Reading: The Secret History

Moving: another reason driving to work is bad

Garden: none of that either

Watching: F/X is showing up to three Buffys a day. Season 5 is much better than 4.

20 November 2002: Donna Tartt

Last night at 6:30 I got my ticket for a place in the booksigning line (ninth! whoo!) and scampered across the street to spend the hour before the reading looking for a v-neck ribbed black cardigan.

I figured a regular department store like Foley's would have what I wanted, but sheesh, I am so accustomed to Ross I have no idea how to shop at a regular department store. I want all the dresses together by size, all the shirts by size. By designer is not useful. I didn't find anything I liked for less than four million dollars and tried other stores.

It was not a busy night and, in most stores, a salesperson approached me immediately or I would approach a knot of them chatting. J. Crew was one of the latter. One turned to me and asked if she could help me, and I said I was looking for a black, ribbed, v-necked cardigan, button not zip. She responded, "Anything specific?"

My face showed some reaction that she probably saw as offense or lack of humor, and she touched my arm and said "Just teasing," and I smiled with relief. I am so accustomed to reviewing my utterances for what I managed to blurt this time that I do, I know, focus (on me, again) on that to the exclusion of the conversation at hand, of give and take and of humor.

If I had better instincts--or trusted my instincts better?--maybe I'd be able to have normal conversations.

Anyway. Looking at sweaters and reading The Secret History reminded me of something I hadn't thought of for many years. In ninth grade, my mother gave me a sweater for Christmas. Kelly green, with navy around the neck and cuffs, and five whales in three rows, two one two, across the front. I loved that sweater. In ninth grade I was taking Latin. And I've been naming everything my whole life. I named those whales nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative.

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So. The reading. When I got back to the Tattered Cover, the third floor was packed. I think I've been in bigger crowds, for Margaret Atwood and Douglas Coupland, but those readings were held in the downtown store, which has a room specifically for such crowds.

She read I think the entire prologue from The Little Friend (I didn't follow along in the book, just listened, and hadn't otherwise cracked the book yet), including singing two snippets from hymns she quotes as what's playing on the radio. I think she's a soprano. She looks just the same as her jacket photograph, reserved and suited and short sharp shocked hair (a tremendously abbreviated bob, sleek and glossly black and exactly long enough to tuck behind her ears).

She took only four questions, but considering the size of the crowd, that was understandable. Though vexing. I've been a madwoman for "The Fellowship of the Ring," and though I don't like the extended beginning, I'm glad of the other added scenes. I would have asked how you know when a book is done and that this one, without another sentence or alternative synonym, is the definitive version, when movies and songs are extended and recut and remixed and recovered and improvised live. Especially since she seems so exacting. I assumed she'd read the prologue at her appearances, since the book's about solving a murder. Reading the same thing repeatedly, at what point do you resist the temptation to revise or improve? On the Usual Suspects, Beth pointed out that a novel being a definitive text is a contemporary idea, and Gabby suggested that novels become cut-and-dried when they have to be produced and marketed (and filmed). (What Tim O'Brien read aloud from July, July a couple of weeks ago is not what appears on the printed page and that didn't surprise me about him. That's the entire point of The Things They Carried, that there cannot be one definitive version of the truth. I know little about Tartt but doubt she'd riff.) Gabby said that in Donna Tartt's own narration of the audio version of Secret History, she omits a paragraph (why?!) and someone who attended a reading in Jackson, Mississippi, said she read from later in the book. So much for that theory.

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Hey! Jerry from "ER" is the troll in "Triangle," season five of Buffy. Hee. Also, Giles's pre-BMW is the same car, as much as I can distinguish cars, as Mr. Katimsky's in "My So-Called Life."

And I stopped watching "Buckaroo" a half-hour in; I regret to say it has lost all but sentimental appeal. Sorry, Jessie. If it's full of clever cultural references, like the one Jessie noticed to The Crying of Lot 49, then I freely admit I am an ignoramus who cannot appreciate the movie without recognizing them. But tonight I resumed watching it, and wheee! Kurgan from "Highlander" (another movie that now has only nostalgia in its favor)/ Byron Hadley from "Shawshank Redemption"/ Ellis West from "ER" is in "Buckaroo" too. How novel for Clancy Brown to play a good guy. This movie has everyone--Jeff Goldblum, John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli--well, okay, it has all the Movie Crazies.