That name may not scream out anything to you, but she published her first novel in 1980, it was called Housekeeping, and in spite of the awful title, it was wondrous. (And beautiful film version by that Scottish guy who does the little films, what's his name? Did Local Hero and . . . But see the film first if you're going to do both. No one who follows the opposite order seems to think the film lives up, as is usually the case.)

And then she refused to write another one.

According to this really scizo AP story on BEA: "The reason it took this long is that I have many other interests," said Robinson, who has since written two nonfiction books and teaches at the University of Iowa.

Huh. I hope it doesn't take me that long. After I write my first one, I mean.

The new novel is called Gilead. Another unpromising title, but I'm excited to get my hands on it anyway.

that i can think of.

i really wish i had.

i was supposed to.

oh, i did work out. and read a good chunk of The Stone Raft, this alternatingly fascinating and exasperating book by Jose Saramago, my first. by him. more fascinating. but the pace i'm really having trouble with the pace. there isn't any.

but i was supposed to be wrapping up my book proposal.

damn.

Just procrastinating, reading the rabbit blog, (which had a really biting/trenchant/concise take on reagan), but then took me to one of Heather Havrilesky's wonderful I Like To Watch columns for Salon, which mentioned the greatest show of the 90s, My So Called Life, returning in reruns again on this weird network where I've been watching it, which brought me to an odd little fan site, which had some wonderful quotes from the show:

Angela: My parents keep asking how school was. It's like saying, "How was that drive-by shooting?" You don't care how it *was*, you're lucky to get out alive.

Angela: If Jordan Catalano is nearby, my whole body knows it. Like one of those dogs that point. I'll keep talking and stuff, but my mind won't even know what I'm saying. I keep wondering if there's a term for this.

Rayanne: You wanna have sex with him.
Angela: Who?
Rayanne: Who. Jordan. Catalano. Come on, I'm not gonna tell anyone, just admit it.
Angela: I just like how he's always leaning. Against stuff. He leans great. Well, either sex or a conversation. Ideally both.

And from another site, with quotes from every episode:

Rickie: "If you were about to do it, okay, what would you want the other
person to say, like, right before."
Rayanne: "`This won't take long.'"
Rickie: "No, seriously."
Rayanne: "`Do I know you?'"
Rickie: "No, like, for real.  Like, romantic."
Angela: "`You're so beautiful, it hurts to look at you.'"
Rayanne: "`It hurts to look at you?'"
Rickie: "How'd you think of that?"
Rayanne: Where would it hurt?

"What I, like, dread is when people who know you in completely
different ways end up in the same area.  You have to develop this,
like, combination you on the spot."
-- Angela

"We both stopped talking.  Part of his sleeve was touching my arm.  I
don't know if he knew.  Then everything started to seem perfect for
some reason.  The feel of his shirt against my elbow, the fact that I
still had an elbow.  It was the perfect moment for him to kiss me,
to anything me."
-- Angela, just before Jordan
   lets her out of his car

"Mom, I'm not having sex, all right?  Realy!  I'm not even close.  To
an embarrassing degree."
-- Angela, to Patty

"Could you imagine Rickie in a high-security prison?  Who'd supply his
makeup?"
-- Rayanne, to Angela

OK, that's enough. God, I love that show.

So I'm sure Ronald Reagan was a lovable old codger, but the revisionist crap we're having to sit through right now just for fond rememberances of the dead . . . ugh.

I FF'd through much of the twaddle on This Week, but stopped out of nostalgia or something for the roundtable with those three clowns sam, george and cokie. The most incredible moment came when Cokie went on and on about how the Democrats just never got it. Reagan would say all these things that were wrong, factually wrong--even incredible things like saying he played Grover Cleveland in a movie when he played someone with a similar name, and Tip O'Niel had to correct him, incredulously . . . That just didn't matter, Cokie said. Reagan being wrong about everything under the sun didn't matter, how utterly silly of them to think it did.

How utterly disconerting that we live in La Mancha, where the truth means nothing to a woman close to the top of a calling with the single goal of disseminating it.

If this woman thinks so little of the truth that she belittles others for placing stock in it, what on earth does she thinks she is inhabiting this earth to do? Offer witty asides? She's not really that witty.

I whined quite a bit last summer that it was too early, way too dangerously early to be plunging ahead into gay marriage. We had not sufficiently prepared the public, I had convinced myself.

Wrong, wrong, looks like I was dead wrong, as I have admitted here repeatedly since. But I really wasn't prepared for the big yawn out of Massacheusetts last month. No one seems to even be noticing.

I wonder how much it is the war. Quite a bit, I think. Nothing like a good national crisis to put priorities in place. Too much idle time on our hands can be a bad thing, right? Just gives all those straight people time to sit around fretting what gay marriage might do to them.

(Not to mention both discrediting the champions of the opposition, and forcing them to drop the stupid battle to take on something really imporant, like their appalling mismanagement of the war.)

And the one-two punch of a war on the heals of a troubled economy, all the better. The big question now is which will matter more in November--can the economy push the war back off center stage? I doubt it, personally, but either way, gay marriage just seem too trivial for most people to spend their time on today. Frank Rich in today's column:

But Massachusetts's wedding day proved to be the show dog that didn't bark. Americans merely shrugged, confirming polls both before and after that fateful day: voters rate same-sex marriage dead last in importance among issues in an election year dominated by a runaway real war.

(The column is hysterical, as usual, by the way, in a good way, of course.)

But I also think the San Francisco marriages helped. Get people used to it gradually. That just happened so suddenly, and as Joan Walsh wrote at the time, suddenly it seemed so inevitable: there's really no turning back after that. So those marriages may not end up standing up in the courts, but the couples have done their work for the rest of us. They pushed us all right past the what-if stage. What if men and men and women and women got married to each other, not just in their own private ceremonies, but legally, with bone fide marriage certificates issued by the actual government? Nothing, apparently. The sky didn't fall.

So when it happened again in Massacheusetts? What straight person was even going to be interested enough to watch that rerun. You can only get excited about it so many times. And the first time you see gay people kiss can be shocking--I still remember witnessing my first; I was still a straight guy, and I wasn't so much shocked as disgusted. But I got over it pretty fast. Even with all my internalized homophobia over my own situation simmering just under the surface.

Most straight people prolly weren't dialing up Nightline that night specifically to learn what was up with the homos, but if they happened to have the tube tuned to that channel they may well have sat there and watched. Or they can across the images elsewhere and will again in the future. No avoiding them, really.

Apparently I was just being a big chicken. Maybe the public was ready.

But it sure helps to have the war going on.