I am reading The Moon and Sixpence after pretty recently reading Cakes and Ale and despite having a taste for Maugham’s writing at the moment, I’m starting to get annoyed. Cakes and Ale was fine enough, and the first few chapters pretty funny, but after a while he seems so intent on skewering whomever (Walpole and Hardy?) in a lot of boring specificity that he begins to repeat himself, and then the ending threw all my assumptions about the book into disarray. Rosie turns out to have a tragic secret! Only the heartrending death of a child could explain her naughty behavior! So much for being frank and unconventional. It turns out she’s just a muse. Empty and highly reflective with a “body made for the act of love.” (Hahaha! Oh no, really?)  Also, I assumed the narrator was supposed to be a bitchy pedant, but nothing really happened to confirm it was intentional; and now I find the same narrator in The Moon and Sixpence droning on about women in a fantastically pompous voice that barely hides his squeamishness. Yikes, was that Somerset Maugham? I s’pose it partly is, given the actual Vicar-uncle of Something-stable and his history as a medical student. Poor guy. For your enjoyment, a digested version of The Moon and Sixpence:

I have a recollection of large, unbending women with great noses and rapacious eyes. “Why do nice women marry dull men?” “Because intelligent men won’t marry nice women.” I did not know then how great a part is played in women’s life by the opinion of others. It throws a shadow of insincerity over their most deeply felt emotions. I have always been a little disconcerted by the passion women have for behaving beautifully at the death-bed of those they love. “Who makes fame? Critics, writers, stockbrokers, women.” “You mustn’t take very seriously what women say when they’re in a passion” What I had taken for love was no more than the feminine response to caresses and comfort which in the minds of most women passes for it. It is an emotion made up of the satisfaction in security, pride of property, the pleasure of being desired, the gratification of a household, and it is only by an amiable vanity that women ascribe to it spiritual value. Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed. It’s generally a gesture to arouse pity or terror in their lover. Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous importance. “Women are the instruments of my pleasure.” As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times. “Women are strange little beasts,” he said to Dr. Coutras. “You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.”

Nevertheless, I am actually enjoying it and spending a good amount of time speculating about how much of it was really Gauguin. Could anyone have been so opaque to their own family? That cranky that much of the time? And I guess leprosy is more literary than syphilis. More of a clear judgement from on high with no room for a jolly elbow to the ribs. It’s a good enough book to take the taste of The Magician out of my mouth– bleh, dilute Le Fanu with a lot of scholarly references thrown in for effect. (Though I’d happily take a list of said scholarly references. I was reading in Eucalyptus, which presumptuously does not allow bookmarks. I have a weakness for alchemists, guys. All I want to do is fold down the corner of the page.) The best parts were descriptions of how Susie was dressed: a green silk gown with ancient lace and “a chain which had once adorned that of a madonna in an Andalusian church.” At first I thought we’d have gotten along, but then she fell in selflessly in love… The other night I read Of Human Bondage for the first time since high school. I had a headache that wouldn’t budge. In fact, I have it still. It’s been more than a week and either someone is trying to poison me for my vast fortune (I read a lot of Agatha Christie during my formative years.) or someone else is feeling unwell and getting up six or more times in the night to be comforted. Tangentially, the latter someone has been begging me to swaddle him and walk around with him, which is what we did from six to ten pm every night of the first three or four months of his tortured little life. In those days, he cried the whole time, but despite that, it must have been comforting because the last few nights he’s requested we wrap his arms (tight!) and walk the same stumbling loop around the dark bedroom. Anyhow, the headache—it’s different from the usual. A tight band with painful swollen spots at the base of my skull that are impervious to heat. I thought I couldn’t handle it any more so I took some Excedrin migraine. I don’t normally take pain killers for headaches since they have a rebound effect on me, but I was stupidly desperate. Afterward I was so wired (and still headache-y) I didn’t even feel drowsy until seven am. Instead I intermittently walked the baby and read Of Human Bondage. It was odd to recall my own emotional responses to the story but not the details of the story itself. I think the dreary repetitive realism frightened me a bit at the time. (Too soon after Agatha Christie, perhaps?) Now I’m drunk with exhaustion and still more headache, but fine enough to look up soap bubbles and the Marangoni Effect.

