No, I still haven't finished it. Two-thirds through, and I'm enjoying it but not enough not to interrupt it, not enough that it compels me above any other activity or book. A reason for my unenthrallment is squirmishness: I feel guilty for reading something that seems so prejudiced. Every race and culture is shown warts and all; Smith is an equal-opportunity mocker. And it is not racist to mention a truth of racism.
It's really funny in lots of places. Joyce and her self-righteousness showing her racism. Alsanai's malapropisms. "Post class aberration consideration period" for detention.
Ah yes. My not-having-finished-yet point is the title of the chapter I'm on, "More English than the English." I'm sure I had heard this sort of phrase before I tried to watch a four-hour Jimmy Stewart epic about "pioneering," read colonizing, the American West, whose title escapes me. I got a few minutes into it--just past the overture--when the narrator began to describe Stewart's character as "more Indian than the Indians." Y'know, because it was a decent culture and all, but it took Whitey to do it right and better than the lazy redskins. I turned it off without regrets. Anyway, that phrase now reminds me of that movie, and if I'm supposed to think of ethnicism upon reading it yeah I get that. But it makes me squirmy.
The mountains are slathered with white, the sky is blue with white polka clouds, the s are snapping, and it's in the high 50s. I sat outside in the the warmth of the sun with White Teeth and my lunch (spinach salad with chicken and cheese). Bliss.
For afters I had some Hershey's Mint Kisses, which are my primary weakness. Now that I have determined that chocolate with mint is superior to chocolate with peanut butter (years of serious study led to this conclusion), the next debate will be between chocolate with raspberry and chocolate with blueberry. Really, blueberry wins hands down, but raspberry has the advantage of availability.
I biked today, and even in the morning my thin Old Lyme sweatshirt was too much. I lost my long-sleeved t-shirt somewhere along the line and need to replace it. Perhaps at REI tonight; it's time for Shadowfax's 30-day tune-up. I have to find out whether I can wait for this check-up or must leave it. I didn't bike-commute yesterday but intend to for the rest of the week.
Still to do:
Okay, partly this struck me because I had just begun Barbara Kingsolver's new book of essays Small Wonder, in which a torturer says, "We can milk roosters here; and bears lay eggs." And partly, as I drowsily thumbed through a Pottery Barn catalog, because it's so stupid. I know this is really Mr. Gradgrindy of me, but an egg- (or other small object-) containing rooster (with a small opening in the back to insert same) is Why No One Knows How Stuff Works.
In college sometime I saw a child with a plush toy (I can't quite call it a stuffed animal, even though "stuffed" here is particularly apt) that was up the spout. The animal you bought--a nice non-threatening domesticated species like a dog, cat, or horse--came with three babies, unless you were really lucky and it had four, or really lucky and it came with five. This reminded me of Veruca Salt's quest for a Golden Ticket, just to keep buying until one turned out right. Besides that, the really offensive part was that the animals had slits in their bellies, and the babies got tucked into the belly for storage or could be removed. My conclusion was that the Caesarian Section Surgery Company must have promoted that toy, to make a generation grow up thinking that's where babies ought to come from. And be reinsertable.
I broke Buddy's heart again by leaving as soon as I'd showered and snacked. I bussed downtown, not biking because I just don't trust Shadowfax unattended in downtown, and plus there isn't a bike rack outside Capitol Books, and I would have to a) train myself to lock up at Capitol and then go through the entire unlocking ritual, ride the mere three blocks to the 'brary, and lock up again. Or b) leave the bike at Capitol and walk across the state capitol complex after dark to return to it (no thank you) or c) leave it at the 'brary to begin with and walk thence to Capitol and back.
It's good I didn't choose c) (taking the most time), because who knew Capitol closes at 6? I ducked inside at 5:53, without my list because I'm a nidiot. I remembered my priorities, at least: no Bean Trees, but The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, check, and The Toughest Indian in the World. Small Wonder, Kingsolver essays not fiction. Checking the sf shelves for Card or Gibson or Stephenson, I found the first two Green Sky books. They are the really cheesy pulp format, a little shorter even than regular pulp, with bad paper, but I am pretty sure they're out of print so I snapped them up.
I began Fistfight walking to the library. I'll like that.
For the first time, I went downstairs at the library, to the conference center. The stairs are at the west, Denver Art Museum end of the building, and when I got to the bottom to looked to my right in surprise. I never knew there was an underground passage between the library and the museum. I would have explored immediately but someone addressed me:
"Are you confused too?" probably taking my pausing and looking down the passage in nostalgia (how I would have loved that as a child!) for lostness.
"No," I said. "I just never knew there was a tunnel between the library and the museum."
"Sweet," said the bearded young man dismissively, after a quick glance. "I was looking for the internet computers."
I directed him to either the main fiction hall or the nonfiction floors above, where there would be fewer people.
"Thank you ma'am," he finished.
Criminy. I never thought I'd be 34, did you?
So then "Stagecoach." I knew when I sat down in the second row, right side (because of Haitch, I always sit on the right side of a theatre now) that I would never opt to watch a movie, thankfully only a 96' movie, in such a chair. I dealt because I am, ma'am, apparently a grown-up now, until a few minutes into the movie when a late arrival needed to stand right in front of me asking the people in the first row whether this seat or that was taken. Since the seats were empty and the movie had started, there's your answer, see? Then he sat down, right in front of me, after being all concerned about everyone else in the front row, clearly not caring about moi, than whom he was much taller and much much stinkier. Plus the two men behind me had not quite ceased their conversation, and they spoke like my father, self-affirming and the only person worth listening to. I rose with my stack of books, walked down around the back and up, and lay on the scratchy filthy carpet in front of the left side. The five books made an excellent pillow.
All I knew about "Stagecoach" was that it was nominated for best picture in 1939 (the library series is "The Golden Year of Film"). I only ever knew John Wayne as an old man and a cariacature of himself in all the westerns I watched with my father, and I have a hard time seeing him as a real actor. But it was quite good. It took me a moment to realize about the One Bullet Left and its best use. Introducing the movie, a librarian had mentioned its archetypes, such as the prostitute with the heart of gold. She kinda implied this was an element in the Western that "Stagecoach" invented, but I must have mistaken her, because also in 1939 there's Belle Watling in "Gone with the Wind."
The other day Uberboss said he had a book for me, couldn't remember the title, lots of literary hijinks (his word) and kind of skiffy (not his word) with time travel...
"Is it The Eyre Affair?" I asked. He was pleased that I knew it and brought it in the next day. I read the first few pages and it will be fun I'm sure; the epigraph of the very first chapter is an excerpt from a book that I promptly submitted to the Invisible Library whose author is Millon de Floss.
Yesterday he came in brandishing Atonement and asked if I were next in line for it. No, I read it in September and we hadn't talked about it. We both liked it better than Amsterdam and I admired how its three sections worked so well together, as distinct in style and content as each is, and he praised its craft.
---
Saturday night Lou and her partner had a birthday party, renting out a bowling alley for their few hundred closest friends and coworkers. They know everyone: a mayoral candidate was there and another easily could have been invited. At one point I was chatting with a coworker, who occasionally leaned forward and rubbed the shoulders of another coworker (down one level on the bowling floor) to the point that my observation changed from "whatever" to "huh." Finally I sought out CoolBoss and said, "I have a gossip question for you." I whispered the two names in her ear.
"Where have you been?" she mock-demanded. "For two years now."
Where I've been, by the way, is sitting in my cube across the hall from one of the two and across from her, who is good friends with the other. My only defense was that I am not a gossip at work.
I have been commended at performance evaluations for not involving myself in office gossip and politics, and that's an image I want to maintain and cultivate. For the first time (that I know of) something is going on that could affect me directly, with two factions each reasonably supposing I am privy to the other, and the more people think I know nothing, the better off I am.
---
Yesterday Egg left for a week in Paris and the Loire valley. Her flight was at 3; she didn't leave the office until after 1. It's less than a half-hour to DIA, but eesh. Believe me, no one would have died if she had delegated or postponed a thing or two. This is why I'm usually content to be support staff. This job ceases to exist at 4 o'clock (or 4:30, flexing with a half-hour lunch), and that's a-okay with me. Another reason I like her is that, when she hugged me g'bye and I said "Bon voya-gee!" she knew who I was being.
I have no idea why this took me so long to read. I enjoyed it all the way through, and I thought the dramatic culmination of all the threads at the end really well done.
When we got back from the gym, we lit a fire, one whose smoke went where it's meant to. RDC turned the chair to face the fire, and I lay my neglected yoga mat on the floor with the coarse-woven Mexican blanket on top. I thought I might still want the fleece blanket, because I am insane. My feet, more than six feet from the fire, did want it; my arms and face, stretched toward the fire, baked as I finished my book.
I love a fire. A particularly true line from A Single Shard is that there are two things people cannot resist watching: fire and falling water, always changing, always the same.
Precor Elliptical 45' @ 12/20 resistance and 20/20 incline, 5750 strides total. I got competitive with the fellow next to me, who held onto the handles and whose resistance was a fraction of mine. But we got on our machines at about the same time and eventually I noticed that he had a higher stride-per-minute rate than I. I might not have felt compelled to exceed him had he not been overweight (and wearing black socks). He left at 35' and I did my 45', plus 3' or so of cooldown.
I read Poisonwood Bible in the fall of 2001 and Prodigal Summer the next winter or spring. I've been meaning to read more Kingsolver, and when I recently came across an essay about genetic modification--about a lot more than that--that reminded me again. I started Small Wonder Wednesday night and Animal Dreams this morning. I got a late start to the day, watching the bedroom darken as clouds thickened in the sky, reading in bed. The child not understanding her parent's love and the relationship between the sisters is going to make this book hurt and work for me, I am sure.
