When I say there are layers here, I mean there are interlocking populations who loathe each other: the witches’ coven and their ogress (surprise!) adoptee trying to fight back a demonic mist using only the repellent power of squash vines, the often monstrous local villagers who collaborate with the mist, the country folk who travel to get the witches’ aid for things like unwanted pregnancies, and the Gorges - a vast wasteland of broken skyscrapers where the mist holds sway. I eat the promise of these glimpses up.

But the layers are also visual, and this is what has haunted me about Fert’s work - its strikingly moody watercolour style, shifting its colour palette slowly from scene to scene, sometimes evoking the art deco grandeur of period National Parks posters, sometimes expressionistic horror, sometimes psychedelic swirls, sometimes the glimmering light of Impressionism. Fert is a confident manipulator of pace and place, allowing us to sink slowly into the mood of this otherworld that seems to have sprung, mushroomlike, in the remains of our own.

(I received this book as an ARC via NetGalley. The English-language release of volume 1 of this series - “The Breath of Things” - occurred on September 27, 2023.)

So yesterday I started in on Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel (the first I’ve read of hers), Romantic Comedy, oily rag in hand, trying desperately not to sneeze as I struck up clouds of mold-tinged dust. I’ll just listen to the first chapter, I thought in the morning, and next thing I knew I was sitting in bed after midnight, wide-eyed, listening to the epilogue.

The premise here is a classic rom-com, as many have noted: it’s not a deconstruction or a satire of the genre, and it is not, thank god, interested in sneering at it, a high-cultural impulse that is rooted in deep misogyny. Sally is a writer for an SNL-à-clef called “The Night Owls” or “TNO,” appalled by the idea of performing in the weekly skits and hiding the details of her job from the guys she casually hooks up with. When her office-mate, a clever, belching, aggressively normal dude, meets Hollywood’s A-list starlet du jour while she hosts an episode of TNO, and they get engaged after a whirlwind romance, Sally loses her patience. This is the third or fourth case of a male TNO writer’s dating or marrying out of their league - a woman considerable wealthier, more successful, more famous, and more conventionally beautiful than he is. Society just accepts this as par for the course. But why, Sally asks in a skit, does this rule not apply to celebrated men and typical women? (It doesn’t occur to Sally, a consummate expert at the peak of her career, that she is hardly typical.

This is the impediment when Noah, the most famous pop star in the country, brings his beachy (slightly aged) heartthrob looks and cheesy (Sally’s word) hit songs to the hosting gig. He seeks her out for writing advice, she realizes he’s not a status-flaunting dodo, they banter, she panics, and everything falls apart when she lobs a resentful comment about men who just date models at him.

This book is a perfect artifact of the internal experience of a recent historical moment. Noah comes to host (and Sally writes her sketch about the inequities of celebrity dating) in 2018, when the American social landscape is shot through with a sense of doom about gender exploitation and the rise of Trump. The anxieties the alienate Sally and Noah from each other, despite their obvious compatibility, are suffused with the justified anger that the Weinstein and Cosby scandals, not to mention the discourse surrounding Clinton and Trump, had dragged to the surface in the preceding years.

But then there’s a record-scratch time leap of two years, as the novel shifts to the epistolary form. Stuck in lockdown, and recovering from a terrifying case of COVID in the very first US wave, Noah sends a questing email into the abyss: is Sally still to be found at this address? If so, he’s sorry for how their nascent friendship ended. Sally is still to be found at this email, as it turns out, but she fled the city when lockdown began, horrified by her quick descent into isolation and near-starvation, and is living in her childhood bedroom in her step-father’s house in Kansas City. What follows is one of the best literary descriptions I’ve seen so far of how scary and high stakes everyday life and its most basic actions in 2020 were and felt. The painful details of caring for a sick octogenarian become, in breathtaking (pun intended) fashion the grand gesture of romance that levels all distinctions between the lovers. It’s a testament to how well Sittenfeld renders these chapters that, although I am one of the least COVID-denying or -normalizing people I know (I still mask everywhere public and avoid unmasked indoor encounters in 2023), I was taken aback by this vision of a society where privileged people were still extending caution and care and worry - I hadn’t almost forgotten that this was even possible. Such is the gravitational pull of the Normal towards erasure.

