Loose Cans

It is unspeakably, unfathomably, unimaginably beautiful out. Sunny without being too bright, cool without being too chilling, warm without being uncharitable. There's a light breeze toying in the trees. People are out in sunglasses and spring jackets. 58ª. January has gone senile.

I must get out of the house. I have been at Tae Kwon Do for the past hour. I am getting much better, surtout as far as endurance is concerned. Been to three classes in three days and am feeling pride: I wake up in the morning and my body says No oh Jesus please don't do it again and I tell my body to stuff it, You will do as I say or no jelly beans for you. And so I go to class and my body, being a mensch that way, rallies as beleaguered-yet-redemption-worthy Yankees surely will when we come to pitchers and catchers in a month, and says All right. Let's do it.

I must get out of the house today.

For those of you who can't view the facebook photos, I've started posting some of the highlights from the trip here on Flickr.com. There are only 24 so far, but more to come.

I have just finished Bridget Jones' Diary (research purposes, I swear to God), and I must confess I am concerned. It reads like a sitcom, everything exaggerated, inflated and pandering. Plastic, "pointing north at all times." A whorish book, indeed. It is not that it is poorly written--the writing is at times skillful and pleasing. It is, instead, that it is wilfully stupid. The misfortunes that befall this silly woman come so thick and fast that one wonders what she has done to deserve it. These things simply do not happen; no one can be that incompetent and live. Even when she does something right, like get her weight to drop to 119, it goes miserably awry. And the supporting cast remind me of the racist cops in Harold and Kumar, just as wholly unrealistic, only without the bludgeoning satiric wit. What I am saying is that while those cops are obvious spoofs--"obvious" being a considerable understatement, of course--the writing of the gallingly cruel Smug Marrieds rings hollow. Or the whole first party at the Alconbury's, where she is constantly grilled on her prospects for marriage, because, really, the whole world is full of mean mean meanies, except Bridget and her friends. It's that Fielding's social mathematics are whacked. The law of averages insists that she will get something right sooner or later. But no. Even the absurd, stapled-on ending in which Darcy ridiculously announces his passion and devotion, is really not of her production. She sits on her ass phoning 1471 while he goes swashbuckling around Portugal. He is a perfect mensch, and how he decides that she's the one for him, I can't understand. This book is svelter, more elaborate romance, nothing more, a ten-dollar rendition of the dime-store supermarket fantasy in which the dumpy bumbling excruciatingly average singleton gets swept off her feet by the dashing hero who sees reflected in her eyes, tucked neatly between plump cheeks, an exquisite inner beauty that no
one else believed was there. Frankly, even after reading BJ, even I don't believe it's there. Elizabeth Bennett is just as extraordinary as Mr. Darcy, and that's what makes the romance so compelling--because we believe that for each character, none but the other will ever do. That this book even dares compare itself to Pride and Prejudice bespeaks chutzpah it doesn't even begin to deserve.

Most of all what I dislike in this book is the fact that it's just not really like that. It's not that bad, it really isn't. I resent the way in which writers use an unending cavalcade of adorable pratfalls to provoke sympathy in the reader. The "awww..." factor. But these pratfalls stop being cute and klutzy, and start seeming more unjustifiably boneheaded, like the results of chronic denial: denial (understandable, I concede) of the fact that she is, as previously mentioned, dumb as rocks. Incompetent to say the least. She fails at literally everything she undertakes. In cooking she produces blue soup and marmalade. She works at a publishing agency and seems barely to be able to read. She gets handed this job for a TV show, and on the one occasion she doesn't fuck up entirely, it's because Mark Darcy comes
to the rescue. There's nothing much wrong with updating the story of the knight coming to save the damsel in distress, but usually, that distress is not squarely the damsel's fault. Usually a dragon or Snidely Whiplash or something. In this case, though, Bridget rarely has anyone to blame but herself for her incurable naïveté, ignorance and total lack of
self-discipline. And yet, somehow, she always does find someone else to blame. Her inability to quit smoking, her binge drinking, her self-defeating dieting? Never her fault. Someone else has invariably caused her trauma and, sooner than, you know, trying to remedy the situation, she "fumigates" and "drowns" and "smothers" it. Which ultimately only makes the problem worse. She has no sense of duty, none whatsoever. As a realistic novel, BJ is a miserable failure. As
a moralistic novel, it misses the mark by miles. But as a depiction of the everywoman, the average, the example, it's flatly frightening. If everyone is like Bridget, democracy is a more fucked than we thought.