There's been a whole lotta torpor goin' on in these pages lately, or so it might seem to someone not familiar with latency. The two states can look a lot alike, after all, but beneath all this apparent inactivity I've been one industrious sumgun.

Sounds familiar.

Calm down. Start with a list. Flesh it out later.

Books

Two books�both kid lit�that I've read since my last visit here deserve quick mention.

1. Chris Lynch's Freewill, a young adult novel about a teen dealing with suicide, has a voice and tone darkly reminiscent [a reviewer's cliche, but I'm in a hurry here, so I'm lettin' it stand] of Stewart O'Nan's A Prayer for the Dying. This quiet, restrained novel does not condescend to its youthful audience and is well worth adult attention.
2. If I missed Norton Juster's 1961 story The Phantom Tollbooth (with illustrations by Jules Feiffer), it's probably because as a kid I was a snot: 's not Baldwin, 's not Ellison, 's not Vonnegut, 's not Salinger, 's not Dostoevsky, 's not in the adult section of the library. I've read The Phantom Tollbooth through once quickly for the Alice in Wonderland fun of it, and I'm going back before bedtimes now to mine it for wordplay such as this:

   [About to board a small wooden wagon for a journey in the kingdom of Dictionopolis, our young hero Milo has a question.]

   "How are you going to make it move? It doesn't have a ��"

   "Be very quiet," observed the duke, "for it goes without saying."

   The copy I'm reading is a well-used, hardback, public library copy with foxed pages and the durable library binding that reveals the texture of the cloth that lies beneath the stainproof veneer. The binding has a name that I can't retrieve right now. It will come to me�after I've uploaded this, no doubt.

Mail

These pages don't generate much e-mail�maybe a letter a month, and (so far) always a cordial one. I always reply to such mail, because I don't want the writer to feel they've intruded, as I have been made to feel on occasion. I reply equally cordially, and usually briefly. I'm almost always brief, because I suspect neither the correspondent nor I am in the market for a pen pal. Because not everyone feels the same way about unsolicited correspondence and because I occasionally initiate a brief exchange of correspondence, I send just a bit more e-mail than I receive. (If anyone is following this so far, I'm saying that some folks don't reply, and I mention that with only a hint of rancor virulence venom resentment disappointment.)

Some folks are, of course, too busy to reply (but then I might note that James Lileks, who probably receives as much mail from his pages in an hour as I receive in a year, was able to reply to me yesterday in fewer than twelve hours), and sometimes e-mail does go astray (that's a good one—I've used it myself).

Sometimes, unsolicited e-mail is not only cordial and brief, but also genuinely helpful, as it was a few weeks ago when Stephanie, a librarian and the writer of the journal Yer Blues, wrote to tell me that the author of the story I had recounted in my previous entry here was W. Somerset Maugham. She even provided a link to an online posting of the story (called "The Verger" —who'd a thunkit!) and she was polite enough not to mention that I might have remembered the tone of the story incorrectly, as I discovered I had upon rereading it.

Travels

A few weeks ago (Sunday, February 17th?) I took a drive into the countryside on the McDowell Creek loop south of town, a 40-mile loop through the Flint Hills favored as a touring route by many local cyclists, a few of whom were out spinning that day.

I've also made a photo trip to St. Marys (a small town between here and Topeka), and I'll soon have a page of Kansas links to share, as well as photo records of local day trips. (More about that another day.)

Kids

Josh has taken the LSATs and feels pretty confident about the results. A sophomore, he has already begun to shop for grad school opportunities. This weekend, he'll drive home for his spring break.

Owen performed this Tuesday night in another choral presentation at the high school. As a freshman, he's not eligible to perform in some of the more exclusive groups, but not a note was sung by any of the students senior to him that he couldn't have sung better. Okay, I'm not entirely unbiased, but the kid's voice and presence are both great.

We've spent part of each of the last few Sundays at the high school gym, where Taylor and the Cyclones take on other fifth and sixth graders in a thirty-two minute basketball scrum. Their young coaches (local students at KSU) have worked wonders on these kids. They lost their first few games (a typical score might have been in the range of 20-14), but two weeks ago they tied in a game with the team that Taylor's friend hyphenated Ben plays on (22-22), and then last Sunday their game of pass and shoot finally paid off in a 42-22 win.

Taylor plays point guard and hasn't had many scoring opportunities (I count as passes those shots that fly over the basket without touching basket or backboard and land in the waiting hands of a teammate). What he has learned to do exceptionally well is dribble and pass through a fullcourt press and then fire passes through the defense to the open kid waiting under the basket. I didn't know he could fire a baseball so accurately and hard, much less a basketball.

But enough for now.

Reading: Free Will, Chris Lynch (sophisticated YA fiction about teen suicide), The Phantom Tollbooth (again) and Kansas stuff

Watching: Steel Magnolias, The Last Picture Show, Six Degrees of Separation, and the ever popular Beetlejuice