Well, it's Monday and that should be a good thing. New week, new tasks (lovely word), new energy, new resolution. But I ran out of all of them. My Icelandic class is every Monday night and I did my homework: had to write a description in Icelandic of the events pictured on a page. I use a translator on the net to help me but even so it's hard, and I keep wanting to say it in French.
I had another job (task) in mind when I finished that but I didn't do it. So I puttered, made phone calls, knocked other things off my list, but not my other assignment. Wait until tomorrow. (After all, tomorrow is another day.)
So I picked up an early book of short stories by Lydia Davis. My co-op has a library, run and supplied by occupants. Davis's stories are sort of fun, the shorter the better. I feel I know her a little because her mother (Hope Hale Davis, 1903-2004) taught a seminar on diaries when I was at Radcliffe on a Bunting Fellowship. I was working on a play about Alice James, whose diary led me there in the first place, but I was allowed, as a Bunting Fellow, to take any course I wanted, at no charge, although the participants of the seminar on journal writing had to write to be admitted. Of course, Hope didn't teach, as such; she supplied us with lists and conversation and we (14 women) kept diaries and read excerpts from them aloud each week. After I finished my play, I wrote a book about women's diaries (Reading Between the Lines, Key Porter Books). At first I started doing double-entry book keeping: one diary for me and one for show, sort of, until it got to be too much work so I just did one diary fits all. I read the group the blow-by-blow diary account of writing the first draft of my play. They all attended the Symposium when I presented it, with professional actors reading the parts - not difficult because it was a three-hander - and they sent me flowers!
Anyway, I kept on seeing Hope after my fellowship was over because I had a daughter, Kate, who lived in Boston (and now in Quincy) so when I visited her I made a point of visiting Hope, too, and her (fourth) husband, Robert Gorham Davis. So that's how I feel I know Lydia.
She makes me want to write some short stories. Not hard to write, but hard to sell. Everything is.