Girl Detective

Like Ex Machina, 100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso is another comic I stopped buying monthly and instead get the graphic novel collections. That didn’t help me much with “Dirty“, though.

There was not a unifying story to this group of issues, and it felt very “been there, done that” with this series: blood, violence, sex, death. All of which can be powerful forces when used carefully in telling a story. Here, though, it feels like they’re being tossed up to meet a deadline, or fill in issues as the series moves to its conclusion. I really enjoyed this series, and thought it was a great modern crime story. As it’s gone on, though, my appreciation has waned. Is it me, is it the series? I don’t know. I’ll read till the end, and hope the creators are able to pull things together in a satisfying way. “Dirty” though, is an apt description of a weak entry in a once-strong series.

Ex Machina, written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Tony Harris, is one of the comic books I stopped buying monthly. Instead, I read the graphic novel story collections. They are free of intrusive, obnoxious ads, and have a self-contained story that I’m better able to appreciate in one sitting then spread out over months.

In “Ex Cathedra“, New York mayor Mitchell Hundred is summoned to an audience with the pope. As usual for this series, the episodes of ongoing story are introduced with flashbacks to Hundred’s past as the crime fighter The Great Machine, or to the lives of the series’ supporting characters. The story with the pope has some interesting wrinkles, and it’s paralleled by a less successful subplot of nasty Russian criminals. At which I wondered, “Russians? Really?” just like the characters in Burn After Reading did.

In spite of the odd villain choice, “Ex Cathedra” is a strong, engaging entry in one of the best series on comic shelves today.

Seeing Bond movies on opening night has become a tradition for my husband G. Grod and me; we saw Goldeneye on our second date, almost exactly thirteen years ago. Quantum of Solace, the newest Bond movie, disappoints, but still entertains. It’s a step down from Casino Royale, but still a reasonable entry in the Bond oeuvre, which was never meant to be high art.

Daniel Craig is handsome and brooding, Judi Dench is classy and stern, Mathieu Amalric as the villain is especially good. He’s all the more scary for not being a cartoon, as are most Bond villains. The Bond girls are by the book, as are the opening song and montage–meh. The action sequences are terrible, perhaps unsurprising given the director’s indie-film experience. As Hollywood learned last year with the Chris Weitz directed Golden Compass, you can’t just slap a small-film director, no matter how talented, on a big-budget action film. The story also suffers in the telling, becoming muddied and even boring.

Complaints about the film, as in this review from the NYT’s A.O. Scott, are that Bond is too brooding, and the film is too Bourne-like–the final scene is an out-and-out homage to the final scene in The Bourne Identity. Based on what happens in QoS, I suspect we’ll see a return to the more charming and urbane Bond in the next film. But Bond is always a reflection of his times. I don’t find it incongruous that he’s more dark and violent. He still looks good in a tux.

As part of what appears to be my ongoing “unit” of Shakespeare, I re-watched Shakespeare in Love for the first time since seeing it in the theater ten years ago.

The Best Picture winner holds up well. Fiennes and Paltrow are pretty and charming in the leads; Paltrow won the Oscar for Best Actress that year. (I thought it should have gone to Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth.) Rupert Everett gets far too little screen time as Christopher Marlowe, while Ben Affleck gets too much as player Ned Alleyne. Tom Wilkinson, Geoffry Rush, and Imelda Staunton excel in supporting roles, while Colin Firth is a good sport, playing the foppish bad guy, an ironic contrast to his turn as Mr. Darcy, I think. Judi Dench as Elizabeth steals every scene she’s in and won the supporting actress Oscar for about eleven minutes of screen time. (I thought that Oscar should have gone to Lynn Redgrave from Gods and Monsters.)

By turns comic, tragic and romantic, SiL is a fitting homage to the work of Shakespeare. True to its roots, it is an entertainment. It combines history with the plays Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night to good effect. Tom Stoppard polished the screenplay; his is a funny, informed post-modern influence, as in this oft-repeated exchange:

“It will all turn out well.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

SiL is fun and touching, but not to be taken as fact–it’s a pleasing fiction, based on the work of others, like Shakespeare’s own works.

