My shoulder came back. For a while lifting my right arm brought only pain and incapacity, and even once stronger it suffered a queasy shift-and-pop on certain motions, especially washing hair in the shower, as some part of the architecture decided to try out liberating new living arrangements. But in the past couple of weeks it’s finally firmed up, solid, strong and rather more prominent to the touch than before. Don’t fuck with it.
For family reasons we’ve been traveling a lot through the new, hot western world; I’ve been reading, mostly good books (see lower right), but also the entirely of a T.C. Boyle story in The New Yorker, I guess because it was set in Kingman, AZ and I have a ghoulish fascination with Kingman, AZ. Fiction that thinks of itself as “ethical,” or anyhow takes ethics as its meat because that’s what magazine fiction has traditionally laid out on the butcher’s block. It’s correct in the way that a sonata is correct. But there’s no reason that these particular formal cuts had to be enacted against ethics as such: it could have been metallurgy. It could have been baseball scores. The actual revealed attitude toward ethics is something between sham and indifference. Statesmen still hoping to improve the youth are not encouraged.
