Haldoor Laxness's Chair

I went to the library yesterday for "The Brothers Karamazov."

It wasn't there.

I really wanted some heavy winter reading and thought only Doestoyevsky would do.

Joan Didion's book, "Blue Nights", was on the shelf of books marked New. I kind of knew what it was about and decided to take it home.

She's so easy to read, so palatable. I can't decide if this is good or bad? To be easy to read when you're writing about death, that is.

I read late into the night. As usual when I read Joan Didion I can't tell if she's writing about someone else or about herself. In the case of "Blue Nights," I think she's writing about herself when she's writing about her daughter Quintana Roo, who died a few years ago providing the subject matter for Joan Didion to write about herself as she'd written previously in her book, "The Year of Magical Thinking," written upon the death of her husband John, Quintana Roo's father.

The poet Basho has this beautiful notion of composition, that it must occur in an instant, "like a woodcutter felling a large tree, or a swordsman leaping at his enemy."  I don't know how Joan Didion writes, but I read her like Basho says a poet must write. I finished reading "Blue Nights" at 2:36 a.m.

In Iceland this summer, I took this picture of the writer Haldoor Laxness's chair. I was walking around his house which has been turned into a kind of museum. I wasn't supposed to take a picture but I did. I could see him sitting there, alive, with a notebook on his knees, looking out the window for some middle way between what he could see and what he couldn't.