Reading: Rose Daughter

Moving: walked 6 miles

Watching: Olympics, natch

Learning: Margaret Atwood was in Iran months before the Shah was assassinated and in Afghanistan weeks before the USSR invaded it. (This was in response to someone's asking about The Handmaid's Tale who hadn't realized that Atwood invented not a single element of the totalitarian Christian regime. The questioner somehow didn't know that each part of it is historical.

16 September 2000: Margaret Atwood

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

In the car today RDC plied the radio buttons and I exclaimed before he could continued past Don Henley's "Boys of Summer."
"I love this song!"
"You do?"

Yes, I do. It's not too surprising, is it, that I should like a song from a 1984 or '85 album that he does not? There were three albums we listened to most at HLV: Tears for Fears' Songs from the Big Chair, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, and Don Henley's Building the Perfect Beast. Someone--it must have been one of the many from within driving distance of Lynchburg--had brought a box, and these tapes topped the rotation. There were other albums: Unforgettable Fire (which I preferred) and Glenn Frey's solo album,* which had come out at the same time as his fellow ex-Eagle's (which PSA preferred, perhaps because he loved "Miami Vice" and the show used songs from that album). Then there was Phil Collins's No Jacket Required. Anyway, those first three are the ones I associate with HLV. The only one I could still listen to is Beast.

* The All-Nighter. I love the Internet.

RDC called me on Born in the U.S.A., since I prefer no one know that I ever liked Bruce Springsteen. I was not always the faultless arbiter of taste I now am, okay? I received my first radio for Christmas in 10th grade, almost 1984, and yes, in my first flush of listening to rock 'n' roll like all the rest of the kids, instead of the easy listening my mother's radio was constantly tuned to, I liked Born in the USA I am pretty sure I had gotten over that before I graduated. At least mostly, and not so much that I didn't dance to "Glory Days" at RRP's wedding (and, scarily, remember the words).

"Out on the road today/ I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac/ A little voice inside my head said/ Don't look back you can never look back.

That's my line. I guess--PSA, did I ever tell you this? (I guess I could email him directly, a novel idea)--I always associated the chorus ("My love for you will still be strong/ After the boys of summer are gone") with PSA's being protective of me for years afterward, and with my enduring nostalgia.

Forced to listen to the song, RDC had to get analytical. "You know 'the boys of summer' refers to baseball, right?"
Um, no, and I cast back through the lyrics for supporting textual evidence. If the song is not directly about baseball--as so many 1985 songs were, like "Glory Days" and ex-Creedence Clearwater Revival's John Fogerty's "Center Field," among others I've mercifully forgotten--then at least the title might be, I'll allow. "So what is she," I asked, "Susan Sarandon in 'Bull Durham' and he'll love her after she's done with Tim Robbins? That's what I always thought it meant, that he'd love her despite her flings, after her flings--whoever they were with--and he hoped she'd come back to him even though he knows 'you can't look back.' Besides, Deadheads often called the Dead 'the boys,' and what with the Deadhead sticker on the Cadillac, the text suggests she's sleeping her way through summer tour rather than through the minors."

Sheesh.

I don't write this sitting in the kitchen sink. I just like I Capture the Castle. Actually I write this sitting in the Tattered Cover waiting for Godot. No, for Aphrodite. Actually for Margaret Atwood. It's 7:37, and aha! she's just arrived, seven minutes late, and here my writing becomes even more disjointed. I am not in NYC with Robin McKinley, Lloyd Alexander, and Susan Cooper, but I hope Melissa is.

CGK is next to me. A little while ago, I noticed what I was doing and confessed to her that I am a reading voyeur. I always want to know what people are reading--perhaps particularly anyone who wants to hear Margaret Atwood, which is what led to the confession, but everyone else too. As I walked to the Tattered Cover and passed the al fresco seating of Marlowe's, probably none too subtly I slowed my pace and forced my eyes into my right temple so I could see what a solitary diner was reading (and despite the lack of subtlety, I wasn't successful. Poo). CGK said that she's a writing voyeur and always wants to see what others are writing. Then she went off to talk to another DU student, and by the time she got back, I was writing. It wasn't deliberate on my part to taunt her, honestly! but she laughed and said she'd restrain herself from leaning over my shoulder. I restrained myself from saying well gee if you're curious you can read all this, typed and not scrawled, because I have this on-line journal, you know.... But I didn't.

Notes from Atwood's reading:

• Her first selection is the chapter "The soda." Perhaps she's tired, but she sounds like the simulated voice on my Mac, the one that says "Alert. This Macintosh is not responding. Please [do whatever it is]" if I haven't responded to a dialogue box promptly. Plus, though I'm only on page 157, I have read this chapter already and maybe I'm not paying strict attention. Maybe because I'm writing. But it's always during occasions like this--lectures and meetings--that I have more of an urge to write. Ah, this second selection sounds better. The first was fine, really--her amazing, poetical metaphors still rang out, and people laughed at the little jokes in the prose.
• The family in the book has a button factory because one of Atwood's favorite playthings as a child was the button jar. (I shall never believe that any novel can be wholly free of its author's autobiographical influence.) She told us she sorted the buttons in complicated social arrangements, and I thought of Francie learning arithmetic.
• Someone asked which of her books is her favorite. She said, "I never say anything about favorites. The other ones will hear about it if you do. And they will get back at you." She glanced at the large cart arrayed with dozens of The Blind Assassin and a collection of 25 others titles--and addressed them. "I love them all equally, as different as they are from one another. Equally," she repeated with some emphasis, and I giggled my loud giggle.

Note from Atwood's signing: I wrote my name and my sister's on two bookmarks. She signed CLH's first. "Ah, the moon goddess. And you're even wearing a moon kind of hat." What she meant by this I have no idea; my hat is sage green (like LIW's poke bonnet!) and I like it, damn it, but all I said was, "That one's for my sister." By this time she was on the other book, and she said, "So you're Lisa." So that was fine. She took liberties with my blister's name nearly three years ago, signing Alias Grace, and I wasn't going to let her mess it up again. So I went with her actual name rather than the diminutive, and all was well.

---

I'm typing this on Sunday, not Saturday. Today I bought a pruning saw and took off some of the nectarine's deadwood and did away with a sumac that's sproinged up nearly under the fence way in the corner where I could have killed it with the shears if I had noticed it earlier in the season, plus some of the shoots of the cherry tree, or whatever the woody upstarts around its trunk were. I couldn't do as much of the nectarine as it needs; unfortunately a larger limb that's still wick--thank you, Dickon--has to come off, more carefully and with an extension ladder. But from the step ladder I was able to climb into the tree a bit and clean it up some, and as I began to saw, I began to recite:

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
I left it dead, and with its head
I went galumphing back.

If I changed the pronouns slightly, I think it only fitting. After all, wasn't it Alice herself who said, "'You are old, Father William,' the young man said/ 'And your hair has become very white;/ And yet you incessantly stand on your head--/ Do you think, at your age, it is right?'"