Genre is essentially a marketing construct, which is to say there is little essential and everything constructed about it. This is marketed as literary fiction, and it is a classic romance, very well wrought, as are many that are marketed as Harlequin-style mass-markets. I’ve been trying to work out my ambivalences about that - I’m glad if it gets a greater readership or acceptance for the genre, a genre that has kept publishing afloat in many ways, especially since the rise of ebooks. But I’m wary of the allure of respectability politics. Why does this novel get such acclaim and acceptance, when so many equally excellent ones published as romances don’t? How would this book have been received by reviewers at major newspapers if it had had a couple in passionate embrace on the cover?

Much has happened since I last posted nearly nine years ago. I had a baby, uncoincidentally, in the year after that last post. Where has the time gone? (Into the endless churn of motherhood and global crisis.) In that first year of my child’s life, I experienced some pretty severe anxiety. Uncoincidentally again, this correlated with my home country’s (and much of the rest of the world) abruptly open embrace of fascism. I went to live in New Orleans for a year while on parental leave (thank you, Canada, I do not know how any nation can call itself civilized without acknowledging the physical, mental, and social toll of having an infant), ate very well, slept almost never, and probably permanently affected my child’s hearing and flamboyance with the number of parades we went to. We went to live in London for six months during a sabbatical, during which we watched in terror as Trump was elected, and, each day, managed to roll out a new policy horror at about 11 p.m. GMT. We went to a lot of theatre, and slept very little. When my daughter started at full-time daycare and then school, I became more heavily involved in union work. Then: a global pandemic. We got chickens, which we named after Greek goddesses. We got bees, which got eaten by bears in the first year, destroyed by mites the second, and have now swarmed in the third. One of my parents was starkly immune-suppressed. Every time it seemed safe (and possible - we were on different sides of a close international border for a big chunk of the pandemic) to visit, a new variant surge would occur. Finally, just as we felt comfortable visiting with the supports of testing/vaccination/masking, he was diagnosed with cancer. A year later, my father died.

That brings us up to the present moment, and all sounds pretty grim when I put it down on paper, a paragraph of nine years.

But why this homecoming to Sycorax Pine? Well, I’d like to redevelop a practice of public rumination on my reading. (An extension, I suppose, of the fact that I publicly ruminate on my reading in a classroom several times a week.) I’d like a deeper record of what I’m reading and seeing. I’d like a community, though I know that the past nine years have also been transformative for blogging as a community and practice, and not necessarily in a good way. We’ll see how it goes, even if I am just ruminating into the abyss!

A distressed coach, but a fascinating pedagogical model

I should say that I'm more willing to abandon the car on the drive than I am to abandon the Heels, ever.

So I took out the toboggan that we now always keep in the trunk (this is all still part of my larger college basketball metaphor, you understand), loaded it up with my computer, my purse, my textbooks, and our CSA farm box, and began slowly, Lucky-like, dragging it up the icy hill. Happily, we keep a flashlight in the car. Unhappily, it was dead. So up I slogged in the light of the cold, cold moon.

This was all well and good until I reach the top third of the Way some minutes later. Here, the snow had completely thawed, making sledge-dragging an exercise in more than usual futility. I sighed, heaved the bags and boxes into my arms, and flung the toboggan into the nearest ditch. Onward the trudge.

She honestly struggled for several minutes, all the while casting reproachful looks at my laughing face. Eventually I had to go and unwedge her. Her face said, "If you didn't have so many BOOKS this wouldn't be a problem." "Wow," I replied, "You really are D's cat."

Yes, that was my imaginary argument with my cat. And D.
 

So what I am basically saying is that as soon as I have finished my children's book based on an insane pair of black and polydactyl cats, "The Adventures of Bread and Yet," I'm going to embark on writing a buddy cop/sleuthing series starring Alice Roosevelt and my Nonna.  I imagine them solving crimes with arch indifference, withering criminals with swift, insightful skepticism about their upbringing and politics.

Ah, but Dan tells me I've forgotten to include the punchline to my grandmother's story. Here it is:

"What is this all about?" asked the former first daughter. 
"Oh, there's just been a robbery," said my grandmother.
"Mmm," Alice quipped, "It's a shame we missed it."
 

**(Seriously, this semester was a long nightmare. 

You may have noticed my blog and social media absence.

I'm hoping that next term, when I will have a third as many students

and one fewer classes, will be less tormented and isolating.)

 And the whole volume smells strongly of some ancient and unnostalgic perfume that broke over it in a move. It actually reeks of the rot of youth's empire.

