Reading: Keri Hulme, The Bone People, Harper's, Westword

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Watching: melting snow

Listening: Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking (tape 4)

12 April 2001: Usage

A couple of months ago I said something about cops with which a reader recently took issue. He's right that I stereotyped, but his analogy--what if I had not ranked on cops but on an ethnic or racial group--is faulty, if only because you can choose your career in a way you cannot choose your race, ethnicity, or culture. Anyway, I didn't excise my comment. Though I choose how to present myself (and I do; "selectively," if you wondered, OMFB), whether warts and all or not, once a wart is up, it should stay.

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The Haunting of Hill House reminded me of No Exit and The Yellow Wallpaper. First No Exit, which I wrongly remembered as having four people instead of three, with the Dudleys serving as the butler-type character. The four main characters never leave the property and barely the house; service is questionable; Eleanor thinks she's made a friend in Theodora, but has she? Plus the very simple house:hell thing. And Mrs. Montague; if she's not fiendish torture devised in at least the fourth circle, what is she?

Then, spoiler, The Yellow Wallpaper. Eleanor arrives at the creepy old house expecting it will help her, but it doesn't; the decor is deplorable; as Eleanor never leaves the property and barely the house, so does Gilman's protagonist barely leave the room; the nursery is important; the house has a mind and an intent of its own; and there's no way out. Wait, I'm back to Sartre. Plus if, as Columbine says, it's one of the creepiest books ever, then it has even more in common with The Yellow Wallpaper, which has a lot of creeping in it.

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Another thing last week's clerk at the Tattered Cover mentioned was an article in a recent Harper's in which David Foster Wallace reviews a new usage book. Or rants about grammar and syntax. She said, "and he goes on..." and I added, "and on and on and on?" and she grinned. So I picked up the Harper's. The first page of his article is nearly flush to each margin and set in maybe four-point type, hundreds of abused words, like using "escalate" as a transitive verb, just for instance. The reader-critic supra said that such a comment as I made about cops uttered by my father about black people would make me bust [sic] a blood vessel. For the record, his opinions don't make me apopletic, perhaps because, refusing to listen to them, I don't allow it. What shouldn't irk me as much as it does comes a lot closer to making me burst a blood vessel than his prejudice, because I can't refuse to listen to it. My father, who loves me wholeheartedly, says "irregardless."

If Wallace's fiction is anything like this article, peppered with footnotes and self-referential blather and asides from both himself and the editor (he writes "OK" even though Harper's writes "okay"), then I bet I'd like it for the same reason I liked David Eggers. Self-deprecating while self-aggrandizing. Mmm, that sounds familiar.

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My babies are doing well. I mean, for plants of mine they must be, as any of them have sprouted at all. I put a few seeds into each two-inch square pot, which should have been okay since the spacing of all of them was 1/2". No more than one seed per pot has sprouted and not all of the pots have a little green stem reaching for the sky, but those that are are so beautiful, so strong, so alive.