Weekend Round-up

Diego

I consulted my expert on all things Hispanic /Latino, Rosie, regarding Diego. Her response:

"Dominican men are very friendly towards women. He does not feel sorry for you. He is showing you his rico suave moves that his father taught him, as his grandfather taught him and as his great-grandfather taught him. If you like the look of him, feel free, but just make sure that he is not married, has a baby mama or a girlfriend. You do not want her knocking on your door at two in the morning."

And so there went my three second fantasy of being Salma Hayak in a flouncy white dress, dancing with Diego on a patio lit with multi-colored lights. Oh well. Wasn't it pretty to think so?

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Stinky Me

I have noticed that as I am getting to be an old bat my skin is getting thinner. It's more sensitive than it used to be. It takes longer for cat scratches to heal.

Also? It hurts to take a shower. No, the water is not scalding hot, yes, the shower is set on the rainforest trickle setting, and still it hurts. I no longer shower daily but scrub the smelly bits with a fresh washcloth and soap.

I think this calls for a change of method, so will begin taking warm baths in the evenings before bed.

Meanwhile - dang, that hurts.

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Boris and Taylor Health Report

All seems to be going smoothly. I have to keep an eye on them, of course, and give them meds they don't want. Boris is terrific about getting sub q fluids.
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One of My Favorite Lines in Western Literature


"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

I just re-read The Great Gatsby. The writing at the start of the book is just mesmerizing. Once the story gets going, the language isn't as lyrical, but there's a feeling that nothing can stop the story. Fate is fate.

And Nick Carraway is not the innocent bystander / narrator I remembered him as being. He didn't go forward to the police and say, "Daisy was driving" while everyone was blaming Gatsby. No, they all closed ranks against the outsider. In fact, Nick was a bit of a hypocrite.

See you 20th Century American Lit tomorrow!

Dear Target,

I'm sorry. I accidentally became on of THOSE people today. You know, those people who go through the whole store, pile the cart up high, and then abandon it. I'm sorry.

I had to.

I don't remember the last time I saw my debit card. Within the week, I think.

Credit card even longer.

So I figured I could write a check, using my driver's license for identification. And I know the last time I used that was when I cashed a check at the credit union on Thursday.

I pawed all through my bag. No luck.

I'm sure all of this is in my car somewhere, but oy.

So, Target people, I apologize. And by the time I'd done with selecting the perfect purple Skull Candy headphones, the perfect purple-yellow-orange-green checked bag for my books, the this, the that and the other, I was exhausted. And I knew I would not have the energy to put everything back. It was a lot of stuff but thank Heaven I managed to resist buying any perishables.

I'm sorry. Really I am. I will not do it again.

However.

I did have enough cash to go to Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy of Pillars of the Earth. Oh, and I've been ready lots about The Lost City of Z, about the last of the great British Victorian explorers who went into the Amazon and was never seen again. And the people that went after him were never seen again. But the guy who wrote this book went after him, kind of, sort of found out what happened and managed to get out alive.

But wouldn't you know that it was one of those, buy 2, get 3 deals. So I picked up a book about Teddy Roosevelt's Amazon adventures (no, it has nothing to do with the Kindle) and a book about Cornelius Vanderbilt. As far as I know, The Commodore never ventured below the equator.

If you haven't seen the first four episodes of "Pillars of the Earth" on Starz or Netflix or whatever, it's worth the time. Although it has absolutely nothing to do with the Amazon.

Me vs. Fate

Or God.

This is pretty much just middle-class whining, so ignore at your leisure.

What I want to know, God, is when I get a break. Sure, I'll go along with...oh, say 80% of this mess I'm in being my own doing. However. There is another 20% that needs to be accounted for. And maybe it's the old 80/20 rule - if you can brush off the 80%, then the 20% must be pretty choice.

Honestly? It hasn't been easy. Stop, I know, it could have been harder. But really. Could you please cut me some slack, or has that rope already run out?

How was I to know the weird pinging headache that I've had for over a week was caused by allergies? How was I to know that Benadryl suddenly made me go face-first into a conference room table? Especially since my past experience with Benadryl has been like waving away a fly. Yes, I know when I went out to my car for a snooze that I should have put my Big Finance badge around my neck. I also know that no matter how clever I think it is, it isn't all that smart to carry my debit card piggy backed in the ID case.

