Boldly going where most people had already gone

At this point in 1975, I believe I had just purchased a television set. My first. If I'd had one during the (many) years I was in college, I'd probably still be in college. So I was able to watch all the Star Trek re-runs for the first time. The books I checked out of the library reflects that. Well, except for the Jayne Mansfield bio, but I believe I already confessed to my celebrity bio weakness!

November 13 to 24, 1975

Jayne Mansfield and the American 50s, Martha Saxon

Bracknell's Law, E. W. Hildick (noted that this was a murder mystery)

The Trouble with Tribbles, David Gerrold

The World of Star Trek, David Gerrold

The Making of Star Trek, Stephen E. S Whitfield, Gene Roddenberry


November 13 to 24, 2005

Yikes! Still doing editing and scrambling away at web page essays. Reading the backs of cereal and soy milk cartons. I may be enjoying the essay writing about as much as I enjoyed the Star Trek reading 30 years ago. Hard to tell!

Nutrition--physical and mental

November 4-12, 1975

Nutrition and Your Mind, George Watson

I found a neat quote from him online in a site discussing nutrition and alcohol abuse

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/youropinions.php?opinionid=4908

I don't remember reading Nutrition and Your Mind, but alcohol was certainly relevant to my life in 1975--it was a major part of my rather questionable coping strategy.

Those were the days when my only cookbooks were the Adele (not Angela!) Davis's nutritional cookbook given to me by my health-food-freak grandmother, and whatever diet book I was trying to follow at the time. As I look him up on the net, some of Watson's ideas about nutrition and psychological functioning resonate. Other people have taken his ideas in a number of different directions since. Some of them have made a lot of money morphing them into diet books. I don't remember if I experimented with his ideas back then—probably.

The Doonesbury Chronicles, GB Trudeau

Fun, and mentally nutritious! Still going strong after 35 years, and now it's online—god, I love the internet!

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/


November 4-12, 2005

The past week or so I've been editing business stuff for pay and starting to write the essays I keep threatening to put on my web site, so I didn't read any books during this period. I'm sure full-scale fiction withdrawal pains will strike at any moment.

A little touch of Falstaff in the night & Fat Chicks Ruling

Thirty years ago I was having a great time reading plays and thrillers--this past week…ehhh, about fifty-fifty fun to irritation. I think it's cumulative. I concluded reading a whole banquet of books with Fat in the title, preparatory to writing a sort of round up review and "state of the F word." Even avoiding the obviously negative books, it was a mixed mood experience, as you'll see below.

October 27-November 4 1975

The Odd Couple, Neil Simon
The Subject Was Roses, Gilroy
Marathon Man, William Goldman
Black Sunday, Thomas Harris


October 27-November 4 2005

Fat Boys, A Slim Book, Sander Gilman

Is the title offensive? I asked a fat male friend and got no reply—so I guess that would be a "Yes." It's offensive, and on purpose. When a woman refers to herself as a "fat girl" or a Fat Chick" it can seem like taking control because pairing a frivolous word like Girl or Chick with the much-demonized "Fat" puts an aggressively flirtatious spin on it.

The word "boy" has a different history. First of all, Gilman is referring to others, not himself. This is not the "fat boy's guide to life." For all we know, Gilman is quite thin. As is frequently the case in academic works, he does not discuss himself at all. But he admits that "Fat Man" has a totally different resonance than "Fat Boy." To call a grown male a boy indicates a put-down.

On the one hand, Gilman wants to explore the most derogatory description possible. Yet he includes a wierd little explanation of why it might be okay, simply because fat males often refer to each other this way.

The phrase "fat boy" will serve as shorthand in this study for the obese male. Elmer Wheeler pointed out that his rather obtuse (and rotund) publisher initially objected to his title: "I straightened out the publisher. Fat boys, I told him, have a habit of calling to each other, 'Hey, fat boy!'" [Elmer Wheeler is or was, the author of The Fat Boys Diet Book in the 1940s]
Fat Boys, A Slim Book, p. 8

This anecdote "straightens out" nothing. Aside from the questionable wisdom of insulting one's publisher, the fact that men hurl insults at each other when they are bonding is well known (some women do this as well). However, men also hurl insults just before they violently attack each other, as in the expression "fighting words." I see no evidence of brotherly affection in the text of Gilman's book, or in old Elmer Wheeler's "explanation." We never hear from Wheeler again in Sander's text. Possibly his miffed publisher made sure the book never left the warehouse.

Gilman's reason for compiling centuries of the most derogatory statements about fat men (and women as well) is that these attitudes have persisted throughout history. Slavery, mass murder and child abuse have also persisted throughout history but that doesn't mean we should accept them as folk wisdom. The book is on the scholarly side, with almost as many pages devoted to footnotes as to text. I can't call it a Recovering Dissertation because evidently the author has published a few other scholarly type books earlier.

