Reading: Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne's House of Dreams, Sons and Lovers

Moving: A day off

Listening: news

Watching: "Night Train"

23 December 2000: With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knees

I made another batch of snowballs, this time with Crisco, damn it--that's its commercial name in a country not controlled by the religious right, Crisco Damn It, and may I mention how pleased I am not with who got the nod for Attorney General?--dragging myself back on track, and--damn it again--they worked. Not as nearly perfectly half-domed like Ayers Rocks as CLH's are, but definitely better. Also I made the spiced molasses and chocolate rolled cookies again because I know they work, even if neither RDC nor HAO likes them. Perhaps I had too heavy a hand with the cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves last time, because this time RDC liked them. In addition to cookies last weekend, HAO and I had Christmas, and (she claims) she can't wrap so gave me loot in gift bags. Despite the bags having penguins on them, I was able to part with them, filling them with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (and surrounding othercookiness) and the rolled cookies (which I kept simple, gingerfolk and stars and trees and no moose or tin soldiers) and foisting them on neighbors. Then I washed my hands of the whole business, literally, until next year.

Yesterday I finished Anne of Windy Poplars and felt stupid indeed when Anne wrote to Gilbert referring to the War of 1812 and how glad she is that that period of human history is over with. She's writing this letter in the early 1910s. War does not yet touch House of Dreams, at least. Two items make it obvious LMM (no, even Lucy Maude Montgomery is not safe from being reduced to a TLA) wrote Windy Poplars later, when--as she herself wrote--she was tired of Anne. One, Anne would have had the aunts Kate and Chatty, Rebecca Dew, and Elizabeth and her father to the wedding. Two, the book's not about Anne but about romantically Dickensian relationships (lost children, erstwhile lovers, curses, drop-the-silverware names, ludicrosity) in a style both popular and easily copied.

House of Dreams also had cariacature'd characters and howlers, as Anne would say, of unlikely coincidi (which joins the ranks of my Preferred Plurals alongside "acquainti"), but still in Anne's style.

I would like to know if any dog who was a lonely human's sole companion on Prince Edward Island was not named Carlo. First the Little Lord Fauntleroy kid in Windy Poplars then Dick Moore's pooch in House of Dreams. I can't remember the dog's name in William Sleator's Into the Dream. The dog's mother's name was Rose. I don't think the dog's name was Carlo, though.

I loved House of Dreams, of course. Windy Poplars was a page turner and I read it thus. But House of Dreams was great, despite my criticisms, despite the fact that I knew what was going to happen by reading the Table of Contents. "Dawn and Dusk"? Damn, the symbolism of that is so obvious I may as well be reading D.H. Lawrence, which, ho-hum, I am.

That damn list. Let's look at it again. Three Lawrences. Lawrence isn't as good as Faulkner, who also has three. And who was Arnold Bennett and how could The Old Wives' Tale deserve a spot on that list ahead of, instead of, Song of Solomon? It's ridiculous. Four Joseph Conrads and no Toni Morrison, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, and no To Kill a Mockingbird at all? The list is, in a word, fucked.

So my list. I'm going to read Sons and Lovers because I began it as a freshling? sophomore? when I was going to read Great Literature on my own and, ahem, never finished it. I'd like to read Lady Chatterly's Lover--shut up, OMFB--because at least Lawrence stopped being so coy. I assume. I am not going to re-order my list except to put the ones I've read at the bottom.

I'm not going to second-guess the MLA on titles about which I know nothing, or not on all of them. But I want to know about these:

• Robertson Davies's Deptford, Salterton, or Cornish trilogy.
• Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle, Cat's Eye, or another.
• John Updike's Rabbit novels?
• Cormac McCarthy, the Border Trilogy.

I started obsessing with the list again because it's easier than reading Sons and Lovers, which has symbolism about as heavy-handed and transparent as, say, Gregory Peck's dreams in "Spellbound."

---

Everything that's coming on time is wrapped and under the tree. I scampered, hardly scurried considering traffic, to the post office yesterday to get the package my father sent, returned books to the DU library, and found a parrot treat in a grocery store, which means I don't have to brave PetsMart, hooray! All the cookies are baked and many foisted on neighbors. RDC is watching a Jim Jarmusch documentary, "Year of the Horse," about Neil Young. Which reminds me that we're planning to roadtrip to Crazy Horse late this coming spring. So all that is happy and done.

And as a Christmas present to me, I called Nisou today, her birthday. This morning I turned on Fiver to get her number, checked my email, read a frantic note from my sister about whether I'd received her packages, replied and signed off mentioning my call to Nisou, and finally placed the call.

European phones have weird rings.

When someone picked up, there was a significant pause during which I heard house noises but no human voice. "Allo? Allo?" It wasn't SPG, but his visiting father who has almost zero English--zero plus "hello okay please thank you goodbye" and probably, though I haven't asked, fuck. Not that my French is so wonderful, since I seem to have forgotten everything, but ooof. Hmmm. "Je m'appelle Lisa." I almost asked "Est Nisou chez" before I realized that probably would make no sense. So I just asked, "Nisou?"--except with her actual name--figuring my purpose would be obvious enough. Finally Monsieur G. understood what I meant and said "Nisou est absent. SPG est absent aussi." Then he said something or other I forget that meant they'd be back in an hour.

I was finding this pretty comical, two mutually unintelligible people paralyzed by their respective monolingualisms, trying to communicate obvious things like "They'll be back in an hour" and "Please tell Nisou Lisa called to say bonne anniversaire and I'll call again later" but it didn't seem like he did. I suppose I was just a simple-minded inarticulate Yank.

Then I called CLH. She'd had a trying morning. Our mother called waking her up, and then later when she was on the phone with a friend our father and then I called. She didn't take our father's call but she took mine, tra la. She wanted to know what I though of her recent email:

[Our mother] called and left a message that she would be home wed am, so clever thing i think i am i call wed pm but she was home and talked for 20-30 minutes until i had call waiting, saved by the buzz, had to go to work. the only entertaining part of the conversation was every few minutes her stopping the monologue to say "are you there? are you there? are you there? " because i was silently enduring weeks of pent-up maternal babble. i did not have the heart to say "you would know i was here if we were having a conversation" but she hardly stopped for a breath.

What had I thought of it? I spit a mouthful of water all over the screen, is what I thought of it. So if she happens to get a dictionary for Christmas, she might send her the definition of "dialogue."

Then I called Nisou back. If we don't go to Europe this year she is going to spank us.