Daily Blague

And I'll have had a bit of a rest, too. Without the free Ethernet connection that's available at Park Hyatt Hotels (think Lost In Translation - although I've never stayed at that one), Internet access is slow and very expensive, and in any case, for the first couple of days, I had no desire to connect. But two of the books that I brought along have got the old percolator going. First, Alice Munro's new collection of stories, Runaway. I owe this pleasure to Jonathan Franzen's recent rave review - a rave for Ms Munro's oeuvre - in the NYTBR. The second is an extended essay that I don't think I'd have ever heard about if I didn't persist as a Reader's Subscription member. Mark Edmundson's Why Read? bursts with so much intelligent judgment that I can hardly get through a page without taking notes. Among other astonishing and enlightened proposals, Mr Edmundson suggests that, instead of deconstructing Dickens, say, into the terms of Foucauldian analysis, we ought to be deconstructing Foucault himself, to what he has to tell us about how we should live. I make it sound merely clever, perhaps, but it's not meant saracastically. Indeed, sarcasm is quite blessedly absent from Why Read?

When I wrote that our room is not twenty yards from the ocean, I meant it. Most of the beachfront here is protected by a breakwater, but outside our small building the shore itself is littered with what I gather are fossilized dunes. Swimming is impracticable - and forbidden. Wading is probably forbidden, too, but I've been doing quite a lot of that anyway, not just because it's fun to be in the water but because it's fun to walk all over what appears to be a reef. What I don't know about reefs! But I'm fairly sure that the level, just-submarine plateau that runs near but not up to the low-tide waterline is not a block of eroding rock. It feels spongy to walk on, perhaps because it's covered with marine life. And I mean covered. I've seen submerged rock before, and it hasn't looked like this. (But then I've never been to the tropics; in any case, something to research at non-Hyatt rates!) Whatever the formation is, I did not come equipped with the appropriate footwear for walking on it, but, having found a pair of Speedo shoves in one of the shops, I did not recoil when I peered closely into one of the many tennis-ball-<sized indentations and saw the spines, then the red body, of an urchin. Nor when, having seen the one, I suddenly saw dozens.

Kathleen, who found a delicate piece of fan coral - strangely blackened - was frustrated by discovering that all the prettier shells on the beach were already taken by hermit crabs. Each of them could have fit on a quarter, but they were gallant troupers for all that, marching in their slightly lopsided way in certain pursuit.

Time to order lunch. Kathleen is so napping so blissfully that she'll be grateful to stay put - she's assured me of that.
Why go to one of the terrace restaurants, anyway? Hermit crabs and sea urchins are great to come across in their place, but the blackbirds that penetrate the netting at the restaurants are something less than charming. I have good reason to inspect my chair carefully before sitting down in it.