One of the best things about Sunday and the New York Times is that I can give my undivided attention to one thing, without feeling at my back all the myriad tasks I have to fuss about during the week. Focus, that's what it is, and what a valuable blessing it is, and nice to know that I am still (sort of) capable of it. So why am I writing my blog? Because it's a given by now and I feel driven and hounded on the days I don't do it, like last week. Guilt. Ever thus.

Last night I was focussed, so much so that I forgot an evening engagement I had agreed upon with a neighbour - fortunately a close neighbour, because when she called half an hour after my appointed time of arrival, she was close enough I could run downstairs (on the elevator) and show up only 35 minutes late. What was I focussed on? Well, forgive me, but I'm happy to say that I was working on my current book and forgot that I had an appointment to do something else. That doesn't happen often because I am very careful about my commitments. I can still remember the first time I ever mislaid a promise - years ago now, when my chidden were still in school and I was supposed to pick them up to take them to the dentist. I was working on a book, my first novel, never published, and lost track of the time. Suddenly, just minutes after they left me after lunch, there they were, three hours later, coming in the door and asking where I was. Upstairs, writing.

The next time, years later, we were all in Stratford by then and I was working on a play (later produced), and I missed a party at my very next-door neighbour's. How could I not have noticed the cars and the traffic and the voices? I apologized that evening when I realized too late what I had missed, but she never spoke to me again. How fragile and tenuous a blossoming friendship can be.

That was then, this is now. Now I do not (consciously) offend anyone with my hermit-like behaviour. And today is Sunday, welcome Sunday, and I have the New York Times.

Anon, anon.

The Anatomy of Disgust by William Ian Miller. Harvard University Press, 1998 - Literary Criticism - 320 pages

I came across the title of this book somewhere in that stash of clippings I recently uncovered, and how did I miss this one? William Miller thinks that disgust helps to bring order and meaning to us even as it horrifies and revolts us. I have not read the book, nor do I think i want to, but he apparently goes into details about our basic human, physical activities: "eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying and dying." Whether the list is the reviewer's or Miller's, you'll notice some of the verbs have Latin roots and some Anglo-Saxon. No F-word. "The pleasure of sex comes from the titillating violation of disgust prohibitions."

That makes me think of that joke about the fastidious Jewish American princess saying to her new husband, "You want to put your what into my what????"

What's love got to do with it?

"Imagine aesthetics without disgust for tastelessness and vulgarity; imagine morality without disgust for evil, hypocrisy, stupidity, and cruelty."

Is it simply an Either-Or world, after all? I checked out Kierkegaard. Yeah, maybe. It's a puzzlement.

Upper and lower class divisions are based on such distinctions. "The high's belief that the low actually smell bad, or are sources of pollution, seriously threatens democracy."

Oh, dear: snap decisions made on the very personal reactions of the olfactory nerve are very scary. But Miller thinks that our failure (more like prejudice) is not really an occasion for despair, for disgust also "helps to animate the world, and to make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place."

And the you-know-what hits the fan.