I wonder when's a good time to talk about the decomposing cat, in the rain, on the grass, its skin the colour of the pasta we overcooked, extremely visible from the covered picnic bench ten feet away, on which we ate all our dinners for two weeks, while on the empty campsite around it we worked, with shovels and sacks, and occasionally argued about who should pick it up, and nobody picked it up.
I wonder when's a good time to talk about the gruesome 1978 cover of Renata Adler's Speedboat, with its blurred brown humanoid staring at a frozen grey boatless sea, beneath a John Updike quote that's been trowelled on under the author's name in a nervous font that has something up with its A's, but I couldn't tell you what, and Updike always comes attached in my mind to the most unpleasant book title anywhere, ever, which is Rabbit, Run, which I tried to read once, but something about the sound of the title's syllables and the big pompous comma, like a fingernail in the eye, made me stop. And all the bits of this cover's text seem very slightly too close together, and very slightly off-centre, and this ocean of hogwash rested in my hand the whole time I was reading the book, which was very good, and I nearly removed it, the cover, but kept thinking then what?
If I put it in the bin, someone else might see it. If I bury it, a child could accidentally or on purpose dig some of it up. The proper thing to do is to feed it to a massive snake.
I just left it. But now it's over, I really think something should've been done.
