No One Left Who Would Be Interested

I got some cds in the mail: Dead Voices on Air: Piss Frond, Dead Voices on Air: Shap, Lozenge: Doozy (thanks to Mary Beth's other cd of their I guess she didn't even realize was something she has), Aube: Triad Thread, and Francisco López: Absolute Noise Ensemble (this last one has a lot of collaborators spliced into it...one of them happens to be Mike Honeycutt, so!). I finished reading Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor and it was really good. It overall doesn't have a bleak FEEL and it can be humorous and charming and all, but when it hits those very sharply pointed moments, it can be pretty devastatingly bleak (and I guess that sense of hopeless isolation and loneliness hovers over the whole thing). And in two pivotal moments it had me weeping a bit (not in a sentimental sort of way...it does have a light touch but the touch in those moments are very penetrating and abject). There are also a lot of complexities with the characters and their relationships to each other. The one person who's closest to being an "antagonist" is the one you end up feeling the sorriest for, and the person who is the best and most "helpful" (I mean, he really is in a sense) is also...well, it's definitely not an altruistically perfect thing (which doesn't take away from the good there is). Shortly after finishing the book, I discovered there was a movie adaptation in the aughts and I was hate-reading about it (from a pretty universal impression, even from positive reviews, that it's a bland, heartwarming, soulless, feelgood movie that makes the friendship between the young man and the old woman too perfect (even people who like it claiming that that part is very unrealistic...which is way the opposite of in the book, how even when it's good, it's still awkward and flawed and somewhat begrudging), turning what was at its core an unflinching depiction of the descending stages of the indignity of old age into a sappy little moral lesson on the importance of chosen families (which, the importance of chosen families is something that is in the book...but it's not romanticized and while it does bring about the best things that happen, it's also unreliable and inconsistent and doesn't save anything)). Okay, I've ranted enough about a movie I haven't even seen! At night Mary Beth and I hung outside on the deck with Peanut for a little bit.