For a few weeks now, my husband G. Grod and I have made the same joke when the boys, 5yo Drake and 2yo Guppy, are being especially difficult.

“I wonder how far it is to Nebraska?”

It’s in bad taste, but it helps break the tension. Turns out, though, it’s not much of a joke. Nebraska recently instated a safe-haven law; it allows infants to be dropped off at hospitals without prosecution of the dropper off, usually a teen or single parent. The law in Nebraska did not include an age limit, though. This loophole was made apparent when a man dropped off nine children, aged one to seventeen. Since its inception, thirty four children have been dropped off, none of them infants.

Like G. and I have noticed, the law is an easy target for the jokes. But the reason people are dropping off kids is sad, not funny. Raising kids is hard, and in the USA’s increasingly independent and me-focused culture, there’s not much help to be had. Like many, G and I live far from family; we’re lucky to have a community of friends for help.

So next time you see a kid melting down, and a tired or cranky-looking parent, offer help, not judgment. Politely looking away isn’t helpful, either. Empathy, though, is a wonderful thing–take it from this tired, cranky parent.

The tagline for Christopher Rush’s Will is “After 400 years, Shakespeare breaks his silence.” Rush imagines Shakespeare on his death bed, dictating his will to his lawyer. In between bequests, he tells the lawyer the story of his life. At first, the conceit felt artificial, but compared to what? Two star-crossed lovers in Verona? Mysterious shipwrecks? It bothered me initially, but it made sense for a playwright’s telling of his own story, and was further shored up by an elaboration near the end of the book.

What can you say? What can you do, when you’re sick and tired, and your lawyer is pawing the floorboards like a little black bull? You get down to it, of course, just as he directs….

But for you, my masters, my shadows, my audience, my charmed circle, for you it’s different. Desire, not business is your theme. Huddle up then, come close, forget [the lawyer], and tell me what you’d like to hear. A speech of quality, no doubt, before this humdrum legalese? I can do you anything, gentle friends, any exit peiece you care to name–tomorrow and tomorrow, never never never, ripeness is all, the rest is silence. The simplest words worked best, put into the mouths of doomed and dying mortals, words that made even the groundlings stop scratching, stand still and wet their cheeks, like trees bedashed with rain.

Rush takes the impressive risk of ventriloquizing Shakespeare and spins the few hard facts about his life into a sprawling 460-page tale, by turns harrowing, hilarious, bawdy, and heartbreaking.
Will is an exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, imagination of Shakespeare’s entire life. Rush notes in the acknowledgments that the book grew underground for nearly fifty years; given its scope I’m not surprised. It offers hints and ideas to answer questions scholars have been arguing for centuries. It’s filled with possible inspirations and influences for his famous plays and poems, many of which are lovingly quoted and contextualized. This is an impressive idea, well executed, that fans of Shakespeare’s plays will likely appreciate and enjoy.

Minnesota food critic Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl recommends Porter and Frye for “The Big Birthday” in November’s issue of Minnesota Monthly (Online article doesn’t include P & F.) To celebrate a similar big event–G. Grod’s and my tenth wedding anniversary–my generous family treated us to dinner at Porter and Frye in downtown Minneapolis’ Ivy hotel. Beforehand, the restaurant called to find out our likes, dislikes, foods to avoid, and foods to include (foie gras, for G. and me), then they crafted a menu and an accompanying wine flight just for us.

We were seated at the cozy circular booth tucked into the stairwell. Service was knowledgeable, personable, attentive but never oppressive. And the meal. Oh, my. Chef Josh Habiger (his Flickr page has lots of beautiful food pics to ogle) and his team hit it out of the park: king-crab salad with Japanese pepper and vanilla foam in a martini glass; pressed roasted squash in a brilliant green tarragon sauce with little gumdrop-shaped nuggets of ripe, local pear caramelized on their tiny bottoms; foie gras with concord grape jam and sorbet, with buttered toast to sop up every last delicious morsel; veal sweetbreads with flash fried chard that dissolved in my mouth plus a savory sauteed chard; duck with mustard, figs and duck-fat sauteed parsnips; pork tenderloin and belly with a perfectly non-sweet gingerbread, and a sweet potato puree so light and fluffy I could not fathom the science involved in getting it that way (and they didn’t tell me); raspberry and chili pepper sorbet, and cream cheese ice cream alongside a chocolate, cherry and vanilla pastry.

