Girl Detective

(thanks to Pages Turned)

What are you reading right now? About to start Phillip Pullman’s Golden Compass

Do you have any idea what you’ll read when you’re done with that? The Long Goodbye

What magazines do you have in your bathroom right now? Entertainment Weekly and The Atlantic

What’s the worst thing you were ever forced to read? Paper by a racist student in a writing class I taught.

What’s the one book you always recommend to just about everyone? Lately? Eat, Pray, Love.

Admit it, the librarians at your library know you on a first name basis, don’t they? They know my kids by first name, since they often hear me calling after them. They know my last name, since that’s what my holds are under.

Is there a book you absolutely love, but for some reason, people never think it sounds interesting, or maybe they read it and don’t like it at all? Gilead. Neither of my book groups liked it.

Do you read books while you eat? While you bathe? While you watch movies or TV? While you listen to music? While you’re on the computer? While you’re having sex? While you’re driving? While I’m eating, if I’m eating alone, which is rare.

When you were little, did other children tease you about your reading habits? Yes, I sat against a wall at recess with my book, and always finished my schoolwork quickly so I could pull out my book.

What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down? HP and the Deathly Hallows. For me, half the night was after 11pm.

Is it possible to walk by a candy dish of Dark Chocolate M & Ms and not grab a few?

And further, would I WANT to be that person?

I think not.

Summer isn’t quite over, but Chris Gore has a Summer 2007 Movie Scorecard at Suicide Girls.

I still haven’t seen it, but isn’t Once supposed to be the sleeper hit of the summer? And what about Waitress?

Heh-heh. Quel surprise, I’m a literature nerd. But what I want to know is, what’s a social nerd?

(Thanks to Haddayr for the link.)

Speaking of overly critical, it should NOT have a hyphen. No hyphens after -ly. Again, heh-heh.

The copy of Lionel Shriver’s Post-Birthday World that I’m reading is an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) I picked up for $2.98 at my used bookstore. I have a few other ARCs on my shelves, that I’ve either bought used, or was given by kind bookstore friends. But since my to-read pile is usually so large that the book is not only released in HC, but available in TPB or even MMPB by the time I get to reading it, I want to eschew ARCs. They’re full of typos, so they offend my copyeditor sensibilities. They can contain narrative mistakes. They’re usually larger, cheaper quality, and uglier than the for-sale editions. I’m not saying I need to buy any more books. But I can use my library and get an actual copy in about the time it would take me to get around to a distractingly imperfect and homely ARC.

“The idea is that you don’t have only one destiny. Younger and younger, kids are pressed to decide what they want to do with their lives, as if everything hinges on one decision. But whichever direction you go, there are going to be upsides and downsides. You’re dealing with a set of trade-offs, and not one perfect course in comparison to which all the others are crap. The idea is to take the pressure off….There are varying advantages to each competing future. But I didn’t want to have one bad future and one good. In both, everything is all right, really. Everything is all right.”

I place far too much weight on decisions. I can agonize over such trivial things as whether to go to the grocery or to yoga. I used to consult my Magic 8 ball with far too little skepticism. This passage sums up the guiding theme of The Post-Birthday World. It’s a refreshing and freeing one for me.

Last week’s Top Chef episode 7, Guilty Pleasures, featured a bait-and-switch strategy. The chefs were told they were going out, and got dressed up. Once at the club, though, they were pressed into catering to the closing hour munchies of the other patrons. Some of them rolled with this better than others. Sara was asked to pack her knives, because she was slow to produce an underseasoned burger and terrible milkshake. Interestingly, though Howie’s sandwich was also reviled, and their team was taken to task for communication problems, he was not given the boot. The week before, Joey got sent packing because he wouldn’t listen to Hung. But this week, Howie didn’t get sent packing, even though he didn’t talk to Sara.

Episode 8, Restaurant Wars, was itself a bait-and-switch. Everyone is warned that competition is more fierce because the winner of the quickfire no longer gets immunity. CJ squanders his advantage by picking a weak team. What was with Casey’s pissed look as Brian and she joined the team? Not only was it clear to me that it’s Casey who’s going to get the boot (she’s the one who looks like she’s on the verge of tears in the studio interviews) but both teams did such a bad job of the impossible task of opening a restaurant that they got a mulligan, so it’s to be continued, and we won’t find out for sure till next week who is eliminated. To add insult to injury, the judges didn’t critique the chefs much. Instead, Padma read aloud from a blogger’s comments, and used her criticisms instead of the judges table. Oh, yes, great idea to have a guest judge of Daniel Boulud, then hand all the judgment to a blogger? Feh.

