I'm looking at the day's third Granny Smith apple, untouched (the apple) on the sill. Tonight is the Second Big Gallstone Purge and so I'm supposed to stop all intake, solid and liquid, at some point - 3 o'clock? 6? It's OK because by Day 3 of the apple fast you're not hungry anymore anyway.

Glorious gray gusty cool today. I'll have to lower the south awning again before it's ripped from its hinges. Hark! is that rainspatter din on tin roof? Splendid. I didn't want to mow the lawn today, anyway.

Reread Hemingway's "The Gambler, The Nun, The Radio" this morning, tangenting from discussion of white noise in the choral interstices of Kerouac's Mexico City Blues. Strange story; I'd forgotten how strange. Odd repetitions and refrains. I'll read Hemingway for Part 4 of the Thing I'm Writing, and Gertrude Stein behind Part 5. Joyce will do for 1, and for 2 maybe tales of Robin Hood and King Arthur - that's it! I'll just burrow into My Book House. Part 3, my finished "Road Choruses," is Kerouac. Six needs something sensual, overwritten - something Jamesian, maybe, or out of Virginia Woolf.

The Lombardy poplars across the way bend and sway in their neat row; trees always seem to dance in slow motion, in any wind. When I was young and paid attention to the World Out There I used to hypnotize myself watching them communicate among themselves, especially if the leaves were shiny and the sun was high, all the sparkles. I remember lying in bed during my second miscarriage, having taken too much Darvon for the pain, following, waltzing with those leafglints in the grove out the window.

Billowing curtains - same thing.