Yesterday at Google Plus, +Murphy Jacobs made a very good post about the composing of book lists, setting the parameters at 30 physical books you'd bring with you on a trip through time and space. "Because you are a smart person, and it's going to be a very long trip, you decide to take 15 books you know and love, and 15 books you've wanted to read but just haven't read yet."
The lists I saw from other people were all very good and interesting, so I thought a lot about it, then spent three hours last night composing my own. I wrote them on paper, because I think better that way, then took phone pix of the pages.
If you'll recall my last blog post, I mentioned wanting to make some goals for edification. One goal is to reread some books I didn't get enough out of the first time long ago. Another is to work in a more dedicated fashion on my French, which I've been doing, then take up Italian in the fall. I'm learning the Habanera aria, just for kicks, and working very hard on eating better. But last night, I got back to my book list making. I ended up with only 12 new books to read. However, one of them is actually 7 volumes, and so I imagine that's all right.
I take book lists as seriously as Emma Woodhouse always means to. So now I'm going to read these books. It might take the rest of the year since I won't do it all at once and have always other books to reread, and various series to follow. Probably I'll save the Proust for autumn. But I am commiting myself to posting something about each one in its turn.
Yes, I think a personal record was broken for use of the word "very." But this isn't to be edited; it's time to move on to folia, and life.
So much, so much, but I don't, because my head has too much energy for the rest of me to use. I don't know if that made sense. Here is some blather, broken up by stuff to make it seem less of a chore to slog through.
Toward the end of February, I contracted a virus. Well, a boy did first. He was the sickest of his life, at age 15, and I actually took him to the clinic on a Sunday, where we learned he didn't have the flu, just one of these things you get now and then that sticks to you. And as he was getting better after needing more serious attention than he has in over a decade, I fell ill. Well, I seem to every year at the end of winter, actually, but anyway. It took him over two weeks to be better, took me over three. But now it's been over six weeks, and I'm still not right. It's because of weak lungs, asthma, etc. I need a stretch of two or three days in warm dry sunshine, then I'll be fine.
In the meantime, so much in my head, and I've been sewing, doing puzzles, watching French and Japanese movies, listening to opera, having mini existential crises, and planning a duo of paintings in a similar (though poorly similar, and that's okay by me) style to a few early ones by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, to put on my living room wall.
And someone recently mentioned he'd finally read a great long 19th century piece of literature, which got me thinking.
I make a general goal each year to take some time to appreciate good stuff or go back over great stuff to see or hear it all with a current perspective. But very general, not like when I was 17, or maybe 18, and my brother said I should make a list of good books I never read, and read them, and I sat in a tree in Loose Park with Emma and a bag of almond croissants and fell in love with Mr Knightley. Because I got through only about half the list after that. I mean, directly after that. It's a certainty I've covered it all by now.
Only there's so much else I haven't covered! I'm still lousy at Italian; every time I tackle it, I start reviewing French, instead. Whenever I try to read Ukridge, I find myself back at Blandings Castle. Things like this. So I am making a real list, and I'll make neat lines through it as I go along.
I imagined whistling through the parking lot of Home Depot, as I do, the Habanera aria from Carmen, and someone from the web would call me a poseur, only whatever the word is in 2014 for that, and I'd have to sing it aloud and annoyingly in order to shut them up, but that one line that goes, "Et c’est l’autre que je préfère—Il n’a rien dit mais il me plait" has this rhythm I can't quite get. And I could never match the sheer incredibleness of this, especially at 1.49 or I forget, thereabouts.
Still, that should be on the list, even though the internet, fortunately, tends to stay where it is and not follow people through parking lots.
But look, I have read Ulysses. I get why it's a thing and all, however, I didn't get any pride from it, and on the whole, I'd rather just listen to Kate Bush, only not very young Kate Bush. So the list is just for me, not anybody else, or so I can check off more boxes at a Buzzfeed page and be scored on how very, very special I am, indeed, or almost! if I just try a little bit harder.
