House:
Errands
Kinwork and Lisaism
Reading:
It's not Evolution of Jane, and nothing could be, but it was quite good. It took me until about halfway through to appreciate was Schine was doing, and if it had been another author whom I have less invested in, I might have given up. The daughter, mother, and grandmother vibrated off the page, and the endings felt right, and I saw traces of Cathleen Schine's own story (through an essay she wrote for The New Yorker) toward the end. I loved that, and the bits about naming.
Someone says, "I need to bare my soul," and I thought of how true the homophone verb would work there. She needs to bare it because she otherwise could not bear it.
A stray dog needs a name. "When you got right down to it, what name wasn't a brand? She thought what a shame it was that language had devolved from being a means of expression to being little more than a flag....When everything in life was judged as an adornment rather than by its utility, when even a dog was seen as an accessory, when even its name was chosen as a mirror for one's own aspirations, then what name was free, what name was personal, what name was just a name?...'We'll name him after the first sign we see.'"
I laughed at us after a couple of weeks in the house for having such unrealistic plans of painting both the study and the bedroom in one weekend, our first. Nevertheless I somehow still had the idea I could put two coats of primer in the landing today. RDC disillusioned me of that because primer needs 24 hours between coats. Nevertheless I didn't expect it to take me over three hours to do a 3'x7'x9' space with one doorway and one window. The stairs made for more reaching, and the banisters made one length difficult to reach.
The trim, of course, will need a zillion more coats. Not even the raw wood of the new floor mouldings need as much primer as the damn gunmetal gray of the window and door mouldings. But this does mark the end of the gray, hooray.
I am not, as we know, a football watcher. Today, however, I am not doing a damn thing more. If only there were still chamberpots. So here I am. Laptop, Douglas Coupland, and Superbowl TiVoing. When I started to watch "CBS Sunday Morning" and saw it would have a story on Superbowl ads, I tuned live tv to CBS and, what the hell, hit record. There's still Douglas Coupland and "Mary of Scotland" and "The Little Minister" until it's time to fast-forward in search of ads.
When CBS came on, someone was singing a tribute to the Columbia, which tribute was fitting though the performance a trifle twee. I don't know how Josh Groban could look familiar to me, but he did. He looks like Adrien Brody.
When did "The Star-Spangled Banner" become an easy-listening melody? Where is the shame in singing it as written? For all that Roseanne Barr's baseball version was foul and mean-spirited and out of tune, at least it followed the notes.
And what you learn from television! From "CBS Sunday Morning" again, Princess Leia is Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher's daughter? And Elizabeth Taylor was her stepmother for however long that marriage lasted? And she was married to Paul Simon for an instant in 1983? If Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor are friends now (and they are), does that mean Carrie Fisher and Edie Brickell are buds too?
Well, 2004 wasn't like 1984 either: no Mac ad at all. Oh, and New England won, which should make my father happy. And my sister too, I guess.
I was late leaving the house and rushing. I didn't rush enough to catch my bus; I walked the full four miles. Then we had a new person start and what with one thing and another I had a busy day. It wasn't until I was within a block of the house that I wondered about Blake. I could remember giving him fresh food and water and wheeling his cage in front of the living room window so he could look out, but...
I forgot either to put the stick in his door (which means that if he hops hard onto the dishes that latch into the door, he can bounce the door open) or to close the door at all. This I saw through the window as I raced up the steps, because his cage was empty (or full of everything but bird). I opened the door carefully not to squish him, then proceeded through the house at a trot, calling for him. The toilet had no cockatiel in it. I glanced into the bedroom: there he was.
He had spent the day on my fleece sock by the bed. He didn't seem particularly hungry or thirsty and in fact just wanted to return to his sock. His tail was filthy because he had squatted horizontally on a sock instead of standing vertically on a perch and occasionally taken refuge under the dusty bed (for a nearer ceiling than the actual one), so the most traumatic thing part of the experience was my taking an old, dampened toothbrush to his precious tail.
Good thing I don't have a dog.
I walked the four miles to work because I missed the bus that would have carried me the middle 2.5 miles. It was a lovely walk through two inches of fresh snow.
