I was down at Laity Lodge last week and it rained the whole time I was there, but the Frio Canyon remained and remains safe, even though it’s no more than 20 miles from the Guadalupe. I drove back to Waco in heavy rain, and near Gatesville my car hydroplaned: I slid across the southbound lane — no cars were coming — and crashed sideways into a tree. I was unhurt and, amazingly, I could drive my battered car home. It was a close call and I am a bit shaken, but what happened to me was one of the least serious things that can happen when too much water falls onto bare limestone. I am so grieved for the lost lives — especially the young lives. I don’t know how the families can be comforted, but I pray they will be.
Finished reading: We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole. A brilliant, fascinating, disturbing book. It’s marred by its relentless Manichaeanism: in O’Toole’s moral world there’s nothing bad to be said about people like him, the “sophisticated” and “cosmopolitan” — words he uses unironically and even uncritically —, and nothing good to be said about Catholicism. But if like O’Toole (who’s my age) I had grown up amidst the spectacular moral corruption of the Irish Church, I would probably feel just as he feels. 📚
Finished reading: Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast by Patrick McGilligan. A fascinating book in many ways but Lang was such a despicable person that I feel I need a palate-cleanser of some kind. 📚
Kieran Healy has just become a citizen of the U.S.A.:
I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth — as you please — that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.
Randall Jarrell famously defined the novel as “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.“ My books are prose arguments or expositions of some length that have many things wrong with them. In fact, the wrong things are the only things I remember about my books.
I’m delighted to see this review of Paradise Lost: A Biography — by the great Dana Gioia! Dana is absolutely correct to say that Malcolm X should have been in the book. He’s in my notes… I’m not totally sure how he didn’t make it into the final version.