gentleman prefer blondes

Anita Loos, 1925. Hootingly funny:

A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs. I mean I seem to be thinking practically all of the time. I mean it is my favorite recreation and sometimes I sit for hours and do not seem to do anything else but think. So this gentleman said a girl with brains ought to do something else with them besides think....

So while I was thinking it all over there was a knock on the drawing room door, so I told him to come in and it was a gentleman who said he had seen me quite a lot in New York and he had always wanted to have an introduction to me, because we had quite a lot of friends who were common.

bike

Two 3.6-mile city rides.

This morning the thermometer read about 25 degrees, absolutely fine, but because of either my throat or possible incipient illness or the stiff wind, I actually turned around less than a block from home to fetch and wear a facemask. Folded down away from my nose and even from the top of my mouth, but still.

more books

A while ago I decided I should push on with the Feminista list, because much of the remainder of the Modern Library list is Conrad, Dos Passos, Dreiser, James, and Lawrence and life is too short to read remaindered books.* I requested several from the library at once, figuring that that would be safe and they would come available gradually. I suppose I overlooked what negative demand these books have, because all seven (Djuna Barnes, Ana Castillo, Anita Desai, Bessie Head, Patricia Highsmith, Anita Loos, and Grace Paley) came in at once, accompanied by a book I discovered while just noodling around, Louise Desalvo's Conceived with Malice: Literature as Revenge, or not noodling around but searching for Regina Barreca's Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even. Barreca, a UConn English professor, has been toward the top of my memory recently because Frankenstein was one of the books we had in her course on revenge in lit.

Before the eight fell on my head at once, I had plucked two books I own from my to-read shelf, whose combination, RDC said, might make my head explode. Yesterday I told Überboss that he might get a kick out of my current choice of books and told him RDC's opinion, then I produced from my backpack Lucky Jim and Naked Lunch. He snorted and agreed. This morning I asked him if he had ever read Gentleman Prefer Blondes, the funniest thing I've read since Tobacco Road. He had, and it is one of the funniest books ever, all funniest-ever books always being second to the actual funniest book ever, and I spoke in unison with him because he's suggested it before, Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog.

* I am a little sick today and thought that was funny. However, I also thought were funny, and offer as possibly funny or at least laughable, the following responses:

Q: When is Good Friday this year?
L: On a Tuesday.

Q: And does he now live in shame?
L: No, in Alamosa.

The first is because I heard the local news say that Mardi Gras (not Carnivale) would start on a Saturday, and I cannot back that usage. The second came about this way: The new intern (not, sadly, my beloved Intern, now in Argentina) is a college football fan and is obliged, for reasons I didn't follow, to dislike Big 10 12 [sorry, Haitch] schools, one of which is University of Oklahoma, and Überboss taught there for a spell. ÜberBoss, not a football fan and no longer affiliated with OU when it happened, remembers the Famous Tipping of the Sooner Chuckwagon Incident. (I know of it because the tipper is a friend of Haitch's.) The intern asked if the tipper lived in shame. Tragically, my Alamosa response could have been a falsehood as well as a straight line: I don't know if even Haitch knows where he's living anymore.