Cool car I saw in the parking lot at the gym:

Shortly, I must toddle off to the New Paltz garden for more weeding as it's supposed to get hot this afternoon.
Yesterday, I did very little of anything except
tromp (Winding Hills,
steep) and start rereading Tracy Daugherty's biography of Joan Didion—which is not as good as Tracy Daugherty's bio of Larry McMurtry.
I suspect Didion simply did not
engage Daugherty as much: She is an excellent prose writer, but comes across as an unsympathetic human being, unspontaneous, unlikeable, studied to an extreme. One gets the impression that Didion hovered over her words like a vulture hovering over a skull, wondering,
Did I miss anything the first time I picked this clean? It probably took her half an hour to write a single sentence.
McMurtry, in contrast, was a kind of mad, slapdash writer. Every morning of his life, he was up and at that typewriter by 7:30 a.m., typing away like a maniac. By 9 a.m., he'd have produced 10 pages. And then he'd stop.
Ten pages in an hour and a half! That's
crazy fast!
And probably accounts for his uneven output: Easily half of what McMurtry wrote is really baaaaad.
But McMurtry draws the reader in in a way that Didion is simply not capable of doing. One must
parse Didion's sentences. And that is exhausting when one is reading for pleasure. Hence, one never reads Didion for pleasure.
Interestingly, both Didion and McMurtry are ultimately what you might call regional writers. Didion's region was California; McMurtry's region was Texas. And each writer's finest output amounts to kind of a harvest of regional tropes: Didion's basket is "the pioneer," while McMurtry's is "the American West."