We had the seven-course meal. It was a lot of food, but I cannot name a course I would have skipped. Our tenth anniversary dinner was filled with beautiful plates of delicious, high-quality food prepared with mind-boggling creativity and cutting-edge techniques. I’ll cherish the memory of this meal for a long time.

Edited to add all sorts of links. Be sure to look at the food photos; they make me awestruck and hungry at the same time.

Doesn’t it seem like post-Halloween is too soon for holiday decorations and best-of lists?

In any case, Publishers Weekly has their picks for the year in several categories: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, mystery, sci fi, kids and more. I’ve read only one from the fiction list, My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru, which I recommend. (Link from Minnesota Reads)

I left out two important things from my recent post on Macbeth.

One, a taste of the play itself. The witches get many of the good lines, but Lady Macbeth’s speeches stirred me most:

…Come, you Spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood,
Stop up th’access and passage to remorse;
That no compunctious visitings of Nature
Shake my fell purpose, no keep peace between
Th’effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on Nature’s mischief! Come, thick Night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’ (I. v. 40-54)

Also, as I did with Hamlet, I saw details in Macbeth that I think Dostoevsky echoes in Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov: a murderer torn by doubt, whose guilt nearly destroys him, but who eventually acknowledges his deed and seizes back his own destiny. Macbeth and Raskolnikov met with very different fates, perhaps because they had very different women by their sides–Macbeth’s ambitious Lady M versus Raskolnikov’s hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Sofya. Since many things in Macbeth echo those in Hamlet (e.g., Lady Macbeth’s wish to “pour my spirits in thine ear,” I. v. 26), I’m not surprised to find echoes of both in the later Russian work. I hope, in my not-very-copious free time, to research this Shakespeare/Dostoevsky connection I detect.

In preparation for seeing the Torch Theater production, I re-read Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As with Hamlet, I was struck by how many lines continue to be quoted (sometimes incorrectly) hundreds of years later. The plot is familiar to most, even those who have never read the play. The particulars, though, drew me through the story. I noted Macbeth’s vacillation, so like Hamlet’s in that earlier, and IMO better, tragedy. I appreciated the crowd-pleasing breather of the drunken porter scene, and was annoyed by my edition; it debates the provenance of almost every passage in “Macbeth”, but doesn’t bother to speculate on “nose painting.” Overall, though, I appreciated the notes detailing the centuries-long debate over what parts of the play Shakespeare wrote, what he didn’t, etc.

As for the story as a whole, I contrast Macbeth’s change over the play, from hero to doubter to outward embracer of his role as villain, with that of Lady Macbeth, who is constant from first learning of the prophecy, yet shatters on the interior from the stress of her misdeeds in the service of her ambition. Macbeth and his lady balance one another, even as they plunge down a slippery slope of morality to their demises.

Macbeth and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: I’ve noted some similarities of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Shakespeare before, in my reading of Titus Andronicus. G. Grod and I were watching BtVS Season 2* on DVD while I read Macbeth. Creator Joss Whedon, in his commentary on the season’s (and perhaps the series’) pivotal two episodes, “Surprise” and “Innocence,” states his preference for psychology in the service of a tale. He wants to add realistic touches to supernatural elements to create a fantastic yet believable story. He offered as examples the star-crossed lovers Angel, the vampire with a soul, and Buffy, the slayer who’s in love with a vampire.