By the time we finally got up this morning, woke up, and breakfasted, it was almost noon. I love weekends. By lingering in bed so long I missed the best sun; I rolled Blake in front of the windows to watch and scream as I worked in the garden (because of the porch, he could only see me when I stood up). High Country Gardens said cutting back all the shrubby stuff was fine, and I am confident that that's what the Nepeta x faasenni and even the Agastache rupestris wanted. I also cut down the spires of the Salvia pitcheri but I am not at all sure that's what it wanted. I was to cut down the sage as well but leaves are budding on last year's growth. This is the same dilemma I have with the raspberry canes: buds on last year's growth. Did I wait too late to cut them down? Or will there be leaves but no fruit on those canes?
I brought in some kindling for the fire we'll start in a bit. My brushpile is just that, and with the addition of the cherry and pine branches, I should turn it over so the seasoned wood is on top. The blizzard hit cedars the worst; the deciduous trees didn't have leaves yet to hold a heavier load of snow and I guess cedars' denser needles hold more than slicker, longer pine and spruce needles.
Damn amputations. I recently watched "Gone with the Wind" and decided, Tuesday night in Home Despot buying a new pruning saw, that I would probably be as tormented as Dr. Meade performing a similar duty. But, I am gratified to report, his patient's terrible pleas did not pop into my head until well afterward, as I sat in my garden clipping shrubs (about which I feel much less guilty and worried about pain).
The sun gave up before 2, so in I came. RDC came home with groceries, so we can hibernate, and mineral spirits and cheap brushes so we can apply the linseed oil I bought should it ever be warm again (ha!), and some Widespread Panic (I knew it would only a matter of time for him). Plant catalogs and a fire and Animal Dreams await me. I love weekends.
I recently read a searingly loving and painful essay a friend wrote about her mother's early-onset Alzheimer's. Homero's chapters reminded me of that, of Charles Wallace Within Chuck in A Swiftly Moving Planet and his slippery time, of dear Littlejohn in the eponymous novel. Cosima and Halimeda, a close pair of sisters who consider their parent unfeeling; Cosima, unable to see the love Homero demonstrates, avoiding responsibility, not remembering stories from her childhood. If Cosima had been the younger of the sisters, three years apart, this book might have devoured me instead of vice versa. Older Cosima doesn't remember something that younger Halimeda does; this reminded me uncomfortably of my not remembering family incidents that happened when I was 12 that were repeats of things that had happened when my sister was 9, when she remembers more from a younger age.
Twins have been a theme lately. Loyd and Leander here; Magid and Millat in White Teeth, Ormus and Gayomart in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, John and Paul? Ottokar in Whistling Woman. Why Loyd had only one L is never explained. Because he's not Welsh, presumably. But the name reminded me of the neighbor-widow's unmissed dead husband in the Anastasia books, of the woman's never being able to take her husband seriously after he asked her to pronounce his name "Yoyd" as if it were a Spanish instead of a Welsh invention.
Animal Dreams. Wow.
That too clever-for-my-own-good first-person tone. I managed it for To Say Nothing of the Dog and that was thrice as long. I can handle it in this, as long as there aren't too many names like Paige Turner.
Names to look up, because I assume none is without its joke: Landen Parke-Laine (I get the Parke-Laine part). Milton Keens. Lamber Thwalts. Acheron Hades. Fillip Tamworth. Buckett. Edmund Capillary. Filbert Snood.
Books to contribute to the Invisible Library: Millon de Floss, A Short History of the Special Operations Network and Thursday Next--A Biography; Acheron Hades, Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit; Landen Parke-Laine, Once Were Scroundrels; Thursday Next, A Life in Special Ops.
Blake is hopping from knee to knee on RDC's lap, bobbing excitedly because he (the verb will clarify the antecedent) is reading "Tinturn Abbey." (Blake loves for RDC to read aloud.) I am agog at this.
Guess where we might go this summer.
Precor Elliptical, 20' @ 20/20 incline and 13/20 resistance. People who won't clear off after 20' when people are waiting (and the whole place is mirrored, you can see the line from any machine) continue to pis me off.
Weighted seated calf raises, 2x30 and 1x40 @ 90. Probably not enough lift. What the hell.
Leg presses, 3x12 @140. I haven't been doing weights (d'ya guess?)
Leg curls, 3x12 @ 70. Or maybe x10. I was impressed I could do so many before my knee hurt.
Hack squats, 3x5 @125. Five. I suck.
Leg extensions, 3x12 @ 70.
Lat pull downs, 3x15 @80. My lats are better.
Seated row, 3x15 @~75
Some other back machine.
My sister asked me Saturday if I liked Wind in the Willows. "It's okay," I said, "not one of my special favorites." I am not doing so well with the Quelling Impulsively Honest Answer In Favor of Weighing Actual Import of Question Before Opening Piehole.
She wanted to give me a copy she found in a used bookshop in Marblehead, a 1968 British printing with Arthur Rackham illustrations. Last year she gave me a bubble machine for my birthday, and she was really disappointed I didn't consider it the best gift ever (she has been pleased to note that it has featured prominently in all my outdoor festivities since, though).
I didn't say anything about Arthur Rackham vs. Original and therefore Right Ernest Shepherd decorations. I didn't go on about how the second half, with Toad getting all Napoleon-like (I don't mean Bonapartesque, I mean like in Animal Farm), depresses me. Ratty and Moley messing about in boats, that I like. Ratty and Moley finding Otter's child sleeping in the curve of Pan's arm as he pipes in the dawn, that I like. Toad driving a car and escaping from jail disguised as a laundress, not so much. I just left it at "not one of my favorites."
She wanted to give me a Foundational children's book printed in my birthyear, and probably all my recoiling is my own baggage. She didn't say anything about its being Valuable other than that it was a used and rare (so not necessarily both) bookstore.
I don't want to own a Valuable book. If a book is valuable monetarily, it had better be because it's someone or other's Book of Hours from 1361 and illuminated with gold leaf and lapis lazuli. In which case it belongs in a museum (cue Indiana Jones). If a volume of Leaves of Grass is valuable because, I'm making this up, Wilfred Owen carried it into the trenches, it belongs in the Owen library. If a collector puts a dollar amount on it because it carries someone's signature, and you buy it for the signature not the content, then that's not true value. I love my copy of Possession more than I used to because now it has A.S. Byatt's signature on it, but that's emotional value to me because she spoke to me, we exchanged pleasantries, while she touched and held and signed the book. (It's also irreplaceable because for as much as I know you can only buy the book with Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow instead of Sir Edward Burne-Jones's The Beguiling of Merlin on the cover. Aha--no, though the painting remains, the cover design is tainted witha Major Motion Picture thingie.)
Last year in Books of Wonder I saw a complete first edition of Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, House at Pooh Corner, When We Were Very Young, and Now We Are Six. Five or seven thousand dollars, if I recall. Now me, I'm dragonny with my books, bad at lending, bad at returning, prone to hoarding. But I can't imagine those four books being in any individual's private library, because what're you going to do, read them? Read them to a child, and risk the damage that makes cardboard books such a good idea for the very young? Read them in your armchair and risk losing one among the cushions? Read them with a stick of candy and drool all over the colored plates of precious stones and then not have Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle around to help you steam open the pages? Or, and this is the real sacrilege, "own" them but never ever read them because you might damage their physical selves, ignoring their content? I can't get behind that.
I feel guilty about Acquiring more children's books (when it's acquisition more than possession, a word I use deliberately). Especially picture books. I keenly feel the absence of Corduroy and, now that I rediscovered it, Umbrella from my library. But I do feel that it would be Wrong to Acquire books when they'll go mostly unread. There are many, many picture books that add to a Compleat or Representative Collection of the Necessary, but the only one I crave is The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes.
All that is because I just don't reread picture books very often (except Harold and the Purple Crayon). The Wind in the Willows is not a picture book. So maybe I was reluctant to be given it again for a different reason. As a matter of fact I have two reasons. One, I had it on my Amazon wishlist last year and my notstepmother gave it to me for Christmas (along with The Grapes of Wrath because she Understands the multifacetedness that is I. (She called that list intimidating. Sorry.)) Aiming for the G shelf with the book in paw, I laughed quietly at myself because, I now bothered to notice, I already owned it. It's heretical, isn't it, to own a book and not know it, to the point that you ask for it again because you're a grasping, acquisitive, dragonny sort? I'm going to pass my notstepmother's brand new book on to Emlet, keeping the used one because it's used. My sister's gift should be valuable for its sentiment--that she gave it to me, having selected it for her reasons--and it would be, except I would feel guilty for owning two copies of it (and I would have to keep the other for the illustrations).
Two, NCS gave a version of it to me, lo these many years. I finally read it the summer I lived with Nisou (another reason it's not sacred to me is that I didn't read it until 1988), and we loved the scene with Otter's child and Pan piping. She gave me a Picasso print of Pan piping (it's been on my wall ever since). I told NCS about that, and of course Pink Floyd, his favorite band, had an album entitled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. So he gave me a version, and I say "version" because the illustrations were just so wrong. The Rackham ones, from Amazon's sample pages, look okay; they're just not Original Shephard. Those in NCS's version I remember to be Off. (My memory could not possibly be tainted, oh no, especially considering the book did not long stay in my can't-say-possession--I think not even until I finally broke up with him nineish months later. Lord, but I was emotionally dishonest to us both.)
So anyway. Lots of baggage re Wind in the Willows particularly, assorted guilt about acquiring rather than possessing books particularly children's books.
In this entry, to which I referred above, I said The Story about Ping was the oldest book I own. In my own personal mythology, this is true, the way HPV is my oldest friend even though, say, SEM is older than she. I mean that book is the one longest in my possession.
