The Great April Prognostication of Now and To Come

Unceasing wonders:

Catherwood is back in print!

I've decided that the basic Yankee snow heap with scooped bedroom and candles is a perfectly fine sort of house after all.

My children have decided to put off the teenage years until their second childhoods.

The Grumpy Old Bookman is no longer Grumpy but Happy. Really. (It's enough to set my teeth on edge. And which dwarf-adjective comes next?)

My forthcoming novel will be the lead book at FSG . . . I am taking lead-book lessons from J. Franzen, just to be prepared with the most up-to-date methods.

All the megacorporations are breaking up into tiny boutique publishers in order to nurture writers and offer them tea and shortbread in the afternoons.

Books will now be shelved beginning with the letter "Z," sometimes with "Y," so that my books are never again in the bottom right-hand corner with the dust bunnies.

I have stopped wanting to eat lady peas and okra and all the things I can't get Up Here.

The Waldenbooks in Oneonta has decided to carry local authors!

America has thrown its trashiest books out the windows, where red-blooded American dogs are e'en now gumming and savaging their intimate intimacies and making the yard look like Cooperstown: that is, very white with snow, snow on snow, in the bleak December, etc.

"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" will be read on the steps of the Village Library on the 4th of July. The hunt is on for a wild-eyed villager with stentorian voice.

People who have not read Fenimore Cooper will not be allowed to talk about him, no time, no more, uh-uh. Not even at the annual Village Library Book Sale.

P. O. T. (promise of Tinkerbell): no more books of mine will ever appear just after an editor (mine!) has departed the house or mere days after dire national disasters.

My very own copies of what everybody says is the beautiful Argosy Quarterly will arrive on Monday.

My children will quit eating 40 hours a month with their insane, obsessive desire for more, more, more karate.

The fancy Lady Azure (blue Persian with a heart murmur given to us rather than flogged to some lady-fied person who has all day to comb out her dread-locked fur) will quit being too stuck-up to use the litter box with Theodora.

Lady Azure will quit needing baths.

Someone else will bathe Lady Azure. And comb out those teeny-weeny dreadlocks. And clean her tiny, fabulous nose.

It occurs to me that Lady Azure is really a live teddy bear. Someone will want to do those things to a live teddy bear. Soon.

Big news! The Baseball Hall of Fame is moving to Poughkeepsie.

Moreover, the baseball shops are moving to Poughkeepsie. (P. O. T.: There will be children's underpants and Other Useful Things in the new shops.)

Naturally, the baseball tourists will be following the BHF and the shops to Poughkeepsie. This will leave us with the Fenimore and Farmer Museum breed of tourist, the opera tourist, and the old-house-and-nature tourist. And the shops with the children's etcetera.

Poughkeepsie will welcome the BHF tourist, assuredly...

More big news: James Fenimore Cooper is moving to Poughkeepsie.

Good for Poughkeepsie!