Name that book
Buggery Blogger is only part of the reason I haven’t been posting much lately. It’s back-to-work week, and my mind and body agree that waking up early sucks. I feel like crap, and even Edna Mode can’t cheer me up.
This comes from Bookseller Chick:
Since you’ve read lots of Harlequin Presents, would you maybe have any recollections of a book I’m trying to find? –A girl gets together with a guy in a van during a snowstorm. They are complete strangers. To keep warm, they may or may not have sex. Through most of the book, he thinks she is all too promiscuous. This tortures him. Of course she is actually a bookworm and introvert. He just happens to see her a second time after she has just had a makeover and is wearing a form-fitting sweater.
The cover features a brunette wearing a yellow sweater and maybe a plaid skirt. It’s a plain white background. Published before 1996 I believe but newer than the early 80s ones where nothing happens before marriage. Can you help?
If any of you can name that book, go help out the BSC, okay? Link above.
Here’s one of my own:
Pub date, 1970s. Science Fiction. A guy wakes up one day to find himself in a 12-year-old body — his own, about thirty years ago. Somehow, he’s living out the fantasy of being a kid again “with all I know now.” He turns the tables on his flirtatious cousin who used to make his life hell, and he rakes in the dough on horseraces (conveniently, he remembers some key race results). The mob gets wind of his success and wants to know how he does it. Eventually, he gets gunned down by the mob.
He wakes up on a space ship. Aliens have granted him three wishes, and he just screwed up his first wish. The next two-thirds of the book concern his other wishes. In one, he’s back in his 40-something-year-old body, but with superhuman strength and amazing sexual powers. Trouble is, his physiology is different, so alcohol makes him violently ill. Things end badly after he throws up on an important business client.
***
While I have Bookseller Chick’s attention . . .
Yesterday in the grocery store, I picked up a paperback edition of Tuesdays with Morrie. I remembered reading something about this in a magazine, and it sounded like a cool idea for a book. In the store, I looked at the acknowledgements. Author Mitch Albom acknowledges, among other people, a rabbi. Okay, so that’s good. Next, I read the first two pages. The writing is a bit too slick and a bit too cute, but still, the guy writes a good hook. I’m a millimeter away from buying this thing, but then I get to the deal-breaker.
You see, I’m curious about this “wisdom” thing. If Morrie is so full of wisdom, says I, I ought to be able to open the book at random and find some of that wisdom. I did just that, and soon realized that all dialog in the book is written like this:
“Here’s me saying something.” That’s Morrie. No ‘Morrie said,’ nothin’.
And here’s the author saying something back. No quotes. No ‘I said.’
Albom distinguishes between his voice and Morrie’s by the use of quotes or the lack of quotes. No saids at all.
I’m not saying it was intelligent or rational to put the book back on the rack, but I did. Maybe it’s a wonderful book. I’ll never know. Looking at that single page of dialog, I knew a whole book of that would drive me nuts.
I have other quirks, too. Pretentiousness is a deal-breaker for me; I’ve never made it past the first page of Unbearable Lightness of Being. I liked the first sentence of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger,
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
but after the second sentence, I put it back on the shelf:
The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what might have been parsecs in all directions.
First I’m looking at a crisp cinematic image (good), then I’m looking at King tap-tapping at his keyboard (not good).
The first paperback I ever bought with my own money (for fifty cents, I think), The Path Beyond the Stars, had as its first line,
It was axiomatic, Jon Wood groused.
How do I remember that? Because my brother, who thought it ridiculous for a six-year-old to spend his money on paperbacks, snatched the book from my hands and said, “Look at that! There’s two words in the first sentence you can’t possibly understand.” Never mind that he didn’t know the meaning of axiomatic or groused either. This was a dare and, dammit, I read the whole thing. And remembered that first sentence forevere’n’ever.
But I’m not six anymore. For adult Doug, if an author wants to throw apotheosis around, he’d damn well better have a good reason to do it.
Call me snobbish or neurotic or a miserable little prick. I deserve it. All I’m saying is, these are deal-breakers for me, and I’m one of the guys in your book-buying audience.
