Friday

I just decided to fast today. Or at least to eat very little. So a baby-fast. I put on my "go out shopping" pants and they are too tight. Now is the time to do something. I'll report back if I succeed, or not.
Meanwhile I found this at the library. A must read! Or at least it's worth a try. Not today but soon.

This book! Making me nuts. False pride is involved, I believe.

I skimmed this book because a neighbor recommended it to me. It's causing me to fret way, way, way more than it should, and for all the wrong reasons. I'm not going to tell the whole story right now--because I seem incapable of blogging a short story (see, for example, yesterday's overly long story about a micro dog bite). But friends and family will get a sense of why I'm wringing my hands over the book when I reveal that the neighbor who suggested it is my Tea Party/Trump Supporter/Conspiracy Theorist Neighbor, with whom I have a love-hate relationship.

Skimming the book led me to this article, which is also why my brain is so muddled right now.

Recipes in novels

 

I'm going to try this recipe tonight. From the novel Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. Enjoying the book; plan to enjoy the eggs too.

A Worthy project.

Every Wednesday I spend a few hours volunteering at my local library. This is my all-time favorite volunteer activity -- shelving books, recovering books, moving books. I even get to push one of those library carts around like a big shot.

Recently the head librarian asked me to take on a special project (!!). Mr. Worthy, a daily library patron I've never met, leaves little slips of paper with quotations he's found in books he's reading. The librarians, not knowing exactly what to do with all these slips of paper, have kept them in an envelope waiting for an idea to emerge. Now I have the slips of paper and I'm typing them up, cutting them into strips, and they'll be folded and placed in a basket so other patrons can pick one up as they leave the library. Sort of like fortune cookies without the cookie. 

When I'm working on this project, I always think of my good friend San Francisco Margo. She makes adorable book marks and sends me a supply every couple of years. She often uses old Christmas cards or other greeting cards to find a nice image. Then she laminates the pithy quotation on the back and viola! a sweet bookmark. They are well used in this house. 

Most of Mr. Worthy's quotations are sweet thoughts about how to love and live happily. This, however, is my favorite so far:

When you criticize someone you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them you are a mile away from them and  you have their shoes.

                                                                                                           Author Unknown

Again with the crows.

There are a lot of nice books about crows. I've read some, but not all, of these. Doug got this whole crow thing started by reading Gifts of the Crows -- we think I brought a copy home from the library. That led to us paying more attention to our own local flock, and to reading more about crows. As Margaret pointed out in a comment to the previous crow post, crows are said to recognize faces, bring gifts, and generally interact with humans in a way unlike other birds. 

Another attempt to get organized and decluttered.

Here's the 1-2-3 of this book:

The process takes 6 months. You start with your clothes, all clothes. Put your tops in a pile. Starting with off-season clothes, pick up each item and ruthlessly toss it into a discard box (actually more than 1 box but that's a minor detail) unless you have worn it recently or can honestly say that it ... brings you joy. Then you do the same thing with piles of (1) skirts/pants, (2) shoes, (3) accessories.

Do the same with (1) books, (2) your papers, (3) miscellany, and (4) sentimental items.

I only read half of the book (it was overdue at the library) but I might give it a try. It's so very rigid and that might appeal to me. I've already decided to completely ignore her advice about books. I'm not normal about books and I'm not ever going to be, so the books stay. [By the way, she recommends having a tiny number, fewer than 30 I think she said. Snort. As if.]

Hi to Margaret, Zazzy, Peggy, and Kitt for saying hello!

Oh, and there's this. Makes me laugh every time I see it. So juvenile I know. Keith has a new album out.

Fungi and moss.

 

[Boy, I really phoned it in yesterday, didn't I? Blogging about a day-glo Polish statue of Lenin taking a leak.]

The mushrooms at the top were in my backyard a week or so ago. I love when they turn black--so beautiful. The other three pictures are from the Patuxent Wildlife Center in September. The book I just finished, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, has some wonderful passages about moss. I wanted to put one here, but unfortunately, I read an electronic library copy of the book and it's no longer on my Kindle. Another mark against electronic books (which I'll continue to read anyway because it's just so easy, and I'm all about easy).

Big coincidences and little coincidences.

I'm reading both of these right now; actually I'm listening to the Dylan book. Yesterday, I came across a mention of De Materia Medica, a book written between 50 and 70 AD by Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician and botanist. It's an encyclopedia of medicinal herbs and plants. I wasn't aware of this book until I read about it twice yesterday. I think that's at least a medium coincidence.

A page from De Materia Medica.

A few thoughts about words.

