.. and I’m a little scared.  This facebook stuff is a bit fancy for me.  But I was just asked to be another “friend”, so while I was over there I decided to poke Lisa.  I hope it didn’t hurt her, or violate my marriage vows.  I’ll find out in due time, I suppose. 

The Good Wife is going horribly slow.  But here’s a clip.

The Jenks, like everyone else on their block and the next block and the blocks on either side of those, lived in a four-bedroom house with 2.1 baths.  It boasted a “great room” with sliding glass doors that opened up to a small white-fenced yard.  There was wood in the kitchen, on the floor, it was light brown.  Everywhere else there was carpet; white in the “blue” room, berber where they kept the tv.   

They had a two-car garage, half of which was kept clear for Ellen’s minivan, the other half for bicycles and wagons, the lawnmower, and things Howard brought back from Home Depot. 

They parked a Camry outside, in the driveway.

You can bring me lunch if you want, I’m almost hungry.  A big salad with some spinach and maybe greek-y with olives and feta. 

Tonight I’m making a souffle.  I never have before and I want to, I should have by now.  I have three days, still, to accomplish stuff before I’m 40.   That’s it for now.   

I have things to do, I must leave you.  But before I go, for the record, Humboldt’s Gift (Saul Bellow) is just under 70,000 words.  The Good Wife, as I speak, is 133,140 (words).  Eighty thousand is just about right; I’ve a lot of cutting to do. 

Send virtual scissors here.

A., you guys, is nuts (see # 4.)  What book is that, A., and why are you reading it at work?  Nevermind.  My job, most times, is fun, because I get to read and look up curious things, and do some research and make things up.  Today I’m reading on-line excerpts of Saul Bellow because when I get stuck I need good writing and he’s a standy. 

Here’s a great little bit from Humboldt’s Gift:

“To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege.  It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine.  Money always inspired him.  He adored talking about the rich.  Brought up on New York tabloids, he often mentioned the golden scandals of yesteryear, Peaches and Daddy Browning, Harry Thaw and Evelyn Nesbitt, plus the Jazz Age, Scott Fitzgerald, and the Super-Rich.  The heiresses of Henry James he knew cold.”

To be loused up by DiFalco was kind of a privilege.  Like getting the two-for-one milk coupon at Safeway, or the front mezzanine seats with M. and D.  (M. — I didn’t get them yet, I’ll email you about it.) 

I, sir, am no Saul Bellow.  Still.

Okay, then, you asked for it.

He thought of her stories as a television that didn’t shut off, buzzing and humming in the background from show to show from break to break, but then suddenly without warning demanding he interact.  “Did you hear me?” 

What to do when the television demands participation?  It violates every rule.

What to do if the television insists, while you’re in the room with it, that you talk back?  That you respond to what it says, that you keep up with every thread, the laugh-track of its sitcoms, its documentary of a bronze foundry, its Clint Eastwood movie, its cooking show, its Pro Bowl football game, its commercials — what if the television asked at the end of every plug for Diet Coke, “So, Howard, what do you think, do you think you’ll buy it?  Did that make you thirsty for Diet Coke, will you stop drinking Pepsi?  Are you listening to me?”

This was his problem with Ellen’s stories, they didn’t shut off and they demanded activity.  He lived in fear of entering a room where she stood, having no power over the controls.  She turned on and off, she switched channels and volume at random. 

He wouldn’t have minded listening to her if he weren’t required to account for so much of it. 

Well darlings, I submitted a story.  To a contest thing, I picked it out of nowhere for no reason, I just saw it today and then I sent it.  My story.  A different sort of story, it’s dark and arty. I found it on a CD from my old Dell because I was looking for my resume so I can change it.  (Did you really need all that?  No, but we’re both here and with the time, so …)

So, I sent it and we’ll see.  It’s short — 940 words — and all lower case so it will either be vague and meaningless enough to approach genius (and win the hefty prize, a toaster I think) or will flounder at vague and meaningless and earn a pretty rejection which I’ll post for you here. 

When you think of it, everyone wins. 

My cell phone doesn’t work; first my ankle and now the cell.  So if you’re calling me on it, I can’t hear you.  Of course that’s nothing new because when you’ve called before it’s either been in my car or in a different house than me, so it’s typical that I don’t hear it. What’s different now is that hours later I won’t even see that you called.  It’s dark, no light, no words on its little screen, nothing.  I’ll fix it, in time.  It just doesn’t seem important right this minute, much like my ankle.

