Winter Makepeace: what a name. I would object on the grounds of generic overexuberance (let's not forget that his sisters go by the similarly abstemious names Temperance and Silence, and one of them ran off with a semi-reformed ne'er-do-well named Lazarus), if I hadn't just come across three separate, apparently devout ancestors named "Love" (each after her grandmother) in my genealogical explorations.  Three Loves amidst a sea of Margarets.  That's my kind of naming.

In this fourth in Elizabeth Hoyt's Maiden Lane series, the ascetic Winter Makepeace, overseer of a foundling's home in down-at-the-heels St. Giles, is by night the Thief of Shadows, a super-hero avant la lettre called the Ghost of St. Giles, who wanders the streets defending the disenfranchised and forgotten.  Quite early in the novel he finds himself at the tender mercies of Lady Isabel Beckinhall, who is working very hard to convince the world of how scintillating her surface is, and how very little lies beneath it.  The romance that unfolds after she rescues the Ghost from a rampaging mob, all without ever removing his mask is nice enough - the lovers are likable, and the skepticism about the rapaciousness of an aristocratic economy is welcome in a historical romance - but nothing feels particularly wrenching or revelatory. Isabel in particular never really gets off the ground for me as a character: although she's kind and realistically self-questioning, her various characteristics don't ultimately congeal into a coherent personality.  Winter's does to a greater extent, because he is the more unusual persona, but the problems which lend conflict to the romance (having to do with his self-denying tendency to devote himself fully to any task he takes up, whether it be superheroic scurrying about on rooftops, running a children's home, or caring for a family) are all too easily solved when love (sweet clarifying love) helpfully reshuffles his priorities.  I wish that unusual characters like Winter would maintain their distinctiveness (in his case, his chilly austerity) when and after they fall in love, rather than thawing into a rather generic heroic suaveness and confidence.  My favorite scenes with both Winter and Isabel were those in which they were uncertain: it's their prickliness that drew me in, not how polished and dashing they could be.

The gothic genre (to which this book only lightly belongs) has developed a reputation for drawing its personalities in broad, bravura strokes, but I'm not sure a really skillful evocation of the genre should  should mean half-hearted characterization as much as it means dynamic environmental tension.  These characters were psychologized (and likable) but they weren't vivid.  And in the gothic mode, everything should be vivid.

Stray notes:

• The editor in me feels honor-bound to point out that there are some infelicities (as they say) in the writing here: sporadic and awkward archaisms, unnecessary interjections of "telling," etc.  It's fairly rare, but I'd like to have seen these ironed out.  Know that this also isn't a piece of decorous realism: if you are seeking a painstaking evocation of historical social mores, go elsewhere.  Hoyt's more interested in building a warm affection between her characters (which she does deftly in all of her novels that I've read), and they routinely find themselves in situations that defy the period's standards of social decency. 
• Speaking of which, there's one scene of rather explicit banter about how hard Winter and Isabel like their mattresses - all par for the course, except that they are having this conversation over the head of Isabel's young ward, who finally asks why they are speaking of riding their mattresses when they should be sleeping in them.  Honestly, now, I thought, thinning my lips schoolmarmishly: there's a time and a place, people. Innuendo is decreasingly sexy as you add children to its audience. Am I approaching withered old stick status, or is this icky?
• For a time, it seemed like the plot was settling into a too-familiar, "Will she guess his secret identity?  Will she be torn between attraction to two men who are in fact the same person? What does it mean to be jealous of yourself?" territory, but Hoyt blessedly avoids getting too tangled in this (because her heroine isn't an idiot).  It's possible that in this section, I may have found myself repeatedly humming the "Spiderpig" theme. I admit nothing. 
• A whole crowd of hurrahs (and some spoilers, for the wary) for a novel which contains both an unashamedly untouched hero and a portrayal of infertility that doesn't end with love as the magical cure. More like this, please.

[Note: This was my first experiment with reviewing a book from NetGalley, and I'm torn about how to negotiate the ethics (and legalities) of indicating the source of books I've received from publishers/authors rather than from libraries/purchase. I'd like just to be able to tag them as galleys, but tags in my blog template are only searchable, not always visible. In future, I'll mark these books as "Galley," "ARC," or "Publisher-provided" in the ratings section of a post, and do my utmost to ensure that the free nature of the text doesn't affect my the nature or tone of my reviews.]


Saturday, Septemeber 15, 2012
Farfara

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

(Groucho Marx)

Often I find myself buying romances on the strength of a recommendation from someone I really trust.  As with all other genres and art forms, my taste doesn't run so much towards particular sub-genres, tropes, and tones as it does towards innovation, quality, and complexity within a particular form. (This is how I got looped into romance reading as a literary scholar at all, not to mention comics, horror films, anime, reality dance competitions, curling, etc.) So from time to time I just take the risk and buy while thinking that the less I know about what I am about to read the better.

And then I open up the ebook, and it has an adorable puppy on the cover, and I think, "Oh Jesus.  What have I done." (I can't even make this last a question, so heavy is the weight of dread upon my soul at the sight of that cheerful furball.)

Jean-Honore Fragonard "Girl with a Dog" (c. 1770) Dogs and erotics Seriously: what's this about?

I don't know why I have such an entrenched bias against dog-themed romances, but I encountered it again when I cracked (clicked?) the e-spine of Nikki and the Lone Wolf*.  I think it is the feeling that the text I'm reading has been so heavily engineered to fit within a marketable trope.  ("Banksia Bay," goes the tag-line for this series, "where lost dogs heal lonely hearts.")  I feel the burden of the commodification of literature particularly heavily when I see that I'm being manipulated by an adorable mammal.  But also, as an inveterate cat-person, I feel alienated by this creaky, ubiquitous association between dog ownership and romantic healing:  why dogs, I find myself asking?  Why associate dogs, of all creatures, with romantic (or, more unsettlingly, erotic) triumph?  Why not cats? Too on the nose?  I suppose the same must be true of snakes.  When are we going to see a rash of romances (a phrase that I should really put on my "never use again" list) about people brought together by their mutual love of ferrets?  Judith Ivory's already laid out the seminal text for that movement in The Proposition, a Pygmalion tale about a rat catcher and his linguist love. [And see Laura Vivanco's excellent note below on the continuing role ferrets have had to play in the scandals of romancelandia.]

I'm troubled by the idea that dogs have an entrenched role to play in a certain genre of romance because they set out a silent, adorable and adoring model for love as faith.  What the routinely skittish protagonists of a dog romance see in their canine companions is love that is patient and kind, love that does not envy, does not boast, and is not proud, love that does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking or easily angered, and that keep no record of wrongs.  Love that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Beautiful, Biblical stuff - the love of dog as a model for romantic love, which itself becomes a model for love of god.

But, curb the canine and call me Darcy, I myself prefer romantic love with a touch of pride about it. Not love as self-abnegating devotion.

There's a certain irony here: despite my initial stomach-churning sense of dread, I often quite enjoy a good dog-themed romance.  One of my favorite authors, Jennifer Crusie, frequently features dogs in her  books, and they are fully-fledged characters, with as much personality and autonomy as any of the human players in the drama. And certainly I am a sucker for the sentimentalization of animal-owner relationships, and perhaps this is why I so resent being manipulated by them when they are in less skillful hands (or more blatantly mobilized by publishers) - I will snuffle into my drink about an ill-treated animal, but I'll also resent you for exploiting this empathy cheaply.

