A raincloud of tantruming toddlers and aggressively colicky carry-on infants now seems to follow me around no matter what airport I’m in or what airplane I’m on. Horrid little brat-shaped air-raid sirens shrieking their germs into the bored faces of their parents, who are lucky enough to be able to tune the sound out. Something about contemporary aviation must be extra upsetting to the 21st-century young — perhaps the TSA’s ramped-up X-rays are agitating their Nerfy fontanelles. (Nice baby.) Last week’s quotations involving DFW’s and Z. Smith’s comments on M. Amis remind me of what Smith told Lorrie Moore regarding DFW: I want to meet him so much it’s giving me a hernia. Raincloud notwithstanding, on Black Friday I make respectable if not overly substantial progress through Amis’s Money and Elizabeth Crane’s All This Heavenly Glory while in the airports and on the planes, en route back home to the proper cold and proper dismal. In Money I hit the line “Selina and I get on like a house on fire” only shortly after noting that Thisbe Nissen’s blurb on the back cover of Heavenly Glory begins: “Elizabeth Crane writes like a house on fire!” (Which is true.)