Reading: The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Shut up.

14 November 2002: Mrs. Frisby

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is a fine reading aloud book. I don't remember the last time I read it; this time I'm noticing all this subtle sexism. Jeremy introduces Mrs. Frisby to the owl as a lady mouse. I can nearly excuse that because Jeremy's pretty young and just today I told someone that if someone else had one more edit to my project I'd have to yell her "Look, lady!" in a really threatening tone. But I was totally channeling Calvin there, "Believe it, lady." There's the whole issue that she's Mrs. Frisby without a first name, whatever. It's 1971. The thing that really gets to me--besides that of Mrs. Frisby's two sons and two daughters, the flighty one's the one named Cynthia, and besides that "the wives" prettied up the hallway, and besides that the girl-rat is all swoony over Justin (the reason I can overlook these things is that Mrs. Frisby does what she needs to do, period, because she RULZ)--is that it's Mr. Fitzgibbon's farm. Not the Fitzgibbons' farm, with a Mr. and a Mrs. and two sons. Just Mr. Fitzgibbon's. Is this to emphasize that he is The Enemy? Because he's not, not even to the level of the humans Nuthanger Farm.

RDC cracked me up though. In the beginning O'Brien lists the farm's crops, including black-eyed peas. RDC made me go back and repeat that part. He was surprised by black-eyed peas, it turns out, because he thought this book was set in England. I knew he was completely unfamiliar with the book except the title. It took me a second. "They're not the rats of Nym, you goof," I said. "They don't hang out with Pistol and Bardolph." That was pretty funny. But am I supposed to say En Eye Em Aitch? Because I never will, any more than I will ever think "pound" when I see "lb."

In other pop culture news, F/X finally is playing season 5 of Buffy. How I do hope that it's better than the fourth.

In further pop culture news, I got my extended "Fellowship of the Ring" yesterday and watched the first half. I am so glad the theatrical cut didn't include all that damn hobbit exposition with Bilbo's narration. We don't need to be told explicitly that hobbits eat a lot, because we've got Pippin complaining about no second breakfast later. We don't need to be told hobbits love peace and pastority (did you like that? instead of peace and prosperity?) because that's obvious from our first introduction to Frodo, reading under a tree, and the hoeing hobbit whom Gandalf passes in his pony cart, and the appearance in general of the Shire. I am so glad my first introduction to a cinematized Middle Earth was just Galadriel's backstory and then that wonderful ponycart tour, culminating in Bag End from the outside. So I hated the whole first ten minutes, feeling held at a distance by narration instead of immediately being hurled into the world and the story by action and scenery.

Afterward the added scenes are fine. The Green Dragon scene, showing Frodo among his friends in contrast to coming home to a dark hole with a what in it; and a little more about the ring's betraying Isildur; and Gandalf's fight with Saruman not feeling so rushed, and a little more background on the one ring. Except the bit with Boromir in the council makes it too obvious he's going to betray the cause. In fact it's obvious when he meets Aragorn. Oh no. They're not going to do that miniseries thing in Two Towers and Return where you waste time explaining the backstory of the previous installment, are they?

And now, The Ground Beneath Her Feet.It's brilliant. He seamlessly weaves lyrics and taglines into his prose, many that I wouldn't recognize, many that I didn't, and others that gave me a frisson both of recognition and of awe. Like when Rai summed up a paragraph about grief with "And a rock feels no pain."

When I want to go to the Connecticut River Museum on Thanksgiving Friday to avoid sitting around my mother's house staring at one other as dull as two cats, I am extremely aware I am quoting Sense and Sensibility. I'm in awe of his subtlety. Subtlety being something I aspire to as anything I could possibly attain.

None of the following is a spoiler. In the world of this novel, F. Alexander, Kilgore Trout, and Nathan Zuckerman are authors not author-characters in other authors' books. John Shade is a poet. Someone named Pierre Ménard wrote Don Quixote, which is a Jorge Luis Borges joke I don't get. Besides the Orpheus myth, whose appropriateness is obvious, the other book that's all through this is Garden of the Forking Paths. In this world, there's an author named Elrond Hubbard, which cracked me up. There's a director called Guido Anselmi. There are countries named Illyria and Gramarye. I knew from somewhere that Heller's first title was Catch-18 but that he changed it because of Leon Uris's Stalag 18, and in Ground, someone says that Catch-18 (as it is in this world) is a response to The Naked and the Dead. All I know is that I need to read some Norman Mailer and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Then there's all the actual story and all the playing with words that aren't cultural references but his own. What a great book.