secondhand gods

randoms

Watching: the weather; thunderstorms in the forecast for the next several days. Our weekly summer grill-out to celebrate the weekend -- usually on Friday nights, GB & I sprawl out on our back patio between the square foot gardens and the Fuckington's riotous perennial bed, cooking burgers on a tiny charcoal grill, watching birds on the birdbath and in the birdhouses, listening to neighborhood sounds -- was unexpectedly cut short last night by a fast-moving swathe of storms. The entire state was under a tornado watch and during my commute home from work, the announcer kept breaking in on NPR to advise of a new tornado in some unheard-of, distant county. We got our burgers, but there were no s'mores last night as I'd been hoping. Instead, we got some rain and some high winds and I had to settle for a raw uncooked Hershey bar. Also watching:  Our peony bushes, which are finally blossoming.

Not Watching: Television. Our experiment to cut back our amount of television consumption is about two weeks old and we're both amazed at the difference it's made to our evenings and weekends. We eat dinner together at the table, sometimes talking, sometimes reading companionably. Except to watch the Red Wings win the Stanley Cup, the TV has not been turned on at all in the evenings, which has brought us a grounded sense of calm and leisure. We feel we can set our own rhythm and pace without being hectored by commercial breaks or laugh tracks in the background. I still like the Weather Channel, so that's on occasionally, and overall it will be interesting to see if I am able to keep the TV off when GB is traveling for a few days in a row (I usually turn it on for companionship when he's away, and that's when I can get sucked into the most disappointing programming.) I think we've made a substantive and positive change to our habits well before Miss Snoop arrives.

Reading: With all that extra time, I've been reading a lot. A big fan of Frank Herbert's indescribably fascinating "Dune" series, I reluctantly picked up the more recent offerings written by his son and another writer. I didn't expect to like them, but they've been more fulfilling than I thought they would be. For one, they don't try to pick the story up where it left off -- the books are prequels to the original series. In some cases, you're reading about familiar characters at an earlier stage of their lives, in others, you're reading about events that were a historical basis for the original books. The writing is not nearly as complex, intriguing, and satisfying as Frank Herbert's. But then again, the plots are faster-moving, less thorny and multi-layered, and thus a lot more accessible. The characters are quick to engage with. Overall, the series passes the test for me and I can deem the books acceptable.

I have it in my sidebar, but I couldn't finish Steve Berry's "Venetian Betrayal." I just couldn't get into it. He didn't spend any time on character development, so I was plunged in with these characters that I neither knew nor particularly wanted to know, with no desire to go back to the beginning of his series and read more books to get to know them. His writing is quick and choppy, with two or three page long chapters, which is good when you're sleepy and thinking, "I'll just read one more" but it left me disoriented. Now, his historical sequences about Alexander the Great were fascinating, but I read several books about Alexander the Great when we were in Australia so already thought he was an extremely absorbing topic, and if I want to read more about him then I'll just check out a biography from the library or reread Mary Renault's books.

I am just finishing up "Confederates in the Attic" by Tony Horwitz which has been fabulous. I can highly recommend it. I checked it out while waiting for his latest book, "A Voyage Long and Strange", and it has been wonderful. It's a blend of history, journalism, and humor as he goes roaming around the South in search of the Civil War. He eventually gets sucked in to "hardcore" Civil War reenactments with people who are so obsessed that they even extreme-diet to achieve the sunken look of old Civil War soldier photographs. The descriptions of his adventures with these groups -- and one guy in particular, whose grumpy visage adorns the cover -- are historically enlightening and hilarious to boot.

