Colette in occupied Paris, Jennifer Weiner in Shoes and taboos

From September 22 to 25, 1975, I read:

Looking Backward, Colette

I remember reading many of Colette’s books, and even where I was living and where I sat or lay when I read them--many of my small apartments had no chairs, so I frequently read in bed. But specifics on this book eluded me. So I looked it up on the net and found a 1975 New York Times review by Anatole Broyard. Vaguely, I remember that this was about her life in Paris during the Nazi occupation, but I hadn’t remembered that she purposely went there when she could have stayed in a small village. God, I love the Internet (also Colette)!

Who could describe better than Colette, I thought, the almost dreamlike character of life in Paris during the Occupation? Safely lodged in a small village in central France, she had returned to Paris impulsively, unwilling to miss the tragicomedy, the cramped heroism, of keeping body and soul together under such conditions. A connoisseur of gestures, she was ideally equipped to appreciate the strategies of improvisation, the stubborn Gallic shrugs of perseverance. Already quite old and partly lamed by arthritis, she sat in her window, one of France's greatest voyeurs, and reviewed the long-running drama of survival.

How to keep warm? she asks in "Looking Backwards." "An old armchair is sure to burn slowly and steadily. I used to know a Breton set of shelves which would go up very well in smoke ... the skeletons of crates, the handles of broken brooms, the empty case that once held a dozen bottles of champagne ... let's screw up rolls of newspaper with an iron wire, which will burn almost without flaring up." A friend is traveling to Boulogne to buy animal sculptures to burn, "a stag and a Newfoundland dog, both in wood, life-size. A Newfoundland had a hare in his mouth and a thick tree trunk beside him -- even a branch of flowing hawthorn ... from Anatole Broyard’s 1975 NYT review of Colette’s Looking Backwards.


From September 22 to 25, 2005, I read:

In Her Shoes, Jennifer Weiner

I contemplated reviewing this for my web page where I consider books that touch on size acceptance, but I decided not to. The interview with Jennifer Weiner that was included at the back of the paperback has a section that illuminates why I didn’t want to review the book. Actually I agree with Weiner on most points, but I put in bold the section that pointed to why I didn’t want to write an entire essay on her book, and explained below:

Q: In both of your novels [Good in Bed and In Her Shoes], the idea of body image is a central theme. Do you think this concept is a constraint that we place on ourselves, a restraint that society places on women, or a combination of the two?

A: Um, all of the above? I think it starts out as being a societal mandate—a kind of signpost outside of life’s roller coaster, reading “You Must Be Less Than This Fat Or Nobody Will Ever Love You”—and it’s something that women internalize, and carry with them in different ways. One of the things I was trying to do with this book was to show both sides of the coin, and the different ways that buying the beauty myth can harm you. Rose, for example, who’s a normal size and healthy, gets the message that her body is something to be ignored and concealed, swathed in sweatpants and unfashionable-length skirts, until she learns that however it appears, her body is first and foremost, something to use—to get her around, to ride a bike, to walk a dog, to hold the people she loves. And then there’s Maggie, who’s got this ready-for-its-closeup body (which, as we see, requires a tremendous investment in terms of effort and time), but it doesn’t bring her all the happiness that the plastic surgeons and diet merchants promise. It gets her scads of attention—good and bad—and it gets her judged, the same way Rose’s body earns her judgments. I hope someday the idea of “you are how you look” will change. . . But I worry that there’s so much money to be made off of convincing women that they’re inadequate, too big, too little, or otherwise completely unacceptable that change is going to be painfully slow.
From A Conversation with Jennifer Weiner, p. 534-35, Pocket Book paperback edition of In Her Shoes.

As I said, I totally agree with that last bit, and I realize that every woman in America today has to live with constant pressure to feel bad about herself—and then go buy something to make her feel better.

But Weiner has chosen to tell the story of a “normal size” sister, whom our twisted culture beats up on as “fat,” with her body-obsessed, yet dyslexic sister, who manipulates others with her body and is trashed by those around her as “stupid.” She's spanned the whole gamut of body oppression from A to B (to paraphrase Dorothy Parker's review of Katherine Hepburn).

I think Weiner’s work is size positive, but intentionally avoids scaring people away by using a character who actually is fat--as opposed to one who is merely healthy but considered as fat in our twisted view. I am guessing that this was a conscious decision on Weiner's part and it can be defended from the point of view of reaching a larger audience (um, larger in the sense of more readers, not larger readers). It certainly has worked, in that the paperback I bought was a mass market edition accompanying a motion picture release.

A positive fat character, a meditation instructor, appears in Weiner’s Good in Bed. The heroine, Canny, calls her a good “role model” but almost immediately upon sitting down to meditate, she has an insight that causes her to run away. One could argue that it's only coincidence that she talks to a fat lady and leaves town immediately. But from where I sit, it looked as if she needed to distance herself from the very idea of this woman’s fatness—be she positive or negative.

As a novelist, I know it’s damn hard to bring the reader into the head of a humanized fat character—as opposed to a stereotype of one sort or another.

Worse yet, and it is worse, I truly believe that an actual fat character used in a positive way is a taboo in fiction nowadays. And it’s not one of those fun-to-break taboos like cannibalism and necrophilia that bring in the big bucks.

My writer’s brain is already meditating on that State of the “F” Word essay. . . I’ll take my keyboard and soap box in the other room and let you know when it’s done and up on the web page. . .

A spy by any other name & talking the writer's block blues

September 18-21, 1975 I read:

Spy/Counterspy: The Autobiography of Dusko Popov

The name's Popov, Dusko Popov....
Some names cry out to be fictionalized.