I like to think I would have loved it as a child, but despite its abundance of perfect elements I think it might have frightened or bored me--because it's old-seeming? because the slipperinesses in time would have offended my linear little self?
Marvelous.
"You mean...there's insanity in the family?"--Katharine Hepburn in "Bill of Divorcement."
A father is asked why he always calls his son worthless. "Because the little shit kept on landing in trouble--BB guns and rifles--neighbors showing up with half of their cats in each hand..."
"That was an accident, Dad."
This cracked me up from cover to cover. Nearly cover to cover. And continually, not continuously, but often and often. It was like The Corrections on nitros oxide. I liked Hey, Nostradamus! just fine, but that was regular Douglas Coupland. This was Coupland seeming to mind much less whether everyone noticed how clever he was, which allowed him to be a lot funnier than usual.
Also, someone is from New Lyme, Connecticut. Hey! Quit that!
I am going to sleep, watch two "West Wings," do something about my emailbox, sleep, paint the landing ceiling and trim, sleep, call RPR's baby shower, sleep, buy something for another baby shower and go to that in person, sleep, empty the cupboards around the stove (three of four done), and sleep, and that will be Saturday. Sunday I hope to snowshoe, finally, and cap the day at Hot Sulphur Springs. Also I am going read Everything Is Illuminated.
Coordinating the kitchen work is going to make my eyes bug out of my ears. After I empty those particular cabinets, they need to come off the wall, which will damage the plaster. An, I hope, multi-talented electrician will inspect the kitchen and attic (which means emptying RDC's closet, removing the rod, and setting up the ladder) next week and give a price to install the hood. At that point, the hood begins to make its way to the house, either within a week from the distributor or in a couple of months from the manufacturer; and as soon as the hood is a certainty, we can order the cabinets, which will also take six to eight weeks to arrive. In the interim, we repair the plaster.
I found two methods to repair plaster. One talks about plasterboard so I think actually means drywall. (Perhaps I can use that method to repair the hole in my study ceiling.) The other relies on luck: "Cut around the hole, making sure not to damage more plaster." It doesn't give any tips about how not to damage the plaster.
And I thought tiling the backsplash would happen at our own pace, after we had Other People install the cabinets and countertops and replaced the range, but it has to happen before the range goes in. That means we have to decide about tiles before the counter goes in, before we get a feel for how the counter will look in the room.
I toted a 12-inch square piece of Blue Pearl granite about the store and RDC saw that the cobalt blue sink did not match. So the sink will be stainless steel. Also we upgraded from a drop-in to an undermounted sink. The Great Indoors gave us a much more manageable three-inch square sample to take home. It goes really well with the pale blue on the back landing that I plan to apply to the kitchen.
After emptying the cabinets, my next step is to look at tile, bringing the granite chip and the Behr* Ocean Air paint card and the, sadly, mere catalog photograph of the cabinets along. It's actually a fun prospect.
But I begin to see why redoing a kitchen will always burgeon beyond the four- to six-week plan people think about.
* Yeah, Behr. I decided to paint the landing while standing in Home Depot, hence violating the vow we took never to buy Behr again. Besides, the front landing will be in Behr as well, the same sage as most of the upstairs.
** I'm not going to link the color because it displays online as green, whereas on the chip and the wall it's blue.
RDC wants to get me a phone that takes pictures, which would enable even more pictures than the iSight, so there'd be a lot more of these. That might get excessive. Here we have me on the chair, Blake tucked on my chest, the edge of a book tucked between back and arm of chair, and the arm of the chair (I want to emphasize that that's not my arm).
When I woke up this morning I was really disoriented and almost dizzy from bizarre dreams twisting together "What Dreams May Come" and "Angels in America." I called CLH so she could talk me into the present. I slept late, which is one reason my dreams were strange (either I'm more awake at the end of a long sleep, so I remember them more, or--my preference--my mind is using up the dregs of its material), and between that and the long sister-chat, I ditched the idea of painting the landing ceiling. It will wait.
I did go for a walk in the Preserve for the first time in maybe two years. I had avoided it because I remembered, I guess wrongly, from the last time I went, signs announcing new houses in the middle of a hairpin loop that had housed raptors and coyotes and waterfowl and kingfishers in wetlands: the big They were going to fill in the ponds. But either I misremember or the signs were for two mansions that have gone up on the built-in side of the canal, and which are palatially gargantuan but not on wetlands.