Knitting: I'm getting extremely sick of knitting little hats and booties. I'm starting on a pair of socks next, to get back into some good old "adult knitting." My evening free time has helped me surge ahead on finishing the baby yoda jacket, though, and I think it's going to be really cute, although it is a lot of seaming and I am just not a seamstress; I'm hoping everything doesn't end up crooked and mismatched. The neck stitches are still on scrap yarn stitch holders, waiting to be finished off once the seaming is done. I'm pleasantly surprised to find that it doesn't look as boyish as I'd feared, even in the rough natural cotton yarn; as GB said objectively, "It just looks earthy." And as he rightly pointed out, she has a lot of pink and fluff and frills in her wardrobe, so she could definitely use some earthy pieces to balance it out.

randoms

• "The Monsters of Templeton" is really very good (thank you NY Times Book Review!)
• Reddi Whip makes any kind of bland dessert even better.
• When confronted with the prospect of a hard frost in April, red squirrels are capable of making incredible leaps from amazingly distant pieces of lawn furniture onto tempting bird feeders.
• My lesson for the day at Widget Central was: write your name on your Lean Cuisine before trustingly storing it in the second-floor town hall freezer. I walked in at lunchtime today, rummaged through the freezer, and found my meal GONE. There were several other frozen entrees there, but all of them contained meat and I do not tend to purchase anything except the vegetable ones, because I find the meat in any kind of frozen meal to be "Smeat" and horrid and gristly and gag-worthy. I immediately uttered some foul oaths and proclaimed to the two startled bystanders using the microwaves, "SOMEONE STOLE MY LUNCH!" There was a moment of shocked silence and then one of them politely said, "REALLY? What was it?" I advised him as to the type of Lean Cuisine it had been. The other bystander gave a guilty start and said, "Oh, I'm microwaving that right now!" I fixed her with a gimlet eye and she said hastily that her HUSBAND had packed her Lean Cuisine for her that morning and she hadn't known what kind it was, so she had just pulled one out of the Widget Central freezer that "seemed right." She surrendered it without a fight and then went over to the freezer and blithely pulled another meal out without reading the box. I was on the verge of asking, "Meathead, if you don't know what kind he packed you -- EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE THE ONE WHO TOOK IT OUT OF YOUR LUNCH BAG AND PUT IT IN THE WIDGET CENTRAL FREEZER AT SOME POINT -- then how do you know THAT is yours?" But since I had recovered my lunch, it was not my job to safeguard some other poor sap's Sesame Chicken from the slavering wolfpack who exist on the second floor of Widget Central. Write your name on things. To her credit, she did seem properly horrified that she had practically taken food out of the mouth of a six-month-pregnant woman. I shudder to think what might have happened if I'd arrived at the freezer a few minutes later.

a little bit of weather, eating, reading

The weather here in Detroit has been absolutely lovely lately. There are red tulips in the beds and baby leaves on the trees and cardinals on the feeder, all of which are very cheerful.

GB has been traveling for the past 2 weeks and will be gone again next week as well. *sigh* I know it's his job and for the most part he really likes his job, so that makes me agreeable to it, but I certainly miss him when he is gone.

The travel is difficult for him as well, and he doesn't like being away from home, living out of a suitcase and eating restaurant food* all the time. But again, it comes with the job and he likes his job and there are trade-offs.

*Actually, this isn't true, because most of the time he'll sniff out a Trader Joe's in his port of call and load up on snacks. GB is one of those rare people who can get a nice loaf of bread and some tapenade, some good cheese, fruit and nuts and other little munchies, and be perfectly content to call it supper. I, on the other hand, am not. Anyway.

When GB is gone I eat a lot of cereal, lounge in the bathtub, go to bed early, eat snacks, and do a lot of reading. During his recent voyages I have consumed the following:

Beekeeper's Apprentice & Justice Hall - Laurie R. King. Typically, the idea of an author cadging another author's character, particularly an iconic one such as Sherlock Holmes, is so distasteful to me that I can't even pick up the book without shuddering. But my library chose Beekeeper as a recent book club selection, so I thought I would try it too. To my surprise, it was palatable. They didn't have the sequel, so I got the third in the series, and it was better than the first. Oh, not great -- merely passable -- but Sherlock Holmes is definitely recognizable as Sherlock Holmes even if his turn of the century feminist sidekick is laid on a bit thick for my taste. And it gave me the icky creeps to think that a Holmes in his mid-sixties would marry a twenty-year old. What is this, a Harrison Ford movie? But all in all, they were quick reads and while not particularly memorable, I couldn't complain too much. They paired well with a bowl of Cream of Wheat and some banana slices on toast.

