The Clareverse

Spring has finally arrived, so it’s the time of year when I stop reading so much and I start obsessing about my garden.

Last year was the first year I’ve ever planted a garden, and I didn’t clean it up at the end of the season. The dried dead stalks of various prairie plants have been sticking up through the snow all winter looking like a metaphor for desolation. They looked completely dead, but when I cleared away all the brown crap I found new green shoots at the bottom of every plant. I know that this is how perennials are supposed to work, but it was still really cool to see the monarda and rudbeckia that I put in my yard doing their thing without any help from me. I totally grew plants.

I also checked my compost heap. Again, I understand the principle of composting, but it was really cool to see that what was a big pile of grass clippings and kitchen waste last summer has turned into a big pile of rich dirt full of worms. It’s like magic - where did all the garbage go? I dug out the compost and put it on the perennial bed, which is old roadbed and has crappy soil. The veggie garden is the original prairie topsoil, crazy good soil, and doesn’t need as much help.

So, yay garden! First year successfully completed. My big plan for this year is to pimp out the rain barrel I got for $10 off craigslist. My goal is to use only collected rainwater on the garden all summer. Since I plant mainly drought-tolerant native flowers, I should only need enough water for the veggies and tomatoes. We’ll see how it goes.

Enough about what I’ve been reading - here’s a review of a workout DVD: Carmen Electra’s Fit to Strip 2*.

Carmen Electra could kick my ass. Every time I do this DVD workout I’m sore in strange and obscure muscles for days. Actually, I can’t say I do the workout because I’ve never gotten past the second section - the one that ends with Carmen saying “And my butt thanks you too! Right, ladies?” I had the DVD for months before I even realized there were other sections.

Besides being a decent workout, the DVD is pretty funny. Carmen gives a cheerfully vapid introduction, makes silly comments, and tries to do all the moves in as sexy a manner as possible. She’s so earnest. She cracks me up every time. The trainer, Michael Carson, is a good sport, and watching him respond to Carmen with affable courtesy is amusing in itself. While following along I usually exercise my sarcasm as well as my thighs and abs. I also get in a few reps of eye-rolling.

I’ve tried a few fitness DVDs and this is the only one I own. The combination of funny and strenuous makes it great for a quick workout when it’s too rainy or cold for running.

*There’s no stripping on this DVD. No “dancing” either.

Audrey Niffenegger, 2003.

I have rarely read a book that interested me so much in the first 40 pages. Audrey Niffenegger might as well have been writing this book to me. Here’s the first few things that sucked me into the book:

1. The heroine’s name is Clare, and she spells it like me. So naturally, I want to read about how smart, talented, beautiful and wonderful she is.

2. Clare lives at Hoyne and Addison. That’s exactly where I lived when I first moved to Chicago. It’s like Niffenegger is writing about me and my fabulous romantic life! Oooh, keep reading.

3. This sentence: “I now have an erection that is probably tall enough to ride some of the scarier rides at Great America without a parent.” First, that’s funny. Second, “Great America” is exactly how a Chicago kid would refer to our local amusement park, regardless of Six Flags’ marketing. So the novel is not just set in Chicago, Audrey Niffenegger knows the city well and is writing her characters as Chicagoans. OK, you got me. Read read read.

So I’m sitting on the living room floor with the sidekick, reading while we’re playing Scrabble and watching Life of Mammals, and this is a transcript of me reading the next few chapters:

Me: Hey, they’re going to the Field Museum!
Sidekick: Yeah?
Me: Now they’re breaking into the Army Surplus store on Belmont!
Sidekick: Huh.
Me: And they’re eating at Ann Sathers!
Sidekick: Wait, did you write this book?

After the Clare-trapping entertainment of the first few chapters, the novel tells an interesting story with big neat ideas and weepy romantic drama. The time travel in the book is well-thought-out and thoroughly explored. I love to see a single magical or sci-fi idea applied to the normal world and then investigated in detail. Niffenegger did a lot of work getting her chronologies straight and thinking about what uncontrollable time travel would do to a pair of lives.

But as in the best science fiction, the book isn’t just about time travel. Niffenegger uses time travel as a metaphor for anything that can interrupt a relationship: illness, work, circumstance. The book is full of all kinds of ideas about the transience and permanence of love, with sex as the grounding force that keeps the couple together. Time travel is also explored as a metaphor for memory and imagination, the way we live in bits of other moments all the time, wandering in our minds from the present instead of inhabiting it and paying attention to what’s going on now.

