This is how I sit when I'm freezing cold. Despite its being a perfectly reasonable 34 F outside and the heat being set, at least, at an unprecedented 71 F inside, I am freezing. Thus one one-armed self-hug and knees up. Blake's on my shoulder attending to his tail.

Along the back of the futon behind me are two of Granny's pieces: a quilted runner and cushion needlepointed in roses. Also the top of a copy box is on the seat.

Reading: Go Tell It on the Mountain

Moving: 5.2 mile walk

Watching: "Emmanuelle" last night; Sunday night lineup tonight

Listening: The Red Shoes and Trinity Session

7 January 2001: Better and Worse

Better:

I can admit when I'm wrong and I was wrong about Crooked Little Heart. No: I was wrong in my expectation that I would hate Crooked Little Heart. I was right that it was extremely autobiographical, which was a very bad thing in Hard Laughter and just as thinly disguised here but not as much wishful thinking.

I announced the other day that I was on page 17 and unthrilled. The first scene that started me thinking that maybe this would be okay happened on pp 61-63, the last dance of seventh grade. Elizabeth on the trampoline is also superb.

Lamott is still clumsy, clumsier than the other novelists with autobiographical evidence in their work whom I like. I know from Bird by Bird that she's a big believer in writing stuff, or taping it, to index cards and carrying a stack around with you so you don't forget stuff and so you can pin them to the wall and be inspired by them later. Here's a bit she just couldn't fit in any better way but couldn't bear to leave out. Remember, James is a struggling writer.

"Fiber adds bulk to the stool," read one piece of newsprint taped to an index card, "and among Finns stool tends to be three times larger than among New Yorkers."
"Honey," she asked [...] "How on earth will you use this?"
He raised his head slowly to see what she was reading.
"Writing," he said rather primly, is a very mysterious process." (83)

Also there are clumsinesses with editing. Both Elizabeth and Rosie remember a poem Andrew recited to them ("James James Morrison Morrison"), but Lamott tells us twice in 100 pages that Rosie remembers the poem and no editor caught the redundancy.

Lamott tosses out the occasional great line, like their family being something you'd get at a garage sale (284), but she can't leave out her newfound God stuff either. That might be one thing, but she betrays what I see as her hypocrisy as well: the things that Rae used to call friendships and sunset still look like friendships and sunsets to Rosie but Rae now calls them Jesus. Jesus is a convenient excuse for Lamott-read-Rae: when Rae tells Elizabeth she hates Rosie's current tennis opponents, Elizabeth (only superficially tolerant of the Christianity) asks her how Jesus feels about her hating these young girls, and Rae says, "Oh, he hates them too." Rae's attitude is one Lamott has shown in her Salon columns, and isn't it convenient to have such a plastic god. That isn't Jesus's fault but that of those who interpret his teachings to suit themselves. Charming.

I am certain that Lamott's initial inspiration for the book is this image:

At an outdoor café on the water, watching the ferries and sailboats, silent brown pelicans gliding by on powerful wings, he put his chair next to hers and his arm around her shoulders, and they sat quietly together. A stranger watching them, noting their dark clothes, their closeness, Elizabeth's handsome dignity, Lank's cherubic compassion, might have assumed that they were a quiet and creative couple, one who had just buried a cavernous pocket of grief. (293)

And if it wasn't, Lamott shouldn't've written it as if it were. She's as transparent as John Fowles in the train with his own character in The French Lieutenant's Woman, but at least Fowles was honest enough to say "Here I am" and make it a part of the plot (with the character becoming annoyed at the scrutiny of a stranger).

Oh, and the bit at the end with Elizabeth and Rosie at the tidepools reminds me of Gretel Ehrlich's Match to the Heart. Ehrlich wrote that recovering from being struck by lightning in Wyoming. She wrote of walks on the beach (she stayed with her parents in California) with her dog (who'd also been affected by the blow) and exploring tide pools and contemplating how very close to death she had come. When she came to the UConn Co-op for a reading and signing, I asked if the tidepool exploration, physical and philosophical, had been deliberate: between ocean and dry land, between life and death. She was, pardon the term, thunderstruck, because she had never considered that but realized the truth of it when I mentioned it. (We talked for a long time and afterward she told Suzy--the general books coordinator and my personal book purveyor--"I enjoyed talking to the woman in the red dress.")

Overall, I liked it.

---

Worse:

Oh. Ma. Gawd. "Emmannuelle" I bought this for RDC off his wishlist knowing nothing about it. He put it on his wishlist because somewhere or other he read that it was erotic but the puritanical U.S. ratings system gave it an X in the fine tradition that protected us from "Eyes Wide Shut." I suppose if I had expected it to be just plain sex, I wouldn't've been so disappointed in its utter stupidity--I would have expected it. However, it would disappoint anyone who expected hard-core sex à la "See You Next Tuesday" too, because it's not explicit.