I find an echo in Whedon’s comments to those of Kenneth Muir in the Macbeth Introduction:

Shakespeare was not so much concerned with the creation of real human beings, but with theatrical or poetical effect. He was fascinated by the very difficulty of making the psychologically improbable, by sheer virtuosity, appear possible. Shakespeare made ‘the bold experiment of a character with a strongly marked mixture of qualities of which the one seems almost to preclude the other’–a brave warrior who is a moral coward, a brutal murderer who is racked by feelings of guilt, and so on. (Intro, xlvii)

Macbeth, Torch Theater, 1 November 2008: The irony of seeing Macbeth on All Saints Day amused me. This production was on a small scale, but with two locally renowned actors, Stacia Rice and Sean Haberle, in the lead roles. The supporting roles were filled with actors of varying skill. Macduff was effective, I found, while Malcolm was not. Still, the power of the story combined with its strong actors made for an stirring show.** Star Tribune review here, City Pages review here.

For a geeky variation on “Macbeth”, see Theresa and Patrick Nielson-Hayden’s excellent blog Making Light.

*Query: is Buffy Season 2 one of the best seasons of TV ever? Discuss.

**My favorable impression of the play may have been enhanced by the kind usher who told me my outfit was really working for me (I wore these shoes), and because I was basking in the aftermath of a fabulous meal from Nick and Eddie’s.

Neil Gaiman’s new picture book, illustrated by Gris Grimly is the frightfully entertaining Dangerous Alphabet. It is not, however, for the squeamish or faint of heart.

A piratical ghost story in thirteen ingenious but potentially disturbing rhyming couplets, originally conceived as a confection both to amuse and to entertain…featuring two brave children, their diminutive but no less courageous gazelle, and a large number of extremely dangerous trolls, monsters, bugbears, creatures, and other such nastinesses, many of which have perfectly disgusting eating habits and ought not, under any circumstances, to be encouraged.

The text and illustrations might scare some children, but my two boys, 2 and 5 years old, love this book. The tale unfolds visually, with finely etched painted drawings accompanied by Gaiman’s rhyming couplets. There are a lot of clumsy rhyming books, but Gaiman, with a background in Shakespeare, executes seamless and flowing poetry. Often, though, Grimly’s detailed illustrations cause the boys and me to pause, which interrupts the rhyme of the couplet. It’s a nice problem to have. As with many alphabet books, there are more items on each page than are named. I would guess it’s unique, though, in its depiction of maggots and meat on the M page. I see something new each time I read the book.

The Dangerous Alphabet is great fun for fans of ghoulish humor books for kids, like those of Roald Dahl, Edward Gorey or Lemony Snicket. Others might want to keep their distance. And thus their lunch.

The Film Club is a memoir of Canadian novelist (NOT Pink Floyd guitarist and vocalist) David Gilmour, who lets his 15yo son Jesse drop out of school if he agrees to watch three movies a week together. So begins a wild adventure in parenting. Gilmour starts with Truffaut’s New Wave classic, The 400 Blows. But as almost every review of the book crows, he follows it up with “dessert”, the eminently watchable, if made by sleazy people, Basic Instinct.

I picked the movies arbitrarily, in no particular order; for the most part they had to be good, classics when possible, but engaging, had to pull him out of his own thoughts with a strong storyline. There was no point, not at this juncture anyway, in showing him stuff like Fellini’s 8 1/2. (1963).

It’s this unconventional, anti-film-snob approach to movies that probably helped their film club to work for the next few years. Gilmour never forgot, or stopped trying to impart to his son, that films were created as entertainment. So while Jesse got a full run of classics, like Citizen Kane and Chinatown, he also watched horror films like Rosemary’s Baby and guilty pleasures like La Femme Nikita.

More than a movie memoir, it’s one of parenting, as Gilmour coaxes Jesse through some typically disastrous adolescent romances. Gilmour won’t be nominated for parent of the year anytime, but he’s got the critical basics down: empathy, honesty, and the ability to apologize. As a parent I often wonder if I taught my kids my own foibles, or if they go through them because its in their genes, so the best I can do is help them through it, as Gilmour does with humor and self-effacement in this winning book.

I love the morning. I look forward to it every night before bed. My current regime is a double short cappuccino (with another waiting in the wings; thanks, G. Grod!), and Nature’s Path cherry/pomegranate toaster pastry. Today’s book, which I finished at breakfast, was David Gilmour’s The Film Club, recommended both at Entertainment Weekly and Mental Multivitamin. Good for film geeks and parents.