What are your deal-breakers? Bookseller Chick, do you have any thoughts about this?
D.
Grumble grumble
Blogger crashed for me earlier this evening. I had something in mind. Really, I did.
But I’m tired now, so instead of Balls and Walnuts’ usual high quality entertainment, I offer you tonight’s post over at Wax, Boogers, and Phlegm. Get a load of the hate mail I get from ear candling fanatics. (And this one is mild.)
More tomorrow, Blogger willing.
D.
Personal growth
Shaving* naked in front of the mirror last night, looking at the new roundishness of my abdomen — a pregnant muchness that wasn’t there three months ago, back before my gym closed — I thought of personal growth, the kind of growth that derives its substance from too many bags of microwave popcorn and too many Christmas cookies and too many pieces of Belgian chocolate (oh thank you very much, my beloved patients, but don’t you realize that if you kill me, I won’t be here to take care of you?)
Turning this way and that, trying to find some angle where I didn’t look like Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair, only, you know, hairy, suppressing the urge to take a scalpel to my flesh because what the hell good is it being a surgeon anyway if I can’t even fix blubber belly, I reflected (in the mirror, get it?) that this was why I loved writing.
Think about it. Friends drift away, love affairs fly apart, bodies go to hell, and yet our writing chugs on, barring hard drive crashes, fire, floods, and fiction-hating dogs, of course. Every bit of writing we do improves us as writers. Well, that one month foray into screenwriting put me into an extended writer’s block, but I still learned from that, didn’t I? (Yeah. You learned not to fuck with me, sailor. — Doug’s muse.) And I may have spent my first two years and 100K words of ‘serious’ writing on a project that went nowhere fast, but if I hadn’t done that, could I have written a 300K word novel that actually went somewhere? I don’t think so.
What’s my problem with scale, anyway? I’ve sold flash fiction and stories in the 4K to 6K range, and I’ve written a humongous novel, but I can’t manage to turn out a modest 90K novel. But I digress.
Writing is the one compartment of my life where I feel like things are getting better**. I may be getting poorer thanks to this money pit of a house, and I may be getting older and fatter and balder, but at least with writing, if I put out the effort, I have something to show for it: not just the words on the page, but also an internal maturation which makes it possible to do that much more the next time my fingers hit the keyboard.
So I’m shaving, looking at that 4-month-preggers so-not-a-six-pack of mine, and I’m thinking, Maybe there is something growing in there. Maybe I could take that 2001-2002 project of mine, Karakoram, and turn it into something 90K-ish, tight, interesting, funny, poignant — in short, everything I wanted it to be when I first got started. Maybe I can do that now.
Yeah.
D.
*My face. Detail added for Maureen’s benefit.
**Before you ask: no, there’s nothing wrong with my marriage. Knockingonwood knockingonwood knockingonwood.
Ear wax for Candy
Ear wax may be good for some things*, but it doesn’t provide the most fertile ground for humor. Four times a day, sometimes more, I’ll be cleaning someone’s ear and the patient or his spouse will say, “Ooh, can you see through to the other side?” Gawd, I hate that joke. It ranks right up there with “Huh?” in response to, “How’s your hearing?”
However, I do have one good ear story, which I dedicate to the lovely Candy for thinking of me today, even if you don’t think enough of me to enter Kate’s contest. Grumble.
In college, I racked up enough credits to take time off for an internship. I thought I wanted to be a chemist, so I opted for a six month organic chemistry fellowship at Stauffer Chemical Company in Richmond, California. Stauffer manufactured herbicides. Most likely corporate mission statement: Stauffer. We take all the lovely green things in the world and kill them. The State of California owns that place now; it’s part of the Department of Toxic Substances Control. Ironic, eh?
One of the PhD chemists was a grizzly old man who would have made a damned good Scrooge. This guy was filthy — physically, morally, and spiritually filthy. Why, he was so filthy the Mitchell Brothers gave the guy an honorary chair at their theater. With his name on it. In gold lettering.
It’s what you would call a well endowed chair.
