See his little pink foot? He's scratching his face, somehow managing not to poke out an eye or burst his own eardrum.

Reading: Carson McCullers, "Member of the Wedding"; also Paula Danziger, This Place Has No Atmosophere

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Watching: Everything. "Almost Famous," "Wit, "High Fidelity," "To Kill a Mockingbird," the Oscars, "The Sopranos

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

26 March 2001: This book has too much atmosphere

From On the Road: did Kerouac make up the term "hincty" and what does it mean? Who were the Laodiceans?

Saturday when RDC and I did some errands in the car, he demanded to know whether I'd called KBCO and programmed it like a jukebox: "Don't Give Up," "Alison," and "Don't You Forget about Me." Whoever is driving chooses the music, a fact he forgets sometimes. He likes Peter Gabriel because I broke him in; he likes Elvis Costello not because I do but because JGW does. JGW, much older than RDC as a first-semester freshling, turned his randomly assigned roommate from a Led Zeppelin-listening skid into a Deadhead, for which I'm grateful. In the much wider variety of music that he likes is Roxy Music, for which I'm also grateful, but not Avalon, which exception I don't understand. "Don't You Forget about Me" is exempt from RDC's No '80s Pop While I'm Driving rule; he knows better than to turn that off.

Anyway, JGW liked Elvis Costello and, RDC told me, JGW had a big poster on their wall from "...some album. I forget."

I rolled my eyes. "That's My Aim Is True, you git. 'Alison,' 'Less Than Zero,' 'Watching the Detectives'....?"

So we started talking about Less Than Zero. I was just trying to recall with Haitch, I think, when I started to read adult books on my own: Cheaper by the Dozen and Auntie Mame don't count; Watership Down (age 13) and Less Than Zero (age 18) do. I hope Stephen King and V.C. Andrews don't. Of course for school I had read Great Expectations and Ethan Frome and Heart of Darkness and Dr. Zhivago, but when did I browse in the adult stacks as well as the YA shelves and the children's room? Then I remembered Clan of the Cave Bear, which was probably the first grown-up book I found on my own, when I was 15, from the cart at PGN. That's how I found a lot of books: someone would return a title but instead of reshelving it I would check it out.

I read Less Than Zero freshling Christmas break. I sold my textbooks (damn! why?) and bought my Christmas reading. Or at least one book. Also that break I read, finally, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. (And watched "Divoce Court," I recall.) I wish I had kept a book journal then. I hate that I remember so few of the books I have read. I suppose if I've forgotten them, there's a reason.

And I reread Less Than Zero. And reread it some more. I remember being crushed when PSA told me, some months later, that it was poorly written or uncrafted or unimaginative or however he ripped it apart. I believed him when I was 17 that Tom Robbins is, and I quote, "pseudo-intellectual bullshit." (He was 16 when he said that. Can I tell that?) I was accustomed to accepting his literary judgments and continuing to like Less Than Zero might have been my first conscious break from them. I'm pretty sure it was the first contemporary adult book I read that was about me. Its events occur when Clay goes home for Christmas break after his first semester at school; I read it over Christmas break after my first semester at school. (Never mind that he went to Bennington or Dartmouth or wherever and had friends who kept up with their parents by reading People.) I haven't read it in years, but I read it continually throughout college.

Only two days ago in the car when I told RDC--who'd also read it--that Clay had that same Elvis Costello poster on his wall, and as we went on to talk about Bret Easton Ellis aping Raymond Carver's minimalism, and how everything focuses on death, did I realize the significance of Clay's name.

A girl who, happily for me, left Lyme-Old Lyme by ninth grade, used to say "Now duh-uhhhh!" more often than any other three syllables in semi-English speech to express how stupid the world around her was. I remember thinking how incongruous Clay's name is, how unfit for his West Beverly Hills, coke-snorting self it is. His girlfriend's name is Blair; his dealer's name is Rip; his best friend is Julian. "Clay" is way too low-class a name for his crowd; I never wondered whether that incongruity was deliberately metaphoric.

Never occurred to me.

