The pointless forest has moved, like Birnam Wood up Dunsinane Hill, to Typepad. I've done this mainly because I'd like people to be able to comment without having to have a Vox account (though most likely everyone who is interested in doing so has already taken care of it). There's a little overlap between the last couple of posts here and the first couple there, but I have now also started posting brand new things over there.
Most people, unlike me, probably just use a feed reader anyhow, but I know that if you do not, the Vox interface does make it easier, under some circumstances, to notice when your friends have posted something new. Would it be useful, then, do you think, to make a little post here when I've posted something there? Or would that just be extra cruft to no good purpose?
In less than a week, Team Snarkfox will be in glorious London, England, with all that entails (acute childhood nostalgia, oddly flavored crisps, gawking at things in Liberty, visits to cousins, buckets of tea, the Tate Modern, hemorrhaging money). We haven't been in almost six years, and I can hardly wait. I am filling the time until then with:
- desultory filling-out of forms that must be completed before my job status shifts over to something else, which it will do while we are out of town;
- largely failing to read the things I ought to be reading in preparation for next semester;
- sending occasional work-related emails so that people will be under the mistaken impression that I am getting something done;
- formulating schemes to run away and read novels on the lawn.
I have been feeling somewhat ancient and unaccomplished lately--or rather, naggingly aware of the fact that I should have gotten a good deal more sorted out by now, given the age that I am, and that I'm not going to suddenly get a few years back to get it righter. On the other hand, this state of affairs is hardly a surprising outcome of the habits outlined above, now is it? Also I note that my face appears to have mutated into that of a well-creased yet puffy monkey, which is not heartening. I had hoped to age gracefully, but it seems that unless it turns out that "comic and rubbery" is the height of grace, I am out of luck. Too bad.
But London! London will be extremely heartening, and indeed probably even replete with actual reading of novels on lawns. There are a lot of grassy squares that are eminently suitable for just that very thing. It will be restorative.
Speaking of novels, I keep reading The Fountain Overflows, by Rebecca West, over and over again. I read lots of books more than once, of course, but this is a different, more total and consuming, kind of rereading. There are a number of books that I read and have read this way, often coming to the end and flipping back to the beginning to start over again without standing up in between. Most of the books that fall into this category I read for the first time quite some time ago. The majority date from childhood, when it seems my whole life was consumed by an unbroken stream of reading, and whenever I happened by some circumstance to be forced to do something other than read, my mind was still awash in whatever books I had been reading just before.
The Fountain Overflows I read for the first time only six months ago and I believe I have read it at least six times since then. I wish I felt I had the skill to explain what makes it so entirely compelling to me.
It was written in 1956 but is set about fifty years earlier. The narrator, Rose Aubrey, is one of four children in a family that appears to be almost entirely unfit for the world in which it lives. Their father is brilliant, handsome, mercurial, a political genius, and constitutionally incapable of passing up an opportunity to lose money in the stock market or to bite a hand that feeds him. Their mother, once an accomplished concert pianist, is thin, anxious, nerve-jangled, shabby. To outsiders she seems hopelessly odd, but in fact she is clever and generous, capable of holding the family together and looking after a number of other characters in distress that cross their path.
Rose, her twin sister Mary, and their brother Richard Quin never doubt that where the Aubreys and the outside world diverge, it is infinitely better to be an Aubrey. The oldest child, Cordelia, is built differently. Their oddness and poverty agonize her. She is pretty; she plays the violin in a way that stupider adults think is impressive, though the musical Aubreys know better and are agonized in their turn:
...we would rather have been musical with Mamma than have red-gold curls and make utter fools of ourselves by playing the violin as Cordelia did. We were sorry for Cordelia, particularly now, when Papa, from whom she derived such interest as she possessed, had gone away for six weeks. But all the same she was an ass to think she could play the violin, it was as if Mary and I thought we had red-gold curls.
This gives you some idea of the quality of the writing. The discrepancies between the judgments of the non-Cordelia Aubreys and the judgments of most of the people they come into contact with (in all of which the book sides definitively with Rose) produce the emotional tensions and central drama of the book, though page to page it is filled with small events. Mainly it brilliantly captures what it is to be a child, (thus) relatively powerless, and possessed of very high standards. I love it.
Oh dear, what a ridiculously long post this turned out to be, and with so little holding it together. On the other hand, writing it cheered me up enormously. Since I'm pretty sure that only about three people are going to read it in any case, so be it. Maybe one of you will even read the book and tell me how much you loved it.
In a shocking deviation from normal practice, I got something done around the house. Yesterday I put together something called a back porch compost tumbler, which is a sort of drum on wheels that you can dump your scraps into and whirl around, then push like a wheelbarrow if you want to move it somewhere else. Because who doesn't want to roll a lot of half-rotted vegetable bits from place to place?
The one we got I think perhaps missed a step in its factory fabrication, because every single hole that a screw or bolt was supposed to run through seemed to be unfinished and needed to be drilled out before I could proceed. On the other hand, doing that did make me feel extra handy and competent, so all in all it was perhaps more satisfying this way than the alternative.
