Blake really doesn't like the camera, so I couldn't get him to stand still, but if I had, this picture would show a most impressive Beak Sculpture, which is what we call what accumulates on his mandibles (and under the lower one, in the notch between it and his skin) after he eats some nice moist vegetables and finishes off with some seeds.

Reading: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night. Still. And I don't like it yet.

Moving: I forgot to set the clock last night, so I didn't walk in, but I have no excuse for what didn't happen when I got home.

Watching: "Gone with the Wind" on TCM. Robert Osbourne brags that TCM shows it as the producer intended, complete with the overture, entr' acte, and exit music, and without commercials, but hello, it's still pan-and-scan. I used not to cry during this movie, but now, depending on my mood, even the casualty lists after Gettysburg--to say nothing of the rows of men dying prone in the red Georgia dirt--elicits a tear.

Listening: Toni Morrison, Paradise (tape 9 of 10)

23 March 2001: Forty acres and mule

I'm avoiding Tender Is the Night. I've been avoiding it with Carson McCullers, who doesn't exactly provide the Happy Happy Happy break from grown-up books I've been craving. I read "Ballad of the Sade Café" and started "Member of the Wedding," neither of which is calculated to make anyone glad to be alive. Tender is apparently Blair's Favorite Book in All the Land with Updike's Rabbit tetralogy in second place. Well, I just don't see it myself.

Meanwhile, some email:

To a nonliterary friend applying for a teaching job, who had asked about a quote he remembered about education in The Once and Only King by E.B. White:

T.H. (Terence Hanbury) White wrote The Once and Future King. (E.B White wrote Charlotte's Web and some other children's books and for the New Yorker and other literary mags.) I found a web page with an essay and a passage from the novel:

In addition to new characters, White adds new adventures as well. In Arthurian novels of the past, Wart's education was not a prominent event. However, as C. M. Adderly writes that "education is the theme which most clearly gives The Once and Future King its structure" (55). Wart's education gives White's novel an overlay in theme of the advancement of the human nature. Merlyn tells Wart that "the best thing for being sad is to learn something" (185).

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then...to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."

I don't find the exact line you gave, but the importance of education is a recurring theme in the book, that and pacifism.

That took me about two seconds to find. I love the web.

Today at work a Dot Orgerista recommended a movie she'd just seen, "Enemy at the Gates," about the siege of Stalingrad. She told me about all its moviesqueness and asked where in Russia Stalingrad was. It shows how much history I've forgotten that I couldn't find it on the map. Another two seconds on the web--well, I can't get into Britannica now so I'll misspell the first name--reminded me: the town's name until 1925 was Tsaritzina, whereupon it, too imperial, was changed to Stalingrad; the town withstood, in a Pyrrhic victory, a siege I thought lasted a lot longer than three seasons; after Stalin's fall in 1962 the name was changed to Volgograd. Which is how we found it on the big wall map, right on the Volga where you'd expect.

I love the web, but I wonder where my notebooks from high school history are. I don't care that I was only in ninth and tenth grades; Ancient & Medieval and Modern European taught me more in less time than any other course until I was a sophomore in college.

To my besty pals:

Yea! This is one of those years when the calendar makes sense. Monday I walked to work in fleece and boots and was warm; Tuesday was the first day of spring; Wednesday it hit 70 degrees; today I walked to work in cotton trousers and Tevas (with socks. shhh).

I saw Hoover the yellow lab and met a Borzoi named Arthur whose mother carried in her non-leash arm some miniature poodle about the size of a guinea pig who she said was alpha dog despite the Borzoi being over three feet at the shoulder. (Notice I didn't ask the name of the puny dog; I would have asked if it had actually been a guinea pig.) I want to ask why Hoover's name is Hoover--we always called Shadow The Vacuum Cleaner but this dog could be named for the dam.

