The Vintage Reader

...Because, unlike the romantic comedies of yesteryear (my personal favorite, even though it's totally unoriginal to say so, is The Philadelphia Story), their heroines are boring, unbelievable caricatures concocted entirely for marketing purposes. (via Booksquare)

So yesterday I'm cruising along listening to my favorite radio station, and they play side 2 of Bookends, which hit #1 on that day in 1968. It replaced The Graduate, which is also an S&G album, but I count it equally as a Dave Grusin album; his snaky party music on that album sums up the 60s for me, which might not being saying much since I only arrived in the latter half of the decade, but there you go.

So anyway. I got off the highway with "Hazy Shade of Winter" and headed to the drugstore. And just as I drove past the zoo, where lots of people were out enjoying the first real spring day we've had, guess what came on? That's right! "At the Zoo". I cranked it up so they could also enjoy lines like "Orangutans are skeptical of changes in their cages, and the zookeeper is very fond of rum". (And does anyone remember a children's book that came out--in the early 90s, I think--that was an illustrated version of the song? I never saw it, but apparently the illustration that accompanied that last line had some kind of friendly creature with a nametag that said "Rum" hugging the zookeeper. "Hamsters turn on frequently" had a hamster in a miner's hat with a light that turned on and off.)

This is not my first incidence of synchronicity this week, nor was it to be my last. A few days ago, as I drove past the parking lot they're repaving in the middle of what used to be a natural wetland, I heard "Big Yellow Taxi." I'm not sure that's so much synchronicity as normalcy for my environmentally oblivious area, though.

And then last night I was reading a short story by one of mystery's Big Guys. He grew up in the neighborhood I live in and went to the high school down the street. In the first paragraph of the story he mentions my hometown (1000 miles away) AND the radio station that used to be my favorite in another city, before Clear Channel bought it and turned it from one of the oldest rock-and-roll stations in the country to a syndicated All Talk All The Time station, ugh. It's attributed to the wrong city, but its call letters are the abbreviation for the airport in the city it's attributed to, so maybe the author was just having a little fun. He's been known to do that. On the next page, he mentions a country singer whose private e-mail address I have on a message in my inbox, because the singer's brother is an old friend who sends out a semiannual State of My Life report to his friends and family.

Well, okay, I thought it was a cool series of events. I think I'll go get some more coffee now.

Just heard this on PlanetZeb on Live365 and remembered how much I've always loved this particular line:

"She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
Like a watercolor in the rain"

--from "The Year of the Cat"

That sun/running rhyme, along with the lovely imagery, get me every time. I love Al Stewart.

So I'm watching Flashdance (...and btw... ewwwwww! I just realized that she's supposed to be 18, and he's, like, 40!), which came out right before my senior year of high school started. Suddenly dancers were IT. And by the next year the craze was full-on. I went to a school with a growing dance department. My roommates ripped their sweatshirts strategically and wore legwarmers that were frayed at the bottom from actually dancing in them (or maybe just walking around campus; they looked cool, anyway). You could buy jazz shoes in cool colors at department stores (I had a pair of gray Capezios) and dancewear at the dime store.

I can't remember another movie that's had such an effect on fashion since... but I was 16 and 17 then, and probably much more susceptible to movie influences on fashion. Perhaps there have been others (The Matrix, maybe?) and I've just missed them. Of course, I've always heard that undershirt sales plummeted when Clark Gable didn't wear one in It Happened One Night, but according to Snopes, it could be that dear Mr. Gable was reflecting a trend, not setting one. And I suppose that could be the case with Flashdance too--but I knew a lot of dancers around the time it came out, even before college, and they all wore Levi's and Ralph Lauren, not headbands and legwarmers.

A neat history of the Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest. Click through on the decades to get the winning recipes!

Okay, I'll admit it: I had a ranting fit when I got to the end of the Gilmore Girls season finale--at about a 40-minute delay--and ReplayTV had cut off the very last few seconds of the show. Then I went to the boards to see what happened at the end and found that all the Tivo users had the same problem, so it wasn't my ReplayTV; it was the WB.

I have a feeling that the networks have finally figured out a way to get back at us for the whole PVR thing: they run the shows over so we lose the cliffhanger ending. Thus encouraging us to... what? Quit using our PVRs? Get real, WB: I'd rather wait till the whole season comes out on DVD or on Lifetime or something than give up my ReplayTV. It's the last model with commercial advance. So neener neener neener.

