Reading - FUSSY

Freddy and Frederika, by Mark Helprin

I’d never read any Mark Helprin before, probably because an old boyfriend wanted me to read A Winter’s Tale and at the time it was more important for me to be an argumentative jerk than find out why he loved Helprin so much. Well, guess what? The man can write. This book casts a dreamy, dreamy spell in which you may actually start to believe all that rot about the noble heritage of kings. But of course the royal family is all barking mad, and oh my god the horrible puns. In a nutshell, the prince and princess of Wales are sent to capture America; dropped from an airplane with just the clothes on their backs, their real identities secret, hilarity doth ensue. And some glorious descriptions of the American landscape.

Jackson cut his first tooth today, on his seven-month birthday. He’s been remarkably good-natured about it, though it disrupted his sleep (and mine, and Jack’s) last night. Poor little guy. He’s sleeping now. Sometimes I love him so much I just ache.

He wasn’t much in the mood for photos today.

Here’s the first page of John Fante’s Full of Life, which he dedicated to H. L. Mencken.

One

It was a large house because we were people with big plans. The first was already there, a mound at her waist, a thing of lambent movement, slithering and squirming like a ball of serpents. In the quiet hours before midnight I lay with my ear to the place and heard the trickling as from a spring, the gurgles and sucks and splashings.

I said, “It certainly behaves like a male of the species.”

“Not necessarily.”

“No female kicks that much.”

But she did not argue, my Joyce. She had the thing within her, and she was remote and disdainful and quite beatified.

Still, I didn’t care for the bulge.

“It’s unaesthetic,” and I suggested she wear something to pack it in.

“And kill it?”

“They make special things. I saw them.”

She looked at me with coldness–the ignorant one, the fool who had passed by in the night, a person no more, malefic, absurd.

The house had four bedrooms. It was a pretty house.