Rhett Butler's People - Donald McCaig. This was an unmitigated disaster. I couldn't even finish it. Perhaps the relative success of the Sherlock Holmes thing in the above books made me cocky, but I pushed my luck. It wasn't even a sequel -- it was an actual attempt at rewriting bits of GWTW from Rhett's perspective. Unfortunately, this Rhett Butler was an utter ponce. I wish I could have those hours of my life back. I would have rather been watching Rock of Love 2 on VH1. Paired with grilled cheese sandwiches and Key Lime pie yogurt. Reading the nutrition info on the yogurt was more entertaining than this book.

Duma Key - Stephen King. I love Stephen King and although he has let me down in the past (Tales from a Buick 8, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the last few novels of the Dark Tower series), he is always worth the time. I think his early works -- the ones written when he was by his own admission drinking Scope out of the bottle when he ran out of other intoxicants -- are unparalleled. I was lukewarm on the most recent Lisey's Story but started out liking Duma Key. I thought it was creepy, atmospheric, the characters engaging, the story brisk but the book itself satisfyingly thick (I hate books that take me as long to read as People magazine.) I would find myself sitting in dull Widget Central meetings with my mind wandering to the beach at Duma Key and wishing the time would move more quickly so I could hurry home in rush hour and get back to Big Pink. And he still knows how to make you regret reading him after dark in an empty house.

However, he has never quite mastered the art of the successful ending -- The Stand being a prime example of a masterpiece of a book marred by a hasty and disappointing finale. Duma Key ended on a disjointed, ludicrous note with far too many loose flapping ends and a general sense of anticlimax. However, I can't complain too much because I did enjoy 75% of the story. Also, I read this one whilst enjoying a particularly fine bunch of sweet green grapes and really superior Thai takeout from the great little joint around the corner (Pad Almond, medium, with a spring roll and plum sauce), and Trader Joe's Cinnamon Schoolbook cookies (which I can recommend more highly than the book.)

Next in the queue: Monsters of Templeton - Lauren Groff. Hopefully with a Peanut Buster Parfait from DQ.

found

On a lazy Sunday afternoon, with the tantalizing scent of bread baking in the $5 bread machine wafting through the house, and my husband in the basement hammering industriously on his new workbench (and inexplicably listening to "Witchy Woman" several times in a row), I stumbled across two boxes of books that I had not yet unpacked.

We have several caches of unpacked boxes throughout the house. Please remember, the vast majority of our material goods were packed away in storage for two years, so it's still possible for me to find things that I do not ever remember having to begin with.

I pounced upon the box and began to pull books out of it. Nice books. Books leftover from college, books I'd read before we went to Australia, books that I bought on numerous spending sprees at glossy bookshops in the bleak years after graduation but could never quite drag myself out of my morass of depression (1998-2001) to read. Books that have spent the last two years in an anonymous storage facility in suburban Detroit.

It was rather like opening a time capsule of different eras of my life, all jumbled up.

I found the "Gnomes" picture books, by Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet. These books were life-altering for me as a child, and I cannot count the number of hours I spent looking at the pictures and reading the fanciful accounts of the different types of gnomes, their habits, and their stories.

I had an obsession with ancient Rome for awhile after school, so I found my "Annals of Imperial Rome", and my Suetonius. It was a point of pride for me at a certain time of my life that I was probably the only person employed by a certain Soulless Evil Chemical Company capable of reciting the names of all twelve Caesars and some brief biographical facts about each. I kept that list in my head like a talisman for a long time. ("Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Galba, Otho...") It might have protected me for awhile, but its powers were limited.

