People think my hair is long. The end of my braid doesn't reach my hipbone, and therefore, it is not long.

Reading: William Kennedy, Ironweed.

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Watching: "Affliction" later. Also "ER" later.

Listening: Sister Helen Prajean, Dead Man Walking (finished tape one)

Garden: It is Never Going to Be Sunny Again.

28 March 2001: Chia Abs

Chia abs. I really like that mental image. Chia abs.

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Hair Commentary, removed from the left column where it doesn't belong: This morning someone asked if I'd cut my hair, because my braid wasn't as long as usual. I freaked for two seconds before remembering that it was french-braided, which takes up more hair across and so leaves less down. I'm back to thinking I could never cut it. RDC said "Good."

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Ironweed isn't any joyfest either, but the prose is amazing. It's the third novel in his Albany cycle, a fact I didn't know when I started it. I am hoping they're all only set in Albany. Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool owes a lot, so far, to Ironweed. Maybe I only think so because of the New York thing, though Albany's hardly upstate to anyone who doesn't live in the City. Furthermore, Richard Russo's Mohawk and Risk Pool are also set in upstate New York. Three books by Kennedy, three by Russo. It's only the state and protagonist, the loner who should be despicable but isn't, that they really have in common.

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The plot of Best Picture of the Year that isn't the best at all, 1996 and 2001: One man played by an Aussie whom others find, for reasons that escape me, rivetingly attractive, loses his love and guides an untrained band of brave but ignorant folk who've been roped into battle when they've better things to do, into what seems for a while like victory until the one man, who wears a skirt, is betrayed by a Bad Man--you can tell he's bad because the average Usan moviegoer does not sympathize with his sexual tastes--and dies a martyr's death.

Differences:

• Russell Crowe can act.
• Gladiator is watchable.
• In Braveheart, only the rabble wear skirts.

I watched it again last night, trying to Appreciate it this time. Once again, eh. I must see "Traffic."

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On this morning's walk I finished Paradise, and after a half a block or so when I had finished reeling--not the cassette but my gait--I shucked my backpack to dig out my next book, Dead Man Walking. George Guidall, my favorite reader, introduces it. His voice makes me go all gooey inside. And then Barbara Caruso began her reading. I knew when I checked out the audio book that I had listened to her before, but I couldn't remember exactly what. Recorded Books Inc. lists a lot of children's books--Tuck Everlasting, A Wrinkle in Time, String on the Harp, and Louisa May Alcott, Beverly Cleary, Lucy Maude Montgomergy, and Cynthia Voigt. And aha, I've listened to her read Song of the Lark, Cat's Eye, and The Robber Bride. Ooo, and she's also done Waiting for Aphrodite. I love Sue Hubbell. Listening to The Robber Bride was great, because you get the full effect of Toni's talking backward. She sings "Darling Clementine" backward and reading it on the page isn't nearly as funny or illustrative as hearing it. And Porter's read Main Street, too, so if I can get ahold of it I'll listen to that to knock it off my 2001 reading menu.

Browsing through Recorded Books Inc., I see that I can listen to Anna Karenina and The Red and the Black read by Davina Porter, whom I like, and The Call of the Wild, Darkness at Noon, The Good Soldier, and The Razor's Edge read by Frank Muller, who read me Moby-Dick and Blue Highways. Ooo, or Shakespeare's sonnets. Three of those Mullers are on the Modern Library list, three that I'm not excited about, and it is (admittedly) effortless to listen. Well, no; hearing is effortless. But Muller will make it easy to listen.

And absolutely the narrator makes a difference--I listened to Out of Africa and West with the Night, one after the other and read by the same narrator, and now I can't tell the two apart. A woman with the unfortunate name of Lynn Thigpen read Paradise, and though I saw Rubyfruit Jungle at the library I took Dead Man Walking because she read Rita Mae Brown too. I don't suppose Paradise and Rubyfruit have as much in common as the two tales of two women in east Africa in the '20s who both were involved with Dennis Fitzhadden*, but the narrator is a huge influence.

* Or whatever his name was. Of Dennis I'm sure, because--autobiographical critic that I am--I am sure that's how the penname Dinesen originates. Oh, poop. It's not. Dinesen was her father's name. My reason was more romantic. And his name was Finch Hatton. How odd of me to guess at a similar sound. Anyway, once again, I love the web.

Dead Man Walking is going to be wonderful. Painful and wrenching and brutal and honest and wonderful.

And now I have an audio menu too:

• Anna Karenina
• At Play in the Fields of the Lord
• Babbitt
• Babylon Revisited
• Basque History of the World
• The Castle
• Crime and Punishment
• Cunning Man
• Fathers and Sons
• Galileo's Daughter
• Night
• The Red and the Black
• Rubyfruit Jungle
• The Tin Drum
• The Trial

Especially after Tender Is the Night, I'm not likely to read Babylon Revisited, nor do I pursue Kafka or Dostoevsky or Sinclair Lewis enthusiastically.