House and Garden
Reading
Moving
Kinwork
Listening to Jeremy Irons read Vladimir Nabokov's prose was, how shall I say, uplifting. If I were male that adjective would work better. Lolita became more amazing because I heard all Nabokov's language (whereas in print I have to make a conscious effort to hear the words), and Jeremy Irons's voice and the feeling but not dramatization he brings to the text enhanced it even further. I thought my favorite audio book was Their Eyes Were Watching God or Catch-22 or A River Runs Through It or Rob Inglis reading Tolkien but it is Jeremy Irons reading Vladimir Nabokov. I was as enchanted as a hunter throughout.
Two 3.6-mile city rides and three miles of jogging.
I jogged more of my route than before but at a slower pace.
On days I both bike-commute and run at noon, I must eat more than an apple and two bananas. I was shaky by the time I got home.
Alfred Appel Jr., editor. Extremely helpful, and he admits that Nabokov chastised him for seeing symbolism in words like rose and carmine where, Nabokov said, if he'd wanted to describe something "red" and mean something by it, he'd've done so, and even more useful for the Latin and French and pidgined Latin-and-French I would otherwise miss in an audio version, like the "Repersonne" pun.
I searched Project Gutenberg for books on the lists with the earliest publication dates, and that's how I came to read Knut Hamsun sooner rather than later. And am I ever glad. It made a good companion piece to listening to Lolita because of the all-consuming insanity of the protagonists. Where Humbert Humbert has the selfish absorption of the pedophile, the unnamed narrator here has starved himself into Vision Quest. It's amazing.
Philippa Gregory. The best of the trilogy (which isn't saying much) because there wasn't any gratuitous incest.
Should I have a television category? Should I not censor books into their own category?
Trish lent me the first season of "Gilmore Girls" and she was right that I would like it. I couldn't've watched it as a television show but as 20 hours of smarm-set-in-"Connecticut" it did fine.
The other town troubadour runs a Kinko's in Groton? The town was founded in 1779 but had (or not) a battle in the Revolutionary War, which is chronologically possible but highly unlikely, and what New England town with any pride gives such a late date? Even Old Lyme, which wasn't named until the 1850 split from Lyme, claims "settled" so it can weasel a 17C date. Hartford is 30 minutes away from what seems like a Litchfield County town? Hartford is a nice place for people as displaced in time and culture as the grandparents to live in? (Oh, maybe it's the Hartford from "Judging Amy," another show I tried for the Connecticut tie-in.) You can walk to all these great places in Stars Hollow, which has fewer than ten thousand people and was founded in the 18C but has a distinct downtown with three-story edifices? Driving from Stars Hollow to Hartford takes you past the Gelston House in Haddam?
And don't even get me started on the fact that Lorelai declares she and Chris wouldn't be where they each are if they had got married at 16, as if by contrast being a single, teenaged mother didn't hold her back at all. And that house, and those clothes, on the income of the manager of an inn?
Anti-feminist subtext aside, mostly all I want to say is that Stars Hollow is no Cicely, Alaska--which I'm sure also couldn't exist but at least had a better personality along the way.
Where's season 2?
Reportedly, only Usan English has "fall" and the other Englishes, even Canada's, say "autumn." Autumn is merely a season and might only be poesy, not a season but only a section of calendar for those freaky wrong places where leaves do not fall. Fall is a season and a mood. Fall is wonderful.
This morning I looked out at the birdfeeder that I have left empty since July but neglected to take down, and upon it perched a hopeful finch, the first bird I have seen on it since a week after I left them all to starve. I also noticed raindrops on the last of the nectarine leaves. I took a hint and filled the feeder before retreating to my breakfast. Over no more time than breakfast I watched the rain turn to snow turn to bright blue sky and strong sunlight.
I do like Denver. And fall.
Oh my. Leah Stewart has written a book reminiscent to me of The Dogs of Babel (in tone and forensic storytelling) and The Evolution of Jane (in the rediscovery of self that happens upon the rediscovery of a friend), and Angle of Repose (for family history and an old historian and younger assistant, though the points of view are reversed) and I think of The Archivist too, even though I barely remember it and perhaps only through its title. I love it, even though no one wearing contacts opens her eyes underwater, but whether because its plot and theme are my touchstones or because it's actually good I cannot tell.
Also I'm listening to No Country for Old Men, which I love as I guess I've determined to love all Cormac McCarthy, and Chigurh's search for people who tell him things or not reminds me of Cameron's search for Sonia, and of the trusting people who I hope exist in more than just the pages of fiction.
Just a brisk lovely walk in the park in the late afternoon. Fleece on top, shorts below. A good day.
