In an idiom borrowed from Facebook, [Look, everybody!] My newly picked garden-fresh string beans…

To the post office this morning to send my next-to-youngest grandson Cosmo some birthday loot – doesn’t the post office look nostalgic in black-and white? (I just discovered this function on my cellphone camera.) But black-and-white could never give you the glory of our postmistress’s hair (no artificial coloring or photoshopping!), one of the sights of Woodstock.

Finally, Steve and Paul, two stalwarts of Easton Lane, our street, Steve a genius of furniture-making and house design, Paul simply a genius and currently Steve’s jack-of-all-trades employee, his Figaro.

Today was the 5th and final day of the Facebook-led free e-book download promotion, on Amazon.com, of Book One of my new novel, Who Was That Lady? (We achieved a very pleasing 120+ downloads.) Today was also the day of my oldest pal, Steve Wilson, posting a review to beat all reviews of the book, on Amazon. Best of all, today was the day my friend, brother and colleague John Keller was finally offered an incredibly well-deserved permanent post, like mine, teaching English at the City University of New York.

As soon as I have reason to think someone is reading my book I always want to sit down and read it again, imagining I’m reading it with them. Some kind friends are aware of this and send me brief notes saying, ‘On page 575 now…’ (this is the page in the photograph, right) or wherever it is they’ve reached, and I turn at once to the page in question and read it pretending I’m seeing it through someone else’s eyes.

Not so long ago I received an email that mentioned, ‘I’m afraid I gave up reading your book on page […] (I won’t say which page it was but it’s seared into my memory. The number, that is. As for the page itself I haven’t been able to bring myself to look it up – for fear of thinking, this is the fatal page that stopped someone dead…).

Down to P’keepsie, New York’s little Detroit, to record my weekly radio show, today with star Private Chef Sarah Chianese as my guest, to talk about her life and consuming passion: food. A storm supposedly due, never materialized. Instead, wonderful skies.

On Main Street, P’keepsie: our radio station, the best radio station in the nation, as I intone on air with great sincerity – because it’s true. Wonderful music – old jazz, blues and rock, collected by the station’s owner J P Ferraro – and some nicely eccentric shows, like mine: Roll on the Radio, it’s called, in honor of our sponsor, Rollmagazine.com. Opposite the station, my favorite store, the House of Cards reduced to a compelling message. Use ’em, I say! Use nothing else, in this verkockte world.

Baptism tonight of a new local Festival, the Kingston Festival of the Arts. We went with our friend Linda, and our no less dear friend (and tenant, and neighbor-to-be) Dan, who joined us too, and here we all are at the Uptown diner before going to the evening of operatic and other songs, held in the old Dutch Church in the old town, that initiated the Festival. We went via Claire’s exhibition (part of the Festival) – more on this soon – at the Uptown gallery, her portraits shown off in very satisfying circumstances on a long wall.

The trouble with this blogging business is that it turns you into yet another of the world’s shutterbugs – if that old term still serves for digital cameras, and for smartphones with their increasingly marvellous lenses. Where once the man or woman with a camera was a noticeable pest (or a professional, or both), now the entire population of the planet is armed – they may not have water but they have a phone – with a pocket-slim device once the accoutrement of a master-spy and manufactured by James Bond’s armourer (‘Q’, or whatever his name was), and behold! – (more beholding than in the entire history of our species) – all except obdurate technophobes are everywhere lifting their device to their eye and snapping each other, each other’s pets, each other’s food and their own, until nothing goes unrecorded – not even crime, if it’s street crime. The life of the anchorite in his cave was never a more timely alternative – until the very bears are issued with iPhones.

In the city for the day of the Three Tenors, or rather the Three Colleagues, two composers and a fellow-novelist (and my co-writer of a potentially revolutionary grammar primer, about to be published) each of whom I saw separately in rapid succession after alighting from the 7:30 am Woodstock-Manhattan bus and before boarding the 4:30 bus home. We got useful work done in each case, and in each case Providence has blessed me with enchanting, flexible, and brilliant collaborators. Here they are – musical composer Jimmy, opera composer (and composer in many further genres including instrumental music from suite to symphony, songs, an about-to-be Broadway musical score and, now, film music) Nolan, and author John. How wonderful it is to work with cheerful and co-operative spirits! – younger ones too!

Beautiful soft August days, in this cool summer following an icy winter. What will be next? Another cold one? Nataka’s beautiful flower arranging sums up the glory of summer – this one I find especially lovely, in a vase she acquired for Bread Alone, the Woodstock meeting place/coffee bar/bread and pastry shop, where it sits, majestically. Amid the sunflowers and orchidacious summer lilies, bright spots of St. John’s wort berries (not the herbal wort but a kindred species) show off the golden colors.

Saturday brought a trio of poets to the Golden Notebook bookstore, where I had the wonderfully easy job of introducing them – all three of them my friends, all three of them bright with genius: Sparrow, divine comedian of verse, music and all manner of performance, Michael Brownstein, undimmed idealist and revolutionary, and Peter Lamborn Wilson, our astonishing scholar and poet, master of so many fields, trailblazing anarchist and fund of esoteric knowledge The audience burst into applause when I introduced him as a national treasure – which he is.

My friend, colleague and inspiration John Keller was with us in our country retreat this weekend, and we worked on our grammar book, 3 and a half years in the making – years of unbroken work on it – and now about to be published: grammar for the school generation no longer taught the basics; a grammar free of jargon, with a whole new approach to written English and an expository style residing almost entirely in examples. Its title: Where Did You Get That Bitch? (front cover – rear cover, Where Did You Get That, Bitch?, both with appropriate color photo illustrations). We’ve been field-testing it to our extremely enthusiastic composition classes for years. Now we’re ready to go. It was fireworks night in Woodstock, and I felt our book was being feted in the night skies!