Reading: Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Moving: swam 1k

25 July 2001: Books

I'm not reading Under the Net because I am pretty sure I left it on the bus Monday afternoon. Wheee. So I've been reading High Fidelity. Except last night when I was looking through The Joy of Cooking to discover something new to do to zucchini and saw how certain individual pages are stained and crumpled, I thought of Sam Hamilton's home doctoring book and how some sections were well-thumbed--broken bones and everything to do with pregnancy and childbirth--and other sections (on STDs) had never been cracked (Steinbeck says because the Hamiltons were either moral or lucky). Although I was aiming for East of Eden, somehow I took She's Come Undone as well. That ending still gets to me, what she sees on tv the night before and what she sees not on tv the day of.

For the first time I noticed a time discrepancy, with spoilers: Dolores announces her independence from psychiatry in 1976, moves to Montpelier in the summer, lives with Dante through the fall, and has an abortion early in 1977. In the spring of 1978, their friends buy a house. In the summer of 1979, they go on the road trip, during which the child would have passed its first birthday [sic]. The marriage ends in the spring of 1980, just before her grandmother dies. All those dates are given in the text. The whole novel depends on pop culture, on television shows, music, and the detritus of fads, and it uses as milestone the touchstones of our cultural memory: the Mod Squad, Etch-a-Sketches, Sly and the Family Stone, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, the U.S. hostages in Iran. Of course Lamb had to work in the bicentennial, so being independent in 1976 works. Dolores' remembering Vita Marie's first birthday would have passed while they're on the road is the beginning of the end of the marriage, and indeed it doesn't last until her second. I think Lamb just goofed up. It's minor.

I enjoyed The Mists of Avalon, as always, but I noticed glitches more than minor in it this time. Just before the Beltane when Gwenhwyfar wears the charm, Morgaine tells her that Arthur can father a child, that he has and Morgause is fostering it and that it is not the sort of child he could acknowledge. She also tells her not to ask questions, and G doesn't. Later on, Gareth mentions Morgaine's son while at Camelot, and this is how Gwenhwyfar first learns Morgaine has a child. At this point, Gwenhwyfar should have reflected, "Now gee, my husband has a son Morgause is fostering, and Morgaine has a son Morgause is fostering, and why can't Arthur even know about, let alone acknowledge, his child?"

Nine hundred pages of plot intrigue and character development are hard to keep a grip on, I'm sure. That's why when Taleisin calls Igraine "child," she appreciates his paternal affection and his age that allows him to see her as so much younger than he. That must be why Morgaine's reaction, several years and scores and scores of pages later, is about the same as Igraine's was.

Whatever. It's still a great book and one of my favorites.

I can't believe I watched that stupid made-for-tv movie. I taped it, so at least I wasted only 3.5 hours instead of the full four, but still. The compression of the plot, yes, whatever. I expected that. I did expect that there would be some attempt, however feeble, to convey the power of belief. There was none. I did expect the Avalon-Christian struggle to be dropped for the sensitivity of the average Usan, and it was.

• I'm not sure, but I'd say the priestesses would have considered pyrokinesis sacrilegious, just as they considered the Christian transubstantiation sacrilegious. So I thought that was a bad example of what Morgaine learned. Also it reminded me, and probably many of the rest of the audience, of Carrie and Firestarter.
• And all the sunny colors of robes made everyone on Avalon look like Hare Krishnas or whatever that cult was that Bill the Cat got sucked into. Dye was expensive as well as a vanity and the main color would have been blue. Woad have been blue. Ahem. Or no color at all.
• When Arthur was King Stag--with other hunters? and a spear?--I was reminded of the opening scene of "Last of the Mohicans," but whoever played Arthur wasn't nearly as hot as Daniel Day Lewis (as, in fact, he shouldn't be). That's when the resemblance to "Excalibur" was greatest, which isn't a compliment.
• Any time any one had a fit of the Sight, she looked transmogrified, not transfixed. Speaking of, spinning wheels? Does the average television-watcher not understand about spindles and distaffs? Britannica posits that the spinning wheel was invented in India and brought to Europe in the middle ages, which is later than Mists is set, and Britain would have had it last of anyone but Ireland. And Iceland. And the Faroes. But anyway, later than most of Europe. And not in the fifth century.

Grr.

Anyway.

