Reading: The Flâneur, Lost, Falling Angels, The Griffon, The Wars of the Roses

Moving: not enough

Listening: Darkness at Noon

Watching:

October 2001: The Month

Westword ran an article on sprawl back in August. A subsequent letter to the editor said sprawl results when women have more than two children. Truth. There was backlash--I was not myself aware women had mastered parthenogenesis à la Herland. The letter-writer said in yet another letter that anger is exactly what he wanted to provoke to make people think, and it is women's fault because we're the ones who get and remain pregnant. His vitriol does nothing to promote even voluntary childlessness, let alone voluntary exinction.

Westword also ran a letter from someone who disagreed with a negative review of "Legally Blonde." She called the movie "profound" and exclaimed about its many merits and truths to her companions throughout the show, apparently with such insight that another moviegoer thanked her for the commentary as they filed out. Snort.

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5-8 October
I'm glad we coordinated our return from Europe for a Friday to have the whole weekend to recover. That weekend I even wrote a few entries. I have no idea what we did the last weekend of September, but this Columbus Day weekend we went to Aspen to use another free hotel weekend--a benefit to RDC's traveling and the reason we stayed in l'Avenue George V in Paris. I do love Aspen. It was dead as it ever gets, after aspen foliage, before snow, despite the film festival the town sponsors to drum up pre-ski travel. But so beautiful, so peaceful.

The night we arrived, we brought our books downstairs to the three leather couches squared around a dual-sided fireplace. I ordered mulled cider, RDC brandy, and the three people on the next couch ordered s'mores. When their order arrove, I stared. No graham crackers but lemony gingerbread, no marshmallows out of a bag but carefully shaped s-curves of whatever the stuff is that makes marshmallows, and, OMFB, the chocolate was far beyond a Hershey bar. Not only were all the ingredients homemade, but the fire itself was delivered in a literal pot-au-feu. The people--two classmates from Northwestern's MBA program and the spouse of one from Old Greenwich, CT--asked, seeing our not so inconspicuous glances, whether we had never had s'mores around a campfire.

Jumping Jehosophat, people, because I grew up in Old Lyme instead of Old Greenwich and went to a public university does not mean I'm completely culturally deprived. I said of course I had had s'mores, but I had never seen the very fire delivered. I did not continue to add that I had expected the server to bring the stuff and they to toast their marshmallows over the large gas fire with its faux logs, not that, Aspen or not, the clientele wouldn't be so inconvenienced as to remove themselves from their blanket to the hearth. But of course, it was Aspen, it was the St. Regis, and in Aspen, they bring you the fire.

Saturday we shuttle-bused up to the Maroon Bells and hiked up to a fading-away lake whose name I forget with a couple named, I kid you not, Tom and Jerry, except probably Jerri or Gerri. Tom was a geologist who taught at a community college nearish Plymouth, which surprised me. He had such a Kennedy accent I was sure he was from Hyannisport itself and not nearly as far away as Plymouth. So he made an interesting hiking companion.

The Maroon Bells are so beautiful.

Saturday night we ate at a great place called Campo Fiori whose decor I loved. Painted ivy trailed everywhere. Sunday we ate sushi at Kenichi, which was, surprise surprise, overpriced, also no better than we have at Tazu in Denver. Sunday day we spent with newspapers and books, walking around town, swimming in the pool, reading the news, savoring a yummy breakfast from the Main Street Café, browsing in Explore bookstore (where I bought Girl with a Pearl Earring and Elske and RDC The Art of War). It was in the bookstore immediately after breakfast that we heard on NPR that the war had started. We did not go up Aspen mountain on the gondola, which had been the plan, because town was so dead the gondola was off until Thanksgiving. In the evening, in front of the fire, I finished rereading Elske and we had our own s'mores, with laptop fire.

And they were good.

Monday we drove home and I read The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Speaking of, where is my book?

12 October
As soon as people started to cancel from JournalCon, I was glad to throw my hat in with the deserters. Especially at the moment I learned of the mistake that required us pay twice for Shakespeare tickets, the day after the attacks when casual flying seemed no longer so casual and certainly not so convenient, bowing out seemed fine. I'll meet Dora one day.

16 October
I took out the vegetable garden in here somewhere. The rest of the month fades to the 16th, when I saw Nick Bantock at the Tattered Cover. He said that he had never intended to write a story, only to draw its pictures, and it's true that the plot of all is weak and contrived. The artwork is so amazing the stilted plot doesn't matter, of course. He spoke of how the pictures are at least as important as the words--for him I'd say more--and when he was asking questions afterward I asked him if he thought of his books as you would of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Of Experience. He thanked me for the comparison. Afterward when he was signing my book, I introduced myself, saying I had been the one asking about Blake. He had remembered in the interim that Sabine quotes Blake while walking in London in Sabine's Notebook, "fearful symmetry." I'm a horrible blurter: I repeated "fearful symmetry" but pronounced it (correctly) to rhyme with "hand or eye." He nodded, smiling.

Also, before the reading, he read "Slouching toward Bethlehem," which he's quoted in the books often. Yeats published it in 1921--the year of the Palestinian mandate. It's so hideously appropriate.

