Are you much taken by jewelry?

Why won’t the aliens step forth to help us?

Do you know the distinctions, empirical or theoretical, between moss and lichen?

Yes, they are, aren’t they? The questions, I mean, all taken from the first four pages from The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell. This book is now on my Required Reading for Sentient Beings.

Here’s a paragraph from page 4:

Can you ride a bicycle very well? Was learning to ride one for you as a child easy or not? Have you had the pleasure of teaching a child to ride a bicycle? Are your emotions rich and various and warm, or are they small and pinched and brittle and cheap and like spit? Do you trust even yourself? Isn’t it, forgive me this pop locution, hard being you? If you could trade out and be, say, Godzilla, wouldn’t you jump on it, dear? Couldn’t you then forgo your bad haircuts and dour wardrobe and moping ways and begin to have some fun, as Godzilla? What might we have to give you to induce you to become Godzilla and leave us alone? Shall we await your answer?

This small volume is comprised entirely of questions. I merely dipped into it this afternoon and am having to force myself to stop reading it.

Would you like to live a life that allows for frequent use of acronym, as in “Let’s proceed according to SOP?”

Can you stand Pat Boone?

Are you daft?

So, I’m reading Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust, via dailylit.com, and it’s a rough read. When I described him as Western civ’s biggest moonbat, I was not kidding.

And, quite possibly, this lack (or seeming lack) of participation by a person’s soul in the significant marks of its own special virtue has, apart from its aesthetic meaning, a reality which, if not strictly psychological, may at least be called physiognomical.

There you go. That was yesterday’s gem.

I may not make it.

After I finished Treasure Island via email (from dailylit.com), it was my intention to subscribe to Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, but when I searched for the title one of the results was Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (aka these days as In Search of Lost Time).

What the hey, I thought, why not?

And then I also had on hand a nice Easton Press edition of The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. (You know the Easton Press: they’re the ones who have gone to great lengths to bind the Classics in Leather with Silk Endpapers, etc., etc. This volume is actually nice, so their advertising is truthful.)

What the hey, I thought, why not?

Why not tackle two of the most abstruse and impenetrable books at the same time? To make it the more gracious, peradventure, I calculated the number of days that dailylit.com will take to send me all the installments of Swann’s Way, and then calculated the number of pages per day it will take to finish Tristram Shandy in the same length of time. Fortunately, it was only nine pages a day.

So far it’s had a curious frisson: slogging through the fuzzy musings of Western Civilization’s biggest mooncalf while at the same time untangling the convoluted snark of the first postmodern novel.

If I have any actual insights, I’ll post them.

I have been reading Treasure Island, of all things, via dailylit.com, and I have to say it is a ripping tale. If you have not read it, believe all the good things you’ve ever heard about it and go subscribe to it. I subscribed to the “double dose” mailing, because I knew that one small chunk every morning would not be enough.

I am rereading A Short History of a Small Place, by T. R. Pearson, one of the funniest novels of Southern literature.

Short version: Miss Pettigrew, last of a noble family, climbs up the water tower with her chimpanzee and jumps off. (The chimp remains behind.)

Long version: The town of Neely, NC, and everyone in it.

There are the Epperson sisters and their cousin Cora, who “distinguished themselves in the minds of the Neelyites by going from reasonably normal to unquestionably insane without ever pausing at peculiar,” by emerging from their home one day having “decided they were triplets.”

When they are upset that the city won’t recognize them formally, the sheriff “said he was so pained by their predicament that he suddenly suffered a lapse in good judgment. [He] told them that he would consider recognizing them as triplets if they were able to get fifty adults in Neely to sign a petition verifying their claim. It was a tremendous mistake. The sheriff said he had temporarily forgotten what people are like.”

There’s the new Methodist pastor, who wants live animals at the Christmas pageant and obtains the services of “Mr. Jip French’s old blind pony that his boys chased around the pasture and ran into fences. But when he tried the animals out at a full-dress rehearsal the reverend discovered that he couldn’t use the pony because it was given to breaking wind, not very loudly, Momma said, but in near lethal concentrations. So the reverend tried to get another pony but couldn’t and had to settle for Mr. Earl Jemison’s steely-grey hound, Mayhew, which was probably one of the biggest dogs in the county and which the reverend decided to transform into a camel by means of a couple pillows and a brown rug.” The pageant itself is wildly wrong.

There’s Pinky Throckmorton, who in trying to rid the windowsill outside his office in the post office of pigeons, ends up partially poisoning them all and enraging the D.A.R.’s sensibilities, until fortunately there was a national convention in Nashville and “the whole local unit of the D.A.R. chartered out the First Baptist Church activity bus and headed west for the weekend, and when they returned to Neely all blue-blooded afresh and historically agitated anew, a trashcan full of poisoned pigeons did not seem such an atrocity anymore.”

The Throckmorton episode is a 52-page digression from the main story, triggered by the monkey pissing on Pinky on page 108, winding its way through Pinky’s heritage and detailing his obsession with suing his fellow man, and ending with the fallout from the pigeon massacre on 160. By that time, you’ve forgotten all about the chimp and are truly startled and delighted to be reminded why we’re being told about Pinky in the first place. (He’s going to sue the mayor for being pissed on.)

And that’s where I am now. Go get your copy and read it, right after you read Jasper Dash and the Flame Pits of Delaware, by M. T. Anderson.

I was cleaning out my computer satchel and came across these pages from last year’s Forgotten English daily calendar. I clearly never got around to blogging about them. Since I’m waiting for the sun to come up before I get to work in the labyrinth, I’ll just do that right now.