Here are more words, then you can go:

He thought of her stories as a television that didn’t shut off, buzzing and humming in the background from show to show from break to break, but then suddenly without warning demanding he interact.  “Did you hear me?” 

What to do when the television demands participation?  It violates every rule.

A. has a new web site at work, I’ll give it to you when it’s up.  We’ll have a launch party, we’ll all wear toner. 

“Listening is an effort that ages the face, makes the neck muscles ache, and stiffens the eyelids looking fixedly at the speaker.  It is a kind of studied debauch … the elevating to its secret meaning a litany of dull words …”

Collette said that.  Curiously, A. keeps looking younger and his eyelids are remarkably lithe.  It’s paid off, his vow of abstinence from the litany of my dull words. 

Today I’m working in Garamond and eating cantaloupe and writing of monkeys.  Ellen’s lover, Reed, lives at the Sunnyside Terrace home in a “persistent vegetative state” and rooms with a monkey, a Capuchin.  Capuchins are small and affectionate and good at getting lids off of jars.  Ellen has issues with intimacy. 

Scruffy is making a sloppy, lip-sucking sound that makes it extremely difficult to work.  I bet monkeys don’t do that.  Maybe I’ll trade him for one. 

I linked to Collette, by the way, so you could read about her lovers.  Including but not limited to her stepson. 

I’m up to get coffee and move Scruffy; if you need to interrupt me, now’s the time.  (If you’d like to leave hot soup at my door, to surprise me for lunch, you may do that now, too.)

I’m slipping, don’t think I don’t know it.  My prose has been shoddy, “The Human Comedy“ has languished, my posts are full of typos and misspells and sometimes entire misposts. 

I forgot to put books on the tables this morning at library, hid out back before Holly or Jennifer could ask for the broom, got in a fight with Chiquita, and am now here alone with my words.  Words, words, words and all of them bad.  So many to choose from and yet I chose, just now, these:

“I slept well the night I gave June the key, as often happens with mistakes.”

Hmm.  Well, technically, I didn’t choose those, Nell Freudenberger did and she put them in The Dissident.  It kind of makes me mad, though, because I had been just about to choose them, I swear, right before she did and now I’m left to choose others.  Such as these:

“Elizabeth David Night fell flat and Ellen tottered eerily before the unopened door resembling Carrie at the prom just after they’d doused her in blood.”

Menza menz.  Also these:

“Howard found her swaying like this, bent toward the scattering leaves, and plucked her at the stem like a poppy.”

What do they mean?  I don’t know, they’re just words.  Here’s more:

“Ellen eventually discovered, not to her liking, that Howard looked at everyone in that same gauzy way, in the same way he looked at her.  Bankers, babies, the girl at the information desk at Barnes and Noble; even the guys at the Jiffy Lube.   where he dropped his car every 3,000 miles.”

I’m not crazy about that passage.  I don’t think “gauzy” conveys what I want, nor does it mesh well with the miles – there’s a certain charm about Howard that your “3,000 miles” Joe lacks, but I needed a detail.  The detail I actually need is his car, the kind of car Howard drives, but I don’t know it.  I should know what he drives, but I don’t.  Let’s move on:

“It’s not us, Ellen said out loud one day, three months into their seventh year.  It’s the great room that got small.”

Oh, dear, I’m afraid I have to go.  I just had an episode with the broom that’s left me rattled.  Holly hunted me down and demanded to know where it was.  I stalled, I stymied hemmed and hawed, and eventually I led her to the exact spot of the broom.  (Brilliant luck!)  And with a slight degree of authority, I might add.  I think she thought it was there because it’s where I’d last used it.  That’s the attitude I took, anyway.

Still, I wasn’t prepared for all of that so I have to lie down now and rest.

If you’ve got words of your own to send me, please do. 

[Anne Snow turned 40 two days ago.  E. will, very shortly, write a poem.]