Worse yet, the name of this book is confusing to Mad Magazine readers. When I looked at this 30 years later I wondered if it was a book of cartoons. Fortunately, the Internet informs us that "Popov was one of the most important double agents the British had during World War Two and was rumored to be Ian Fleming's model for James Bond. Known to the British as 'Tricycle' and to the Germans as 'Ivan’” It's vaguely coming back to me.


September 18-21, 2005 I read:

Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon

Sometimes I get in the mood to read about writing—usually not a sign of productivity! Chabon has an interesting insight--

…about the nature of he midnight disease, which started as a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to “fit in” by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happened with the midnight disease was that you began actually to crave this feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief object of your own hostile gaze. Wonder Boys, p. 76

Hmmm, creative writing as a form of substance abuse. Fortunately the navel-gazing insights in the book are interspersed with road trips, minor thefts, low-life characters and genuine humor. It may seem hard to imagine being captivated by the story of a professor with writer’s block and practically no conscience, suffering through a college literary festival. But the Hunter S. Thompson style field trips provide enough action to make the book hard to put down.

A-bombs, exorcism and lost books re-found

September 12-17, 1975 I read:

Lawrence and Oppenheimer, Nuel Pharr Davis
Interesting book about the fathers of the atomic bomb.

The Devil’s Bride, Exorcism: Past and Present, Martin Ebon
I looked this up online and discovered that there is now a racy Regency romance novel with the same title! Um, just the “devil’s bride” part, not the part about “exorcism past and present”--I guess THAT would be a work about divorce law.

The Youth Doctors, Patrick M. McGrady, Jr. (skimmed. A very tedious book.)


September 12-17, 2005

Eleven On Top, Janet Evanovich
Recent Evanovich books have not made me laugh as much as this one, definitely a fun read.

Fly Away Home, Marge Piercy
I had read this in the mid-80s. The book about a woman finding herself in mid-life resonated with me. But for some reason I didn’t connect Piercy the novelist with Piercy the poet, whose work I also read.

On re-reading, I was startled to see how many small, peripheral things in this book influenced me. I recently even wrote a "women's novel" (romantic comedy--title: The Happily Ever After Diet, a Guide for the Dysfunctional Bride, with size acceptance highlights) with a heroine named Daria. My Daria is, however, very different from Piercy's, and I still haven't found a publisher for her story, alas! Oddly, when I mentioned Fly Away Home to a friend who has read everything she could find by Piercy it turned out this was one she hadn’t read. I had to have another reading of it before I passed it along! It was as good as I had remembered.


Sleeping with Cats, Marge Piercy
Autobiography with cat appreciation. It always interests me the degree to which authors are or are not sociable. Aside from her cats, Piercy has led a life with an amazing about of major human social interaction--friendly, romantic, political... I got exhausted just reading about it! Some of the cat stories were sad, but stories from her life were interesting enough to keep me reading past midnight.

Many flavors of escape, humor and a cry for self-help

In 1975, having finally graduated (over the summer) from San Francisco State, I started a full-time word processing job at a bankers' association. This cut severely into my reading time. If I started to read something that didn’t offer the kind of escape I needed, I didn’t bother to finish it.

September 3-11, 1975 I read--

Half Lives, Erica Jong

I'm Done Crying, Louanne Ferris as told to Beth Day

Hanging by a Thread, Joan Kahn, ed.

The Best from Orbit, Damon Knight, ed (SF anthology)

The Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov in mystery writer mode

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald (didn’t finish)

Forbidden Colors, Yukio Mishima (couldn’t endure it—skimmed it)


By contrast in 2005, my need for escape is less intense, writing fulfills some of it. Also, for various reasons, my books come from other places than the public library, so I can't be quite as impulsive. The desire for escape has morphed into a quest for laughter and self-improvement, which come in many flavors.

September 3-11, 2005 I read:

Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris
For the longest time I had David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs mixed up. When I opened up the mailer with the copy of Holidays on Ice, I wondered if I had accidentally bought two copies of the Burroughs book, Dry. Both covers are white with gray details and sinister moods. Holiday has a white cover with a black and white photo of a clear liquid in a whiskey glass, with black snowflakes showing up against the ice cubes. Then I realized that Dry has a white cover with blurred gray letters, no graphic. Whew! Ten dollar error avoided and I now no longer confuse Sedaris and Burroughs.

Sedaris’s small book (134 pages) provided several laughs in the first essay--"The Santaland Diaries," which recounted the author's adventures as an elf in Macy's Santaland. The other three essays left me cold as the ice cubes on the cover. I just don’t know, and thus can’t laugh at, rarified suburbanites who use the holidays as markers on a social climbing expedition. On the other hand now I understand why Sedaris is so frequently published by The New Yorker.

This reminded me how fragile, quirky and culturally nurtured humor is. Like a delicate flower, it blooms in one climate and refuses to stick its head out of the ground in another.


What to Say When You Talk to Yourself, Shad Helmstetter, Ph.D.
My friend and fellow novelist Jaqueline Girdner entitled one of her Marin County murder
mysteries, A Cry for Self-Help. Helmstetter would be comfortable talking to the New Age suspects in that book.

Is there a 12-step group for those of us addicted to self-help books? I don't know if I'm ready to give up the habit though, because some of these books have proved incredibly useful. I learned to stop at least 90% of my negative self-talk on body issues with some of these simple techniques from Marcia Hutchinson’s Transforming Body Image, and similar body-positive works.

I expected What to Say, etc. to be about self-esteem, but maybe a little more generic. Not exactly. It turns out to have a bit of Napoleon Hill type Think and Grow Rich flavor to it.

The first part of the book is great, about keeping affirmations simple. There’s a cute story about his sitting down in the middle of three empty seats in a crowded airport, initiating both sides of a loud discussion with himself, managing to get three seats to himself to engage in his audible self-talk.