Perhaps if someone had paid me to read the entire book.... But no one did, so I didn't. Short as it was, I could only bear to skim most of it. For ordinary folks, I'd recommend keeping a fast acting, anti-depressant handy while reading it. (Is there such a thing? Never mind.)


As a fiction writer, what particularly offended me was Gilman's take on Falstaff. I've used the Falstaff archetype in my own fiction (don't ask where, but if you want to be notified when it sees print, I'll email you—it may be a few years!) My own creative experience with Falstaff, the Fat Rogue, was an amazing one. When I invoked him from the place where fictional characters live (in this case, Room #23 of the Boar's Head Tavern, in the Shakespeare Quarter of the Collective Unconscious), Falstaff was alive, exuberant, and energized. As a con man and bad boy, he radiated naughty energy and and he was ready to meet my characters and run with them. He had some ideas of where he wanted to go for starters. First stop the Big and Tall Store for clothes, next stop a tavern with ale and pork roast, etc.

I felt that Gilman's dissection of the meaning of Falstaff (diseased, aged, emasculated) combined an autopsy report and a social worker's report. All data and no juice. I strenuously disagree that Falstaff engendered contempt in audiences. Queen Elizabeth the First did not request a play be written "with Falstaff in love" because he was a diseased, impotent, old codger. She didn't think there was too much of him—she wanted more!

I really wanted to like Fat Boys, A Slim Book because there aren't that many books exploring maleness and fatness. If someone knows of any that really do, please tell me!


Fat Chicks Rule! Lara Frater

After Fat Boys, I was relieved to turn to this, a witty book with no pretensions and a totally positive and accessible tone.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that under Fat Chick Lit, Frater lists my Josephine Fuller mystery series, for which I am duly grateful.

The edge to Frater's book comes from her description of her own experience growing up fat.

When you begin to look into size acceptance you encounter so many "fat stories" and so much suffering. It reminds me of the phrase "Speak Bitterness." The women's movement of the 1970s borrowed this phrase from 1940s China, where women who had been literally enslaved, were liberated and encouraged to talk about their experiences being sold as concubines, battered and oppressed in ways unthinkable to us.

Sometimes it is very healing to speak the bitterness—to be allowed to say what happened, and to know that people will listen. I'm not going to go into this at great length here, but I gotta say reading a few dozen "fat stories" can depress the hell out of you for awhile. The ill-treatment doesn't extend to slavery, but there's no question that people with low self-esteem can be easily exploited.

Frater's Introduction devotes three pages to her own story as a fat person--which was the perfect amount for this kind of book. She discussed how she has coped, and while admittedly a work in progress, she is ready to offer up resources to help others. She says--

I want to help end the cycle of destruction that dieting and lack of self-esteem leads to, and help my fellow fat chicks accept two important things:

You are beautiful even if you don't measure up to the Hollywood standard of beauty.

There is no perfect number, perfect weight, perfect size or perfect body, except what you think is perfect for you. Fat Chicks Rule! p. 13

Frater offers a wide range of strategies for fat chicks getting ready to rule. Some chapters include, Roll Models: Famous Fat Chicks, Entertainment, Seating Issues, Witty Comebacks, Fat and Fit are Just Fine, Tips on Looking Hot, Romance, Sex - including positions! The explanation of how "the same thing that makes us fat helps us to enjoy sex." was worth the price of admission.

I liked the crystal clear, totally positive tone of Fat Chicks Rule! I would definitely give it to a young woman struggling with body image issues, but I hope it finds its way into the hands of many, many women of all ages.

Our Obsessions, Ourselves

October 16-25, 1975

Busman's Honeymoon, Dorothy L. Sayers
(Read once more with pleasure)

Constant Reader, Dorothy Parker, New Yorker pieces 1927-33)

Mademoiselle Chanel, Pierre Galante: translated by Eileen Geist & Jessie Wood
Skimmed, I vaguely remember good photographs

Extreme Remedies, John Hejinian

Dolphins, Jacques Cousteau & Phillippe Diate

Homeward and Beyond, Poul Anderson

Lovecraft, Sprague de Campe

The Tomb and Other Tales of Horror, H.P. Lovecraft


Oct 16-25, 2005

I'm Not the New Me, a Memoir, Wendy McClure

A Fat Girl's Guide to Life, Wendy Shanker

Before I picked theses books up, I had Wendy McClure and Wendy Shanker mixed up. Well, actually I thought they were the same person, and at first I was confused that Shanker's website http://www.wendyshanker.com/
didn't have McClure's hilarious satire on Weight Watchers cards, which you can read at http://www.candyboots.com/ .

I gotta tell ya--reading the books together cleared that up in a hurry!

Wendy McClure writes for Television without Pity. She seems to be about 30.