I just took three bags of trash out of my car. Oh - have you looked at my car lately? At the bashes and dings and scrapes? Anyway, I didn't find my Big Finance ID. And I'm kind of sad today because I let down The Worried Man at Big Finance.

Anyway. Ahem. RCW and I used to say to each other, in sternly warning voices, "Don't fuck away the magic." I don't think I did that. I think I gave it away in handfuls to people who didn't deserve it.

The other day, I asked myself, if I had a ten gallon pail filled with magical stardust, what exactly would I expect to have happen if I flung it up into the air?

I couldn't think of answer.

It was like the scene in "Uncle Buck" when John Candy is trying to talk to his girlfriend, who won't let him get a word in edgewise.

I could save some mone - no. I could take a va - no. I could buy new clo - no. It would rain - no. My front steps would stop crumbling - no.

Well, I still can't find my ID. Or my ego. Or my superego.

I also figured out recently that with the Mom Voice In My Head forever stilled, the Annushka Voice in My Head right along with it, that I now have the grooming habits of a 19 year old American male in a frat house. And the cleaning habits, too. I never got to rebel. Oh, I shot my mouth off a lot but I was always home before ten, cleaned the house on Saturday mornings, started dinner when I was told to, did my laundry, bought and ironed (!) table cloths. And used them. Newp. You won't see much of that around here.

So.

The Benadryl was a mistake. Reading Little Bee, despite how wonderful the writing is and how grab you by your throat the story is, I still think it's a mistake. I was going to join a reading group, you know. Oh, it's a long list. Do we have to do that now?

One thing I do have in my thin and ragged bag of tricks is a flashlight given to me by a fire fighter. (Don't ask.) It is a magic flashlight because it always illuminates the lost and misplaced. I'll use that and if it fails me for once, will go through the necessary drudgery of getting my ID and my debit card replaced.

Okay - here's the deal. You can keep raining shit down on me, but save up all the magic for that day in October, okay? Is that a deal?

You never talk back to me but I suppose that's a good thing.

Book A Week: Book 1

A couple of weeks ago, I read in the NY Times an article about a woman who has vowed to read a book a day for a year. That's right. One book. One day.

She's retired and apparently very well off. She has some rules about what she reads. Some of them make sense and some of them are challenging. The books she reads are between 250 - 300 pages long. She never reads two books by the same author. She's going out of her way to read books from different cultures. And I'm guessing Jude Devereaux is not on her TBR stack.

A very, very long time ago, I made a resolution that I would read a book a week. I kept that resolution for a long time but have fallen off a lot in the past seven years. There were actually a couple of years when I probably read less than 10 books.

So I'm going to try to go back to this resolution now. I will read anything. Anything over 500 pages gets two weeks. Anything by Dostoevsky gets three weeks.

Fiction, non-fiction, new, old, I don't care.

I have made amends with the library (I had two books displaced by the infamous cleaning lady that were ridiculously overdue) and last week, picked up Relentless by Dean Koontz. Which I read. In a week.

And now I will tell you about Relentless by Dean Koontz.

Early in his career, Dean Koontz was a boogety-boo writer. Something happened maybe five or six years ago that changed him around completely. Oh, he still does some boogety-boo stuff, but the wonderful thing is that his work no longer seems to have this black cloud hanging over everything. In fact, most of what he writes now has a non-existentialist ending. This makes me happy.

Relentless is about a writer (go figure!) who is married to a wonderful woman (go figure!) and together they have a beyond-genius son. The main character gets a slashing, venomous review from a renowned critic. This delights the writer's agent but scares the writer. He's gotten bad reviews before but this seems vindictive and spiteful and very personal.

After the review, the Bad Critic (cast in my head as Philip Seymour Hoffman) appears almost magically in the writer's life and bad things, terrible things happen. The writer's house gets blown up. They take it on the lam. And yet, the Bad Critic is everywhere and always doing terrible, cruel things.

And why? Because the writer is just too damn happy. Too optimistic. Too non-existential. In fact, artists and writers who show these traits have had terrible, terrible things done to them, too. Because some people just don't want you to be happy. That's why.

I have a feeling I'm not the only one who noticed the uptick in Mr. Koontz's mood. No doubt he got a snide review from the Times or some such because of his new outlook.

