� Amar, here

Well then, Miss, you�re just going to have to wait until tomorrow to see what tomorrow is.

Two more factors that I�m betting contributed to my running out of steam on yesterday�s entry. One is that Steve, not to get overly dramatic about it, is at all times one click away from the ground zero of my diary, and sometimes I remember this and sometimes I forget; sometimes I forget and then I remember, and between benign self-editing and asking for trouble there�s a lot less space than you�d think there is. Two is the a state of mind that is occuping me now on two fronts, the one where after so long a time during which people have been saying, w/r/t some aspect of your life Good lord, how can you stand it? and you have been chirping back It�s not so bad you finally admit to yourself and to them how really fucking bad it is and has been all along, and that knocks the wind out of you, you experience suddenly the burden that if you hadn�t been dutifully deluding yourself would have been more aggregated, and what sets in is fatigue, lethargy, hopelessness. I need to keep reminding myself of Anthropology 045, is what I need to do. I took that class my first semester in school because it was a BDR (basic degree requirement) that I got strong-armed into by some advisor before I figured out that fulfilling BDRs with large entry-level lecture classes was kind of the opposite of why I was going to college. The professor was openly contemptuous of all undergrads except for the skinny blond one who kissed his ass from front row center and he�d assembled his syllabus for this alleged survey course as a survey of his own and his collaborators� research interests � many of whose overpriced books we naturally had to buy � and he mumbled and rambled and bored us all to tears, and on top of all that the class was held from 2:30 to 3:45, my sleepiest time of day, in a room that was hot and unventilated. I took a semester off between high school and college, which means that as the semester wore on and 045 wore on me, the weather was getting lovelier and more springlike by the day. But I had this schoolgirly idea that cutting class was bad and that as soon as I started rationalizing it to myself I�d be on my way down the path of academic unworthiness, and sometime in March I counted up total number of minutes of this class my semester would contain, and I gave myself the assignment of not falling asleep at all costs, so that when I got close I could count of minutes one by one and figure, to three decimal places, what percent of the way I was to Done. I told myself that this was as bad as it would get for my entire college career, that I was never going to let the advisers boss me into a such a swamp again (and also that I was going to reconsider my martyr�s stance that dropping classes was for pussies), and that if I could get through 045 I could get through anything. The weird part, weird considering my na�vet� at the time, is that I turned out to be pretty much right. So, OK, I�ve been through worse. I�ve been through worse and I can handle this for four more weeks, for � after today � three weeks and three days. Of course I can.

My abortive entry yesterday neglected to address many aspects of my weekend. I went off-trail hiking and could die happy if I never do that again. I have scratches all over my legs and lots of bug bites. I talked to a rock star while I was wearing the drummer dress. I�d write extensively here about who I saw Saturday night looking so puffy and haggard and used in her ill-fitting dress that at first I did not recognize her had I not gone to the beach with Jason and Vanessa and Steve the next day feeling in my new swimsuit so puffy and haggard that I did not want to recognize myself. (I had bad cramps. I ate potato chips and drank Gatorade.) I made buckwheat pancakes with blueberries and read the Sunday paper. It was so hot that a receipt I�d left on the front seat of my car from that morning�s buttermilk run was charred around the edges by late afternoon.

And also I started reading "The Corrections," which Vanessa loaned me. In the same issue of "Harper�s" as the Furst piece there�s a review essay by Wyatt Mason (with whom I am not familiar) of James Wood�s first novel, and it scares and sobers me to say this about anything in that magazine � I don�t want to give Lapham the satisfaction; I feel almost like my aesthetic consciousness is writing a suicide note � but the essay gave me things to think about. Mason, quoting Wood, gives voice to what for me utterly fails to engage in the Franzen. In the Mason: �in Jonathan Franzen�s writing, "What is retained from DeLillo is the tentacular ambition, the effort to pin down an entire writhing culture." Or, a direct quotation from Wood: "Cosmopolis," so eager to tell us about our age, to bring back the news, delivers a kind of information, and delivers it in such a way that finally it threatens the existence of the novel form. For in what way does this novel tell us something about the world that only the novel could tell us? Before I read Mason�s essay, I would have classified the Franzen as a prickly hybrid of a novel and a satire that does not succeed as either, I would have observed that he wants to be Philip Roth but will be hampered by among other things his lack of a soul, I would have said that he�s written a book populated by characters for whom it is impossible to feel affection or sympathy and his own bilious feelings for whom distract the reader by constantly implying the question of why he wrote the book in the first place, what motivates him, what it is like � as Jonathan Franzen � to feel. Mason won�t go all the way with me on this one; he later makes clear that he thought "The Corrections" was boffo and that it "is so successful a book on precisely the matter of character" (uh, what?) and chin-chucks Wood by characterizing what to me are the legitimate critical issues he raises as "the whole social novel bugaboo." Dick. (And that�s what I mean about "Harper�s" and Lapham.) But like I said I have new things to think about. Zadie Smith for instance I have felt so bad about disliking as much as I do, especially because I don�t know whether I could have isolated my dislike beyond something weaselly and frankly unbefitting a liberal-artsy type like myself, It feels slack and fraudulent, her characters are a compilation of mannerisms and opinions rather than real people, whine whine whine.

Oh, nobody wants to read this shit from me. What am I doing.

Sorry. Will try again tomorrow.