Oh damn, still in this dream.

Mother Nature is supposed to be watering the garden today, thereby ushering in cooler, more seasonable temps that will allow me to finish the major plantings tomorrow.

Other than that, not much on the agenda. I will continue chipping away at the Work in Progress and making money.

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I've been reading Elizabeth Strout, who is kinda the American Alice Munro.

(I had to stop reading the genuine Alice Munro after the news broke that she'd been complicit in her second husband's sexual abuse of her youngest daughter. The abuse started when the girl was nine years old. And I will never forgive Munro.)

I can't tell whether I like Strout or not, but up to a certain point, she is compulsively readable, her short, structurally straightforward sentences create pointilist fictional characterizations, simple detail layering on to simple detail. She uses a lot of repetition, and though her language is utterly humorless, sometimes she will position a sentence within a paragraph in an arch way.

But her characters ultimately bore me. Once I figured out (fairly early in the book) that—Spoiler! Spoiler! Spoiler!—the father sexually abused the protagonist in My Name Is Lucy Barton, I kinda lost interest in reading any further.

I guess I'm not really interested in the basic humanity of all people.

I'm only interested in the basic humanity of interesting people.

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As a side note, I'll add that abuse is abuse and never to be tolerated.

But in general, I am more forgiving than is sanctioned by current American morality of consensual sexual relationships between underage but postpubescent teenagers and adults. Pedophilia is to 21st-century America what communism was to the U.S. in the 1950s. Wasn't too terribly long ago that Gigi and Summer of '42 were box office hits.

The scientific rationale behind the current morality is that minors' frontal lobes are undeveloped, implying that on the evening before one's 18th birthday, there's some sort of time-lapse flurry of neurological activity so that frontal lobes magically mature, thereby rendering consent legal (if still ill-advised) the following morning. Which is patently ridiculous.

And anyway, the pre-frontal cortex doesn't stop developing until some time between the ages of 25 and 30.

Philippe Aries maintained that adolescence was an invention of post-industrial society, designed to keep an entire class of people off the job market.

I'm inclined to agree.