Then there was the witchcraft thing, so "Devil in Massachusetts" was unearthed. And the high-school and college obsession with Sylvia Plath, so her "Letters Home" and a biography, "Bitter Fame." This is just a small part of a larger collection -- I took her diaries and "Ariel" with me to Australia and bought the restored edition of "Ariel" while we were over there. I am a peanut-cruncher, somewhat fascinated with her legacy, and I can too easily slip into the spell of her words. "(My selves dissolving , old whore petticoats--)".

There's also an Anne Sexton collection, which I'm eager to reread, because I don't remember anything she wrote or whether I liked it or could like it.

I found two books by Anais Nin, because in my younger years her life seemed so amazing and romantic and literary, although I was forced to look at her through new eyes when I read this recent piece in the "New York Times" about the death of her male companion Rupert Pole. And then the whole thing just seemed like what it was -- a cruel, selfish, and sorry business. Nonetheless. Remember the movie "Henry and June" wherein Uma Thurman played June?

I found "High Fidelity" by Nick Hornby, which I will reread forthwith, and "Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary" by Pamela Dean, who is an author whose work I find utterly bewitching and brilliant. I'm always surprised by how many people don't know about her. Her "Secret Country" trilogy is amazing, and if you haven't read her "Tam Lin" -- well, go out and get it. Right now. You won't be sorry.

"The Little Friend," by Donna Tartt, which also deserves a reread, because I was so blown away by "The Secret History" that I was unable to fairly judge this long-awaited follow-up novel and was thus very disappointed; fair or not? I don't know. Again, it deserves a reread.

And lastly, a collection of essays by Jim Harrison, a writer who's almost a bit of deity to my brother and me. There are two books that I passionately thrust upon my husband, thinking that if he were to know anything about me and my inner geography, he should read those books. "The Secret History" was one, and the first, most important, was "The Road Home" by Jim Harrison.

I think it was reading "The Road Home" that cured me of that 1998-2001 depression I referenced earlier. I almost referred to him as "a Michigan writer" because he is that, but he's much more than that, too. You might know him from "Legends of the Fall," which was rather unfortunately turned into a movie starring Brad Pitt, sporting long, artfully mussed peroxide blonde locks. I'll probably pick up the book of essays again, but the pinnacle of his work for me is and always will be "The Road Home." I remember laying in bed in my Atlanta apartment reading it and crying, and wanting to go back to Michigan -- home -- so bad I could taste it. (I did, of course, but my route was a bit circuitous.)

Although if they ever make a movie out of it and cast someone like Brad Pitt in the role of Nelse -- sporting long, artfully mussed peroxide blonde locks -- that noise you hear will be my head exploding.

My brother has also said that his latest work, "Returning to Earth," reviewed here by the New York Times, just today, is also well worth checking out, but my brother is more of a Harrison aficionado than I am, and probably more able to judge his work as a body rather than being emotionally attached to one single piece.

Now, if you'll excuse me, the bread is done, and I need a thick slice with butter and honey, and a cuppa, and I need to go slink off with my newly-found treasures, and do some reading.

buffy lives

So last night we watched this:

Which I saw when it was in the theaters, and which is a sign of its times, featuring not one but three songs by Toad the Wet Sprocket on the soundtrack.

(Throughout the entire film, I kept remembering the time I saw Luke Perry in the lounge at LAX, and how shocked I was to be nose-to-nose with a celebrity. I actually almost ran into him as I came out of the bathroom and people -- he's not tall. So nose-to-nose is not that far off.)

Nonetheless, being an enormous fan of this:

Well, "enormous disappointment" really only begins to sum it up.

However, I hear that there is a new one of these:

due out later this year. Call it a graphic novel, call it a comic -- I just call it something to look forward to.