pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE GRANGE 11 p.m. and I am pondering what to have with the glass of wine left over from that exceptional dinner that Pottergrrl and I shared on my deck this weekend. Wine doesn't go with popcorn. and I'm too lazy to cook something this late. . . . Hmm, okay, so I toasted some cheddar with coarse-grain mustard cheese on some of Pottergrrl's excellent rosemary-olive bread. Guess I could scrounge up some sun-dried tomatoes and olive oil and fresh basil and dip my bread in that too. Mmm. Now that's good, even if the basil did have raindrops on it! I gotta learn how to bake so I can eat this bread on a regular basis! Have been working on that behemoth book manuscript project ever since I arrived home at 6:30 and am sad to report that the book STILL seems to grow larger every time I turn a page. Dunno how this can happen, but I read and read and read and still seem to make no progress. At least it's an interesting read though. (Perhaps I need to quit taking notes about things I want to think about and just read the thing instead—not think of the manuscript as yet another place where I can glean ideas for my own writing and focus instead on the speedy completion of the task at hand. Hard to do that though when it's generating so many good ideas.) F. Scott Fitzgerald says "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." That line has been running through my head tonight as I read about a powerful unreconstructed rebel who was weaned on stories of the Confederate dead—a southerner whose sense of identity and attitudes are colored by a war that unleashed economic and social forces that left the South almost unrecognizably transformed and left too many white southerners puffed up with a sense of defiant entitlement, especially after impressment—the confiscation of private property with the promise of future repayment—and whose other perceived woes wound up putting starch in their collective, bristling backs. Long story short, I'm reading about a judge who is racist through and through, yet has a brilliant legal mind—someone whose attitudes remind me again of this very Southern approach to living: "nothing in his background led him to look to anyone other than himself to make his place." It has always interesting to encounter a person with such a profound ability to compartmentalize herself. So here I sit reading about this woman drenched in her so-called noble Lost Cause mythology and wondering if I have it in me to stay up till 2 a.m. tonight. I could probably plod my way through another 150 pages, so I guess I will. I am tired though and would like nothing better than to have a glass of wine and just kick back and play guitar instead of working for, what, more than fifteen hours straight now. Meanwhile, I have spoken with my dear friend and mentor Shakespeare, who says I am making good decisions and who wants to know when exactly I am coming to Kentucky to visit her new digs (in late July if I enough of my staff returns to work). She was just awarded the title of Distinguished Professor, which she really, really deserves and which she will use proudly her final year teaching. I also received a postcard from my older sister Penelope, whose family was apparently in their own not-so-private Idaho a few days ago checking out bears before moving on to the Golden Gate Bridge. She wants to know the dates and times when I am taking my niece CeeCee and my mother to a nearby amusement park, which my sister Glittergrrl apparently told her I was doing without ever asking me. "The first cold day in Hell" is what I think I'll tell her. • One thing this manuscript has made me think about is the Grange/Farmer's Alliance. In South Carolina, I attended many a family reunion or fiftieth-wedding celebration or other family event at some rural grange building. (There are many migrant camp–owning peach farmers and soybean growers in my extended family.) Both organizations came into being to address practices that favor creditors over debtors' practices that can make it all but impossible for farmers to survive. And I can't help but think that we're in a similar place again, with big-business Bush and his cronies getting richer by the second while exorbitant interest rates bleed small-town farmers and anyone else unfortunate enough to have to live paycheck to paycheck. Here in the South, home of violence and intimidation and one stubborn sense of pride, I imagine the lives of the people I see going into those payday lending places, their pride so strong or their world so desperate that they take out a loan with upwards of thirty percent interest in order to maintain the appearance of surviving. And it does not fail to escape me that Republicans are akin to some of those post-Civil War southern gentry who resented increased taxes imposed to implement egalitarian policies. • And now I see that I am really meandering wildly and grasping for similarities, so I am just going to call it a night and collapse into my happy sheets till morning. Good night. • (Tuesday) Reading the New York Times online. John Irving's Until I Find You, touted as his magnum opus, is due out in July. I really like The World According to Garp, Ciderhouse Rules, and especially A Prayer for Owen Meaney,—like that he writes about the New Hampshire prep high school that my ex Tree attended too, because I can actually picture the place when he talks about it—and so am looking forward to reading this new book. Of course, I have a pile of at least fifteen books I want to read right now, and really need a week off at the beach, sitting in a folding chair with sand on my feet, listening to the waves crash around me as I read. SANG IN SHOWER: No big surprise, but hadn't even remembered this song existed till it came out of my mouth: ZZ Top's The Grange LISTENING TO: My fingers pecking out these words
BEST OF SPAM: My traffic secret can be yours (Huh? I got my own traffic secret, bud. It's called pedal to the metal in a zippy little car that can slide right around your slow ass.) 9:26 a.m. - 2005-06-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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