I want veins to pop when I do this.

Reading: William Faulkner, Light in August; Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh; and Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

Moving: lots of gardening this weekend, plus weights today.

Listening: Bob Marley.

29 April 2001: Over in April

This morning in bed I finished Light in August. About that book, I have this to say: "Hazel considered this lot briefly, but it beat him." Its language was amazing, but its point, I confess, eluded me. I had expected it to be about the woman who was going to deliver and become lighter in August. Silly me.

Thick as I am, mere moments after I closed Faulkner with a humph, I opened The Golden Bowl. I read a page and a half over breakfast; RDC asked me what book it was and I told him.
"I thought you weren't going to read any Henry James."
"But there's the movie coming out with Jeremy Northam and Kate Beckinsale."
RDC has a low opinion of Merchant-Ivory movies and expressed it here. I have a low opinion of James.
A movie is a silly reason to read a book, it's true, and in the few pages over whose lines I had moved my eyes, I could tell that this was going to be another novel of mouse-language. (And the Watership Down mouse has maybe an Italian accent, which matches the Italian prince's character, so it all fits together.) So I closed the James and wondered what I would read next.

What I want to read is something from the Feminista list, specifically Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, since I liked Sexing the Cherry and The Passion so much. But we have only Written on the Body. So maybe I'll read The Way of All Flesh, again from Modern Library (except what I have is a no-name paperback from Phoebe's booksale). I liked Butler's Erewhon well enough and hey, Way is at least mentioned in a Merchant-Ivory movie.

I bought a lot of books that I thought I Ought to Read from Phoebe's booksales. I got some great stuff, like Swallows and Amazons (which I had not read before 1990) and a complete Crosswicks Journals. Looking at the A-Dickens bookcase, I can see that I bought Lucky Jim and a biography of Elizabeth Bowen and non-Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess titles and A Journal of the Plague Years and books about which I knew nothing except that Richard Adams used their lines as epigrams in Watership Down (like Walter de la Mare), few of which I've read because they're all yellowed and musty. In fact I've just donated my DisPossessed* and Crime and Punishment because if I ever do read any Dostoyevsky I'll do so from attractive, readable volumes.

* 9 May 2001: Ursula LeGuin wrote The Dispossessed. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote The Possessed. I be an English major, honest.

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Yesterday as I dug through what will be a modest annual bed, I turned up lots of earthworms, which made me happy. That bed must have been a garden patch before, because it's good loamy dirt. I found a lot of regular earthworms and feed them compost mixed thoroughly with the living dirt, and greeted them all by name (all their names were either "Squirmy" or "Lowly"). Then I turned over one more trowelful of dirt and shrieked.

Normal North American worms are thinner around than a pencil and even thinner when they're stretched out, right? What I had exposed was thicker around than those beginner crayon sets, the eight-color Crayola pack you use in first grade when you're still getting used to writing implements. This monster was as big around as my thumb. I expected to see a crew of Fremen on its back with grappling hooks. So instead of Squirmy or Lowly I called this one Arrakis and buried it. Deep.

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I call RDC's office his study, because that's what it was when he was in school and it's a nicer name. He calls it his office but also calls my room "office" instead of "study." This bothered me--because my room is definitely not an office--until it occurred to me that it might be an Office. It is not at the top of a brownstone or of a country house; it doesn't have a skylight and four windows facing east and north or seven windows with a suspicious gap on the east side; it doesn't have pictures of warships looking like teakettles or articles about Tribble Customs in the Sudden glued to the walls; but it does have walls encrusted with indispensable objects and bookcases bursting with books; a shelf of [stuffed animals] in [no] degree of decay, leftover decorations from everywhen, one mask (with fake peacock feathers), and other articles too numerous to mention. So RDC can call it an office, but I know it's an Office. I'm working on the trapeze.

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Gardening: I double-dug the annual bed, evened out the pile of dirt in the vegetable frame, weeded around the raspberry bushes, tried to amend that soil with less success (it's very clayey), turned the compost heap (what remained of it after the amending), watered the roots of the nectarine and pear trees and lobbed off some dead branches. And forgot entirely to get a load of vegetable and fruit pulp from the Wild Oats Juice Bar later Saturday afternoon.

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Today we treated the patio furniture with teak oil. Also RDC started to work on the bikes while I lolled under the cherry tree with (not Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit but) Written on the Body, of which we've had our own bookseller's uncorrected review copy for almost ten years. But the bike pump no longer pumps, so, frustrated, we retreated from the heat for him to read/watch tv/nap while I did 90', not continuously or perhaps rigorously enough, of weights, and then he got on the Nordic Track while I continued my lolling on the porch swing with my book and my buddy (and my very sore thighs).

Our neighbors were having a family party, and I sat reading and listening to the pleasant sounds of conversation and vigorous play with Uncle Neighbor. Eventually a two-year-old stopped in front of our walk. "Is that a birdie?" Blake's cage with him in it was on the top porch column, as usual. Quickly the other three Neighbors' Nephews, none older than five, joined the first little boy. From their shouts and giggles I already knew all four names and who was who. The original one wanted to touch Blake, which absolutely wasn't going to happen, and all four crowded around his cage. He was so good with them, chucking his little greeting noise (which a friend of ours thought was an attack noise, although his tone and posture make him about as threatening as a ladybug while he delivers it) and bowing to them, even though he usually is leery of kids. They're so freakishly short, and they move unexpectedly! Who wouldn't be scared of kids? Brr.

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And I closed The Way of All Flesh for now because I'm going to have to convince myself it's not another Of Human Bondage. Plus it's on the Modern Library list only because it was published posthumously. It was written in the 1880s. A little earlier than Maugham, but still dreadworthy: as RDC said, high realism, e.g., Henry James. Blarg. In some popular media form I forget, a character dismisses Of Human Bondage for being so disappointing--obviously not the subject matter he'd expected. In "A Room with a View," the Reverend Beebe puts down The Way of All Flesh with superior distaste, "Never heard of it," also clearly mistaking the subject matter.

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I love Julie Andrews. I like Christopher Plummer and after seeing him onstage in "Barrymore" admire him even more. But for them to star in "On Golden Pond," presumably a body of water across the Alps from Austria, is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. I cannot picture Mary Poppins asking Captain Georg von Trapp if he'd rather dance or suck face. I know I'm way out of my demographic watching "60 Minutes"; nothing, however, ever swayed me from my loyalty to this program until the preview for that travesty.

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In happier news, both RDC and I think my saddlebags are less. Wheeeeee!