Disclaimer: I know the title of a porn movie! I would be ashamed except that I know it only because of "An American Werewolf in London" which is stupid and pointless in ways I like (unlike "Emmannuelle"). In a cinema playing this flick, David meets his decaying corpse of friend and his various victims.

Emmannuelle is supposed to enjoy her sexual awakening, but mostly she doesn't appear to. She chooses what happens on the plane and she chooses a partner named Bee--this (nick)name might make some Frainch sense or humor that didn't carry over into English subtitles--but she doesn't choose the partners anyone else chooses for her and--how surprising!--is shocked/upset/bored/abused/exploited/etc. by the latter. We laughed derisively throughout: that planes' bathrooms used to be that big, that she ran away to the Thai jungle in a flimsy white dress, that anyone suffering from the heat would strip off her shirt rather than her denim Daisy Dukes, that anyone--even so small-breasted--would play squash without a bra.

This flick is fated for Second Spin.

---

I emptied the built-in shelves flanking the fireplace. The living room hasn't been so empty since before my first visit as an owner: the first thing I did, after walking in the door with Blake in his travel cage in one hand and a box in the other, was to put a flowering plant on the mantel and introductory books on the shelves: Watership Down, To Kill a Mockingbird, Pride and Prejudice (three favorites), Harold and the Purple Crayon (so I could find my room), Possession (the novel does explore many aspects of possession, though not of houses), Mandy (who wanted a home of her own). I crammed all the stuff into the family room. I love having all this space-suh. Then I pried all the nails out of the wall and unscrewed the hardware from two previous versions of curtains that no one removed when they installed the current version of curtain. Now the room is ready for me to scrub down.

I washed the hallway and the dining room in August, when it was hot. Now it's going to be cold and chemically instead of refreshingly cool and chemically. Wheee.

After scrubbing, patching, spackling, sanding, wiping down again, and priming, we can paint.

Meanwhile RDC has been dismembering the windows and replacing sash cords and sanding down the four layers of paint and prizing off hardware and such. He was trying to attach a window to sawhorses downstairs and I suggested angling the vise this way and he did that and tightened the screw and cracked the pane. Now we need a glazier. I am so helpful around the house.

I like the wood vise. It's two stout pieces of wood connected and separated by two long screws, one on either side. What I like about it is that, as a tool, I bet it hasn't changed in a thousand years except for the screws now being machine-made instead of hand-forged or -cut.

---

This morning I lay under the dining room table (still on top of the rug, which I was enjoying without the table up until Tuesday) with Go Tell It on the Mountain. When he discovered me. RDC asked if I had run away. When I ran away, I ran away either under my mother's desk or into the shed or, when I was serious, into the woods. Never under the table.

---

I emptied over a year's worth of correspondence from the interim box where I throw it and started sorting it into rubber-banded piles in the two copy boxes it now occupies. Doing this is always kind of precarious occupation. The interim box is about the size of a shoebox and overflowed: two Christmases. Opening the boxes can be dangerous; I feel like Pandora.

I still have letters from Big Blue Marble in Spaaaaaace penpals Ranger Rick set me up with when I was 8 and haven't written to since I was 12. I have every letter PSA ever wrote me, and we were long-distance friends for ten years before email. I have get-well cards my hallmates made for me out of construction paper when I got mono freshling year. I have birthday cards signed--printed--by my babysitting girls when they were newly literate. Everything.

From the bottom of the shoebox (where drift movie stubs and little things and where remain other things I think I am going to Do Something with other than pack away) emerged another picture of a newborn. I'm going to scan it and sent it to the various families whose sproutling it could be and ask, Is this yours? (I wonder if even the several parents will be able to distinguish.) I must have a dozen of those little wallet sized pictures taken of humans just hours old and still strongly resembling iguanas. (Aha! a reason for everyone in the bar in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to have turned into a lizard! They were regressing!) I can't tell one from another and I confess I didn't mark each one myself.

NML's daughter's photograph is easy. In it, HGL is a few months old, for one thing, and while not looking like her father at least doesn't look like a newt. Also she's wearing the (may I say) darling little onesie printed with dachsunds that I sent her.

I did turn up actual photographs of identifiable people--ABW's boys flourishing (the three-year-old) or gnawing (the four-month-old) their respective presents, ZBD playing dress-up, LEB's new cat, RDC's coworker's daughter playing the dulcimer (she's 7) and showing her various art projects to RDC.

About Christmas cards I can be ruthless. I keep every message that's more than a signature. If lacking an interior message, the fronts become gift tags if possible or are tossed if ugly. If the card is pretty overall but cannot be a gift tag, I might keep it even if there's only a signature, which is why I have two jam-packed boxes of correspondence. I mean, this sorting process involves removing letters from envelopes (and writing the postmark date on the letter if the writer was negligent: order must be maintained) to reduce bulk.

There's a new bundle this time: actual paper correspondence from online journalers.

The reason this job can be uncomfortable is the correspondence in bundles that will never be added to. If I feel self-flagellatory, I might reread some. I actually had forgotten whom I would find in the UConn stack and so got a nasty shock.