Unfortunately, Helmstetter seemed to go totally bonkers in the last part of the book. It’s like his affirmations become cumbersome contracts covering every possible eventuality. Throw one of those at it, and I think my subconscious mind would react in a similar way to my conscious mind—hey, leave me alone and stop telling me every little thing to think. The first part, where his suggestions are simple, seemed possibly useful.

Object lesson for me on finishing books before commenting...plus warning label

I regret that I didn’t quite finish reading Augusten Burroughs’ Dry when I wrote yesterday’s entry. I hadn’t reached the two pages wherein he details his disgust at Sally Struthers’ fatness, and envisions her in vicious detail—collecting donations for her Feed the Children charity and using them to buy and messily consume junk food. I guess there is supposed to be a joke swimming somewhere in that vitriol.

I totally get that Burroughs’ fat hatred is fat phobia from a self-confessedly appearance-obsessed gay man of a certain age. Hey, I read a LOT of stuff by authors who meet that description. But not if they gratuitously spit venom on fat women, life's too short to pay people to do that.

I write this in irritation with myself: (A) for not finishing the book before I endorsed it, and (B) for not totally “getting” the fat phobia until nearly 24 hours after I did finish the book. We live in such a sea of body hatred messages, that sometimes I get numb to them.

Now about the cats. I almost called this entry “fat hatred and cat hatred in Burroughs” but I think it’s more like fat phobia and cat victimization….

I long ago decided that no book, no matter how well-written is worth the piece of my life it would take to read it, if it contains fat hatred and/or cruelty to animals. I was disturbed by the crazed adolescent starving her cat to death in Running with Scissors. But yesterday I read on a blog that there is discussion of a cat-poisoning substance in Burroughs’ most recent book, which is labeled fiction--no doubt with an eye to not being sued, as he's currently being taken to court by relatives of the crazy doctor portrayed in Running with Scissors. The blogger mildly suggests that crazy people who might read such a book don’t need more information to facilitate animal abuse. I agree.

charm, laughter, and thoughtful things

August 28-31, 1975, I read:

Mother Goddam: The Story Of The Career Of Bette Davis, Whitney Stine

This book is waaaay out of print now. My memory of the joke Bette Davis made about the title came from the notorious 1926 play, The Shanghai Gesture. She remarked that when Hollywood made the picture, the owner of a notorious Shanghai brothel, Mother Goddam, would have to be called “Mother Gosh Darn.” In the von Sternberg film the part was re-christened Mother Gin Sling, so she wasn’t far wrong (though she didn’t play the part).

Born with the Dead, Robert Silverberg

Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Jokes, Isaac Asimov, Ed.

The Roots of Coincidence, Arthur Koestler
--I noted "such a small book and I couldn't finish it even though I LIKED it." Who knows, one day I might finish this!

The Embedding, Ian Watson


August 28-31, 2005, I read three books that would seem to have not so much in common, but in fact all three are sustained primarily by the author’s charm:

In the Company of Cheerful Women, Alexander McCall Smith

This is a mystery that follows none of the conventions of a murder mystery. There is no murder, and the rather mildly mysterious crime that is presented is never solidly resolved. Yet, the book is worth reading for the author’s evocation of Botswana and the further developments in the lives of the Precious Ramotswe and her associates at the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, characters we’ve come to care about in previous books. I also need to mention how beautiful these hardcover books are in every detail, notably the bold, almost Kente cloth-style African designs on the end papers (orange in this case) that compliment the covers.

Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs

Burroughs’ memoir of a bizarrely dysfunctional childhood, is a story of survival very different from McCall Smith’s gentle meditation. But Burroughs has his own kind of charm and humor, and it was sufficient to keep me reading his tale of an upbringing that makes Christina Crawford’s Mommy Dearest sound like Little Women. In Dry (see below) Burroughs sums up his childhood when he explains it to a potential boyfriend:

He was surprised to learn that my Southern parents divorced when I was young and that my mother gave me away to her psychiatrist when I was twelve and that I lived with crazy people in the doctor’s home and never went to school and had a relationship with the pedophile who lived in the barn behind the house.

In a nutshell (to coin a phrase) this is the subject matter of Running with Scissors. To pull laughter out of such raw pain a major accomplishment. (E.g., when Burroughs at 13 wants to quit school, his doctor and now legal guardian, suggests a suicide attempt and proceeds to supply both liquor and pills, and walk the child through it, supervising his hospitalization and then writing a letter to the school so that Burroughs can be officially excused due to mental fragility.)

There is a gross-out, “what-atrocity-will-happen-next?” quality to the book and I cringed as often as I laughed—a few episodes I skipped, and a few I wish I had skipped. My fellow cat-lovers may want to either avoid the book or skip the section where one of the crazed daughters decides her cat is sick and proceeds to starve it to death with no intervention from any family member.

But I was interested enough to read Burroughs’ next book Dry. Anyone who can make me laugh several times in the course of a book is worth a return engagement.

Dry, Augusten Burroughs

This is the story of Burroughs’ adventures in rehab. He brings us up to the point at which the story begins by saying.

When I finally escaped [from a life of squalor, pedophiles, no school and free pills], I presented myself to advertising agencies as a self-educated, slightly eccentric youth, filled with passion, bursting with ideas. I left out the fact that I didn’t know how to spell or that I had been giving blow jobs since I was thirteen.

Although successful at 24, his monumental alcohol problem comes to the attention of his employers, who intervene and send him to rehab. In a way it’s a familiar story, and it reminds me of Marian Keyes’ Rachel’s Holiday. Not as much wild laughter—the deep wounds sustained in childhood are beginning to be dealt with. But, Burroughs is not only brilliantly witty, but also thoughtful, warm and decent.

