Sorry, work ate up my week, and I’ve felt toward my life like Daniel Day-Lewis getting swept away in Last of the Mohicans, all “You stay alive, no matter what occurs! I will find you!”
For one little project I had to compile a list of business jargon. Trolling around the Internet looking for lingo, I came across this bit of wisdom in an article about procrastination*:

Make up your own rewards. For example, promise yourself a piece of tasty flapjack at lunchtime if you’ve completed a certain task.

It’s such a minor, random thing but I’m completely diverted by that “piece of tasty flapjack at lunchtime.” At the paper where I used to work my friend M. and I went through a period where we tried to insert the phrase “in the ensuing melee” into all of our articles, e.g., “City Council debated the measure and in the ensuing melee the motion passed with a 7-2 vote.” And as this article is otherwise sane, I’m just going to guess that the writers at MindTools have something similar going with “piece of tasty flapjack.”
So, more here Monday. Until then, hope you have a good weekend with lots of tasty flapjacks!
* Also, can there be anything that smacks more of procrastination than reading an article about how not to procrastinate? The whole thing should be four words: “Get back to work.”

• Quiet Bubble’s appreciation of The Royal Tenenbaums riffs fruitfully on the film’s debt to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.
• If you haven’t yet caught up with Lizzie Skurnick’s wonderful “Fine Lines” feature at Jezebel, now is the time. The series revisits classics of children and YA literature. The subject of last week’s entry was Katherine Paterson’s Jacob Have I Loved, a book I haven’t re-read in a long while but which I think about all the time. (Random, inside-baseball observation: Lately I’ve taken to hoping that Lizzie will write a girl detective series with a heroine named Mirabile Dictu. Or if not Lizzie, someone should write it.)
• Speaking of such, The Independent gets ten writers to share their failed darlings, the books they wrote or planned to write that never made it into print. Like Jenny, from whom I pinched the link, I was especially charmed by Amanda Cross’s entry, which begins:

I have a few “sock drawer novels” knocking around – a dreadful romantic thriller set on Capri, a historical tragedy inspired by the life of the poet Catullus and a mock-Gothic mystery involving the Brothers Grimm. All were half-written in my teens and early twenties, when I was under the delusion that fiction was about fame, money and the love of beautiful men.

Two things: 1) I would happily read any and all of those books as outlined; and 2) fame, money and the love of beautiful men are the main reasons I write: Don’t take away my dreams, Cross!

A review in the TLS of a new edition of Aldous Huxley’s letters devotes special attention to the author’s complicated relationship with Mary Hutchinson, noting:

What was kept a close secret was that the [Huxley] marriage went through a long period during which both Maria and Aldous were sexually involved with Mary Hutchinson – a writer, married to a barrister. She was also, but less discreetly, a mistress of Clive Bell’s. (An unflattering portrait of her by Bell’s wife, Vanessa, is now in the Tate.)

Emphasis is mine; the “unflattering portrait” is the sour, lemony one shown here. The Tate’s display caption for the painting reads in part, “This portrait shows the short-story writer Mary Hutchinson. She was the mistress of Bell’s husband Clive, a fact of which Bell was aware. This may account for the unflattering nature of the portrait. When it was exhibited, to the sitter’s consternation, Vanessa Bell wrote ‘It’s perfectly hideous… and yet quite recognisable.'”
Image taken from the Tate’s website. © Estate of Vanessa Bell.

• “Fumes made me go lowbrow, said writer.” (Via.)
• It’s already been widely linked to but as an Amazon review obsessive I’m obliged to point you toward Garth Risk Hallberg’s intelligent essay on the phenomenon. His thesis: that the top reviewers aren’t so much disinterested amateurs as they are “a curious hybrid: part customer, part employee.” (My favorite Amazon reviewer is G. Gibson of Rome, Italy. Misunderstood, maligned: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about G. Gibson and eagerly await his definitive translation of The Aeneid, which will show all others as the grievous abominations they are.)
• A gallery of photos related to D.H. Lawrence and the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial.

I very much like Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and revisit the poem (story? fairy tale?) every so often. Re-reading it this past time, I was struck by how much Laura’s sin, of eating the goblin fruit, has its mirror in the new food asceticism, which also at times equates eating the wrong things with immorality. (I’m thinking of the Skinny Bitches and their ilk, though one imagines the only objection the Skinny Bitches would have to goblin fruit is if it wasn’t organic.)
If this idea is phrased inelegantly, just be grateful I didn’t approach you with any of the “Discussion Questions” that run alongside the poem. It’s hard to imagine the discussion that wouldn’t be stopped dead in its tracks by “feminist poem or religious allegory?”
Recently, Guardian blogger Shirley Dent took up a similar line of thought, finding parallels between the advice of modern diet books and 13th-century religious guides for women that warn, “Lechery comes from gluttony and from enjoyment of the flesh, for as St Gregory says, ‘Food and drink beyond what is right give birth to three broods: frivolous words, frivolous deeds, and lechery’s desire'”.

We are suffering an incursion of mice in the kitchen. This is the sort of thing the cat used to take care of, but she appears to have retired. In the evenings she’s taken to sitting in the doorway and watching as mice dance back and forth across the floor, swishing her tail and forth like she’s at a particularly enjoyable performance of The Nutcracker.
So a few nights ago we put out traps. Two different kinds; eight in all: Enough to booby-trap the main drawers and cabinets. Mr. Tingle just checked them and made this report:
1. No mice caught.
2. Peanut-butter bait has been eaten from all traps.
3. Three of the traps have been crapped on.
About the last he says, “Now I know what it’s like to be bitch slapped by a mouse.”

“He had come from Rome. ‘Oh, Rome?’ she exclaimed. ‘How lovely!’
He shrugged: ‘Too many nice people.’
She was surprised. He reflected on Roman society, but had enjoyed himself. Though not, evidently, a son of the Church, he was on the warmest of terms with it; prelates and colleges flashed through his talk, he spoke with affection of two or three cardinals; she was left with a clear impression that he had lunched at the Vatican. As he talked, antiquity became brittle, Imperial columns and arches like so much canvas. Mark’s Rome was late Renaissance, with a touch of the slick mundanity of Vogue. The sky above Rome, like the arch of an ornate altar-piece, became dark and flapping with draperies and august conversational figures. Cecilia — whose personal Rome was confined to one mildish Bostonian princess and her circle, who spent innocent days in the Forum displacing always a little hopefully a little more dust with the point of her parasol, who sighed her way into churches and bought pink ink-tinted freezias at the foot of the Spanish steps — could not but be impressed.”
Elizabeth Bowen, To the North