Getting Started

 Set the alarm for 5:30 this morning to see the eclipse. Looking west from the bathroom window, the moon was little more than a red smudge resting a few inches above my neighbor's roofline.  It's always just before or right after a total eclipse that the moon reaches its fullest extent -- further proof of the Dao in action, in case you're wondering. 

I spread out the blue exercise mat and meditated for a while under the moon's influence, alining myself near perfectly with both the eclipsed moon and the sun, as it was getting ready to rise.  What a great way to start the day. Today is election day to boot.  And just yesterday I had heard back from this literary agent who was first person to read the working draft of my new book - he had been the only one who asked to see the draft in response to a few query letters I had sent out the previous week.  His reaction was a tepid pass.  "I enjoyed it but I'm just not sure it warrants book length treatment. Maybe it should be a magazine article."  Oh well, it was Thoreau who wrote somewhere we have to learn to find compensation in every disappointment.  In this case, my compensation shall be my redoubled resolve to finish the first draft with a flourish.  Fuck them all. 

Later in the morning, I did a double compost run - 9 households altogether, which netted a total of more than 70 pounds of fresh food waste.  The corn is played out now; it's primarily squash and cabbage leaves that account for serious bulk of household food waste this time of year.  Here's a picture of today's haul spread across the the current active compost pile, after shoveling a blanket of maple shavings on top.  It's a post-harvest still life worthy of Flemish painter. 

Honestly, I've spent the last day trying to absorb this first bit of reader reaction -- I'm just not sure it warrants book length treatment -- a real kick in the solar plexus for a self-doubting writer such as me.  Those words go right to the heart of the enterprise.  Writing a biography invariably rests upon developing an unhealthy obsessive interest in someone else -- whether that someone is interesting enough to warrant book-length treatment cannot be well-judged once you fall under their spell.  I acknowledge that this has happened to me - I have become too much of an acolyte perhaps, an apologist, as it were, for Allan, who after all is just another seriously flawed individual.  But twenty or thirty years from now, I don't think mine will be the only book that's been written about Allan and his work.  I think it more likely there will be at least a handful of others.  That at least is the retort to this first reader of mine that I've been formulating in my head all day.  It may be the fault of the messenger rather than the message inasmuch as my manuscript -- which is still a working draft, after all -- still fails to adequately convey a sense of Allan's genius.  Perhaps it's time to turn up the amp a notch, and infuse a bit more poetry into my prose. 

So all things considered, it's a good day to write a first entry here on my new blog, where I plan to keep track (for myself if no one else) on current work-in-progress, destined as it is for the compost heap.