Over dessert at Café Star (chili chocolate pot du crême for me and Key lime pie for RDC), we saw former neighbors, chatted with the bartender, drooled over the new winter menu, and delighted that all this was here within walking distance in our neighborhood that we love. The bartender comped us a dessert after I told him and RDC about how, at the latest Other bookgroup, a woman asked about new nearby restaurants to take friends to and Kal and I blurted, in unison, "Café Star," and when after our descritpion she continued that these friends lived in Highlands Ranch, we said, again in unison but more emphatically, "Café Star." Suburbanites need to see Colfax Avenue, the grit and vitality of a real city street.
On our walk home I suggested that in whatever kind of town we lived, I'd come up with justifications for why it was the best. The favorite boast of some of our Connecticut friends is that from their houses they can see no neighbors, but though I wouldn't mind space enough for more trees, it's front porches and sidewalk and proximity that make my neighborhood a thriving community. Do people who can't see their neighbors get trick-or-treaters?
The one Connecticut house owned by friends of my generation that I admire is an 18C farmhouse in North Windham--old enough still to have character, near a real town square instead of in the faux country of two-acre lots, imbued with the love that only owners who are doing the work themselves can bestow on a dwelling. RDC pointed out that North Windham is basically Willimantic and who would want to live there, and I countered, "But what is Willimantic other than the Colfax of Connecticut?" He retorted, "Yes, all the heroin and none of the restaurants."
I think Romantic Willimantic has a new tagline.
Cormac McCarthy published this book recently but I'd like to know when he wrote it. I accept that people were saying "fedex" by 1980, when it's set, but I'm glad no one used that abbreviation as a verb. Someone offers to go to an ATM, and while ATMs existed in 1973, it doesn't seem likely that west Texas was awash in them seven years later. An Amazon reviewer points out that Texas didn't have a gas chamber, and that's a bad mistake, one that McCarthy as a Texan shouldn't've made. Merely as an Usan adult from before 1980 to now, he has no excuse that I can think of to put a mobile phone in a regular Joe's shirt pocket.
I'm glad I listened to this: It wasn't good enough a book to navigate without punctuation or dialog markers but it was an enjoyable listen, well-performed, and "dont" and "I knowed it" don't hurt my brain as much to hear as to read.
RDC asked if I thought it was a reactionary book, and that's an interesting question because I'm not sure how much to separate Sheriff Bell and Cormac McCarthy. The book has to be set in 1980 and not much later because Bell has to have served in WWII with enough time to have passed for him to be old but not yet decrepit. From Moss's being a Vietnam vet, in contrast, we are to know that while Bell is Good, Moss is Flawed.
Oh, that's another mistake. Moss ascribes to himself only one brother's worth of family, but Bell eventually speaks to what seemed like Moss's parents.
Yeah, the book's reactionary, or McCarthy is: if Bell had his ideas--that society went to hell when people stopped saying "sir"--in the third person narration of the bulk of the novel, I'd say that McCarthy wrote Bell. But Bell'sfirst-person interludes look to me a lot like Lightly Disguised Author.
I love the NameVoyager and its creator's commentaries. Today's mucking about reminded me of my own naming hypotheses.
For a while my hypothetical daughter's name was Ainsley Cynthia. Reading Margaret Atwood's Edible Woman in 1989 was the first time I noticed the name Ainsley, and Cynthia is obvious. I don't remember what name I planned before. (After my reading The Thorn Birds at 13 and my later falling in love with Peter Gabriel's music, my name for a boy was Dane Gabriel. CLH mocked that one hard, and I parenthesize it because yeah, what was I thinking?)
When RDC and I began thinking long-term, family names came up. In my address book are listed 11 women roughly of my generation who didn't take the name of the heterosexual partner they have children with. The children of eight have the man's surname--even the child of the unpartnered parents, even the children of parents whose names differ only in vowel, as in Smith and Smoth, but differ enough, as in Smith and Smoth, such that naming the children Smoth instead of Smith seems cruel. Then again, for another set the father's name is the preferable so maybe it's a good thing they have it. One child has both surnames, with father's last and mother's as a middle, and another set of two siblings has both their parents' surnames, in the older the father's dominates and it's the younger sibling whose mother-name dominates. For only two of my acquaintances who kept their names and had children, does the first-born child bear the mother's surname.
