Reading: Biographer's Tale

Moving: 10' Nordic Track; also 20' yesterday

Listening: "Love is a Battlefield." Was it recently in a movie? That's the first time I've heard it since I was forced to see Pat Benatar at a concert five years ago and then Jessie heard it twice in one day

Watching: CNN

2 October 2000: Slogging

What did I do last week after Jessie left but immediately read the entries she posted on our DSL line? Since then I've been waiting for new entries to find out what I should call the Interrupting Cow. Now I know.

"Interrupting Cow" isn't what he's called in real life, of course; nor is the name with which he is addressed in real life his legal one. Everyone at the House of Spleen has such a different name, and everytime T. or Jessie or IC would mention one, I would jump up and down and demand its history. Names and naming are rivetingly interesting to me.

So Jessie told me a story about the House of Spleen and its occupants when one of them fell or just fell ill and outsiders--cops, EMTs, I forget--showed up and asked standersby his name. Jessie said the dead silence oozed palpably for whole cringeworthy seconds before someone (Jessie herself) recollected and blurted, "Bob Jones!" or whatever his name was. This makes me wonder if the Smoot whose inebriated body measured the Mass. Ave. bridge was indeed named Smoot or something much more anonymous.

And I never remember how many Smoots long that bridge is. Somewhere in the 700s, I think, and I know that the measurement ends, "plus an ear."

So anyway, I've been waiting a week to read how she would size me up. And now I know.

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The saga about shoe-hunting has come to an end and it has left me too discouraged to recount much. The details of what stores carry size 9,the mind-boggling assortment of butt-ugly shoes in the world, and the fact that some cost over $300 without, say, even minimal hover functionality, are probably just as uninteresting as I assume.

I started The Biographer's Tale at the Williams Fork on Saturday. I brought it and only it for reasons that seemed good at the time: I would have to read it for lack of anything else and my freight would be minimized. Except that I also brought my bird field guide (I chalked up the western kingbird) and DayRunner and RDC's Standing in a River Waving a Stick, activities which he did not read about all day but performed, when he wasn't falling in instead.

He fell in just a little tiny bit, by which I mean only once and not enough to break his rod. Instead of his four-weight? six-weight?--as if I can keep them straight--he twisted his knee. I thought several hours standing waist-high in water so fast-running and freezing cold that even I barely waded would do it some good. He wasn't expecting that notch in the two-foot bank, which is how he wound up in. And then the river ran over two feet just there. That plus the stumble made for a wadersful of cold water. He kept the neoprene on and fished anyway. I lolled on the bank, read my book, looked at birds, watched the wind in the trees, soaked up sun, and loved being out of the city.

I love the Williams Fork. What's amazing to me about it is how sere everything around it is compared to how lush the valley is. You tramp through two miles of sage brush from the parking area, snorting dust and the clean, heady scent of sage, and then you see a different color of green over there, and you walk a little farther, and then you look down into a green river valley, full of cottonwood and willow and actual green. It's wonderful. It's wonderful in the late summer. I have never been there in the early summer, when the valley is still wet from spring run-off. RDC's first time was in June, when standing water supports a chokingly thick mosquito population.

Besides that and an accompanying tendency to flood the valley in spring, it's where I want to live. In the meantime, the occasional weekend is just fine.

That was just a big seque away from A.S. Byatt. Hooo-boy, this is going to be a toughy. I loved Possession, which was my first Byatt. I've liked everything especially Possession a whole lot, even if I thought Jude Mason's novel was an eensy bit bizarre in Babel Tower. In Biographer's Tale, I want my own waders and maybe a staff.

Remember how Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths" is about the spy who finds the scholar who solves the spy's ancestor's riddle and the riddle is how the spy gets information to his side? Remember how in Pale Fire the protagonist thinks the poet wrote the poem about him? Remember how in The Unconsoled the geography is dreamlike in its plastic surrealism and how you as the reader never find your footing either? Remember how you hope one day when you're quite big you'll be able to understand Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov and Kazuo Ishiguro? Remember how reassured you felt when RDC's dissertation adviser said that Ishiguro was being deliberately obtuse in The Unconsoled so it wasn't just you being stupid but the author's own twisted mind that was befuddling you?