Also, just above I say I don't want to own a valuable book. I don't know if it is valuable, but certainly the actually oldest book I own is a sight older than any other. It was printed in the 17th century; the date is in Roman numerals. Of a sort: the D is not printed with a single D but composed of an I and a backward C. RJH, whose book it was, could not parse it, and I glanced at it and suggested the cipher. He was really impressed. I was pleased he was impressed, but I really didn't think I was so very clever to have worked it out. He did, though, and that book was his wedding present (a masterful touch).
When I worked in Phoebe I checked out a stack of books for a little old woman whose name was Lois Darling. "That's almost the name of one of my favorite children's book illustrators!" I exclaimed. Louis Darling, it turned out, was her husband. Louis and Lois, a coincidence almost too Darling for words. Yeah. (Louis Darling illustrated Beverly Cleary's books until his death in the early '70s; the third or fourth Ramona book is dedicated to him.) She was an illustrator as well and it was my exuberance at meeting her that inspired her finally to assemble an exhibit of their work for display in the library, as she had promised for many moons. Her last project before her death in 1989 was a replica of Ratty's boat, which she donated to the Mystic Seaport Museum. When I brought Nisou's two sets of frainch parents to the Seaport in 1996, I enquired about that boat. It wasn't on display--I suppose there's not a lot of whaling signficance to it.
All of these things I have told before.
RDC and Blake were in the living room, Blake on the windowsill and RDC in the chair. Blake emitted his scream of bloody terror and launched himself all the way to the sunroom, the length of the house (that's on a full wing trim). The falcon was just launching from the ground by the nectarine tree, not yet successful that RDC could see.
Which bird should we call Frightful in this scenario?
It must be difficult for a raptor to stoop from whatever height into the 15' foot gap between houses, through the branches of one tree or between the two trees, and come away with a meal. I might be confusing raptor statistics with lion ones, that 90% of hunting attempts are unsuccessful?
If I replace the old tube feeder with the new, allegedly more squirrel-proof feeder in the nectarine, maybe I can put the tube one in a more open spot in the backyard, for easier falcon-feeding.
I understand that a house designed for an individual is the most likely to be the best tailored to that person's quirks and needs, but jeepers.
She does clarify that she means "not so big" as "not necessarily small no sirree bob, merely smaller than you thought you needed," but some of these were gargantuan. The hiring of an architect and the building of a house from scratch makes the idea of such a house completely out of most people's grasp.
None of the McMansions in Highlands Ranch will, I pray, ever make it onto the National Register of Historic Places, while some of these domiciles could, but let's keep in mind that not everyone can afford a second house on Orcas Island for day trips from Seattle, or on Penobscot Bay, or in Westport, Connecticut, or Lexington, Massachusetts. I was not surprised that most of the houses were sited in the north, either New England or the Pacific Northwest, with an exception in Taos (another bargain community). One was in South Carolina and another was in the hill country around Houston (there were trees, so I wouldn't've ever guessed it was in Texas), but otherwise these were really desirable dream houses for the comfortably filthily rich.
I can't say the title misled me: Creating the Not So Big House. It didn't say anything about making the most space with what you have, which I would find more useful. Creating the Not So Big House was a big ol' exercise in architectural masturbation, and fun as such, but totally out of touch with normal people.
I am so proud. Also grateful. Last week Melissa mentioned a clearance sale at J. Crew. I went and looked, and it was manna for the Ross shopper (yammer re exploited resources and near-slave labor for my vanity).
I have a new skirt! A new winter skirt, when winter clothing is so tedious I usually can't bear to shop for it, even for skirts, and alternate between a short gray one and a long black all season. Winter clothing is tedious because it is black, or because black is so practical it is also tedious, or something. This new skirt is longer than ankle-length: in fact it breaks like a pant leg on the top of my foot; it has a long enough slit that I can still take a full stride; it is unwaisted. It is wool lined with acetate; the weave is sharkskin (whatever that means). Furthermore, it is not black. It is olivey brown.
Also a sweater about which I am not as excited. It is, after all, not a skirt or a dress, so inherently less interesting. Very thinly woven merino wool, so thinly woven you can see my ivory-colored bra through it--otherwise I suppose no one would ever know I wear one. J. Crew called the sweater "camel" but I would call it toffee. (Isn't one of the lists in Microserfs J. Crew colors? All I can remember right now are two from the soup flavors list, Beak and Creamy Dolphin.) If it were really camel it might be more interesting. My usual button-down, though crew- not v-neck.
I didn't select the pieces to go together but they do, and here I am in my new togs fresh out of the box, in a skirt that is not black or grey and a shirt that is not grey or lavender or periwinkle or that peachy rose that I refuse to accept as pink. It's shocking.
Today I wore my new clothes, figuring that since I froze the other day in premature spring clothing I'd be cozy. Wrongo. I baked. Even Egg, who is tall and attenuated and always chilly, was warm.
The thin sweatshirt that was a fine weight for the morning ride was too much this afternoon, and I had not had a proper shower for 2.5 days: Monday evening after the gym I washed but didn't shave, Tuesday morning I declared myself still clean, and this morning I showered at work where I have no razor. Leg stubble I can handle. Pit stubble makes me cranky. I am so Usan.
Gorgeous ride this morning. My hands were a little cold in cotton glove liners under bike gloves, but my thin sweatshirt was fine. In the afternoon I sweated biking home but was still amply more comfortable than I had been in the office all day, since the heat was cranked.
Two 3.8-mile city rides, and I've got significantly faster.
Flexing! I love flexing when I do it. When I stop loving it, I don't do it. Meanwhile, it felt luxurious to leave today at 4:00 instead of at 4:30, and today didn't even feel like Thursday yet but not only was it Thursday it was also the last day of the week.
Two 3.8 mile city rides.
A fun romp, but an editor could have pranced around with a pair of garden clippers and tidied up a bit. I stopped noting characters because I never did get that inkpen implanted in my right index finger; at least the invisible books come conveniently packaged in the epitaphs. Braxton Hicks, fr'instance, was just amusing, like Linsey Woolsey in Auntie Mame. So I stopped hoping all the characters' names Meant something. I don't know Martin Chuzzlewit from a hole in the ground, though Quaverley is a great name; I was waiting for the Brontë stuff.
At the first mention of Jane Eyre the denouement is obvious and tantalizes you with satisfaction--eventually. That's good. Fforde does a decent job of briefly summarizing novels and integrating the summarizing into the action so someone's explaining Jane Eyre to a heretic nonreader didn't make me want to gauge my eyes out too much. That was fine. What wasn't fun was the tone. I am not well-versed in either detective or speculative fiction; a reason is that the tone of the first person narrators in these books usually puts me off by page one.
I'm thinking of Dan Simmons's Song of Kali. I remember that the author attempted to undo his protagonist's sexism through his wife's t-shirt, which read "A Woman's Place Is in the House...and in the Senate." Ooo, bumper-sticker humor, wittily original and redemptive. Anyway, that protagonist had that Tone. So did that of To Say Nothing of the Dog. The Left Hand of Darkness didn't, but I never finished it anyway. I can't think of another first-person-narrated skiffy book that I've read. There might be one.
The Tone is common enough in detective fiction as well to be spoofed in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and in "Calvin and Hobbes" through Tracer Bullet, and since this book is both vaguely speculative and vaguely detectivey, the presence of that Tone nearly put me off. Especially with a protagonist named Thursday Next. But not quite.
It was fun anyway, if not nearly as clever as it thought.
Yeah. The Tone. Maybe The Eyre Affair toned down the Tone enough for me to bear, maybe it's all in my imagination, maybe I wanted to like it because ÜberBoss liked it, maybe I wanted to like it because some Usual Suspects like it.
Maybe I just dealt because I'm gearing up for a big sf onslaught. I just put a slew of skiffy fiction on hold at the 'brary. Columbine found it amusing that I consider some books necessary to my cultural grounding; I just find it pathetic that I'm much more likely to succeed at slogging through Cryptomicon than Paradise Lost.
I was actually going to buy Ender's Game recently. It was there. It was cheap. It was trade not pulp size. Then I looked at the typeface--that was pulp not trade. I am hopeful that a library might have some of the books I want--Snow Crash in addition to the two above--in hardcover, though it's a detraction from the genre at all that so much of it is printed in paperback alone and not in cloth, and of that paperback, pulp not trade.
PLT sent me a Vernor Vinge book once. Pulp, hundreds of pages. Shyeah. Egg offered to lend me How Green Was My Valley, which I was listening to, so I could see how to spell some of the names. I finally got rid of copies of Crime and Punishment etc., that I bought at the annual library book sale when I only knew about obligations but not taste or translations, because if I ever do read any Dostoyevsky, it'll be in a readable format, not in pulp. I don't like pulp.
I also requested Hyperion, on PLT's recommendation. The author's name rang a bell--the Song of Kali fellow Dan Simmons. Bah. I should stick to discussing Barbara Kingsolver with STL instead.
I swapped out the storms for screens on three sides of the house. I don't particularly consider this more than halfway through, though, because the north side is the most annoying. The front's easiest because it all happens on the porch without a ladder; the south side is fine because the ladder fits neatly on the sidewalk; the back is fine because the ladder's on the patio and that's where the back door is. In contrast, the ground on north side of the house conspires with the ladder to break my neck, and I have to trot the windows around three sides of the house to hose them--waiiiiit a minute, one of the perks of getting the swamp cooler properly plumbed last year was that we have hose fitting there. Well, I still have to haul them back anyway to spare the living room my clumsiness, and the back stairs are wider and shallower than the front ones.
Something right has happened with the resistance training, because the wide windows (this isn't an Unfortunate Event, I promise) that have been tricky to handle before are not so tricky now. They're not heavy, but their width and the being on a ladder and the fragility used to be more difficult to juggle than now.
