Yesterday, the weekend’s legacy of fatigue finally materialized. I was writing about last Friday’s movie, Faubourg 36 (which I saw on Monday, actually), when I realized that the eighth or ninth paragraph was in fact my “lead,” and that the entire piece would have to be rearranged, if not rewritten. Lordy.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I try to deal with it manfully. That was beyond me yesterday. I felt the way you do when you’ve just lost a ten-page paper, and you’ve got to reconstruct all the fantastic lines that came so easily the first time around but that become teasing, evanescent ghosts when you’ve got to will them back into being.

So I took the rest of the day off. I know; I know: I said that I was going to take Monday off. I watched the BBC adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s great novel about the Eighties, The Line of Beauty. “Is that what you should be watching?” Kathleen asked, knowing how low I get when I’m exhausted. She had a point — I felt awful for about an hour after it was over. But by then I was deep into the novel on the cover of this week’s Book Review.

The Week at Portico: Although I drafted a few new pages this week, only one of them was beaten into presentable shape, this week’s Book Review review.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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