Probably I should reach farther, though, is the original point. My comfort zone is wider than many, but not actually much or any deeper.
The conversation after the short bit of rehearsal we are shown amuses me.
That's what was running through my mind over and over again when I awoke after some silly dreams; typical dreams for me, wherein very interesting things are just about to happen, and then are inexplicably and interminably delayed.
Then suddenly this song was in my head. I've never been a great fan of it, but it has lasted, hasn't it?
As I was turning on the lights in my little plant box, I was thinking about that, and of course the name Mungo Jerry came to mind, and before one of my kids could say, "Bob's my uncle," Mun-go Jerrie-and-Rum-ple-Tea-zer came wandering into my brain.
I haven't written about Werther yet, because he might be right; it's the best one we've seen. In a way.
But it always comes back to Frank, and I expect he plans to sing this song to me all morning.
This weekend I hope to see two movies; The Wind Rises and TheGrand Budapest Hotel, and I hope to shore up the plastic greenhouse so I can put a heater in it and start using it, and I hope to make a little marmalade and also write down more stuff and work on my quilt. We'll just see about all that.
Mais, d'apprendre à me connaître dans le matin nécessite de l'energie, n'est ce pas? Only when the sun is shining...
It's been a long strange winter, and I want to share all about it. But in no particular order. I might write 16 posts or 3 very long ones or change my mind and keep writing with pen and paper to no audience. But here's something.
I found this show on Acorn TV called Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie, and watched the first episode last night, "Les Meurtres ABC." The first eleven episodes of the show are set in the 1930s and star Antoine Duléry and Marius Colucci. Here's the Google translation of the Wikipedia.fr page: "The main characters are the Commissioner Jean Larosière, fifties seducer, poet and Epicurean and Deputy Inspector Émile Lantern, thirty, shy, bumbling and awkward, but very endearing."
Acorn TV has six of their eleven episodes available, and one from the newer series which began last year, is set in the 1950s, and stars "A new born duo: Blandine Bellavoir in the role of Alice Avril, a journalist Voix du Nord (that's a newspaper in Northern France where the series is set) and Samuel Labarthe in the role of Commissioner Laurence Swan."
Knowing that, I have mixed feelings. I wonder why they were released this way, instead of in two full sets with the second including the replacement cast, and carrying on from there.
Anyway, I didn't look too deeply into it, but apparently Duléry said it was time to move on while things were still swell, which is what they always say, and fan reaction was exactly the same as everywhere else, from the emotional "Oh, no, it will be terrible now!" to the pedantic "I have faith in the writers' creativity and will continue to watch."
I know what I'd have thought. "Oh. Labarthe isn't nearly as…well, maybe. We'll see."
So the show is very good. The production values are rich and thoughtful and thoroughly satisfying. I saw a couple of English language reviews stating "This isn't the real thing, sniff." Well, in a sense, it's more real than the adaptations we've seen lately, to be honest. I think Agatha Christie would be rather more pleased with these interpretations of her stories than she would be with, for example, the bizarre 2008 Murder is Easy, even if Benedict Cumberbatch was a somewhat inspired choice for retired policeman Luke Fitzwilliam. I'm not saying it's terrible. But a purist would hate it.
The ending of "Les Meurtres ABC" struck me as a bit too entangled and even more improbable than the original ABC Murders ending, until I thought it over. I believe the subtitle translation influenced my view of it, and so now I also believe the writers actually made a little more sense of it, rather than less. And I think Christie'd have preferred the somewhat gratuitous (but not actually! it was a power grab! and kind of hot...) love scene between the deputy inspector and the substitute commissioner, to the perpetual BBC notion that every single unmarried woman of a certain age in her stories was a lesbian.
I wish I could just watch without subtitles, but there's too much I'd miss. You have to immerse yourself in a spoken world in order to pick up the speed and rhythm of speech, and I've never had that opportunity. I think possibly I read French well enough that I could follow closed captioning instead of subtitles, with a certain amount of pausing, but that isn't available.
