better

Those water sculptures are cool, Bruce. Wonder what happens when they thaw? I can just see Buick-sized chunks sliding down the road . . .

Dave, I started GARDEN OF EDEN twice before I could finish it. Hemingway was a much better writer when he was alive. It's a courageous and dangerous book for a man so welded to his masculinity, though, and I wonder what EH might have wound up doing with it if he had survived his late-middle-aged insanity to take an unblinking look at his life and the wreckage that it left behind. (I guess that's one lesson he left for the rest of us: it's hard to steer a steady course if you never let go of your dick.)

Sean, I used to go up to Norbert Slepyan's office in the Scribner's Building – Norbert was peripherally concerned with sf back in the early 70s – and I was totally taken with the place; its gravity and sense of history. The great bust of Hemingway in the entrance helped, too. Walking in the corridors where he and Fitzgerald and Max Perkins hung out. Now gone to the metaphorical wrecking ball. When I was last there it was a cosmetics store.

I'm still creeping around like someone who's been Roto-Rootered through the belly, but the plumbing is waking up and finally the pain is down to where I can concentrate on something besides being sick. Wrote a couple of pages on the novel today after spending some time reading through and amending it here and there. Great relief.

Picked up the guitar and found it curiously easy to play – the powerful pain drugs mitigating my joints' arthritis – but my voice belongs in a bad cartoon. Maybe it's time for a po-mo Bob Dylan. (The answer ... my fren' …. is pissin' in the wind …. )

Joe