Can You Hear My Hair Frizzing?

I like alliteration as much as any native speaker of English, but there’s one phrase I cannot stand: “Hazy, hot and humid” is a bad, bad thing as far as I’m concerned. How about this, though? My friend Mark just told me that he loves it when he walks outside and feels like he’s being wrapped up in a warm, wet blanket. He likes it when it’s too hot to sleep with a blanket. How can he love these things that enrage me?

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My reading has been sort of slow these days, as I’m busy and crabby. Or maybe I’m crabby because my reading has been slow? That’s pretty likely. Anyway, I just started The Family Trade, which is the first in Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series. I wouldn’t have given this a second glance, but the second book is one of Salon’s recommendations for summer reading.

At first I thought the book’s protagonist, Miriam Beckstein, was a wonderful Jewish version of Thursday Next. That may end up being the case—especially as I get into the second book—but I’m having my doubts. What’s wrong? It’s Stross that’s causing the problems, not Miriam. Stross is Scottish—according to the flap copy, he lives “with his wife, Feòrag NicBhride, in a flat in Edinburgh, Scotland, that is slightly older than the state of Texas.”

Let’s give Stross the benefit of the doubt and assume that some jerk wrote that pretentious copy. Fine. The fact remains, though, that Stross is a Scottish man writing the story of an American woman. Why would he do this? And where is his editor? It’s jarring when an American woman in Boston gets her Saturn from the car park. There are other words and phrases and grammatical constructions on nearly every page, and it’s driving me to distraction. Yes, Miriam’s mother emigrated from England more than thirty years ago, but that’s no excuse for this disturbing language problem.

I’ll keep at it, though, because I’m curious about the story.

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I just read Goodbye, Columbus, which Philip Roth wrote when he was 26. I had an infant when I was 26, along with a closeted gay husband and a rollicking case of panic and anxiety disorder. I wonder whether Roth enjoyed his 20s more than I did?


I picked up John Wesley Harding’s Misfortune at the library, but I’m not digging it. I might give it another go, but it’s just not grabbing me. What else have I read? I liked the new Nick Hornby, which Val is digging at all. Granted, it’s no High Fidelity, but I think Hornby put a lot of himself into it—and certainly not his best features—and I somehow feel closer to him for having read the book. I recently reread If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What am I Doing in the Pits? Don’t laugh. I cried when poor Erma Bombeck died.

What else have I read lately? My short-term memory is shot. Val? Have I mentioned anything?

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The play’s the thing. I read Teddy an adaptation of the Scottish play, which was pretty fun. He was thrilled with some of the famous lines, like “Bubble, bubble . . .” The only problem I have with adaptations of books/plays/whatever for kids is that I read some when I was in grade school and then felt that I already knew it all when it came time to read them again in high school. You know?

Speaking of plays, I listened recently to Neil Simon’s Chapter Two, which was okay, and Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, which was great. I’m in the middle of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windemere’s Fan, and it’s super. I’m getting the plays on CD from the library, but I’m finding them first through the LA Theatre Works web site. They have a great collection of stuff that’s been produced for radio. If you’re at all interested in listening to something other than music in the car or through your headphones, you should check it out.


And now, I should go and do some of the work I’m paid for.