Well well well.

Phineas decides to write a biography of a biographer. The biographer, to do a good biography, had to learn more about his subject's areas of interest than the subject knew. Therefore Phineas has to know more than the biographer, for the same reason. Plus the biographer has left other mss about other biographical subjects. Maybe. And that's only by page 38, which is as far as I got all weekend. The pages are thick with post-its already.

In my own defense, I mostly lolled. And breathed. Also I reread. Plus, not particularly in my own defense, Saturday night we watched "Goodfellas" and I did not read. And Sunday morning I finished The Blind Assassin, which I liked better for having given it large chunks of time. In the beginning I was reading it in five-minute chunks and interrupting it with everything under the sun.

HAO lent me "Badlands" and "Goodfellas" in exchange for "Being John Malkovich." She was reading off the titles of her inherited, alphabetized DVDs and stopped at "Buffalo 66." "I know it's a good movie," I told her, "but it's got Canine Mortality in it." By the time she got to the house for the trade-off, she had remembered an occasion of Canine Mortality in "Badlands" as well. Luckily it was perfectly obvious and I had plenty of time to cover my eyes, plus it was quick.

What else. I suggested taking the longer way home from the Fork, the way past the outlet stores in Silverthorne. There at the Nine West store I found silvery grey satin pumps of a regular shape, not vampy as I pictured but much easier to walk in, 75% off the alleged retail price. Phew. So I can wear the slate-blue dress to EJB's wedding.

Which meant that Sunday morning I could return the torture devices I bought in a fit of madness last Monday.

I made pancakes again, having to use up the buttermilk, of course, but this time I had no blueberries. Plus I used up the last of the Vermont syrup we bought at CostCo and cracked the bottle BJWL gave us from an Old Lyme sugar shack. It's distinctly less rich in flavor, though still several cuts above Mrs. Butterworth. We clipped Blake's talons. I had planned to get to the store at 10 but I'm glad I didn't get there until 10:30--the stupid mall doesn't open until 11 on Sundays.

But this give me a chance to go to the Tattered Cover and write for a fevered half-hour:

This morning, solely becaus I am a craven individual, I turned on the television (without being on the Nordic Track). Solely to check if there were any good movies on, of course. VH-1 had "Behind the Music" on and the featured artist was Cat Stevens. Cat, Ithought. SEB, I thought not much later and probably simultaneously. About ten minutes later I caught myself watching television on a sunny day and remembered I had to go to the mall instead. After clipping Blake's talons, I scurried downstairs to snag my three Cat Stevens discs. Driving and parking took only three songs from Teaser and the Firecat, since I turned the car to ACC to finish "If I Laugh." SEB, of course. Unavoidable. Also I opened the case and confronted myself with that photograph, that one photograph in which Cat is so supremely hot (if you can forget about the whole jihad thing), and thought of a fellow from UConn named Jason.

I don't remember if he was new in our junior or senior year, but I remember meeting him. HEB, TJZ, and I were sitting at a table and this man walked up and asked if he could join us. He looked just like Cat Stevens, we all agreed. SEB wasn't there to give an opinion, either because it was junior year and she was in England or it was senior year and she wasn't sitting with me. A few conversations ended the acquaintance, and then he cut his hair and shaved and so ended the resemblance to Cat Stevens, and that was that. I think it was senior year.

Until later. I had been going out with SSP for just a little while when SSP ran into Jason in the hallway of their dorm. Jason was jumping up and down on one leg and holding the other ankle. He said to SSP, "I sprained my ankle!" and SSP touched the held ankle making some comment about the sore foot. "Not that one! The other one!" Jason corrected. Drunkenness had led to the sprained ankle; further drunkenness or sheer stupidity led him to jump up and down on the injured leg. But he wasn't finished with SSP yet. He said, "So. You pokin' Lisa?" SSP was fairly offended. A few days later in the caf, SSP asked Jason what he, SSP, was doing--he was poking me in the arm with his finger. "You're pointing at her," guessed Jason, the master of English speech and gesture. SSP shook his head. "You're poking--oh, god, did I really say that?" He was mortified and SSP somewhat mollified.