From blondes to wizards

August 22-27, 1975, I read:

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos
Anita Loos created an archetype in Lorelei Lee, the not-so-dumb-as-you-might-imagine, gold-digging, blonde heroine.

Anthology containing House of Double Minds by Robert Silverberg
I managed to not write down the title of this science fiction anthology, but clearly it was the Silverberg story that impressed me.


August 22-27, 2005, I read

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, sixth in the Harry Potter series

An absorbing few days with Harry and friends. Even with all the powers of darkness running rampant in the wizard world (sort of a “post-911 Hogwarts” high security atmosphere), Rowling has created a world that is a compelling place to revisit. The scenario of discovering unfolding new powers within oneself and facing unambiguous evil is refreshing in a healing way. Real life in our mundane world is never so simple—which is why we need such escapes from time to time.

This site link below has some fun Harry Potter links, and if you read the first one, an interview with J. K. Rowling, you’ll see a picture of her with her husband, Dr. Neil Murray (no relation to moi!) who really does look like a grown up Harry Potter—amazing! If only life would imitate fiction in this manner more often.

http://www.internetwritingjournal.com/harrypotter/

While we’re on this Harry topic, I’ve noticed a several fantasy heroes with the name of Harry. Harry Dresden in Jim Butcher’s “Chicago gumshoe wizard" series, and Harry Keogh in the Necroscope series come to mind immediately. Am I really stretching if I mention “Henry” in Jane Yolen’s Wizard’s Hall? Um, yeah, kinda. Okay, so that's not "several." For a minute I wondered if it could be a legacy of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, Henry/Harry/hero thing, sort of like the great “Kate” phenomena in mystery fiction a few years back, where we saw countless Kates encountering corpses.

Untangling webs . . . ferreting out secrets

August 13-22 1975

Marjoe, Marjoe Gortner
This was an interesting story of someone born into the business of evangelism, who managed to learn to think for himself and live as a rational person without disrespecting the tradition he was raised in. This fascinated me because I was beginning the process of sorting out the deeper religion from the crowd control. Later, I saw the documentary movie, Marjoe, about Gortner revisiting his former profession with a film crew. An interview that gives the gist of his journey is at the link below.
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/marjoe.htm


Looking Away, Hollywood and Vietnam, Julian Smith

Jacqueline, Ron Goulart, photographer (photo book of Kennedy-Onassis)

Eleven Blue Men and other Narratives of Medical Detection, Berton Roueche

Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe by Daniel Hoffman
Um, this one was about Edgar Allen Poe.

The Edge of the Chair, Suspense, fact/fiction, Joan Kahn, Ed.



August 13-22, 2005, concluding my tabloid research, I read:

Poison Pen, The True Confessions of Two Tabloid Reporters, by Lysa Moskowitz-Mateu & David LaFontaine

What really offended me about this book was the contemptuous attitude that the male half of the formerly married couple adopts toward tabloid readers. I’ve now read several books on this subject and this was the only one that stooped to sneer.

One thing the former couple still has in common is a feeling of having been traumatized by the process of working for the tabloids--though frankly, I think reporters for a great many non-tabloid news outlets get just as down and dirty in pursuit of a story as any of the tabloid transgressions described. Haven't these people seen The Front Page or His Girl Friday?

LaFontaine, the male half of the former couple, has major S. Hunter Thompson attitude that doesn’t mesh well with his “I’m too good for this job” pose. His wannabe gonzo riffs came across as adolescent.

To her credit, Moskowitz-Mateu, doesn’t put down tabloid readers, although she appears to feel equally ill-used by her former employers. Mostly she feels for the celebrity targets of the tabloids, and she spends a lot of the book in mea culpa mode, confessing to ploys she undertook to get stories and bemoaning the effect on her psyche.


"I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby!" A C0lorful History of the Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact, by Bill Sloan

Sloan has worked for both tabloid organizations and been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for a mainstream newspaper. The book’s title comes from one of the more fanciful tabloids. But the author gives a comprehensive history of the popular press journalism from the penny dreadfuls of the 1830s through Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst’s wild and wooly press in the early 1900s. He points out that the tabloids of the last 30 years have invaded the mainstream media to the point of undermining their own existence.

The book with the wildest title had the most thoughtful examination of the phenomenon--go figure

little houses in which our hearts...

Old Songs are more than tunes, they are little houses in which our hearts once lived.
Ben Hecht

For me that quote applies to books as well—

August 8 to August 12, 1975, I read:

Harriet Said, Beryl Bainbridge

Death of a Dude, Rex Stout
Ah, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin—there’s a little house of the imagination in these stories. Wolfe’s brownstone with the orchids he cultivates, the able chef and the constant diversion of solving crime. This was my first exposure to these mysteries, as you can see, I immediately went to get more!

Death of a Doxie, Rex Stout

Don't Fall off the Mountain, Shirley MacLaine
A whole different kind of mystery with Shirley MacLaine.

Kings Full of Aces, Rex Stout
(anthology - Too Many Cooks, Plot It Yourself, Triple Jeopardy, Home to Roost, The Cop Killer, The Saint and the Monkey)

August 8-12, 2005 I read:

The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
This was a hypnotic book. The storyteller’s art is highlighted by the Scheherezade device of a storyteller using the stories in a life and death game. I wouldn’t have bought this book in hardcover if the first chapter hadn’t drawn me completely in. Kostova manages to sustain the weaving of several narratives through the device of the narrator gradually learning from her father about her origins and her mother—about which her father has been mysteriously silent. His silence involves a threat from a vampire, and he only begins to speak when the danger of silence becomes greater than the danger of telling the story.