I think there were plenty of candidates for booting: Brian fell apart up front, Dale’s decor was awful, Tre had inedible potatoes, and Howie had bad and heavy risotto. Why not just send Howie home instead of drawing out the misery for another week?

I rarely comment on a book until I’ve finished it; I’m still a little bitter about the ending of Smilla’s Sense of Snow. But I’m very much enjoying Lionel Shriver’s Post-Birthday World. Irina faces down a momentous decision on a friend’s birthday: to begin an affair, or go back to her long-time partner. After that scene, the book is told in alternating “what if” chapters.

One of those many interstitial sequences that didn’t tell well: Lawrence left for work in a jacket that wasn’t waterproof, and I ran after him in the rain with his overcoat and lunch. Little wonder that Irina began dinner with friends like Betsy at a loss for stories. But these moments were the stuff of life and they were the stuff of a good life.

I smiled at the above passage when I read it, because it’s something that the author at Mental Multivitamin often reminds readers: life isn’t the exclamation points, it’s the stuff in between. So cherish it.

I also had a wry smile for this passage, since it encapsulates the defensive-mommy zeigeist:

Tatyana had embraced domesticity with the same extremity as she had ballet. She was eternally quilting, canning, baking, upholstering, and knitting sweaters nobody needed. Her officious conduct of motherhood gave off that whiff of defensive self-righteousness characteristic of contemporary stay-at-home moms. She was stifling, fussy and overprotective, for if children were to redeem her existence, they would redeem it with a vengeance.

What I’m most enjoying about the book is Shriver’s uncanny ability to delve into the muck of secret thoughts and emotions. It feels rather as if she rummaged around in the dark corners of my mind. The alternating chapters could come across as precious, but I don’t find them so. Instead, they display (thus far; I’m about 3/5 the way through) an admirable complexity, with intriguing comparisons and contrasts. When I’m away from the book I am eager to get back to it. I wonder about the characters, and what they’re doing between the covers of my book. In addition to mesmerizing me, the book has also made me very eager to finally read Anna Karenina.

I love lists. I make them. I cross things off. There are a few problems, though.

One is that I don’t throw away lists every day. If there are things left undone, I keep the lists, but still make new ones. Is this a cause or effect of my anxious nature? I don’t know.

Another problem is that I have a very active monkey mind, and tend to write whatever pops into my head on a list, with no regard to whether it’s reasonable, achievable, or quantifiable. So my lists are not only always setting myself up for failure, but they’re also accumulating to remind me of my “failure” to achieve these ridiculous, impossible goals.

(Do you, like me, often mis-type “goal” as “gaol”? Significant, I think.)

I refer not only to task lists, but also to amazon wish lists, reading lists, listening lists, and watching lists. My lists for these have become so bloated that I hardly check them anyway.

I have a practice that I’ve abandoned for a while, and I think it’s time to resurrect. It’s to stop making lists. Instead, it’s to take the moment, when it arises, and calmly consider the next thing to do/read/buy/etc. It relies on trusting both myself and the universe to remember intriguing things, and to remind me of them enough times to fix them in my consciousness. If a book, or cd, or movie, is meant to be in my life, I hope to be reminded of it enough times that I don’t need to write it on a list.

It’s a sound plan. I have considered, and quailed before, the idea of deleting and throwing away all my current lists. Right now it’s all I can do not to make new ones. That is significant progress, so I’ll leave it at that for today.

Yes, I know that life isn’t all happy bunnies and sunshine, or Oprah and bonbons. I think a great deal of my struggle with post-partum depression was that my pregnancy and the adjustment to a second child were so much harder and longer than I’d expected. Further, they upset the rhythm and routine that G. Grod, Drake and I had established. While I knew to accept disruption for a while, the continued chaos and difference of every day wore on me. It felt like body surfing–the variety of waves can be exciting. But once I was tired, I couldn’t withdraw to the beach; I was stuck in the ocean, constantly facing new and different varieties of challenge.

Even now that Guppy is a year and a half, I still struggle to settle our life into routine. It continues to elude me, though. The best I can do for now is to rest, take short breaks, try to look ahead, and not get frustrated when things go awry, as they are so wont to do. We will eventually have a routine, and the peace and comfort that it brings.

