This summer I took a stroll through my mind (the Temptations helpfully suggested the trip). I read "War and Peace":

It's the translation by Anthony Briggs. For what it's worth, I found it less fussy and more readable than any other version. Certainly the prose is rendered in a non-flashy, direct manner without constant notes -- and he helpfully (to me) translates all the French that's used in the book right there on the page rather than as a footnote. It took me over a month to read and I enjoyed it immensely. By the end, I found that I was in complete accord with Tolstoy's humanistic world-view. It was a deep, rewarding experience that snuck up on me (okay, sneaked up on me, whatever). I mean, it seemed like a good story to begin with, but really became something much deeper. I did skim the umpteenth time that Tolstoy broke the narrative to give his views on Napoleon and history and great-men and determinism, yadda, yadda...

I also worked on writing a book. Here are the first two paragraphs:

"The Feast

A rivulet of pig's blood trickled underneath one of the enormous yams. Two rows of yams flanked the sides of a muddy road that led up to the feast house. Each yam was tied to a log and hung liked enormous, deformed Christmas stockings between two oil drums. These giant tubers, hairy with crazed roots and as long as a small child, hung in fat clusters beside the little road. Each cluster of yams weighed hundreds of pounds. A few had to be trucked in on flat-bed pick-ups and hoisted by six men... ten men... fourteen men. The size of the yam was rated by the amount of men it took to carry it on thick poles strung through the bark-roped top of the yam clusters. That's a fourteen-man yam... Each of these monstrous yams was dressed at the top with a garland of green vines. In spite of all the manly endeavor it took to grow, harvest, and carry the yams to the feast, the long row of yam clusters that flanked the road looked something like dressed-up, shy dancers at an awkward party.

The pig's blood flowed beneath the yams into a muddy crevice where barefoot children were playing. The riot of children were landing here, near the pig's blood, after they slid on their butts down a muddy streak in a grassy hill. The morning had brought the usual downpour, but now the weather was sunny, humid, and steaming as the warm pig's blood streaked across the haphazardly placed bits of cement that called itself a road on its way down the small hill in Pwudoi, Pohnpei, Micronesia, Pacific Ocean. The bloody path trickled towards the ocean, towards the open mouths of a tangle of eels, waiting in the dark maze of a mangrove swamp. The blood crossed the island's narrow circumferential road, went under the cement beams of the policeman's house and through his small sakau market where people were sitting on plastic coolers and drinking a gray, dirty mildly psychoactive liquid out of emptied-bottles of cheap Filipino rum. From the cement edge of the market, the blood dripped into the waiting maws of the eels."

In preparation for my wedding, I painted eight portraits of authors in oil on canvas.

This is Haldor Laxness, (I mean Halldor Laxness) Icelandic Nobel Laureate:



This is Tillie Olsen -- my favorite of the eight that I painted, mostly because the hand doesn't totally suck.



This is the poet Robert Lowell:



There's only one person in the world who could inspire me to paint eight portraits and write a book, that's Kristin Gourlay. Here we are in Quebec after the marriage:



Here are our hands on the top of Mont Tremblant, Quebec:




We picked up some Elk Pate (you know, with the slash above the "e") in Quebec and brought it back for my daughter's birthday.






What's better than an Elken meat-spread on your birthday?

Then we went camping in Eastern Kentucky with our new tent.


What a great summer! Too bad it's over... but even that Temptations song alluded to earlier came to an end -- eventually -- after eight interminable minutes of psychadelic noodling (and I'm huge fan, okay! Check out this CD! You won't be disappointed!) and the Temptations dropped off one-by-one so that now I think they tour with the ashes of an original member and maybe one guy who joined them when they were doing duets with Rick James... Ah yes, seasons turn, the great wheel of heaven grinds on, cloud nine dissipates, papa is a rolling stone and gets a brand new bag -- and honest papas love their mamas better, by the way - and so we write an end to the summer, farewell -- those ashes are now cold from the fire that once made my sweet, sweet s'mores...