One good book, one really not.
More Harriet the Spy: Harriet loses her Ole Golly, and her parents are as distant as the Spy's. She has her Little Friend Hely (pronounced Healy; is this some sort of Southern thing, not that that would excuse it?) as the Spy has Sport.
More copyediting errors: Tartt confuses "repetitious" and "repetitive." Is Allison's note "IDAJ..." a typo or does the J mean something elusive? "Part of the reason was because..."?! Pot, kettle, whatever; I am, very obviously, not even proofread here, which is not a published book.
One of the criticisms I've read of The Secret History is how much more like a stage set than real life Tartt's Vermont feels. I didn't remark this, and on reread it didn't bother me, because I thought she was going for a mood more than for verisimilitude, the way (I know I'm almost alone in this) the impossible generations in The Corrections didn't bother me because Franzen was going for archetype (I thought).
I wouldn't know how fake her Mississippi is. I did wonder why a felon whose offenses were state would have wound up in Angola, but that might be a regional prison rather than a Louisiana-only institution. The attitudes really seemed to bend back and forth between '50sish and '70sish, and that really got to me. If she named a year at the start, I missed it; for ages I read thinking it was set in the '50s but then something--a TransAm, mention of Vietnam--would make it '70s. The boy Hely imagines himself as Bond in "From Russia with Love" and that was 1963. How would a boy not yet born in 1963 know a movie from that year, before VCRs and in a town probably lacking in rerun movie houses? I guess it could have been on television. Would it have been more credible for him to refer to a '70s Bond film?
Yeah, I was fed up anyway, and fed up more because I woke at 3 in the morning and ended up reading in the living room, finishing the book just after 7:00, but at the end Tartt really got clumsy. Though I'm still not certain of the year, it had to be after 1977 because a boy has a "Star Wars" toy. Since it's set in summer, it might even be 1978. Yet Tartt has a character mention the Indianapolis and the sharks as if no one would have known about it, as if, therefore, "Jaws" had not yet been released. "Jaws" came out in 1975.
I am impossible to please lately. I spent the morning in the really blissfully comfortable reading chair with The Iliad, a sweet-tempered cockatiel, and the propensity, after the sleepless night, to nap (despite a delicious vanilla latte that I drank soon enough after breakfast to enjoy rather than be drugged by).
After he listened to Great Books, RDC looked for audio versions of The Iliad and the ones he found through Audible were all abridged. I told him I wouldn't worry about it: the abridgement would leave mostly only the begats on the cutting room floor. What, like cataloguing the boats and warriors isn't equivalent to the begats of the Old Testament?
Anyway, now I'm reading all the begats, a bunch of people and cities with unpronounceable names, and wondering what I got myself into. Did I read this in English 112 with Tom Roberts or not? I remember clearly his saying that there are two types of people, those who prefer The Iliad to The Odyssey and those who don't know enough to prefer The Iliad to The Odyssey. I probably wouldn't remember that comment if I had read more than only the inferior one at the time--so was he only mentioning it in passing or introducing it in lecture? I would have read it, even freshling year, if he had assigned it, however minimal my understanding might have been. (I was damn stupid about my college papers and notes and syllabi, early on.)
I'm ready for Achilles's anger and Agamemnon's nobility and the gods' capriciousness and so on, but right now all I see is a bunch of people sticking it to another bunch of people.
I really like the translator's and editor's notes, from which I learned that Homer's Greek is not a Greek that anyone would have spoken. Like, ever. It's more than just archaic and rarefied, as the English of the King James Bible seems to a contemporary reader. Or something. But I do have this expectation of high-blown language, so in the text whenever someone, mortal or deathless, uses a contraction, I cringe. I feel like the translator uses a contraction for meter, not because it's akin to the original language. Well, that is the dilemma of translation.
Check. My very first pie crust that didn't sulk and become delinquent before grumping off into a tough and unchewable texture. Or at least, so I hope. It's in the oven.
I called my mother to tell her. I told her I had good news, that I was not pregnant but she should sit down anyway. (I wouldn't want to incubate her hopes at all.) I only found out in November that when I was a wee tot, she and her friend (the one whose glance reassured my eulogy at Granny's funeral) made pies for the sorely missed Lymelight Diner. How can I not have known this, all the Thanksgiving Eves when I would peel pecks of apples for pies and watch her make pie dough and help spread butter and cinnamon and sugar on the scraps to make kisses? Her husband happened to mention it as we sat at lunch in the Bee & Thistle. So she told about splitting up the work, about her making the apple pies one week and her friend making the berry ones the next, and about using lard in the dough, about how the health inspector, visiting the house to issue a commercial baking license, first gave my sister and me the once-over. That probably is an excellent initial indicator, clean and happy kids. I always knew she made the best pies--much better than Granny's--(and never skimped on the telling her, either, not biting the hand that fed me apple pie) and it saddened me that I never knew that. Could I have forgotten?
So. RDC helped with the crust, verbally. I'm the only one who touched it, but he offered valuable advice like to freeze the pastry roller and spray it with Pam and to preheat the oven and not to stress the dough by rolling tooo fast. As soon as the pie went in the oven, I called my mother and we talked through my rolling out scraps. (I've never had scraps, before using only the Pillsbury premade crusts.)
My beleaguered mother. She asked me if I still had my hair in that "cute" cut she saw in January and I told her no, that I'd grown it a couple of feet since. In all honesty this is the same smart-ass answer I'd give to anyone, but since I know her question meant "I really like that haircut" despite its simultaneous undertones of "and thank god you don't look like such a hippie anymore," I could answer her accordingly. But I am constitutionally unable to cut her a break. However, she did seem to get the joke. Whew.
The pie's not out of the oven yet but the kisses have disappeared. Something went right, apparently.
The other day RDC and I arrove home at the same time, me on Shadowfax and he in Cassidy. I pulled up next to him as he unfolded himself, chatting about the day and the bike and watching two little boys--well, nineish, not so little--walk along. They were clearly on expotition (RDC blames me for his no longer being able to say "expedition"), one in camo, one in as close to hunter's-orange as he could get, both carrying backpacks full of, I was sure, vital supplies, both carrying weapons, striding along on their mission. I watched them, grinning. They gained the corner and looked up from their intent conversation. They saw me and one raised his plywood gun and aimed it at me.
"Please don't point your gun at me!" I exclaimed. "I have done nothing to you!"
He lowered his rifle immediately, waved sheepishly with his other arm, and called "Sorry!"
I grinned wide at him, still charmed. "That's all right."
And it was. Somehow, it still has to be.
This was taken in January (so that's the old box on top of his cage and about two shoelaces ago) but somehow I hadn't posted it yet. He is now perched on my toes, probably entertaining impure thoughts since I am wearing fleece socks with a fleece blanket on my legs, while preening. Blake's had a wonderful Sunday: housebound, reading parents, a new living room arrangement by which he can hop from the toes of the parent in the recliner to the table, across the table to the other parent on the couch, hot cereal and a bit of orange and a sour cherry.