In Nikki and the Lone Wolf, Marion Lennox draws a vivid portrait of Horse, a massive and mistreated wolfhound who draws the hero and heroine from their homes one gothic night by howling inconsolably at the ocean.  His owner threw him overboard to drown, but still he's faithfully waiting for this abusive scoundrel, and will be until the hero can persuade the heroine to take a dominant tone with the poor misguided soul (and thereby provide a new home, a new bond of love).  Horse is a great character, as are his owners, but the resolution [SPOILER], which comes by way of a massive community-wide oceanic search for the beast, after he goes swimming off into the ocean like he's Edna Pontellier, desperate to find his mistress (who has herself, with irksome parallelism, stormed off in a fit of romantic pique), seems not just implausible but also exasperating.  Is this the model of love we're looking at, I found myself asking, suicidal, irrational devotion that takes a village to soothe?  If so, the hero and heroine are right to resist it.





*Is it piling on to talk about these silly titles?  Admittedly this one is less egregious than the previous two in the series, Misty and the Single Dad and Abby and the Bachelor Cop, but it's the formula that gets me.  Heroines get a name - a diminutive, early 90s identity - while heroes get a social role.

While we were in London, D found something like this Bookcase wallpaper the glorious Dorky Medievalist sent me. (I covet it.  Perhaps for the guest bathroom?)  When D discovered it, it was like a whole new realm of strategy opened up in his war on my library.  He became very excited: "How 'bout we just get rid of all the books and replace them with wallpaper that LOOKS like books?"

There followed an acid pause.

Then I said, "I've consulted with the books, and they think I should buy D wallpaper for every room and get rid of YOU."

“‘Look at you,’ he murmured almost to himself. ‘You’re a baby, nothing but a moment, a heartbeat.’

She took a quivering breath. ‘I’m more than that.’” (67)

“His head jerked up.  He had one of the most startling and unwelcome thoughts of the last century.

Am I a boyfriend?” (203)

“‘If someone swears and oath of his own free will, the binding falls into the realm of contractual obligation and justice.  I can do that.  And have as a matter of fact,’ the other woman said.  She moved toward the back of her shop. ‘Follow me.’

Pia’s abused conscience twitched.  Unlike the polarized white and black magics, gray magic was supposed to be neutral, but the witch’s kind of ethical parsing never did sit well with her.  Like the relaxation spell in the shop, it felt manipulative, devoid of any real moral substance.  A great deal of harm could be done under the guise of neutrality.” (15)

Internal June, External January

It's snowing again in Nova Scotia.  Having done my dutiful and invigorating round of civically-minded shoveling, I'm burrowing in for a day of reading and course prep.  It's going to be a week of Ibsen and Chekhov and Shaw (leavened by an exploration of the Icarus myth across the ages that I'll link to  a lecture on intertextuality and plagiarism that somehow heavily features the Beyoncé video for "Single Ladies").   My neighbors just rang the doorbell to give me cinnamon rolls as a thank you for shoveling the walkway. Life could definitely be a lot worse.

[There was a moment earlier in the week when the specter of a less than Little Women-worthy society crossed my neighborhood. Leaving the house, I encountered my neighbor on the other side, hanging up her laundry in the freezing air.  I greeted her in jolly tones.  And she gave me the cut direct.   I felt ready to succumb to a fit of the vapors.  This was very un-Nova Scotian.

A friend quickly sent me to this definition of the verb "to cut" from The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811), a book I heartily wish to absorb in its entirety into my everyday usage:

To renounce acquaintance with any one is to cut him. There are several species of the cut. Such as the cut direct, the cut indirect, the cut sublime, the cut infernal, &c. The cut direct, is to start across the street, at the approach of the obnoxious person in order to avoid him. The cut indirect, is to look another way, and pass without appearing to observe him. The cut sublime, is to admire the top of King’s College Chapel, or the beauty of the passing clouds, till he is out of sight. The cut infernal, is to analyze the arrangement of your shoe-strings, for the same purpose.

Ok, I replied, to be honest it might have been the cut indirect.  She didn't cut across the alley to avoid me.  But she was hanging up laundry at the time, and that sort of tied her down.  I would have preferred either the cut infernal or the cut sublime.  (I'll have to start practicing those.)  If she was looking at her clothesline when I said "hello" from five feet away, does that make it a cut sublime?  I certainly hope so.

My mother (who birthday it is today - Happy Birthday!) joined the debate: "This reminds me," she said, "of the description of various forms of PR in Sheridan's The Critic, as expounded by the expert, Mr. Puff: 'puffing is of various sorts: the principal are the puff direct, the puff preliminary, the puff collateral, the puff collusive, and the puff oblique, or puff by implication.'  Maybe you could use one of these on your neighbor to improve relations."

My friend S, a scholar of the Renaissance, brought her expertise to bear with some sobering words: "Better than the lie direct -- that would have led irretrievably to a duel, unless you had thought of an 'if'."

Happily, it didn't come to that.  I don't have it in me to get up at dawn again this week.

In fact, I saw my neighbor hanging laundry again two days ago.  She smiled broadly at me: "Hallo."  "Hallo," I replied, much relieved.  It turns out that there is a very fine line between stone-cold and stone-deaf.)

There's been a lot more activity at Sycorax Pine lately, due in part to my new policy of attempting at least "Lightning Reviews" of a few lines for everything I watch and read.  I'm a few behind right now, but feeling good - come by and take a look around to see the changes.

So, if I have time to venture beyond work today, what will I be doing?  Finishing Betina Krahn's The Husband Test (my first of Krahn's, and a fun gambol). Starting Lady Audley's Secret, which promises to be no less scandalous, and possibly considerably more so. Watching the end of Secretary (I've been on a bit of a Maggie Gyllenhaal streak lately, and I'm not enjoying it at all).  Tuning in for the next installment of Downton Abbey, which I'm really lapping up.  As I said in the comments at Read React Review,

There have been some moments that twinged my anachronism radar, but I really appreciate the multi-level (and relatively unsentimental) treatment of how class functioned in complex and codependent ways in a country house setting. The key moment for me was when the new middle-class heir (who until then I had assumed the modern spectator was meant to identify with) sweeps into town and tells his valet that he has a “silly job for a grown man.” Brilliantly rendered by both actors and the director.

Trying to finish up Geraldine Brooks's March, which hasn't (at the halfway point) impressed me to the extent that it did my book club mates.  I am assured that at some point in the next twenty pages, however, it will become unputdownable.  I do want to forge ahead to the point where Marmee's voice enters the narrative.  Oh, and listening to Nina Simone.  I'll leave you with the lady herself on this fine Sunday:

When we began Fumi Yoshinago's ten-part series-in-progress, the world of the shogun's court was one of rigid, elaborate decadence.  The male population of early modern Japan had been reduced to a fifth of the size of the female population by a terrible plague, and the female shogun broadcast her power in this context by gathering the most beautiful men in the nation into a harem (the Ooku, or Inner Chambers), thereby concentrating a tremendous amount of reproductive power on a single woman's body.  Not to mention creating a context of absurd uselessness for the men of the Ooku, who (denied a public life) focus instead on endless politicking and lavish attention to aesthetic questions of dress and ceremony.

The shogun of this era was a fascinating figure, all-powerful and yet chained to tradition, and she ends the first volume with a developing curiosity about the origins of the rules and structures that govern her court.  She delves into the archives of the Ooku, and would that she would delve out of them from time to time: two volumes later we are still immersed in the story-within-a-story, and I'd appreciate a respite from the considerably more petulant first female shogun at the centre of these installments.

