How awesomely cool it must be to have people making adaptations of your work over a century later in some futuristic technology of which you couldn’t possible conceive? I mean, how cool that would be if you could know about it, which you couldn’t, because you’d be dead. But it does make me wonder why anyone would bother writing non-fiction at all, because unless it’s The Origin of Species, no one will care about it after a few years. At best they’ll just make dreary documentaries about you instead of feature-length films starring attractive famous people.

When I was reading Middlemarch I remarked on how progressive it was, especially in its treatment of women and religion. Sure, it was written by a woman and so I would expect it to be generally sympathetic towards them. It’s especially sympathetic towards the women who are independent-minded, who aren’t in pursuit of marriage and child production. Sometimes their pursuits are selfish but more often they’re noble. This is a book with a cast of dozens, so sure, there are also female characters who are portrayed positively and do exhibit traditional values, but they tend to fade easily into the background. It’s the honest and independent, or weak and scheming, who draw our attention for better or worse.

The novel is forward-thinking but much more conservative than its author’s life would lead one to expect. At age 22, Marian Evans decided that Christianity was based on “mingled truth and fiction” and she refused to go to church. Eventually she moved to London by herself and began socializing and working with radicals. According to one biographer, “Her social position as a single working woman in London in the early 1850s was extremely unusual. [...] She was now in a society composed entirely of men, and though it was intellectually stimulating to associate with them freely, she was risking her reputation in doing so.” A society composed entirely of men. That sounds totally hot.

Eventually she entered into a relationship with a man in an open marriage. They lived together for decades, during which she wrote her novels under a pseudonym largely because she was already notorious as a political writer. Her non-husband died after many happy years together and and as a result she was “plunged into loneliness, filling her journal with verses from Tennyson’s great poem of mourning, In Memoriam (1850), as Queen Victoria had also done after the death of Prince Albert.” Eventually she resolved the loneliness by marrying a dumb guy twenty years her junior. And then she died. Hell yeah.

The miniseries is really good too, and features Colin Firth’s brother.

Once I freed up the rusted bike lock and got the apartment windows to slide smoothly, I was pretty desperate to find something else I could spray with WD-40.

Last night after the Squarepusher show I got on a late bus. Normally, buses are inconvenient because of frequent stops, but this driver did not stop for anyone or anything else, not even four red lights.

I got off at the last stop, in Government Center, and walked from there towards my apartment, down Tremont by Park Street and the Commons. At the intersection by the T stop I stopped to notice a very large bird flying towards me. It landed on a U-shaped balcony just over my head, and I could see clearly through the railing that it was a grey and white striped owl. I watched it for a minute while it swiveled its head around and around. Lots of drunk people were passing me but no one seemed to notice or care that a woman was standing alone on the sidewalk at 2am staring up at a building.

“Who,” I said.

The owl swiveled around to stare directly at me. Without breaking gaze, it hopped from one end of the railing to the other, putting it now just a few feet over my head.

I stood there for a few minutes more, just watching it. A car pulled up behind me, which I didn’t turn around to see but I heard someone roll down the window and start screaming, “Who! Whooooo! WHOOOOO!!!”

The owl didn’t look especially startled but it did decide to take off. It crouched down for an instant and then leapt into the air in a cloud of feathers. One of them drifted right to me, which I caught.

Herring gulls have discovered the dumpster behind Finagle-A-Bagel on Congress Street. Yesterday I saw only one, standing in the garbage with a cream cheese packet in its mouth. Today there were at least twenty, mostly dashing back and forth in front of the dumpster. A handful were watching from the top of a covered parking area, and the corrugated metal roof amplified their excited pacing.

There is nothing more hilarious than a seagull dragging a whole everything bagel around a parking lot. Even though the bags in the dumpster had been ripped wide open and the bagel supply therein was nearly limitless, the gulls prefer chasing after the excavated spoils rather than acquiring their own. A speckled brown juvenile tore off a piece of another bird’s meal, swallowed it whole rather than surrender it to higher-ranking animals, and then stood still, possibly quite alarmed, with a half-moon wedge of bread bulging out of its neck like some kind of gluten-filled goiter.