I suppose he might have landed himself in a world of trouble for sexual harassment, but the women he worked with didn’t take him seriously. A day or two in his presence and you became calloused to his bottomless pit of linguistic ooze. Even Maria, a sweet Catholic woman in her late 20s, tended to smile at his profane stories and look the other way.
One day, he launched into some weird diatribe about one of the new Vietnamese PhDs down at the chemical engineering end of the building. He had seen shoe-prints on the toilet seat — that’s what set him off — and, yes, you can add racism to his list of sins. After the thirtieth or fortieth “fuckin’ this fuckin’ that,” Maria said, “Oh! My virgin ears.”
To which our hero replied, “Wassamatter? Ain’t you never got it in your ear before?”
See, Candy? You never can tell what will jog my memory.
D.
*True fact: some heroin addicts use ear wax to grease their syringes. Now, that’s American ingenuity in action!
Looking Backward
I’d hate to plot this on the same scale as the YesButNoButYes gang’s graph, but I’m happy with it, just the same.
I can’t remember why or how I started Shatter (AKA Balls and Walnuts). Who turned me on to Blogger? I’m far too much of a technological nincompoop to find something like that on my own.
Blogging gives me the illusion of writerly discipline. Look at me, I’m writing every day — sometimes two or three times a day! Perhaps I had hoped that discipline would carry over into my more serious literary pursuits, but it hasn’t. If I had channeled all of this effort into my manuscript, I would have finished it months ago.
But then I wouldn’t have met all of y’all.
My first real post (April 9) concerned my short story, “My Troll Lover”, which reminds me: damn, that’s a fine story. I really ought to buff it and send it out. Again.
The big traffic bump in May came courtesy of John Scalzi. What amazed me, though, was the way my June traffic didn’t fall back to April levels. Smart Bitches didn’t discover me until July, so I really can’t account for my June numbers.
The rest of the growth I attribute to regular posting, persistent schmoozing, and shameless Technorati blogwhoring (my bloggenitals were particularly sore in October). Don’t know if I can continue this growth rate, but you know something? I don’t care. I’m having fun, and I like my gang of readers.
Happy New Year, everyone.
D.
The Anti-Lewis
Pop quiz: what contemporary author called C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories “morally loathsome,” and in a 1998 essay for the Guardian, “The Dark Side of Narnia,” derided “the misognyny, the racism, the sado-masochistic relish for violence that permeates the whole cycle”?
Hint 1: the author was the subject of a Peter Hitchens essay entitled, “This Is the Most Dangerous Author in Britain.”
Hint 2: the author also said, “‘The Lord of the Rings’ is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He’s interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.”
Give up? Go sit under a cold shower for ten minutes if you answered J.K. Rowling, because the author in question is Philip Pullman, author of (among other things) the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Laura Miller in The New Yorker (Dec. 26, 2005 & Jan. 2, 2006) has a wonderful piece on Pullman, which you can read online here. Miller provides a three-dimensional glimpse of Pullman and his work. Her article is one of the best literary focus pieces I’ve read in a very long time.
Okay, time to get to work on dinner.
D.
Best of the Best-ofs
Once again, Steve Gilliard says it better than I ever could.
Over at HuffPo, Seth Greenland gives us Dubya’s top 10 New Year’s Resolutions.
I’ve learned to make resolutions which are within the realm of possibility. Thus:
1. Lose five pounds.
2. Sign up at another gym (my favorite one closed) and, um, like, actually use the place.
3. Lose my temper with my son 25% less.
4. Finish editing TBC and send out queries.
5. Write my congressmen (yeah, they’re all guys) every time I think my head might explode.
And because I really really hate living in a warehouse . . .
6. Get flooring and countertops!
We’ll revisit this next year.
To all of my readers: you’re my friends. Well, not that nasty-assed guy who kept posting crap when I wrote about the neo-Nazi blonde singing duo, but the rest of you, yeah. I wish all the best for you and your families.
Happy New Year!
D.
Personal myth
Some kids have to share their moms with brothers and sisters. Since I’m the youngest by seven years, I had my mother all to myself. No sibling rivalry here.
Except for Chi Chi.
