Rain rain, go away
Feb. 19th, 2008 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaSpecifically, go to Tahoe! Go now, fly like the wind (which, since you are a weather pattern, is not merely a rhetorical cliche), and become snow over the northern part of Lake Tahoe! I like a cozy evening with tea and a movie or a good book as much as the next domestic sybarite, but I must confess that this rain worries me when I know that Daniel is out in it. All other things being equal, the boy has enough sense to come in out of the rain, but tonight the Berkeley math circle meets, and he goes regularly every Tuesday, and that apparently means that all other things are not equal. So I sit here, with dinner quietly simmering on low heat and await his step at the door, which will be followed by a very wet, hairy math teacher who needs a place to dump his soaking wet jacket, shoes, bookbag, and probably could use a pair of dry pants and socks. This is why I miss real winters. Snow might be a heckuva lot colder than rain, but it's also a heckuva lot prettier and not nearly as messy. Maybe I'll be at Cornell next year this time (living on the lots of money they're offering me (because they're offering me LOTS OF MONEY*)) enjoying the snow. (Actually,three days from now this time I'll be enjoying the snow at Tahoe, so perhaps I shouldn't be too wistful about Ithaca before I learn more about the program and students and other stuffs. I do miss the days, however, when snow was brought right to my door in Chicago.)
I should start keeping a running log of books I'm reading. This is not only for my own reference, but also serves a purpose: to wit, Daniel has a Virginia Woolf-themed bookmark that he adores, and I used it a few books back, after which it was never seen again. I looked through the books I'd read recently to see if I'd left it in them, but I have no way of knowing whether that list was exhaustive, since my memory is faulty. Hence, a sort of running tally from Christmas on forward, which might very well be incomplete**:
Richard Russo:
Mohawk
The Risk Pool (Which I swear I read before. Many scenes are remarkably familiar: the scene where the narrator as a boy admires the girl next door undressing, only to realize later that she probably knew the whole time he was watching and titillating him unmercifully; the narrator throwing a rock down at a shed in a garbage dump and seeing his somewhat vagabond father run out, startled by the noise on the roof; the narrator's entire adolescence in the company of his father's girlfriend's motorcycle-riding weight-lifting punk-acting son; and the narrator-become-man working as a bartender in a rather lousy bar, where once a week, regularly, an old woman comes in, asks for a specific drink, consumes four of them, pees all over the booth where she's sitting, and then leaves. But the familiarity seems to date from a time when I think I was pretty young--fourteen-to-sixteen-ish--and I can't possibly imagine my mother suggesting anything by Richard Russo to a little sixteen-year-old Clarochka.
Straight Man (Oh, my goodness, this book is the most screamingly funny description of dead-end academia I've ever read.)
Barry Lyndon, by William Makepeace Thackeray. (It has the same flavor as Vanity Fair, but with more bitterness and less balanced sarcasm. You feel grateful at the end for the sake of the author, who's clearly gotten so sick of his beastly creation that he can't wait to get rid of him somehow or other.)
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her book is good as an anti-slavery screed because it covers all the strong arguments against slavery, but there's still a good bit of unconscious racism in it. Negros, see, are more domestic and retiring than white people, with more innately visual minds, which is why they're always happiest when they're comfortably at home, singing spiritual songs whose lyrics contain strong imagery.)
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. (I'm not quite clear whether it's actually a novel or partly autobiographical, but very amusing either way. To be honest, the entertainment value outweighs the social justice argument. To paraphrase the expression, he aimed for our hearts and hit us in the funny bone.)
The Europeans by Henry James. (My mother promised that this was delightful and charming and all those other things that characterize early James, but I must add that, while the book was very finely crafted and flowed along swimmingly, it didn't have any of the significance of his later books or even of his earlier longer works, and it wasn't nearly as tight as Daisy Miller or Washington Square.)