Now that the fall television season is in full swing, I’m definitely seeing fewer movies. As the crapitude of the shows grows, though, the better big screen things look on our small screen. I’ve dropped several shows that I used to watch: Dirty Sexy Money, Terminator, America’s Test Kitchen, At the Movies. And I’m on the fence about Life and Bones; my crush on Damian Lewis is giving Life probably too much credit, though Alan Sepinwall thinks it merits attention, too. In the midst of so much mediocre tv, then, Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages was a welcome respite.

Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman are middle aged intellectuals who are suddenly forced to assume care of their aged estranged and increasingly demented father. The film handles dark subjects and complex characters with a light touch. It’s not so much bittersweet as refreshingly semi-sweet. One critic described it as a coming of middle-age story, a description I find apt. Linney and Hoffman were, as per their usual, terrific. A funny, thoughtful, thought-provoking little film.

It’s Guy Fawkes Day, when Fawkes and others tried to blow up Parliament.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I can think of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up the King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!

Recommended reading: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ V for Vendetta, and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. The excellent final issue, collected in Absolute Sandman v. 4 and “The Wake” includes a scene speculating who the author(s) of the verse might have been.

On an almost unrelated tangent, do any other Project Runway fans think that Season 4 Blayne’s catchphrase, “Holla-atcha, boy” is surprisingly similar to “Holloa, boys”?

It took him about a month of hauling around a very heavy messenger bag, but my husband G. Grod finally finished the late, lamented David Foster Wallace’s 1,079-page (nearly 100 of which are end notes) magnum opus, Infinite Jest.

His response? “That was good, but there was so much going on. I’ll have to read it again.”

I’m happy for, and proud of him. It’s been on our shelf for about a decade, and I hope to get to it soon. After Will by Christopher Rush, The Film Club by David Gilmour (latter two from the library; I broke my only-one-book-on-hold at library vow), The Return of the Dancing Master by Henning Mankell (for book group), The Likeness by Tana French (on hold at library), My Name is Will by Jess Winfield, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and various graphic novels.

Yeah, I’ll be getting right on Infinite Jest.

Before seeing MacBeth last week, my husband G. Grod and I had dinner at Nick and Eddie’s in Loring Park.

They have a new fall menu that’s not up on their site yet. I had braised beef cheek over a root-vegetable puree accompanied by pan-roasted brussel sprouts, all in an intensely flavored house-made reduction of the braising liquid and drizzled with a mustard chantilly sauce. The beef was so tender I cut it with my fork. The whole dish was warm, comforting, and a delicious mix of color, texture and flavor. I sopped up every drop of it with the restaurants wonderful brioche.

For dessert, I had a thick, moist slice of spice cake drizzled with creme fraiche and atop a pool of house-made caramel sauce. The spice cake was rich with the flavor of molasses, and left a pleasant tingle of ginger to let me know it meant business. G. Grod had the chocolate roll-up, which is what Ho-Ho’s dream of growing up to be. Rich chocolate cake surrounds a thick whipped cream filling that tastes faintly of vanilla and is a brilliantly non-sweet counterpoint to the cake.

If you’re craving fall comfort food of the first order, I highly recommend Nick and Eddie’s.

Hooray for the United States. We did it; we elected Barack Obama to the presidency. Virginia and North Carolina went blue? An historic day, indeed.

Election night had some bitter with the sweet, though. California is close to a ban of gay marriage. Alaska elected a convicted felon. Here in Minnesota, Michelle Bachmann was re-elected, and the Al Franken/Norm Coleman race is too close to call, and headed into recount. And the Comedy Central special was wildly uneven; what’s up when a Harvard law prof out-funnies Colbert and Stewart?

Big changes are imminent, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do.

Edited to Add: G and I decided to let 5yo Drake and 2yo Guppy stay up late to watch election returns. We had a lovely vision of cuddling on the couch as a family, munching popcorn, as we watched history being made. As with much of parenting and life, it didn’t unfold that way. The kids were completely uninterested in election tv, though it got them wound up and running around. Instead, they set up their bowling game, which devolved into throwing the pins (foam at least, for which I was thankful) at one another and at G. and me. And so, to bed for them. Where they didn’t stay, because they were so wound up, so G and I had to keep pausing the coverage to go shoo them back to bed. So much for making memories, eh?

