Nom de Plume

What does Harry do while I work? Oh yeah, he’s heads down too, completely bewitched.

“Are we doing anything this weekend?” Steve asked last night over dinner.

“No plans,” I said.

“Can we do something?”

“Sure. What do you want to do?”

“I want to go to Port Townsend for the Wooden Boat Festival.”

“Okay,” said I. “Let’s do it.”

Then Steve got excited. “Maybe there’s some surfing on the strait.”

“It’s cold.”

“Yeah, but I’m hardcore!” He patted his belly. “Let’s do a weekend.”

I agreed. We’ve been pretty housebound for the past few months. If he’s not working Saturdays, then we’re working on the house in our haphazard manner.

The next thing I knew, Steve had pushed away from the table. He rummaged around downstairs and came up with a surf board. Then he propped it up against the art wall. The art wall is our paean to excess; we have far too many pictures, so a lot of them are going on a single wall. It’s a work in progress.

“Look!” he exclaimed, surveying it with immense satisfaction. “If fits perfectly. I think we should hang it there for good.”

As Wade puts it, a “fun or sad interweb game” in which you google “Unfortunately, yournamehere.”

“Unfortunately Zia died in the 1988 plane
crash.”

“Unfortunately Zia was initially brought to the public’s attention for all the wrong reasons.”

“Unfortunately, Zia and Sonia who complete the new foursome have not been brought
up to react in horror.”

“Unfortunately, ZIA does not protect data once an application has read it.”

“Unfortunately, Zia was wrong this time and west won with the queen.”

Rose Olds is born just to be abandoned. Saved from a garbage heap by Lord Geoffroy Lovell in answer to his prayers for an heir, the baby is taken home and named after his sister, who fell out of a tree and died many years before. Geoffroy had an unhealthy obsession with his sister when she was alive–and an even more unhealthy obsession with her memory. So great is his grief that he retained her governess, Anonyma, who now holds the post of house librarian and who, to exclusion of all else, pursues a scholarly obsession with the poet Mary Day. Thus, when the baby girl is brought home, Geoffroy sees her as the incarnation of his dead sister and marries Anonyma to provide the child legitimacy.

Which is all very good and well, but there’s a hitch: Rose Olds is not, in fact, a girl. She is a boy. And she doesn’t discover the fact until she’s ten years old. And this leads to a gender-bending confusion of identity that culminates in the family being kicked out of Love Hall by pecuniary relatives intent on their own gain. But the poet Mary Day saves the day, as surprises everyone but Anonyma. As it turns out, she is more closely connected to Love Hall than anyone had guessed, and the novel proceeds to its predictable ending.

I first chose this off the library shelf because it sounded like Middlesex meets The Crimson Petal and the White. And it was, with the merest tip of Tipping the Velvet, a dash of John Irving, and a even a sprinkle of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. As a result, I wanted to like it. I really, really did.

But I didn’t. Oh, I didn’t hate it or anything. Its imagery was delightful, both whimsical and endearing in its peculiarity. It was one of those start and stop novels; I lost interest in the pages of sometimes didactic explication, only to be drawn in again with great, well-written scenes. But overall, the story plodded, especially after Rose discovers that she is actually a she.

In my recent rereading of all things Austen, I plucked Mr Darcy Takes a Wife off my bookshelf again for a quick reread. And while my original post on the book still stands, I wanted to add a couple of things.

The story’s pretty good — perhaps a little over-the-top and sometimes unconvincing. Darcy is unremittingly uxorious; Elizabeth adapts to gracious living with complete ease. Neither rings absolutely true to character. Still, it doesn’t really matter because, after all, this is a romance, and we are all so grateful for having a continuation of Pride and Prejudice that we’re willing to overlook a lot.

The language, on the other hand, is appallingly bad. Midway through, I started getting really irritated with the howbeits and albeits. There’s at least one per page. In fact, the whole book reads as though Berdoll first wrote in modern day English — and then went back and tortured her prose into twisted convolutions of itself. Harsh? Perhaps, but sobeit.

