Fell asleep last night round about 7 or 8 with lens in and light on. Single glass of wine doesn't usually have that effect on me. Pulled myself back down to sleep whenever I came to the surface in order not to have a troublesome three or four hours of wakefulness, because these days it might have turned into 'irrevocably awake from 1 a.m. to 9.' Instead I was up finally at 6 something, did my exercises, and got to the coffee shop before 8 when the pastry was still warm, and still being brought up from the kitchen, and the place was empty. Dispiritingly, it starts to fill precisely at 8 when I shall never again be awake to repeat today's performance.
Reading Hurston's observations of 1930s Haiti is also depressing. Should skip that section and go back to the voudoun chapters, but my completist conscience won't permit. The voudoun section has its own blinkety-blink passages, like the one where a master is being interred and the title passed on to his successor. Hurston has no problem with the bit where the dead master is asked if he agrees to the succession and the corpse sits up and nods, but she's totally kerblonxed by an overwhelming sense of evil that attacks the assembly a few moments later, source unknown. 'American readers may not credit this'- the sense of evil- but are expected not to turn a hair at corpses that sit up. Yes, I've read similar things about Tibetan lamas as described by Americans, but enh- you expect that sort of thing from Buddhists.
