suzannareads

Finished Heat and Light.

Such an ambitious novel!

Has at least 15 POV characters who are rotated through the novel in 10-page bursts, giving the reader a multi-dimensional view of a dying town. None of the views are particularly sympathetic.

The town was modeled after the author's hometown of Barnesboro.

Barnesboro is a prime example of one of those places that if you end up in it (somehow), you think, Why is this here?

It's the fundamental question in economic geography.

Well. It's here because of its history. History is like gravity: You can't see it, you're mostly unaware of it, but it glues people to particular places. When they're young, they want to leave. But then they forget why they want to leave, and they stay.

###

Other than that, I did very little, though I did tromp—early in the morning, but not early enough to beat the heat. It's 80° here by 8 a.m. and very, very humid. This quashes any interest I might have in vacating the air-conditioned, kiska-and-plant-filled Patrizia-torium. (And let's not forget the Italian masks! Woo-woo!)

I'm still trying to come up with some kind of plot for the Neversink story.

But today, I really must Remunerate.

I started sleeping again. Monday night I actually slept 10 hours!

I have been tromping and going to the gym. Some days, both.

Flavia sez she ❤️LUV❤️s the idea of doing Brianpalooza at the Middletown tea house, so you know, good. Brianpalooza must have Flavia's blessing.

Apart from tromping, I have been pretty much a lazy slob. The Patrizia-torium looks like Atilla has been quartering some time-tripping Huns here.

And I haven't done anything in the way of serious revenue generation in about a week.

Instead, I have been watching an awful Lena Dunham show all about her breakup with Jack Antonoff and her hasty rebound marriage. And reading a book called Heat & Light by Jennifer Haigh, which is all about the intergenerational effects of fracking on a small town in southcentral Pennsylvania. It's very well written! And manages to connect coal mining, fracking, and Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania's three big dalliances with environmental disaster.

###

Environmental disasters fascinate me. I once wheedled Brian into doing a short road trip to Carbon County, Pennsylvania just so that I could see the culm banks, black mountains of anthracite coal waste, with my own eyes:




Meanwhile, Pennsylvania didn't do so good with fracking. Twenty years after the first wells were driven into the Marcellus shale, job creation has been just about nil, the water table is polluted, and residents wander around like characters in an H.P. Lovecraft story, complaining of nausea, headaches, nosebleeds, livestock that drop dead suddenly with no reason. Asthma is up; birth weights are down.

Somebody is clearly making money. Doubt it's the landowners, though.

I'm bored with grieving.

Brian would have thoroughly sympathized.

Brian was one of the least sentimental humans I've ever met.

###

Daria & I are sentimental enough to want to do a memorial. Flavia is not interested at all in doing a memorial, says Brian wouldn't have cared one way or another, which may or may not be true, but anyway, even if it is true, is entirely irrelevant: Memorials are for the survivors.

Flavia's reluctance does raise some issues, though. Like is she reluctant because she is too prostrate with grief to participate in anything? As the kinda/sorta Official Grieving Widow, will she resent it—consciously or unconsciously—if two survivors lower down on the Grief Ladder seize the initiative here?

No real plans have been made other than a vague commitment to the third or fourth week in September, a date far enough ahead in an indeterminate future to seem doable.

But if we really want to do it, we're gonna have to begin to make some concrete plans sooner rather than later. Pin down an actual date; pin down a venue. New Paltz is the obvious venue, but I've also been wondering about Norma's, BB's & my favorite cafe in Wappingers Falls, or Tranquili-Tea, that adorable little rabbit hole in (of all bizarre places) Middletown that we stumbled across that day:



I had a busy weekend: Democratic Committee meeting, D&D with the Boneyard BoyZ, & a tea party that doubled as a Democratic fundraiser. Also I baked a sour cherry pie:



The aesthetics are off. As I say, I am just terrible with crusts! But the pie tastes great.

I hadn't exercised in 10 days, but yesterday I trotted off to the gym and today I plan to tromp before it gets too hot.

###

I've been trying to think of a plot to graft on to the Neversink backstory.

Of course, it should focus on the animosity between the folks who've been farming in these parts for three or four generations and the recent emigrants from the Big City, 'cause that's a very real dynamic in these parts plus the whole water theft—They drowned our homes so their city could have water!—demands it.

Possibly a young, idealistic Brooklyn immigrant runs for the village planning board? Maybe there's still some arcane zoning law that she opposes that allows stores to be built in the middle of the reservoir? (But why would she oppose it? There are tons of arcane laws dating back centuries in every town in these parts! People just ignore them.) And, of course, on the actual night of the election, the reservoir recedes so you can see the chimneys & spires & mercantile towers of the drowned town.

Writing style I'm aiming for is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Susanna Clark does a most excellent job of integrating fantasma into everyday.

I will mull it over some more.

But not too much. Some things just naturally work themselves out while you're writing.