Argh — it’s driving me…

Argh -- it's driving me nuts, not knowing whether we can go long or not. I want to finish this draft, dangit. I hate having it just hanging there...

In the meantime, I wait. I think about the new project. There's a young man at the heart of it, a bright graduate student in classics, of all things. He's broken-hearted; he's just gotten his first academic job, a good one, but his girlfriend of many years has just told him that she's not interested in moving to New York with him. And, in fact, that she's been having sex with someone else. For a while now. Poor munchkin. He'll go to New York anyway -- what choice does he have? He'll try to console himself with work. But he's going to have a hard time concentrating -- when Kev and I broke up, I was alternately buried in work and useless at it. And there are certain other...distractions, in New York.

While that's simmering away at the back of the brain, I wander around the house. I clean, and start cooking for tomorrow's pre-Thanksgiving dinner. Yesterday, I made cornbread for the stuffing. Today, I'll make the squash soup (it reheats beautifully) and probably actually cook the stuffing too. Kevin's doing the turkey for me, so all I'll have to do tomorrow are the mashed potatoes and the yams. I keep feeling like I'm forgetting something, but I'm pretty sure that's all I'd planned on cooking. I have cans of jellied cranberry; if I get very motivated, I suppose I might try making a cranberry sauce too. Oh, and I'll mull some apple cider. But everything else is being brought by others: carrots in brown sugar, a chestnut dish, sprouts and green beans, green salad, leek gratin, matzo stuffing, dinner rolls, pecan pie, pumpkin pie. Nummy!

I finished the first novella in the Byatt, Morpho Eugenia. I enjoyed it, and it's certainly relevant, but it was also...oddly predictable? About halfway through it was clear what the rest of the story would be, and instead of moving quickly to that conclusion, it got much slower, more metaphorical and pedantic. All very self-consciously so. Even if you enjoy intellectual writing (and I do), this was a bit much. We'll see if I like the second novella better. Of course, I'm not really supposed to focus on the writing aspects now; I'm supposed to be thinking in terms of this whole post-colonial thing, more like a lit. student. But I'm not sure this book actually fits into all that -- it's set in a colonial era (during Lincoln's tenure as president), but it wasn't written then, and so its consideration of the issues seems a bit...knowing? I don't know; it's relevant and yet not relevant at the same time. I wonder if Katie was thinking about that aspect when she had me include it.

Still, glad I read it.

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