Wendy Shanker has done stand up comedy on television as well as articles for many women's magazines. She seems perhaps in her mid-30s. Five years can make a difference in that decade of life! In my own defense against ditziness for getting the two confused, I'll say that the two books came out at the same time and were often reviewed together.


I'm Not the New Me, a Memoir, Wendy McClure

I started with this book because I had found her satire on the 1970s Weight Watchers cards so funny. Indeed at the end of the book, in the acknowledgements, she states: "Thank you, Weight Watchers, International, for influencing me in a way that certainly neither of us ever expected. And for not, you know, suing me." I am Not the New Me, p. 308.

Why should they sue her? Her book is a WW marketer's wet dream. (Hereafter I'm going to refer to it as "WW" because I don't care to waste keystrokes on them.)

Oh, McClure makes fun of 1970s WW recipe cards, but I'm not surprised that a publisher pounced on this one like a cat on a hot tinned mackerel.

Let's review" She's 30ish, writes for a popular-with-plugged-in-youth website, she's got her own "dieting progress" website with all kind of quirky, funny scenes from the life, and she's essentially endorsing female bonding through a venerable diet organization with a major marketing budget and a vested interest in attracting younger consumers…. Hmmm…. That's the kind of math publishers like to do.

McClure's charm notwithstanding, I had to stop reading for awhile. I felt a mixture of anger, sadness and queasiness. The writing may be appealing or amusing but the actual effect is saddening.

It's one thing when McClure free-associates over the lame, puke-in-Technicolor '70s recipe cards. I laughed. You can read it free at the candyboots.com site referenced above.

But when I realized that I had paid money for a book that was essentially a love affair with a national diet plan, I had to put the book down. I got nauseous for real.

Fortunately, I picked up--

Review of A Fat Girl’s Guide to Life by Wendy Shanker

Shanker's journalistic background and in-your-face feminist attitude cleared out some cobwebs immediately.

Plenty of research suggests that obesity—at least as it's classically defined—is not nearly the death sentence that most media outlets and weight-loss companies would have you believe. Half of have the battle is won when you start reading between the lines. You have to look for alternative opinions because they don't get a lot of publicity. NO ONE MAKES MONEY FROM TELLING YOU YOU'RE FINE THE WAY YOU ARE. The Fat Girl's Guide to Life, p. 113 [full caps from LM.]


Okay just one more quote, the nausea receding…feeling better now:

….MAJOR WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAMS WOULD NOT BE SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS MODELS IF THEY HELPED YOU LOSE WEIGHT AND MAINTAIN THAT LOSS. The Fat Girl's Guide to Life, p. 50 [full caps in original].

Shanker gets a bit bossy in her prescriptions for a healthy life as a "Fat Girl" (as opposed to a cringing lower case "fat girl"). But there are so many people trying to tell us what to do and eat and think, it's refreshing to find a bossy young woman telling us, "Think for yourself, goddamn it."

Eventually I did go back and finish I Am Not the New Me. McClure is a skillful and sensitive writer. I suppose what haunted me the most—possibly because I'm around the same age as McClure's mother—is the way that both mother and daughter justify the mother's TWO stomach stapling operations, and then blame the mother for regaining all the weight after each. McClure states:

My mom was getting fat again. The surgeries could only do so much; unlike the kinds of gastric surgeries that came later, there was no intestinal bypass….and it was possible to stretch the stomach over time. I Am Not the New Me, p. 144.

First of all this is classical blaming the victim. Second, gastric surgeons change techniques often—essentially experimenting on their paying clients. This also allows them to say, "Oh, those old operations were flawed." There is no proof whatsoever that the current crop of operations will have any different regain rates than the old. Weight loss surgery of any kind is essentially creates surgically enforced bulimia and anorexia--when they talk among themselves, bariatric surgeons admit as much. The effect is the same with both older and newer operations, and it does not make a naturally thin person out of a fat person.

McClure's mother sounds like a very gentle, long-suffering person, and I hated so much to see her blamed for regaining weight, or for eating ice cream because it was all she could keep down without vomiting. McClure asks her mother (who is a therapist) if she felt okay about having two gastric surgeries and then regaining all the weight each time. Her mother essentially tells her--

...she says she wished she hadn't, of course. She says it was goodjust to do it. There was a time she'd convinced herself that she was just too far gone, and the fact that her body had this potential to change, that despite everything it could follow the logic of science, that therefore she was still a part of the world, part of everything. I'm Not the New Me, p. 297

Sigh.

McClure certainly took risks, first in web journaling openly on the internet about intensely personal life, and now in exposing the same things in book form. Her honesty is engaging, but the way that she clings to weighing herself as a barometer of self-worth drives me totally up the wall.

Mainly I felt like handing McClure a copy of A Fat Girl's Guide to Life.

