(I knew at least that she could read–there was a James Clavell novel and a book on how to get a job in her beach bag.) But as I wrote onward (about a librarian, a youthful next-door neighbor, and a UPS man, since, being a beginner, I thought I should at least make an attempt to follow the conventions), picking the setting and the physical traits of my few characters pretty much at random, I got interested in what I was doing and found that it was making me want very much to make myself come. In fact, for the first twenty minutes or so, every time I typed the word “she” or “her” I slowed way down to press the component letters, overcome in the act of placing a feminine pronoun on the page by an almost irresistible need to whale on my bone. But I denied myself; instead I took off my bathing suit and knelt, crouched over before the typewriter as if I were on a prayer rug, showing the ocean my open ass and udderously self-juggling balls.

Note: I had this book at the top of a stack I was about to trade in for credit at the used books store, but reading this bit at random brought the whole novel back to mind and I now intend to keep it and read it again. Thanks Brandon! It’s about a man who finds that he is able to snap a rubberband on his wrist and stop time for everybody but himself. He makes the most of this skill by indulging himself in many ways–often in ways that resemble the antics found in that old National Lampoon cartoon series The Adventures of Vinny Shinblind, the Invisible Sex Maniac. In this scene he has stopped time on the beach, near a young woman who is sunbathing, and he is writing a pornographic story that he will bury in the sand near her trailing left hand. It will stick up sufficiently, of course, for her to find it and for him–now lying at some distance from her–to watch her read it.

He was cold now, deep cold, the chill wedged into his bones as unyieldingly as it lodged in the bricks of his Boston rooming-house for six months of the year. The food sat in his belly like a block of ice. There were thirty-six hours to go, and he was tired. He had no feeling in his hands and he slapped them together, rubbed them hard, forcing blood back into the wooden slabs they’d become, then dug around in his pack for his address book and a stub of pencil.

I realize now that you are quite the ¶ enthusiast! I hadn’t wanted to look it up at the time yet regretted the omission almost immediately.

Next time, I will not forget!

Meanwhile, each week, the intimacy deepened in its own way. They found out more about each other. Walter insisted she quit the Communist Party, and Ann did. She received in reply a vaguely threatening letter, but she had not been important to the Party; they had not thought highly of her; she did not hear from them again.

John Banville, Athena

Once upon a time the nobility, high society, had kept blackmoors. She called to mind charming pictures of sleigh-drives with gaily caparisoned horses, plumed lackeys and frost-white, glittering trees; but this romantic side of high life had long vanished. “Society life has become soulless, nowadays,” she thought.