I left the parking lot and crossed the Summer Street bridge, and there were two more gulls in the channel, one juvenile and one adult. The younger bird was swimming back and forth in front of the other, turning each time the elder did, the way people walking towards each other negotiate passing by uselessly starting right and left in synchrony. Except this bird was clearly doing it on purpose. When the adult gave up and took to the air, the younger one followed right behind. I quickly lost sight of them because seagulls do not conduct their business on a human scale.

The first couple was well-dressed, middle to upper class, probably on their way to the theater. He was all J. Crew, she had long, straight black hair. He was touching her hair as I approached them.

“I see another one,” he teased.

“Shut up,” she said.

“That’s two grey hairs. I bet there’s more.”

“Shut up! Pull them out!”

He brushed her hair back from her face. “I wouldn’t do that. I think they’re beautiful.”

. . .

The second couple was in the supermarket:
Her: “Ew, I don’t buy that stuff. I hate whipped cream.”

Him: “Well, there goes that fantasy.”

Overheard at Fenway Park:

“I really want to get one of those little flags.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, they’re giving them out over there, but you need to sign up for a credit card first.”

Words used by Artisanal, a fondue restaurant in New York City, to describe their cheese selections:

• Grainy
• Unctuous
• Explosive
• Grassy
• Herbaceous
• Minerally
• Fluffy
• Varying
• Spoonable
• Sassafras-wrapped
• Extra daring

I called Citibank to activate a new credit card. An older guy answered.

“Welcome to Citibank, this is Leonard Bernstein. Can I have your first and last name as it appears on the card, please?”

“Liza with a Z?”

Sigh. “Yeah.”

“Like how Liza Minelli spells it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well my name is Leonard Bernstein, so I know a little about music, if you know who he is.”

“I do.”

“And where are you calling from today?”

“Boston, Massachusetts.”

“Boston! The Boston Pops are very familiar with Mr. Bernstein’s music.”

“Indeed.”

“Boston is important to my family, you know my daughter went to Harvard Law school. Then she married a cardiologist from Chicago where they live now, but he took her out of the courtroom and into the hospital because in February she will be delivering to us three beautiful triplets.”

“Wow, triplets.”

“Yes, my wife of 32 years has left me to go live with my daughter while she is expecting as has the wife of my son-in-law, which means that the two men are now bachelors but we are very much looking forward to this.”

“That’s great.”

“Well I’m very sorry that the Boston Red Sox did not go to the World Series against the Chicago Cubs this year.”

“Oh, yes.”

Then he told me about a card protection plan.

Coming out of January already having read two of the books on my list, I was feeling pretty damn cocky. Enough that I added a second challenge, which was to also watch film adaptations of all of the books, trailing behind my reading list as fast as my Netflix queue could keep up.

I based the choice of adaptation on whether they were reportedly:

1. Very good
2. Very bad
3. Starring the cast of The Lord of the Rings

Great Expectations (1998) qualified strongly as #2. It was utterly incoherent. How bad could an Ethan Hawke movie be? I had wondered. Now I know.

Jane Eyre (1997) wasn’t so great either, which was similarly disappointing because I like Samantha Morton. She isn’t bald or mute in Jane Eyre but she is pretty spacey and weird, much like her Princess Leia hairdo. The adaptation was worth watching if only because it threw into relief the aspects of the book that were interesting to a modern reader. In the novel she has a frank wit that makes men notice her. She’s comfortable in her unattractiveness and gets creeped out when she’s objectified as a beauty. She rejects being the mistress of a man she loves but can’t marry, but then she suggests being the unmarried (platonic) companion of another man who would marry her but doesn’t love her. When she finally does marry the man she loves, it’s after he’s become blind and disfigured and she’s independently wealthy. Most of those interesting rough spots are missing from the movie. And the girl who plays the little French chick totally sucks, holy crap.

So far, The Portrait of a Lady is pretty dull. The movie isn’t available on Netflix. It features Aragorn.

One block into the ride I leaned forward and said, “Your meter’s off.”

“Oh, thank you! I’m so tired.”