I'm going to try to log daily happenings, with a look toward maintaining more of a record.

To some extent, my online journal--the way I've been doing it--will do that, but because it is so essay-ish in nature, I lose a lot of details.

Here, I hope to track a few extra details, more or less without comment.

Maybe I should say "with abbreviated comment." I'm wordy.

When I read those lines several months ago in the pages of My Jaded Journey, they immediately struck me as sensible and useful. So why hadn't the idea for the format that Jade had adopted for her journal occurred to me? The problem might have been my usual forest/tree problem, exacerbated by my frequently demonstrated inability to distinguish figure from ground, the telling detail from the merely trivial.

I wrote everything above the line, as well as the terms in the left column, in January 2001. I came across this scrap in my archives for March. I'm guessing that I started an entry in January to explain the changes that I imagined for these pages and to credit the inspiration for the changes. Having failed on the January attempt, I took another run at it in March. I failed again.

I did, however, go ahead with some of the changes (the album, for instance), but then incipient entropy set in and I neglected the flotsam side almost entirely, providing almost nothing "essay-ish in nature." The jetsam side, the loggier side, hasn't fared much better, given how sporadic my entries there have become.

The format I have is easy enough to manage. The fault lies not in the HTML but in myself.

I must get over the idea that anything that appears here must be a finished product, a cohesive, unified essay. I must remind myself that this is a notebook, a sketchbook, a junk drawer complete with Play-Doh clogged garlic presses, dusty corners and three loose staples. I don't need a title, or a photo, or some unifying idea. And if I choose to note in the middle of some rant that finding that our numerous garlic presses are no longer Play-Doh encrusted but might actually be usable -- if I should note, as I was saying, that that isn't entirely a good thing, well, pffffft! -- so be it. I am not writing a column; I am accumulating details that might interest only me, and the act of accumulating details must be sufficient justification for my presence here.

What I need from this activity is a place to record the fact that I've added two books to my somedaymaybe reading list:

• Fire, essays by Sebastian Junger
• Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage by Joseph Persico (reviewed in the October 21st NY Times)

Or I might need to record the fact that I can't remember who borrowed my copy of Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, a book whose thesis might be carefully considered in view of the current perils we face, and that I'm a little peeved both by the borrower, and by the fact that the local public library, the university library, and the local bookstores do not currently have it on the shelf. For several days, the lack of that book got in the way of my getting anything else done -- or it stood as the excuse for my not getting anything else done. The fact that the public library copy is checked out on my recommendation to one of my students is small comfort.

I might need to record a snippet of month-old conversation between the household fiddler (Taylor) and me that occurred after he'd stopped his passage through the room in which I was listening to Barber's Adagio and wondering how a composition about a river had become a dirge:

"Someday you'll be able to play like that."

"Someday I'll be able to do everything."

And I might like to record that snippet without feeling I must make a some weighty point about it.

Procrustes: "a villainous son of Poseidon in Greek mythology who forces travelers to fit into his bed by stretching their bodies or cutting off their legs"

flotsam: "floating wreckage of a ship or its cargo"

jetsam: "the part of a ship, its equipment, or its cargo that is cast overboard to lighten the load in time of distress and that sinks or is washed ashore"

Recent reading:
The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright

The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

Driving Mr Albert: A Trip across America with Einstein's Brain, Michael Paterniti (a wonderful gift from a student who thinks I read weird stuff)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominque Bauby