Reading: Lois Duncan, Game of Danger

Moving: not a whit

Listening: Kate Bush, The Kick Inside, Lionheart, Never for Ever, The Dreaming, The Hounds of Love

Viewing: not a smidge of television.

Christmas: started a batch of cookie cutter batter

Learning: to melt the chocolate a little more, or as it cools before you add it, it'll get clumps.

15 December 1999: Lois Duncan

I didn't speed up my usual routine this morning and so I didn't spend much time saying goodbye to RDC than I do of a regular morning. He was up, though, so I got to hug him fully, unlike of a regular morning when I just kiss his nose a few times and then his lips and then scurry.

I realized on the bus that I had left A Maggot by my bed so I read Civilization instead. I like it. Überboss has good taste in periodicals (he also takes The New Yorker and Smithsonian), plus the Down Easter that his mother, still living in his native Maine, subscribes him to.

I needed a book for the bus ride home, though, and scampered to the 'brary at lunch. I returned my ILL Betsy Was a Junior and browsed through the adult stacks and, of course, the YA. I was highly amused to find an early Lois Duncan, Season of the Two-Heart, there a while ago and today was rewarded with Game of Danger. I'd like to find all her earliest books, which are easily identified by their chronological setting and their lack of psychological element. Season of the Two-Heart was pretty good, a clear and believable picture of a girl trying to reconcile her Pueblo upbringing and loyalty with her Anglo (or Bahana) aspirations. Game of Danger reminded me of Madeleine L'Engle, for no good reason. Duncan uses the first person, as she often does, as L'Engle occasionally does. Actually L'Engle uses it in the chronos books (Vicky Austin narrates Meet the Austins, The Moon by Night, and A Ring of Endless Light) and not in any of the kairos books I can think of. Also Game's protagonist, Anne, has a younger brother named Rob, as Vicky Austin has, though not as much younger. If the similarity had struck me later in the book, it might have flitted and been gone, but in the first few pages, Anne displays the same kind of unquestioning faith in her parents Vicky Austin has, plus Rob, plus details of hair and clothing that set in firmly in its late '50s/early '60s time, particularly like The Moon by Night, so it set the mood for the whole bok..

In Moon, the Austins are on a camping trip, and something or other upsets Vicky's hair, which she had "just washed and set the night before." On any camping trip, washing might be less frequent than at home, but here in context hair-washing was clearly less frequent and more of a production for Vicky than for a contemporary reader. So.

The most glaring anvil of Game's chronological setting is the fear of Communists. It is obviously a post-Sputnick (1957) book (1962). (Season must be earlier.) By infiltrating school boards across the country, communists in disguise as god-fearing Murkans influence the quality and quantity of education in the U.S., simultaneously educating the socks off their own upcoming generation, so that poof! the U.S. will weaken and be ripe for take-over.

Nearly 40 years later that's quietly ironic. Turns out the defunct Soviet Union would rather have butter than guns.

The fear of Communist take-over prevades and exists as a given, needing no explanation, rather like one of Sam Gribley's glib reasons for going off to live deliberately when he didn't want to state his real reasons: maybe it was a civil defense initiative, an alternative to bomb shelters. The implications of that evaded me when I first read My Side of the Mountain in fourth grade.

Oh, and plus it gave a source for another, later Duncan book. In Don't Look Behind You, unlike Game of Danger, the father really is guilty and the family relocated through the Witness Protection Program. The later novel is updated in several ways: the father is guilty, wholly guilty, instead of blackmailed and tipping off the FBI to assuage his conscience; the girl doesn't trust her parents as absolutely and without questions as Anne; the girl and her brother don't get along in such saccarine incredibility as Anne and Rob; the bad guys are just as USAn as the good guys; and there's not a happy ending with all loose ends safely tied up. However, both protagonists have extremely distinctive long, blonde hair that they must sacrifice for their disguises.

I read that walking from the library to Organic Orbit, and from Organic Orbit to Dot Org, and then, since it'd been a quick errand-like 'brary visit, for the remaining third of my hour, and finished it on the bus.

Another thing I got from the 'brary was the movie "San Francisco," since a coworker told me it's her annual New Year's Eve sop fest and she's always in tears by the end of it, plus it has Clark Gable. Obviously a chick flick and appropriate for RDC's absence.

Interesting Clark Gable tidbit: Saturday night before watching "Antz," which we'd rented, we started to watch "The Man Who Would Be King" on TMC. The TMC announcer, Robert Osbourne (whom I didn't have to look up but whose name just appeared in my head; I must watch a lot of TMC), said that John Huston first planned to make this movie in the '50s with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. I wrinkled my nose. Clark Gable is Rhett Butler and none other in my head (which ought to make watching "San Francisco" an interesting pastiche of geography for me. Not a pastiche. What is that word that means a manuscript made from scraping the ink from a piece of parchment and rewriting it? Pastiche came to my head because of Margaret Atwood, well and good; someone wrote to me with that in her sig line: "That was me. I was the pastiche." But I don't want The Robber Bride. I am going to have to reread The Handmaid's Tale tonight unless I can find or remember that word before--if it's pastiche, I'll have to beat up Merriam-Webster for not listing it and then myself for not recognizing it. Not panoply or panacea either. Damn it. Anyway, after Bogart died, and a good thing he did or this movie would suck, Huston wanted to have Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. No no no no no no. Clearly, Bogart would have played Michael Caine's character, as Peter O'Toole would have (Osbourne didn't say, but that's how it seems to me). Before Huston could ruin "Beckett" for me by repeating that pair in such different roles, Burton died too, and thus, 20 years later, Huston directed the film with the only two Rightful actors, Michael Caine and Sean Connery.