I’ve moved to the living room now, which is not where I planned to work today, but Tony’s coming and I can’t hear him when I’m out back and I didn’t want to just wait, lingering, with nothing to do, so I brought it all – PC, Dumas, Yates, the whole thing.  And picking up Yates again, it hits me what I’ve known all along but haven’t done — The Good Wife must tell it from Howard’s view as well.  Right now it is, for the most part, Ellen’s tale, and the protracted trials and small insults that are her life, but Howard must have his voice, too.  He has also suffered the wearying trivial routine, the day-after-day that tries a man’s soul, makes his back hurt.

I just moments ago returned from the back room.  I ran there to hide because I saw the church girls with notebooks at the door across the street — it was unnecessary, they never came.  Perhaps they saw me run, or maybe they skipped me and went to Ned’s.  Or Ty’s.  Is it Ned and Ty?  They’re our nice-enough neighbors around the corner, last house on the dead end.  Though they run a rental on our other side that leaks trash and front-porch tv screens and sometimes old gutted cars.  We’d prefer it wasn’t there, but it is, and the irritation it creates has caused me to insult them (Ned and Ty), I think, twice. 

First I didn’t invite them at Christmas.  Then I stopped either Ned or Ty outside recently and was snide about the new renters.  He seemed impatient. 

Since then, the renters have scrammed.  In the middle of the night leaving bicycles and shoes on the porch and it’s haunted me. I behaved poorly.  I sneered at them, I talked behind their backs, I picked their trash up off the lawn and then glared at them when they cursed too loud.  But who am I?  It’s well-known that I sometimes curse loud and I leave all sorts of things around the house in places they don’t belong.

I should photograph the bikes and the shoes to show you.  You’ll be disappointed in me.  I should have brought them a cake instead of worrying about the trash. 

That all seems to have little to do with Ned (or Howard and Ellen, for that matter) except that when I think of Ned or his house, which I did when the church girls disappeared, I think of how I behaved to the neighbors and how they left in the night without their shoes. 

It’s raining, it’s pouring, Proust is in bed snoring …  

I though this letter, from Marcel to his friend George de Lauris, was appropriate for today’s dismal drear.  (From: “Today in Letters“)  Proust, as you know, was famous for his writing, as well as never getting out of bed. 

My dear Georges,

When I spoke the other day of Moses on the threshold of the Promised Land and yet unable to enter it, I didn’t know how apt it was.  Twice I have been to Paris and the state of my asthma has suddenly worsened as a result of the difference in altitude (or at least so I suppose, but I know absolutely nothing about it) making it impossible to climb even two steps in spite of all the caffeine in the world.  This impotence of my friendship is a terrible thing for me, a mixture of grief and humiliation.  I think of my poor mama saying to me at Evian:  “I’m going back to Paris because I’m helpless and can no longer be of any use to you when you are ill.”  I cannot repay the tender care you gave me; I always have to receive from you and never give back.  And my friendship is perhaps more unhappy as a consequence of this than of the deprival of seeing you, though this deprivation is all the more cruel just now when, after the shudder of horror and danger, I would so much relish the delight of having you safe and sound.  Yes, sound, for your face, your look, your cheerfulness are not those of a sick man.  And even more than on your face, I could read your health on your father’s face in the hall at the rue Washington.  If I had some really terrifying attacks on my three returns from Paris, and enormous joy on my first visit (when I saw you), on the other two, when I couldn’t have reached the upper floors and remained conscious, I enjoyed some minor pleasures with a girl who is new and dear to me, and a few young friends who are also new …

At the moment, I’m unable to leave my bed, but I hope to come and see you soon … [full letter, here.]

From Gawker, an excerpt of The Financial Times’ profile of literary critic James Wood.  Who I totally heart, it turns out, for the exact same reasons Gawker does.  For one, he gets fact-checkers dead on: 

“I find it isn’t the editors who put the qualification in,” he says.  “It’s the fact-checkers.  They have to be resisted because they want to water down unproveable assertions.  So you say: ‘There is great disagreement about Cormac McCarthy’s status — this was a piece I wrote a couple of years ago when No Country For Old Men came out — and they’ll say to you:  ‘Well, I’ve been on the internet and I haven’t found much disagreement actually.’  So you say:  ‘Well, for instance, Ian McKewan thinks he’s complete shit.’  ‘Yeah, but we’ll have to say, then, there’s “some” disagreement.’  And already it’s getting wimpish.”

Also, he loves semi-colons.  Me too, James!; Me, too;!