Novel ideas

I was eating pistachios tonight, sitting at my desk and cracking them open absentmindedly one by one while I read the last few chapters of Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout. A great mystery. In the last few chapters I began to suspect one of the characters and was proven right in the end, which I suppose helps add to my good feeling. I do prefer a mystery that presents all the fact to the reader, however, just like "Murder She Wrote" did although I was generally too young to pay enough attention to figure it out. The Stout I ended up getting from the library is actually a volume of three Nero Wolfe novels, and I am eager to read the other two. Thanks for the idea George - I'm sorry it has taken me so long to come around. Being very picky about style, I knew I was in for a good read when on the second page a woman was described thus: "The one glance I got was enough to show that she was no factory job but handmade throughout." I can't tell you what I like about this sentence, I just happen to think it's rather fantastic. It doesn't come across quite so well outside the flow of the narrative, now that I look at it above, but I'm leaving it in. Read the whole book if want to see what I mean.

I need this snappy sentence and other more luxurious ones when I spend days like today stuck indoors in the same desk and chair reading Euripides. I liked him fine in English, but in Greek he is terrible. Pedantic, melodramatic, a writer who seems like he's trying to hard. That's the worst kind - I'd much rather read simple and unsophisticated writing than pseudo-highbrow crap. I really hope I fall in the first category (or the unmentioned third, elegant but realistic) instead of the second. [And if I am in the latter, please please someone tell me so I can try to fix myself. I'm not kidding about that. I think I have a pretty good track record when it comes to not killing the messenger.] There is repetition for dramatic effect ("woe is me!" all over the place) and serious melodrama (in the first 300 lines Helen asks about three times why she is still alive, since she is the cause for all the horrific events at Troy). One of my friends in the program described Euripides as a kid with a thesaurus who doesn't quite know how to use it. I may warm up to him in time, but currently I am much more nostalgic for Sophocles and Antigone, which was dramatic without excessive melodrama, and didn't mince words, at least in the standard dialogues.

True to what I wrote a week ago I have not yet cracked open my Edward Abbey finds from the library. I look at the nondescript cover every morning when I gather up my schoolbooks and wonder what the pages hold. Someday, soon perhaps, I will pluck up the courage and lose myself in his prose for hours. After my midterm, I suppose, after the break also since I am leaving this small city in only a few days for the sprawl and shoreline that is Chicago. I want to put a sentence or two here about what Chicago means to me, but I find it difficult to express in words. It is simply the place that I have made my home over the past several years, and as much as I will always tell people I am from California, I go home to Chicago. My familiar city, my familiar faces and routine of life. The freight trains at night and the Powell's box during the day. And the sudden lack of my dependence on email, which gives me so many more hours to spend with the cause. I don't want to embarrass myself or him with an outpouring of emotion, sappy or thoughtful or otherwise, but all those sentiments are there. It is a daily struggle to keep that part of my life private since it is the easiest thing to think about and talk about and dream about. But we tend to be rather reticent in public, and once I sent this out it won't be private any longer. So I write about books and sentences and ultimate, feeling the false privacy of the drawn shade and the solitary lamp and the comfortable mess of laundry spilling out from my closet and hold in the words, sitting in the dark with my pistachios.