In the horse field--the particular horse field with the Przewalski (is it possible for a civilian, even a wealthy one, to have a Przewalski? that's what it looks like) and the donkey and the regular horse--I saw a rough-legged hawk, and at the apex of the hairpin, I overshot my planned turn-around point because I saw I think a Swainson's hawk. Also I might have spotted a peregrine falcon.
There were, however, no dogs. I was walking along in shorts, tank top, an unbuttoned denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and hiking shoes over about four inches of well-trampled snow. But this is Denver: the sun was out and I drove with the window down and was perfectly warm. (Let us not speak of my subcutaneous fat.) The occasional people I passed wore fleece and sweaters and even hats and long pants and were clearly freaks who thought it was too cold to bring their dogs out.
I walked and listened to Underworld and missed Haitch.
Then I visited my favorite library branch. Its architecture is perfect, for one thing, with a separate children's room and lots of window seats and nonfiction on another floor so you can research in quiet, but in addition to its browsable stacks, its main draw is the reader's adviser, a smiling woman named JoAnne who reminds me of my publishing professor.
I picked up Michele Roberts's The Looking Glass, which CLH recommended; The Beans of Egypt, Maine, very popular when I worked at Phoebe; J.M. Coetzee's new Elizabeth Costello; and a couple of volumes of Jane Austen because I have, ahem, never read Lady Susan.
Then I was late for the baby shower. I zipped down to Babies Are Misspelled and Grammatically Incorrect Depot, selected a present by triangulating the factors of registry request, price range, and proximity of item to check-out counter (and it sells wrapping paper too!), and promptly got lost in the Land of AllTheSame. Climbing Tree deliver me from Highlands Ranch and its beige McMansions. I thought that by continuing south of BAMaGI Depot I would find the highway, but apparently I crossed it without noticing as I looked for the Depot--I am used to approaching it from the east and using a Krispy Kreme for a landmark (I have previously visited that hellish pod place in Haitch's company, hence the doughnut stop). In Highlands Ranch, University and Colorado Boulevards intersect instead of running parallel. I ended up approaching the house by following the directions backward, but I got there only 20' past the start time.
I got to meet three newlings: Clove's...Pynchon (too young to be other than iguana-y), Margaret's...Buckbeak (six months old and very sociable), and Begonia's Scarlett (with the little palm tree pigtail most little girls have). I was grateful for Spenser, who has never failed to delight and amuse me even as rarely as I see her, because during Jack and Diane's unwrapping we kvetched (quietly, in the back) about the paraphenalia. Of her blanket, she said, "Needs neither instruction nor assembly." She asked what my "Prince Lionheart Diaper Depot" was about, and I explained my triangulation. Then she looked askance at me when I knew what a Boppie is. But she spoke of Trundlebundlers so we were both suspect.
But my favorite conversation happened with a woman whom I had previously seen only through Haitch. She came to Haitch's graduation party at my house last summer, and recognized me immediately today, but nevertheless had me mixed up with someone else. She came in right after Dexy and Clove with Pynchon and first saw me greeting the baby so after saying hello sequed to, "And how is your little one?"
I paused. This was an ambiguous and probably misguided beginning. "He's fine, thank you...."
She now had a gender, so could ask, "How old is he now?"
I grinned--this was fun. "He was eight in August."
"Where is he today?"
"At home. In his cage."
She laughed, clearly thinking I was being sarcastic. Someone with more guile than I could have kept it going longer, and if I had met Dexy's eye I couldn't have strung it to this point.
"I'm sorry," I explained, "I am quite seriously literal. I do have a little boy whom I love and adore, but Blake is a parrot, not a human."
We laughed and it was fine.
Doing the post mortem with Haitch over the phone later, I told her about an interview of Mohammed Ali I saw. He likes to show a disappearing handkerchief trick to people, but he doesn't like to deceive anyone so always follows up by demonstrating the fake thumb that is the trick's secret. I felt a little like that, delighting in the person's courteous small-talky mistake but not wanting to take advantage of her.
Also Haitch misses our walk.
Yeah.