I like my name. I am determined and independent--marriage was going to be "Let's be independent together!" like Rudoph and Herbie--and my hatchlings would have my name. My potential husbands' names had been, serially, diminutive, inelegant, difficult to enunciate, and now hard to spell and pronounce. Even as we realized that hooray, the other person didn't want children either, we argued about names (name and arguments being fun). At that point, the hypothetical (except certainly singleton) child's name was going to be either Bly David or Bly Cynthia. Bly is pleasantly androgynous so worked for either and was a family name of RDC's to balance my insistence on my last name (a point which I had not won) and David has long my favorite boy's name as well as also a family name of RDC.
My first dog's name is going to be Phoebe, so it had better be female. Recently I've favored more unusual names, and a series of hamsters should get these names out of my system (as should the mere consideration of hamsters). Mathilde. Aloysius. Maebh. Evelyn. Malachi, nicknamed Dactyl. Oo, that could be my next bird's name (because parrots have zygodactyl feet). And if I named a dog Evelyn, around its neck instead of a bandana I would have to tie a special doily with quivering fringe. Er. Not after reading Dogs of Babel and deliberating not reading Lives of the Monster Dogs could I name a dog anything implying modification, further or otherwise.
On a treadmill in the gym, I ran 5K in 36'30". I know very well I have never run three miles straight before, but I had no idea it would be so very much easier in this mode. What a cheat. On a treadmill I should try to run 5 miles, because I should be running farther than the race distance anyway.
Also I should run at all: I am fully confident of my ability to complete the triathlon as long as I pass water stations, and while I'm not foolish enough to think of competing in it, I should aim for a not entirely absent l from my verb.
Remembering how Emlet stretched and luxuriated in her bath at four months, I asked Haitch if Increase likes to bathe. She described his spa treatment--mud mask, pedicure, ear-candling--and said that yes, he likes his bath and just about everything except honey, haycorns, and thistles. She is reading him Winnie-the-Pooh and recognizing lisa-isms.
We each recently dreamed about the other--she must drive carefully today especially and I must not turn into a Gilmore Girl--and I must watch "Me and You and Everyone We Know" and she must read The Myth of You and Me and she laughed at my latest mother-story and if she keeps going to Connecticut for Thanksgiving then maybe I will too.
I miss my Haitch.
Last summer my sister and mother arranged a family reunion. One earliest arrival was a first cousin of my mother's and her husband, who responded to my greeting with the tale of their daughter's suicide attempt. I have no skill in politely disentangling myself and little ability tactfully to redirect inappropriate conversation. Eventually, after having had poured in the porches of mine ears information about my unknown second cousin's depression, school, distance from her parents, church fellowship, and morbid attempt, I blurted, "I'm sorry, but you're wearing sunglasses so I can't see your eyes and is your daughter alive?" She was. She survived her crisis, and her parents saw fit to honor that survival by exacerbating her trauma by breaching her privacy to whoever, including a perfect stranger who happens to be blood kin in the second degree, months afterward. I was horrified to be the passive partner in this intrusion. After my blurt I said that I was sorry for her troubles and theirs and was profoundly grateful to the next arrival, hostessly obligations toward whom I claimed as excuse to extricate myself from this violation of common decency.
My mother just told me that another child of this gossip is soon to marry and that she (my mother) and another cousin are going to travel together to the ceremony. I refrained from asking if intimate details about this near-tragedy will be printed in the program. The woman might recognize that her own idle chit-chat has ensured that everyone in her reach however unconnected to her daughter already knows everything she has seen fit to divulge, but she might not.
I don't remember exactly when the following was my favorite outfit, but I think eighth grade, and I think so because when it became certain that I would go along on the class trip to D.C., I packed immediately and did not thereafter reconsider the clothing I'd selected; but I packed in Connecticut in February and suffered in Washington in early May. Gray wide-wale cords, white oxford, and a sweater that I loved, having picked it out myself: gray sleeves and back and an argyle front of lavender and pale green diamonds and a white stripe. It was a little tight in the sleeves and my mother told me that that was an area clothing manufacturers often skimped on. I remembered it recently when I was trying on a sweater similarly tight in the arms, as if women with solid torsos and unmistakable bosoms should somehow have spindly capellini arms. Or maybe it occurred to me yesterday when I noticed someone wearing a shirt reminiscent of my favorite one from 1985 (I wore it for my 12th grade yearbook picture). It was collarless, white, and not pinstripe but with two narrow gray stripes alternating with a narrow black stripe on the white field. I wore it with a graphite pencil skirt. Ha! It was graphite-gray and, as I recall it, pencil-thin. No pun intended.
I started writing this yesterday in the meeting where I spotted that dated pattern. It also occurs to me that I have claimed lavender as my favorite color for a long time, remembering a lavender henley that I wore to bits throughout college, but that maybe gray is just as long-lasting favorite and isn't just a cockatiel thing. If I were that into mother-son matching outfits, I'd wear orange and yellow too.