Story threads from the daughter, the father, and the father's mentor become puzzle pieces for the reader, and each thread is distinct, clear and fascinating.

Great stuff. I’ve heard this book called “The Da Vinci Code with vampires” but that’s like comparing a wonderful oil painting to a Sunday cartoon strip. The Historian has deep and heartfelt characters as well as an interesting historical puzzle, and that whole vampire threat thing.

I had trouble tearing myself away from it until around page 470. Seriously, this is a 641-page book. When the author dropped a sizeable chunk of a straight-up historical lecture into the plot, things slowed waaaaaay down, and I was able to set the book down for awhile. I had no intention of abandoning it, but I was able to unglue myself from the pages and take a break before coming back.

I really don’t think this digression on pilgrimage routes of Christian monks in the middle ages helped the book. But what do I know? To be honest I skimmed it, and even though it was only a 14 page mini-lecture, it seemed longer. It also ushered in a lot of information on the same topic that cooled my own interest down considerably, though I guess it was necessary to complete the puzzle aspect of the plot.

The good news is that skimming this section, and a lot of other medieval European stuff that only marginally interested me, I was still able to enjoy the last few hundred pages of the book.

I did notice a kind of distancing the reader from the ending however. It was almost as if the author were putting the ending in a historical context, which might or might not have served the story well. I liked it enough that I’ll go back and look at it later, so I may feel differently when I examine the text more carefully.

All in all, however, very few books have held my attention for 470 pages so masterfully, and this is the experience of reading that we keep coming back to seek.

From Mishima to the Enquirer in 30 easy years...well, mostly easy...

July 30-August 5, 1975

After the Banquet and Death in Midsummer and Other Stories, Yukio
Mishima

I went on a brief Yukio Mishima binge after my Buddhist scholar friend told me that her teacher told her "not to spend too much time" on a translation assignment of Mishima's Double Suicide. Dangerous literature appealed to me at that point. For whatever reason, however, I never became very entranced with Mishima. Curiosity followed by mild irritation would be accurate words for my reaction.

Frankenstein Unbound, Brian Aldiss


July 30 to August 5, 2005

Secrets of a Tabloid Reporter, My 20 Years on the National Enquirer’s Hollywood Beat, Barbara Sternig

The Untold Story, My 20 Years Running the National Enquirer, Iain Calder

Truth be told (!) this is research for a ghost story novel I'm writing, ghosts and paparazzi! Honest. But, totally aside from my admitted weakness for celebrity biographies as a kind of soothing potion, I have to say that I think the tabloids are unfairly maligned.

Former Enquirer Editor-in-Chief, Calder sums up my view very handily on the last page of his book:

I believe gossip is as old as civilization. In the days before television, neighbors would be as shocked and entertained by such tidbits as: “Mrs. Jones down the road has run off with the milkman.”

These days the neighbors would have no idea who Mrs. Jones is. Most people hardly even know their next-door neighbor. They do know Oprah, Rosie, Tom Cruise, Britney Spears, and Regis. They want gossip about them. When an Enquirer reader learns something new, it’s fun, and it gives her a feeling of power to call a friend and say: “Did you know. . .”

This, I submit is human nature.

The Untold Story, Iain Calder

Also, I gotta say it, the Enquirer’s readership is 90% female. Did you ever notice how publications aimed at women are frequently disparaged as second rate and trivial? I’ve ranted and raved on this subject as it relates to size acceptance in an essay on my web page at http://www.maadwomen.com/lynnemurray/essays/tabloid.html

The amazing Princess Bride and dinosaur cults in Hawaii

July 29, 1975 read:

The Princess Bride, "by S. Morgenstern" and William Goldman

My note on this title is "sigh" I adored this book. Some books you remember everything about them. I vividly recall the shelf in the news stand style bookstore in Honolulu where I found this book. I went exploring while all the other Buddhists were having a cultural performance of some sort. If I'd been feeling guilty it would have been a guilty pleasure. But I what I was feeling was rebellious. And the first fruit of my own personal declaration of independence was to find this wonderful, magical book.

I sighed after reading it because I enjoyed it so much and it was far beyond what I could imagine writing myself. The modern twists and turns in the story that frames the fairy tale, and delightful flights of fantasy and adventure within it--Cliffs of Insanity, the Rodents of Unusual Size, swordplay and true love. It's all there and the wit flows like wine. Way before the film was made, the watchword among aficionados of the book was, "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

Great stuff.

July 29-30, 2005 I read:

Casual Rex, A Detective Story, Eric Garcia

This is the second in this series introducing undercover Velociraptor and private detective Vincent Rubio. Coincidentally, Vincent's case takes him to Hawaii tracking a victim of a cult. Hmm. Cults in Hawaii. Not going there just now thank you very much. I've already been.

Garcia's first was dino detective book was Casual Rex, and I think there's third one out now called Hot and Sweaty Rex. Sort of Raymond Chandler meets Jurassic Park, although I'm not sure what Chandler would have made of the human-disguised, cross-dressing dinosaurs. A fun read.

The Hawaii to Yorkshire to Los Angeles Express

July 22-25, 1975, no books listed.

A fellow Hawaii convention of 1975 survivor informs me that July 22-29, 1975 we were in Honolulu. One major accomplishment of the convention for me was finishing Michener's Hawaii, and evidently there was an epidemic of reading that book among convention goers. In Honolulu, I found a book that I've adored ever since, but I'll talk about that next time!