So I've mentioned death, my elevating PSA to the literati, and Heart of Darkness. I'm going to pretend that my first Conrad was Death Be Not Proud instead though, okay? Because I want to talk about John Donne. I'll get the PSA connection over with first: he wrote me, from Stanford, years after we met at Lynchburg, when inevitably we were growing apart, something about our friendship and love being "like gold to ayery thinnesse beate." I thought he made that up. Despite the quotation marks, if he used any, and despite the 17th-century spelling, because PSA's handwriting has always been about two ticks from being a purely horizontal line and he's not above copping an affectation. I thought he was such a poet, and such a genius, spouting off against Tom Robbins when most boys his age were reading about motocross, and I don't think my being, at the time, a History major only excuses me. I mean, I still think PSA's brilliant. But I still don't know much of Donne.

I'm so fucking ignorant.

That night, Saturday, RDC and I watched "Wit" on HBO, starring my Emma Thompson as Vivian Bearing (not at all a symbolic name), a 48-year-old Donne scholar who is dying either of ovarian cancer or the eight courses of full-strength experimental chemotherapy she's being treated with. Emma Thompson delivers an absolutely stellar performance, by the bye. She is mostly alone, her parents dead, never married, no children.

Emma Thompson is alone except for her nurse, and one visit from the Donne don she studied under. This professor is in town visiting her great-grandson (who might be Homer, this woman is so old). She has bought the boy some books, and when Thompson--wracked with pain and barely conscious--protests being recited any Donne, the woman reads her Margaret Wise Brown. The runaway bunny says he's going to run away, but his mother says she will run after him. "'If you become a fish and swim in a trout river, then I will be a fisherman who fishes for you,'" she reads, then observes, "What a marvelous allegory of the soul." I had never read that as anything but parent-love, but of course Jesus said he was going to fish for men's souls. Fine. Now I've been one-up'd by a picture book too.

The movie is told in flashbacks, with Vivian professing to a lecture hall in a hospital gown, the don lecturing to Vivian's eyebrowless visage, bald-pated Vivian learning to read. That last was a great scene. Harold Pinter plays her father, for which I might nearly forgive him for that dreadful cinematization of "Mansfield Park," even though we still need to talk about his wretched play "Homecoming." Vivian kneels, sometimes a little girl without front teeth and sometimes her current deteriorating self, on a couch, with a stack of books. As the scene opens, she closes a book--they're all about four inches square and white so I recognized them immediately--and puts it on a stack saying "This one is my favorite." She's obviously said that about each one in turn. Her father, sitting in an armchair with the paper, says, "Good. Read another." She reads the title of the next--The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies--and begins to sound it out: "It is a well-known fact [a truth universally acknowledged?] that lettuce has a soporific effect...." Of course she has trouble with "soporific"; her father has her sound it out and defines it for her. This was the point when Vivian knew her whole life would be about words, because the illustration perfectly bore out the words--the bunnies were getting sleepy.

(RDC knew the books were Beatrix Potter because I squealed when I spotted them and told him what she was reading. Now, though, he was uncertain. "Do Beatrix Potter books really have words like 'soporific' in them?" Of course they have. They're real books for children who will grow up speaking real English; they're not Berenstein Bears with their minimal word lists and Agendas. I relented, informing him that Potter had written Peter Rabbit, the first, for her former governess's children, and therefore perhaps Potter could assume its readers would have the same help with the hard words that Vivian had.)

One of Vivian's doctors--the one who isn't Christoper Lloyd, yoikes--is a former pupil. He explains her scholarship to her primary nurse, who knows nothing of Donne, and it's obvious he understands the gist of Donne's poetry even though he yet sees his patient as research, not a person, while the nurse immediately perceives the human aspect of Donne's metaphysics. Cliché. Fine. Eventually Vivian is put on morphine, and she asks the nurse if it has a soporific effect. The nurse doesn't know about that, but it sure makes you sleepy. Vivian had been worried that her last clear-headed thought might be rotely droning "fine thank you" in response to the inane "How are you feeling today?" Explaining about "soporific" allowed that clear-headed thought to be a shared joke, with laughter.

An amazing movie. Of course, what I liked best was that of the three total authors featured, I could explain two of them to RDC.

One of those errands that we ran, late Saturday afternoon, was the acquisition of cookies, which followed the acquisition of "Almost Famous." Back in October or so, we went to see the re-released "Exorcist," but the theatre had substituted "Pay It Forward" for a sneak preview instead. I suggested "Almost Famous" but RDC, who doesn't universally trust my taste in movies, opted to buy "The Exorcist" instead and watch it at home. I hadn't suggested "Almost Famous" because it had Julia Roberts or Rupert Everett or Julia Ormond's hair or any of my other questionable motives in it; I suggested it because I thought he would like it. I went along with "The Exorcist" at the time but was irritated when RDC got home from a recent trip telling me he'd watched "Almost Famous" on the plane, and it was good and I would like it. Damn it, I knew it was good and that I would like it six months ago. So we bought it. Of course, for airplane viewing two scenes are deleted: the airplane scene--which explains everything and without which the balance of the movie is pointless--and the name of the next summer's tour written on the bus: "No More Planes."

