Mallory's Camera

In the morning, I picked up a battered copy of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and then I spent the day reading it—which I hadn't intended to do.

I do love me some Thomas Hardy.

Part of that is because I'd read so many of his novels by the time I was 16.

But part of that is because Hardy was a Victorian neorealist: Despite sometimes ungainly language & syntax choices, he really knew how to create vivid characters & settings, and he has a rare ability to shift between exterior landscapes & geographies of the heart, seemingly effortlessly.

Tess lives on Hardy's pages—and she could so easily have become a caricature of the Maiden Despoiled (as so many girls in similar circumstances do on Dickens' pages.) The rape scene is almost painful to read, laid out as it is with a kind of Victorian Me Too specificity. And the death of Sorrow: So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman’s shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God’s allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.

"Conjecturally damned"!

Be still, my beating heart.

###

At this point in the novel, I noticed the light had shifted, and it was now—ulp!—two o'clock, and I l had yet to do a single Useful Thing.

So, I scurried off to the Walkway and tromped.

My tromping stamina is wayyyyyyy down. The gym sessions have certainly toned my body, and you'd think that since I do spinning for half an hour at the end of them, my cardiovascular endurance would be up, too, but that hasn't been the case. Five miles is hard for me to tromp. Three miles is really what I feel comfortable with.

Lazy! my mind scolds my body. Undisciplined!

But then I remind myself: Girl, you're old now! Three miles is not bad for a septuagenarian.

###

The evening was the evening.

I can never do Useful Work in the evenings, so I made dinner, explained the Romantic tradition in English literature to the kiskas, and watched more White Lotus.

White Lotus is not a show that binges very well.

One gets bored with the cliches.

I started with the second season 'cause Sicily plus RTT told me it was the best. The second season was okay.

And then I tried to watch the first season and had to give up because the characters were monumentally uninteresting.

And then I tried to watch the third season (because I'm too brain-dead to read at night) and gave up because the characters were repulsive.

I don't know what I'm gonna watch now!

Somebody really needs to do a reality TV show based on Tess of the d'Urbervilles: The Real Milkmaids of the Vale of Blackmore. Or something.

Terrible Oscars—female red carpet looks were dishwater dull, though some of the male looks were okay. Also Conan O'Brien is Not Funny, & I don't understand why he has a career.

But Tom & I snarked our way through it, which was the Big Fun, plus Anora won big, & I really loved Anora.

###

I went to the Oscars twice as People Magazine's Interactive Editor. 1997 & 1998. This was back when the Internet was still the red-headed stepchild that Hollywood ignored, so I had a hard time wrangling interviews.

The press had to dress up in full evening dress regalia so that we'd look like guests if we got caught on live camera. The whole evening was kinda like that—a lot of bored people lolling around, then turning on the juice when the cameras started whirring. I remember the canapes—they were not very good. I remember catching Ashley Judd smoking in the ladies' room: She leaned very far over the sink so as not to burn spark holes in a rather lovely nude gauze dress appliqued with white flowers, and we actually bantered, but this was not the kind of thing I could report on.

Before I worked for People, I used to give Oscar parties every year where I required all my guests to dress up in evening garb & smoke out in the backyard. When I went back to Monterey last Thanksgiving, several people remembered those parties fondly to me.

These days, I am mostly out of the gossip reporter mentality. The celebrities I followed all got old, and I wasn't at all interested in the celebrities that replaced them. The classic Corvette was manufactured in 1967. Who gives a fuck about any of the Corvette models manufactured in the years after?

One thing I do like to do still is thumb through those Where Are They Now pix of the Great Beauties of my youth. They were so unbelievably gorgeous then! Unreachably gorgeous! But now, I look better! Why I should get a ping out of that—Vanity, vanity, all is vanity—I do not know. But I do.

###

Before that, I went to the gym—where gasp! I noticed several guys checking me out. (I am back to having a perfect hourglass figure in leggings and teeshirt, and all those overhead presses have firmed up my bust noticeably.)

And after that, I went to a D&D meetup where I was the pet septuagenarian. The D&D group is mostly high school students, with one 50s-ish eccentric I kinda know from around town, and one amazingly handsome, eloquent guy in his 30s who is driving a schoolbus until his rock 'n' roll career takes off. The D&D meetup was the Big Fun, too! What I liked about the group was how absolutely unabashed everyone was about having an imagination and inviting other people in to explore it!!!

It almost doesn't matter how that imagination manifests!

It's just such a sweet, sweet thing in these grim, souless times, to be around genuine imagination!

###

All in all, a good day.

Thank you, Jaysus! I needed a good day. I was getting very tired of staring out that airplane window just so that plane would stay up in the sky on its flight to nowhere.