Vietnamese woman energetically drilling, scraping, prodding, saturating, suctioning, swabbing my teeth. It would be so interesting to be a person as skilled as this, I reflect, as she performs these maneuvers over myself… I appreciate her quiet industry and intensity.
When seeking out a dentist, my only guiding principles had been — (1) location — and (2) that I’d had positive experiences with lady health professionals in the past (although not having myself been one of their patients — having not myself been to see a health professional in 3 decades until around now.)
In the lobby beforehand, still reading Tristram Shandy, fighting at every moment to read it over the noise of CNN reportage of the depressing “dogshit bill,” as Yglesias had called it, the BBB… I did manage, however, to come across a quotable passage in this not very quotable book, which I would probably post on a blog later —
“That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best — I’m sure it is the most religious — for I begin with writing the first sentence — and trusting to Almighty God for the second.”
This reminded me somewhat of the first sentence of Augie March but, having by a miracle efficiently found a copy of that book in my library — though my library is not extensive, just extremely disordered — I found it was not as snug a fit as I first thought, and tabled the idea of trying to link them. (Idea was supposed to have been — “spontaneously” is the only way to write. A writer’s fundamental work is experiencing — thought, emotion, sensation –, after which, the rest should follow more or less naturally. Contra-Flaubert, I suppose.)
The other statement that leapt out at me, in the waiting room, over the CNN, was a little Whitman-like (Whitman, who wrote spontaneously, not laboriously, according to my information). Tristram writes: “For my own part, I am resolved never to read any book but my own, as long as I live.”
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 
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