In the spring of 1981, I bought Along Comes the Association at a garage sale, and listened to it constantly. So I've known all the words to "Cherish" for 24 years. And yet, I never noticed how creepy they are until yesterday, when I heard it on the radio:

"I don't know how many times I've wished that I had told you,
I don't know how many times I've wished that I could hold you,
I don't know how many times I've wished that I could mold you into someone who could cherish me as much as I cherish you."

What was probably seen as adolescent wistfulness in the 60s sounds a little obsessive now.

And then there's this:

"I'm beginning to think that man has never found
The words that can make you want me
That have the right amount of letters
Just the right sound
So I can make you hear
Make you see that you are drivin' me out of my mind"

Which might as well be a note from a stalker. I will never hear this song the same way again.

The flower in his paw is blinking red and black. Today is Simon's Lastday.

Simon is 15, and he has squamous cell carcinoma under his tongue. The vet gave him two weeks; that was a week ago, but the cancer has spread and he's having a hard time even swallowing. He still seems to be in good spirits, but cats are good at hiding how bad they feel--which is probably why we caught this so late. He had his twice-weekly painkiller last night, so he's feeling better right now; but if we look at him as a sick animal instead of as our dear companion of all these years, we can see how much he's hurting. So we have made the decision to let Simon go. This afternoon.

I took the day off, and Simon and I have a pleasant day planned: first we're going to continue snuggling on the sofa, which we're doing right now, until he decides to get up. He still gets his insulin this morning, but no antibiotics, no irrigating under his tongue, none of the stuff that's been making him miserable for the last few weeks. Later, we're going to make a pawprint with a special non-toxic polymer clay. We'll go outside for a while so he can soak up some sun if he wants to, and he'll get as much Fancy Feast as he feels like eating. Then the spa treatment--a facial and pedicure, because his current way of eating is to push all the food to the center of the dish with his paw and plunge his whole face in, and I don't think he would want to go to the Great Hereafter with big globs of Tuna Mackerel Treat in his whiskers. He's always been such a fastidious little gentleman.

And then my husband and I will bundle up our best friend and take him to the vet, where he's spent so much time over the last couple of years, and we won't bring him home. I can hardly stand this.

Yesterday, inspired by The Little Professor, I went over to the university library to pick up Cold Comfort Farm. Since I had just mailed off a DVD of the 1995 movie version to my sister for her birthday, I was in the mood for it anyway, and to my delight, the library had not just one, but two copies--one from the 30s, and the sturdier one I checked out, from the 60s.

But even better, there were two other books by Stella Gibbons, whose books aren't that easy to find. I checked them both out, and, as is my habit with old books, took a look at the date due slip to see when they were last checked out.

I know this is a fairly strange habit, but I think it's interesting to see the patterns. This library's curious custom of stamping the date just any old place makes it a little harder than usual to see the circulation history, but the date due slip from The Bachelor tells me several things. First off, this edition of the book is the first edition, second printing, from October 1944. The fact that it wasn't checked out until 1957 probably means that this was a gift book--and sure enough, there's a donation bookplate in the front, although it's not filled out so there's no telling who donated it. It circulated once every few years in the '60s, which should have made it a prime target for weeding, but this library doesn't seem to weed very strenuously (fortunately for me; I've found some great old stuff there). In 1976 it was checked out for one day. And then nothing, for 20 years. All three books experienced a sudden surge in circulation after the movie of Cold Comfort Farm came out. And then not much until yesterday, when The Little Professor blogged a quote and I saw it and decided to get some weekend reading. :-)

...and not the kind I normally write about.

No, instead, I've got some notes about the blog today. The Internausea that was plaguing me (which I wrote about on my other blog) seems to have abated, and I'm back to reading blogs--although refreshingly, I've figured out that I can get rid of about half the feeds I was reading regularly without any regret. But mainly, now that I can face text on a computer screen again, I'll resume posting.

The other main thing is that I opened the site up in Internet Explorer the other day and realized that the IE Peek-a-boo Bug is back. That's a quirk in the way IE displays Cascading Style Sheets that makes whole sections of a page disappear, but reappear when you scroll down and scroll back up. I haven't changed the CSS in I don't know how long, so this might have been a problem for a long time, but I probably won't have time to fix it until later in the weekend. For now, if you're using IE--well, switch to Firefox. You'll like it, I promise.

...than We'll Map Manhattan for this wonderful project: mapping where literary characters lived in Manhattan. I have a vivid picture in my mind of where the Morgensterns (Marjorie's family, from Marjorie Morningstar) lived. I would love to see if I'm right about what it looks like.

You can also submit characters for the map, so go to it.

(via Booksquare)