Niffenegger obviously put a lot of thought into her ideas, and wrote details into the book that build on her main themes. For example, Clare makes paper and Henry’s a librarian at the Newberry Library, So she’s creating new blank sheets for recording something, and he’s at the other end of the book spectrum, working with historical collections of records on paper. This mirrors their relationship, where they’re coming at their marriage from opposite ends, each knowing part of the story because he’s been coming from his future to tell her about it. She’s the blank page and he’s the story already told, making her into the woman he knows she will be because when he first met her she told him he would.

Henry and Clare are idealized lovers who turn each other into the person they want and use their mad time skillz to create a temporarily perfect life. They’re not at all regular people with ordinary lives. Their characters are not gritty or realistic, but that’s fine in this book. The narrative is engrossing, there’s some wonderful images, and it’s really fun to read an mythic love story set in modern Chicago.

The main thing I didn’t like: Why is the man always the traveler? Why does the woman always have to stay home? I always hated how Penelope got stuck at home waiting for Odysseus. I’m sure it was great being queen of her own island and doing whatever she wanted because the king wasn’t around, but nobody wrote an epic poem about that. I find man=wanderer and woman=home a tedious repetition of traditional gender role stereotyping. Henry and Clare are kind of metaphors of ideal lovers, rather than actual people, and the book is otherwise awesome, so this didn’t bother me that much. But speaking as a woman who moved to another continent 3 days after her wedding - with the husband’s prior approval, of course - I’d rather read about a woman going on crazy adventures while the man stays home. I guess I should just write my own story.

Mark Haddon, 2003.

What a fun book. Like The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, it’s a story about the effect of a “special needs” child on a family and a terrible deception, but unlike MKD this story is well-written, smart, and entertaining. Let’s compare and contrast with The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which I hated.

1.) How the mystery is handled. Unlike MKD, which starts by telling you exactly who did what, Curious Incident starts with the discovery of the existence of the mystery, and then the plot involves the narrator investigating and reflecting on the recent past and exploring the present while trying to figure out what happened. My curiosity kept me engaged with the story as it progressed; I kept reading because I wanted to find out what had happened and what would happen. In MKD, that simple pleasure had been removed by the lack of en media res and the the stupid spoilery dustjacket that summarized the main plot points of the story.

2.) The narrator’s voice. So well done! The narrator of Curious Incident is a high-functioning autistic teenager, and everything is told in his voice and explained as he sees the world. It’s funny and interesting, and I always like reading a story with an unreliable narrator because you get the extra entertainment of figuring out how their version of their world is different from the “real” version. Having a personal insight into the mind of the main character makes them more likable and makes the story more involving because you care what happens to them. I didn’t care if any of the robots in MKD ever achieved personal happiness. Although I knew which ones would, because, again, of the dust jacket.

3.) “Redemptive power of love”. The father in Curious Incident doesn’t go around navel-gazing and reflecting on his woeful lot as a parent of a “special needs” child, or his own personal tragedy, he just tries to do his best. His emotions aren’t detailed in long descriptive passages, but implied by his actions, which is a particularly effective technique since the narrator can’t interpret emotions instinctively and has to figure out how people feel by observing them. I thought the father was very believable and likable, even when he was obviously making horrible mistakes.

4.) The title. It’s so perfect for the book. It references the details of the mystery which opens the book (a dog is found dead) and ties in with both the narrator’s actions (he decides to investigate the dog’s death) and the narrator’s interests (he likes Sherlock Holmes). And the narrator likes Sherlock Holmes because the detective’s misanthropy and meticulous attention to detail are similar to the kid’s social dysfunction and hypersensitivity to stimuli. See, it works on a few levels. And like the book, the title is clever and funny.

The book is full of wonderful diagrammatic illustrations with which the narrator explains his view of the world, and there’s an appendix detailing the proof of an A-levels math question, which was way over my head. The whole book is touching but lighthearted, and very enjoyable.

Tuesday night I went to my sister-in-law’s house to entertain the four-year-old niece, J, while the newborn niece was being calmed and fed. My job on these visits is to tell a ‘Once upon a time’ story and get J into bed. The story isn’t so much a story as an interactive roleplaying game directed by J and featuring every object in her bedroom. Summary of Tuesday night’s story:

• I was an witch who wanted to cast a spell on the chief fairy, J. The spell would turn her into a bird who only liked black things, which would be represented by putting on a big pink boa.
• No matter how I cast the spell, J was able to deflect it by waving a purple lei and giggle-shrieking. I eventually just gave up and put the boa on myself and became a grouchy goth bird.
• After defeating me, J deputized me to find the evilest fairy in the world. I asked around the bedroom and in a surprising third-act reversal discovered that J herself was the evilest fairy in the world.

I thought the changing roles of good and evil gave this story an unusual sophistication. Sort of like L.A. Confidential, but with fairies. Fairy noir.