{"id":1485,"date":"2006-11-27T21:42:17","date_gmt":"2006-11-28T05:42:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/?p=1485"},"modified":"2006-11-27T21:42:17","modified_gmt":"2006-11-28T05:42:17","slug":"sbd-2-bushnelled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/?p=1485","title":{"rendered":"SBD 2: Bushnelled"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Whenever Jake has Taekwondo, I have an hour of down time. Today, I went to our local megalomart in search of a good book. God forbid I should try to sit alone with my own thoughts for an hour. Anyway, here&#8217;s what I found:<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/11\/sex_and_the_city.jpg\" \/><\/div>\n<p>I loved the TV show well enough to write a horror spoof of it (&#8220;Sex and the Single Wendigo&#8221;, waaaay up in the upper lefthand corner). So I should love the book, too &#8212; right? Well. I&#8217;m only 2.5 chapters into the book, so it would be unfair to judge it so soon, but so far: Meh.<\/p>\n<p>The book and the show seem so fundamentally different. The women in the show approached relationships and sex with inexhaustible hope and gusto, while the men and women of <em>Sex and the City<\/em> le book have in place of hearts, lumps of coal. The show was a romance, the book, anti-romance.<\/p>\n<p>But it was the Introduction to this edition (pictured above) which really grabbed my attention. The author herself wrote the intro, dated 2001, and oh boy is it an eye-opener. See, I always thought it worked this way:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You write a book.<\/li>\n<li><em>If<\/em> it gets published, and <em>if<\/em> it assumes some degree of social or literary significance, brainy types will pen brilliant criticism discussing your book.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It had never occurred to me that the author could pen her own brilliant criticism, but that&#8217;s what Candace Bushnell has done. From her Intro:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I suppose that&#8217;s why <em>Sex and the City<\/em> is such an unsentimental examination of relationships and mating habits. Although some people find its lack of sentiment and cruel humor disturbing, it&#8217;s probably only because the book contains some kind of universal truth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What possessed Bushnell to write a new ending for <em>SatC<\/em>? No insight there, but she does reveal the ending. That&#8217;s right &#8212; she gives a spoiler for her own book. And then she analyzes the new ending and tells us what it means!<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>And so, at last, the book has a real ending, in which Carrie and Mr. Big break up. [<em>WTF? That&#8217;s not how the series ended!<\/em>] It&#8217;s a bittersweet ending [<em>Really? You thought so? How good of you to tell us how to feel<\/em>] &#8212; not just the end of Carrie&#8217;s relationship with Mr. Big, but the end of her dream of finding the proverbial Mr. Big &#8212; a man who doesn&#8217;t really exist [<em>While you&#8217;re at it, please provide a list of all symbols used in the book and tell us what each symbol represents.<\/em>] If you read closely [<em>Are you listening, all you barely literate readers who fail to understand my all new ending?<\/em>], you&#8217;ll discover that even Mr. Big himself points out that he is a fantasy in Carrie&#8217;s imagination, and that you can&#8217;t love a fantasy. And so we leave Carrie to enter a new phase of her life when she understands that she will have to find herself (without a man), and in doing so will hopefully be able to find a relationship.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe I&#8217;m not as unsentimental as I thought. [<em>But are you as arrogant as you thought?<\/em>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is breathtaking, really breathtaking. I&#8217;m all snarked out.<\/p>\n<p>D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whenever Jake has Taekwondo, I have an hour of down time. Today, I went to our local megalomart in search of a good book. God forbid I should try to sit alone with my own thoughts for an hour. Anyway, here&#8217;s what I found: I loved the TV show well enough to write a horror&hellip; <a class=\"continue\" href=\"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/?p=1485\">Continue Reading SBD 2: Bushnelled<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-n-authors","category-the-fearful-meme","radius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}