I am close to finishing the Jim Harrison memoir, so now I have little excuse to not dive into The Brothers Karamazov. I have the book set aside on my dining room table, next to a deck of Magic cards, an army surplus map case, a button, and Peter Gabriel’s latest album, Up . Between myself and The Brothers Karamazov, metaphorically speaking, are a philosophy book, David Egger’s new novel, and issues 1, 2, and 3 of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. More practically, before that stack is even cracked, I must suffer through six hours of sleep, eight to ten hours of work, and three hours of tai chi.

What kind of a sad world do we live in, where such worldly concerns are deemed more important than good literature?

Outside at 11:30 at night we have a light dusting of snow on all available surfaces, particularly the tree directly in front of my living room window which, in the bad light of the street lamp, in silhouette underneath the clouds, look like a negative of a stormscape. Or an aesthetically conscious mathematics experiment. Or just a snow-covered tree, stark against the sky.