No snowshoeing and no hot sulphur springs: the windchill in Grand Lake is going to be -20, and the gusts will approach gale strength. So instead I will paint and demolish some cabinets and hope that next weekend is warmer and sunnier. Four days of snow between now and then, as forecast, would make for great snowshoeing next weekend.
Probably because I saw JoAnne who reminds me of my publishing professor--oh, and also because yesterday Haitch's professor made the same mistake about Blake that mine did*--last night I dreamed of the latter. CLH, who organized my wonderful 30th birthday party, led (my class? a group of dream-strangers?) us onto a school bus that brought us to a wonderful, Charenton-like house. Charenton-like because of the fruit growing everywhere, but Green Knowe-like in architecture, with a little bit of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle thrown in for magic, and Phoebe for nostalgia. Everyone suddenly knew how to cook and created a feast with the produce of the gardens that everyone else had gathered, and we all pitched in with our various talents like the Country Bunny's 21 children. The occasion was a Great Expectations-style wedding: seemingly unplanned but perfect and sweet and filled with love. I don't know from what mental recess I pulled a groom for my professor--I think he was an amalgam of my favorite Phoebe patrons.
Now that's a dream.
* When we bought the house, I sent change-of-address cards to everyone announcing that Lisa, RDC, and Blake had moved. My professor, with whom I was in mere year-end card contact, wrote congratulating me on the house but mostly on the offspring she assumed Blake represented. I responded, thanking her and confirming that while yes, Blake ruled the roost, he was our pet and not our child.
For the past several days the floor lamp in the den has flickered. Occasionally. Somewhat. Was it the new bulbs? If we abandon the pretext of additional nontelevision entertainment, we turn off the floor lamp and on the Anglepoise* clamped to the bookcases on the back wall, because the den must have some light even when we're just watching television because Blake is afraid of the dark. Except the Anglepoise flickered too. It's allowed to die--my mother gave it to me when I graduated from high school in 1986--but it's not as if lamps have a hard life.
* I don't know what this sort of lamp is called in the States. In Possession, it's an Anglepoise.
To avoid the Scary Darkness, I usually turn on the glary overheads with the switch at the top of the stairs, descend, light the floor lamp, and douse the overheads with the switch at the bottom. Tonight for the first time in a while, because it was still light when I spelunked with cockatiel, cockatiel tray, laptop, and decoy book, I didn't bother with the overheads but turned on the lamp and then plugged in my iBook. Flicker fade flicker fade fade fade.
Aha. So I decided it was that outlet. Except both lamps flicker when you plug anything--even a cord without a laptop at the other end--into any of the three outlets on that wall. The circuitry dance commenced.
Now. The den is at the front of the house, downstairs. The bedroom is at the back of the house, upstairs, and the bathroom is next to it. The circuit that controls four of the five outlets in the den (there might be a fifth behind bookcases) and two (but not a third) in my study, but not the overheads, is also the one for the bathroom (all) and the bedroom (overheads and two outlets but not a third). So we can't keep the circuit turned off, but there might be...arcing (for clarity's sake, that should be "arcking," like picnicking and singeing, n'est-ce pas?). That's bad. And difficult to diagnose. And probably requires a certified electrician to fix.
Also we've been trying to figure out how to install a hood in the kitchen. There's not a spare circuit in the junction box. Is that what I mean? what used to be called a fusebox? The range, being gas, doesn't need its own dedicated circuit. Maybe the hood doesn't either. That's just the electricity. Construction-wise...the hood will require cutting out a square of lathe and plaster, nailing 2x6s between the studs, drywalling a patch on, and screwing the hood into the 2x6s.
Also, the walls under the tiles are a fusion of glue and crumbling plaster and backing material and I don't know what else. So now we're hypothesizing granite up the walls for a backsplash, instead of tiles.
And the kitchen might be the lesser of the current house worries.
What have we got ourselves into?
I'm sorry, Haitch, but this is allegedly my "journal," so you'll have to cope.