July 18-25, 2005 I read:

Dialogues of the Dead, Reginald Hill

This is a mystery featuring the Yorkshire-based detectives, Chief Superintendent Andy Dalziel (often referred to as "the Fat Man") and DS Peter Pascoe. Definitely a size friendly book, because of the respect Fat Andy Dalziel demands. There's a very generous supply of locker room and barracks banter, but this must be one of the few police procedurals where the Oxford English Dictionary features so importantly in the plot! Hill knows how to tell a story--this is the 19th in this series, and I think there have been a few more since it originally came out. This book had an interesting variation on the double and triple twist ending.

A Playdate with Death, Ayelet Waldman

Very different from the Yorkshire police locker room! Waldman's "mommy track" mystery series, set in Southern California, features Juliet Applebaum, a former lawyer turned stay-at-home mother of two young children. In this book, the death of Juliet's personal trainer seems to have been a suicide but might have been murder. Juliet investigates, and finds a twisted trail of closed adoption, covert anti-Semitism and family secrets. There were some laugh-out-loud moments in the book, which I always enjoy.

haunted mysteries and historical horror

July 14 to 17, 1975, no entry - maybe I was still chipping away at Michener’s Hawaii, in anticipation of actually going there that month.

July 14 to 17, 2005, I read:

No Man Standing, Barbara Seranella

This is the fifth in the Munch Mancini series wherein the former biker chick and recovering addict protagonist solves a mystery and copes with the ghosts of her past. Excellent writing, and the heroine’s grit makes her human and understandable. The previous four books are No Human Involved, No Offense Intended, Unwanted Company and Unfinished Business. There’s a sixth, Unpaid Dues, and a seventh, Unwilling Accomplice, just out, but I don’t have my hands on those.


The Colour Out of Space, Tales of Horror by Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird, selected by D. Thin, New York Review of Books

These are the venerable masters of the weird--and I can’t resist being naughty and pointing out that none of these stories are protected by copyright, which makes them much cheaper to anthologize. If one is not used to the florid verbiage of bye gone storytelling, one might be impatient with these masters. This one was.

However, I’ve been going through some Lovecraft nostalgia. One of the things I did in Hawaii in July 1975, was to play hooky from the Buddhist convention to watch on The Dunwich Horror (with Sandra Dee!) on TV in the hotel room. Amazing. Younger readers will find it hard to imagine, but I actually did not own a TV, so this was a special treat for me.

The Masters of the Wierd anthology had some good stories, specifically the title story. I wouldn’t recommend the gratuitous sadistic cat slaughter in Bram Stoker’s The Squaw, which is also horribly contrived--the minute the iron maiden torture device is mentioned, you know the author’s going to turn twist the narrative into a pretzel to get a character in there. I sort of wanted O. Henry to come in and shake his finger at Stoker for this.

Reality, fiction, emotion

July 11, 1975, I read:

The Reality Trip, Robert Silverberg


July 7 through July 13, 2005, I read:

Something Rotten, Jasper Fforde
The totally charming, and moving, fourth and final book in the Thursday Next, time-traveling, book-traveling series. I always like books that make me laugh out loud, and am generally suspicious of the ones that bring tears. I distrust manipulative writing and never touch known tearjerkers. But Fforde ends this book and the series with genuine emotion and a resolution that seemed inevitable and just right.


The Closers, Michael Connelly
Connelly is a master of storytelling and particularly in elegantly filling in the somewhat complicated background of his police detective, Harry Bosch, without ever giving the reader the sense that the story stops so that information can be delivered. If you read the early Connelly books, you can see that it was not ever thus, and it gives us all hope to see a writer growing more powerful with each book and giving a series character more depth.

The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters, Elisabeth Robinson
If this book had not been so well written, I wouldn’t have stayed the distance because both the tragic and the comic subject matter equally push my anxiety buttons. It is told in letters written by older sister Olivia as she tries to keep her Hollywood producer career going and at the same helps take care of her gravely ill younger sister. I had to skip some sections that so faithfully recorded the long hospital hell sections. “Blah-blah-blah--hospital” Two pages later. “still in the hospital." In real life you have no choice. In a book you can skip the pages.

Ironically, the book’s comic relief letters were almost as painful for me. The narrator alternates letters to and about her dying sister with letters and emails selling herself as a producer and detailing her deals with Hollywood, movie stars, backstabbing fellow producers.

Let‘s see, life and death in the hospital waiting room, or grinning tap dancing in the face of rejection and double dealing--way too much like what writers go through selling our work.

It‘s truly a testament to Robinson's excellent writing that I read as much, and skipped as little as I did.

That said, this was not one of those books of such stunning genius that I was unable to skip. There are such books--I‘ve gravitated to them through some sort of death wish in times of crisis. Hot tip: If you‘re going through a horrible life crisis, I personally do not recommend reading D.M. Thomas‘s The White Hotel or William Kennedy‘s Ironweed--beautifully written, majorly depressing.

No computer for 2 weeks….resurrecting old habits

On or around June 23, my old computer turned itself off and refused to be turned on again. It expired at the age of 6, which is roughly 102 in computer years. It had lived a full life and certainly pushed its brain to the max. It was sorely missed by me. I had no connection to the internet, no way to add to my ongoing manuscripts…no way to do the work I do in order to pay my living expenses--and in the short run, no funds to simply buy a new computer.

Over the past two weeks I tried a loaned computer that didn’t work. It could not be induced to connect with the internet. This was one of those computers, that when you talk to tech support and they ask, "What kind of computer do you have?" you have to read a list of parts that your local Frankenstein Junior has kindly put together and zapped into existence. The New Improved Tech Support Person then tells you that the equipment you have won't cut it, and recognizing a sales opportunity, routes you to a sales person who tries to sell you a new computer that you can't afford.