But then we watched "Antz." Which sucked, especially compared to "A Bug's Life." These ants might have had six legs instead of four, but that was its only advantage. The animation sucked. No child, and few adults in their right minds, identify with Woody Allen. Every actor with an identifiable voice also had his or her usual character as well; they weren't original. The story was stupid. And mean. Also in contrast to "A Bug's Life." Stupid Bill Gates. That paragraph illustrates why I have never tried to write reviews professionally: "It sucked!"

Palimpsest. I don't wonder why I withdrew from grad school. I know why. It's because a mere seven years later, I can't remember a basic word like palimpsest. I know what novel to find it in, though. That's got to count for something, plus I amuse myself in that I confuse two uncommon p words in two different Margaret Atwood novels. Anyway, if I scrape the antebellum South off Rhett Butler and watch "San Francisco" over that scorched earth, there'll be a geographic palimpsest.

From The Handmaid's Tale: "Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpset of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurent of drums, a forlorn wall, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirros, powdering the dancers with a snow of light." In Alias Grace, all clothing--outfits, garments, laundry, sartorial guidelines--and the color white, especially white clothing--is meaningful. In The Robber Bride, Atwood abstracts with names and semiotics; characters reinvent themselves and subvert their worlds by changing their names (none of the four main characters thinks of herself with the name she was given at birth). In The Handmaid's Tale, almost every word or concept that might refer to or pun upon sex--genitals, bed, fruit--probably does.

A friend of mine (what was her name?) at UConn taught The Handmaid's Tale to her lower-div English class, and she pointed this out to me about how all Atwood's nouns are suspect. During a Scrabble game, the protagonist (whose own name Atwood never tells but who is referred to by her patronymic, Offred) plays the following words: larynx, valance, quince, zygote, limp, gorge. "Larynx" isn't sexual, but Offred's voice as well as her sexuality is tightly constrained. Valance is a canopy, as on a bed. Quince is a fruit--a nice round vaguely apple-like one. Zygote, limp, and gorge I didn't have to look up. Was my acquaintance's name Kate? Anyway, she asked if I had ever noticed how Offred expresses herself through her Scrabble words, and I had not. I did notice that she used all the valuable letters repeatedly, which in turn my friend had not noticed. So Offred is expressing her intelligence as well as the elements of her survival through her vocabulary.

And even palimpsest, here a metaphor for a high school dance (universally charged with hormones), belongs with larynx. Offred cannot speak at will and even cannot think too much; meanwhile everything she used to know is being obliterated and overwritten, like a palimpsest.

Back to Wednesday.

I planned to go to a community carol sing in the Capitol Hill neighborhood (no, we don't live there) but I had to go to Pak Mail and throw stuff at them first. Naturally the line was really long, so by the time I had sent off three boxes, two to Boston and one to Old Lyme, I realized I was feeling rushed, and after all I was going to go to the Cherry Creek North caroling tomorrow, so I blew it off. I sat at home and read A Maggot and tried to run the camera so RDC could have a dose of home.

I liked this one because of all the luscious hair. Two minutes out of the braid in which it had dried for the past twelve hours, my hair looked pretty good. I should like to clarify that I am mostly lying on the couch and the camera is a lot closer to my chest than to my hair. I am not obese, and if I look like a pinhead I am not. I jammed the sphere of the camera into the cushions on the back of the couch while the laptop sat on a crate uncannily like the ones people steal from dairy companies on the floor to my left. Blake must have been on top of his cage, behind me.

Before I became a pinhead, I made cookie batter. I think most cookie cutter cookies are just an excuse to play with the shapes, but these are good. I don't think I'll make Macintoshes this year, though, as I did last year.Maybe I should, though: I didn't get a penguin cookie cutter this year, still no Linux. I noticed something while I was making the batter: that bird kept a very close eye (literally, he being unable to look at something with two eyes at once--I like pointing that out) on the egg guts as they spilled from the shell a foot or more into the bowl. I think RDC usually makes just egg-white omelettes from pint cartons of Best of the Egg or whatever that stuff is, but he does occasionally use actual eggs. Blake would probably rather I had scrambled that egg for him than put it into cookies that, what with their sugar and chocolate, he cannot eat.

These I took with the quick cam: bent in half, standing on one foot on my leg, Blake preens his belly. Then, I say "Hey Blake!" and he looks up, jowls fluffed, lowering his right foot from whatever out of the way place he'd put it, and wonders where I get off interrupting him like that.

Holding the camera in front of me, a smile; shoving the thing into the cushions, my buddy and I share a smooch.