Dogs aside, it's spring! Just a couple of blocks from home I saw a magpie snap off a twig of an ash tree and dart with it into a blue-berried cedar. And I thought yea! it's almost time for magpie babies! Several blocks later I watched a magpie try to clear an entire front yard full of twigs for its nest but every time it picked up one twig, it would drop another. Finally it gave up and flew into yet another cedar with what twigs it could manage. Plus now I know where they like to nest and which trees to keep an eye on.

Two years ago in Vail, we saw a baby robin perched uncertainly in a low tree. RDC is always better with birds than I and approached it carefully--while I yammered about how he should leave it alone--and actually got it to perch on his finger for a moment before it flew unsteadily away (so at least it could fly). At which point my yammering became "but that's not fair because now I want to hold a robin" Hypocrism, that is.

Last year I found a magpie baby on the sidewalk, crying, while its parent cried several feet above. I crossed the street hastily so at least it might get fed, but I don't know if it was fledged yet and could return to its nest. Down showed through its black cravat. This year and in years to come I hope to have lots more things growing in my garden that magpies will bring their children to eat.

Like blueberries! I just found out that there are species of blueberries that can manage in our climate. They don't like our soil, which is too alkaline for them. But I could get a big big big pot and mix a nice strong acidy soil especially for it and grow a highbush blueberry! And build a cage for it too to protect it from the magpies. The magpies can have something else.

When I filled out that survey and said one of my favorite foods was blueberry, I meant it, but my favorite blueberries are the ones I eat straight off Charenton's bushes. I'd love to eat my own too.

To my other besty pals:

I am pleased to report that I had a Good Luck Day at Ross yesterday. I regret to report that my purchases prove I am just as much of a freak as ever.

In the pictures of the dining room, you might have noticed, say, the color of the walls, the rug, the upholstery of the chairs. And you know my bedroom is lavender, right?

Well. I first noticed this phenomenon last summer when I bought a lavender dress, a sage green dress, and a sage dress with lavender flowers. Perhaps not too surprising, since I've been wearing too much lavender since I was 17 (in the corsage I bought for myself to go to my junior prom by myself, I had lavender-dyed roses--classy, eh?). The sage might have been new for me, though, from the color of the rest of the upstairs.

Yesterday at Ross I found (a) a dress. Sand-colored tencel (that new rayon-y fabric you can wash at home, unlike rayon), no waist, ankle length, destined to be a house dress. And (b) a green t-shirt-type shirt, knit silk, kind of a piney green. And (c) a skirt, also ankle-length, like sweatpants except it's a skirt. And finally, (d) a suit of a very small print like a houndstooth but not quite.

I showed the suit to my coworker asking if it looked too much like the upholstery of my dining room chairs. She said no, but she doesn't know it as intimately as I do. The chairs are covered in a fabric of off-white, pine green, and chocolate brown, and look from a distance overall kind of sand-colored. Huh.

The suit didn't work. I never hem a damn thing and this skirt hung a couple of inches below the knee--matron length. So I didn't get it.

But I got everything else. And the only thing that doesn't look like my furniture is the sweatshirty skirt. The sand dress matches the upholstery and rug. The pine green shirt matches the pine green in the chairs.

Do you think I should seek psychological treatment?

But you know, I like it. I like these colors. That's why I'm painting my house in those colors, because I like them. The thing that's sick is that it makes me think of a line from The Fountainhead. Dominique is in love with Howard, an architect, who raped her. And then they had this wonderful love affair. Because, you know, Ayn Rand was such an emotionally well-balanced author. Dominique, to prove her love to Howard, marries someone else (the logic of this escapes me), who knows nothing of her past and who hires Howard to build them a house. He does, and what the husband notices about the house makes him think that Howard is a great architect, nothing else: "I didn't know a house could be designed for a woman, like a dress. ... Even the texture of the walls goes with your skin in an odd way."

About the last thing I want to do is apply Ayn Rand to my life; the only thing I want to do less is be like one of her characters. I'm a freak, I tell you.

But now I'm watching "Gone with the Wind" for the billionth time so all must be well.

Lest she feel left out, I must tell you, OMFB, that Haitch is in Europe and out of email range.

