Dear Diary: Triste
In the current issue of Granta, Jhumpa Lahiri interviews Mavis Gallant. I’ve been reading Ms Gallant’s stories off and on ever since they began reappearing in NYRB editions — to the third of which Ms Lahiri will write the introduction. Along with a lot of interesting personal matter, the interview touches on three of Ms Gallant’s works (so to speak): an early novel, a lengthy short story from the Seventies, “The Remission,” and the four “Carette” short stories. I read “The Remission” this afternoon. It was rich, haunting, and extremely well done, but the reading experience was also fairly lowering.
I had hoped to be far more productive today. Last night at about this time, I was reading Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold, luxuriating in the sheer peace and quiet of reading, and thinking of an early night. But when Kathleen came home, at around midnight, she said that she needed to write a brief email to someone. I ought to have nodded and retired to the blue room. Instead, I sat in the bedroom while she tried to dispatch the note from the netbook, a machine with which she was unfamiliar. I’d recommended that she use the newest computer in the house because it was up and running. But it turned out that Kathleen’s idea of a “brief email” is highly relative. The note involved a lot of cutting and pasting (murder on a strange touch pad) and multiple addressees drawn from various documents. Beset by visions of a very late night, with Kathleen growing less and less capable as she grew more tired, I panicked and got upset.
Computers are about the only thing that Kathleen and I squabble about. We approach the machines in very different ways, but what really marks us apart is Kathleen’s comfort level with setbacks and technological snafus. I have no comfort level with these matters, and I’m inclined to think that tolerating them is the slippery slope to Idiocracy.
So we were up for an extra hour. An extra hour at least. And then I had to read — and raid the icebox — just to calm down.
In the afternoon, I planned to do a bit of writing, and I did do a bit of writing — just a page. I wrote up Up. I was going to do a little housework and then write some more, but Kathleen had some prescriptions to pick up at the drugstore, so (not least to atone for my sharpness last night) I offered to run the errand for her. The prescriptions weren’t ready; I was told to come back in an hour. That is when I read “The Remission.” After picking up the filled prescriptions, I went to the Food Emporium and bought a few things, so that I’d have a choice between burgers on a baguette or a Caesar salad for dinner. By the time the shopping was delivered, it was too late (and my brain was too scrambled) to start writing, so I took on a project that I expected to be daunting. It wasn’t.
The ongoing project is to create labels for the paper sleeves in which I now store DVDs. I bought the dual-feed Dymo label printer a few weeks ago. It was installed immediately, but along with a lot of other stuff, so that I didn’t remember how to operate the thing. There turned out to be nothing to it. I plugged it in and got right to work.
Being me, I did not begin by lugging one of the drawers of discs to the table and beginning at the beginning (with All About Eve). Oh, no. I made labels for DVDs that came to mind. Casablanca; Unforgiven; Merci, Docteur Rey. And wouldn’t you know it? Four of the titles that “came to mind”— three starring Cary Grant, as it happened — weren’t in the drawer at all (as I found when I finally did drag it out), but in original, special-edition cases that I had decided to keep. In the end, I pasted the labels for The Awful Truth, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, and The Lady Eve on empty sleeves and tucked them in front of All About Eve. This is how I keep my life simple.
(I’d still be printing labels, but I saw that I was about to run out of blanks. I’ll have to run up to Staples tomorrow for more.)
For dinner, I broiled three mini burgers — on offer at Gristede’s last week; I’d never seen them before — and then melted chunks of blue cheese over bacon bits on top of them. The burgers were spatula’d onto a halved demi-baguette, slathered with mustard and mayonnaise. I cut the baguette on either side of the burger in the middle, making three pieces. The result was even better than I’d hoped it would be. The crust of the baguette closed down around the burgers like a clamshell, while the interior soaked up all the juices. Imagine: a medium-rare burger that didn’t drip! Speaking of Barbara Stanwyck, the DVD that’s playing in the kitchen whenever I’m in there for more than five minutes is Ball of Fire. Drum boogie!
It’s not yet midnight, and/but Kathleen is home. She is absolutely finished working for the day, and if she turns on her computer at all, it will be to loiter at eBay.