I cut down some raspberry canes, hosed all the storms down (the dust in the sills being black since it's primarily auto exhaust), polished and waxed (not really) the inside sashes, raked the north front yard clean in preparation for tomorrow's digging, washed and line-dried the living room curtains, hauled the patio furntiure to the "grass" there to hose and scrub it, and emptied the Hestia hearth ash into the compost. (That last is my fond name for the outdoor fireplace, a copper or copper alloy bowl in a frame we bought last summer.)
I figured the compost could do with a dousing, so I trained the hose on it to carry the ash into its depths. I heard rustlings from deep within and I figured the water was settling layers. Last year when I watered the trees with a spike, I was used to the water erupting at the surface a good reach away from where the spike penetrated. I figured something similar might be happening, but no. The rustlings became scrabblings from higher up, and two pairs of beady little eyes looked at me in apprehension before the mousiekins leapt out and away. I planned to turn the compost this weekend, but damn, there might be a nest in there. Why can't they nest in the woodpile?
In the middle of all this we went to the Bonnard exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. His paintings are fabulous, lush with color, vibrant with light, and reluctant to show their images. I was not so overwhelmed with his lithographs and pen & ink, because really he's a colorist. Boy was he a colorist. Initially he seemed like a cat person, but then in later paintings dachshunds appeared and I was happy. Also his earlier paintings are set in Paris, where he was a flâneur, a connoisseur of everyday life (we both read Edmund White's Le Flâneur after our trip last year); later ones are set in the country.
A new hall of mirrors has been installed in the ground floor of the museum. It reminded me, I said to RDC, of "Cube," except, as he pointed out, they're not moving all over trying to kill us. You slip booties over your feet--or I did both of us since RDC is gimpy these days--and enter at the right aft end of a 30-foot passage. All the surfaces are mirrored, so above your head you can see yourself underfoot. It's pretty wild. Then you exit on the left fore end--it's shaped like a periscope--and scamper into Bonnard.
We had wanted to have tea at the Brown Palace in the afternoon, but they were booked, the lazy sows. So we ambled down to Larimer and the Del Mar Crab House where we had oysters and a crab melt for me and a soft-shelled crab sandwich for him. I don't understand why soft-shelled crabs come in sandwiches. They're already breaded. Also, a soft-shelled crab fits on a hamburger-type bun but this one--"Why do they serve it on a hero bun?" I asked, and then shook myself. We had just passed the gyro cart, so maybe the sound was in my head, but I even call the things you get at Subway grinders, not subs, and heros--I have no idea where in the country they're called heros. Somewhere, though nowhere I've lived. Dunno where that came from.
I ordered my plants from High Country Gardens. They'll arrive in the days before Mother's Day weekend, a fine time to plant. I'll have that Friday off again. So that's done. They're all low-water shrubby type things, and I hope I chose a good variety of colors and bloom times. The one bit that scares me is the vinca I ordered for the easement. The description says it's an aggressive spreader and shouldn't be planted near anything else, which makes its insular position in the easement a fine one, but I don't think we're allowed to erect any kind of stakes and a string fence to protect it in its infancy from people getting out of their cars (we plan to gravel the two feet closest to the street), and planting it means opening up the groundcloth which might mean an onslaught of bindweed.
I am going to go find a good movie to watch while I iron the curtains. That'll be the last remnant of the smoke-filled house incident gone.
I knew nothing about this except that it was on one of my lists, and then I read one of Jamaica Kincaid's short stories in The Secret Self. Lushly stark, if that's possible. I thought I would feel more connection with the protagonist given her name; I didn't, hence the "stark." Brief asides to Paul Gaugin (one of his paintings is on the cover) and, I'll have to check, I think The Second Sex.
I approached the front yard with a shovel and a hoe and a swan rake, actually wearing boots because I anticipated a boot-on-the-shovel method of digging.
Oh-ho-ho.
I might have been better off with a sod-cutting plough. I did maybe a third of the area I intended before the hoe broke. I worked for a while with a fork and trowel before stopping. I'll attempt the rest tomorrow after the epoxy dries the hoe into one again. I hope.
I noticed another branch off the evergreen and one cracked off a plum, and just now, when I'm quite Done for the day, looking out the bedroom window, I noticed another small one broken off the cherry tree. Lest anyone think my beating the crap outta my trees was in vain, I should point out that these broken branches were higher than my reach, unless they were on the evergreen, which I ignored, or the cherry, which I forgot about. So I hauled a bunch of plum branches to the back and started cutting them up for the brush pile I mistook my left forefinger for a branch and decided I was too tired to see or cut straight. So I stopped.
RDC oiled the patio furniture and it looks miles better. And I finished swapping the windows. Last night I melted the care tag on one of the curtains into the iron, so I rehung the washed living room curtains wrinkled. RDC suggests either melting or sanding the polyester off the iron, since isoprophyl alcohol won't touch it; I favor buying a new iron.
I finally hung the new birdfeeder. The birds have already decided that the New and Different is not a threat and I can't wait for a squirrel to try it.
I had lunch with someone the other day who repeated someone else's description of two adjacent houses, one covered with anti-war signs and the other with a U.S. flag and a Marines flag, as "dueling houses." I said, because this really gets me, "I don't know why those two concepts have to be perceived as opposing."
Can o' worms, party of four.
She asked what I meant, and I said that a silver lining from last September was that anyone could fly the flag without being misunderstood: the whole country could claim it. But now it's shifted back to "belonging" only to a certain faction or mindset.
She didn't know what I meant, which I found frustrating since she agreed with the "dueling" perception. While I paused, thinking how politely to communicate the contradiction I saw in her stance, happily someone else got my back by saying that yes, she had flown her flag immediately after September 11th but not during the action in Afghanistan, "because I didn't want...," she paused,
"...to be misunderstood?" I suggested, and
she nodded, "anyone to think I supported that bombing." Explaining herself further, she said she sees that the flag represents jingoistic support of the conservative end of the spectrum rather than patriotism. I nodded, glad to have someone articulate the thought.
We then explained jingoistic: simplistic, reductionist slogans that quash discourse, such as "My country right or wrong" and "America--love it or leave it."
I didn't know how to communicate the contradiction I saw between the first person's a) perception of the flying the flag and peace as dueling concepts yet b) disagreement with the notion that the flag does not belong to all patriotic citizens. I am tongue-tied when it comes to polite but impassioned debate.
(And of course anyone should fly the flag and not be concerned with What Someone Might Think, but I think it's testament to how much the flag does "belong" more to conservatives that being misunderstood is so valid a concern.)
I brought it upon myself though. I had mentioned seeing a recent abuse of the flag that pressed all my buttons.
I hate car flags. I hate that they are made of flimsy plastic, that the wind rends them to tatters yet their owners don't replace them even when the stripes are half gone, their disposability. This most egregious offense yet was a U.S. flag on the left rear door of a car, with a Denver Broncos football team's flag on the right rear door.
These people didn't even know that the flag should always be on its own right and higher than any other domestic flag or pennant. I left unsaid the obvious, that football, stupid waste of time or not, should not be (by flag height) thus equated to the ideals of the United States of America, let alone (by being on the right) supersede them. Isn't knowledge of right treatment of the flag basic civic knowledge?
In later September 2001, I saw a photograph of a sidewalk outside the U.S. embassy in Canberra. (I think. Somewhere in Australia anyway.) A flag lay on the pavement, a carpet for letters and candles and flowers people had lain there in support of us in our crisis. I recoiled at that photograph, on a gut level, because that the flag shouldn't be on the ground is instinctual to me (speaking of jingoistic), then reprimanded myself: other countries are less goose-steppy about their flags and it's kindness, so accept it. I made the mistake of telling my father that, trying to explain what I saw as a fault in my reaction. He--he who told me I was in for a world of hurt in my idealism, who was my first opponent when I realized how ineffectual "America--love it or leave it" is as a statement of purpose, who taught me how to treat the flag--couldn't get past its being on the ground: another failure on my end to communicate my thought.
I don't see that similar ignorance or abuse by citizens or resident aliens, when committed with similar kind intent, is okay. It's yours. Treat it well.
What I mean by Hard Work Day is the picture book Alan Arkin (the actor) wrote about his son, but it seems the edition with the real illustrations is out of print and it's been reissued with new (i.e. wrong) illustrations. So no link for you, OMFB.
I ripped out the rest of the front yard, out to the tree and down to the sidealk. And you may ask yourself, even if you haven't been listening to Remain in Light, well, why did you do this? Okay, that doesn't go into the rhythm of "Once in a Lifetime" so well.
Last year I used a rototiller, which involved two trips in one day to Home Despot--a farther one than our usual, with a rental center--the return trip being mid-afternoon and therefore interminable, gasoline for the rototiller and us to breathe, nearly ripping out the sprinkler heads (do we know where they are? we do not), and, let's be honest, my getting RDC to do the actual rototilling, because that thing was a lot stronger than I am and clearly in the Hot or Sharp Category.
This year RDC has a wonky knee and I might be stronger than last year but in principles as well as physically and if I despise snowblowers leafblowers snowmobiles and jetskis I shouldn't cop out with a rototiller either. Also the sumac tree's roots are right on the surface. I'm not overly fond of the tree--its bark and inedible fruit are both orange--but it's a tree so it stays.
I have seldom wanted to be Dr. Dolittle's next Tommy as I did today. Not that talking to moles would have helped. I don't think Colorado has any. I don't need to add one to my list of quasipets--the invisible, cocker-spaniel-sized elephant, the hypothetical dog, and the eventual goat. And the penguins. So I did it. I am the human rototiller. Except I overturned maybe two inches instead of six.
Then I cut more deadweight from a plum tree and trimmed all the deciduous deadfall to fit neatly into the brush pile. That made me feel vaguely like SNL's Anal Retentive Chef but really that pile can't get any bigger than it is. Since it was all dead I didn't have "Gone with the Wind" in my head either but the Grinch, from when he saws bits off Max's antler.