I yearn for a simple life, without literal or metaphorical clutter. Two kids, a house, and modern life, though, seem to conspire against me. Near constant vigilance is required to stem the tide of too much stuff. I give baby items my boys have outgrown to friends. I donate regularly. I take myself off mailing lists, but still, the crap creeps in. One of the most superfluous bits of modern junk is the podcast. I steer clear because life is too short, and my limited time too valuable.

M. from Mental Multivitamin periodically expresses the need for “no”. I recently agreed with Lazy Cow that I often hear M’s advice in my head, and count myself fortunate for it. She is a passionate advocate for the value of one’s time, especially as it relates to learning and writing.

I recently attended a writing workshop. I enjoyed it, and thought the writing within the group was very good. When the address list for the class was passed around, though, I didn’t add my email address. I feared looking snobbish and exclusionary. But I couldn’t subject myself to a mailing list, no matter how well intentioned. Some might argue that it’s quick and easy to delete. But it still takes time, and consideration that I want to spend on my current emails from friends and family, and the considerable backlog of correspondence I’ve got dating from when Guppy was born. The address list went around a second time. I think the woman sitting next to me thought I’d been skipped on the first time around. I steeled my resolve, though, and passed it on. I wish the others well in their writing, but I want to spend what little time I have on my writing, not on email about writing.

If you other parents have read truck books as many times as I have, you may have wondered at the difference, if any, between concrete and cement. Sometimes trucks are referred to as cement mixers, other times they’re called concrete mixers. Concrete is a mixture of cement plus gravel and sand, so they’re not the same thing. Concrete contains cement; cement is an ingredient of concrete. Concrete has more letters than cement; I try to remember the difference this way.

Last night G. Grod and I pushed our luck and succeeded at dinner and a movie while our babysitter played with the boys. As per their usual, they were better behaved and went to bed earlier than they do with us. Either our sitter is being nice, or our kids trust G. Grod and me to love their good and bad behavior. I know it’s the latter, and even while I’m a bit resentful that we get the defiance, I’m also glad that the sitter gets the mostly good behavior because we all like her a lot. Plus G. Grod and I really like these occasional nights out.

We started with a very good meal at the new Harry’s Food and Cocktails. For a while I fretted that G. and I had little to talk about, then I just enjoyed the peace and quiet. We then managed the 7:40 show of Stardust, a funny, sweet and dark fantasy based on the excellent graphic novel by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, begun in the wake of their winning the World Fantasy Award:

It mostly started with, in 1991, Charles and I won the World Fantasy Award for “Sandman” #19, “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.” We were out in Tuscon, Arizona, and astonished ourselves and everybody else by winning the award. We astonished everyone else to the point where the secret committee behind the judging got together the following morning to change the rules so that it could never happen again!

It’s more than a little reminiscent of Princess Bride, and one sequence is a very close homage to one of the PB plot threads. Stardust is a lot of fun (aside from a truly execrable closing ballad), and I hope it finds a wide audience. Gaiman has said he’s now too famous for his comfort level; I suspect he’s not going to get more comfortable anytime soon, with upcoming productions of Beowulf and Coraline.

Last night we checked out Harry’s Food and Cocktails, in Minneapolis on Washington Ave. It’s in the old Nochee space next to the depot, with the Botero sculpture in front. It’s chef Steven Brown’s new place, and has an old-fashioned American steakhouse vibe, with simple, dark decor to match.

The table had a dish of mostly sweet and slightly sour homemade pickles, and the Sunday night special was a green goddess salad with a pork chop. G. and I got an appetizer of calamari and tried two of the many burger variations. The calamari were good, but not great. The pieces were sweet and tender, but the coating was slightly greasy, and thus a bit doughy. The accompanying pepper aioli had a nice kick, though.

I got the Harry’s burger, which the menu said had cheddar cheese and special sauce. It arrived cooked to my order (medium), but with an unexpected giant pile of sweet, sauteed onions. They were good, but overwhelmed the taste of everything else, so I had no idea what the special sauce tasted of. G. had made the better choice with the Dara burger, named for the City Pages food critic. It was a revision of the burger Brown did at Rock Star, with crispy prosciutto, a melty blue cheese, and a burger whose flavor at medium-rare blasted out of the bun. The fries were very good, and at the end we were beyond full, so while the dessert list looked good, we had to pass.

The service was good but not exceptional, and my water glass dipped low several times. I was disappointed that they didn’t have a local root beer on tap. They’re still within weeks of opening, though, so these are all fixable issues. The vibe was reminiscent of Ike’s, another old-time-y steakhouse that started strong, but couldn’t maintain momentum. I hope that Harry’s can do better.

