James Spader will never be anyone but Steff. And I hate Steff. I'm not sure if "Sex, Lies and Videotape" would have stood a chance with someone other than him in it; and in the two minutes of "Less Than Zero" I watched I thought Steff was a good choice to play Rip; but for Steff to be in "Secretary" didn't work for me. At all. I wondered who told him a bad Christopher Walken imitation would be a good idea. Because it wasn't.
I mistook the time and arrove at noon, but the pool wouldn't open until 1:15. So I sat and read We for over an hour before swimming only .5K, because I'd been away from the ball and chain long enough. It's such a short ride the bikeage doesn't count.
No, really I love my house. It's just that sometimes it warrants escape. We were going to work on it both days but we might play hooky and go bike up in Fraser tomorrow instead.
So I raked out the big stupid chunky mulch and spread some better stuff, though I still need to do a Home Despot run for more mulch and for stakes. Also I don't think groundcloth and mulch is best for the vinca to spread with. I wonder if pine needles--or sunflower seeds, hm--would suppress weeds enough while still enabling the vinca to spread from below.
The city's digging up the city and I have got to order fill before it gets to our street. If I have two cubic yards delivered on Friday, hopefully that will be in time for delivery to the street, the side of the house that needs it, rather than to the alley, which would be way more extra work than I want to take on.
Then I went for a swim.
Meanwhile RDC installed a steel-reinforced beam to the roof and added a vertical buttress as well. Evenings this week I am going to remove all the rock etc. from the north side and prime and paint the new wood bits. A lot of the bungalow porches have, or had, windows or at least glass on the north side, so you could sit on your porch somewhat protected from wintry winds. I figure the vertical beam will look like that. I hope. Rule the first: no paint on the brick.
Afterward I weeded some of the backyard. Whatever it is that looks kinda like a dandelion but isn't must be on speed: its stem is nearly a trunk, nearly wood, nearly an inch in diameter, and I am barely exaggerating.
And then I dug out the sprouty shrubby stump. I want the raspberries to expand thataway, is why it needed to leave. I couldn't quite bring myself to wear boots when it was over 80 but Tevas were enough to stomp--I first typed "stump"--on the shovel with. I dug and sawed through roots and dug and stomped and pried and finally flourished it above my head, Perseus-like. Blake did not turn to stone, and the only snake-ish things were worms, and it wasn't that ugly, but I was glad to see the end of it.
That I can't remember the source of this recommendation makes me itch, but recommended or discussed it was, so I requested it of the library. Someone whose taste I generally respect later said it was good, better than 1984.
Whatever.
Its descendents are 1984 and Brave New World, or so says the back of the translation. They're also dystopias, but otherwise but I see more of it in Anthem and This Perfect Day than in the former pair. Really it's all through This Perfect Day, to the point that Ira Levin should acknowledge Zamyatin (maybe he does).
The second recommender liked its mathyness and I did like how no revolution can be the last one because no number can be the last one, and how frightening the concept of the square root of negative one must be in an exactly rational society.
Mostly I thought it dull, like "Logan's Run" and The Giver. (Okay, The Giver isn't dull but frustratingly undeveloped).
I don't remember when I developed a taste for dystopias. I had 1984 in tenth grade and either Brave New World as well or I read it independently.
I also liked post-apocalyptic fare, or maybe only liked The Stand so much--one book when I was 14--that I drew a fallacy of generalization. Earth Abides disappointed mostly for its premise that Earth needs human husbandry but partly because I have an expectation I will like post-apocalyptic fiction--why I have that expectation, since it was only the The Stand, and that during my mercifully short Stephen King period, I don't know. Oh yeah, also Empty World by the Tripods trilogy's John Christopher, and I must have read several post-Armageddon books as a teenager as well, that being during the early '80s when we all expected to be toasting marshmallows over each other by next week. On the Beach was okay. I would have liked it better if I hadn't hated Shute's Town Like Alice.
Anyway, dystopias.
I must have read Ira Levin's This Perfect Day during high or maybe middle school as I branched out from Stephen King (I read and reread Rosemary's Baby, Stepford Wives, Boys from Brazil, and even his first one about people who take over the night. Boys and Day were my favorites, by far.) In my Ayn Rand stage, I adored Anthem. I read Utopia freshling year of college, and Erewhon sometime during college, though not for a class.
I should not be drawing a blank here. Oh of course! Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland, but of course that was, according to her intention, a utopia. Is The Dispossessed a u- and dystopia? This is how to get along on a subsitence-level planet and this is how excessive a luxurious planet can be? "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" shows up on a discussion of dystopian texts, speaking of LeGuin, but I wouldn't call that a dystopia anymore than, say, The Handmaid's Tale. Because their settings but not their primary themes are dystopian? I'm not sure I have a reason other than that.
The only unfamiliar title searches of dystopian novels turn up is It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis. When I remember to read that, let me remember why.