I also hoed the vegetable and south gardens, added the leftover edging from last year to the new garden, dumped all the clots of grass from the front under the cherry tree in what I'm sure is a very attractive manner, and brought the last of the cleaned storm windows to the coal cellar while bringing most of the firewood back out.
I'm tired.
I am listening to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, not particularly closely. The first third--the download came in three sections--was mostly background noise. I listened to the second third this weekend but felt bad that Dandelion got all dirty in the garden with me. I might have set up external speakers on the porch but audio books really don't work well at such a cranked-up volume. It's in some primitive format, but it's narrated by George Guidall, which is all I needed to know.
When the librarian introduced "Stage Coach" at the 'brary earlier this month, she mentioned "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" as one the superb movies released that year. A child in the audience asked if the library were going to show that as well. "No," said the librarian, not adding, "and this version that I mentioned is not the Disney abortion you probably mean." I felt bad for the kid: I really don't think "Stagecoach" can be very fun for a seven-year-old. There's really not much adventure in it, just anxiety about the adventure.
I don't remember the movie of "Hunchback" much at all, just the basics--Charles Laughton begging for water and the creepy priest. I had forgotten the goat. As soon as someone mentioned trial for witchcraft, I twitched. There's going to be Goat Mortality, I just know it.
I am reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry to RDC. I haven't read him a book since Christmas, with Bridge to Terabithia. As expected, the grounding in time and place that you get reading the book to yourself falters when my Yankee voice doesn't easily drop g's in dialogue, and the flavor of everyone's speech is diminished as I fumble to say "they" instead of "their."
But it's a great story. It was my first, and for years my only, exposure to what life was like for people for an entire century between the Civil War and Civil Rights. I really like May the Circle Be Unbroken as well, though it's a much less compelling story. I think Taylor tried to include too much and didn't integrate the pieces well. Of course it's hard to avoid seeing Wade Jamison as Atticus Finch during T.J.'s trial. But Stacey's job and Moe's cotton and Miss Annie Lee's voting and Cousin David's daughter and marbles-as-gambling too--those are a lot of themes to juggle, and they're not integrated very well.
Then there's The Land, which I was glad to read for more background on the Logan family but which just did not work as a story. I don't even remember The Road to Memphis. But I do love love love Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
What is the world coming to? Neve Campbell cast as Salamanca Hiddle with Sarah Michelle Gellar as Phoebe in a cinematization of Walk Two Moons? A reportedly not fat kid as Stanley Yelnats and a reportedly not African-American kid as Zero in the cinematization of Holes? Avoiding the cinematization of Ring of Endless Light was easy, and Sigourney Weaver as the warden is pretty brilliant casting. So I might not die. Unless I have to see the movie of I Capture the Castle. I would just fall over and expire.
RDC is going to the east coast soon, to work in Boston for a week and then go to Connecticut. He'll see his best friend and his baby one day and spend another with his aunt and uncle and see his grandfather. He has just persuaded his aunt and uncle to go to New York to see the Matisse-Picasso exhibit at the MOMA. I am envious but not jealous, which is fine. He was debating the ethics of cajoling his aunt and uncle into doing this. They're not afraid of the city, as my relatives are; they saw the huge van Gogh exhibit at the Met; they brought him to the Tutankhamen exhibit when he was a child.
Really, that was the deciding factor for me. He asked me if I would be jealous, and I said no, I would be happy for him. I will always regret that I didn't see Tut; unless I ever go to Cairo, I never will. He must go.
His aunt said they could train back afterward and eat in Connecticut. That cracked me up, because that's what she wanted to do when we went east in November as well: to join us in the city on Wednesday during daylight and then train home in time to eat dinner. In Connecticut. Leaving New York City. To eat in Connecticut.
And now I can die happy, for I have met Howie the Dog.
The move has meant everyone at work has new neighbors, and so I have got to know different people. (The woman I saw "Bowling for Columbine" with? Barely knew her name before October.) So I was passing the time of day with someone ages ago and saw on her shelf a picture. A picture of a dog. Of Howie the Dog.
Howie the Dog is half basset hound and half dalmatian. He has a slightly larger than average basset shape, dalmatian spots, and a basset's loveability (I have seldom heard of or met a dalmatian with a nice personality). In the photograph, he was sitting, which always looks ridiculous (read: loveable) in a basset anyway, with his head turned up a little so his ears looked even longer, and had slightly lifted one paw, kind of demurely.
I was in love.
This woman lives nearby and I pass near her house on my bike commute. I have been kind of hopeful that what finally happened yesterday would eventually happen. As I turned onto the bike route, at the bottom of a slope a short block away was a long, low, spotty dog, on a leash with two humans. There could be only one. I yelled, "Howie!" and sped down the hill.
My coworker took a moment to recognize me in helmet and sunglasses but I tumbled (on purpose, I feel I should clarify) off the bike and into Howie's lap, or vice-versa. What a great dog. He loved me immediately, tried to burrow under my skin to get closer, and eagerly welcomed all my fondling and cooing. (Oh, and I met her husband. I'm sure he is very nice but suspect he was taken aback by my rambunctious exuberance.) Howie is black and white, like magpies and penguins and some painted ponies; and he is spotted but has nearly solidly black ears, which a dog ought to have if it possibly can. He even matched my bike, I observed aloud, white with black, except he was not a hardtail. His entire stern, not just his tail, wagged joyfully. He clearly had not been pet or flubbered or loved in any way at all in simply years, very shocking behavior on his parents' part. He needed to be skritched and made to kick his leg by rubbing his belly in the right spot (literally: his markings made it easy to locate and remember the right place) and of course his ears folded in many different ways. One day, I will count all his spots and tickle them all.
O My Friends and Brothers, I like me like that. My coworker is fairly used to me bounding into her office to tell her new fun gossip or telling outrageous stories. It is rare these days for me to be so confident that my behavior is perfectly correct and that if it's wrong I don't want to be right. Meeting Howie the Dog was therefore uplifting in two ways.
Allons en Europe!
RDC has a business trip (let us all slap our palms to our foreheads in sympathy) to Paris. Two years ago I didn't go to Northern Ireland with him and I've never particularly gotten over it. We were going to go away for my birthday anyway, either a day's drive to South Dakota to see Crazy Horse and Mt. Rushmore or a Surprise for me that RDC was plotting for me in Colorado, and, as my sister said last night, Rapid City, Paris, what's the difference?
I'll take the TGV to visit Emlet for the days that RDC is working. Nisou and SPG are going à Bretagne over the weekend, so unless Nisou brings Emlet to Paris instead he still won't get to see them, but these are details we have yet to hash out.
I am going to see the chapel that Melissa recommended last time, and eat glace on the Île de St. Louis as Lucy recommended, and go the Louvre and the Rodin and maybe the Pompidou and the Tour d'Eiffel.
Wheeeeeee!
Yesterday when I took a shower when I got home, Blake pouted until I caught on. I filled up his spray bottle and gave him a thorough shower. He was begging for it even when I just tested to see if this was what he really wanted (by casting a sopping hand's worth of droplets toward him). Because showers involve me in the altogether as well as the buddy, you get to see only the intense post-shower preen.
Here we are on the couch in the sunlight. (See how much better the rug looks in sunlight? Not ochre!)
Observe the damp feathers on his neck, all spikey.
I was trying to get him to look up at me because his preening face is so adorable (much like most of his faces). All the feathers that usually warm his lower mandible instead angle back; we call this his muttonchop look and he looks nineteenth century.
He was having none of my interruptions though. When I gave up and poked him in the breast to force him to look up, he did so with his bitey face on, crest lowered, scowling. Not so cute.
He finishes up an all-over preen with a good head scratching. See the little foot? Sometimes when his toe gets into the right angle of his jaw he gives himself the yawns.
After enough preening, he was ready to prance. He loves the space between the couch and the wall. It's ceiled by the couch arm. The webcam is a great way to keep an eye on him, to ensure he doesn't suddenly get interested in the power cords. He hasn't been yet. He can't resist thin round cables, like the lower end of a Macintosh power cable or a FireWire or headphones, but electric cords don't intrigue him.
Yet.
He's not Howie the Dog. I know. But he's still adorable in his own way.
This bit should go with a photograph above but I'm padding. On the table behind him you can see Culture of Fear and--very appropriately--Blake's chief fear, a promotional toy RDC picked up at a conference. It is not big, it is not blue, but it is a squeezey, stress-ball, golf ball-patterned thing, and he hates it. We keep it in easy reach for when we want to chase him out from under the dining table or keep him away from our sexy feet.
Is is okay that I bought this book directly before seeing "Stagecoach," a "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" western?
The stories and storytelling are remarkable. I wasn't sure of each narrator or what his relationship to everyone else might be but I felt strongly that that didn't matter. Years ago when I was having trouble getting in One Hundred Years of Solitude, someone told me not to try to keep track of the names but just absorb the beauty of the story. That's what I finally could do with this.
I typed "years" instead of "weeks" there because it really has felt that long.
One 3.8 mile city ride, then RDC picked me up after work and we went to the gym.
Precor Elliptical 30' 20/20 resistance and 12/20 incline, total strides 3800+. I should strive for 4000.
Bar lat pulldowns, 3x10 @80
Hammer Strength high row, 3x12 @ 100
Hammer Strength lat pulldown, 3x12 @ 80
Back extensions, 50
Seated weighted calf raises, 50 @ 55.