But this petulant predecessor is developing, albeit for all the most painful reasons.  She is the illegitimate daughter of the politically savvy and legendarily gay last male shogun, Iemitsu.  When Iemitsu dies of the red face pox, his Machiavellian nurse arranges for his daughter to masquerade as the late shogun until such a time as she can bear a male heir, and uses Iemitsu's well-known appreciation for beautiful men as an excuse to set up the Ooku.  The Ooku develops as a dynastic tool and a means of protecting the shogun's gender secret: no one who sees the shogun will ever have contact with the outside world again.

In volume 2, through some gender shenanigans, the faux "Iemetsu" fell in love with a dignified abbot named Arikoto.  In volume 3, they must confront the fact that love and fertility (thousands of romance plots aside) don't always go hand in hand.  When the Machiavellian nurse (the Livia of the Ooku) tells Arikoto that he must remove himself by choice from the shogun's bedchamber to make room for someone more reproductively potent, he loses his composure for the first time I can remember: "I plead not only for myself," he cries, "More than anything, this is too cruel a way to treat her highness!  Indeed, 'tis as though she were livestock!! What is to be gained in carrying on this bloodline, if it is to be achieved at so great a cost?!  What doth the house of Tokugawa mean to you that you must go to such lengths to perpetuate it?!".  The old woman takes a long look at him, and then she says, "It means a country at peace, without war."

Again Arikoto has to reconcile his ethics (which as as strong as any character's I have encountered recently) with the imperatives of passion.  He goes to "Iemitsu" to explain his choice ("What canst thou know of me?!" she explodes while he looks at her with desperate eyes, "Thou art not compelled to do a thing. 'Tis only I who must be handled by another man!! 'Tis only my person that must always be sullied, and debased, and made to bleed...!!") and the scenes that follow, in which duty requires sacrifice after sacrifice from the pair, are some of the more excruciatingly effective love scenes I've ever read.  Arikoto has always had a substantial capacity for self-abnegation, but the more "Iemitsu" must give up, the stronger and more subtle she becomes, until finally at the end of this volume she is ready to move Japan into a brand new era.

The tumultuous sadness with which I left this volume is largely a product of its immensely thoughtful panel arrangement, which (especially in the novels' many love scenes) gives the reader an almost cubist impression of the characters' fragmented emotions.  Small panels detail each expression on the path of a character's developing feelings - each is lovely, and we get a half dozen at a time, composing an emotional arc that lasted only a few seconds.  Often I wasn't sure which order I should read these flurry of panels in, a confusion which only underscored the confusion of the character at that moment - my gaze darted rapidly back and forth as I tried to take in all the possible narrative paths at once.  Sometimes these moments of cubist fragmentation end with a large panel showing the lovers tangled in impossible, tormented knots of arms, legs, spines, gasping with the need not to be separated, not to be separable.  Lovely and terrible, all at once.

A world ruled (they think) by the Psy, a group of interconnected minds that have stamped out all trace of emotion. Sascha's powerful mother sends her to craft a real estate deal with a Changeling leader (a were-leopard with his own agenda, and - naturally! - passions to spare).  Character-building cleverness across a large cast (addicting me to what promises to be a long series), but also the usual ick factor of paranormal romances - love is too fated (thus yawningly unrelated to the developing relationship of the real people involved) and gender too power-laden.  Nonetheless, the building of affection between the hero and a heroine who doesn't think she can feel properly, much less touch, is first-class.  A slow, halting read for me.


Slave to Sensation
Nalini Singh (New Zealand, 1996)
***
Finished Jan 9.

Awful title, lovely book.  Childhood friends.  The hero struggles with wartime losses, the heroine with the painfully realized scars of illness.  But the plot's climax (although hilarious) seems both Dan Brownish and rampagingly irresponsible (given what is done to an already traumatized person), and it nearly turns me against a lovely, gritty heroine.  There was a longer, calmer, less plotty novel here somewhere, and it was sublime.  As it was, it's just very good.  No complaints.


Here Comes the Groom
Karina Bliss (New Zealand, 2011)
***1/2
Finished Jan 8.

The most poisonous mother in existence drops a (surprise!) niece in Ella's lap, leaving her to track down the father.  Naturally (naturally!) her search starts with millionaire playboy Jack Travis, who takes a strangely possessive stance towards her, despite her unconventional (and narratively unacceptable) reluctance to marry.  I raged and raged, and the pages turned and turned.  Dammit.


Smooth Talking Stranger
Lisa Kleypas (USA, 2009)
***
Finished Jan 8.

Uzis and Ilium, arrows that land "as microphones on politicians' stands."  This micro-Iliad flirts with incoherence. Just like war.


all day permanent red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad, Rewritten
Christopher Logue (2003, UK)
***1/2
Finished Jan 8.

Top of the list of things Margaret Atwood has taught me: you have to protect your five-hole.

I've had Atwood on the brain this week.  The last two first-year classes have featured a comparison of Atwood's "you fit into me" and "Miserable" by the band Lit, as well as close analyses of the intros to Dexter and True Blood as demonstrations of defamiliarization through framing and juxtaposition.  Now I'm gearing up for next time's use of the Avett Brothers to demonstrate metaphor and simile, followed by a hearty romp through Ovid.

Also making an appearance next class: Magritte, Tolkien, Plath, Anglo-Saxon riddles, George Elliott Clarke, the short film "Logorama," and the Beatles.  I seem to remember that when my late college advisor wrote me a rec letter for grad school, he praised the "Coleridgean quality" of my "connective spirit."  This one's for you, Dr. K.

1. Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden (1996, Australia) ***1/2, finished January 4. 
2. Reckless by Amanda Quick (1992, USA) **, finished January 4.
3. More than a Mistress by Mary Balogh (2000, Canada) **1/2, finished January 6.
4. The Indiscretion by Judith Ivory (2001, USA) ***1/2, finished January 9.
5. Untie my Heart by Judith Ivory (2002, USA) ***1/2, finished January 10. 
6. Look Back in Anger by John Osborne (1956, UK) ***1/2, finished January 11.
7. Lady Elizabeth's Comet by Sheila Simonson (2008, USA) ***1/2, finished January 11.
8. Agamemnon by Aeschylus (458 BCE, Athens) ****1/2, finished January 12.
9. Angel in a Red Dress by Judith Ivory (1988, USA) ***, finished January 13.
10. Lord Ruin by Carolyn Jewel (2002, USA) *1/2, finished January 17.
11. Oedipus the King by Sophocles (c. 428 BCE, Athens) ****, finished January 18.
12. The Caretaker by Harold Pinter (1959, UK) ***1/2, finished January 18.
13. Morning Glory by LaVyrle Spencer (USA) **1/2, finished January 18.
14. The Wild Child by Mary Jo Putney (1999, USA) ***, finished January 21.
15. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1967, UK) *****, finished January 25.
16. The Bacchae by Euripides (406 BCE, Athens) ****, finished January 25.
17. The Winter Queen by Amanda McCabe (2009, USA) **1/2 , finished January 25.
18. The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost (2004, USA/Holland) ***, finished February 1.
19. What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton (1967, UK) ***1/2, finished February 1.
20. Lysistrata by Aristophanes (411 BCE, Athens) ***1/2, finished February 2.
21. The Proposition by Judith Ivory (1999, USA) ***1/2, finished February 6.
22. Lessons in French by Laura Kinsale (2010, USA) ****, finished February 7.
23. Equus by Peter Shaffer (1973, UK) ***, finished February 8.
24. Sleeping Beauty by Judith Ivory (1998, USA) ***1/2, finished February 10.
25. Eyton by Lynne Connolly (2010, USA) *, finished February 12.
26. Ember by Bettie Sharpe (2008, USA) ****, finished February 13.
27. 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick (2007, USA) ****, finished February 13.
28. Everyman (15th C, England) ***1/2, finished February 15.
29. Top Girls by Caryl Churchill (1982, UK) ****, finished February 16.
30. Black Ice by Anne Stuart (2005, USA) **1/2, finished February 16.
31. Dark Needs at Night's Edge by Kresley Cole (2008, USA) **, finished February 17.
32. The Rebellious Ward by Joan Wolf (1984, USA) ***1/2, finished February 17.
33. The Double Deception by Joan Wolf (1983, USA) **1/2, finished February 19.
34. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (1811, UK) ****, finished February 22.  
35. To Have and to Hold by Patricia Gaffney (1995, USA) ***, finished February 23.
36. Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie (2004, USA) ***, finished February 23.
37. Our Country's Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker (1988, UK) ***1/2, finished March 1.
38. The Slightest Provocation by Pam Rosenthal (2006, USA) **1/2, finished March 1.
39. Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (1590-1593, England) ***, finished March 3. 
40. Pentecost by David Edgar (1995, UK) ****, finished March 10. 
41. A London Season by Joan Wolf (1980, USA) **1/2, finished March 10. 
42. Sabriel by Garth Nix (1995, Australia) ***, finished March 12. 
43. A Gypsy at Almack's by Chloe Cheshire (1993, USA) ***1/2, finished March 12. 
44. What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell (2008, USA) ***, finished March 13.  
45. Like a Thief in the Night by Bettie Sharpe (2008, USA) **1/2, finished March 14. 
46. Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega (~1614, Spain) ***, finished March 15.
47. Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (1998, UK) ****1/2, finished March 15.
48. Celia's Secret by Michael Frayn and David Burke (2001, UK) ***1/2, finished March 17.
49. Dark Angel by Mary Balogh (1994, Canada) ***, finished March 19.
50. Lord Carew's Bride by Mary Balogh (1995, Canada) **1/2, finished March 20. 
51. 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane (1999, UK) ****1/2, finished March 22. 
52. Bliss by Judith Ivory/Judy Cuevas (1995, USA) ****, finished March 23.
53. House by Alan Ayckbourn (2000, UK) ***1/2, finished March 25.
54. Tartuffe by Molière (1664-9, France) ***1/2, finished March 29.
55. Garden by Alan Ayckbourn (2000, UK) ***1/2, finished March 29. 
56. The Scottish Lord by Joan Wolf (1981, USA) **1/2, finished April 3. 
57. Incredible Change-Bots by Jeffrey Brown (2007, USA) ***, finished April 3.
58. Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin (2008, UK) ****, finished April 3.
59. Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth (2009, UK) ****, finished April 5.
60. Phaedra by Jean Racine (1677, France) ****, finished April 5.
61. Another Faust by Daniel and Dina Nayeri (2009, USA) ***, finished April 12.
62. Mind Games by Carolyn Crane (2010, USA) ***1/2, finished April 14.
63. Goddess of the Hunt by Tessa Dare (2009, USA) ***, finished April 15.
64. Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs (2008, USA) ***, finished April 16.
65. The Serpent's Tale by Ariana Franklin (2008, UK) ***1/2, finished April 20. 
66. Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta (2008, Australia) ****, finished April 21.
67. Wicked all Day by Liz Carlyle (2009) **1/2, finished May 5.
68. The Gilded Web by Mary Balogh (Wales/Canada, 1989) **1/2, finished Mary 8.
69. Naked in Death by J.D. Robb (1995, USA) ***, finished May 16.
70. The Best of Saki by Saki (1904/1910/1911/1914/1923, UK) ****, finished May 24.
71. Wicked Becomes You by Meredith Duran (2010, USA) ***1/2, finished May 27.
72. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (2008, UK/USA) ***1/2, finished May 30.
73. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (1991, USA) **1/12, finished June 9.
74. Pyongyang by Guy Delisle (2003, Canada) ***1/2, finished June 16.
75. Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris (2010, USA) **, finished June 16.
76. Improper Relations by Janet Mullany (2010, UK) ***, finished June 20.
77. His at Night by Sherry Thomas (2010, USA) ***1/2, finished June 27.
78. Jim the Boy by Tony Earley (2000, USA) ****, finished June 29.
79. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (1987, USA) ***, finished July 1
80. Dungeon: Twilight, Vol. 3: The New Centurions by Sfar, Trondheim, Kerascoet and Obion (2006, France) ***1/2, finished July 2.
81. Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder (2005, USA) ***1/2, finished July 4.
82. Ooku: The Inner Chambers, vol. 1 by Fumi Yoshinaga (2005, Japan)***1/2, finished July 6.
83. A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro (1982, UK) ****, finished July 8.
84. The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig (2005, USA), ***, finished July 9.
85. Lady Isabella's Scandalous Marriage by Jennifer Ashley (2010, USA) ***, finished July 9.
86. The Princess and the Hound by Mette Ivie Harrison (2007, USA) ***, finished July 10. 
87. Bangkok 8 by John Burdett (2003, USA) ***1/2, finished July 13.
88. Magic Study by Maria V. Snyder (2006, USA) ***, finished July 14.
89. Scandal by Carolyn Jewel (2009, USA) ****, finished July 15.
90. If his Kiss is Wicked by Jo Goodman (2007, USA) ***1/2, finished July 16.
91. Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie (2000, USA) ****, finished July 17.
92. House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer (2002, USA) ***1/2, finished July 21.
93. Whisper of Warning by Laura Griffin (2009, USA) **1/2, finished July 23.
94. Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto (1988, Japan) ***, finished July 24. 
95. The Rules of Gentility by Janet Mullany (2007, USA) **1/2, finished July 24.
96. Heaven's Fire by Patricia Ryan (1996, USA) ***, finished July 28.
97. Lily by Patricia Gaffney (1996, USA) ***, finished July 28.
98. Still Life with Murder by P.B. Ryan (2003, USA) ****, finished July 29.
99. Murder in a Mill Town by P.B. Ryan (2004, USA) ***1/2, finished July 29.
100. Death on Beacon Hill by P.B. Ryan (2005, USA) ***, finished July 30.
101. Murder on Black Friday by P.B. Ryan (2005, USA) ***, finished July 30.
102. Memories of my Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia, 2005) ***1/2, finished July 31.
103. Web of Love by Mary Balogh (1990, Canada) ***1/2, finished August 1.
104. The Devil's Web by Mary Balogh (1990, Canada) ***, finished August 2.
105. The Leopard Prince by Elizabeth Hoyt (2007, USA) ***, finished August 4.
106. Silken Threads by Patricia Ryan (1999, USA) ***1/2, finished August 6.
107. Flat Out Sexy by Erin McCarthy (2008, USA) **, finished August 7.
108. Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett (1987, UK) ***, finished August 8.
109. My Lord and Spymaster by Joanna Bourne (2008, USA) **1/2, finished August 9.
110. The Village Spinster by Laura Matthews (1993, USA) ***, finished August 10. 
111. The Devil's Waltz by Anne Stuart (2006, USA) **1/2, finished August 11.
112. Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams (1958, USA) ****, finished August 11.
113. Mouth to Mouth by Erin McCarthy (2005, USA) **1/2, finished August 11.
114. Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty (2000, Australia) ***, finished August 12.
115. Master of Desire by Kinley MacGregor (2001, USA) **, finished August 15.
116. The China Garden by Liz Berry (1996, UK) ***1/2, finished August 17.
117. Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany (2005, Australia) ****, finished August 18.
118. Everything and the Moon by Julia Quinn (1997, USA) **, finished August 19.
119. The War against Miss Winter by Kathryn Miller Haines (2007, USA) ***1/2, finished August 24.
120. Dead of Night by John Marsden (1994, Australia) ***1/2, finished August 25.
121. Grave Goods by Ariana Franklin (2009, UK) ****,  finished August 26.
122. Ooku: The Inner Chambers, Vol. 2 by Fumi Yoshinaga (2006, Japan) ***1/2, finished August 27.
123. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (2010, USA) ****, finished September 3.
124. The Sun and the Moon by Patricia Ryan (2000, USA) *** 1/2, finished September 5.
125. The Masque of the Black Tulip by Lauren Willig (2006, USA) ***, finished September 7.
126. The Marriage Bed by Laura Lee Guhrke (2005, USA) ***, finished September 10.
127. Loving a Lost Lord by Mary Jo Putney (2009, USA) ***, finished September 12.
128. The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard (1983, UK) ****1/2, finished September 15.
129. Agamemnon by Aeschylus (458 BCE, Athens) ****1/2, finished September 15.
130. Ransom by Julie Garwood (1999, USA) ***, finished September 18.
131. The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness (2009, UK) ****, finished September 22.
132. Cold as Ice by Anne Stuart (2006, USA) **1/2, finished September 26.
133. Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (1921, Italy) ****, finished September 28.
134. Double Cross by Carolyn Crane (USA, 2010) ****, finished September 30.
135. Proof by Seduction by Courtney Milan (USA, 2010) ****, finished October 4.
136. Trial by Desire by Courtney Milan (2010, USA) ***1/2, finished October 5.
137. The Blacks: A Clown Show by Jean Genet (France, 1958) ***1/2, finished October 10.
138. Suddenly You by Lisa Kleypas (2001, USA) **1/2, finished Oct 15.
139. The Frogs by Aristophanes (205 BCE, Athens) ****, finished October 17.
140. Stranger in My Arms by Lisa Kleypas (1998, USA)***, finished October 17.
141. Mine till Midnight by Lisa Kleypas (2007, USA) ***, finished ~ October 19.
     
