Hmmm. Yesterday was an interesting lapse. I decided back in July sometime that putting my personal life here on the internet was not interesting to me, but then for some reason yesterday I crossed that line again. Hmmm. At the time it felt like a continuation of the playing-with-fire mood that caused the situation that I was writing about. Hmmm.

Anyhow, I am almost finished with -Sometime a Great Notion-. I have been reading slower and slower as I got closer to the end. I can't help but feeling that even more awfulness and brutality is waiting, and I won't be able to bear it, but of course I'll have to, because by this time I'm far too wrapped up in it to walk away... The book has taken on the feeling of some sort of terrible inexorable machine that will continue to grind its way forward with or without me or any of the characters at this point. Somehow, the ending of the story has been ordained, and it is beyond the power of anyone in the story to change or influence its outcome. So Hank Stamper and I are equivalent at this point. Both spectators to what I fear must be his inevitable undoing.

What a book.