Maybe they’re crazy, my relatives, maybe I just don’t pay close attention.  It’s just that I was reading Carey’s lovely post about Virginia Woolf’s nephew’s biography of Virginia Woolf, and she pullled out two great stories of his crazy kin (besides Virginia, who was crazy in the sad not the fun way).  I want some of those, too.  I want arsonist great-uncles, and aunts who drank whiskey in church.  I want a long-gone distant cousin who was an opium smuggler from borneo, and once lifted up the skirts of the First Lady Taft.  I want these stories and a fireplace.  I want to tell them in front of the fire in technicolor detail.  I want to tell them so often that A. rolls his eyes when I start, and dozes off.

My Great-Grandmother named my Grandmother “Enola”.  Not for the plane (which hadn’t been made), but because she was “alone” when she had her.  A-l-o-n-e.  E-n-o-l-a.   

That’s the best one I’ve got.

No one in my family likes fondue, so I’ve decided to make it a tradition — New Year’s Eve fondue.  If there are other things you don’t like, family, please inform me so I can schedule them.

I had a party.  And I didn’t invite half of you, but it wasn’t on purpose, I swear.  I had a whole troubling two days with invitations and if any of you know me at all — if you’ve seen me try to snorkel for instance, or wrap presents, or master tasks that most people think simple, then you understand what I’m saying and have no need to read further. 

I waited too long, for one, so couldn’t outsource them.  Then there were struggles with my printer, and postcard paper, and Microsoft Publisher.  There were the labels, and the finding of your address.  [Steve and Dana, by the way, yours came back.  I forgot the stamp.]

Anyway, I got some out and then had to walk away from the whole thing.  I left a big pile of unaddressed / unstamped / unsent invites in my office and went to the liquor store.  That I can master. 

But next year, please come, I’ll just post it big here, so you’ll know. 

My point?  It was fun.  We should all do it more.  There aren’t enough dinners or parties or chamber music in people’s homes, there should be more.  More more more.  I didn’t worry about space and it worked itself out.  We don’t have furniture yet and that worked itself out, too.  There’s no place to park because we currently own 4 used cars, but people found their way in.

A dinner party a month in ’08.  Tell me if you want to come.

I’m stuck in end of year limbo.  Bored, nothing to read, writing going slow, junky food in the house.  I want someone to make a big pot of soup and then bring me a book.  A. could do it, he could be here in 5 minutes.  He’s driving a new car while they fix the old one.  The new one’s really fast. 

M. sent me a Christmas wrap-up with names of people and places seen.  I didn’t know any of it.  Have I become an outsider peering in on M. and D.’s lives?  Am I displaced?   We’re off to buy an LED to make a battery from our Dangerous Book for Boys.  Which got bad reviews, but is actually quite fun.  For instance, did you know about Douglas Bader?  I bet you didn’t.  Or how to build a go-cart or hunt and kill a rabbit?  Yeah, thought so.  Not to mention all the famous world battles, the 7 wonders, how to carve an Italian nib. 

It rains a lot here, Western Oregon.  Take careful note of that before you move. 

A nap, maybe, until A. makes my soup. 

I found a lovely new person named “Carey”.  She writes here.  She says, (you’ll see if you go there) “I’m going to write a short story every day and you’re going to read it.”  I know nothing else about her.  Well, I know David almost died, and that the birthday party kids didn’t care for the clown, and that her hands look glamorous like her mother’s. 

A nice diversion, she’s a lovely writer from what I can see. 

I can’t tell stories, lately, I’m smothered in detail.  Non-fiction detail — committee meetings, presents, lists, stuff.   

Mr. Harvey, my 5th grade teacher, had this thing we used to do once a week called “Harvey Town”.  There were stores and jobs in Harvey Town and some people earned fake money and other people spent it.  I swept the sidewalks (and made a decent living at it) and the only thing I ever wanted to buy was popcorn.  There was a guy who sold popcorn and it was the best-tasting popcorn in the State. 

This was before microwaves.  We popped it in one of those big plastic dome-lidded things with a metal arm that went round and round to stir up the kernels.  Maybe it was something to do with the device, but there was also a particular popcorn salt we shook on it.  Then there were popcorn bags and we bagged it up (at some point we all sold popcorn, it was the most profitable enterprise in Harvey Town) and sold the bags for a buck a piece.  The money had Mr. Harvey’s picture on it, and was yellow. 

There, that’s my little story.  Not great, but a start.

Stories are good when December stresses you out.  Let’s all tell stories.  (Send one here.)

Michael Dirda reviews Joyce Carol Oates in the Holiday Issue of New York Review of Books.  I don’t read her anymore, I haven’t in a long time.  It’s too daunting.  She’s maniacal in a way I always wanted to be and reading her stresses me out, I couldn’t keep up.  (I forget the last thing I read, it might have been We Were the Mulvaneys.)  There’s the issue of her famous prolificity to grasp — between the beginning of 2000 and the end of 2005, for example, she published 19 books — but in addition to that, the work itself can wreak havoc on your mind.  It’s crazy stuff.  Kafka said “a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us” so her books are all an axe.  (I spell “axe” different than Kafka.)

Anyway, two of the works Dirda discussed have just come out — The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982 and Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations, 1970-2006.  I love the genuine pleasure she gets from her work.  She describes having a purposely simple and ordered life in order to escape so completely in her fiction.  She has contributed, she says, to her image as fragile shut-in because it makes it easier to decline invitations.  All she ever wanted to do, all she wants to do now, is be in a room of books and read them and write some. 

I’ve seen her twice, most recently at a Portland book fair in 2006.  She read a short story, I forget the name, but it was tender and savage and brutal and terrifying and the room collectively fell off its chair with the last word.  It was amazing.  The row I was sitting in all gasped, then breathed, then muttered things like, “God”, “Jesus, “Unbelievable”.  (I feel obligated to also inform you that the row I was sitting in a couple weeks ago, when C. read our excerpt to a packed room, acted similarly.) 

That’s all, I guess.  I put Journals and Conversations on hold at the library.  I won’t have time to read them, though.  I have a gingerbread house to make for crying out loud.  I bet Joyce never made a gingerbread house.  And I bet Scruffy didn’t keep jumping on her computer when she tried to write. 

 … The hams are in, the Iberico hams are in!  Get yours for $199 deposit, plus your first child!

It reminds me of the time I ate my favorite pig Molly for breakfast when I was five.  Umm-um.

And that’s all I’ll say about that.  (Except that Julie Nipp hasn’t called me in years!) 

1.  It’s freezing.  The house temperature has peaked at 64.

2.  G. wanted cold lunch at the last minute so I have to make one and go back.

3.  She also has a sub, so the whole world almost blew up into pieces.  Did you feel it?

4.  No one brings me lunch or something to color at recess.

5.  Thai Country isn’t open on Mondays.

Director George Hickenlooper and writer Alan Sereboff respond to the writer’s strike.  Woody (#20), and Patricia Clarkson / Amy Ryan reading the phone book (#16) are my favorites.  (They’re also the only two I watched.)

Update:  #15′s good, too.

Again-date:  #14 is Chazz Palmienteri, Susan Sarandon, you have to scroll down.  That one’s great, too.  Oh, so’s Ed Asner eating (#13)!  #12′s too loud, I don’t like the loud ones.  Laura Linney’s good in #11.  And in the very first one (#1), Holly Hunter tries to get a writer on the phone who turns out to be a support guy in Bangalore.  Very funny.

(Credit for the link goes to Very Short List.  Sign up now!  Or don’t, who cares.)