Just in time for . . . November . . . the neighborhood giants are back.
It's my birthday today, and I'm sitting at the kitchen table having no particularly philosophical thoughts about it. Yeah, so, the last of the Eff Years. Next year, God willing, I'll have to change the name of this blog. I suppose that today really is the first day of my next decade, though I won't celebrate that until I've finished out the year. And . . . eh. I feel pretty much exactly the same as I always have.
We went out, of course, on Saturday night, so today will be a little anticlimactic, which again is fine. I'll go out this evening to hear J give a talk at the Abbey, then to dinner. Meanwhile, I've been reading my main birthday present:
I almost restarted Master of Hestviken last night, but I'm just not sure I'm up to it. Kristin, either. Instead I restarted David Copperfield, which is a romp by comparison. I had just reread the entire Ngaio Marsh Roderick Alleyn oeuvre, finally allowing myself to buy and read #32, Light Thickens, which for two years I had been putting off letting myself have.
And . . . you know, sometimes I think she just should have written novels about the theater or about painters, without having to make them murder mysteries. Light Thickens is very good, but what's good about it mostly is the development of the play at the heart of it. What Marsh was clearly interested in was artists at work. In case you haven't read Light Thickens, I'll just tell you that we're back at the Dolphin Theatre, which we first encountered in Killer Dolphin, with Peregrine Jay firmly at the helm as artistic director. The play is Macbeth. And the real interest in the novel is the building of the scenes of that play and the director's vision for them. I would really really love to see those witches, in particular, as Peregrine imagines them and has them brought to life on the stage.
Of course, you're reading along going, "At some point somebody in this cast is going to die," and finally they do. All of that, including the revelation of the murderer, is the absolute least interesting part of the story. It feels tacked onto a novel that really wanted to be about something else, but the writer had to pay the bills. This is not to say that I didn't enjoy reading it --- I did. But as I have so often thought, Ngaio Marsh might have been quite a different, and possibly a better, writer. As it is, she's good. Roderick Alleyn still feels like the best-drawn of the Golden Age detectives. Troy decisively trumps Harriet Vane as a sleuth's wife and more than carries the novels she's in, I think largely because her creator is interested in her as a person, not as a figure for Women In Relation To Men (Are Women Human?). That is, her creator is interested in her as an artist, which is the key to her as a person. Her art is central to who she is on the page, not an add-on because she has to do something to earn a living. Marsh is manifestly interested in her processes, just as she's interested in the processes of actors. These things drive what happens in those novels, with central characters revealing who they are through these processes. All of that is interesting, at least to me, without the murder aspect.
Of course, human processes --- like embroidery, for example --- as well as sin, lie at the heart of Sigrid Undset's novels. If I were actually going to write an essay I'd say more about that, but what I'm turning over in my mind is how we all read detective novels for escape, but have to screw our courage on before we start with Undset. Partly it's that Undset's precarious worlds --- and I'm most familiar, as most of us are, with her medieval Norway --- lack the certainty of a detective novel's cosmos. Things are not going to be tidied away. The protagonist is not going home for a cup of tea. Harrowing things happen, and more harrowing things are the fruit of the initial harrowing things, and then everybody gets the plague, the end. And somehow God is present and active, but not in any tidy, comfortable way that helps us go to sleep at night.
Anyway, set beside the prospect of that reading experience, David Copperfield is like potato chips.
So, today:
*walk the dog
*wash my hair
*try to do another power-point thing, for heaven's sake, because I'm recording this class next week
*maybe at least look at what essays I have to write, because I have an uncomfortable feeling that I've got to do three of them
Wearing today --- at least until I go out for the evening:
Basic Teal Willow + thrifted navy Allbirds merino-blend leggings + thrifted Birk Rosemeads. It's amazing what a nice accent color this grapey light purple is . . . maybe that's an eccentric perception, but it's one I persistently have. I mean . . . it's quite possible that I look terrible to everyone but myself. But one of the privileges of being fifty-nine years old is that everyone but myself is probably thinking of other things besides how I, a fifty-nine-year-old woman, look in my clothes. In other words, there are benefits to occupying a basically invisible demographic. Or if I AM visible to somebody, and that somebody thinks I look like an idiot in this or any other outfit, that somebody is cordially invited to go take a cold plunge.
If my husband wishes I would wear something else, he is too politic to say so. But actually, he remarks all the time that he likes how I look in my dresses, and I think he's not just being nice about it, even though this remark could potentially mean a lot of things. Mostly I think it could mean, "It's nice to see you take care of yourself," because for too many years I didn't. It could mean, "This evidence that you are not catatonically depressed is encouraging to me." But it could also mean, "I honestly think you look nice." What it almost certainly means is "I love you."
Anyway, another day, another year, another round of dressing like a Hanna Anderssen preschooler, and I'm not unhappy about any of it.
What I wore out for the evening:
Basically a repeat of Saturday night's outfit, but with Sapphire-dyed merino Snag tights instead of microfiber.