Happily, I have at least this metaphorical solace to impart: over time, earnest highlighting fades, until it's almost impossible to discern that at age 18, the whole world was EMPHATIC.

It's only right that I should live with the stink of my marginal hubris. (Wait. Is that an oxymoron? Or a description of the novel's narrator?)

  Look on my thoughts, ye mighty, and despair.

Some days it's clearer than ever that I'm living in an allegory.

Note the details of this Still-Life with Allegorical Cat.  The flame of learning sputtering in the fireplace. The half-eclipsed bottle of aspirin. The pot of tea with a bluebird hat and a subversive balaclava.  The lightbulbs in impenetrable plastic packaging. The pair of nail clippers in case the Beast gets sleepy enough to permit a desperately needed claw-blunting ambush. The feline glance that says, "Why are analyzing me allegorically when you are down to the wire with this pile of marking?".

And that's how I discovered that Yet likes to climb trees.

Moments after this, I heard a plaintive mew and flung the camera to the ground. As I ran toward the tree, Yet was climbing down the trunk backwards, struggling against her tangled leash, until finally she was just suspended from her harness like the Golden Fleece.

And moments after my daring Argonautical rescue of her, I lay in the hammock reading Hippolytos while the cats hunted butterflies. Because, as Euripides tells us, some Saturdays life is freaking hard.

 I'm having increasingly formal conversations with the cats, and they have the unsettling air of being on the precipice of answering back.

"Bonesy," I said a moment ago, leaning in to the cat curled up by my head, "if I died suddenly and left you alone here, would you eat my face?"

She gave a slow, indulgent cat blink.

"You're very hungry, but I think you wouldn't." She stretched, her polydactyl paw coming affectionately to rest at the very edge of my eye socket.  Wearily, I remembered my Herzog. "Or you'd hold off at least as long as a human would?"

Blink.

I wish that I could describe to you the look the cats cast upon me when I climb on the exercise bike and begin tonelessly belting along to late-90s pop.  I attempted to render its full horror on Twitter earlier, and the closest I could come was the realization that Bonesy bore an uncanny resemblance to that portrait of Garrick as Hamlet, seeing his father's ghost for the first time. You know, the scene for which he had a wig constructed that, upon brief pressure to a trigger in his hand, would raise the hairs in sharp, uncanny alarm.

And Yet, poor Yet, still hasn't forgiven me for sweeping her up to dance with me to the pounding beat of Sleigh Bells. She fled soon after. I can hear her plaintive yawps (she too is untranslatable) echoing downstairs. Come home, D, I think they say. Have mercy: come home.

Really just the weather for the start of term, if one had a mind that ran to pathetic fallacy.

I can't help but feel all three activities are bound by a single dream-logic.

*Have I mentioned our two new(ish) cats, Grind Their Bones to Bake my Bread (a calico) and Yet (pictured below)?  More on them post-tenure-file, I hope.  

Today, testing out my computer's ability to take dictated notes is proving to be an exercise in Dada. Consider this passage from Baudelaire, elaborately embroidered by Mountain Lion: 

"For the perfect plan, for the percussionist spectator, it is menstruate to set up house in the heart of the multitude, I need the end and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the Internet."

The original: 

"For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite."

After that, the dictation program point-blank refused to go on. Perhaps because it was experiencing an epiphanic spiritual crisis, having replaced the infinite with the Internet.

Some days, I know how it feels.

It's been eleven happy years; I wouldn't trade them. Now: reunion, nostos, odysseys end with journeys' meeting. What is love? 'Tis not hereafter; present mirth hath present laughter. What's to come is still unsure.

​

We met in Washington as the midway point.  He's come ​from Honolulu via six weeks in Los Angeles and Raleigh, gathering our belongings in both places.  The LA household has been shipped to Washington, where we're picking up a load of my furniture and childhood belongings.  After a week of sorting, tossing, and packing, we'll clamor into our UHaul and begin the long road north.

For the Valentine's Day Reunion, I celebrated perversely by wearing my 80s-style, off-the-shoulder t-shirt with Darcy's first proposal to Eliza Bennet scrawled across it, unattributed: ‘In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.'

Dan looked at it thoughtfully and finally spoke: "Is that an old-timey version of 'Call Me Maybe'?".

​

​Surf's up

​The bride is faceless for your projecting pleasure.

Things I've found while sorting through my childhood belongings. 

