i don't feel so good. i'm not thinking clearly. i need to refrain in some ways. yesterday i thought i can't go on with the making of americans and then today i saw something that caught me in there and later now it feels dense and dull and intractable. i wish i could glean what i need and move on to the next book waiting for me.

 no kings, just presidents.

 

there are some things i'd like to forget and some things i'd like to remember. i'd like some people to forget about me in the past, and i'd like to forget about some people in the past, but things become part of me and in the end i'm a small part of everything. 

Drone assassinations of presumed enemies, for instance, became a remarkably routine tactic of the Obama administration. And in Donald Trump’s second term, ICE agents in American cities have brought the War on Terror home. 

David Bromwich

The Most Dangerous Country

 i wake up and try the making of americans again. she uses the words queer and singularity a lot. the words had different meanings then. some of the same words changed. then again she was writing for us now, so maybe she was intending layers of meaning past and present and into the future. i read a paragraph to r. and r. wonders how gertrude would read it and we listen to gertrude read on sound cloud and now i think i have to keep on going with the making of americans.

 I don't know if I can do The Making of Americans. It's so thick, and next to it I have a little pink volume called The Threshold and the Ledger so refreshing and a lithe 68 pages. Just thinking about The Making of Americans makes my brain balk and moan in protest. In all humility I admit there are things that are just too unwieldy for me to read in this life.