I guess I usually take the pictures at night. This is about 10:15 in the morning, with not only sun in my basement window but sun reflected against snow in my basement window.

Reading: Pamela Dean, Tam Lin

Not yet given up on: John Milton, Paradise Lost

In the midst of: A.S. Byatt, Biographer's Tale; Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter

On deck: Suburban Nation; Invisible Man; Don Quijote

Moving: not yet

Watching: "State of the Union" sometime today

2 March 2002: I'm getting over this date

For a long time I thought 2 March would always be bad. I usually call my mother on 10 April to tell her I didn't break my arm that day. 2001 was the seventeenth year in a row I haven't broken an arm on 10 April.

I don't know how I remember this, because I started my diary in tenth grade, the week after I broke my arm, but in ninth grade, on 2 March, in history class as we discussed doing some hideous sort of medieval reënactment--did Mr. Roach secretly belong to SCA? Where did he and Mr. Hage get this idea?--everyone had something to do, someone to be, except me. This was classic gym behavior, where the least popular kids are picked last. The boys had already arm-wrestled to determine who would be king, because might made right both in the Dark Ages and in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1983. And most of the girls were going to be wenches or sing or whatever fuckwitted plans the teachers had devised. But I, last to be chosen as ever, had no rôle, so Josh supplied brightly, "She could be the village whore!"

Even as Mr. Roach called to my retreating back as I fled the room, "C'mon back, Lisa; Josh, shut up," he was laughing.

God, I hated high school. And you know, why wasn't Josh reprimanded for that? What kind of a dimwitted teacher was Mr. Roach--overall, not at all; I remember him fondly--to advocate, with his laughter, the idea that I could be so ridiculed, and without repercussion? The joke wasn't that I was the class slut; but that I was so unattractive it would be a pointless endeavor.

That's what Kim remembered, she told me at our ten-year class reunion, that when I was overcome by sadness and ridicule in a class and would run out--I remember running out several times--she would follow me, and we would cry in the bathroom together. I kind of remember her joining me, but I also have the impression that she did so in a spying kind of capacity, not out of empathy. Which in turn bolsters her theory that in high school everyone was so wrapped up in individual misery that we had no idea of our effect on other people. As in, Josh just trying to get attention and be thought amusing; me so miserable and feeling so alone and paranoid that I perceived Kim's fellowship as espionage. And again, as we talked about this at the reunion, Ken saying he always remembered me fondly, when otherwise I would number him among the less harmful but still to be avoided boys.

Even in college I expected bad things to happen on 2 March. What a loon.

---

So. I finished To Say Nothing of the Dog. I was reading it yesterday over my lunch hour and Überboss has read it too. He suggested Three Men in a Boat as the funniest novel in the English language. Okay. I liked To Say Nothing of the Dog fine, until the last several pages. It was fun and escapist and peurile in a P.G. Wodehouse way and combined mystery and comedy and history and fiction-geekery with not-too-annoying time travel. Until the end, when it didn't stop with everyone realizing that the Alexandria library could be spared and Richard Burton's writings and Ralph Ellison's novel and Maxine Hong Kingston (those last two are mine, not mentioned in the book), but with annoying speculation.

Then I started to read Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I started in hardcover chez Nisou last September. My paperback copy was lent to Denver from Summit County and has a preface to this edition. In the second paragraph of that, the author writes, "History before the emergence of writing around 3,000 B.C. also receives brief treatment, although it constitutes 99.9% of the five-million-year history of the human species."

Two things, one minor, one major. Minor: B.C.E., please, if your entire premise is that histories have focused too much on Eurasian cultures and on other cultures only inasmuch as the Eurasian ones have beat them up. Major: there is no history before writing! History is written! Pre-history is what happened before writing was invented! I cannot take him seriously.

And hey, maybe a reason most studies of human culture have focused on the most recent three millennia is that that's when stuff happened. I don't buy that humans have been around for five million years. Hominids, yes. Humans, maybe 100,000 years. Homo sapiens sapiens, i.e., us, 30,000 years. Damn it. What is someone supposed to say about five million years ago Tuesday that would be different than five million years ago Saturday? "Hunted a rabbit. Gathered some berries. Had sex. Heard some good stories," versus "Ate the last of the rabbit. Gathered some leaves. Had more sex. Told some good stories, passed them off as my own though." And the same about four, three, two, and one million years ago. People started getting interesting in a human kind of way a lot more recently than one million years ago, and that's why no one writes histories about before that. They write anthropology and paleoanthrology and archeology and other ologies, but not histories, because history wasn't invented yet.