I haven't written in a few days. The mall doesn't open until 11 but the Tattered Cover opens at a civilized hour. I have just bought a new blank book covered in Thai silk and a gel pen, and here I am scribbling, though I could have made do with a note or two on a slip of receipt paper and scratchy store pen. Glad to have the book though, because I've been wanting one to keep by the bed for dreams separate from my regular paper journal, and the first page can be emergency, non-dreaming space.

[More stuff deleted. I definitely write more like myself with a pen, partly because it's still more natural to me to do so and partly because I have less expectation of posting it, since I'd have to transcribe it.]

Returning the 3" notquitespikes to Nine West, I was waited on, though I hesitate to term it that, by the surliest clerk I have ever encountered in a regular store. Thence I proceeded to Ann Taylor. Friday at one of the two downtown stores I found a brown faux crocodile slingback pump I decided would work with the other wedding's dress, but that store didn't have my size. I didn't make the clerk call around right then, as I should have, but had remembered to do this by Sunday morning. At the Cherry Creek store were both the pump and a mule of the same style and pattern that I preferred, but none of the five Ann Taylor stores in or near Denver had either mule or pump in a 9.

But also on Friday I placed a pair of shoes on hold at another store. They're kind of shiny and therefore maybe not good for linen, but at this point I don't care. I'm wearing 'em, probably thereby compounding the faux pas of wearing sleeveless linen in October. My sister can't sneer at the shoes until after the fact and from photographs, so today I picked up the runners-up and called myself done. Whew.

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Later Sunday I read on the porch swing with my journal and Biographer's Tale also Dr. Seuss Goes to War (because JUMB just sent me an article from the Manchester Guardian Weekly about it, and I never did finish reading it when I bought it--last winter? the night I bought Miss Wyoming?).

Wednesdat at Phish in a context I have wholly forgotten but couldn't reproduce anyway, HAO and I talked about "Planet of the Apes." We couldn't remember the name of the male chimpanzee. Last night RDC and I were watching "The Simpsons" and someone described Moe the bartender as looking like Cornelius from guess what movie.

So I called HAO. She wasn't home so I left a message with HPS: "The male chimp was Cornelius." When she called back she said it was like the time we couldn't remember the name of the fourth Cosby child, Sondra Denise Theo ? Rudy, and she remembered after I had left and left a message with RDC: "Vanessa." When I got home, RDC managed to insinuate the name into conversation as if it had just happened to come to him, to him who watched even fewer episodes of "The Cosby Show" than I did. "And remember that time when you thought the remote control was possessed?" That's a story best not dwelt on.

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After our regular line-up, RDC went upstairs. I discovered "Singing in the Rain" on TCM. On Three-Way Action several people have named it as one of three desert island movies and I've never seen the whole thing. And today, the day after, I still haven't seen the whole thing. It's a musical and it's in technicolor, and unless a movie is "The Wizard of Oz" that's two strikes of insurmountable badness. I got to it in time for a number with the three leads breaking into an allegedly unrehearsed yet perfectly synchronized casual dance. You know, as people so commonly do. Soon after that is the the "Singing in the Rain" song and dance, and which I've seen umpteen times in movie shows and find delightful. I like that Gene Kelly stomps in puddles like Christopher Robin and that he gives away his umbrella and loves the rain because he loves everything after the kiss. During the song, RDC returned downstairs. He heard the song from the stairwell and asked if "A Clockwork Orange" were on.

No it was certainly not.

But "Hope and Glory" was. I didn't watch the whole thing because I refuse to watch movies with commercials but I saw some of the best lines: "It's time to smash things up!" and "He was limping when he ran off" and the scene with the bombed fish and most especially, the scene when Billy and his grandfather play cricket in the garden. Either the thrown ball or the grandfather's thrashing through the underbrush disturbed the grandfather's outdoor aviary of cockatiels. This time, just like every other time, our own cockatiel reacted. He clambered up from his safe spot under my chin to the top of my bent knee, to look for his compadres and establish his dominance. My little guy. Almost as nifty as I think he is.