Here, for my Twitter/Tumblr friends who have not seen it, a talk show segment with Antoine Duléry and Jean Dujardin.
If this were a true essay, I'd quote to you from this linked one at The Atlantic: Does Prince Charming Really Need to be Reinvented? and cite sources and things, but I mean, it isn't. My head is too crowded this week to say all I could truly say on the subject, anyway, so here's kind of a quick response.
I appreciated the thoughts in this essay; it's just the sort of thing I wonder over from time to time. It's too complex and there's too much to unravel to just soundbite agree or disagree in a comment field, which is why I'm typing this here and not at the magazine or Google Plus: Bark-Examining Society.
I was a child in the 70s, a time when girls could do anything, but as girls. Jane West, the girl cowboy, Nancy Drew, the girl detective. Only the three divorced moms wore jeans, but a girl could say she wanted to be a doctor instead of a nurse. A woman doctor, I mean. Women lawyers were straight-up Angry Feminists, you know. Airline attendants were still stewardesses, of course, but no longer glamorous. And women ran things, but if it was a big thing, she still wasn't listed on the board of directors. She might become a woman politician, though, in the following decade.
In the 80s, when I was growing up, many women emulated men kind of by the book for awhile if they wanted to be on top of the game. For women like me, it was weird and actually disappointing. And it created a huge divide between two distinct types, with a huge middle section working too hard to be both. Their lives didn't all turn out like the Enjoli ad. But we're slowly moving past it now. Apparently, men are less frightened of sharing control, and hopefully, most of the younger ones don't even see gender in that way. At least their sons won't. (There are still "woman engineers," though, and that is a whole ball of wax that's got to be discussed and melted.)
I think twisting the hero prince story in Frozen is cool, if maybe a little mind-bending for some seven year-old hearts. A reaction that says it's cool specifically because no girl should dream of an old-time fairy tale prince is kind of narrow and clenchy, though. And already a cliché. Plus we have the teen movies later on telling us the boy we might really want is the hero's sidekick, right? We evolve, yet we're not all the same, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
I've been in love with nearly every character Jim Garner played, because I always liked my heroes to have an edge and sometimes an air of reluctance. But would I actually marry the cowboy instead of the pharmacist? Well, I always knew I wanted the real man himself, who was all of his characters but in fact, none of them. What a person.
I know I'm the product, the result, of an anachronistic pocket in a chaotic time. At least, that is what I am often told, (because of the lack of dollars it generates) and therefore I am required to believe it. My truest self, though, has never had a problem with "lady truck drivers" or preschool teachers who are male or physicists who happen to be female. I just always thought they should go, do, be themselves, however they wished to. And not ever did I wish to be a princess. That wasn't what I grew up with; I read the fairy tales but saw cowboys and detectives on TV, and wanted to be one of those, or the sidekick of one, as I didn't actually want to rescue or be rescued. I wanted to go along for the ride and tell stories about it later.
I think the huge princess phenomenon that developed in the past couple of decades was a sort of backlash to all the fantasy having disappeared under the weight of life management. (this needs another paragraph of development for people who weren't there.) But what those girls see in every day life is what counts in the end. Hopefully, they're shown something more of life than just the series of financial traps most of us find ourselves in. Then they can choose to be their best selves, and fantasize about whatever they like at the same time. You know, I do believe in fairies. Why not?
2014 book series release dates to look forward to. There should be links but there are not. I will (no, really) add some in soon.
