Late Night Thoughts

It's no secret that I've been reading a lot of fiction lately, finding genre fiction (detective stories) freeing in a way that television fails at, and good fiction, the likes of Munroe, Stroud, Baker, Moore, to be almost as skin-tinglingy perfect as poetry. I read mostly at night. Though I'm unemployed and my day is embarrassingly free, I try to fill it with purposeful actions: looking at job postings, sending out résumés and submissions — okay, and Facebook. But reading in bed has its drawbacks. Sometimes I'm so excited by what I read, I enter into a mental conversation with the writer that keeps me awake. The conversation may take the form of phrases to post here. At least three times lately, I've written volumes of such pillowtalk in my head.

Last night, reading the Birds of America story by Lorrie Moore called "Agnes of Iowa," I came upon this: "Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else …" and I thought, that's why she writes stories, that's the reason to be a writer! To not have to choose — or anyway, to have, in some measure the arrangement and the something else as well. Maybe that isn't what she meant, but it works for me.

Oh yes: found a newspaper cutout — not even a coupon, just a picture — of BumbleBee Chunk Light Tuna In Water — stuck in my Lorrie Moore book, from the library. How perfect!