This book is amazing. I know I have consistently enjoyed almost all my recent books, but that is a pleasant effect of reading good books. This one--I was only on page 74 when I began this entry--is better. Sophie doesn't come on stage until page 40, and around page 60 we see the number on her arm, and now on page 74 Bobby Weed is mentioned. So I asked my friend Google who Bobby Weed was. On a page about Sophie's Choice, a non-spoiling paragraph said, "In December 1845...a Jewish merchant in Charleston, South Carolina, was arrested for selling a pair of gloves on Sunday.... The Charleston Sunday Times editorialized in favor of the court's decision: An ordinance for the better observance of Sunday...does not say to the Hebrew, You shall not keep holy the seventh day,' but merely declares that you shall not disturb the Christian by business or labor on his Sabbath."
I am going to feel guilty by transference by reading this book. Within the same site is mentioned Philip Roth's Ghost Writer, of which I hadn't heard, which imagines that Anne Frank survived Bergen-Belsen and became a creative writing student in the United States. I also haven't heard of Leslie Epstein's King of the Jews, which is about a Jewish tyrant within the ghetto system. And the page itself, which I didn't read closely for fear of spoilage, posits that Sophie's Choice is not about the Holocaust but about its "ideological representation."
The physical and psychological stereotypes about "race" make me itch: "wore in lovely hooded eyes the vaguely disconsolate, largely inscrutable mystery of her race." It's set in the late '40s, but the narrator implies a few decades of hindsight.
In Maus, Spiegelmann speaks of his father's having survivor's guilt; I have the egotistical guilt of the latter born. I love Styron's writing, and I love his forthright, examining what interests him and dealing with lambasting, and most especially his not shirking that intellectual obligation just for fear of the lambasting.
The downstairs fridge has Gethen's drawing of a dragonfly and two flowers. Haitch gave me hot chocolate to remind me of her all winter long. Scarf welcomed me to her Solstice celebration. I sent Kal home to Mitten Country with cookies and a card signed "love actually" (for the movie we intended to watch together but which I didn't have at the time), to which she responded, briefly because at work, "ditto." My mantel is plastered with cards from everyone--my uncle admiring my pluck and spirit, PSA's son in a spectacular Japanese costume, SFR surrounded by the paraphernalia of a first Christmas. My cup runneth over.
It is nonetheless somewhat short of full. Tonight my longest best beloveds are collected at Charenton for Nisou's birthday. Having a Christmas birthday makes you feel shortchanged as a child, but as an adult can be a blessing because your best present is seeing everyone come home. The house is full of children, cacophony, and revelry, but one after another HEBD, Nisou, PLT, and SEM closeted themselves in a pantry so they could hear me on the phone.
I spoke only briefly with each, HEBD telling me what everyone is doing--SPG stirring fondue, a nine-year-old the oldest and only boy of at least eight children, the Zs surely hatching a drama or two--and Nisou accepting my birthday wishes and love and PLT pondering gulping tempting foods and my god-husband SEM threatening a February visit and being the last to agree to distribute all my love and nose-lickings and strangulations of love to the rest and especially our goddaughter.
I am just a tad homesick and jealous. It should be just envy, but it's jealousy too, because I am selfish.
Today we went to the Denver Art Museum to see Tiwanaku, an exhibit of ancestors of the Inca; Japanese Prints: 150th Anniversary of United States-Japan Relations; Heaven and Home: Chinese Art of the Han Dynasty from the Sze Hong Collection; and "No Boundaries," 13 works "leading us to the intersection of fine art and fiber art."
I miss downtown, I miss noontime access to the museum, and I even miss the ménage aux roues that is the Colfax bus. We had a lovely time, even finding points of commonality among the two-dimensional art we liked--I liked a depressing still life and he liked a Georgia O'Keeffe, and then we came home and had tea and read in the direct sun of later (and slightly longer) afternoon.
So I had a lovely day, and I am surrounded by love: my tree, with ornaments from my sister and grandmother; my husband, napping on the couch with Blake; my bear, whom I fetched for the last few pages of Sophie's Choice because Blake was otherwise occupied; and I had a nice conversation with my mother this morning. But I still miss the rest of my family.
Yes, a nice conversation with my mother. Overnight I had a bad dream about her, she and her husband building an ostentatious house without windows (ooo! symbolism!) and she getting furious with me because I was so foolish as to walk home (across the road) from HPV's house (in real life, our parents' houses are joined by a now-overgrown path through the woods between) in the dark without an escort.
In daylight, I talked with my mother. RDC says 80% of our discourse is my explaining things to her. She wanted to know if I made my cards. I told her yes, I colored them each with crayons so carefully that they looked like they were printed, and she understood I was making a joke! She wanted to know where I got the stock (Office Depot) and if that was like a Staples. She appreciated points of the Catalog o' Tackiness I made for CLH but didn't get the toilet seat illustrated with fishing lures (of course she didn't get it: the reason for its inclusion is its utter absurdity) or the story behind the crystal objet de snot that I called the Ice Princess. My sister, of course, understood why this thing would have to be preserved from the Cassadine family and probably explained it to our mother at the time, but today was four whole days later so she'd already forgotten. From a gardening catalog I included a photograph of a cement (therefore white) tomato and gave the plot summary of Bunnicula before querying why anyone would want a cast of a giant tomato at all, let alone a white instead of red one.
She didn't remember Kal's name but did remember that I had a new friend only half a year older than my youngest babysitting victim, and was happy to hear about Scarf and socializing with neighbors, and when I confessed to homesickness, she seemed purely to sympathize without taint of blame, since it's my fault, or my victimization at my husband's nefarious hands, that I am so far away.
Awake, if not asleep, I get along with my mother better now than I ever have. And that makes me happy. More spillage.
Blake has been one-footed for most of the day. He was mad when we went to the museum but has happily napped or sung in his box since we've been home.
I have no idea what he's looking up at. I checked for spiders and saw none. Possibly he is looking up at the ceiling fixture to bring on a sneeze, but I don't know if cockatiels have that light reflex at all, and he didn't sneeze, and the reading lamp is brighter anyway. Possibly he is just a cockatiel.
yawning and napping on my leg