you know you've been away from home too long when the season starts to change and you're without autumn clothes. northern michigan turns chilly in september, often starts snowing in october, and is truly disgusting until april. so i'm on the cusp of real change. the leaves can be incredible here, though, and i've already noticed small bursts of red and yellow behind the asylum where arlo and i go walking. but i have only one sweater and its holes are growing -- so much so that i'm currently feeling sheepish about wearing it to visit my 89 year old grandfather tonight.

i've been starring at the computer screening for almost a week, transcribing hundreds of digital photographs of text that i took in the Boston Public Library archives in the summer of '06. most of them are quite good, but others are miserable -- poor photography compounding poor nineteenth-century handwriting. i'm nearly done transcribing (one more day!) and will then get to plot out my chapter on this correspondence society.


I'm maybe headed back to the chap in two weeks...in time to catch the end of summer in the South but after the extreme heat passes. not looking forward to another long drive...

p.s. Maura -- you can get Whitman's Brooklyn Eagle pieces in his The Gathering of the Forces. It's two volumes and I picked them up a few years ago at the Bookshop on Franklin St for less than $20.00. Back then they had another set as well.

I've got the spots. Perhaps you can see them, perhaps not, but they're all over my face. Little bumps everywhere. I was getting ready to chalk this up to the blended salad that I've been eating (drinking) for lunch (it's a really very vile meal, but one by which I manage to consume 4 cups of greenery). In any case, I think I've ruled out the blended salad (and the peach pie I made yesterday) and am now debating between excessive indoor sweating from the treadmill in my mother's basement (i should be clear: i sweat profusely on it; the machine itself doesn't sweat) or reading Whitman. While the former would seem the more obvious choice, I'm going with the latter. I've been feeling that overwhelming sense that thinking about Whitman is often like thinking about vomit -- it just pours and pours and pours out, and in all the pouring, it flattens itself. I also have had no access to the prose from my childhood hamlet of Traverse City, Michigan. What does it mean to be in a place where a girl can't even get her hand on Whitman's letters? So instead of pulling out my hair, I've ordered a couple of volumes of prose and correspondence (NYU has recently released all their Whitman texts -- Daybooks, Notebooks, Unpublished Prose, Letters, etc. in paperback). In the meantime, I've been transcribing all of my notes from the records of a cool homeschooling society that was fascinating and will be another chapter. In fear of jinxing myself, I don't want to talk too much about it. But suffice it to say, in 1880 their American history and American literature curriculum (mind you, almost no other school or college would teach anything called "American Literature" for almost another two decades) included the likes of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Washington Cable, Catherine Maria Sedgwick...and the expected Longfellow, Bryant, et. al.