This will not live on in the annals of great American literature. (Is there one? I mean, after Mark Twain?) It was a good quick read.

The part of Mr. Koontz's oeuvre that will live on, should live on are the "Odd" books. Sweet and poignant and with one of the best main characters I've read in years. I love Odd.

Next week, maybe:
"My Life as a Guinea Pig"
or
"Unquenchable"

Oh, the cover shown here is the British one. The American one is just too boring.

Parting is No Sorrow At All

Over the course of the last couple of months, I've decided that publishing and I are going our separate ways.

There's no excuse at all for the chaos the industry is experiencing.

Once upon a time, maybe ten years ago, the Old Guard began moving out. The gentlemen and ladies of the age of A Gentleman's Pastime retired to their summer homes. In the meantime, the up and comers were people who could afford to live in New York City on $20,000 a year because they had their trust funds to make up the difference.

The industry was repeatedly stabbing itself in the gut and wondered at the same time where all the blood was coming from.

I began seeing the problem with publishing over thirty years ago, when I worked for a small magazine.

But ten years ago, there wasn't just one problem. There were many, many, many problems. And now when S&S cry and mourn loudly about a lousy year, I have no sympathy.

A friend of mine bought a Rocket reader and I thought, this is a new beginning and I don't think that many people are paying attention.

I went to industry conferences and soaked up every word. What the leaders in publishing didn't realize was that they were running on the same track and due to have a head-on collision with technology. The few that came to their senses made feeble attempts at correcting them.

One thing that I heard and shuddered at was "We've made books too precious. People don't want to throw them away." Now the industry is making certain books entirely too precious. The Kindle is a wonderful thing to behold, but could I loan a friend of mine a book that she just has to read? I somehow doubt it.

Five years ago, I heard one of the head honchos at SanDisk talk about putting a year's worth of school books on one thumb drive. It only made sense. But nothing was done with it.

Publishing has ignored technology at its peril. Technology will kill the publishing industry as it exists today. This was something I said at Unnamed Co. over and over again. I was smiled at politely and told to run away now, dear.

Oh, and the Big Idea that won me my "prize" at Unnamed Co.? Barnes and Noble has it and anyone with a smart phone can download the app. Unnamed Co. is still off wandering in the woods.

Publishing is going to be forced to change. The people coming to the fore now grew up with technology and expect nothing less in their workaday lives and in the products they offer.

I realize that there's a great deal about publishing that I was never savvy about.

For the first few months after I was laid off from Unnamed Co., I faithfully followed the comings and goings, I read PW Daily, I checked it out at the library.

Changing publishing is like trying to stop a train with one hand. You'll just be - briefly - an ugly blot on the landscape but you won't slow the train for one second.

I give. Not that anyone would notice.

Confessions of a Book Whore

Hey, baby, do you want a date or my last copy of Stephen Mitchell's translation of Rilke's Duino Elegies?

When I lived in Florida, I briefly worked for a bookstore that sold nothing but remainders. Well, we occasionally got in best sellers because when people came into the book store, they actually expected to see copies of books they wanted to read.

I called this store The Book Whorehouse. I was a whore for books. I should never have accepted a paycheck because most of my extremely paltry salary went to buying books. Left alone among such largesse for the whole day, or even part of a day, how could I expect to walk out, untainted by the printed word, untempted by the pleasures of touching a book's skin?

I'm reading Lewis Buzbee's The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop. This man completely understands books and how those who lust for books think and operate. He worked for a couple of primo bookstores in the Bay Area. (I'd been auditioning with BDalton and Waldenbooks for years and never got a callback. The best I could do was Book Whorehouse.)

He completely understands the aesthetics of bookstores, he explains why I'm creeped out by the wide open spaces of the newer Borders stores I've been in. It should not be this way. There should be towers of shelves, but not perilous. There should be room to navigate comfortably, but the feeling of being sheltered by the stacks and stacks of books is a must, something I don't get at Borders.

I'm half way through this little book and I've lost count of the number of times I've gasped and said, "Yes! Exactly!" When he listed off the books he ordered from Scholastic, I recognized at least half of them.

Right now, he's going into a history of bookstores and libraries, along with a brief history of the printed and written word. And explains why, for the longest time, booksellers were regarded with suspicion.