142. The Iron Duke by Meljean Brook (2010, USA) ***1/2, finished ~ October 21.
143. Offending the Audience by Peter Handke (1966, Austria) ****, finished October 24.
     
144. Seduce me at Sunrise by Lisa Kleypas (2008, USA) ***1/2, finished October 28.
145. Faking It by Jennifer Crusie (2002, USA) ****1/2, finished October 29. 
146. The Heir and the Spare by Maya Rodale (2007, USA) **1/2, finished November 1.
147. Pantomime by Derek Walcott (1978, Saint Lucia) ****, finished November 2.
148. Tempt Me At Twilight by Lisa Kleypas (2009, USA) ****, finished November 4.
149. Married by Morning by Lisa Kleypas (2010, USA) ***1/2, finished November 5.
150. Love in the Afternoon by Lisa Kleypas (2010, USA) ***1/2, finished November 6.
151. The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona (1973, South Africa) ****, finished November 9.
152. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980, USA) ****, finished  November 9.
153. Lady Sophia's Lover by Lisa Kleypas (2002, USA) **1/2, finished November 10.
154. Manhunting by Jennifer Crusie (1993, USA) ***, finished November 11.
155. The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd (?) (1582-1592, England) ***1/2, finished November 15.
156. Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater (2009, USA) ***, finished November 17. 
157. Strange Bedpersons by Jennifer Crusie (1994, USA) **, finished November 18.
158. Butterfly Swords by Jeannie Lin (2010, USA) ***, finished November 20.
159. The Native Star by M.K. Hobson (2010, USA) ***1/2, finished November 26.
160. Maybe this Time by Jennifer Crusie (2010, USA) ***, finished November 27.
161. Glory in Death by J.D. Robb (1995, USA) ***, finished December 2.
162. Blue by George Eliot Clarke (2001, Canada) ****1/2, finished December 3.
163. Silver Lining by Maggie Osborne (2000, USA) ***, finished December 4.
164. Life as we Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer (2006, USA) ***1/2, finished December 4.
165. Practice Makes Perfect by Julie James (2009, USA) ***, finished December 6.
166. Trust Me on This by Jennifer Crusie (1997, USA) ***, finished December 8.
167. By Design by Madeline Hunter (2001, USA) ***, finished December 9.
168. Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Banks (1999, USA) ****, finished December 9.
169. The Author by Tim Crouch (2009, UK) ***1/2, finished December 11. 
170. Enchanting the Lady by Kathryne Kennedy (2008, USA) *1/2, finished December 13.
171. Women at the Thesmophoria by Aristophanes (Athens) ***, finished December 15.
172. Just the Sexiest Man Alive by Julie James (USA) ***, finished December 17.
173. Hoops by Patricia McLinn (USA) **1/2, finished December 22.
174. The Luneburg Variation by Paolo Maurensig (Italy, 1993) ***, finished December 24.
175. And Only to Deceive by Tasha Alexander (USA, 2005) ***1/2, finished December 24.
176. A Poisoned Season by Tasha Alexander (USA, 2007) ***1/2, finished December 25.
177. Point Omega by Don Delillo (USA, 2010) ***, finished December 26.
178. The Summer of You by Kate Noble (USA, 2010) ***1/2, finished December 27.
179. Body Check by Deirdre Martin (USA, 2003) **1/2, finished December 30.

Happy Christmas and Merry Solstice, all.  I'm with my family in Washington, DC now, eating heartily and basking in the company of old friends.  We've given up holiday gift-giving in my family (to the very great reduction in our wintertime stress and expenditure), but my antimaterialism isn't so ardent that I didn't get myself a bit of a Mt. Grademore-completion present:  a NOOK!

Ever since I've been madly reading away on it.  Despite my steadfast commitment to the experience of reading paper books, the ereader has its distinctive pleasures, not least of which is the ability to take hundreds of books with me when I travel.  (I thought this had been a light year for travel for me.  Then I totted up the list of places I've been in 2010: Halifax, Cape Breton, Washington, Los Angeles, London, Dublin, Oahu, Kauai, North Carolina.  Guess I need a memory adjustment.)  Three things that would improve the excellent Nook experience for me: 1) Better screensavers (the Kindle has such lovely ones - pages from medieval manuscripts and the like - while the Nook has cartoon portraits of authors looking oddly like Hollywood actors), 2) easier library navigation, and 3) more font choices for a cleaner aesthetic experience.

The long and the short of it is that reading a paper book is a more satisfyingly sensual experience: the design of print books is better because it is fully within the control of the designer (in other words, the more control you give to the reader, the less coherent the design will become, and the less books will appear as art objects in their own right) and the tactile experience of paper is richer.  And, of course, until the Nook and Kindle come with little Smell-o-vision atomizer attachments, the olfactory experience of reading won't be the same with ebooks.  But the ereader is, to my very great shock, profoundly comfortable. I'm loving mine.