I expect I think so because I am a hideous European oppressor.

---

So I put that aside and picked up Tam Lin. To Say Nothing of the Dog had an sf sticker on its pulp spine. Tam Lin has a fantasy sticker. And, thanks to the Usual Suspects, I have obtained, not from a library with its computerized records, and not from a bookstore when my money would go to the publisher, and not with plastic with its computerized records, but with cash, from Capitol Hill [used] Books, my sister's favorite V.C. Andrews, one of the ones Andrews actually wrote before she died and acquired a ghost writer, My Sweet Audrina. Sf, fantasy, and smutty horror. Yeah, and this was going to be my nonfiction year.

If I cannot quote Flowers in the Attic chapter and verse anymore, I can still remember it in shamelessly shameful detail. I only read the Dollanganger books, coming to my senses between If There Be Thorns (1981; I was 13) and Seeds of Yesterday (1984), and then reading, despite my sense, Seeds and Garden of Shadows as well. Despite that I didn't have this word at my disposal at the time, I realized that Garden was no better than fanfic, with massive discrepancies between it and its predecessors.

But anyway, when I was 11 and 12 and first warping myself with V.C. Andrews, CLH liked My Sweet Audrina, which is not part of a series, best. I never read it, probably out of the same weirdness that prevented me from meeting the Austins out of loyalty to L'Engle's Murrys. Now I might, except I'm thumbing through my five Dollanganger books (stashed behind other books in an under-the-mattress way), and they're overblown and nigh unbearable. Thank goodness.

---

I tried to read Tam Lin over breakfast today, but it's hard to read a mass-market paperback and eat a bowl of oatmeal at the same time. Maybe this is why I don't read a lot of genre fiction, because of its format. A trade paperback or hardcover you can prop open with one hand while manipulating the spoon with the other. And some elements were jostling against each other--Indian print bedspreads and clothing from the late '60s, phys. ed. still being a college requirement and Classics being a common major feeling like the '50s, but interaction among the students feeling much later than either of those times.

So I called Jessie, whose fault my reading this is. "Look," I said, "any fantasy book whose front-cover blurb ["a gorgeous book"] is attributed to Morgan Llywelyn I just can't take seriously. She should call herself Starhawk and be done with it."
"Or she could just be actually Welsh," Jessie pointed out. "Besides, that blurb is a typo. What it's supposed to be is 'This book made Jessie want to study college English.'" (I'm paraphrasing.) "Plus, stop calling me when I'm cleaning for a housewarming party." (I called her last November when I got to the bad bit in Amber Spyglass insisting she reassure me it was going to be okay, but she hadn't read it yet plus was housewarming her apartment.) "Also, it's 1972, and their conversation is off because their consciousnesses have been raised too far for that year."

Oh.

Also--though I have no idea how we got on this topic--oh yes, I do. We were talking, or she was telling me, about how these old tales have been Christianized, so that you can protect yourself from Faerie with baptism and so forth. I told her I always wondered if there were Jewish vampires who didn't mind the cross. Or how a Jewish person would protect herself from a vampire if she didn't want to use a cross. (Actually, I said "himself," and Jessie used the feminine pronoun the next time; see my being a hideous European oppressor, supra.) RDC contributed that a Jewish vampire would be a failure, because it would have to bleed its victim to death in the proper kosher slaughter method, and then blood isn't kosher, so it would starve. "There's a really funny short story to be written there," Jessie realized.

Being neither a vampire nor a Jew, I can't write it; plus I haven't got my bad college-derived novel out of my system yet.

---

Tonight, instead of going to Jessie's housewarming party, which she didn't even invite us to, we are going to the "Where the Wild Things Are" ballet. Haitch was dubious, or worse, but then I learned that Maurice Sendak helped to design the costumes and the set and participated in the choreography (probably only verbally; I saw him ten years ago and I doubt he's gotten svelter or bendier since) and he had always envisioned the book as a dance. I mean, of course it's a dance. What else is a wild rumpus but a dance?