The acquisition of cookies did not include me calling my husband a goober, unlike the movie incident. I demanded dessert, and so we stopped at Wild Oats to buy its all-natural version of Oreos. (Both of us prefer these to Oreos; my only criticism is that, without hydrogenated fats, the white goo melts too readily for easy sandwich-building.) Being butter-fingered, I dropped the first box as I took it off the shelf. As I stooped to pick it up, RDC reached over my head: "I think I want this box." He did not call me a goober, although I deserved it.

While he made dinner, I sat in the kitchen doorway and read aloud a Hemingway short story, "Cross-Country Snow." I was almost done with Tender Is the Night and not amused--except when Franz suggests in his latterly-acquired English that Dick Diver take a leave of abstinence--and I wanted some explanation of the Hemingway/Fitzgerald thing. I still don't get it. Except for For Whom the Bell Tolls, which wasn't an iceberg.

On the other hand, talking about Carson McCullers with my sister that morning was amusing. I told her I had read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and "Ballad of the Sade Cafe'" and was now reading "Member of the Wedding."

"Is that the one with the sad lonely little girl and the black cook?"

I cracked up. She'd summed up Carson McCullers in a phrase. Well, two out of the three I've read and there's lots more I haven't read. But still. I dealt with Heart but I can tell "Member" is going to break me up. "They are the we of me."

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Apparently it is never going to be sunny again. Saturday we bought supplies for our vegetable garden and went to the museum with friends; Sunday we watched "High Fidelity" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" and became vertical only long enough to make marinara sauce to eat over pasta while watching the Oscars followed by "The Sopranos."

• I've been meaning to see "High Fidelity" and then PLT just suggested it to me with its lists and introspection and retrospection and endless self-analysis and the making of mix tapes. Great movie. I am going to associate it with "The Truth about Cats and Dogs," which I haven't seen; I don't know why. There's a Lili Taylor/ Janeane Garofalo parallel in my head for reasons I cannot fathom.
• I don't remember where I just read some theory that Truman Capote actually wrote Mockingbird. I have no loyalty to Harper Lee and she's never spoken about it (which strengthens some's theory) so it's not as if she's continued lying about it, and the book is still wonderful, so I don't know why this should upset me so. It's obvious, once you know that Lee and Capote grew up next door to each other, that Dill is Capote. If Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's plays, they're still there to be read. The author being one person or another shouldn't detract from the work, right? I'm the great autobiographical critic, though; of course a different author changes the (perception of the) text.
• The spaghetti sauce was actually a meat one, not marinara.
• Oscars. You know, Julia Roberts can't be my actress of shame when she has such a great smile. I haven't seen "Requiem for a Dream" which looked like a much more demanding role for Ellen Burstyn than Erin Brockovich was for Roberts; or "The Contender," and I hear Joan Allen was great; or "You Can Count on Me," because that's the stupidest title. Juliette Binoche was pleasant in the pleasant "Chocolat," but neither the role nor the movie was groundbreaking or challenging. So even though Julia got it ahead of three people who probably deserved it more, boy I do like her enthusiasm. And that, accepting the highest honor of her chosen career, she interrupted herself to arrange her dress.
• Sopranos. I do not understand this "RDC looks like Christopher" thing everyone says. I told my sister that people say RDC looks like someone from that show and she said "He does? Who? Oh, Christopher? Maybe a little." She could guess without being told, not that there are so very many options, but she didn't think it was so striking. For which I'm grateful. Except that his own mother thinks so. Sigh. Now I'm calling him my little mafioso.

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Today TDT wasn't feeling well and didn't want to work out, so I scampered to the library. All the grown-up books I've been reading are sad, so I borrowed Paula Danziger's This Place Has No Atmosphere. It's stupid, and not in a good The Cat Ate My Gymsuit kind of way. It's stupid in a The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp kind of way, with the author too busy with plot to cope well with the "futuristic" bits and the "futuristic" bits being inconsistent--overpopulation of humans but there's still paper?