Brr. 21 degrees this morning. With fleece pants over my bike shorts and a thin sweatshirt, I was fine all over except the tips of my fingers, which my full-finger bikegloves cannot protect. The homeward ride was fine at 41: fingerless bike gloves with the full ones and the fleece in my panniers.
Two 3.6-mile city rides.
Considering I had neither sports bra, headphones, nor a water bottle, I had an okay workout. The workout tank affords slight support, certainly not the least support you might notice in any given gym visit, so I started with weights. After my leg presses, RDC caught up with me and lent me his spare headphones. Running was still right out but I did 15' on the elliptical, 12/20 resistance and 20/20 incline. I wanted to do some stairs after that but the mill was balky so I returned to weights, lat pull downs, thigh abductors and adductors or whatever the reverse is, weighted crunches, inclined crunches, suspended leg lifts.
I thoroughly enjoyed Ragtime and Billy Bathgate and RDC liked those plus Sweet Land Stories and this, so I had high hopes. I do like it, and as an audio book it's a good companion to The Killer Angels and The Known World, combining the former's military and the latter's civilian life as it does (though World is antebellum).
Unfortunately a couple of things jarred me out of the story. In dialogue, Doctorow writes realistic speech faithfully, with "mens" and "he don't" and General Sherman saying "darkie" when better educated or less prejudiced whites say "Negro," etc. In internal dialogue, he uses such markers only occasionally in otherwise standard English, out of context. Maybe this works better in print than in audio, and maybe some of it is the performer's fault: he speaks dialogue differently than narration, but internal dialogue as narration. Another thing was anachronistic vocabulary. Although "guerrilla" originated in the early 19th century (to mean the sort of warfare the Spanish could conduct against the invading French under Napoleon; the tactics of course predated their name) and it's possible that Sherman would have used that word, it does not seem to me likely that an illiterate fieldhand like Coalhouse would know it. "Bivouac," too, I thought was an anachronism, of WWI coinage, but Etymology Online says it came into English also after the Napoleonic wars.
The March was an excellent complement to The Killer Angels and The Known World. Before reading the former, what I knew of Gettysburg was its date, that the North won and thank goodness because we desperately needed a victory for morale and public support, that the South lost because Lee made a major error, and that Lincoln made a brilliant speech. Having read it, I know more of the key players' names, and what the mistake was, and that the cherries were ripe in southern Pennsylvania. But I guess I don't need to know the exact specifics of who moved where when. The time was I could you the troop movements in Tours, Crécy, Verdun, and Normandy; that time has passed and I doubt I will ever reread The Longest Day or The Song of Roland. The Known World is antebellum and from several African-American perspectives, and wholly invented (not just fictional). The March was good in that it showed several characters' perspectives over time, free and freed, civilian and military, white and black--and how the gray are those concepts of supposed opposites.
Halldór Laxness. Jane Smiley's Greenlanders for desperate geography. Frank Norris's McTeague for stubbornly stupid protagonist, though more loveable if even more irascible and lethal. The subtle cues and obvious illustrations of the wretched life in a land only just this side of sustainable.
I borrowed this because it had won the Nobel for literature ("Where do you find these things?" Kal asked) and knew nothing about it. This is the best book I have read this year from the lists and not also recommended by an actual person. It's heartbreaking and brutal and wise; it is hopeless and hopeful.
As I was getting ready to start raking, I remembered I hadn't charged Dandelion and it was only one-quarter charged. While I brushed my beak and hung laundry on the line and did everything before seizing the rake, I powered it. My goal for the day was the front and sides, but I had just about finished the back as well before the music died. The yard needs a fine combing, and the gardens keep their leaves for insulation until spring, but overall I had a satisfying work day.
Ralph Fiennes is perfect as Voldemort. Despite the makeup, his icky Ralph-Fiennes-ness was evident in his mannerisms and gestures. Frankly he didn't look a lot different than he did in "The English Patient," before or after the burns. To my way of thinking he'd be just as scary-looking with no makeup at all.
I got all bouncy during the preview for "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," which looks like it might be worthy, and TMH confessed she hasn't read them. I leaned as far away from her as I could. She suggested borrowing mine, and while I could easily lend The Last Battle, which I think I've read just twice (the first time and when CLH gave me the boxed set), Lion is as necessary to my household as a dishwasher. I've owed her Sound and the Fury for a while now, so afterward I bought her both and explained that though Lion is marked #2, it is really the first, because while C.S. Lewis could write them he had no idea how to order them. How do these 6-1-5-2-3-4-7 heretics explain the order of the movies?
