In Erewhon, Samuel Butler describes a culture where illness is illegal but criminality is a sickness. Therefore to gloss over someone's slight indisposition without getting them in trouble, you'd say "he's got the socks," i.e., stolen an insignificant item. We use this for Blake when he's got the flaps.
What I mean is that I Don't Get Sick, Especially in the Summer. I know very well I did get sick over July Fourth two years ago, but I like to pretend that that didn't happen. Thursday night I thought I bit my lower lip because I am clumsy, but I am probably catching RDC's cold: when my immune system is compromised, I get cankers. A canker just inside my lower lip swells it enough that I bite the lip. Yea! So now I might be getting RDC's cold.
Which means that this is the fourth weekend in a row we're not tiling the kitchen; RDC doesn't feel steady enough to operate the saw and heaven knows what butchery I'd commit even if I were 100%.
Last Saturday, RDC slept until late after the Dead show in the rain at Red Rocks after returning from Vancouver at 2:00 a.m. Friday; the weekend before that CLH was here; the weekend before that we went to Aspen; the weekend before that it was too cold to get sprayed by the wetsaw. This is just never going to get done.
And then we're not going to paint until the tiling is done, and even after the tiling, there's moulding to be made for the floor and scrim to be removed from the cabinets before the painting can be tackled. This is, I repeat, never going to get done.
So I am just going to flobber (my favorite neologism, inspired by flobberworms in Prisoner of Azkaban) about today, headachey and muscle-weary.
I read the first part of this amused by a fellow elitist stickler. Then at lunch yesterday I talked to Überboss about it and he said that after reading the New Yorker review he only wanted to look through it. I read that review when I got home and the remainder of the book fell apart and Lynne Truss seemed unnecessarily snobbish. That's how malleable I am.
The review was good. In the first third, Louis Menand dissects Lynne Truss's grammatical mistakes in perhaps a fussily nitpicky way, but in writing a book subtitled The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, she has to have expected that. And why isn't it "zero-tolerance"? Surely it needs a hyphen? Menard uses the book('s faults) mostly as a springboard into a broader, compelling discussion of voice in writing, and that discussion, more than his nitpicking, was the brilliant bit.
Überboss's understated snark (that having acknowledgments, foreword, publisher's note, preface, and introduction is a sure sign of a new writer pulling out all the stops*) and the review made me much more critical the second part of the book, but she didn't entirely lose my respect until page 158:
* This isn't a quite fair snark. Only the American printing has Frank McCourt's foreword, and if a stop was pulled out it was the publisher soliciting McCourt for his sure-fire appeal to Usans; and the publisher's note explains how we Usans are getting the exact same book the Brits got even though the two countries punctuate differently; and what ÜberBoss mistook for an introduction is really a first chapter. But it does look like excess and perhaps could have been disguised.
Also, the panda joke is just not funny. The argument over the serial comma is a valid one--"I'd like to dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God" is an excellent, if apocryphal, argument for it--but a comma between predicate and direct object is a mistake, not a stylistic nuance. And it's a British joke: in the States you'd have a serial comma that would certainly clarify that the sentence has a three-part predicate and should be modified.
Moon Tiger appeared on my to-be-read list because it was on the Feminista century's-best list. I'm not sure when I connected the author with my childhood favorite The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, but Moon Tiger got bumped up when I cross-referenced all those lists with the Booker and Pulitzer lists.
It is again raining and I cannot convey how strange this is. The chief occupation of this flobbery day was reading Moon Tiger, and it was time well spent. I knew immediately I would like the book--Thomas Kempe's author writing about an historian--and it lived up to my expectations. I liked the protagonist initially because of Antonia Fremont, a stupid reason, since Claudia Hampton and the Margaret Atwood character have only being historians in common, and because of "Wit," a better reason, each with a woman on her deathbed contemplating her life. Also she reminded me of Penelope Keeling, and I don't care that Shell-Seekers is banal fluff because war-time love is a particularly romantic sort.
I particularly liked how she and her friend or lover would recall the exact same scene, both remembering the truth but each knowing different words and gestures and ramifications.
I think this means I have to go back to Portrait of a Lady. That I don't mind giving half an eye to, but I won't deny myself full attention for The History of the Siege of Lisbon. That looks promising for the same reason Mooon Tiger did: "Raimundo Silva...has chosent he safe occupation of proofreader at a distinguished publishing house. One day he inexplicably takes it upon himself to alter a key word in a history text. His alteration leads him into an affair of the heart that changes the course of European history....Saramago has constructed one of his most ambitious, sweeping novels to date: a broad, multifaceted tableau involving meditations on historiography, the uses and abuses of language, and life under authoritarian rule. This rollicking love story is a delight for readers of Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, and Gabriel García Márquez."
Between "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and Tobacco Road, I'm pretty sure I never want to be in the pine woods of Georgia.
"Babylon Revisited" makes me hope that Tender Is the Night was a fluke and F. Scott Fitzgerald is usually eminently readable.
I love Many Moons and James Thurber's little illustrated story called something like "The Last Flower." "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is more like O. Henry and why I can always confuse the name of Hemingway's character with the short happy life.