CAAF: Afternoon coffee

Howdy, and sorry so quiet here. Like Terry, I’ve been working like crazy on my book although unlike Terry (I suspect) my definition of “like crazy” includes time for Scrabulous. It’s a brave new world for me, Scrabulous. And it turns out, a fairly addictive one! I keep wondering how much games like this will figure in future literary biographies, i.e., “Work on the trilogy then halted as he strove to get under 5 minutes on the Hard level of Web Sudoku.” But mostly, I’ve been concentrating — I want to be finished with this thing by summer. Till then, full warning, I’ll be a little tired and not as polished as I wish I were (not to claim that I’ve ever operated like a ray-gun of insight and incisive comment) — because really, when I take a break lately, all I want to do is stand around & chat nonsense & have nonsense chatted back at me.
• Edith Wharton’s The Mount needs to raise $3 million to stay open after April 24 (Thursday). The situation sounds dire; the worst part of the story is that Wharton’s personal library, which was re-acquired by the estate only a couple years ago, may have to be sold to make up the funds. I’ve been hoping to visit The Mount for a while now, and so was glad the story includes a slideshow tour of its interiors. So many author houses are a disappointment — you go there looking for something that’s only in the books — but with Wharton, with her love of design and ornamentation, it doesn’t seem so extracurricular.
• Isabel Fonseca, author of the incredible Bury Me Standing and the new novel Attachment, and who I feel oddly protective over as people seem bent on dismissing her as being only Martin Amis’s pretty wife when Bury Me Standing is a formidable, great piece of nonfiction, profiled by Charles McGrath for The New York Times. Going over her history, McGrath compares her entertainingly to the Max Beerbohm character Zuleika Dobson, “a beautiful young woman who turns up at Oxford and makes all the undergrads suicidal with longing.” (Via TEV.)