the piling up

so what do you do when your books are already occupying the radiator that might some year have to go back on, and then they spill and then you might take one or two out and they spill really over and you are reading 5 at a time and not finishing any because you want to get back to the other one you just didn't finish, so now I am in the middle or somewhere or other in:
Benita Eisler: Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe and then in my office I have the letters from them: The Faraway One or something like that
Christopher Benfey about the Hummingbirds and Heade and Dickinson, wonderful book
and How to Live: or a Life of Montaigne : witty and grand and brava for Sarah Bakewell
and the de Botton How Proust can Change Your Life (well, maybe he doesn't, but it's a great title) which I read before
and The Swerve, of course, keep almost finishing, but it's like dessert



and then proofreading La Proie s'ombre by Gherasim Luca that I translated, on and on, i burnt the cookies I was making for
what used to be tomorrow night but I see that if it readily is 4:36 am it is tonight

Constable's clouds

Having finished my work in the Beinecke library at Yale earlier than predicted, I sauntered over to Chapel Street -- past the gate where you enter to get to the Dwight Chapel, where I was married the first time -- and went to the British art gallery, as I always do when I have a moment in New Haven. This time, I just wanted to look at John Constable's cloud studies, on the second floor, and they fill your head with happiness, somehow. It is like seeing Martin Johnson Heade's paintings in the Met Museum in New York: things you go back to. And i am reading, with delight, Christopher Benfey's book on hummingbirds and Heade and Dickinson, which even contains a bit on Joseph Cornell and his great box about the Blue Peninsula and Dickinson...Those clouds. I remember one Constable cloud formation in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, that I also go back to visit. It has to be reached up those narrow stairs in the middle of some room, and it is worth it. Ages ago, I read Lucas on clouds, all because of these Constables, and the Theorie des nuages of the terrific French critic Hubert Damisch....More clouds, please.