I usually read myself to sleep. This means that I read, fall asleep, refuse to admit I've fallen asleep for the first few times RDC asks if I'm asleep, and finally mark my place, drop the book on my bedtable, and switch off the light. Often I refuse to admit I'm asleep because the marking and moving and switching might wake me up. Last night I woke from a dream in which I had finished my chapter, moved the post-it that is my bookmark, dropped the book (sometimes I lean it on the bed slat, against the table), and turned off the light. Like Calvin, waking from a dream in which he had already got up, eaten breakfast, and run for the bus, I grumbled that my dreams had become way too literal.
This morning I was grateful to my alarm clock (which hey! means I slept all the way to 6:30!) because it woke me from Yet Another high school dream. Can't I be done with these people yet? Taking French. Being the butt of this one's joke and that one's faux sympathy and the others' perfect blind eyes.
Last entry I mentioned a lamp my mother gave me, for high school graduation, as part of my expected dorm furnishings. Eighteen years, OMFB! Make it stop!
Gael Cooper linked to an Ask the White House session in whose transcript the contraction "they're" is written as "their."
That's at least one person whose spelling was left behind.
Oh goodness. No child left behind. I had never thought of the apocalyptic novels and that phrase before. If it wasn't deliberate, it's at the least a happy accident for them.
It just started while I sat in the living room and ate my breakfast over the morning surf (doesn't that sound like I watched the sun rise over the ocean?). Who knows how long it'll last, but it's falling thickly, not just flurrying. Please, snow, snow! I want to plant a tree this spring.
If there is anything happier than a cockatiel with a shoelace, especially when he has not had a shoelace for several weeks, I have yet to see it.
There is also the tile-gnawing cockatiel. Now that we want to encourage kitchen demolition, he can chew on all the grout he wants. But he still expects to be reprimanded for it, so he'll point his eye at you, beak bared (this would be "fangs bared" if he had any; the facial expression is the same), ready to defy you.
Oh, and the "No, I'd prefer to stay where I am, thank you" cockatiel. If he is on your finger and you would like him to step off onto someone's shoulder, or onto the top of his cage, or onto his windowsill, or down anywhere when he does not want to go, he is quite expert at simply refusing to step off while leaning back the better to keep his grip as you rotate your finger forward to tip him off.
When I first came across this title I thought it would be schmaltzy faux sentimality as I assume Tuesdays with Morrie to be. It might turn out to be so--I'm under halfway through--but mostly it cracks me up, especially when there are three connotations for "illuminated" in two pages.
"He was a changing god, destroyed and recreated by his believers, destroyed and recreated by their belief....Those who prayed came to believe less and less in the god of their creation and more and more in their belief. The unmarried women kissed the Dial's battered lips, although they were not faithful to their god, but to the kiss: they were kissing themselves" (p. 140).
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault quotes Jorge Luis Borges either translating or inventing a "certain Chinese encyclopedia" in which it is written that "animals are divided into
Some of the language choices were delightful: a second-person pronoun is "casual," and it took me a moment to realize he meant "familiar."
Mostly I enjoyed how differently each character saw and told their story, particularly Alexandr and Jonathan Safran Foer. And I loved the multiple meanings of "illuminate."
I got a late start and thought I would get nothing done before lunch. How wrong I was.
Carrying the hamper down to the laundry room, I was disoriented by the dropcloth bunched at the bottom of the stairs that disguised where the floor began. I stepped out, expecting floor, instead of down to the final step. Ow. Extreme ow. On three points, I crawled upstairs, toward the phone, in sight of Blake, in sunlight. By the time I lay supine on the living room carpet, my subverbal moaning had evolved into sobbing. I steeled myself to unclench my hands from my ankle and examine it. It was the right shape. I could move it in any direction. I didn't need Willoughby to ascertain if there were any breaks. In fact the initial burst of pain subsided quickly, and it soon could bear weight.
So I wrapped it up tight and put another coat of paint (embarrassingly, "December Lace") on the front landing ceiling, up both ladders to be careful of the edging. There.
Then I had a lunch date with a friend of a friend. KMJ left Denver in 1998 and I last saw her in 2000, but we keep in touch and when her friend Paul recently moved to Denver, she gave him our email address. Someone raised her eyebrow at this--a date with a man I'd never met before without RDC, who was out of town--but at least called it an adventure instead of quite a rendez-vous. Paul was charming, a good conversationalist, funny. After bison burgers at the Wynkoop, where he taunted me about his Canadians burning down the president's house during the war of 1812, which I dismissed as their being colonialists following Mother England's orders, we wandered around the Tattered Cover, where I bought books entirely forgetting to use the gift card I was recently given (The Good Earth in a trade paperback) and discovered that one of Paul's favorite books is José Saramago's Blindness. I'm a fan.