Anyway. Discussing Half-Blood Prince after its release this summer, I said I was frustrated by Rowling's sudden invention of the convenient Retiring Room, but a Suspect said it did appear previously, in Goblet, during the Yule Ball. I emailed myself to check that, and today I finally did. It is there, indeed, as Dumbledore's well-proportioned room of chamberpots, in a line as seemingly throwaway as any other. Now I know very well than Rowling deliberately plants disguised clues, but jesus. Harry has to refurbish his Potions kit as well in Goblet, and is essence of belladonna going to be the key to everything in #7? There are artful disguises, and there red herrings, and then there is mishmash.
The movie's a lot better than the book--Harry's not as whiny, his fight with Ron is shorter, Fleur's disdain for all things non-Beauxbatons that comes off as nothing more than Brit disdain for all things non-British is absent.
Kal and I dined at Piscos, whose focus is South American cuisine rather than fish, and had a remarkably good meal. She had a stew with beef and several colors of potatoes, and I had a pork chop with squash and several kinds of cheese. Oo, and the biscuits beforehand were just tremendous. She brought from Maine chocolate-covered blueberries for bootleg concessions.
When we saw the trailer for this before "March of the Penguins," the plan was for at least me to sit in the hindmost row so I could make self-hanging gestures as needed without disturbing anyone. But this weekend I watched the 1995 miniseries and reread large chunks, such as April at Rosings. I don't like that the Langton version skips over Elizabeth's accidentally getting pretty near the truth about Georgianna with Col. Fitzwilliam, and that it doesn't explain why the obviously charming colonel isn't interested in Elizabeth. So I had had sufficient doses of Acceptable to innoculate myself against the possibly Totally Unworthy.
But it was fine! It's not Pride and Prejudice, and that was okay. Mr. Bennet calls Mrs. Bennet "Blossom," in addition to saying wearily that because she wants to tell him something, whether he wants to hear it is immaterial. He stops a much more likeable Mary from playing badly at a ball, but he consoles the sobbing girl afterward. Mary is merely plain and has not practiced that song enough instead of not playing well.
Two things only made me mutter aloud: Mary's saying Miss Bingley's line about conversation instead of dancing being more sensible fits her character; but while Miss Bingley must of course be rude, her saying Bingley's line about that's not resembling a ball doesn't fit. I read somewhere that the British release ends with Mr. Bennet's being quite at leisure for any more young men, and I wish the Usan cut stopped there too, because the "Blue Lagoon" scene with the Emmaish discussion of terms of endearment ("Mrs. Darcy" rather than "Mr. Knightley") was just wrong wrong wrong.
Other things made me scowl, if not flinch or mutter, such as almost all instances of non-Austen dialogue and the Bennets being portrayed as poorer than they are (poorer than the junior Musgroves in "Persuasion"). And Darcy go anywhere with his collar unbuttoned and no cravat? Never (though I do crave the long coat in that straight-off-a-bodice-ripper-cover scene, just as I long for Mr. Bennet's in the Langton) But Judi Dench especially made me happy and all the casting I hadn't steeled myself to ahead of time (Keira Knightley) except Bingley who looked like Peter Pan was suitable. I don't need and didn't expect a slavishly exact cinematization; I wanted, and got, eye candy and fun.
Elliptical, 15' @ 12/20 resistance and 20/20 incline; treadmill, run 5k in 35'30; some weights; swim 800m.
Ow. Not at the time, but two days later and even three days later (when I write this). I'm not going about this the right way, I can tell.
I love the web. At one point in the book, someone sees the Southern Cross, from Vietnam. There must be some crossover, because you don't see an entirely different set of stars at 1 degree north latitude than at 1 degree south; but I had thought of the Southern Cross as severely southern, as southern as Polaris is northern. I googled: how far north is the Southern Cross visible? Answer: 30 degrees. Vietnam must lie south of that latitude, I was sure, and sure enough, it ranges from 21 to 9 degrees north.
Vocabulary: Pataphysics is the physics beyond metaphysics.
Thank you, David James Duncan, for a terrific book. Critics fuss at the character-narrator's narrating scenes at which he was not present, but I say it works. It works because the siblings are so interwoven, however different they all are.
I expected parallels to The Brothers Karamazov to be more obvious. . And I was glad they weren't. Dmitri, Ivan, Alexei, and the illegitimate one whose name is not Karamazov, to Everett, Peter, Irwin, and Kincaid, plus Bet and Freddy: not exactly. Politics and philosophy and religion and the love of good women appear in both, but mostly Duncan likes the pun. Besides, their last name doesn't begin with K.