Mistral

We came back today from a short vacation in Sardegna. The weather was great. People, including me, complain about the maestrale wind but I liked it this time because it didn’t spit sand at me, and it brought waves. I did enjoy lounging on the beach, protestations otherwise aside.

I’m sure the highlight of my trip, however, was reading Villette. (Guadalupe, I hate you!) I sent the boys to the beach in the mornings without me so I could drink all the coffee and read and take notes. I really missed my calling as a scholar of Victorian literature. Oh well, I've made this my Brontë year in any case, and am making up for lost time.

As ever, the publisher found a very uninspiring painting of a solitary woman for the cover. It’s called the Charlotte Brontë Cover Art Disease. Is there not a person with another idea?

While I was gone, Escape into Life ran its ‘Dog Days’ summer poems. Thanks to Kathleen Kirk, my prose poem “As Smoke Enters My Mustache” is included. It’s a complaint poem, or rather, a recovery-from-complaint poem. I was lucky to have another canine ode - Song of the Small Dog - at EIL last year, too.