I myself prefer Sun, Sea, and Socialism.

Today I was at the dry-cleaning place next to Bagel Gourmet, dropping off a couple pairs of pants (pants that I probably won't be wearing for the rest of the summer anyway, because they're wool and the weather's finally getting hot). I noticed that the cashier--a friendly-looking teenage boy--had a copy of José Saramago's Blindness next to the register. The paper receipt he was using as a bookmark indicated that he was almost finished with it.

Now, when I read Blindness in my AP English class in high school, I was thoroughly impressed by it. I wrote a rambling, overwrought paper about its connections to Camus' La Peste, and I engineered a group presentation in which our classroom was transformed into a feuding roomful of the temporarily blind, with me shouting passages from the book via a portable PA system. Which, in retrospect, was probably overkill.

Anyway, I then noticed that the cashier was wearing a t-shirt from a lacrosse camp whose logo read "God-Family-Lacrosse." Was he grudgingly reading the book for a school assignment, or was Saramago for him somehow compatible with this particularly abhorrent facet of American culture? Though it's logically flimsy, my faith in the idea that literature makes one a better person is inseperable from my belief that a 'better person' is one for whom there are more just and humane ideals than God, Family, and Lacrosse.

Coincidentally, he also had a copy of Ian McEwan's Atonement, which I actually started last week but have laid aside for the moment. At least from this brief taste of McEwan, I think he's a bit too polished and boring--but I hear Saturday's good.