Random April

Busiest April ever. Still writing a poem a day, plus reading plays for a contest, attending play readings, drafting scripts, editing, and working. Sometimes I forget to eat, which can be remedied by chocolate-covered raisins, wine, and giant reception cookies at campus events. Yes! (Making this a Fat Tuesday as well as a Random Coinciday in the blog.) In connection with The Paris Wife, I recently re-read A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway, which was one of Paula McLain's main sources for her novel. I'd forgotten how funny Hemingway could be, and how snarky, easily betraying his friends, but he is also tender in this memoir, and you hear his regret, and his recognition that his first wife, his Paris wife, was his real wife. "I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone." I was surprised at how moved I was by this the second time around. (Moved, heh.)

I have never read this book, Random Harvest, by James Hilton, but I remember seeing the movie as a kid and loving it. Wow! That can happen? It's an amnesia story and a love story. Like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway and various Hemingway figures, the main character suffers from shell shock in the first world war. So my reading lately has connected. Then, the book review editor at EIL posted a review by Sarah Sloat of a book of sayings and I went to a Jesus Seminar on the Road about the Gospel of Thomas, among other things, which is basically also a book of sayings. Thomas Jefferson would have liked it, a gospel without miracles. He is said to have cut up his Bible, clipping out all the miracle stories. Sloat is, during the month of April, writing erasure poems, a similar activity, and other interesting poetry concoctions! I'd say more, but I'm off to see a play in a planetarium.