Well, the childcare conundrum is momentarily moot. Aure is sick and expected to stay that way for a month or so. I’d have been paying for a month’s vacation for a sitter, so I s’pose it’s fine. (How long can I postpone new projects without going to debters prison or forgetting how to use a computer, I wonder? What is it I do again? Some sort of typing?) Speaking of babies, the Times has a lovely OpEd story about how babies grasp concepts like probability. Though the idea that the “remote block” might be especially astonishing or improbable to a baby made me giggle. Babies are really gullible, researchers of the world! They don’t know about Newtonian physics or that objects are attached to single words or any of the other abstractions we invented to get through the day…
I remember reading or maybe hearing fourth hand about a study in which they offered toddlers a variety of food items and found that they (the babies) regulated their eating according to which nutrients they needed, including munching on stuff like straight salt. However I can’t find anything on the internet about it (it’s not the giant FITS study), so it’s possible I dreamt it. In my memory there is an enormous glassy white room with a huge grid of tiny white bowls, each with a heap of some vividly colored substance. Diapered babies mill about poking their fingers into the bowls, while white coated researchers with clipboards watch through a diaphanous mirror. Yup, I’m pretty sure that’s the study. It was conducted on the set of THX 1138, if memory serves. Anyhow, the idea that taste and sensitivity to certain flavors, especially minerals, might be influenced by physiological requirements is really fascinating to me. (I think of this when the subject refuses to eat anything but pumpkin seeds for a day and a half.) I know that the intensity of salt taste is mediated at least in part by aldosterone, a hormone that has something to do with sodium and potassium balance, water retention and blood pressure—or something. Theoretically one should be able to trust one’s salt cravings. (Not that I’ve ever dreamed of not dumping salt where ‘ere I please. As a nephrologist I once knew used to ask, what else are your kidneys for?) The idea that taste might be more trustworthy than we think (are conditioned to think?) pleases me. Though I imagine it only works in a fairly pure context. I bet the gustatory feedback loops associated with particular minerals could be confounded by more powerful tastes like MSG or maybe cravings for things like sugar… Huh, here’s a story of salt taste abnormality, hypothesizing a relationship with blood pressure, and something about salt taste and circadian rhythm. And wow, a study correlating high serum aldosterone with greater hearing sensitivity. The abstract doesn’t say much about pitch, but is this why my salt craving self can still at age 36 hear those horrid teen repellent noises? And how does that relate to diurnal cortisol levels and general alertness and reflexes, including stuff like a tendency to startle, I wonder? Too bad no one wants me to do a science fair project. (I sure wish I had to time to work on The Lived Body project, a sort of science-fair-project-making device Mitsu and I have been talking about for more than a year.) I wonder if there are studies relating this in more detail to other minerals. Zinc deficiency is associated with anorexia, though it’s unclear why. Hmm, some case reports of taste disorders from zinc deficiency.  Boy, is this reading ever making me hungry. How about a plate of back yard garden tomatoes?

Whew, I’m back. Traverse City is a really pleasant town with very good coffee and a nice but not overpowering healthy hippie feel to it. There is an abundance of water sports, kombucha, and frisbees. I liked it. I liked being in the car too. I liked stopping at the antique stores on Lake Michigan and talking to very old ladies about Victorian clothing and handling fractured flapper dresses with pounds of beads and crumbling silk shoulders, while Aure played with hundred year old dolls, miniature windmills, ancient light bulbs, flaking egg beaters, and other pleasantly hazardous toys. I have a heap of brand new old indestructible linen tea towels and a pile of ragged old clothing in patterns and textures I couldn’t resist, despite their unwearability. We played on the beach in Lake Michigan and grilled things out of doors and ate quantities of cherries and honey and Michigan maple syrup, which is dark and sharp with a mineral, molasses flavor.