Flavia De Luce—Alan Bradley January 16 Sebastian St Cyr—C. S. Harris March 4 Molly Murphy—Rhys Bowen March 4 Charlotte and Thomas Pitt—Anne Perry March 25 Gaslight mysteries—Victoria Thompson May 6 Her Royal Spyness—Rhys Bowen August 5
I'm also looking forward to more from Louise Penny, my favorite current writer; head and shoulders above most of the rest (one exception is Alan Bradley, who is also a big fan of hers,) Deanna Raybourn's Lady Julia series, and Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily series. Raybourn has been writing stand-alone stories; I'll probably get to checking those out when they're discounted a bit. I hope there is another Captain Lacey book by Ashley Gardner (Jennifer Ashley) in the offing.
I keep meaning to have a look at Charles Finch's Charles Lenox series. He's terribly young to have written so many books, and I'm slightly jealous.
I'm sure I've left some out. I wish Diana Gabaldon would write another Lord John Grey book, but she tends to be busy with her 1100 page Outlander cliffhangers. Oh, and Cara Black's Aimée Leduc, only up to 2010 with her.
I'm working through Phryne Fisher by Kerry Greenwood right now. Uneven, but kinda fun. Only today I suddenly had that "must read at least back half of Gaudy Night" sensation that comes around regularly.
Probably I'll redo the toenails with the same green as before, Essie, of course, "vested interest." Don't Google it yourself, because there are all these hands polished with it, holding the bottle? And I honestly think it looks terrible on their hands. Truthfully, I don't think darker green or blue looks good on anyone's hands, but on the feet, many more colors can work. At least their cuticles were all right. You can do the most perfect job shaping and painting your fingernails, but if your cuticles are dry, and peeling or cracked, It's like you frosted just the top of an old stale cake.
I haven't bought any of this year's winter colors, but I'm thinking of trying "mind your mittens" next week.
There will be no weekly home spa treatment cocktail tonight, though, because I am having only bland eating for the next few days. Here is what a cocktail might look like, were I to have one.
My sons have helped me determine that I must exercise in a more focused way to lose the Ohio weight because my diet is generally wholesome, balanced, and so forth. But there is a divide in our thinking wherein I can't seem to relate to this "exercise for the sake of exercise" business, which they say leads to a feeling of accomplishment and therefore a drive to do more, but I say leads to mass thought, eventually forming a fascist political party run by a character played by Edward Arnold in pince-nez. And after all, it's winter, and it's been years since I could just bowl several times a week for free or almost nothing, and I live in Camazotz now, instead of a place that's alive all year round and has a walking culture. (Walking to places, not just in a circle around the block or on a treadmill.)
Well, in my head, my mini golf average is 37. What good does that do anybody? I think the boys understand the point of virtual satisfaction from mindless exercise as they get a lot of mental stimulation from video games, which I've never liked since my mother was addicted to Ms Pacman and I had to watch her play for half an hour on one quarter everywhere we went, because that game was everywhere.
In reality, my bowling average is still over 170, if it didn't require driving to an awful place and paying $4 a game. And I want to weigh what I did in New Jersey where I bowled a lot and also was less afraid to ride my bike on the road. In Cincinnati, they seem to aim cars at bikes frequently. They expect you to drive for miles and then get out and ride the bike on a path, or else be prepared for a trip to the ER and possibly a mortuary.
I like to dig in the garden, and mow the lawn, too, but I didn't do enough of that this summer. And swimming, though as I favor the backstroke pretty heavily but also rather casually, the benefit is probably limited.
In the winter, I'm required to take my exercise indoors because of some reasons, so here we are back at virtual fascism.
Oh, dear. I just realized someone from Google Plus might read this, maybe the wrong someone. I seem to attract such a linear sort of person there. Thinking I mean things in such a distressingly literal sense. It quite drains me of energy. Where was I?
Oh, yes. Exercise. I must take some. I know all the right kinds and so forth, of course. But just weighing whatever I did two years ago or five years ago, better still, is hardly enough incentive for that. I like myself much too well to need to rely upon a dress size for emotional satisfaction. On the other hand, there are some dresses in my closet that require the more extreme shapewear and a certain amount of will when it comes to zipping them up; a consideration worthy of notation.