19 October
I met Chile at the Tattered Cover to see Tracey Chevalier. I love that Vermeer. I had bought Elske and Girl with the Pearl Earring, the former because I must possess all Cynthia Voigt and the latter because I had heard good things about it and because I judge books by their covers and I love that Vermeer. For Elske, I wonder if Voigt had that painting in mind for the cover from the start, because the society is Dutch in feel--trade and water and aprons. Girl I positively adored. I read it Monday. Friday I heard the author read from Falling Angels, "which has nothing to do with Vermeer or the Netherlands, even though I know a lot of people would like for my second book to have been Daughter of the Girl with a Pearl Earring orA Year in Provence with the Girl with a Pearl Earring." I really enjoyed her reading. And then she talked about plans for her third book, which will again be about a mystery of art: The Lady and the Unicorn Tapestries, which, she informed her audience, hang in the Cluny Museum in Paris. I squealed and whacked Chile on the arm.

22 October
The last of a string of great author visits, Gregory Maguire came to the Tattered Cover for his new book Lost.

26 October
Happy Hour at Hemingway's for Haitch's birthday. (Doesn't she have great hair? Perfect strangers often comment on it.) Being the generous person I am, I returned her copies of Rick Steve's French, German, and Italian Phrasebook and Me Talk Pretty One Day, finally handed over the French Kit-Kats she had implored me to get (there was an 18" strip of them) and the bar of European Nestlé chocolate that, at 85% cocoa, is really chocolate, and gave her The Gryphon (the new Bantock) and a gift certificate to Bath & Body Works. I met a lot of this year's new students including a man Haitch is, quite rightly in my opinion, taken by, and also, uh, pseudonym, pseudonym, Butterfly I guess, who had me laughing from the first.

Haitch came up with the best birthday idea ever for next year, when she turns 30. She is going to have a Last Day, just like in "Logan's Run." I would combine it with Hallowe'en and dress up like Peter Ustinov (I could hardly be more unattractive as him than as Twister), but I think she just wants everyone to have a crystal in their palm. Besides, she already has a great Hallowe'en costume idea.

Fiver's not enjoying System 10.

27 October
After dropping RDC at DIA, I went to the Koelbel library (one of my favorites) for the first time in years--years?--and walked the 5.2 mile link along the Highline Canal for the first time in not quite as long.

Hallowe'en party chez someone I met only once before, at last year's party, co-hosted by last year's host. I was finally Twister, and while people did occasionally spin my spinner and lay a hand or foot on me as appropriate (interactivity being the key to a successful costume), neither had I put enough effort into creating the costume nor had I really the body to have made it really successful. Barbie was a drugstore cowgirl, Sabrina a mummy. (I recognized her immediately recognizable because of the way she moves; Clove (a geisha) did because of her toes.) Butterfly and I danced (and she can dance) to Animotion's "Obsession" during the '80s portion of the night, hence the pseudonym; I siezed Dexy and pulled him onto the dance floor during the first notes of, of course, "Come on Eileen," because I wouldn't've named him after Dexy and the Midnight Runners for nothing; and Clove and I turned to each other, squealed, and dashed for the floor upon the first notes of "Dancing Queen" (during the '70s portion). Meanwhile, Haitch looked absolutely fantastic in her corset (which I got to lace her into)--I have to ask her permission to repeat the description I read in Darkness at Noon--and danced with the man who has so many desirable, intriguing, and worthy qualities I struggle to reduce them to a suitable alias. Harlequin Sweetlips, maybe, which is a joke Haitch wouldn't get but which I hope is making Jessie laugh right now. During lulls in the dancing music (who put that Carl Orff bit--the bit they use in movies to indicate, as in "Excalibur," that no one can act in the following scene so they use this by-now clichéd music to convey emotion--to an industrial beat? Whoever is responsible needs to be spanked), I talked to Matters, who conducted the interview with Barbie and Sabrina for their business for "Colorado Matters" on CPR. He was really interesting and I enjoyed him a lot, and I was thankful that Barbie and Sabrina are as natural and casual flirts as they are because I knew that, had RDC been there and not in Indianapolis (aha, my revenge), I wouldn't have given a second thought to the attention I was paying him--RDC and I generally spend parties in opposite corners of the room--but without him, there might have been a Question.

29 October
I watched "The Ref," because it was on while I was doing weights. Kevin Spacey, therefore okay, except not. Some good lines. The best bit: it was set in "Old Baybrook," Connecticut.

30 October:
Waaaah!

31 October:
Grand total: six trick-or-treaters, three one and two. The three were small, with their father, and my favorite because they were my first (in two years) and the only ones to say "Trick or Treat!" They were a vampire, a ghoul, and a clown. I sat reading at the dining table and when I finally heard little kid voices I had the door open the second after they rang it. (To have it open before they rang it really would have made me pathe.) I heard the little-kid voice because it was high-pitched, but I didn't hear the father's response to the question, "What is that?" which I realized probably referred to my jill-o'-lantern. This year I carved it with a peace sign. Later I had a two-year-old astronaut and asked if he was going to go to the moon, and he said no, to his aunt's house. I love little kids. The last were a pair of pubescents out for what, if it would be their last year, they really didn't put a lot of effort into, either costume-wise (one wore pussycat ears, the other nothing at all) or in using the time-honored greeting.