I'd been feeling a little ridiculous throwing out piles of vegetable scraps every week, which I do, and don't have the freezer space or need for stock required to save anything like all of them for cooking. Compost, then, is the obvious solution, but since the garden at our rented house is small and mainly the domain of the owners, who live on the other side of the duplex, I needed to get something unobtrusive, smallish, and self contained. I think this drum guy will work out fine, though we'll need to be good about including enough "brown matter" (no, not the scatological kind) to insure that it rots properly and doesn't get stinky. This brown matter business is easy in autumn when dry leaves are everywhere, but it requires a bit more deliberate thought this time of year. Also, I suppose there will come a point when we'll need to dump mostly-composted stuff into a pile to finish off (there's a good space I'm eyeing next to the garage/shed) so that we aren't continually rendering it unusable as dirt by adding fresh unrotted material.
Anyone more experienced in such matters should please feel more than free to provide advice.
I decided to make things a little more foresty, to go with the pointless forest of it all. I was going to draw a picture of the house belonging to a particular pine cone spirit (retired) that I make up stories about. It didn't come off, though, so this is a picture of another house down the way, not nearly as close to the dark and shadowy edge of the forest. I think this is where the pine cone spirit's friend the Umble lives. He has a large floppy hat that is not very clean and (as you can see from the open barn door in the side of his house) often lives with livestock in the house, usually just a sheep or two but occasionally a goat or a shaggy pony. While the pine cone spirit's house is always very tidy and freshly scrubbed, and he is always ready to sit at a nice bare wood table with you to share some tea and cake, the Umble's house is rather dark and cluttered, and the table is generally covered with stacks of paper and recently washed mugs that he couldn't be bothered to put away and maybe some kittens.
Some bean salad is mushy*, weird, bland, and yucky, but not the bean salad we will be eating for dinner tonight**. It consists of:
Vallarta beans (small, dense, rich)
Chopped broccolini (steamed)
Chopped butter lettuce
Red onion
Toasted pine nuts
Preserved lemon
Garlic
Olive oil
Vinegar
Salt
Lots and lots of pepper
My regret of the evening is that we don't have some good bread in the house to go with it.
*Sometimes, if there are kidney beans involved, it can be both mushy and all too toothsome, at the same time. This is a most regrettable state of affairs.
**No doubt it is our good luck that we are not trying to feed this to a child, as then the smooth expanse of our enjoyment would be wrinkled by dissent on at least one of these points.
It's a bit embarrassing how cheaply my good humor can be purchased by hot, sunny, summery weather, and being out in it. If you could see how sad I was on Monday (when it was cold and grey) and how happy I am today, you would laugh at me.
When I was five, I liked to put talcum powder on my hands before I went to bed (why, I have no idea). I also liked to get myself a glass of water. The trouble was that if I put the powder on first, I'd get it wet when I filled my water glass. If I put the powder on second, I'd get powder in my water. I did the former, because I was worried that the powder might be poisonous. But one evening, I decided to live a little and do it the other way around.
But after I had been in bed for a few minutes, I was struck with terrible remorse. Oh god! It probably WAS poisonous. How could I have been such a fool? I wept. My father heard my stifled, choking sobs from the next room.
"Are you all right?" he called.
"Yes!" I said. "Fine! I was just coughing."
Then I got to work wondering how long poison could take to kill me. After all, I wasn't dead yet. How long would it be before I knew I was in the clear? I began to calculate. Right now I was in kindergarten. Next year, I would be six and in first grade. When I was seven, I would be in second grade. (Hey! If you subtract five from your age, you get the grade you're in! Clever!) Right. Probably if I was still alive by the time I started second grade, then, I could safely assume that the talcum powder had not, in fact, killed me.
The end.
"I still want a bronze cast of your nose."
"Mm."
"I've wanted one for YEARS now."
"I know."
"You would think someone would have believed me and made it happen. All I want is your nose, in a form I can carry in my pocket! Is that so strange?"
"Yes."
Today I went to the mall in an attempt to purchase a pair of linen trousers that did not make me look frumpy and saggy-bottomed. I did not succeed, but I did have the magnificent experience of being at the mall on the afternoon before prom.
It took me a while to work out why I was surrounded legions of fresh-faced young girls wearing jeans, sweatshirts, and elaborately lacquered dragon-lady hairdos. When I wandered through the makeup section of Saks and saw several of the same in the process of having their fresh young faces transformed into extravaganzas of maquillage, light dawned. Prom night! Oh glory.
I went up to one of the counters and asked the nice woman, "Is it prom?" Behind her a wholesome and freckly blonde was being transformed into something that would have made a suitable love object for James Kirk in the original Star Trek, and an entire nuclear family (tired mother in shalwar kameez, text-messaging father in rumpled sportscoat, and rapt little sister in Dora the Explorer shirt) watched as inch-long eyelashes were applied to their adolescent representative. Another pair of girls with uncannily similar arrangements of sausage curls waited their turn.
"Oh, yes, honey," she said, and there was a haunted look in her eye. "It's prom all right. It's been prom all week."
