Now that's a day. It's spring, though it will be winter again before summer. I cut down last year's growth in the front garden, raked out leaves and spiny shrubbery, peeled back groundcloth, scratched Yum-Yum Mix into the soil around each plant, and remulched. It's lovely and green and refreshed now. I cut down the peony skeletons, moved a winter's worth of compost into the vegetable garden, shoved all the front garden debris into the newly empty compost bin, and watered the cherry tree. Also I did what I should have done from the vegetable garden's first winter: covered it with landscaping cloth. It's black and water-permeable, less conspicuous and better for the soil than the blue plastic tarp I have previously used. And the air was clear and warm enough for the sheets to dry in only an afternoon, instead of needing to be halfway machine-dried and then line-dried for a full day only to smell more like city than like sun.
Tonight I am going to choose plants to finish the north front garden and figure out how to fill in the north side of the house.
Don DeLillo's prologue and epilogue are among the best writing I have ever come across, in any period. To place J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, and Frank Sinatra in a box at the Dodgers-Giants 1951 pennant game encapsulates the entire mood of the country on a day of not only that miracle but also of the USSR exploding its first atomic bomb. Historically, I don't know if both events did occur on the same day; bookwise, the juxtaposition resonates.
I confess that I didn't entirely follow the plot of the bulk of the book: it is too long an audiobook for me right now, since I currently don't devote sufficient time frequently enough to listening. I believe, though, that this plot, and whose point of view, and that other plot, are secondary to what I did follow and appreciate: the vignettes and snippets of this American life, especially its seamy and seeming underside, in the second half of the 20th century. Pop art, the Cuban missile crisis, the New York blackouts, Yucca Mountain, the Zapruder film, Lenny Bruce, and the ruminations of someone standing in Freshkills landfill looking over his shoulder to where the World Trade Center is being built in the distance behind him.
That last made me gasp--Underworld was published in 1997--and the cover, in hindsight, is mournful too: the towers in the background, in fog, and in the foreground, sharper and darker, a church.
Now that I'm reading Ulysses and have just finished listening to Underworld and started War and Peace (unfortunately, the Constance Garnet translation, but I'd never read it otherwise so I'll deal, and didn't I just say that Underworld was too long? this is over twice as long), José Saramago seems a lot easier going. I opened The Stone Raft, sad and neglected for weeks, again, and read this:
"Deux Chevaux [Two Horses, either the name or the model of a car] crosses the bridge slowly, at the lowest speed permitted, to give the Spaniard time to admire the beauty of the views of land and sea, and also the impressive feat of engineering that links the two banks of the river, this construction, we are referring to the sentence, is periphrastic, and is used here to avoid repeating the word bridge, which would result in a solecism, of the pleonastic or redundant kind. In the various arts, and above all in that of writing, the shortest distance between two points, even if close to each other, has never been and never will be, nor is it now, what is known as a straight line, never, never, to put it strongly and emphatically in response to any doubts, to silence them once and for all."