Three times today, in three different contexts, I encountered the word "spangle" (or "spangling" or "spangled"). Isn't it a great word? Spangle.

The first occasion was in a book review by Meghan O'Rourke.
Since those days much has changed; you can’t go out to the Fort Greene Greenmarket on Saturday without running into a spangle of fiction writers.

The second occasion was in the book I'm reading for my book group meeting (Gold by Chris Cleave):  
The day of her birthday was hot. ...The wheat was on the turn but it was still fresh and green, with the poppies and the cornflowers spangling it.

I like the way the word sounds in both those instances, although the first use -- "spangle" as a collective noun -- seems to deviate a lot from all the definitions I can find for the word.

And of course we all know "spangled" from the National Anthem, as in star-spangled banner. My third encounter with a spangly word today was during the HBO Veterans Day TV thing. Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, and the Zac Brown Band doing "Fortunate Son" by John Fogerty.

Yeah, some folks inherit star-spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord

Interesting song choice for a Veterans Day event. They were great.

The following sentence, also from the novel Gold, made me grind my teeth: 

Me and Zoe have to see Tom ....

I know it's just a novel, but I hear that kind of sentence ...."Me and Bob are going to ...." far, far too often. I'm flexible, I'm willing to change with the times. But I am not, nor will I ever be, ready to accept "me" as the subject of a sentence. Me won't!!

Finally, I've given up caring about the use of "between you and I." I think even grammarians have given up. There's an entire Wikipedia entry on the subject, including this over-the-top sentence:

In its treatment of "coordinate nominatives" used where the accusative (oblique) case would be used in non-coordinate constructions, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language differentiates different levels of acceptance, depending on the pronouns used and their position in the coordinate construction. Thus, a construction like "without you or I knowing anything about it" is "so common in speech and used by so broad a range of speakers that it has to be recognised as a variety of Standard English."

Sometimes I read a book just because the title makes me snicker.

 

The above book isn't as snicker-inducing as I'd hoped. But I'm not finished yet. Meanwhile, Doug is reading Richard Ford's latest novel, Let Me Be Frank With You, featuring the NJ real estate agent Frank Bascombe. Doug alerted me to this snicker-inducing snippet from the novel:

 

Protagonist walking down a street sees a couple walking toward him;  he doesn't want to talk to them.

I'd rather jump in my watery basement hole than talk to them...How many old acquaintances, neighbors, former teachers, .. have we all caught a glimpse of in an unexpected place and dived in an alley rather than face for a second? All because (1) We don't want to; (2) There's too much unsaid that doesn't need to be said--a Chinese wall of words that would fall on top of us and we'd die; and (3) We know others feel the very same way about us.  We're, most of us, the last person anyone in his right mind wants to talk to on any given day, including Christmas.

That's a five- or six-snicker paragraph for me. I hope to read the book soon. But first I have to finish Gold by Chris Cleave for my book/dinner group next week. So far, I give it a meh. I hang in there with this group of seven nice women, even though I'm still annoyed, irritated?, that the book is usually discussed for only about 10 or 15 minutes. They talk mostly about food and cooking, their kids and parents, travel, work (just a little), health (ugh). I want to talk about the damn book. Excuse me.

The Great Dreary.

 

I've been listening to this book on CD since April. Glory hallelujah I'm done! It's an excellent book, especially for readers who have a high tolerance for wallowing in misery. I'm apparently drawn to depressing books, especially in nonfiction. I have a special love of disasters. Of this I am not proud. And I recognize that it's not good for my mental health but I can't stop myself.

This book needs no description: the subtitle says it all. Although I think I would insert the word "suffering" somewhere in that subtitle: I came away with a very, very full picture of just how awful the aftermath of that storm was for the residents. And the saddest part is that it will happen again.

And while I'm discussing my sick obsession with disasters, here are some observations from an oceanographer who was on the Diane Rehm radio show yesterday. The discussion was all that plastic that's out there in our oceans. (Diane is no slouch in the disaster area herself.)

According to Charles Moore:

You know, we're driven by an economic paradigm that requires us to be wasteful. We produce waste in order to drive the economic system. But there's a wide range of possible scenarios in which attractive economic, social and environmental outcomes are possible without relying on economic growth. We need a steady state economy. We need -- all these ideas about recycling, that's really about a steady state economy, where you take back as much as you produce. And in order to do that, we need a change in the economic paradigm. And the 11th commandment can't be thou shalt grow the economy, but that's the only way a politician can get elected.

