Sounding brass; tinkling cymbal.

Oh, dear. —Bryant Durrell, friend of the pier, went and remembered something I wrote (checks dates) seventeen years ago, and while it’s not that I wish that he hadn’t (one is pleased, after all, to be remembered), still: his assessment of me-then as “overly charitable” is, itself quite graciously charitable; me-now, looking back over that intractably defensive meander, would rather call me-then “gormlessly naïve.” —But time has passed, great seething gobs of the stuff, and the only benefit one can scrabble from its passing is whatever might pass for wisdom: I’d like to think I’ve become a wee bit better at reading things, and reading how they might be read; much less sanguine, anyway, about an author’s ability to keep such material from turning in their hands and pointing the way it’s always going to point without inhuman effort, whatever intentions might charitably be imparted to them in the use of it. —There’s so much more and other more desperately needed work to be done, before we can set ourselves to play in fields like that.