Monday Scramble: Looseleaf
That we’re running late today is no surprise. The miracle is that we’re even crawling to the keyboard. And sitting upright!
We knew that there would come a point in the year when the Editor would have to cut back on posting. But we expected it to come in late November, not early October. We thought that the Editor could make it to his annual Thanksgiving holiday before he felt obliged to divert his attention from the virtual world (and relatively simple pleasure) to the real one (no comment). We were wrong.
The Editor was undone by a single act of upholstery. Moving one substantial piece of furniture in his small apartment tends to set off multiple chain reactions, producing entropic unsightliness. Personally, the Editor is trying very hard not to be the sort of person who tosses problems and projects into shopping bags which he then slides behind the couch with the self-satisfied air of having pulled something over. He has learned that he and he alone is the victim of these feints. He will almost certainly die trying to be better.
It wasn’t that he didn’t get round to writing things up. He did! Jonathan Lethem’s second New Yorker story this year, for example! (He didn’t have much to say.) He got to Elijah Wald’s How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll, a book that he really liked, before oblivion set in and a re-reading would have been required. He even wrote up a chamber concert of Mozart and Gubaidulina, the sort of thing that was generally beyond him last season! And, as always, the  Book Review review.