Tous Les Hommes Sont Mortels by Simone de Beauvoir. (This is one of those books that was a really random selection. I didn't have any kind of background knowledge, or even know that Beauvoir was female until I was several chapters in. I don't know why I bought the book, and the only reason I picked it up off the shelf was that the cover was extremely colorful and I was on my way out the door in something of a hurry. Also, it's still in French, and I was rather curious to see whether I can still read French well. And I can. There are several vocabulary words I don't know, but it's really the same 10 or so that show up over and over again, and I'm slowly beginning to figure out what they mean just from the repeated appearances in context, so it would almost ruin the fun if someone were to tell me what (for example) gonfler means.)
*This is not arrogance behind the capital letters, but squeefulness. They like me! (Or else they're just a rich private school with bucks to burn, but I usually squelch that line of reasoning.)
**These are new books. I've reread a few favorites here and there also, but they don't really count.
I should start keeping a running log of books I'm reading. This is not only for my own reference, but also serves a purpose: to wit, Daniel has a Virginia Woolf-themed bookmark that he adores, and I used it a few books back, after which it was never seen again. I looked through the books I'd read recently to see if I'd left it in them, but I have no way of knowing whether that list was exhaustive, since my memory is faulty. Hence, a sort of running tally from Christmas on forward, which might very well be incomplete**:
Richard Russo:
Mohawk
The Risk Pool (Which I swear I read before. Many scenes are remarkably familiar: the scene where the narrator as a boy admires the girl next door undressing, only to realize later that she probably knew the whole time he was watching and titillating him unmercifully; the narrator throwing a rock down at a shed in a garbage dump and seeing his somewhat vagabond father run out, startled by the noise on the roof; the narrator's entire adolescence in the company of his father's girlfriend's motorcycle-riding weight-lifting punk-acting son; and the narrator-become-man working as a bartender in a rather lousy bar, where once a week, regularly, an old woman comes in, asks for a specific drink, consumes four of them, pees all over the booth where she's sitting, and then leaves. But the familiarity seems to date from a time when I think I was pretty young--fourteen-to-sixteen-ish--and I can't possibly imagine my mother suggesting anything by Richard Russo to a little sixteen-year-old Clarochka.
Straight Man (Oh, my goodness, this book is the most screamingly funny description of dead-end academia I've ever read.)
Barry Lyndon, by William Makepeace Thackeray. (It has the same flavor as Vanity Fair, but with more bitterness and less balanced sarcasm. You feel grateful at the end for the sake of the author, who's clearly gotten so sick of his beastly creation that he can't wait to get rid of him somehow or other.)
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her book is good as an anti-slavery screed because it covers all the strong arguments against slavery, but there's still a good bit of unconscious racism in it. Negros, see, are more domestic and retiring than white people, with more innately visual minds, which is why they're always happiest when they're comfortably at home, singing spiritual songs whose lyrics contain strong imagery.)
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. (I'm not quite clear whether it's actually a novel or partly autobiographical, but very amusing either way. To be honest, the entertainment value outweighs the social justice argument. To paraphrase the expression, he aimed for our hearts and hit us in the funny bone.)
The Europeans by Henry James. (My mother promised that this was delightful and charming and all those other things that characterize early James, but I must add that, while the book was very finely crafted and flowed along swimmingly, it didn't have any of the significance of his later books or even of his earlier longer works, and it wasn't nearly as tight as Daisy Miller or Washington Square.)
Tous Les Hommes Sont Mortels by Simone de Beauvoir. (This is one of those books that was a really random selection. I didn't have any kind of background knowledge, or even know that Beauvoir was female until I was several chapters in. I don't know why I bought the book, and the only reason I picked it up off the shelf was that the cover was extremely colorful and I was on my way out the door in something of a hurry. Also, it's still in French, and I was rather curious to see whether I can still read French well. And I can. There are several vocabulary words I don't know, but it's really the same 10 or so that show up over and over again, and I'm slowly beginning to figure out what they mean just from the repeated appearances in context, so it would almost ruin the fun if someone were to tell me what (for example) gonfler means.)
*This is not arrogance behind the capital letters, but squeefulness. They like me! (Or else they're just a rich private school with bucks to burn, but I usually squelch that line of reasoning.)
**These are new books. I've reread a few favorites here and there also, but they don't really count.