My time at the Book Whorehouse was the palest reflection of Buzbee's career. I didn't really get to wander among the stacks to learn the books. I spent my days slipping the stickers off the remaindered books, using a combination of lighter fluid, a double-edged razor blade, and paper towels. I knew my time was coming to an end when I called the main office one day to tell them the safe had been left open when I came in that morning - and the CEO screamed at me for spending the $1.25 for a long-distance call.

We didn't arrange books by title or genre. We arranged them by color. I'm not kidding. We had one wall of books displayed front-out and it was our task to make sure there were stripes of books in the same color, to make festive patterns as if books were quilting blocks.

I spent one day completely rearranging the cookbooks to reflect this bizarre merchandising method. My reward was high praise from the manager who was moving onto the big leagues of Barnes & Noble. He took pictures and sent them to the headoffice and apparently my example was passed around from store to store.

I'm still trying to get into B&N as a bookseller. They still won't have me.

I was still teetering on the edge when a man threatened to assault me over a copy of The Vampire Lestat. I couldn't and wouldn't give him a bookseller's discount because he didn't have his tax id. There were three other men in the store at the time and they gathered around and shouted at him to back off. The shortest, oldest man was the one who challenged him the most. The man stalked away. Later on in the day, a woman phoned the store and asked if I was all right. I said I was and asked how she knew something had happened.

"My husband was the one who spoke up," she said. "I think it's just shameful what that other man said to you."

But the very end, the last day was on a sunny spring Saturday. One of the frequent customers who came in but never spoke to me was a man who always wore black jogging shorts, a black t-shirt, and had a ZZ Top beard. He was there and a woman came in with her 12 year old daughter and the girl's friend.

The woman came up to me and said, "There's a man back there in the Bible section...masturbating."

"Where are your girls? Get your girls." She did.

I called the cops, but it was too late. He'd already left and I wasn't going to challenge him. The cops showed up. I described the man to him. "Oh yeah. We know that guy. We've run into him before."

I wonder if Lewis Buzbee ever ran into those types. I've heard they aren't that uncommon.

Thus endeth my career as a book whore.

Life's Too Short to Read Bad Fiction

Lately, it's more like, my life is too short to read fiction. Period. Which is odd, because I used to be quite the book fiend.

Wolfey alerted me to this phenomenon a couple of years ago. An avid reader, she went through a spell that was still in effect that last time we spoke many months ago. She just didn't want to read fiction, had lost her taste for it.

As it seems I have.

I'm lately occupied with cramming as much knowledge as I can into my head. And while wisdom may be found in fiction, knowledge cannot be. Unless you can actually read the technical specifications of fighter jets and nuclear submarines that Tom Clancy insists on including in every book he writes.

As a former fiction writer, I am developing a keen mistrust of other fiction writers. I know their tricks, their wiles, and their games. I'm wise to them.

Mostly, I'm tired of being sucked into a book, only to find that it's bad.

It's a big process for me to get ready to read a book. I have to make sure the kitchen is in a state of total non-grunginess and have at least a couple of loads of laundry going. The cats have to be asleep. And there's this subconscious mental process going on, too. Giving myself permission to take the time to read, I guess.

The disappointment in reading what turns out to be bad fiction is just too much. It takes a lot of effort to admit to myself that a book is just plain bad, since I used to make myself finish every book I started. (I don't do that anymore.) I've invested the time, the preparation, the effort to get fifty pages into the thing, only to find out the writing is really bad, the plot is outlandish, and the characters are people you would loathe in real life.

So there I am, with a three hundred page disappointment in my hand.

I distrust book reviewers. I especially distrust the New York Times book review section. And I have learned through hard experience to give wide berth to any book that has ever won any award. Especially The Booker Prize in the UK and the National Book Award in the US. (Surprisingly, on doing a little poking around, I find the Book Sense Book of the Year Awards to be to my taste.)

The only remedy for this that I can see is to read novels that were published before 1900. Unfortunately, this still includes Edith Wharton. And excludes Graham Greene.

I will have to tread carefully as I go about picking and choosing what I will and will not read. It grieves me to have to do it, but the state of modern fiction is such that I can't bear another incident like The Holding.

Who knew that love could be such a minefield?