While I wasn’t looking in the past six years, 3.5” floppy drives have evidently become obsolete, and are no longer standard equipment on computers. So much for my diligent habit of backing up my work! The teenager who was kind enough to help with the loaner computer eventually stopped returning my calls--and I totally understand why! In one of our last communications, I asked about the floppy drive, he suggested I get someone who does have a floppy drive to email me the documents. Alas, since I was unable to connect to the internet to retrieve them… Old people's problems--eeek! When I was his age, I distinctly remember hanging up on some old person who was bugging me about a problem I could not solve and did not want to hear about.

At last, on Friday, July 8th, due to the kindness of my saintly brother and the early payment of an outstanding invoice, I was able to rejoin the computer world with a new brand name computer. Although it doesn’t have a 3.5” floppy drive (or 8-track stereo--sorry that’s a ‘70s joke), I was able to get on the net--receive my archived manuscripts from a kindly neighbor with a 3.5” floppy drive, and rejoin the 21st century.

During the two weeks with no computer, I did my writing with a pen and paper, and read lots o’ books. These old, old habits had never really gone away, and they reminded me that there are ways to cope, no matter what happens.

I read so many books in the last two weeks, and have enough to say, that I’m going to break it down into two entries today and tomorrow.


June 23-July 7, 1975 I read:


George, Be Careful: a Greek florist‘s kid in the roughhouse world of advertising, by legendary adman George Lois

Just as I was looking back at this book, I happened to see George Lois on a television reality show, The Cut, wherein designer Tommy Hilfiger holds a sort of designer boot camp/Survivor Manhattan Island for aspiring designers.


Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder

Psychic discoveries continue, even in the absence of the iron curtain.


June 23-July 7, 2005, I read:


Geisha, Lisa Dalby

Ironically, here’s a 1975 book that I missed the first time round. The geisha world of womanly wiles and eloquent, ritualized clothing that Dalby explored as an anthropologist and a participant is pretty much the opposite of the way I was raised as an American woman. But living so close to Japanese culture as a Buddhist, it fascinates me. This book captured a very familiar world to me--the rich details of geisha life and the very different relations between the sexes in Japan, as seen by an American woman. I also saw how the author of Memoirs of a Geisha (his name eludes me at the moment) took waaaaay too much material from Dalby, and yet, I found his book to be so gorgeously written that I forgave him. I don’t know if I would have done so if I were Ms. Dalby, however.


Paparazzi, Peter Howe

Interesting book about the rogue photographers - thin on text, thick on pix, naturally.

Humor, horror, and--well, fluff

June 16-22, 1975

It looks as if my younger self was not doing much reading that week!

June 16-22, 2005

Undead and Unemployed, MaryJanice Davidson

I've been wrestling with the problem of humor in horror--can it live? This vampire chick lit book didn't help much, because there was very little that was scary, and it was meant to be pure fluff.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Taylor's status as Queen of the Vampires was mainly a way to work in lines like, "between work and the queen of the dead thing, and fending off Sinclair, I just didn't have time to cram a boyfriend into my schedule."

I read the first book in the series, Undead and Unwed, and this is possibly even more lightweight. The idea of the designer shoe fetishist heroine getting a job in Macy's shoe department was cute. One thing that I can see will be harder for the author to continue to pull off in subsequent books is wringing humor out of what begins to sound like a never-ending case of PMS, interspersed with flashes of lust for the King of the Vampires (see Sinclair in the quote above), to whom she is eternally linked, and whom she has decided to despise. It's one of the Scarlett-Rhett, "No, no, no, no--yes, yes, yes, yes!" relationships.

Not a lot of suspense there. As for humor in horror . . . I'll keep you posted.

One woman's poison....many women's whimsy

June 14-15, 1975
Strong Poison, Dorothy L. Sayers

What a great book to read for the first time. I've since re-read it many, many times. Not only is this a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, but it's also the one where he meets Harriet Vane. Many of us have been in love with Lord Peter since our first Dorothy L. Sayers reading experience of him. Harriet Vane, the crime writer on trial for poisoning her ex-lover in Strong Poison, is the perfect love interest for him. Partly because she initially refuses him! Most of us who adore Lord Peter do so because under his elaborately carefree witty persona, there is always a deep chord of how his experience in the World War I scarred him. Despite his witty ranting and his use of solving crimes as a kind of therapy for post-traumatic stress, he really is a noble-hearted, unaffectedly human character. What the whole "English nobility" aspect of his character means to English-born readers, I have no idea. It definitely added a certain glamour to his appeal. But the patient persistence with which he courts Harriet over the course of a few books shows the depth of his character and has provided a hopeless ideal for several generations of female readers--including me--and probably including his creator, I suspect). It's not that Peter Wimsy has all this noble birth stuff going for him (although that makes it possible for him to break a lot of rules in his detection of crimes). Rather it's the witty, loyal, ethical and gentle man of honor that Sayers has created, and that we dream of finding in an actual flesh and blood human of the male persuasion.

...and jumping 30 years forward to something completely different....

June 15-16, 2005
Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane

As a rule I have enjoyed Lehane's storytelling and gripping prose but the ending of this book really set my teeth on edge. I won't reveal any of the corkscrew twists in the last third of the book in case someone reading this wants to experience the ending "unspoiled." But I felt manipulated. Generally Lehane books are dark, but with an underlying affirmation and attention to small, comforting details that makes the darkness bearable. Once the mechanism of the end of this book started cranking, I began to lose interest in the characters to the point where their eventual fading out didn't bother me so much because I'd stopped believing in them. I have hopes that the next Lehane I pick up will be less thriller-ish and gimmicky. This time I just wanted to yell at him--"why do you think we read fiction? To lend meaning to life. To inject some understanding into it. I'm not saying you have to write about that. But if you don't--I don't have to read your stuff."

