Dies Natalis Solis Invicti
For Christmas I gave myself some time to read the Life of Johnson; the moral Tory Boswell is a funny fellow to encounter after getting to know him through all the juvenile boozing and whoring in his 1762 London journal. Poor Boswell, striving for respectability and having to come out against female inheritance and the abolition of the slave trade; poor Dr. Johnson, condemned to take every conversation as a contest in which one man must prove superior; and poor Dr. William Dodd too.
Tucson is full of grackles; I don’t know why. They hang out by the dozens on top of billboards, bobbing their long tails and swiveling their dark heads and casting those bright yellow icterid eyes on the landscape. I’ve seen them in raucous clumps in Texas, but never here; I hope they’re migrating through and aren’t planning to replace the cactus wrens.
Also for Christmas Tyche dropped the plan for a new novel into my lap, I hope a good one. Is it not time, Sir—says the ghost of Samuel Johnson, when he isn’t making fun of my Latin—that you worked at a good novel?