Pseudodox: false, not true opinion. Well, that’s one easy one. The phrases “death panel” and “health care rationing” spring right to mind. Thanks, Sarah Palin! Oh, and anything James Inhofe has said for the past week and a half. As we say in Feydeau, Christ on a bicycle!

Ambiloquy: the use of indeterminate expressions; discourse of doubtful meaning; double-speaking. Vid. sup.

Carriwitchet: a hoaxing, puzzling question, not admitting a satisfactory answer. As in, how do you craft legislation when half your establishment is made up of determined nihilists?

Balitorium: riotous proceedings; the boisterous merrymaking which often accompanies a bonfire. Hey, one I can actually use, and more often than one might think, except for those who actually read this blog, who are usually involved with said boisterous merrymaking. Let the balitorium begin!

Vlonkers: sparks of fire. Let the balitorium begin, but beware the vlonkers! Those things can burn you in inauspicious locations.

Flammivomous: vomiting flames. This has nothing to do with my balitoria; I just liked the word.

Sprunch: the sexual advance of a male, a much stronger term than spark or wing. Another one just for fun. The original calendar says that some hillfolk use sprunchin’ to mean copulation. Let sprunchin’ thrive!

Foot-muff: exactly what it sounds like, a fur-lined thingie for your feet so that you don’t get chilblains on your tootsies when you go sleighing. But it sounds naughty.

Let’s go check in with the labyrinth.

My mother-in-law called yesterday and asked me to put together a list of “25 books you should have read before graduating high school,” for the guidance of her younger grandchildren. Always wishing to avoid the appearance of didacticism, as St. Paul might have better said, I have renamed this list “25 books you’ll have fun reading before you graduate.”

This list can contain anything, from Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter. So, what are your nominations?

Here are my first thoughts:

• Huckleberry Finn and/or Tom Sawyer
• Harry Potter
• at least some of the Sherlock Holmes stories
• Feed

What about the heavies, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, 1984?

I’m behind on my blogging. We’ll see how much I get caught up this week while I’m on spring break.

For some reason I finished up a couple of books all at one time, and with my heavy-duty list of Things to Do over break, I haven’t started anything new yet. All three of my recent reads are worth looking into.

The first is a book of plays by Sarah Ruhl: The Clean House and Other Plays. The other plays are Eurydice, Late: a cowboy play, and Melancholy Play. Of the four, I think Clean House and Eurydice are the best. Both are witty, yet unbearably sad in many ways.

In The Clean House, Lane and her husband Charles are divorced. Both are doctors. She hires a Brazilian cleaning lady to keep her house clean. However, Matilde doesn’t like cleaning, so she readily agrees to let Lane’s sister Virginia scour the place while she continues to work on the best joke in the world. Charles brings his new wife Ana, a beautiful Argentine, to meet everyone. She’s charming and delightful. But her cancer recurs, and the second half of the play is a marvel of surreal warmth. I would love to direct this play. People would laugh, and they would sob. They would have no choice.

Eurydice was also quite lovely in a much grander, mythical way. It would nice to work on, but an elevator that rains?

Next on my reading list was More Information Than You Require, by John Hodgman. Hodgman is the funniest writer in America today. This is the sequel to The Areas of My Expertise, and is in exactly the same hysterical vein, in which he tells us everything we need to know. Everything. A brief example:

• [Teddy] Roosevelt began every day by wrestling his entire cabinet and throwing them out the window. He accidentally killed Secretary of War Elihu Root this way.
• When offered the “Presidential Option” to cover up any murder in the White House, he GUFFAWED MIGHTILY and insisted he could easily bring Root back to life VIA STRENUOUS EXERCISE AND BLACK MAGIC.
• HE WAS RIGHT!
• When rejected by the mainstream Republican Party, Roosevelt created the “BULL MOOSE” Party. Initially, only moose were allowed to join, as Roosevelt admired their solid, stubborn nature, their hatred of trusts, and their ability to LEGALLY HAVE SEX WITH FEMALE MOOSE.
• LATER, PARTY MEMBERSHIP WOULD BE OPEN TO ANYONE WHO COULD GROW ANTLERS.
• Only JANE ADDAMS could manage it!

And so on. A highly recommended read.

Finally, The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914, by Philipp Blom. Breezily written, it explores the social, psychological, and political parallels of the beginning of last century with the beginning of this one. It covers the same territory as Thunder at Twilight, but deals less with the political fissures of the Austrio-Hungarian empire that lead to WWI than it does the mise en scene of Europe as the old order crumbled. It explored some corners of that period of which I had been unaware. Also highly recommended.

So, let me do my taxes, produce a painting for the Patrons of the Centre auction, plant the ferns in the back yard, take out a loan to pay for the Child’s senior year, finish the two-piano arrangement of “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” and create an instructional blog for newbie instructors at GHP, and then I’ll let you know what I’m reading next.

I did not know until this very moment that the author of

is the same man who wrote

I am gobsmacked. I never made the connection.

(I found out at this blog, an amazing place to visit on a regular basis.)

I wish to register a complaint.

As I posted recently, I got two new books about which I am very excited, Lion among men, by Gregory Maguire, and Octavian Nothing, traitor to the nation: The kingdom on the sea, by M.T. Anderson. Both are sequels, and both are presenting the same problem: it has been over a year since I read the previous volume in the series, and both are so complex in their social settings that I cannot remember all the characters and plotlines. I probably need to go back and read those previous volumes before tackling the new ones, and who has time for that?????

That is all.