Broad Margin of Leisure

Saturday, August 9, 1997

We are in the real Seattle summertime now; I don't remember the last time it was raining. This weekend is the climax of Seafair, so we have the Blue Angel jets swooping over us all day, and news of the "hydro" boat races all over the papers and radio.

Today was beautiful, warm, dry and breezy. The air felt silky against my body. A good day to walk to Broadway. This "walk" is about five blocks, all downhill, but the entire expedition probably adds up to a mile or two. I always enjoy looking along the way at what people have planted in their yards. (Gardening and landscape design were earlier obsessions, now receded to the background. I actually studied horticulture at the Northern Virginia Community College, for two years in the mid eighties. This came in handy when I was working on Microsoft Complete Gardening.)

I switched my usual routine and stopped into Twice Sold Tales first rather than last on the trip. The owner was there today. I thought I had written about her before, but a casual inspection doesn't find it. She started out in the Broadway Market at about the same time I moved to Seattle. I remember visiting her book cart in 1989 and picking out a book. She didn't have the right money to give me change, so she handed me the book, and just told me to pay her some other time! She's a real character, very energetic and funny. She's been so successful, I think she now has three or four stores.

So the bookstore owner was ranting about an employee who had decided to leave two hours early, because he thought they weren't busy enough. (This speech wasn't to me personally, but to the other workers and the whole store.) Next week he will have to stay two hours later to make up.

I did accomplish the one thing I needed to do at the bookstore; I got my bookclub book for August, Like Water for Chocolate. I was pleased, because I had neglected to make a note of the author's name. So I just cruised through General Fiction with my head turned sideways till I found it. Lucky the author's name is Esquivel and not Zimmerman! I also got two romance novels that looked likely. The romance section has a good selection, but I don't think they should have a big sign reading "Cheese" identifying it. This genre gets little enough respect as it is!

I was most pleased by finding a novel that I had had in the sixties -- The Passion Flower Hotel by Rosalind Erskine. My parents must have bought this, but I just loved it as a girl. Teens in a British public school start a bordello of sorts. It's very funny, but the purient appeal was thrilling to me as a seventh grader.

But out of all these choices, the novel I started reading as I was eating and waiting for the movie to start was A. N. Wilson's A Bottle in the Smoke. This is a sequel to Incline Our Hearts, which I read a while ago. That book, nominally about a young boy's coming of age, was wickedly funny and biting about the literary world and the class system in Britain. This second volume seems darker, but still funny. It looks back from the present day to the same character's early days in 1950s London. A good quote:

"I think I shared this idea [...] not merely that one should do something with life, but that this doing was a matter of option or will. I thought that a series of infinitely extensible choices stretched ahead. All that was required was to try hard or to wait long enough. I was too young to know that very few wishes are ever fulfilled, or by the time they are, you have often stopped wishing them. I knew nothing about the strange part played in everything by chance. All I foresaw in the way of difficulty was the notorious trouble many creative people have in getting started. Thereafter, I should be able to fashion events."

At the Broadway Market Theater, I saw the only movie playing that I hadn't seen at the Seattle Film Festival, Box of Moonlight starring John Turturro and an actor new to me, Sam Rockwell. Turturro plays a rigid, priggish electrical engineer away from home on a job, and Rockwell is an oddball, living in unconventional rural "self-sufficiency" and wearing a coonskin cap. I liked it, though I wouldn't call it "One of the best independent films of the year" as the critic for The Guardian did. I'm not revealing anything by saying that the proper, conservative character is given a new outlook on life. It would be amazing to see a story in book or film that went the other way! But the movie is worth seeing, if it should cross your path or if you are a Turturro fan.

At home in the evening, I finally saw the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 movie. I think TV is the best way to see this. Maybe I'll just have to get the original shows on video. The Comedy Channel isn't available on my cable system, so the only way I've seen MST3K was on late night syndication. It's one of those things that I know I'd like, but just haven't caught up with yet.