OMFB, I have to be quicker with the cam, like not keeping it in a drawer. I was sitting in the reading chair and had just fetched Blake down from his cage (when he wants to be picked up, he forgets how to elevator down the bars to the stand but paces helpless on the top of his cage, so you have to get up to get him instead of just reaching) when he started scratching his head and jaw so much he gave himself the yawns. He yawned for about three minutes straight, with RDC and me just staring at him in wonder at his adorability. We did not drool, but nearly. Blake was actually tired too, not just reflex yawning, and he wanted to tuck his head but he can't yawn from the tuck. So after every yawn he'd turn his head a little more into the tuck, but face more forward for the yawns, and if I ever manage to catch video of that instead of still photographs, I will strap every one I know into a chair à la Alex until they admit that my buddy is the cutest ever possible yawner.
I really shouldn't've read Card's introduction first. I generally don't read an academic introduction first, because it's criticism and by an editor or critic, not the author. But this was an author and not academic, so I did. If I hadn't already known from his postings on the net and articles about him that he's a Mormon bigot and a poser, the introduction would have clued me. He's also an ostentatious jackass, attacking ad hominem those foolish enough not to like his book.
It's a good story, though Card surfaces not 20 pages in when Ender uses the boys' homophobia to manipulate his social standing in their little Lord of the Flies setup.
I interrupted my reading to open Moonshadow to say that the bits with Valentine and Peter as Demosthenes and Locke are pretty funny in the context of a conversation I had with Trish just the other night, as I chatted with her instead of starting the book, about Pinky and the Brain. "What we do every night, Pinky."
Whoo. I'm listening to PALM: Pick a Lane, Motherfucker, a mix Trish made, and while I am spared the hell of stop-and-go traffic on a daily basis, this might actually get me back in the gym. She is all edjimicating me, music-wise. I've mentioned my unhipness before, yes? or it is otherwise screamingly obvious? Mudhoney, Weezer, Wheatus, the Offspring, Soul Coughing, Foo Fighters. It's all new to me. She is clearly trying to drive me insane, because if Me First and the Gimme Gimmes' covering "Leaving on a Jetplane" nearly broke my head, and Mudhoney's cover of "Pump It Up" is--while not nearly so mind-bending--possibly enough to drive me over the edge.
Anyway, she and Jared picked me up Saturday night and they had the Obligatory Meeting of the Bird. Blake preferred Jared, who is taller (making Blake higher) and wore fabric easier to climb than Trish's. He chucked a little, refused to be pet by such rank amateurs as these, and performed only by bowing to the candelabra (and immediately trotting back to the edge of the table begging to be picked up again). They also had the Obligatory Trot through the House, and Trish won my undying affection by declaring Formigny the Clue House, because of its staircases (short and secret passagey) in opposite corners.
Trish voting for Japanese, I brought them to Japon. Whose chef's name is Wayne Conwell. And which had these beaded metal string curtains which looked like they should be the manes of the Heavy Metal My Pretty Pony. Over dinner, we, by which I mean Trish and I, commiserated with each other about the Johns of C (Cusack and Corbett). Then we gossiped about journals, except none of us had anything particularly new. Then it was late (for me), we were three people sitting around a small table over a drink, so I suggested we all drink to each other's legs. Trish had already abused me for not having seen "Office Space" but I abused her worse for not having memorized "Jaws" and not getting my joke. But Jared did. It was muchos fun.
We all wound up back at my house after midnight, so we officially comprised a very small, very short EasterCon. Just like the cool kids.
My body hating me as it does, I woke at 6 after getting to bed at 1. Instead of admitting how long I stayed inside trying to nap (difficult, what with the two cups of Earl Grey in the morning), I shall only admit that the one thing I accomplished was compost.
I assembled a new bin RDC brought home and turned the compost, putting all the raw stuff in the new one (which does not yet have squirrel and mouse holes bitten through it) and putting all the almost-dirt in the old one. The almost-dirt is going to be only almost-dirt, but I filled up the new one with leaves. I just read that you should shove a bunch of your leaves in a trash bin and attack it with a weed whacker, just like those little hand-held, single-serving blenders, and that will be handy to reduce the volume of my leaves.
I say all this to postpone the ugly truth. I killed a mouse. Or more. I've known for months that mice live in my compost bin, where they have asparagus stumps and orange rind and whatnot to feast on. I suspected they would, in this season, be nesting. But I turned the compost anyway, chasing out two grown mice as I pitchforked all the natal dirt. My last step is always to wet the compost, this time with the five-gallon bucket of roof drippings from Saturday's rain. Heavier stuff sinks, lighter stuff rises. Lighter stuff like a bald, eyes not yet open, but pretty big considering the size of its presumable parents, baby mouse corpse.
It was not a Frisby. It just can't have been.
I know intellectually that there is probably something better to do on a stormy Monday night than play boat in the living room with my buddy, maybe a plate of cinnamon toast, and a satisfying haul of books from the 'brary, and my computer, but right now I can't think of what that might be.
John Banville, The Book of Evidence; Neil Gaiman, Coraline and Sandman (vol. 1); Avi, Crispin: the Cross of Lead, and Joseph Krumgold, ...And Now, Miguel. Also Words to Outlive Us, a book of first-person accounts of the Warsaw ghetto, and The Age of Napoleon, because France is a blank slate for me between 1429 and 1914, except maybe Louis XIV-XVII (the high Louis) and 1871.
Charming and genuine, with real dialect. I think Krumgold reproduced well the rhythms of people fluent in both English and Spanish; it meshed well in my head with what little I know. A simple, if dated, bildungsroman with a really fine chapter as Miguel and his older brother makes sense of their theology. Plus sheep-shearing, for Farm Boy, and living in the Sangre de Cristo which is probably nothing like the territory around Animal Dreams but is enough for my eastern-living, urban-residing mind to make the connection.
When I reserved this, I asked the librarian if she had read it or then liked it. Her response was tepid. I offered that I had often not liked Avi in the past and wondered how much different (and better) this might be than his previous to win the Newbery (although his Nothing But the Truth is an Honor book). She supposed that if I hadn't liked him in the past, I wouldn't like this one: she hadn't either.
I started hopeful: it's set in England in 1377, points more in its favor than contemporary America (Truth) or even a ship (Charlotte Doyle) and I know I've read others by him obviously unmemorable. It's less clumsy than, say, Witch Child in illuminating for a 21st-century young reader certain points of daily life before electricity and running water without sounding like a lecture, and that's fine. But last summer while at Charenton I began a library book APB had just finished and recommended, called The Physician, also set in England in the middle ages, whose boy protagonist begins by being apprenticed to a juggler--well, a physician who attracts his patients with a juggling performance. That's as far as I got in The Physician, but it's enough to make me, already dubious about Avi, see this book's premise as derivative. Plus I read Lord Valentine's Castle, I'm sorry to say, I think on the recommendation of a man I was probably sleeping with at the time, I'm sorry to say, and where it wasn't tedious it was about juggling.
Eh. Newbery hasn't had a dud (that I've read) since...since...1962's Bronze Bow, though Elizabeth George Speare could certainly write herself a good Witch of Blackbird Pond (although what the ALA was thinking to award the medal to nonfiction light on the writing, like Lincoln: A Photobiography, I don't know. A good book, just not Newberyish). And this isn't a dud yet, on page 60. I doubt its target audience has read (or begun) The Physician or Lord Valentine's Castle so if I condemn it I'll do so on its own faults. Or merits. Whichever.
Edited to say: dud. An innocuous story, which is not what a Newbery ought to be. A bildungsroman (a term I probably apply far too broadly), as was Miguel, but with nothing for a reader to take away.
Someone or other who shouldn't have wrote some faux sequels for Jane Austen, The Third Sister about Margaret Dashwood and one for Georgianna Darcy whose name I forget. (Others have been okay, or, if not particularly Austeny, like Eliza's Daughter, at least an adequate story.) My problem with those two is that throughout the entire book you know Margaret and Georgianna are in love with Wrong-Seeming Men yet that they must marry by the end of the books. So you wait for the Wrong-Seeming Man to redeem himself, as Darcy did, or for the Right Man to show up. On both occasions, someone about whose personality and stake we know nothing swoops in at the end to claim his prize. Totally unsatisfying, even more than you ought to expect when you read faux Austen.
Same thing with Avi. Several potential plotlines to develop and he finishes one, an important one, with little but dialog exchanged to gauge the credibility the action.
You know, it could be his whole Sting-Prince-Cher-Madonna thing that I just don't cotton to.
Hookay, it happened again. Whenever I read Witch Child and The Watcher, one after the other, I noticed that both authors used the device of a coin broken in halves as mementos for people who're separating. Yesterday in ...And Now, Miguel, Miguel has a lucky stone with a hole through it. I am just starting Coraline and the protagonist is given a stone with a hole through it as a charm for luck or safety.
Edited to add: pleasantly ghoulish. I immediately thereafter started Sandman (again), where someone is being read Through the Looking Glass. I didn't need to read that that to know that Lewis Carroll must haunt Gaiman's dreams.
My plan, this week, is to grow moss. Which means to prove that I have neither self-respect nor willpower nor discipline when I don't have a chaperon. I intend to eat meals the size of my head, frequently; to read a bunch of books, probably more of the children's than the adult's variety; and to set anti-landspeed records for inertia. Yesterday the obvious excuse not to work outside was the rain; today it's the wind. Also today it's that I got really fucking frustrated at Microsoft Word today, having manually to format shit that would be automated were my software to behave correctly, and then keeping my tongue when after that, the authors wanted to change this and that which meant I redid a lot of that formatting. Tomorrow, though, I might have to get up. Because there's just one small problem in my plot to devolve into an invertebrate, and that is that there is not a lick of chocolate in the entire house.
Did The Bar Sinister, which was written as a sequel to the BBC "Pride and Prejudice" rather than the book, name Darcy's harlequin Great Dane? This dog appears in the miniseries, not the book. A black and white harlequin Great Dane (are harlequins ever another color combination?) who rivals all other dogs in gorgeousness as Howie the Dog rivals them in adorability. I am still looking for its picture but this and that are similar.