3 Names You Answer to:
Zia
Z
munshi

3 Parts of Your Heritage:
Indian (dots, not feathers)
Indian (feathers, not dots)
Norwegian (!!!)

3 Things That Scare You:
Dentists
My never-ending hypochondria
Deadlines

3 Everyday Essentials:
Sleep
Caffeine
E-mail

3 Things You’re Wearing:
Jeans
One of Steve’s flannel shirts
clogs

3 Favorite Songs:
Silence
Silence
Silence

3 Things About the Opposite Sex That Appeal to You:
Broad shoulders
Strong hands
Steve, basically

3 Things You Want in a Relationship:
Someone who makes me laugh (got it)
Support (got it)
A househusband (don’t)

3 Favorite Hobbies:
Reading
Pottery (this is new)
Blogging

3 Things to Do Before You Die:
Finish the two novels I’m working on
Live overseas again
Become filthy rich and famous writing, so I can live overseas again

3 Places You Want to Go:
India again (slated for this year, again)
China
England for stately home tours

3 Ways You’re Stereotypically Female (or male if you’re a guy):
“Do I look fat? No, seriously.”
Sappy commercials make me teary
I really hate the fact that I’m only 32 and already going gray.

There is such a thing as too MUCH customer service.

Take, for instance, my car dealership. After I bought the car, I received a phone call, asking me to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 my experience buying a car. Then I got a questionnaire in the mail asking the same thing. I was happy, and I told them so.

When I drove off the lot, they didn’t have the rubber mats I wanted. So I picked them up a week later. Another phone call. Another mail in questionnaire.

Last month, I got an oil change. Yep, you guessed it. A phone call. And today, I just got the mail-in questionnaire.

This is the thing: I really am very happy with their customer service — they are prompt, courteous, and really do go that extra mile.

But.

I really hate this assiduous followup. It gets irritating.

This is for Barbara.

He nailed pretty much everything else though.

What’s with this news about the Dept of Justice trying to get google’s databases? What’s this about job boards being required to retain old resumes and make them available to employers? And then there are the constant attempts to “Disnify the Internet”? I mean, c’mon people, porn FUELS the Internet, and it doesn’t make me very happy to google myself and find my name on some disgusting site involving animals because some bot grabbed random words out of separate posts, but hey, I live with it. I’m a good old fashioned liberal who believes that the government SHOULD be involved in improving peoples’ lives and ensuring fairness — but this isn’t fairness, this is Big Brother. Meanwhile, all the things that help us as a society just got slashed from the budget.

You know what this is about? This is about stupid people who can’t adhere to a standard code of conduct for themselves and who then demand the government get involved. Can’t stop your teenage kid with rampaging hormones looking for pictures of girls? Pass a law! Stupid enough to buy a genuine Ming vase off eBay for the screaming deal of $9.99? Scream fraud against eBay. And it’s about people who are so terrified of a possible terrorist attack –and, by the way, equally stupid people who voted this moron into office in the first place — that they’re willing to sign away not just their freedoms but everyone else’s too. Because they’re just too stupid and short-sighted and IGNORANT of the way totalitarian governments work.

Which is what this one is becoming.

Unsurprisingly, I have lots of pronunciation peeves, and nothing is more guaranteed to make me cringe than these:

Applicable. The emphasis does NOT fall on “plic”; rather it’s on the first syllable. To pronouce it otherwise reminds me of an icepick. Which is bad, and possibly even fatal.

Realtor. Relator?

Patina. Again, the emphasis is not on the second syllable, but the first. Patina does not rhyme with the name Katina, which in any case sounds like a Vegas stripper. Or, more recently, Katrina, which should be avoided at all costs.

Potable. If it were pronounced with a short “o,” there would be another “t” and then you could plant it. End of story.

Mischievous. Where does the extra “i” and related syllable come from? Miss-CHEE-vee-us? It’s MISS-che-vuss.

On a semi-related note (well, peeves, not pronunciation), there seems to be a tendency to take foreign words and double them up with their English counterparts. Duvet cover. Futon mattress (or pad). Chai tea.

Hmmph.