I’ll certainly go back to Harry’s, not least because I didn’t see the french fries with cheese curds and gravy. The quality and flavor of the food was quite good, and our check arrived with four mini homemade chocolate chip cookies. I think next time I’ll try a salad, split a medium-rare burger with the gravy fries, and have a go at one of the decadent-sounding desserts.

From “Wasps,” a short story by A.L. Kennedy in the New Yorker.

Let’s have a good morning. Before your mother starts to scream and
doesn’t stop and has to be taken away to the hospital for screaming
people. Who would make your breakfasts then?

Her sons showed no sign of having heard her, and she wondered again
which of her threats they would remember, which would be useful and
which would scar. It never was easy to tell, she supposed, if your
parenting was mostly beneficial or bound to harm.

I really enjoyed her novel, Paradise. I was surprised to learn she now does stand-up comedy. The humor in her writing is quite dark, even bleak.

I had questions and quibbles even after reading the previous set of links I posted, but thanks to these exhaustive (and exhausting) HP and the Deathly Hallows links (chock full o’ spoilers), I think I’ve had enough:

transcript of JKR web chat

A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago:

1st thread (120 comments)
2nd thread (49 comments and counting)

Cheryl Klein’s comments on HP7 (copyeditor for the American edition)

Last night, G. Grod and I were huddled in the basement, desperately trying to stay cool in this horrible ongoing heat and humidity. G. heard a noise, well after we’d put the boys to bed, and went upstairs, where he found Drake sitting quietly on the steps.

“What’s up, buddy?” G. asked.

“It’s the friends,” Drake sighed, referring to the group of stuffed animals that he sleeps with, of which Mouton (a sheep blankie from France, pronounced to rhyme with “crouton”) and Daisy are the leaders. “They said they wanted me to sleep in the big bed tonight, not with them.”

G. wasn’t sure if Drake meant our bed, or the guest bed, but he managed to persuade Drake that his friends DID want him in his own bed. Drake returned quietly and happily there.

I felt very sad when G. related this to me. Poor Drake, kicked out of bed by his own coterie of imaginary friends.

Spartan, a David Mamet film starring Val Kilmer, was #52 in my 2007 movie challenge. It was a pick of G. Grod’s, who went on a VK kick while the boys and I were out of town visiting family. Spartan is an exhilarating, if sometimes bizarre and uneven mix of Mamet’s rapid-fire, erudite dialogue and a conventional thriller. A college girl goes missing, and a capable, ethical military man is hired to find her. It bucks several expected plot turns. Kilmer gives a great performance, and Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars) is the missing girl. This was a solid, engaging film, well worth the rental. Recommended.

or how Entertainment Weekly lured me to the dark side. It’s summer and my normal TV shows are in reruns (House, Bones, The Office, My Name is Earl, Battlestar Galactica) or worse, cancelled (RIP Veronica Mars). Because I have so much free time for myself (ha!) I let myself be swayed by good reviews in Entertainment Weekly to check out some new shows, which I did in one big TV free-for-all last weekend. Without exception, I was disappointed.

Mad Men: Nice to look at, but there’s a reason we moved beyond the era of smoking and sexism. There are better ways to depict this age that feel modern. This just felt like an out and out mimic, though I was surprised by the ending of the pilot.

Burn Notice: Average, at best. Cheesy repeated camera shots. The lead actor didn’t engage me, Gabrielle Anwar’s collagen duck lip irritated me, and Bruce Campbell looked so overweight, tired and indifferent that I just felt bad for him.

Psych: Enjoyable enough, but leaving nothing afterward. Like cotton candy.

Simon Schama’s Power of Art: I’d prefer it if this show were a half hour long and reporter style, rather than having staged enactments of Schama interacting with the art, and recreations of the artist. I like the works of Rothko, and was interested to find out more, but couldn’t bring myself to stay with this show for more than half an hour.

There is good news, though. Reruns of both 30 Rock and How I Met Your Mother are funny, clever, and easy on the schedule at 30 minutes minus commercials. If you haven’t already, check them out.

Maps of War shows 5000 years of religion in 90 seconds. (Thanks to Blogenheimer for the link.)

My first reaction is that missions (religious marketing, if you will) really work. I deplore proselytizing, and I prefer attraction to promotion. Yet the spread of Christianity is a testament (sorry for the pun) to the powerful results of preaching for conversion.