I have always been a bit more immune to the famous "Lubitsch touch" than I ought to be.  After all, what is there not to love about witty dialogue batted briskly between stylish characters, splashing in tidal pools of double entendre?  But the three films by the director that I have seen (Trouble in Paradise, To be or not to be, and Ninotchka) left me sadly cold.  All struck me as potentially scintillating films that descend into sentimentality, predictability or falsehood.

When I began Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait last night, I thought Ernst and I had finally understood each other.  It begins likea  hellish counterpart to Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946).  Where the British film follows its hero from a technicolor earth to an infinite, shining black-and-white heaven, Lubitsch opens Heaven Can Wait (1943) down below, in the glossy, vast waiting room of Hell, where an oddly compassionate Devil (all waxed mustaches and toothy smiles) waits to judge whether you've been bad enough to earn a fast trip through a flaming trap door.  If not, it's back into the elevator for you, and we'll see whether they'll take you above.

So Henry van Cleve, child of privilege, charmer of parents and grandparents and legions of women, sets his considerable persuasive skills to work on Satan.  By way of earning a place in Hell, he recounts his life story, starting with a mischievous, spoiled childhood spent getting drunk with the French maid and making astonishingly filthy jokes (for Code-muzzled Hollywood, at least):

That woman with the elaborately expensive dress and the ludicrous accent is the maid, by the by.

The early part of the film is the most ingenious, because it is in the carefully drawn stereotypes of his various family members (a father who can't give utterance to any sentiment but the need to maintain a stiff upper lip, for instance) that the film strikes its richest comic balance between affection and the harshness of satire. On learning that our hero has been sneaking out to drink champagne at a restaurant with the French maid, this is how his family reacts:

Goody Two-Shoes Cousin Albert:
"But that's not all, grandfather.  It seems, from what I could gather, that Mrs. Asterbrook, of the Asterbrooks, who was sitting at an adjoining table, resented bitterly the idea of Henry dropping a nickel into her decolletage and complaining to the management because no chocolate bar dropped out of Mrs. Asterbrook."
Mother:
"Mrs. Asterbrook?  How can I ever face her?"
Grandmother:
"What a disgrace!"
Father:
"I'm going to teach that boy a lesson."
Grandfather:
"Yes, that what he deserves - throwing nickels around like that.  Knowing the Asterbrooks, I can tell you right now we'll never see that nickel again."

The grandfather is by far the most appealing character in this familial menagerie. He is all bluster: stern disapproval masking a boyish love of hijinks.  (The scene above ends with his congratulation of his grandson Albert, whose willingness to rat on his cousin apparently does the family proud.  No sooner does Albert make his smug way downstairs then he finds himself on the receiving end of a glass of water his proud grandpapa has poured from the landing above.  There is much giggling and grandparental creeping-away that follows this dousing.) This aged ancestor wields the words "I love you" like they are a club to bludgeon his family with at the end of a string of insults. [Anything after this point, by the way, might be accounted a spoiler by the more... plot-squeamish among you.] Even when his beloved grandson falls in love, marries, and drives his beloved away with his perpetual infidelities, who is on hand to help the scamp win her back but grandpa!  Naturally.

Don't worry: the heroine will get her own Dickensian nightmare of a family, all of whom are simultaneously affectionate and unbearable.  They are meatpacking magnates, their company represented by a cartoony cow who gleefully proclaims her joy in being eaten in singsong verse.  "We're very proud of Kansas," her mother declares in funereal tones, upon first being introduced to New York society. Her parents are so ensnared in conflicting midwestern puritanisms that every breakfast descends into an apocalyptic battle for the funny papers of Dr. Strangelove proportions.  It's a remarkable scene when we are given a glimpse of these morning maneuvers.

Despite an abundance of scenes like these, scenes which would make sublime short comedies in their own right, the movie falls flatter and flatter as it goes on.  In part this is the same problem I've had with Lubitsch before: the pacing isn't as crisp as this style normally warrants. It isn't as sharp and rollicking and mercilessly paced as Wilde or Coward or Sorkin or Shaw working with similar material.  But this isn't even the real problem.  This I could forgive when weigh in the balance against the abundance of great scenes like the breakfast table battle.  No, the problem is the heroine: Gene Tierney really sinks this film.

I don't ever remember hating Gene Tierney before, although I have to admit that it has been some years since I have seen anything of hers. (I LOVE Laura, so I'm not going to hold this or The Ghost and Mrs. Muir against her.)  But here she is stiff and undernourished and paralyzed by artificiality. The words that fall from her careful pout are somehow both diffident and tortured.  And, thanks to bad styling and some truly terrible wigs, she is not even particularly lovely for most of the film.  Of course, she has a hard row to hoe: while Don Ameche gets to be the dashing, energetic playboy, beloved of all who see him (with the notable exception of a showgirl he encounters in middle age, who really gets the best of him), she has to play the befuddled, put-upon wife, doomed to perpetual cycles of betrayal, disillusionment and forgiveness-against-her-better-judgment until finally she perishes (some years after her self-respect must have died).  She does get some phenomenally complex scenes, however, the best of which is the one where, having left her philandering husband and returned to Kansas, she tells her parents and smug Albert that she won't be judged for the years of her marriage under any circumstances.  It wasn't ten years of suffering, she says, and she refuses to be cast as that kind of woman.  It was a decade of highs and lows, like any other marriage.

Oh, it begins so very high. Henry sees her at a public telephone, lying to her mother about why she isn't home yet. Smitten, he pursues he  into a bookstore, where he finds his beloved perusing a book titled "Making your Husband Happy."

What is a man to do in a situation like that but pose as a sales clerk and persuade the young lady that she needs neither the book nor the man she myopically believes she is marrying.  After an astonishing sales pitch, the disguise begins to crumble:

She:
"If you don't change your attitude, I shall have to complain to your employer."

He:
"I'm not employed here.  I'm not a book salesman. I took one look at you and followed you into the store.  If you'd walked into a restaurant, I would have become a waiter. If you'd walked into a burning building, I would have become a fireman.  If you'd walked into an elevator, I would have stopped it between two floors, and we'd have spent the rest of our lives there."

Swoon.

D, a word to the wise (by which I mean anyone smart enough to fall in love with a bibliophile): anytime you want to say those words to me in a bookstore, I'm yours.

And let's not forget the film's best (only?) elevator: the one that takes hell's rejects up to the other place.  It's hard not to remember this part of the bookstore scene at the film's end....

It's been many a long week since I last joined you for Sunday Salon.  What have I been up to since then?  A welter of teaching and grading.  Somewhat less pleasure reading and film watching.  I became obsessed with the Miltonic television triumph of last spring, Justified, and with Timothy Olyphant's performance in it.  I turned 30, and that seemed like a good moment in my life to decide what kind of character I would be.  And I am deeply in thrall to the Canadian reality show Battle of the Blades, in which ex-NHL players are taught to become pairs figure skaters, to the extent that I now use it to demonstrate theoretical principles in my classes.