As soon as I got home, I broke Blake's little buddy heart by immediately leaving again to see "Girl with a Pearl Earring" Chez Artiste. It was okay. It attempted to keep the spirit of the book, but it failed to convey the chemistry unspokenly explicit in the book. What else did I expect? I do hope Colin Firth doesn't become the new John Corbett, so beloved as Chris in the Morning that he's cast as Perfect Man even if he doesn't fit the role ("Sex and the City," "Serendipity," "My Big Fat Greek Wedding").
The ankle didn't break my heart. It hurt, but it would heal. What broke my heart was my pretty pretty iBook Moonshadow, which wouldn't start when I got home. And my Macintosh consultant was away.
Sunday I started painting the walls and trim. I know you're supposed to do trim first and then walls, but I wanted results. Flat off-white on the ceiling and even semi-gloss blinding white on the trim don't make for contrast against primer. Eggshell moss green does.
Plus I chipped off more tiles and packed up more kitchen.
My sister recommended Michèle Roberts's The Looking Glass, and I am so glad she did. At first the setting felt like Brittany, what with the mermaids and the seacoast, and Normandy was close enough. The imagery mirrored itself throughout, lush and lovely.
And unlike Tracy Chevalier, when different characters spoke, they sounded different. Plus it afforded two more books for the Invisible Library (although that hasn't been updated in ages)--and Everything Is Illuminated offered up The Book of Reminiscences.
This was really popular when I worked at Phoebe. The author blurb reminded me of Bastard out of Carolina, but the first pages made me think it would be less wretched. Nope! Just as wretched, though I was spared the misery of connecting emotionally with the protagonist. Which doesn't mean that Carolyn Chute failed where Dorothy Allison succeeded, just that their effects were different.
I liked how Chute showed how invisible the underclass is to the wealthier eye, and how money does not equal class, and how poverty does not kill decency.
Egg and I cite to each other uses of "literally" as an intensifier rather than a modifier. I recently emailed her:
Arkansas is considering a user fee on ATMs, like a nickel a use. This is problematic of course because how to collect it? When you take $20 out of the bank, does the machine dispense $19.95? Anyway, Tex said, "This is literally nickel-and-diming people." Happily, he didn't continue "...to death."
Also, ÜrBoss described a situation between Dot Org and another party but (diplomatically) didn't name other party. We discussed the occurrence in staff meeting, and Ernier (hey, we have a new Egg! his name is Ernie. He is Not You, but he seems fine) said,
"If ÜrBoss wouldn't have named the party, I would have known it was X because [such-and-such made it obvious]."
He had a valid point to make (though content is never what I discuss myself, only style), but I was too distracted by his confusing mood with tense. I have been trying to find examples of this for ages. He should have said, "If ÜBoss hadn't named the party, I would have known it was X...."
His usage strips English of its fading conditional or subjunctive (I never can keep them straight), don't you think? Saying "if ÜrBoss wouldn't have named..." wouldn't have been correct even if his meaning had been this:
"If ÜrBoss wouldn't have named the party [meaning, in the past-tense meeting he did not do so], I would have [because it needed to be named]."
I think there could be a correct meaning for that construction to express, but damned if I can think of one.
23 February, from another site: [Someone has not done something.] "I wished that he would have done thus-and-so." I don't even know what tense the second predicate is. The first is perfect (or past perfect?), because it's a completed action? Bah.
I don't have the words to describe what I mean because I know the language natively rather than having been taught it and have an ear rather than a learning of grammar. RDC has or had a really useful Spanish text called something like English Grammar for Students of Spanish, meaning to explain all the stuff you know because you speak it but do not understand well enough to implement in another language (especially one, like Spanish, that has so many more tenses than English). I should look up the names of the tense or mood I mean.
Perhaps because I am not as in love with The Sun Also Rises as RDC, I delight in any occasion to say, "Isn't it pretty to think so," because overuse of this phrase makes it less special. Kind of like in For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose most famous line I tried to read without 60 years of cliché robbing it of its power: "The earth moved."
