Reading: Don Quijote and Blindness

Watching: ER

Moving:

26 September 2002: Thursday

FX has shown all of Buffy's season four and has reverted to seasons one and two, but not in order. I can't find a season five in the next two weeks.

Tuesday afternoon I had a package from my mother: the two paintings she wanted me to take in June and a jar of elderberry jam, the latter wrapped in Yule paper, all three items in yet another department store box. The jam was on top of the canvases but had not broken them. She certainly seals a package better now, no longer using masking tape, and, as I told her, after a few hours with a blowtorch I can generally get into one, but she's no better at using a sturdy box.

One painting's colors are right for the living room but not its subject matter (a copper urn), frame (is it hard to reframe a painting?), or size (we have three large wall spaces and it would be dwarfed, like the painting in Winter Solstice. The other is of red flowers and I'll probably hang that in the sunroom eventually. Perhaps the urn could go in the front landing, where it wouldn't have sun directly on it and whose walls are a better size for it.

Wednesday afternoon I found myself at my once-favorite library branch. The central Denver branch downtown is great for its architecture and size and study space and selection, but its mood is lacking. The first best library I found when I moved here is the Koebel branch of Arapahoe County. It has a reader's adviser whose merry smile is as merry and ready as my publishing professor, and like her she has the perfect job.

They've rearranged the children's room with all the juvenile fiction against three walls of the children's room, not as cozy as stacks. I looked for Diana Wynne-Jones books and considering trying Helen Cresselthorpe or whatever the Ordinary Jack author's name is, but I didn't. I looked for Ender's Game and was glad not to find it. It's an assignment book and I'm not in the mood. Instead I found Blindness, which is not only on that list of characters but also on the Scandinavian list of most important books ever (and it was published in 1995). Also The Corrections, because such a trendy reader am I.

Also I finished How Green Was My Valley (finally) and was disappointed at how abruptly it ended. Huw narrates the whole book as he prepares to leave the house he grew up in, when he's about 50. The action is set from his fifth to maybe twentieth year. He drops some hints that he follows up on later, so the fact that several hints and most storylines are not finished off is really jarring. It ended up annoying me. It annoyed me all along: if I'd found it a more compelling listen it wouldn't've taken me four months.

So I got The Tin Drum. I figured it would have names I wouldn't follow for being German, and it does, but its narrator is George Guidall, and that's all I need to know. Oskar's on that list of characters too.

Huw is not.

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I waited until 9:20 to start watching "ER" so I could watch it without commercials. For some time before I watched "The Civil War," the 1864 episodes that had been broadcast Wednesday. So by the time I watched "ER" with its deserved "graphic content" warning, I was already benumbed by photographs of Andersonville prisoners. Not so benumbed that I didn't shriek (making Blake flutter and shriek) and pause, but hollow at least.

One soldier's diary, found on his body after Cold Spring, had a last entry: "Today I died." Soldiers pinned notes to their jackets so their bodies might be identified. The immediate reason--the force of the bullet removed inches of bone--that amputation was necessary. The commandant of Andersonville being the only person prosecuted (and convicted) of war crimes. Glass negative plates of the war's four million photographs lost or broken or sold to gardeners to wall greenhouses, so that "the sun slowly burned the image of war from thousands of greenhouse glass panes."

One hundred and forty years ago and real people and my country vs. a fictional television character. I am ashamed of myself that I shrieked for Romano at all.

And I like saying "The United States is..." rather than "The United States are...."