Also, a board game called 'By Jove!' about ancient mythology, some dozen novels I began and abandoned before the age of fifteen, and an M.C. Escher puzzle with no lid (to show you the entire image), and possibly only some of its pieces. In other words, the portal to madness.

The groom is a part of the outfit, of course, rather than having independent personhood. #VictorianAccessorizing.

​Childhood excavations continued: soliloquizing pillowcase.

​Yes, I wore this as a child. Yes, my grandmother got it for me (in Kashmir, where they were staying on a houseboat made of teak). And yes, it's coming to Farfara.

​My mother: "In the course of packing up for Nova Scotia, Sycorax has just relived her entire childhood. Unfortunately for D, he had to relive it as well."

When I got to my description of Sebastian's Euripidean death, she exclaimed in a Violet Venable voice: "Oh, *Sycorax*, really. Where do you FIND these plays?".

When I had finished my vivid plot summary/reenactment, there was a brief and pregnant pause. Then, suddenly: "Wait. Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams were gay?"

If only Gore Vidal had been there to parse the question with her. His answers always defied mere plebeian yeas and nays. 

​

Over carved roast and horseradish ("You'd think I'd learn my lesson," she murmured, her face one vast contraction of fire), we got down to family history, never her favorite topic.

I: "You never knew your grandparents?"

Nonna: "No."

I: "Why not?"

Nonna, bluntly: "They were all DEAD. Mostly."

I: "Um. Most of them were dead, or they were mostly dead?"

Nonna: [shrug]

After a moment: "My parents moved to Oklahoma City shortly after their marriage for my mother's health. Oklahoma was considered to be quite a wholesome climate then." My grandmother rolls her eyes.

I take the bait: "What was wrong with her health?".

She makes a gesture like she is batting the question aside. "She probably had tuberculosis or something. I had an aunt who died of consumption." Thoughtful pause. "She lived in Arcadia...."

"Even in Arcadia, there is death." I say sententiously.

"It didn't mean anything to me at the time."

I hum my assent: "It was just another of those gorgeously classical place-names that are strewn about the American country-side. Like Athens, Georgia."

"Yes?" She raises her eyebrow, first sign of a challenge. "Name another one."

"Well, I can't think of another one right now. But you know I'm right."

Pause. Regroup.

"My mother was one of the first women in Oklahoma to get a driver's licence. She bought a yellow Apperson Jack Rabbit, and had a driving suit made all in yellow to match it." Slight smile. "She was quite a fashionable woman, my mother."

Courtesy of XKCD

But I've been storing up tales to tell, in snippets and asides, and I hope to dole them out in semi-narrative form here now, so that you can see what I've been up to of late.  Hopefully once the term ends (next week: no joke), I'll be able to weave blogging more seamlessly into the daily pattern of course-prep and frenzied research.  ​

​Meanwhile, to returns and rediscoveries!

​

Yesterday morning, as I was driving my white-knuckled route down the Way, I saw something odd across the deep ditch that abuts it, a few metres into the woods. That evening when I came home from work, I stopped the Barge at the midway point of the drive, where it is at its steepest, and went off to investigate in the frozen, pitchy dark. The spectre was a package, wrapped thoroughly in plastic, and tied to a tree at shoulder height. The delivery guy had hiked halfway up the driveway, and found himself UNABLE TO GO ON. So he went into the woods, and secured the package where he hoped I might someday find it. 

As I slipped down the long, long driveway, I followed the creature's tracks backwards in time, as they lengthened to a loping run, and then became two sets of tracks, forming a wild double helix of a chase. One veered off blithely into the woods, followed by another, bolder and more sinister. Prowling.

"Oh, god," I revised, gripping the wheel as I made my perilous, distracted way down the icy road towards the beginning of the tale, "It wasn't a frolic. It was a woodland MEMENTO, one creature dragging another off bodily into the woods by my front door."

"Well," I say, "you have to remember that, because of the stairs, you only saw a little less than half of Farfara. There are two rooms on the upper floor that have almost nothing inside them."

"Hmm," she replies, "Well, you're coming here on Valentine's Day. That's a good plan."

"I think it's very romantic."

She lets out a cynic's sigh (I'm reluctant to call it a snort): "That's not the word I'd use, but I suppose so."

We'll meet in Washington on Valentine's Day, whence we'll wend our parlous way north in a snowtireless U-Haul through February-drear Maine and New Brunswick. Home: permanently.

This is my idea of romance, and I want no other.