RDC's favorite line from The Sun Also Rises, at least when he's talking to me, is "The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs." We strolled through Cooks' Mart yesterday and I picked up a stuffed animal, a dog with a halo or crown sewn firmly to its little doggy skull, and released it, horrified. (Banzai's hat is attached to her head with one stitch, which doesn't bother me quite so much.) I asked RDC if he saw the stuffed dog I'd just looked at. His face lit up with opportunity to use his line.
"Don't say it," I unkindly cut him off.
Meanwhile, right behind him, another browser said to her friend, "You always say that!" which cracked me up.
I remarked on the maimed dog, I went on to say, because in Whole Foods the other day I saw an affront to all deities and decency: an aromatherapy bear which is supposed to be microwaved whereupon it will be warm and scenty for two hours.
Later that day we passed the Build-a-Bear workshop, luckily along the opposite corridor. The vivisection shop is next to a couple of children's clothing stores and Neiman-Marcus so I usually can easily avert my eyes.
Who comes up with these concepts, anyway?
A couple of hiccups: would someone say "geek" to mean "nerd" (post-1950, credit Dr. Seuss) or "dweeb" (what is its origin?) in 1912? and "neither of us (two discrete persons) were..."
I wish I could pinpoint why Beryl Bainbridge feels so much older than she is. I was sure The Bottle Factory Outing was written before 1950, but it was published in the early '70s. Every Man for Himself is set in 1912, and its writing style, except for the "geek" thing, if that's even an error and not just my assumption, feels no later than 1930. Is it only the setting?
I liked the character's story up until the boat hit the iceberg (most of the action happens on the Titanic), and after that I was so sad about the disaster that I wondered if the protagonist's action were not in character or if I only thought so because of Mrs. Strauss (who famously chose to die with her husband) and the stupid lowering of lifeboats only partly filled and Captain Smith's being so used to how smaller ships worked that he took the wrong evasive manoeuver after the iceberg finally was spotted on the utterly calm sea.
It occurred to me that, say, the Hindenburg doesn't make me as sad as the Titanic: hydrogen! What could you expect? Also death on a much smaller scale. But the Titanic represents the end of an era--from April 15, 1912, to August 1914 is no time whatsoever; and folly, not having enough lifeboats; and pride, calling the ship unsinkable; and those half-filled boats and everything else that consigned more of third class to their deaths than needed be.
Speaking of Hemingway's "The earth moved," when I saw a photography exhibit at the Denver Art Museum I tried to read the front page of a newspaper that quoted the newscaster's "Oh the humanity!" without decades of sarcastic hyperbole but with its original context. I was less successful than with For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Yea! Back on my bike! It's been light enough for a few weeks, but my difficulties were stretches of road on the north side of buildings, still snowy and icy despite warm days, and temperatures below 20.
Two 3.8-mile city rides
Gott in himmel. This evening I read the preface, Homer Contemplates Aristotle, and The Morning After in Richard Ellman's Ulysses on the Liffey, all of David Gifford's notes on the first episode, and the actual first episode of Ulysses.
(I, like scads of others, am determined to have read it by the centennial of Bloomsday.)
Also I put away the wash the same day as I brought it up from the laundry room instead of leaving it to chambre throughout the week. However, Joyce has so enfeebled my intellectual capacities that I left the socks in a heap, unable to pair them.
Because Eliza recently mentioned this book, I ordered it from the library, and today it showed up. I'm glad I read it, so that I can laugh at myself for so immediately failing to read from Ulysses every day. But I read and reread Into the Dream a million times before I was 10, and, heaven help me, Firestarter when I wasn't much older. So Willo Davis Roberts's happy ending for telekinetic kids rang entirely hollow.
Episode 2: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
The analysis in Ulysses on the Liffey is helpful and the notes are interesting for history and theme, but some of the phrases need translation too: the headmaster is always glad to break a lance with Stephen, i.e., joust or spar verbally. Or so I assume.
I am anxious to press on to episode 10 and beyond, because George Lucas has ruined the phrases "episode one," "episode two,"..."episode nine" for me.