Lisa:Don't ask me who I like in the Preakness! I would love to see Giacomo win, so as to silence his critics. I really dislike turf writers who use words like "unworthy" when talking about a horse.
Gardening: Two ugly old overgrown arborvitae gone, replaced by two lovely dwarf crabapple trees. Which has opened up a lot more gardening space for underplanting!
Reading: currently reading St. Dale, by Sharyn McCrumb. And of all things, the poetry of Robert Frost. When we went up to Dartmouth for my last MRI, we spent a few days in Vermont (we stayed at a Morgan horse farm, which was lovely!), and on our way to Middlebury one day, we stopped in Ripton at the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail. The Park Service has done a fantastic job, and reading some of Frost's poems in those settings, the landscape he actually looked out on and lived in, was profound. And profoundly thought-provoking. And in case you ever wondered...
Writing: Not much, I'm afraid. I'm still trying to get those writing muscles back into shape, so I started, earlier this year, and along with half the world, a weblog. Which you can read here.
Melissa seriously needs to update her section, but I can tell you, she's sold another short story, this one to a collection called So Fey, to be published by Haworth Press. Over the past few years, Melissa has been really starting to write in her native Southern voice, and damn, it's good.
Melissa:Besides writing, I play guitar, but haven't had any luck putting together a new band. I was briefly part of what I can only call a "sub-basement band" - we weren't good enough for the garage - but it broke up when the drummer went back to school. Our ambition was to play a set at the Elvis Room (a local coffee house where you only needed 20 minutes of songs to get a gig), but now that it's closed, there's no venue left for the real amateurs. Which is probably just as well!
And, yes, I'm a Winston Cup fan, too. There are a lot of reasons to like stock car racing, but I have to admit that one thing I like best is listening to all the unabashed regional accents among drivers, crew chiefs, team members, and TV announcers. Most of them are still southern, from all across the region, but you can hear the midwest and Michican and Maine, too. You don't hear accents much on national TV any more - and you also don't often hear smart people saying technically complicated things in any kind of regional or ethnic accent. Besides, listening to Mark Martin makes me a feel a little bit like home.
The real trouble is, we're close to a lot of tracks, and I find myself wanting to go racing. Why, just up the road, there's a track with a beginner's division specifically for women, and last year's rookie of the year was only a few years younger than me.... I think I'd better stick with my PlayStation.
Latest literary interests: I've been on a bit of a nonfiction binge recently, from my Christmas NASCAR books (I wouldn't have worked for Larry McReynolds on a bet, but his memoir is great!) to the excellent The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes. I'm also reading Georges Blond's La Grande Armee (in the somewhat literal but entirely serviceable Marshall May translation) - fascinating stuff. Lisa got me to look at Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit, and if you haven't read it, I recommend it highly: it's not just a great story, but it's a brilliant social history that puts Seabiscuit and his connections in the context of American society in the Depression and beyond. A film is currently being made from it, and if it's a tenth as good as the book, it will be an excellent movie. I also read Kevin Conley's Stud: Adventures in Breeding, which I bought partly because of its description of the stallions at Three Chimneys, where we had visited recently, and partly because of a passage I stumbled on when I was flipping through the pages at the bookstore:
(Conley describes the young stallion Cat Thief's first mating.) "But when [Cat Thief] falls off, he seems unsteady on his feet, and he shakes his head - in wonder, bafflement, and a score of other obvious emotions that according to the behaviorists he is incapable of.... As a rule, horses do not place a premium on new experiences, so Cat Thief seems doubly surprised, by the unfamiliar experience and by the idea that the unfamiliar could prove so overwhelmingly satisfying. Maybe, after he shook his head, Cat Thief never gave the whole event a second thought, but his astounded shiver seems to have thrown everybody in the barn into private and unconfessable reflection."
That image alone was worth the price of admission.
I write on a Bondi-blue iMac using OS 8.5, linked by AppleTalk network to Lisa's iMac. I play a reproduction 1957 Fender Telecaster with a tobaccoburst finish, with a Dod FX-17 Wah/Volume pedal and a Boss Blues Driver. We won't talk about my amp or my car.
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