Dancing Around the Four Sides

Uncle Jasper and Aunt Dawn went to the United Church now, as most well-to-do people in town did. United Church people were firm in their faith but did not think that you had to turn up every Sunday, and did not believe that God objected to your having a drink now and then. (Bernice, the maid, attended another church, and played the organ there. Its congregation was small and strange -- they left pamphlets on doorsteps around town, with lists of people who were going to Hell. Not local people, but well-known ones, like Pierre Trudeau.)

:DDD
From "Haven," by Alice Munro, in her collection Dear Life: Stories. I laughed out loud for real when I read that last night.

Just ugh, ugh, ugh with this weather. Some good things though ...

1) Have started reading Kathryn Hughes' Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, in which the author basically asks "Why don't we ever hear about the REAL LIFE STUFF in biographies?" Which means that Hughes gives the reader passages like this:

Dinner guests at Kensington Palace had started to whisper how unfortunate it was that Princess Victoria had yet to master the knack of eating with her mouth closed, especially given her habit of stuffing it so full of food that she resembled a small, pouched rodent.

Dear Reader, you know how folks sometimes say "I laughed so loud I woke up the dog"? That is for real what I did last night when I read those lines. It wasn't really a laugh; it was more of a sound in between a squawk and a snort, but it did cause Layla, who was lying on the bed, to give me a sharp look. It was the small, pouched rodent bit that did it. :D

2) Also finished the Pulitzer Prize winner Less, by Andrew Sean Greer. I had some trepidation when I started the book, because on occasion I've not had a lot of luck with prize-winners (I'm looking at you, The Luminaries). Plus, there was a blurb inside the front cover where someone said it was as good as Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, and holy shit I HATED The Imperfectionists.

Reader, I loved it. Just. Absolutely loved it. And I can't believe I'm saying this about a love story, because I just don't do love stories. But this was so good. It deserves all the stars, two giant thumbs up, enthusiastic recommendation.

3) I need a third point. The hibiscus stopped blooming, so I turned to the Internet. The Internet suggested sprinkling Epsom salts around the plant and watering it in. So I bought a bag of Epsom salts at one of our local grocery stores ($2 for FOUR POUNDS, more than I will ever use in a lifetime) and did the sprinkling and watering. That was a little over a week ago. Now the hibiscus has flower buds and is about to bloom again. :D

There. Three things make a post.

Bonus 4) YAY CROATIA :D

There were few rules and no vetting of volunteers, and so if some spies and informants were brilliantly effective, others were derelict as well as dangerous, spying out of greed or spite or for private revenge. Others wanted adventure, a chance to play a dangerous secret game: they thrived on the excitement. Visceral hatred of the enemy was another motive. Most 'espials' and 'intelligencers' (to Elizabethans the two words meant much the same thing) wrote at some time of their patriotic calling: they spied for God, queen and country. Religious identity was critical. In a book by one Protestant theologian, An harborowe for faithfull and trewe subjectes (1559), his printer added by way of emphasis three significant words in the margin of the text: 'God is English.'

~ from The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, by Stephen Alford, page 15

I wondered afterward if this was the basis for the title of the old R.F. Delderfield book, God Is an Englishman. :D

The seventh nerve is aligned to the nerve of hearing and balance; it tunnels through the skull case behind the ear and issues just under the lobe. After passing through the largest salivary gland, just behind the angle of the jaw, it splits into five branches and radiates across the face into the muscles of facial expression. The five branches are immortalized in every medical student's memory as Two Zombies Buggered My Cat (Temporal, Zygomatic, Buccal, Mandibular and Cervical).

From Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum, by Gavin Francis, page 51

:D

( Another story from the book, this time about mental health ...  )

Well, I had high hopes for Emma Cline's The Girls, but ... alas. I thought the first half of the book was pretty good, but the farther it went, the more annoying all the characters became, and it pretty much ended as a sad story about bad people that I didn't care about. I do think it says something when the most up-voted review on Goodreads is a negative review with 796 votes, and the most up-voted positive review only has 359 "likes." So ... I guess I would recommend it up to a point, because Cline does do a good job, I think, of getting into the head of a 14-year-old girl who is absolutely not a grown-up yet and who makes some absolutely terrible decisions. One thing that really came to irritate me was the sheer ugliness of ... well, everything. Everyone is described in the least attractive terms, with pimples and blackheads and badly-dyed hair and awful sex. There's a layer of grime on every possible surface, and dead flies in the corner, and food is constantly on the verge of going bad, and even what should be good food is described in such a way that who would want to eat it?

... a glut of spaghetti, mossed with cheese.

No. No, thank you. A qualified rec, no thumbs up.

Still lots of little birds at the feeder, and some goldfinches in their winter plumage (not bright yellow) have finally found the thistle sock I hung up last week. :D

I was wondering the other day if this would be our year without a winter -- every time it cools down to a reasonably seasonable temperature, it then goes back up. Ugh.

Finished reading Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach, and ... damn, I was disappointed. I bought it because I loved her previous book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and the strength of the first paragraph of this one:

They'd driven all the way to Mr. Styles's house before Anna realized that her father was nervous. First the ride had distracted her, sailing along Ocean Parkway as if they were headed for Coney Island, although it was four days past Christmas and impossibly cold for the beach. Then the house itself: a palace of golden brick three stories high, windows all the way around, a rowdy flapping of green-and-yellow-striped awnings. It was the last house on the street, which dead-ended at the sea.

See how Egan does that? She manages to set time and place so beautifully, so compactly, it's part of the story and you don't even see her doing it. It's just great. Sadly, for me, the first chapter that paragraph's a part of is the best part of the book. After that the story jumps forward, and Anna the adult is so much less interesting than Anna the child.

I didn't care about any of the characters, their stories, or their problems, and I'm afraid I simply could not suspend my disbelief enough to believe that Anna, through pluck and grit, becomes the first female deep-sea diver at the Brooklyn Navy Yards during WWII (I think the year is 1942 in the book). Yes, I know there were women pilots, but the stretch from pilots to divers was just ... a bridge too far for me. I did like some of the set pieces (a minor character departs the stage, we learn of Anna's first sexual experience), but overall it was a big meh for me. A half thumb up. :-(

ANYWAY. Here are a couple of tweets from today that made me smile -- cat and puppy, and 'Blair Witch Project 1999' (warning for vertigo in this one). :D

The China that existed in the minds of millions of Americans was the most illusory of countries, filled as it was with dutiful, obedient peasants who liked America and loved Americans, who longed for nothing so much as to be like them. It was a country where ordinary peasants allegedly hoped to be more Christian and were eager, despite the considerable obstacles in their way, to rise out of what Americans considered a heathen past. Millions of Americans believed not only that they loved (and understood) China and the Chinese, but that it was their duty to Americanize the Chinese. "With God's help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up until it is just like Kansas City," said Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, one of the Republicans who would become a particularly bitter critic of the administration for its China policies (and who once referred to French Indochina as Indigo-China).

~ David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, "The Politics of Two Continents," page 223