I mentioned Just There horses before. I notice that right after Darcy trots through Meryton on his all-black horse, a villein paces through on a Just There horse with a white blaze and socks, I think to mark their contrast in quality.
I just got off the phone with my mother. She told of the antics of my sister's cat, whom my sister brought home over Easter. My sister's had Kitty (sadly, not an alias: no one has been able to come up with a better name) for maybe two months now and brought her home twice. Our mother persistently refers to the cat as "he." Of course it doesn't really matter: the cat is asexual. And it's not as if "Kitty" as a name offers any clues about gender. But still. Is it just me? Is remembering this so difficult? We anthropomorphize our pets--I wrote "whom" instead of "which" automatically, and so would my mother except she'd say "who"--in so many ways that this should be one. At her first masculine pronoun I interjected "she," possibly rudely, but in a way that almost anyone else I know would have run with ("'She,' right, as I was saying, loves to birdwatch..."). My mother instead required a tangent excusing herself. Perhaps she does this to dissuade me from interrupting her or from correcting her at all. Perhaps she is just incapable of learning or remembering: if I ever correct her again (and I will), she will not remember--any more than she remembers the cat's gender--that she already explained herself (twice now).
Her excuse is that all cats in the house--Granny's exSqueaky, her husband's exMurray--were male. So? All the dogs except Stanley, who was a package deal with my father, were female. Knowing the cat's gender is a part of knowing the cat, and her inability to grasp this simple fact illustrates another reason I'm glad not to have spored: if I had a son, would she never remember his gender because there ever were only girls in her house?
I told her about Howie the Dog though. She appreciated that. But I forgot to tell her that my friend's year-old baby's first utterances have been barking.
Who is responsible for the weather?
I was going to dig out the other bit of the front yard today. I'm not overly enthusiastic about doing this, since we already have problems with drainage in that corner and I'm not a landscape or hydraulics engineer or whatever I'm supposed to be to arrange the ground properly. Also I should rip out that easement, though I didn't order enough ground cover for it. I didn't any evening this week because the weather supported my slugdom (wonderful, wonderful rain!); forecasts called for a warmer and drier Friday. But it is 40 degrees and cloudy.
I think I might walk down to Cherry Creek and look for a skirt--a grey one, naturally--because for Paris I have either my allegedly undyed linen one, very pale, very thin, not a good material for traveling nor a color for wearing several days in a row nor a weight for possible chilliness or rain; or my denim skirt, which is too American. I made the mistake of describing it thus to my mother.
"What's wrong with being American?" she demanded querulously.
"Nothing, of course. What I mean there is that it's denim, it's the equivalent of wearing jeans except it's a skirt, so it's too casual--as the U.S. is casual--and I know you would no more wear jeans traveling in a foreign capital than I would." (I don't know. Maybe now she would. But she didn't pack jeans to go to England in 1981.)
Of course if I can't find the right skirt I'll justify the denim by being appropriate in all other respects, durability and nonwrinklyness and skirtiness.
And then I might bus to downtown and watch a matinee of "Holes."
Because it's damn well too cold to muck about in the muck. Warm muck, that would be okay. Maybe tomorrow.
It is not just that they both have the same Vermeer on their covers that makes them similar to one another. There's also that I read them within months of each other and that Voigt's city of Trastad is (deliberately) very Dutch.
I just reread both of them over the past two days. Elske is satisfying for tying up all the Kingdom threads and for being better than Wings of a Falcon. Girl is just great, though rereading revealed a flaw: on page 46, she tells her family that her employers have a daughter her sister's age but on page 53 her sister sees her at the market with that girl and Griet says she had not mentioned the similarity in ages, that her sister should not feel displaced.
I love that book.
Yesterday a package awaited me on the porch. I left my sister a message that it had arrived and that I wouldn't open it until my birthday, but when we talked last night she had me open it. She wanted me to have the things before going to Paris (my entire family fear I am not going to survive this trip, so if I don't that should be ascribed to my family's Gut, a powerful if temperamental organ of prescience). She told me, as I cut the tape, that it was a bunch of stuff equivalent to the crap she mails me from the Sunday supplements. "A Thomas Kinkade Christmas train?" I asked.
No, but a t-shirt with a train on it. I first thought it was Thomas the Tank (Steam?) Engine, but it's the Smile Train, a charity her friend runs to fund corrective cosmetic surgery for kids with cleft palates and the like. Also a pitcher with a pattern of squares that I recognized (as I was meant to) as reminiscent of our mother's lemonade pitcher. A citronella candle in a periwinkle metal sand bucket. More bubbles for my bubble machine. A purple pen from Liberty Mutual. A lavender box of tissues. Another rubber duckie, this one from the Colonnade whose rooftop pool she uses. A shaven? chenille pillow that neither of us was sure I'd like but that exactly matches both the slate blue pillows and the wine-colored throw on Dim the Couch. (I didn't name my furniture. Someone else did.) So overall it was like a Yule stocking, except a birthday one. It was great, and everything made me laugh.
Also there was the yellow rose I took from my grandmother's grave, all finished drying now.
The English Book of Common Prayer says, "In the midst of life, we are in death." For us that day it was "In the midst of death we are in life." After the service when first my great-aunt and then my other great-aunt and then my mother took yellow roses from the flower arrangement, my sister and cousin and I decided to do so as well before the family stripped it entirely bare. The wreath looked as bedraggled as you'd expect after being tugged at and dismembered, and the three of us chortled mirthlessly at everyone's (and our own) heresy and disrespect, and mirthfully as we invented words for our grandmother, who would pretend to disapprove but suppress a smile and let us see her doing so.
Is it only an Irish thing, to be so close to laughter at or after a funeral? I think not; grief can often lead to hysteria. I do like that Irish short story about the wake, and is the dancing master's wake? Because as people drink and dance at the wake, they decide the guest of honor, loving to dance as he did, should partake of the festivities, so out of the coffin comes the corpse to partner his mourners in their dancing. The story's probably meant to illustrate how we're all drunks with no sense of propriety, but me, I'm glad for when a joke can shine through clouds of grief.
CLH and I laughed, because yesterday was a month and a day before my birthday. But this is what she gets for being so hyperprompt.
I have a few subliterary weaknesses. I speak freely of my pubescent and adolescent predilections for V.C. Andrews and Stephen King, respectively, and I write truthfully if with shame of my continuing addiction to Jean Auel, so you can imagine (or maybe you can't, if you really didn't try, so maybe you shouldn't, OMFB) how much lower my real cheesy subliterary guilty pleasure is.
I would like to state for the record that I seldom indulge in it. In fact, I haven't for years.
There is one title that was always my favorite, except I didn't know the title. Or the author. Only the series name and general plot. (Yes, it was a series.) The book might have resurfaced in my brain when my own personal Gracious Wings realized what a poor joke the male lead's name was. Eventually, a google search turned up a title, Amazon turned up a seller, and now, three months after I bought it--three months during which the vendor, or the vendor's pimp, alleged it had been sent out two days after I placed the order--it showed up in my mailbox (with a note from the vendor apologizing for her tardiness, which was due to illness).
I have to go now. I have to reacquaint myself with trash I knew was trash late in high school--when Stephen King didn't survive tenth grade.
After last Saturday's rain, the basement rug got wet and we brought it outside Sunday to dry. Except I didn't bring it in Monday so it's been wet all week. I am pretty sure I foresee a replacement. But I have to go attack it with the wet-dry vacuum and see if it's salvageable. Plus today it's sunnier but the sun will have a better chance at bleaching or killing the mold or just finishing the drying job if I use the wet-dry vac now. My other tasks today are digging the edging into the north front garden and digging out the easement and the strip between the sumac tree and the property line. I'm really not enthused about doing these things. So I'm babbling here.
It's not so babbly to say that "Holes" was pretty good. The casting was great (except that the actor who plays Stanley's mother annoys me), the story and the mood were faithful to those of the book, and the music fit well. It fit well now, in 2003; my only criticism is that it will date the movie more than necessary. Or maybe only if it's cringeworthy. I just watched "Roxanne" for the first time in a million years and that 1987 mood music was terribly intrusive, like Yaz in "The Chocolate War" or "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" in "Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid."
It is babbly to say that I found a black jersey skirt, just what I wanted--at T.J. Maxx. Cherry Creek is not a very good mall, as no mall probably can be, and Cherry Creek North is waaaaay too expensive a neighborhood to shop in. I went into Bryn Walker, a (shocking!) independent (I think) clothing store in the mall, and I found a skirt I loved because its rear hem fell nearly to the floor while the front hem hit only a mid-ankle.
Then the saleswoman suggested a pair of pants, and what the hell, I don't actually own pants that aren't jeans, for yoga, or part of a suit, so I did. She loved them (or professed to) on me and my "cute shape." She was rounder than I am and it's just a Fact that Salespeople Lie and that if she were thinner herself she wouldn't've said I have a great ass. Since I spent my entire childhood in mortal fear of floodwater pants, I cannot get behind this cropped thing. But I didn't take them off yet.
I tried on a shirt (that she called a "top," which usage makes me itch in a vague way) that did not disguise the bosom nearly as much as I require my shirts to do. There might even have been, by means of clinginess, emphasis, when I have spent my entire boobed life deemphasizing. It was also black, and I should maybe stop shopping with my mental mother. "Don't wear black next to your face" is an axiom I believe in anyway, and I don't wear red. Not because it makes one look like a whore, which is my mother's credo, but because red with any yellow to it doesn't work with my skin tone and red with any blue to it reminds me of my mother's beloved maroons and roses.
