outside

Outside is so much better than inside this time of year -- it's been such a dreary and wet winter that I'm only now remembering what it is I really love about this place. Spring has sprung. Outdoor furniture was purchased, assembled and set up in the (desperately in need of mowing) back yard. George the Dog sat with his face held up in the breeze and ruled the place while Gillian Welch's Time the Revelator played (then Calexico, then miscellaneous other stuff, including Patsy Cline). It's our first spring in this house, but the Welch and the breeze and the grill and the nice white made it feel the same as forever.

We sat outside and read. Christopher reading Charlie Stross's Iron Sunrise, me reading Pashazade by Jon Courtney Grimwood.

This morning we repeated with waffles instead of wine and I read Rick Moody's Believer essay on the NBA media nattering. My favorite part was footnote number 5 -- if you don't have footnotes, it's not The Believer! -- affixed to Laura Miller's name. It reads:

I have neglected to include here reference to Wyatt's third piece, the fifth written in the paper about the award, published after the prize was given to Lily Tuck's novel The News From Paraguay. It's just as slipshod as the earlier pieces. He misquotes my speech, which he could easily have checked (even the New York Observer managed to do as much), so that I appear to laud Tuck's "astonishing quality," an incredibly awkward phrase I hope never to fall prey to during my professional lifetime. He also mocks Tuck for never having visited Paraguay while writing her novel. I bet, however, that the Times did not complain that Alice Sebold never visited Heaven in pursuit of The Lovely Bones.

It seems to me that what I like best about this piece is Moody's quiet snarkiness. (Snark! Snark! Snark! Snark!) It seems that snark is merited, even in The Believer, once snarked upon. For instance, the section that the footnote above was appended to:

The fourth article in the Times was by Laura Miller. Though I know her personally and like her quite a bit, I have almost always found her opinions on books parochial and blandly provocative.

Now, Laura Miller may be a far bigger person (not in the sense of gigantism but forgiveness and spiritual largesse) than me and shrug this off. But I would love to see her face the next time, say, Moody enters the room at a party. Great personal affinity? Even in litville, nobody loves being called parochial. Especially in the area at which they make a living.

Anyway. Then we went for a bike ride and came home to sit outside with some friends. Later, I inflicted the DVRed nonmasterpiece Girls Just Wanna Have Fun on one suspecting and one unsuspecting soul. DTV! Sarah Jessica Parker bests a dog through the help of Aqua Net and Helen Hunt as the "bad friend."

A trip to IMDB reveals that most everyone in the movie experienced immediate career death afterward (with the exception of the three largest female roles, played by SJP, HH and Shannen Doherty, respectively, and the best-friend-to-the-male-lead Jonathan Silverman) -- karma at its finest. We couldn't remember whether this movie was made in reaction to the successs of Footloose or the timing was just serendipitous (or due to some forgotten "dancing in the streets in tight clothes" movement in the Real World around then). Was this related or unrelated to movies in the Breakin' school, which came out around the same time? Film scholars, step forward.

This is the mania of spring.