My fourth Don DeLillo; only The Names to go. He's not a favorite but he merits my reading.
"Mao regarded armed struggle as the final and greatest action of human consciousness." With his apparently usual prescience, DeLillo discusses terrorism and the novel, how terrorism speaks to the masses more than the novel. Someone lives in sight of the World Trade Center.
Precor Elliptical, 30' @ 20/20 incline and 12/20 resistance, 25' with two 2-lb. handweights, only 3818 strides, 408 calories, and average spm 127+.
Some weights: chest press, fly, row, lat pulldown.
100 crunches on the ramp.
Then I ate a salad, I was going to say bigger than my head, but bigger than my foot, at Whole Foods, while reading Lonesome Rangers. I love me some John Leonard. Most people who make me feel unread aren't good reads because I'm intimidated or they're off-putting (or b because a, of course). John Leonard is an exception, so far the exception.
Okay, I got over my exasperation with the one woman kicking herself in the head with a cowboy boot theme of most of the stories in Cowboys Are My Weakness because now I have heard and met Pam Houston, heard her read from Sight Hound, which I'm reading despite its plot focus being canine mortality, and met her at a friend of a daughter of a friend of a friend's house. Or something. Kal belongs to a book group that her aunt has been part of since its inception, and the daughter of one of its members knows Pam Houston, having met her at a Tattered Cover workshop almost a decade ago.
After the reading at the bookstore, about which I kept forgetting to email Scarf, who is starting a neighborhood bookclub with Cowboys, a mass of people descended on the book group member's daughter's/friend of Pam Houston's house for a cocktail reception. Which factored into why I omitted to tell Scarf about it: I was going to be in two new situations myself, Kal's book group and the thrice-removed friend's house, and Scarf deserves a lot more credit for keeping her head afloat than my considering only that it was deep enough water on my own. And I even wasn't on my own.
Pam--can I call her Pam, having been introduced to her? Houston sounds so cold--read bits from Sight Hound, which has 12 voices, nine human, two canine, and one feline. It was on the strength of the feline chapter that I decided to read the novel, and I hope I hear it as I read in Pam's voice, because it was damn funny. Yes, the cat, and not the first dog (she read another, more canine-sounding, dog's part after I had the book in my own paw). The dog is a charming character, but he didn't sound very canine, whereas the cat's thorough cattiness cracked me up.
Pam said she spends a lot of time thinking about what her dogs might be thinking about, which pleases me. I said to Kal's aunt that the one voice the book is missing is the parrot's. There is no parrot, which is a common fault in literature. The aunt, who will also need an alias, and her husband, and more the husband, are owned by a greenwing macaw. (This made Kal very easy to break in, as far as the eccentricities of my own household go.) I spend a lot of time thinking about what Blake might be thinking about myself, and I wonder if I could tell a story from his point of view. I read a translation of a dog barking, approximately, "Oh wow, I'm a dog! Look at me, I'm still a dog! Yea, a dog! I'm a dog I'm a dog yippee." It must have been a golden retriever speaking.
Blake is extremely sweet and self-centered and likes things to be Just So, like Junket, and I severely doubt that any attempt I made to get into his head could be amusing to anyone but me, and to me only if I could stop nattering enough to let him be heard.
Speaking of Blake, as of course I was, we were reading and having our heads pet and preening when he dropped an ordinary gray contour feather, probably from his shoulder by the look of it. We watched it fall and he resumed preening. Then when he scratched his head, a crest feather fell out, not one of the tall ones but one of the wide ones that give it body, asymmetrically vaned with discrete barbs. That one he seemed to want, maybe because I pounced on it, maybe because it's funner to run your beak up and down an inch-long rachis with some spine (metaphorically speaking) to it than a round contour feather almost without structure. The rule is that once it's out of his body, it's not his anymore--this counts for poop too, and yes, we elect to interpret his not wanting to have his tail or feet touched or be otherwise disturbed as poop-possessiveness--so now I own it. Just a few minutes later a center tail feather nearly detached, and I gave it the slightest of tugs to disengage it. Blake is nine and I have never given his feathers away and I think I have fewer perfect tail feathers from him than I have from Percy, whose (much prettier) tail feathers I would often give away and who lived only to 2.5. Mine.