And now– good god, finding child care occupies an astonishing amount of time and thought.  So instead of pretending anything else, I will just cave and admit I haven’t had the energy or the spare brains to think about the world outside a fairly distinct bubble. And you know, when you’re sequestered like that by a glut of immediate things, it becomes both harder and more necessary to look up—sort of the way sitting too long in front of the computer makes you blind after a while. And speaking of small family spaces, there is an apartment in Barcelona featured in Dwell right now that I really love. It’s beautiful and crumbly and distinctly unslick. Go look if you get a chance… I have a theory that the physical spaces occupied by families privileged enough to choose the details of their surroundings serve as a sort of concrete representation of the relationships within them. I’m not saying it very well, but I think sometimes people stay together for years, each interaction with the other adding to and firming their definitions of themselves and each other, which the domestic architecture begins to reflect and further. They may see an increasing brittleness in the relationship, but in the space accreted around them and worn through with deep conduits by a great sameness over the years, they find themselves unable to change direction, trudging along in the track they’ve been bumping around for years now with their eyes closed. Really, I’m making a mash of metaphor and reality here, but I do mean actual physical spaces. If you grew up in suburbia, think about the living room of your childhood. The layout of the kitchen. Your parents bedroom. The place where the washing machine lived… And I can’t help thinking of the place I live now and wondering whether we’ve succeeded in making something that reflects and reinforces the what’s good about each of us and what’s good about us together as a family. And speaking of family and childhood, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky responds to that well written but kind of dumb article by Michael Chabon in the NY Review of Books.

And while I’m on family—adoption, it turns out, is in the eyes of the law much more like a marriage in which one partner has all the decision making power, than a parent child relationship at all. If it doesn’t work out for you, the partner with the power, you can, with some inconvenience, throw your child away, and his take on the matter is irrelevant. Of course some children can’t live in families without being a danger to themselves or other, but I wonder why adopted children in that category are treated as legally distinct from children born into their parents family? (In fact, not only is there a distinction, but there appears to be no statute of limitations on the distinction.) This seems especially shocking after the appalling business of creating a new birth certificate on adoption, as if the child sputtered into existence only at the moment of adoption. Here’s what I know: when we’re the ones in power and they are “the least of these” it is abhorrent to sever ties as though the child involved were a self sufficient adult. The adult in the position of power is morally culpable… How’s that? I’ve gotten soft from all the years of buttery liberal moral relativism and empathy and squishy self protective niceness and superstitious pop tripe about karma, but I can still dig up some fine Brethren style absolutes about millstones and necks and oceans.

My own baby is really and truly a toddler and despite a fancy for purple sequins really and truly a boy. He has entered a phase (from which I s’pose he’s unlikely to emerge) in which he articulately compares most objects in the physical world to his dingling. It’s! like! a! dingling! (No, mothers-to-be who populate the pregnancy message boards of the world, you don’t actually get to choose the discreet euphemism or strict anatomical term your child will settle upon for descriptions of breastfeeding or genitalia. Anything said once by anyone is fair game.) (And please little potato, can’t we draw pictures of hands or feet or even belly buttons for a little while?) He rarely appears to be paying attention but often uses language that surprises me. The other day he was piping on about torres de agua (Is that how you spell water towers? Also– nice and consistent, right?) from the back seat as we drove through the countryside in Michigan, and this morning pointed to Russia on the globe and shouted Rusia! over and over again. When I came over to look, he pointed to the mountain ranges and told me they are rocks then asked me about Costa Rica. I’m pretty sure no one has been teaching him geography since his old babysitter did some five or six months ago. In the same way, he’ll occasionally curse companionably if I act particularly emphatic, though we’ve been pretty careful of our mouths now for ages. It’s a little like having a little back-up conscience. Hell! He’ll bellow as I stamp and sputter about forgetting to buy lemons or public education in the Bronx.

Oh yeah, and one more thing: Did you know there are round trip tickets to Costa Rica right now for some $260 bucks! Really, why stay home for dental work?