Wally Lamb didn't like the first cover for She's Come Undone, which was a woman standing on a beach lightly mummified with ribbon that the wind was unspiraling. My first copy of it was a pulp paperback with a cover I didn't like but he did: the winged leg at least had something to do with the plot. In Denver I bought a trade copy to replace my tattered, falling-apart pulp, and I wonder if he likes it. It's more aesthetically pleasing to me than the leg, but it has less to do with the plot than the ribbon coming undone. I've been thinking of replacing my trade copy of Mists because it has a stain on the cover, and not just an "eeek! the perfection of my book is marred!" stain but a condom stain that is, actually, only vaguely round and not exactly obvious to the casual observer as anything more than a circular discoloration. But now I wonder if the only cover available now features Julianna Marguiles or even mentions the television show.

And I do own a book with a movie cover, with a made-for-television movie cover at that. When I was in middle school there was a miniseries of East of Eden with Jane Seymore. That's why I first read it, and I bought a copy with Timothy Bottoms slouched in the grass and Jane Seymore standing looking down on him. And Bruce Boxleitner. And Sam played by Lloyd Bridges? Wow. And I still haven't seen the James Dean version, which shocks Haitch, but later in high school when I first learned about it and that it started with Cal and Aaron-already-Aron, well, I was shocked. Now I think I could see it with less possessiveness.

That is one of the earliest books I still own. I owned very few books as a child, earned no way to buy them myself and was given few, but had plenty of access to the school and town libraries. My mother gave me The Story about Ping for one Easter and I still have that. In ninth grade on a school trip to Boston, I bought Watership Down. I already might have owned East of Eden. When PGN starting having book sales, I bought lots of used books, some of which I've only just got rid of: I knew I was supposed to read The Brothers Karamazov, so I bought it, but if I were going to read the book now, I certainly would read larger text from non-yellowed paper of less dubious translation. I still have the book sale copies of the Anthony Burgess I bought after reading A Clockwork Orange, Honey for the Bears and The End of the World News. RDC gave me lovely hardcovers of Watership Down and To Kill a Mockingbird for recent Christmases. I gave up my PGN book sale copy of Mockingbird without regret, but I foisted my Watership Down on Haitch, who probably would like to read it, if she ever wants to read it, in as clean a copy as I would like to read Dostoyevsky. Anyway, I'm one remove from its demise, and that's fine.

Dora just read Taking Care of Terrific in the same actual book she read in third grade or whenever. That's amazing to me.

I wonder if I do still own anything earlier than East of Eden besides Ping. I bought Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are and Ferdinand as an adult, but that doesn't mean I didn't have some picture books that I read to tatters and that were thrown out, not by me, one day along with my blankie (true story). I took a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth from the paperback swap shelf at PGN without actually swapping. Someone--Elizabeth?--gave me A Wrinkle in Time for my birthday in fifth grade, but I didn't have it at UConn with me when I met Madeleine L'Engle and bought another copy for her to sign, and I gave away the earlier copy. Katherine, who actually went by a nickname I decline to repeat, gave me Daughters of Eve in sixth grade or so. Maybe seventh. Lou-Anne gave me Julie of the Wolves sometime, in hardcover even. Where is that? I hope in the same box as Claudia and my yearbooks, a box I hope is still in my mother's house somewhere. Oh, and I received a Bible at the end of fourth grade Sunday School with my name on the cover in Child of the Manger gold. I still have that and still haven't bought an academic edition of the King James translation.

Occasionally I was given some money to buy books from Scholastic Books. Mostly I remember feeling left out when the package would come and everyone would have these great new books except me. Waah waah waah. That's one thing I don't resent: that there was no spare money was hardly my mother's fault. I remember an elementary book on anthropology with sepia line drawings of the Leakeys in Olduvai Gorge and a fantasy called something like Lucy and the Merman (at least it was about Lucy and a merman) and a beginner's cookbook. I left that book in my second-grade classroom one day and it disappeared. My mother was really disappointed--not so much in me for losing it, though that was evident, but that the recipes were gone, because she thought they were nice simple ones to start me on. What I remember is an egg rolling off the counter and being far too squicked to clean it up. Also bringing a still-warm brownie--cooked with a different egg and lots of help from my mother--to my father, and I remember his smile. I think the smile sticks with me because I saw it so seldom. And of course Claudia was a Scholastic edition.