Just as I was beginning to think Covid had a positive facet (no mass shootings) the bottom feeders emerged. I won’t honor them by going on about their horrific eruptions of self loathing. Abide no hatred. We shouldn’t let it be just a t-shirt, a passive sentiment. How is a whole ‘nother deal. I guess it starts with the wearer.

I went to KC to get a haircut for the first time in a year. Being two weeks past a covid vaccine shot, I figured if I was careful I could do this. I didn’t know it was my barber’s last day before he quit for good and moved to SC. A sign of something. I’ve gone to him since I moved back to KC 35 years ago. We wore masks. I’ll sure miss him.

Among my early memories of Easter were two ducks my mom named Snafu and Fubar. They grew from little fluffballs that followed me around, to big pushy honkers that bit the dogs. The story I got when they (were) disappeared was they were renditioned to a farm where they would have long and happy lives. The folks said we’d go visit them sometime. “When?” “We’ll see.” When rocks grow and congress passes laws for the good of the people. “We’ll see.” That phrase took its place beside the time-honored “Well, you’re not everyone else.”

The Ides. Covid is spiking again. Vaccines abound, but no pills for stupid--Spring Break! Brackets were busted to smithereens. KU lost by 34 points signalling the sad, phlegmatic end of their era when the Trojans beat them like a very old, warped gong. Enough negativism. Books are where it’s at. Always have been.

The rest of this is about books F and I found interesting, some we’re reading now, and those awaiting TBR. Freddie is reading Damaged Heritage, having finished both of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s books, The Sympathizer (2016 Pulitzer Winner) and The Committed. She did them as audio books, and I only read physical copies so I’ll have to order them. Probably will since she dug both of them. She said while they were both very good, she liked the first one best. Her present read, Damaged Heritage is a hardback so I can grab that when she’s done.

My own tastes are eclectic and not so current. Didion’s latest book isn’t real current either since most of the essays in “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” are from 1968 to 2000, but she stands up to time so well, and her phrasing is magic. “On being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice” is prescient as it addresses today’s scandals from a vantage point of 1968. And her thoughts about California back up my own: she said, in “Notes from a Native Daughter:” “...California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” Things did work out for me there, but the huge cost of living and the earthquakes finally sent me packing. I could see the ocean from where I lived and all that said to me was “you’ve run out of continent.” I often kept the blinds closed.

Do I recommend “Let Me Tell You What I Mean?” It’s required reading in my opinion. Then comes a strange little book by Beth Ann Fennelly, “Heating & Cooling, 52 Micro-Memoirs.” Some memoirs are a sentence long, lonely on an otherwise blank page, and some are several pages. All are titled. In the acknowledgments, she says, “My mom…affirms me daily…despite saying, “This book has a lot of penises, Beth Ann.” This book is alternately powerful, sad, laugh-out-loud funny. You’ll read it more than once. So, yeah, buy it.

“Design Since 1945” is a compendium of “wonderful examples of design within the realities of corporate teamwork.” (Peter Dormer) It belongs on the shelves of serious designers, collectors and anyone who has cast an envious eye on an Eames chair.

A “lost” manuscript from Capote’s younger years “Summer Crossing,” is what I’m reading now, and I’m into it. It’s, in a word, delightful. The story behind this cool find is that when he struck wealth and success in 1966 with “In Cold Blood,” he moved from his Brooklyn apartment and dumped boxes at curbside. One box contained the handwritten manuscript for the never published “Summer Crossing” which he’d started in 1943 and finally abandoned. A thoughtful house-sitter rescued the boxes and, in 2004, they were auctioned at Sotheby’s. Capote scholars had long thought this manuscript lost. As I read its bright, lilting passages, I’m glad it was rescued.

Happy April. G

(A PS about the Capote book. Having read further, I encountered a phrase using a racial slur not once but three tines in a couple of pages. That kind of tore it for me. Sure, it was 1943, but the book would have lost nothing had that phrase been eliminated. So, my original enthusiasm has dimmed for “Summer Crossing.”)