And reading?  I just finished Jennifer Crusie's exceptional good comic novel Faking It, in which an art forger falls in love with a con man only after the most numbingly awkward sexual start.  It's all about the forging of identities in more senses than one - the fabricating of separate selves for separate circumstances and the paralyzing (or sometimes eroticizing) effects of these  performances.  And it is so unspeakably witty, and utterly uninvested in the cliches of the romance genre, except as an object of light satire.  Consider this early moment, when the hero meets the niece and mother of the heroine (whose name he doesn't yet know, although he has decided that she bears a certain passing resemblance to a woman named Boop):

He grinned a little to himself, thinking of Nadine's curly hair and pale blue eyes; clearly she was someone who swam in Betty's gene pool.  And Gwen, too.  If you lined them up, all three of them with those weird eyes, they'd look like an outtake from Children of the Damned.

My favorite of the three Crusie novels I have read so far - I can't wait to read more.

Other news: last week, I discovered that a delightful (and previous unknown to me) colleague at a major university well to the south of me has structured huge parts of a graduate seminar around my (unpublished) dissertation and its framework.  And then my brain crawled out giddily out of my ear.

Three weeks ago, I began to write a Sunday Salon post about the most extraordinary event of the previous week, but I never had time to finish it.  Here it is, better late than never:

I have just two words to say to you about my day: Pumpkin. Regatta.

This time last year I was oppressively exhausted.  D called me up  and said, "You know that town we just visited on the northern shore of Nova Scotia?  They are having a pumpkin regatta tomorrow, and you have to go."

"I don't know," I said, "I am just so tired."

"Ariel," he said sternly, "If I was lucky enough to live an hour away from a pumpkin regatta, nothing could keep me away."

So I went, ploddingly, and (you see where this is going) it was sublime.  I had always thought that small towns as idyllic as the ones we see on television shows like The Gilmore Girls were the stuff of Hollywood fantasy.  Nowhere could be that charming.  Nope: Windsor, NS, with its main street just waiting for a film set in the 40s to take up shooting, is that charming.  It is known for two things: its claim to be the birthplace of hockey, and its unusually plump breed of pumpkins.  So plump are these pumpkins that two adults can sit inside a carved specimen and paddle it about like a boat.


There are generally two events: the motorized pumpkin (an outboard motor is attached to a raft made of two or three giant gourds) and the paddle division (one or two rowers propel a hollowed pumpkin).  Last year the motorized division included just three vessels.  The local head shop had sponsored one boat, which promptly stalled in the middle of the race.  "I don't want to draw any conclusions about the effects of marijuana use on your performance," drawled the announcer, "but there appears to be a bit of trouble out there."  The winner of one of the two races last year was the headmaster of the local school.  The whole town seemed to have brought their dogs - in Halloween costume - for some sort of contest that just precedes the regatta.  The whole thing: totally winning, utterly charming.

D arrived in Halifax late last night - just in time to go to the regatta today.  It was bitterly cold, but we braved the elements with my friend S and perched on damp, windswept rocks with the rest of the crowd to eat our poutine and hotdogs and watch the rotund pumpkin shenanigans.  (S was felled for the rest of the week by a racking illness that I couldn't help but feel partially responsible for, and mentally dubbed the "Giant Pumpkin plague".) 

D and S began to plot for next year, when they would carve their own vessel and take up regatta piracy.  "We could run up a skull and crossbones and wreak havoc among the other contestants," they cried, "we will bring tiny cannons that would shoot those miniature pumpkins instead of cannonballs!"

"Yes," I added, "and instead of being boarded, your victims would be gourded."

Groans all round....

Excerpts from the recent journals of Sycorax Pine:

Thursday, October 7, 2010
30 years ago today, I was supposed to be born, but wasn't.  Instead I was born a week later, on my father's birthday.  He had been born on his parents' anniversary.  As a family, we know to make an entrance.

Wednesday, October 13
Long day at work, came home from salsa class to a table full of fresh lobsters, bought and prepared by my family.  Bliss.  Thanks for your sacrifice, wee lobster friends.

Thursday, October 14, 2010
My 30th birthday.  Spent most of the day in the office, working on a grant proposal and hypothesizing a book project.  Then out to lovely dinner with houseful of visiting family (D, parents, and mother-in-all-but-law) and home to messages from friends.  Exhaustion. Vast improvement over the last two birthdays, when I cried with frustration and loneliness in the face of unscalable Mt. Grademores, nearly burned down the house by leaving the toaster set to "Always On" overnight, and looked out the window to find the city had towed my car.  I sense a new maturity.  But my knees hurt, and they didn't yesterday.

Friday, October 15, 2010
I can't go to see Midnight with Roy tonight, so I console myself by taking us off to see my university's National Hockey Champions play the season opener at local rival Dalhousie.  Immediate college sport culture shock: the night opened with Dal congratulating SMU (my school) on its dominance last year, "Because when one of us wins, we ALL win." My group exchanges glances. "Can you imagine," I say, "If at the beginning of the Carolina-Duke game, the Tar Heels congratulated Dook on their championship win? Anathema." I shudder.  Still, you've got to admire Canadian collectivist politeness at work.  Although the game did end in a giant, fists-flying brawl... after SMU won 5-0. (Go Huskies!)

Sunday, October 17, 2010
Everyone went home at the crack of dawn today and now the house feels both free and barren.  Must get some sonic mouse deterrents.  Little buggers took immediate advantage of unpopulous house to frolic in front of me.  Smart-asses.

Monday, October 18, 2010
Up late last night in empty house and empty bed, churning my way through the pile of Lisa Kleypas romances that landed on my doorstep earlier in the week.  They all begin well, if somewhat identically: strong, confidant woman meets professional man intrigued by her self-sufficiency.  But all end rather unnervingly with a flurry of "No no! Please! Not here! Not now! Someone will find us! Oh, please stop"s that are actually "Yes, yes! I can't resist you! Overcome me!"s.  And there is frequently a trajectory of independent self-reliance disintegrating into sobbing codependence on the part of the heroine.  I don't care for it.  Even when I often admire other things Kleypas is up to, particularly with her use of image and metaphor, I can't help feeling this is queasy gender politics masquerading as feminism.

I began on the night of my 30th birthday with Suddenly You, which begins on the night of its heroine's 30th birthday.  Convinced of her wizened, unapproachable spinsterhood and alarmed by her impending descent into decrepitude, she decides to celebrate by hiring a gigolo and losing her virginity.  Because that's what you do if you are a single Victorian woman of a literary bent and a certain age.  Don't you remember anything from Jane Eyre?  The male prostitute incident was somewhere between the scene in which Rochester cross-dresses as a female gypsy fortune-teller and the one in which Jane flirts with becoming a repressed missionary.

But back to Suddenly You, a book in which this actually does happen.  The man who shows up at her door at the agreed time is surprisingly untawdry.  Still, she is getting cold feet, and begs him to leave.  For the first of many times, he dismisses her request out of hand:

"Oh, no. Not if I'm your birthday present.  I'm going to keep you company.  You're not going to stay alone on such an important evening.  Let me guess - today began your thirtieth year of life."*

"How did you know my age?"

"Because women react strangely to the thirtieth.  I once knew a woman who draped all the mirrors in black cloth on that birthday, for all the world as if a death had occurred."

"She was mourning her lost youth," Amanda said shortly, and downed a large swallow of wine until it sent a flush of heat through her chest.  "She was reacting to the fact that she had become middle-aged."

"You're not middle-aged.  You're ripe.  Like a hothouse peach."

"Nonsense," she muttered.... (15)

Hmmm.  I'm doing some muttering myself.



*That's right - this day actually ENDED her thirtieth year of life, and started her thirty-first.  But who am I to quibble?  Just an old crone, er, hothouse peach.