I didn’t make it to the Junot Diaz reading at the UMN last week, but I’ve taken the Geek Q test from Confessions of an Aca-Fan, that lists a huge number of the often arcane geek touchpoints from The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. How many can you identify? I scored 115. Bonus point if you detect the misspelled item on the list that is abbreviated plus misspelled here, often. Want to up your score quickly? Read Watchmen. Which you should have read already, even if you’re not a geek.

Muhammad Ali
Akira
Lloyd Alexander
Appleseed
Isaac Asimov
Atari
Jeans Pierre Aumont
Balrogs
Billy Batson
Battle of the Planets
“Beam Me Up”
Big Blue Marble
Biggie Smalls
Blake’s 7
Ben Bova
Bon Jovi
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Captain America
Captain Horlock
Chaka
Chakobsa
Champions
Clay’s Ark
Daniel Clowes
Dark Knight Returns
DC
D&D
Samuel Delaney
Deathstroke
DM
Doctor Who
Dr. Manhattan
Dr. Zaius
Dorsai
Dune
Eightball
Elvish
Encyclopedia Brown
The Exorcist
The Eyes of Mingus
Fantasy Games Unlimited
Final Fantasy
George Foreman
The Fountainhead
Galactus
Galadriel
Gamma World
Gen. Urko
Ghost
Gondolin
Good People of Sur
Gorilla Grod
Gary Gygax
Green Lantern
Hardware
Hector Lavoe
Robert Heinlein
Frank Herbert
Herculoids
Hernandez Brothers
Tracy Hickman
Harry Houdini
Robert E. Howard
Ill Will
Incredible Journey
Intellivision
Jabba the Hutt
Jack Kirby
Jedi
The Jeffersons
Kaneda
The Great Kazoo
Stephen King
Land of the Lost
Stan Lee
Ursula Le Guin
Lensman
Lothlorien
H.P. Lovecraft
Luba
Magic
Manhunter
Man Without a Face
Marvel
Mary Jane
Master Killer
John Merrick
Frank Miller
Minas Tirith
Miracle Man
Maria Montez
Alan Moore
Mordor
Morlock
My Side of the Mountain
“Nanoo-Nanoo”
Neo Tokyo
New Order
Andre Norton
“Oh Mighty Isis”
Palomar
Phantom of the Opera
Phantom Zone
Planet of the Apes
Roman Polaski
Project A
Rat Pack
Lou Reed
Return of the King
Robotech Macross
Rorshach
The Sandman
Sauron
Doc Savage
Shazam
Sindarin
Slan
“Doc” Smith
Robert Smith
Solomon Grundy
Sound of Music
Space Ghost
Squadron Supreme
Olaf Stapledon
Star Blazers
Star Trek
Street Fighter
Tom Swift
Sycorax
Take Back the Night
Teen Titans
Tetsuo
The Terminator 2
This Island Earth
Three’s Company
J.R.R. Tolkien
Tomoko
Tribe
Tripods
Twilight Zone
U2
Ultraman
Adrian Veidt
Veritech Fighter
Virus
The Watcher
Watchman
Watership Down
Margaret Weis
H.G. Wells
What If
What’s Happening
Wonder Woman
X-Men
Zardoz

I hope I’m not in need of comfort as the election results roll in tonight here in the US, but just in case, a few things that shore up my soul in times of trouble:

Big, fat novels, re-reading favorite novels or novels by Jane Austen. (These aren’t mutually exclusive, I know.)
Flannel sheets and fluffy duvet over cushy chenille mattress pad over firm mattress, with puffy propping pillows for reading.
Being surrounded by books, in my bedroom, a bookstore or a library.
TV procedurals with character development. People to get involved with, formulas, and a tidy ending. So satisfying.
Oversize flannel or fuzzy pajamas.
Cookies, pie and cake.