But in the black shirt and pants, I tried on a straw hat with a wide brim and slightly peaked crown, and I mourned Audrey. Then the saleswoman wrapped a scarf around my shoulders, and holy shit, I looked--well, I'll say it, I looked pretty good. I looked really good. I looked stylish and as if I didn't dress at Ross. Also I didn't look dumpy and dowdy but attractively curvy, which is a pleasant change.
Her next push was for different shoes. Another reason for me not to wear the pale linen skirt is that I am going to bring one pair of shoes for the week, my black Dansko clogs, and I Don't Wear Black Shoes with Pale Colors. (Which is why I didn't buy a beautiful pink linen dress at Casual Corner, besides that pink linen doesn't travel or hold up for a week any better than undyed linen). She wanted me to try on a pair of mary janes with a flat footbed. Yeah, flâneuring around Paris in new shoes without proper support. That sounds good.
Meanwhile she was telling me she just wouldn't let me get the skirt, that I must get the pants instead. Meanwhile the other customer (in the two-salesperson store) was making a purchase of six hundred and sixty-four dollars (more than my plane ticket). The pants were sixty bucks, as was the skirt; I hadn't looked at the booby shirt's price tag nor that of the scarf or the hat or the shoes. Dumpy and dowdy is cheaper and takes less space on an international flight. Damn. I asked her to hold the skirt and pants and vamoosed with empty hands.
I took the bus downtown, ransacked Ross and T.J. Maxx before "Holes," and found yet another in my long-running series of black jersey skirts, sturdier than the Bryn Walker one, ankle-length though without the fabulous sweeping hem, unwaisted. Also a black linen "top" with white embroidery on it (for my white linen skirt, because my mental mother won't let me buy a piece if it doesn't work with something I already have).
After "Holes" I walked down to the Tattered Cover (take that, Barnes & Noble! which is right under the movie theatre) for Emlet: Make Way for Ducklings and a charming book about a squirrel who paints with his tail, inspired by everything he sees through the windows at the Met. (I do secretly still love the sunflower-beheading, nectarine-raiding, tomato-nibbling squirrels.) This squirrel's name was Micawber, and what could be cuter? But they didn't have Giraffes Can't Dance, so I still haven't seen that. And a Paris guide or two, based on what seemed best from the 'brary.
I am so glad I borrowed this from the Cherry Creek library yesterday: the Audible.com version ended about seven minutes or one chapter too early. I thought that the goat's name was Jolie, because it was pretty, but it was Djali. Also Quasimodo was named for the Sunday on which he was found, and it happened to suit his person as well. There's a half-man holiday, like Whitsunday and Assumption? Okay.
I finished it on the porchswing.
The rug is almost dry, but I wonder if the sun will be able to shine the smell out of it, or if the smell lasted only as long as the wet. I suspect we'll find out the hard way.
I ripped out some of the bit by the porch, trying to spare the grape hyacinth and the tulip that I would like to transplant when the big silver sage goes in there. I put in some edging, but not more because I didn't rip everything out. I didn't rip everything out because the soil's still so wet (excuses excuses...) and would dry into its clumps. And that's really it.
Otherwise Blake and I sat in the sun and read Toni Cade Bambara. I wasn't wearing much, it was 73, and I was hot. Is that usual?
Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson" appeared in The Secret Self collection of short stories I read during the blizzard. These were mostly really good, with one, "Raymond's Run," particularly striking for its lovingness. I confess that I read most of this yesterday in the sun and today in Vito the Reading Chair, indulging in whatever nappitude happened by. So if I didn't follow "The Survivor," that's probably not Bambara's fault. "Maggie of the Green Bottles" and "The Johnson Girls" were also memorable.
By the end of this collection, I had got the point. The point, I must say, had eluded me through the first few installments. Neil Gaiman himself said in his afterword that he didn't find his voice until later on. As the characters, or single character of Dream, developed, I found the narrative more compelling.
I still don't think much of the artwork except for the covers, and for me the difference between a novel and a graphic novel is the, uh, graphics, so if they suck, I'm perfectly comfortable calling the whole shebang a comic book.
I might read more volumes of it.
Last night I watched the Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine cinematization of "Jane Eyre." Orson Welles was Citizen Rochester, all kinds of dark and brooding, and I wonder that he wasn't cast as Heathcliff in 1939 instead of Laurence Olivier. This was made four years after "Citizen Kane," which certainly made its influence felt. The set was Xanadus Lowood and Thornfield, and Mother Citizen played Mrs. Reed. (That was Endora in "Bewitched"!) Orson Welles cannot have been all that mad at "How Green Was My Valley" (which won "Citizen Kane's" Oscar) because Mrs. Morgan played Bessie. I do not understand why Joan Fontaine was considered so Plain and Unremarkable as to be the second Mrs. DeWinter and Jane Eyre both, plus the wife in "Suspicion." Her characters just didn't have good luck with their husbands' first wives, did they? But she was quite pretty, and her sister certainly held up well, given this year's Oscar appearance.
The movie was a hatchet job, adaptation-wise. What really cracked me up was that at every huge departure from the given plot, Joan Fontaine would narrate a paragraph highlighted in a book, strongly implying she was reading straight from the book. The paragraphs above and below the highlighted ones were also not Charlotte Brontë's. I don't require a book to be faithful, ya ya ya, except that Jane does not live up to her childhood pride and self-respect, even as given in the movie: she accepts gifts of dressmaking fabrics (that aren't black or grey) from Mr. Rochester during their engagement; she returns to Gateshead as she vowed, at 10, never to do; she writes a humble letter to Mr. Brocklehurst--though, upon leaving Lowood, she declared herself forever free of him as well. The absence of the Riverses is one thing; the absence of Jane's strength of character quite another.
I wonder if that wonderful harlequin Great Dane was cast in the recent "Pride and Prejudice" because Mr. Rochester's Pilot in this "Jane Eyre" was such a dog?
Sunday I went to see the "Amazing Caves" IMax at the Museum of Nature and Science. I was okay for almost all of it: the repelling down a cliff to a cave mouth in Arizona, the unstable ice cave in Greenland, even most of the cave diving in Mexico. Only when a cave diver removed her tanks to squeeze them before her through a hole and then followed them did I get squeamish, if not actually queasy.
Afterward I strolled through the park and signed a petition near a demonstration for an off-leash area. It really is ridiculous that dogs can't run and play in city parks, as children may. No wonder they have behavior problems (as inactive children do): they're not permitted to be who they are. A coworker was there with her two Frisbee dogs, and there were a three-month-old hound mix (spotted, with big ears: my favorite of the bunch), two Newfs (not with Frisbees), many border collies and heelers and mixes, a sleek doberman, labs and lab mixes, easily two dozen dogs. And the only ones who barked (and that incessantly) were two dustmops--they must have been so jealous of the real dogs of worthwhile sizes and commensurate physical ability. A Newfie might not be a good Frisbee dog, but at least it can rescue a drowning fisherman.
My notstepmother's Yorkshire terrier is at least somewhat of a dog, and my father has certainly encouraged his more aggressive behaviors (like trying to chase away all the birds who live in their hedges). Now my sister has Kitty, and of course there's Blake. My sister observed, "The kids' table at Thanksgiving is going to be a nightmare now."
Two 3.8 mile city rides, and then later
Seated row, 3x12 @60
Tricep rope pull, 3x12 @20 (that pulley thing is weird. When I did 20, the pulley would pop and it'd be super easy; when I put the pin in 30, the pulley wouldn't pop and I could barely budge the rope)
Hack squats, 3x10 @120
Iso Lat pull downs, 3x12 @75
Something that used different and more back muscles, 3x12 @100
50 back extensions
Whatever isolated muscle at the top of the shoulder, 1x10 @30 and then to exhaustion (maybe eight) at 20.
I finished reading this to RDC last night. I am gratified that he liked it so much.
Next up I think might be Jackaroo, though Melissa found it so poorly done that I wonder if it will hold up to RDC's ear. Maybe The Giver, although that doesn't hold up for me. He does need some Voigt (that is, I want him to know some Voigt), but I am dubious how he will feel about the Tillerman saga, when it is so saga-ish. He would like Dicey (read, he had better like Dicey) but Homecoming might be too young or repetitive, although he grew up along their trek route just as I did. (No, he grew up west of New Haven, whereas I can remember when the Old Lyme A&P had the outdoor conveyor belt the Tillermans encountered, and I laughed when they entered Sound View and "everything looked very clean," because Sound View was as scary to me as any inner city when I was a child. Can you say "sheltered"? I knew you could!) Maybe The Runner? Maybe Island of the Blue Dolphins or Julie of the Wolves or My Side of the Mountain for Independent Wilderness Living, despite the Canine Mortality. Which is a factor in The Runner as well.
Me, I'm listening to Across Five Aprils. I should have listened to a sample first, though anyone following George Guidall would compare badly so maybe I should show the narrator some mercy.
Two 3.8 mile city rides through a neighborhood packed with lilac. And it's a damper spring, so their perfume is much stronger. It's wonderful.
Wow. I began this, desultorily and the first two pages, a few days ago; since then I've pussyfooted around it knowing I wanted to give it a reasonable chunk of time. Today I gave it my lunch period, 30 whole minutes, wheeee, but still, that's plenty of time to be dazzled.
If I didn't get as far into it as I ought to have, I blame that on looking up ataraxic and balanic and battenberg and, I admit, probity and catamite too, just to make sure.
I was about to write, I wonder who got the Booker that year, because this is just great. Then I looked at its publication date: 1989. Possession won the 1990 Booker and Remains of the Day the 1989. Well okay then.
I took the 2 bus to downtown from Cherry Creek Friday instead of the usual 83. That was interesting, prettier because it went north on Downing instead of Lincoln, hairier because of much narrower streets. Point being that I exited the bus at Grant and went to Capitol Hill books again. I saw Oscar and Lucinda (1988 Booker) with the Vintage mark and got all happy, but it had the movie cover anyway. Bleah.