D is coming to visit, my first sight of him since August.  (Next anticipated sighting? December.)  He leaves Honolulu at 9:30 tonight, and, traveling without cease, he will arrive in Halifax tomorrow at 10 p.m.  Twenty-four hours of travel apart? I don't care for that.  I feel like we are one internet and cell phone collapse away from carrying on a Victorian epistolary romance.

So... the next twenty-four hours are stretching out ominously, tediously, and busily (there is a lot of cleaning that needs to get done before this house is livable for anyone but me and the mouse colony that has taken up residence under my sofa).   But I am going to while away at least part of that time in reading, so I thought I would share my two favorite bibliophile discoveries of the week with you in honor of this passe-temps.

First, I give you this marvelous Penguin Books campaign.  I mean, who hasn't fantasized that they could just open up their hands and read whatever book they wanted in their palms?  Best mutant power ever.

And then there is the infinitely entertaining Bookshelf Porn, site of endless bibliophile giddiness.  What is there not to love about the shelves that spell out a giant injunction to literacy? (D's roommate tells me she is totally onboard with our putting these up in their LA apartment.)  And I think we all know that if the cautious Canadian banking system (that's why our economy isn't a state of total collapse, RBC bankers routinely say to me, turning a gimlet eye on my profligate American self) refuses me a mortgage,  it will quickly come to this.  Or this, depending on how assailed by worldly troubles I feel.

Last night a friend from my department hosted a massive 80s party.  I may (embarrassingly) be the only person I work with who was born in the 80s (and thus may have a somewhat blurrier memory of the decade than everyone else there), but I did my best to turn it out.  Much planning went into my ensemble: A stiff silk taffeta baby doll dress, its gunmetal overskirt pinned up to render it less demure and show off the ruffled petticoat. Gartered fishnets.  Hand-knitted (over the last two days) faux angora legwarmers that made my feet look like a sooty yeti's and that made a determined run for the floor at every opportunity. Peep-toe, bow-and-brocade black heels (totteringly high, ill-conceived for dancing). Huge, curling-ironed hair, asymmetrically swept up on one side.  Sparkle-encrusted, teal-lined eyes, heavy on the mascara. Harsh blush, hot pink lipstick.  Emphatic brows.

It all started out looking satisfyingly trashy, though by the end of the evening it had settled into this. (Left.  Note that the yeti legwarmers had, at this point, given up any attempt to stay on my gams.)

At any rate, the moral of the story is that this morning (sigh, midday) I look like a raccoon that fell face-first into a child's collection of colored glitters and finger paints, I've lost my voice from shouting over Madonna and the Bangles, and I can barely walk from dancing in those heels.

Ah, well: worth it.

So what am I up to this Sunday? Well, blogging (a pleasure I have shamefully neglected since the start of classes a few weeks ago).  Gym-going.  Lesson-planning for tomorrow.  And, hopefully, some of these other things:


Reading

My copy of Monsters of Men, the third book in Patrick Ness's increasingly brilliant Chaos Walking trilogy, arrived on my doorstep this week, so I am dying to dive into the conclusion to this tale of a world in which a virus has made men's thoughts audible (the Noise, they call it, and it makes living in a community almost unbearable), and the consequences to society of this psychological shift.  I can't forget that I have work to do, or it will absorb me totally.

It's lucky that it arrived when it did, however, because I had just finished Carolyn Crane's excellent romance-tinged sci fi novel, Double Cross, and was feeling a bit bereft.  This is the second in Crane's series about an alternate-history midwestern metropolis in which the, well, excessively-abled (known by those who actually believe in their existence as highcaps) can invade your dreams, or manipulate building structures, or read your thoughts.

The heroine isn't a highcap, but she encounters a magnetic figure named Packard who tells her that her rampant health anxiety (a really crippling hypochondriacal paranoia) can be externalized - purged temporarily from her system and even used as a sort of a weapon or tool.  She can pour it into others, specifically targets who need to be "disillusioned" of their antisocial tendencies, for whom all her potent fear can act as a destructive catharsis.  But Packard, of course, has his own agendas, probably nefarious, and despite the pull he exerts, she also finds herself drawn to a heroic figure named Otto, the mayor of the city and the very emblem of the power of the law and its structures.

I won't say any more for fear of wandering into the dread land of Spoiler for those who haven't read the totally engrossing first book, Mind Games, but I can wholeheartedly recommend both of these trilogies.  Double Cross is the sort of fiction that isn't afraid to (scratch that - is eager to) grapple with big, complex moral issues.  Crane doesn't mind ripping the veneer of perfection away from her characters - the fact that they are human makes them more compelling, and no less admirable (somehow) than the plastic sheen of flawlessness would.  This itself becomes a major theme in book 2...


Watching
I had a lot of time on my hands yesterday, while I had my fingers full of half-knitted legwarmer.  My eyes wandered guiltily to the pile of Zip.ca discs that had gathered dust under my television for the entire month of September.  So, in the time it took to knit a legwarmer and a half, I watched In Bruges (a brutal, sometimes manipulatively shocking, jarringly beautiful movie about two hitmen exiled to the fairy tale limbo of Bruges, it is the filmic equivalent of one of those marvelous, monstrous moral paintings by Brueghel or Bosch, filled with wild demonic torments) and then the classic Man of the West, starring Gary Cooper (never one of my favorite western heros, although he is sort of charmingly clumsy here).  This second may demand a rewatching at some point: my knitting is not so practiced, at this point, that I can take my eyes off it for any length of time, so I missed all the shadings of familial guilt and sexual threat that occur in the silences of a good western.  Another time...




Listening (A Literary Analysis)
All week (when I wasn't bathing my sparkly self in the sounds of the 80s) I was discovering the long-owned and long-neglected (by me) newish album by Josh Ritter, So Runs the World Away.  Ritter has been a favorite of mine for a long time, not only for the richness of his sound, but also for the literary intricacy of his lyrics. Consider my current favorite from the new album, "Change of Time":


He describes a dream of nightswimming, "directionless and drifting," in a world of things that have suffered a sea change (into something rich and strange):

I had a dream last night

and rusting far below me

battered hulls and broken hardships

Leviathan and lonely....

Its the wit of the wordplay that always gets me in a good Ritter song.  A hull is (of course) a nautical term - he is floating above shipwrecks and the sirens that lured men down - but it is also an empty shell, the container for things that have slipped away.  This is a song about the batterings of life, the ellusiveness and hollowness and strange, floating suspension of memory - the pun on "broken hardships" breaks that metaphor wide open for us.

(Also, I may have to name my first novel, set in Nova Scotia, Leviathan and Lonely.  You heard it here first.)

He goes on to extend the metaphor - the past is an anchor we drag behind us, memory is a set of ripped sails that won't quite propel us, catching the wind and then letting it slip through.  We are pummeled by the whitecaps of recollection.

And like so many Ritter songs, there is a fundamentally romantic shift at the end, although one tinged with melancholy rather than sentimentality.  (This is, of course, a pivotal part of my devotion to his music - unsentimental romanticism.  Do you know how hard that is to find?  How hard a pitch it is to hit and maintain?)

I had a dream last night

And when I opened my eyes

Your shoulder blade, your spine

Were shorelines in the moonlight.

New worlds for the weary,

New lands for the living.

I could make it if I tried -

I closed my eyes, I kept on swimming.

Here is a live acoustic version of the song - stripped down, less surging, but still lovely.


Until next time, Saloners! Enjoy your October days before they get too short....