Finishing up:

• In the picture above is the shoulder of my new dress.
• "Oh! My hands are cold and I left my muff at home! Would you mind if I put my hand in your pocket?" What a great movie.
• Yesterday I knew two things that RDC didn't: what a Borzoi dog is and that he could buy pre-drilled paper instead of regular paper and a large three-hole punch.
• Oh! Maybe I don't have to hate Tender Is the Night! I haven't contributed anything to the Invisible Library in ages, but Dick Diver (was Fitzgerald on drugs? Just because he had an alliterative name, is that the best he could come up with?) has a book.
• Which reminded me to look at the library. The curator asked for books in Possession. How have I omitted this?
• So I just now wrote another email:

  In F. Scott Fitzgerald's book, the protagonist Dick Diver writes a book on psychology:

  An Attempt at a Uniform and Pragmatic Classification of the Neuroses and Psychoses, Based on an Examination of Fifteen Hundred Pre-Krapælin and Post-Krapælin Cases as they would be Diagnosed in the Terminology of the Different Contemporary Schools Together with a Chronology of Such Subdivisions of Opinion as Have Arisen Independently.

  Seriously.

  It's also offered in German (I shall type very carefully):

  Ein Versuch die Neurosen und Psychosen gleichmässig und pragmatisch zu klassifizieren auf Grund der Untersuchung von fünfzehn hundert pre-Krapælin und post-Krapælin Fällen wie siz diagnostiziert sein würden in der Terminologie von den verschiedenen Schulen der Gegenwart Zusammen met einer Chronologie solcher Subdivisionen der Meinung welche unabhängig entstanded sind.

  My husband contributes Hemingway's first novel, whose manuscript was lost on a train and never recovered. He refers to it in A Moveable Feast. I say it doesn't count because it was once an actual book, though lost.

  You wanted to know Ash's and Lamotte's books in Possession. Looking through briefly for anything in italics or quotations throughout, I found:

  Randolph Henry Ash wrote poems: The Garden of Proserpina, 1861; Chidiock Tichbourne, Ragnarök, Mummy Possest, Ask to Embla, Swammerdam; and books: Complete Works, Gods, Men and Heroes, The Incarcerated Sorceress, and The Great Collector; and verse dramas, Cromwell, St Bartholomew's Eve, and Cassandra

  Ash's friend Michelet wrote La Mer, La Montagne, L'Oiseau, and L'Insecte.

  Francis Tugwell wrote Anemones of the British Coast.

  Blanche Glover wrote an untitled journal, as did Ellen Ash. Beatrice Nest is editing, though she will probably never publish, an edition of the latter. Sabine Lucrèce Charlotte de Kercoz wrote a Journal Intime.

  Leonora Stern wrote No Place like Home and edited Christabel LaMotte: a Selection of Narrative and Lyric Poems and Herself Herself Involve: LaMotte's Strategies of Evasion.

  Robert Dale Owen wrote The Debateable Land Between This World and the Next.

  James Blackadder writes an edition of Ash, Complete Poems and Plays.

  Isidore Lamotte wrote Mythologies, 1832; Mythologies indigènes de la Bretagne et de la Grande Bretagneè; and Mythologies françaises.

  Christabel LaMotte wrote Tales Told in November and Last Tales; a proem, The Fairy Melusina; and poems, The City of Is plus lots of untitled ones.

  There's an academic book published in 1947, author unknown: White Linen.

  A book containing one of LaMotte's poems: Ghosts and Other Weird Creatures.

  Mortimer Cropper wrote a bio of Ash, The Great Ventriloquist, and edited The Letters of R.H. Ash. The author of this book is unclear but might be Cropper: Unknown Sex Life of Eminent Victorians

  I don't know if this is a real book or not: F.R. Leavis, Scrutiny.

  A vague Mrs Lees wrote autobiographical reminiscences called The Shadowy Portal.

  Dunno what I might have left out.

What a tragic line:
"And I moved the bar too!"
"Just like Pa!"