I can imagine a pre-Doug time when it was just my mom and Chi Chi. Knowing how my mom is with dogs, Chi Chi must have lived in a state of bliss. She would have garnered my mother’s full attention and love, and she wouldn’t have had a care in the world.
Then I came onto the scene, and Chi Chi’s life changed forever. How she must have hated me! Here was this squealing, pooping, puking creature; such a shameful sight, no self-respecting pup would ever put on a display like that. How could my mother tolerate it?
Growing up, Chi Chi fascinated me, all the more because she was untouchable. If I came within six feet of her, she would bare her teeth and growl. I wanted to make her happy, but even gifts of table scraps had no impact on her demeanor. She was a bitter, depressed, hateful old bitch who could not be pleased by anything I did or said. Only one person could thaw her — my mother, of course.
I did the only thing I could do. I begged my mother to pet Chi Chi and praise her. Mom would oblige, but she seemed to tire of it quickly. Nevertheless, for those brief moments in time, Chi Chi was happy, energetic, young again.
When I was five, my parents bought a male Chihuahua whom they named Chico (their names for pets have never strained the imagination). From Chico and Chi Chi I learned that sex involves a lot of yelping, and couples always end up back-to-back before it’s over. Anyway, Chi Chi became pregnant, gave birth at home, fell asleep on top of her puppies, and smothered them all. This did little to help her mood.
When I was twelve, she developed a cough. The vet called it a “heart cough,” which means something to me now, but bewildered me back then. I never had a very good grasp on sickness or death, and my apparent callousness landed me in trouble on more than one occasion — but that’s another story. Chi Chi became weak. She needed help getting off and on her pillow. We moved her pillow next to the back door so that she could be close to her food, water, and potty stomping-grounds.
She woke me up one night with her coughing. Sickness had mellowed her, and she had long since decided I wasn’t worth the energy it took to growl; she allowed me to help her off the pillow — that’s what I’m trying to say. All she wanted was a drink of water. Afterwards, I helped her back onto her pillow. In the morning, I checked her, and she was dead.
I would carry on about the burden of guilt we feel towards our pets, but Jurassic Pork covered that poignantly in recent weeks. I don’t think I can add much. What interests me more is the depth of grief I felt for Chi Chi. It sounds horrible, but her death touched me far more than the deaths of any of my grandparents. Nowadays, I think about my grandparents more often than I do Chi Chi, but at the time, Chi Chi’s death really got me where I lived. I had grown up with her.
Am I alone in creating a personal creation myth? I don’t know if my mother bought Chi Chi before or after I was born, but in my myth, I tell myself: It was before. She was lonely, but the dog didn’t cut it. So she discovered the wondrous magic of pinholes in condoms, and that’s how I came to be.
Little Dougie: because a dog wasn’t good enough.
My parents deny all of this, naturally, but I am unperturbed, and I will not listen to their objections. Myths lose power when subjected to close scrutiny.
D.
Breakfast links
I’m just making myself more depressed.
Media Matters has posted its Most Outrageous Statements of 2005. My favorite:
Focus on the Family founder and chairman James C. Dobson: Same-sex marriage would lead to “marriage between daddies and little girls … between a man and his donkey.”
What’s your favorite?
Heart-sickening-to-the-core: This Modern World discusses the latest torture memos (via Atrios); the General captures the rot at the apple’s core with a single image.
My favorite Guerilla Woman from Tennessee has reprinted in full today’s Op-Ed piece from Paul Krugman. Here’s the punchline:
A year ago, most Americans thought Mr. Bush was honest.
A year ago, we didn’t know for sure that almost all the politicians and pundits who thundered, during the Lewinsky affair, that even the president isn’t above the law have changed their minds. But now we know when it comes to presidents who break the law, it’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.
To my US readers: write your Representatives and Senators. Use those links at the top of my sidebar — it’s easy. And don’t let ’em set cookies.
After that nauseating dive into today’s news (and I haven’t even checked Kos yet), I need a little recharge. Here is a World of Warcraft Broadway show tune for y’all. The graphics stink, but the music rocks. And if that doesn’t do it for you, check out the latest photos from Antarctica.
