idle reading

Much of current reading is infill: I read before I write; I read when I can't sleep; I read in the bath. The rest of the time I am weeding, managing the days, cleaning and replacing. There's an important small pile to the left of my stove: two books by Lena T who stayed with us last year, Anne Carson's Plainwater, an article in the New York Review of Books about classical music, and how it could be the answer.

Some critics have held out hope that classical music, whose decline mirrors the decline of the utopian imagination, might play some part its recovery as well.

The other piece in this pile is another article from the New York Review of Books, by Merve Emre, 'The Illusion of the First Person'. I re-read it every week or so. Tonight I am not ready to read it again. Some pieces you only need to know they're there. Like Thomas Browne, whose capital letters for Elements and Legalities continue to affect my writing though I haven't read him for many years. Or JD Salinger, whom I am re-reading, the italics of his speech, helpless emphases of family life, endemic conversation we need to rehearse.

JD Salinger and Anne Carson, at dusk

I like to have a bath early evening, to divide the day from the night. I read, for preference, the New Yorker. Today Jill Lepore remembered a house she lived in as a student in Boston with fluid others and shouty neighbours, several cats. Then, up in my room, in front of the stove I look again at Franny and Zooey. In the middle of the night last night I read the letter Zooey reads from his older brother Buddy, near the start of the Zooey section of the book. Zooey is reading in the bath, the letter resting on his dry knees. A well-thumbed letter, four years old. Some family is worth hanging onto. JD Salinger is a voice from my library, wearing his cleverness, like Zooey, like a wooden leg.

Anne Carson is adept at deploying her wooden leg. I have had Plainwater out for some weeks now, and this evening was the start of 'Canicula di Anna', which she rapidly inhabits so that several pages in she speaks for Anna, a creature of renaissance Italy as much as for herself; she is not concerned what we think. Any more than any of us in last night's dream as we clambered about our business. P swam the length of a cold pond. There were clouds of paper in the bedroom. And one of P's former students.

Corgi Height: twelve inches above the ground

An ageing civil servant out for a walk with his Corgi in Kent, 1950s or earlier. He strolls his Kentish lanes, his Corgi coursing around, he says, quartering the lane, chasing rabbits. Hedgerows, cornfields, hop-gardens and apple orchards on either side. He is recalled from his meditations by a yelp of pain and fear from a field away. The Corgi needed help. Kentish hedges were high and dense.

Finally I took off my coat, and pushed it before me through the hedge. ... Bramble and eglantine parted before me, and the cruel spines of the hawthorn. The coat saved my face, but from one or two back-lashings of briar sprays I caught some feline scratches on hands and wrists. And an ankle suffered too.

He finds his dog four or five feet through a thicket, beside a stream, caught in rusty wire in front of the rabbit burrow, whimpering. The only way to get to his dog was to lie down on his belly and make his way, slug-like, muddy and wet through the open space between the ground and the bottom growth of the thicket.

There we lay together, a muddy pair. Now I had to get him out. ... it was not so easy ... I looked about me, to realise that for once I was looking at the world from below, from Corgi height ... the smallest weed, the speck of dust, magnified, or conversely the whole world dwarfed to the compass of this patch of woodland and meadow-fall ... I was looking at the universe from below.

I read several of the pieces in Small Moments, by Richard Church, to see why I'd bought the book whenever I did — some drift towards small, towards moments, the ivory paper with wood-engravings, all this would have seduced me, if to be seduced is to understand only this much — then the story of the Corgi chasing rabbits and the civil servant/poet pushing through a hedge and a thicket, confirmed that this was an other person's rendering of what I know, what William Blake, Henry David Thoreau and so many ruralists and poets, know also. Then it's just a question of how you like your eggs.