One of the things I have been doing instead of reading books for fun is working in my garden. Thursday, instead of wrangling words I felt like showing some dirt who’s boss. While being bossy I managed to get filthy and slightly sweaty before the FedEx guy came with a box of more plants that I ordered during a recent, financially unwise spree. Then it was all over for the blank spots between bulb plants. I have another two orders coming in and then I will be able to sit back and enjoy, at least until fall.

My first clematis flower of the season bloomed! It is fuchsia!

I succeeded in waking a number of dormant plants with TLC!

“Muddying up” has now been added to my vocabulary!

I am pretty sure I saw a worm poop!

A number of flies were buzzing around my compost heap and my increasingly filthy body during the hours that I was out there, I saw a giant shiny blue one and a few medium-sized jewel green ones and even a bunch of zebra-striped ones with giant red eyes all of which I would likely consider quite beautiful if I didn’t know that they were feeding off of the corpse of my hipness.

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Recently I have read a few good things and many mediocre things, most of which I am working on writing about for other places. I have, however, been trolling the blogs of literary import and have come up with a few statements:

1) Of course newspapers say silly, uninformed stuff about lit blogs.
2) I am confused as to why litbloggers care about the above.
3) Things are not often the way they are supposed to be.

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The last bleeding heart:


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This weekend, due to traveling and my own forgetfulness, I have read many articles in The Believer. As usual, despite enjoying one or two long articles in each magazine (the May 07 Rick Moody piece on W.G. Sebald’s books comes to mind, especially his bit on textual compulsion and creating reading spaces for each literary obsession), the overall product left me feeling a mixture of envy and a bit shortchanged.

Harrumph.

I really love the sense that Believer writers have the freedom to fail, to fail to reach conclusions, to fail to be constrained by objectivity, to fail to be wholly entertaining. It is a very similar feeling to the one I get when I doodle through the blog roll. I am envious of the beautiful design of each issue and the large pool of artistic talent they seem to be able to draw from. The consistent feeling of fun the magazine maintains is its biggest draw and I am one thousand percent behind fun.

But, at the and of an issue, I do feel a nagging lack of satisfaction, like my Kool Aid was switched with bug juice, but I AM NOT EVEN AT CAMP!