Other people might both blithely and earnestly say regular exercise, even indoors in winter, is good for your brain and the aging process and what-have you, and that would be incentive enough to hit the mat and the hand weights and the bike-on-a-trainer every morning or afternoon. Well, that's a sound reason, but it isn't incentive. I feel it's analogous to finding humor in The Big Bang Theory, though I'm not sure I can vocabulary why.
But don't you worry; vanity will eventually win out and I'll be on the path to broader (by which I actually mean narrower) dress choices by the time Mahler's Fourth hits the Music Hall in late February.
I miss my daughters. Here are some good and bad photos for them, of decorated bits. The tree in the window and the one in the second photo are both made from tomato cages. Aaron put up the porch lights and Theron helped me decorate the tree. The ornaments on the floor were on the crabapple tree last year. I haven't decided whether to do that again. And then we have to hang the wreath. This neighborhood is Big on wreaths; it would be like the boy bouncing the ball out of rhythm to not have at least one, preferably several.
Here's some stuff I wrote down just now, to organize my thoughts a bit.
Green BEAN Delivery: produce (they always have good seasonal lineups prepared) Jungle Jim's: turkey, bread for stuffing, wine Kroger (posh:) flowers
also to buy: aluminum foil bourbon butter cake flour shortening frozen bread dough maple syrup sour cream
to make ahead: orange marmalade pie crusts chicken stock banana or apple bread pumpkin pie filling
to do: organize refrigerator clean dining room floor check up on Christmas ornaments call for dishwasher repair
Whenever we've had dishwasher trouble, it's been at Thanksgiving. When our freezer died, it was Christmas Eve. It's just like that in my life, so I just factor it into my whole "doing things the hard way" system.
Because like, I usually buy orange marmalade for the turkey. And then I made a couple kinds of marmalade a few weeks ago, realized how shockingly easy that is, and thought, "why on earth have I been buying it?" I'm kind of a condiment junky, anyway. It makes better sense to just make enough to use, instead of adding yet another little jar to the collection.
I glaze the turkey with orange marmalade, but it's also basted with a sherry-orange juice butter. I forget who I got the original ideas from, which I just got to combining over the years to suit my tastes.
And there's a bit of orange zest in the cranberry sauce and the mashed sweet potatoes, so I am having oranges sent with the produce delivery this week.
Certain flavors always to be expected if you eat my Thanksgiving dinner: maple, and orange and almond. The green beans (and sometimes Brussels sprouts, but not, I think, this year, as it's a tinier group than usual,) are sauteed with garlic. In this manner, I prepare traditional American holiday foods with a hint of the Mediterranean ancestral memory built into my brain.
The boys voted on cherry pie with the pumpkin pie for this year. I have cherries in the freezer, so that's a happy thing. Probably I will do the sour cream crust recipe I got from Bon Appetit for blueberry pie around 20 years ago. Cake flour is made with a softer wheat and is a good thing to add to pie crusts containing butter. This is baked at 400º for 50 minutes with a filling made from 2 lbs of fruit.
And then they prefer the flaky shortening crust for pumpkin pie, rather than the buttery tart-style ones I tend to use otherwise. The cherry pie is flavored with almond extract, in reminiscence of my mother. She bought canned cherries (not the pie filling,) and cooked them to a rich thickness with almond extract, sugar, and flour. The scent wafting through the house was magical.
So I do much the same thing, but with frozen cherries instead of canned.
I miss my faraway daughters a lot right now. However, I like to make things as great as I can for my sons. It would be crummy of me to put in only half effort for half the family. Thanksgiving dinner has always been my special gift for them, and hopefully they'll all always have good memories of that.
It's a basic menu, but all fully homemade except the dinner rolls, and the bread for the dressing.
Orange-glazed turkey with sherry cream gravy Sage and onion dressing Orange-spiced cranberry sauce Sauteed green beans Maple mashed sweet potatoes Raised dinner rolls Pumpkin pie Cherry pie