A few days with no books read, the business of books

Wouldn't you know that the minute I start collaborating with myself when young, the kid would start slacking off on the book reading! I tell you, young people back then, er, myself back then. Well, I was doing my best, and there was that thing called summer school--I didn't write down textbooks or other boring things I read back then. I had no idea that 30 years later I would be looking for what I had read.

Why do I feel like I'm in that Robert Heinlein time travel story All You Zombies Out There? (One of my all time favorites by the way.)

Actually, I'm in no position to throw stones at my younger self, because I've spent the past few days reading not books, but a pile of last year's New Yorker Magazines that someone gave to me because she couldn't bear to throw them out.

Speaking of New York, if you are interested in the first coherent explanation I've read of the BEA trade show in New York this past week, I put a link below to G. Miki Hayden's piece. This is the first explanation of this event that has made much sense to me. Partly because, as an excellent novelist, she puts you in the scene. She also explains the whole trade show aspect for lay people. I've been to trade shows, but she puts the event into a human framework that I could relate to. That interests me a lot more than what literary celebrities I never heard of were doing at restaurants I also never heard of. I may just enjoy it more because I read more mysteries and am interested in the authors she discusses!

http://www.todayinliterature.com/texts.asp?textID=1941&contributorID=6

Volcanoes, bird droppings, celebrities, ghosts & UFOs

June 2-5, 1975

I was still chipping away at:

Hawaii, James Mitchener
Slow going--I don't recall exactly, but maybe by this point the volcanic eruption that formed the islands had cooled, and the rock broken up to the point where the seeds contained in the droppings of migratory birds were taking root... When Mitchener tells you history, he starts from below the ground and moves up.

June 2-5, 2005 I read:

The Importance of Being Famous, Maureen Orth

Interesting essays (some more than others!) These tales from the frontlines of celebrity culture were entertainingly reported. I read this book partly to indulge my weakness for celebrity bios, and partly as research for one aspect of the ghost story novel I'm writing.

I also went back to finish:

Report on Communion, The Facts Behind the Most Controversial True Story of Our Time, Ed Conroy

I needed to finish with this book so that I could send it and Streiber's Communion itself to my friend in Nevada who was interested in them. The alien critter depicted on both book covers had start to creep me out again.

Okay, I admit it, I am not a fan of disturbing art.

Hawaii - conventions, murders, fictional refuge, true crime puzzles

June , 1975, I started to read:

Hawaii, James Mitchener
This was a long book, and it took awhile to read. I didn't finish till I was on the plane to Hawaii for a Buddhist convention a month later. Mitchener books are useful for tourists because they are like mini-seminars in More Than You Wanted to Know about an area.

Another reason reading this book took so long was because I had discovered I could finally get my BA degree if I took one summer school science course and I elected to take Physics for Non Scientists. This was taught by a radical physicist at SF State. He livened the course up with a visit from a Hiroshima survivor who brought slides of the aftermath (including some haunting images taken before the U.S. military could get there to stop the photography). We were all spellbound hearing how this man had survived because he was late to work--his office building was near the epicenter of the blast. I had some idea of the horrors of that day from reading John Hershey's classic Hiroshima years earlier, but hearing it firsthand made it much more real.

Then I had to explain to this physics prof why I was missing one or two sessions of his class to go to Hawaii for a Buddhist convention. He must have sighed inwardly--you go to all the trouble to dumb down the science, you take out the math, you make it interesting and human. And still these ditzy liberal arts majors need to take time off to go to the beach. Hey, I was a psych major and I knew he was a peace activist, so I talked it up as "for world peace, etc." He agreed to let me make up the work if I would give the class a report. No problem there! I still remember his joke when I told him the name of the organization (as it then was) NSA and he asked, "National Security Agency." Alas, no.

That reminds me of the Richard Armour joke in the form of a quiz in one of his humor books. In writing about The Iliad, he poses this question: "Discuss what would have happened if Helen had been carried off to Paris, instead of being carried off by Paris."

Eventually summer school ended, I passed the class, went to Hawaii, graduated with a mostly worthless BA in psychology and finished reading Mitchner's Hawaii. Not necessarily in that order.

From May 29-June 1, 2005 I read:

The Well of Lost Plots, Jasper Fforde
This was the third of four books about Thursday Next, wherein she hides from time traveling enemies who have "erased" her husband from existence. Where does she hide? In an unpublished book in the Well of Lost Plots. This was a delightful reading experience. . . and a story about storytelling itself. What are its components and how can they be put together? Will they explode or collapse gently into a deflated balloon posture? Do they need to be pepped up by injection of some nifty backstory purchased from a backstoryist in a small crowded shop:

"Something for the lady? Ill treatment at the hands of sadistic stepsisters? Traumatic incident with a wild animal? No? We've got a deal this week on unhappy love affairs; buy one and you get a younger brother with a drug problem at no extra charge."

Great fun meeting some of old friends, i.e., your favorite fictional characters "behind the scenes" in the story. There were too many cool things for me to pick just one... well, okay--I loved the nursery rhyme characters, picketing the Jurisfiction offices--they get no benefits or vacation because their stories are oral rather than written. A funny and convoluted and exhilarating ride.


Heart Full of Lies, Ann Rule
Here's a 30-year coincidence. Although the murder took place in Oregon, a great deal of this true crime book happened in Hawaii. The victim was a Hawaiian Airlines pilot killed by his surf photographer wife. Ann Rule does this sort of book better than anyone, and she keeps the reader turning pages as she puts the jigsaw puzzle together. This is classic Hitchcockian suspense, where the reader knows whodunit, and has a pretty good idea of why. Yet it was hard to put the book down as you rooted for the police to be able to find out the true story of what happened, and discover enough evidence to prove it. Masterfully written.