Oh, my! Mel Gibson has a blog. Gabriele, I’m counting on you to correct his Latin.
Now, if you’ll all please excuse me while I go put a knife in my gut . . .
D.
2001, five years later
Five years, or thirty-seven, thirty-eight . . . who’s counting?
This morning, Karen watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on TV while I read through Miss Snark’s Crap-o-meter critiques of novel synopses. This juxtaposition led me to wonder how I would write a synopsis for the 2001 story.
Think about it. If you focus on the main story arc, your bullet summary will be: An alien artifact acts as a catalyst to human evolution. You would leave out the HAL 9000 subplot because it has nothing to do with the rest of the story. It doesn’t further the plot. It even lacks a thematic connection to the rest of the movie.
The trouble is, I like character-driven drama. HAL is the best character in the story, and the HAL subplot contains the movie’s most poignant moments. Yet if your bullet summary reads: A sentient computer develops a paranoid streak and becomes a homicidal maniac, what will the agent or publisher make of the remaining 3/4 of the story?
I’ve been conflicted about this movie ever since I saw it in the theatre as a seven-year-old. Afterwards, I remember feeling bored, bewildered, and perhaps a little stoned. I can still hear my mother yelling at my brother, “What’s wrong? What’s the matter with him? Why is he acting like that?”
Nothing wrong with me at all, except I had no idea what the ending meant, and when I read Arthur C. Clarke’s book the following year, I was convinced Clarke didn’t understand the ending, either.
Opinions about this movie vary wildly. Pauline Kael, who never met a Kubrick movie she didn’t execrate*, called 2001 “the biggest amateur movie of them all, complete even to the amateur-movie obligatory scene — the director’s little daughter (in curls) telling daddy what kind of present she wants.”
Over at IMDB, a Finnish fellow writes, “One has to be ready for it, or it cannot be understood. In fact I don’t think it can be understood at all, at least not all of it at once. It is a philosophical journey to the infinite and beyond, a masterpiece of it’s genre . . .”
You won’t find many reviews which are in-between. The film ranks #87 in IMDB’s top 250. Read through the 1000+ reader comments if you like. Most are gushingly positive**.
Well, folks, I fall in between. Yes, the movie is beautiful, right down to the non-whooshing*** spacecraft and HAL’s glowing soul. The spacecraft special effects are so damned gorgeous, I’m willing to forgive Kubrick the LSD trip at the end. I’ll even forgive him the Star Child.
Yes, HAL’s story carries as much dramatic heft now as it did in 1968. Yes, it is ambitious and brave and noble to try to make a movie about enlightenment (Karen’s theory re: the ending).
But, holy cow, the story does not hang together. Without HAL, we have majesty and mystery, but precious little drama. Without the monolith, we have a fine space opera, but one which lacks a beginning or an ending. With HAL and the monolith, we have the cinematic equivalent of a grafted cactus.
Samuel R. Delany, a writer for whom I have great respect, tried to pull it all together in this essay, but I don’t think he’s successful. Another Golden Age SF writer, Lester Del Rey, slammed the film in his 1968 review.
What did Kubrick have to say about 2001? The man hated explaining his movies. I suspect the best we’ll get is his endorsement of 15-year-old Margaret Stackhouse’s notes on the film:
“Margaret Stackhouse’s speculations on the film are perhaps the most intelligent that I’ve read anywhere, and I am, of course, including all the reviews and the articles that have appeared on the film and the many hundreds of letters that I have received. What a first-rate intelligence!”
I’ve read Stackhouse’s notes, and you know what? I still don’t think Kubrick is telling a coherent story.
There. Glad I got that off my chest. In HAL’s words, “I feel much better now, I really do.”
D.
*Sorry for the two-bit word, but if you read Kael’s review, you’ll see that the words hate and detest are far too mild.
**If you’re interested in reading a more scholarly appraisal of the critical reaction to 2001, read this superb essay at 2001: A Space Odyssey Internet Resource Archive. This excellent website also has an excellent compendium of other resources on the web.
***In space, no one can hear you whoosh.
PS: Craving more Kubrick? Here’s another cool link.