–it imitated (or seemed to imitate) the style of all the known authors of the time and was therefore understood by the authorities to be a political (or moral) satire. Two–it had no title and was therefore feared by the authorities to be dealing under the cover of obscurity with dangerous subjects. Three–its publisher could not be traced and it was therefore believed by the authorities to have been printed uncommercially. Four–it had no author and was therefore suspected by the authorities of having been written by a dangerous person. Five (and last)–it advertised itself as a book for children, and was therefore concluded by the authorities to have been written with the concealed design of corrupting adults. As the mystery grew, the vigilance of the police grew, and the circulation of the book grew: for the only way that its authorship could be discovered was by increasing the number of people suspected, and this could only be done by increasing the number of readers. The authorities secretly hoped to arrive at the author by separating those who had read the book from those who had not read it, and singling out from among the latter him or her who pretended to know least about it.
—-Therefore the time has come to close. I am discovered, or rather I have discovered myself, for the authorities lost interest in me when they saw that I would discover myself before I could be officially discovered, that I would in fact break through the pages and destroy the strongest evidence that might be held against me, that is, that “An anonymous book”, etc. I understand now that what they desired to prevent was just what has happened. You must forgive me and believe that I was not trying to deceive, but that I became confused. I over-distinguished and so fell into satire and so discovered myself and so could not go on, to maintain a satiric distinction between authorship and scholarship.

*

p.s. Hey. I’m feeling worse today — a bad head/chest cold, I think. I’m going to try to do the p.s., but it’s probably not going to be very thoughtful and attentive, sorry. ** Dominik, Hi!!! If only inspiration paid the bills. Love didn’t manage the immediate help I need, but there’s still time. Love with a handful of tissue at his nose and watery eyes, G. ** Lucas, Hi. Oh, yeah, I love Defunctland, of course. I traverse there very often. Thanks, pal. I’m going to need to get my head well before I dare explore your zine further, but I’m excited to and will share thoughts. But I think it’s safe to say the world is giving it a warm welcome. ** jay, Thanks, jay. Yeah, Defunctland and I are good pals, let’s just say. I’m glad you liked the Apes movies. Surprisingly so, right? ** _Black_Acrylic, I would have gone to that museum. They really should have had rides though. I’ll poke around in MUBI for that film when my world de-blears, thanks. ** Misanthrope, Hi! There you are. Sorry for this zonked welcome back. My head is unfriendly. To me, hopefully not to you. That is a nightmare. Jesus, that guy. I still haven’t laid eyes on a single copy of ‘Flunker’. One of these years. Love to you too, and I’ll be sharper next time. ** Pascal, Hi, P. Yeah, try, I mean, what have you got to lose and all of that. I too do find that an exciting film can wake up the old prose machine as well. Antonioni certainly works in theory. My day is destined to suck, but yours won’t, I sure hope. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. The World’s Fair as cruising grounds, wow, well of course. All those nooks and crannies. I’m avoiding all Tr*mp related everything at the moment, but thank you. I saw Elaine Stritch in some play when I was a kid, I cant remember what though. ** Uday, My head cold is definitely not sexy, so I guess that’s your answer. Nice about your friends. All of my friends are away on summer jaunts, but at least I won’t pass along my malady. Thanks, pal. ** Malik, Hi! Thank you. Me too, and definitely about your heatwave. Thank god we’re still temperate here. Oh, I forgot to send you my email. Wait, it’s [email protected]. Thank you so much about ‘Flunker’! That means a ton, and my head cold is now incrementally better. Ha, I too was surprised that I allowed a Five Nights at Freddy’s reference in here. I must have been deranged by my amusement park fixation. I hope you’re doing really well. ** Don Waters, Thanks, Don. Oh, right, the legendary infectiousness of parenthood. I’ve read about that. Thanks so much about ‘Flunker’. Bret and I have always been friendly and mutual supporters. Being on his show was fun. He talks a lot, so it’s a very easy gig. Take care, D. ** Steve, Hi. Thanks. Resting is not something I have any skills at. I just get kind of slouchy at most. The atmosphere of hysteria in the States right now is way beyond anything I have experienced. ** Harper, Hi. I feel like shit, but I guess we’re on similar pages. Barcelona today! Safe, swift trip there and all of that. Cool. I sort of don’t mind the tourists. Tourists in Paris tend to be very romantic and look around in wonder and go ooh and ahh a lot, and I can relate to that. I will ask my three-book friend next time I talk with him. I hope your health is made tiptop by your new surroundings. ** James Bennett, Hi, James! I’m unfortunately feeling very crappy, but such things happen. I knew/know Steve Roden’s work and saw him play live a couple of times, but I don’t think I ever met him. He was friends with artist friends of mine. Very interesting artist. Cool you’re listening to him. Uh, generally I don’t notice the seasons re: my writing’s ups and downs, but if summer was its doldrums, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised. Did you write something surprising? Surely? ** Charalampos, I’m not quite yet, but thanks. Uh, I don’t know what you mean about a Lorie Moore technique? I don’t know of such a thing, but I am very hazy right now. Good luck with the meditating. Vague by default vibes from Paris. ** Justin D, I agree with you completely. I’m not better, for sure, but I figure it has to be peaking today. The Z Channel, yes, indeed. I remember it and remember watching a lot of things on it. Huh, I forgot all about that channel. Really adventurous compared to any comparably sized ‘cable’ channel nowadays. I’ll go find that doc. I’m glad you’re well and good. ** Oscar 🌀, Sounds worth being in a busy crossing for. Uh, my brain is toast, but, uh … Very hi(gh) weed toking dude trying to send you a smoke signal made out of smoke rings but whose mouth can’t design a recognisable ‘S’ so he gives up early. I did see Godzilla X Kong’. I remember thinking the first, like, hour or something, and the last, like, hour or something were really fun, and I remember the rest of it being rather spotty but totally doable. The fish cutting board is better than money. Okay, maybe not, but it’s a score for sure. I’m kind of sick. It sucks. I never get sick, so it’s an unpleasant and rare surprise. But oh well. I was planning to go see the opening day of ‘Twisters’ on IMAX today, which would have cured me for sure, but I don’t think I’m up for it ultimately. Darn. I am donating what would have been the fun aspects of my Wednesday to you so you can have a doubly fun Wednesday. I hope it works. ** Right. Today I ask you to read about Laura Riding’s legendary yet divisive novel and see what you think. Do that, yes? See you tomorrow in hopefully better mental shape.