I feel that we're being driven into a barbaric situation by this push to constantly grow the economy. We've got to reign in the productive monster. You can't have unlimited growth on finite resources. It just defies logic. And that is a radical change that would deal with the climate crisis as well as the plastic pollution crisis. But we need radicals. Radicals drive change, and that's why I'm an activist.

I'm not an activist or a radical. I'm just a doomsayer. But I do recycle and I no longer buy shampoo so that's something.

On having children.

 

This is a book I read a few years ago. I have zero, and I mean zero, memory of the book so I'm going to break one of my informal rules and read it again. I was reminded of the book (it's short stories, not a novel, which partially explains why it didn't imprint on my brain) when I read an interview with actress Frances McDormand who starred in the HBO miniseries based on the book. In the interview she said this:

About children: "... the minute you smell them there’s a pheromonal reaction between the parent and their child. My son smelled like a cinnamon bun, and that smell entered into my biological being, and it became an imperative that I keep him alive at all costs, so then there’s this monster—this tiger, or lion—that comes forward in you to protect them. And it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t matter if they become men or women. The whole point of a teenager driving you insane is because they’re supposed to wear you down so you can fuckin’ die sooner and get out of the way, because it’s their place.

This passage speaks to me. My children didn't wear me down during their teen years and they're not wearing me down in their early adulthood. But my gut tells me that Frances is right.

And the 2-night, 4-hour miniseries that aired Sunday and Monday nights was wonderful. She's a great actress.

About seeing Ben Affleck's penis.

I read the book Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. It was a fun and easy read. The movie version was released yesterday. I'm not interested in seeing the movie (or Ben's penis either), but for those of you who might be, here's a guide to catching a glimpse. Full guide can be found here, on Vulture.com.

3. There will come a time near the very end of the movie when one character suggests that Ben Affleck take a shower. This is your cue! Lurch forward in your chair, elbow your date, pull out a pair of opera glasses, and generally behave in a fashion that you’ll regret later.

4. The other character will then leisurely stroll upstairs, and the next scene begins in media [sic] res in the bathroom, with Affleck shrugging off his clothes as he approaches the shower moving right to left. Focus intently on the screen at this moment. One method of concentration I’d suggest is to open your eyes very wide and emit a high-pitched, unnerving keen, in order to better block out dangerous and distracting external stimuli.

5. Do not look at the other character, who is naked and showering at scene-left. You did not come here for this other character. Know your mission. Memorize it. Say it out loud to yourself in the bathroom mirror before you leave your home.

6. The camera will start a parabolic dive-swoop towards the disrobing Affleck as he pulls off the below-the-waist garments that have previously restricted your visual access to his nethers. You will experience a brief moment of panic and may even find yourself murmuring, “Wait, the camera is rising all of a sudden, am I even gonna see his ass? This movie ticket was $15 and I might not even see a famous person’s ass! Goddammit, Julie!” (Assuming your date's name is Julie.)

7. Relax, because there is the ass. Is it not fine? Smooth, supple, and tinted olive by director of photography Jeff Cronenweth? It is a good ass. The people nod in assent, knowing this in their hearts to be true.

8. You may be tempted to focus on the ass. You cannot. Instead, shift your attention to the furthest-left part of Affleck’s thighs. This is where it will appear. We are close now. Can you feel the anticipation? The moral rot? It is a great thing to feel these things communally at a movie theater.

9. Lo, it appears, in the bottom-middle of the frame, emerging briefly from behind Affleck’s thigh like Tom Cruise’s similarly curious dong in All the Right Moves! We have dick! We have the Affleck dick! Pop some Champagne!

Picture of Ben came from his appearance last night on Real Time with Bill Maher. Ben and Bill (and author Sam Harris) got into a rousing debate about Islam. 

Hellebores. The first of many posts about hellebores. Dahlias are great but not quite as great as hellebores.

 

These are all new transplants with their very first flowers. I think I moved them from near their mother plants 2 years ago, or maybe just last year. The big surprise is that they have that inner ruffle, which I've never seen in my hellebores. I have a lot to learn about these random double blooms.

 

Last week I went to a plant sale at the American Horticulture Society in Alexandria, VA, and I met one of the authors of this book. So I had to buy it. Hellebores, also called Lenten roses, may be the perfect plant: they require virtually no care and very little sun, they survive very cold winters (the picture below shows my blooms under the last significant snow we had in late March), they produce many seedlings that can be easily moved, and (drumroll) deer won't eat them. Deer do, however, stomp on them so they still have to be protected a bit.

The love of books knows no bounds.

From the Harrison Memorial Library, Carmel, CA.

 

 

 

Tip o' the hat to the Beastie Boys.