As the Feng Shui-s

The "Re" line doesn't seem to have much to do with the books I read--or maybe it does.

I liked the way it sounded saying it out loud. [Ya know,"As the feng shways----never mind.]Written down—not so much!

Come to think of it, maybe it does have something to do with the books I read this past week. Both of which were by women who garner laughter when they read their pieces out loud, and who couldn't get a laugh out of me reading their books. I wanted to laugh...but no. As for what I was reading in 1975--mostly more serious, but not all!

October 10-18, 1975

The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (hardly begun--never finished)

This may have been the point at which I realized I'm never in this life going to finish any of those long Solzhenitzyn books. I did read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but that was short.


Behind the Mask, Louisa May Alcott
American Gothic, Robert Bloch


Oct 10-18, 2005

Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs, Cheryl Peck

I admire Cheryl Peck's positive view about her own body and lifestyle enough that I feel bad about not laughing at anything in this book. Many readers found it hilarious. I also understand the author reads the pieces in various gatherings to appreciative audiences. I am always mystified when people laugh at things I read out loud--there definitely is a "presence factor" that can work in favor of a reader. Maybe Peck's personal magnetism when reading would lend these pieces something that I did not find on the plain black-and-white pages.

I wanted to enjoy this book because the author is a large, in-charge, middle-aged lesbian from Michigan. Those are all things I want to like. I applaud the attitude and I did enjoy some of the pieces, like her touching reminiscence of how her grandmother made all their dresses when she and her sisters were growing up. But I grew distinctly irritated at her sisters, whom she identified with nicknames like Wee One, UnWee—I can't go on. The nicknames in the book were gratuitously precious, and really annoying to me.

Maybe there is no easily discernable "why" one person finds something hilarious and another does not. Here's a sample from the title piece, just in case you may like it:

If you took a poll of fat girls, you would knock on a lot of unfriendly doors before you would find the jolly, fun-loving sport who would answer, "Heck, yes, I love to sit down in a lawn chair that breaks, dumps me on my ass in front of all my friends and leaves me to wonder, how am I ever going to get back up?" Kristin would not be one of those women.
Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs, p. 156

What took the humor right out of the title essay, and irked the hell out of me was how all Kristin's friends unmercifully teased her about this episode. Not amusing to me, and not the sort of friendship I find appealing.


Big Girl's Guide to Life, Bunkie Lynn

A forty-something, self-described Big Girl with attitude, Bunkie Lynn was raised in the American South, now living in Nashville, Tennessee. I have heard from many Southern women that "fat" is a particularly rude and obscene word to say right out there in front of everyone, so saying "Big Girl" makes sense.

The humor is heavy on sarcasm, and evidently she's a successful speaker who entertains her audience in person. Any amusement I might have taken from the author's strategies was heavily diluted by her underlying assumption that she (and every Big Girl by extension) really SHOULD diet, and dieting would "solve" the weight problem—if it wasn't such a major pain in the ass. She just won't and she's now accepted that.

Myself if something has NEVER worked for me, I am no longer so quick to blame myself, and begin to wonder whether that strategy wasn't flawed. But Bunkie has never come to this conclusion, and in the course of blaming herself and taking blame from others in her life, she spends a lot of time (and unforgivable "Big Girl" jokes, aka fat jokes) outlining the supposed binges that Big Girl indulge in, and anyone who tries to stop them should expect to be flattened by an enraged Big Girl. Sigh.

The incorrigible appetites of fat women are a myth, and I just don't find it funny. Your mileage may vary. Here's a sample:

…When it comes to the pain in my load-bearing joints, I have two choices: I could lose weight, which according to my orthopedist would reduce the stress on those puppies at a 4:1 ratio (but the process would cause me to become an axe murderer); or I can maintain my current weight and take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) as the good Lord intended, with an occasional pain pill thrown in for good measure.

Being the intelligent Big Girl that I am, I realize my limitations. If I succumbed to a weight loss program, I'm starin' down 15-25 in the slammer for chopping up everyone around me who is eating foods on my forbidden list. A much wiser choice is to keep those NSAIDs refilled and memorize my orthopedist's phone number. Don't you agree? Of course you do. The Big Girl's Guide to Life, p. 84

Bunkie Lynn doesn't mention, nor does her orthopedist seem aware that "losing weight to reduce stress" in 98% of the attempts, results in regaining—often more weight than was originally lost. How good is that for the joints, eh? Anyway, I'm glad she's decided to maintain the weight she has, rather than losing some that might come back with reinforcements! If the orthopedist is doing such a good job, hasn't he ever heard of physical therapy, or does he just prefer to blame the patient?

Going all over the map without leaving home

October 4-9, 1975

Burr, Gore Vidal
(Didn't finish) I like his short essays, but somehow his full-length novels never have held my interest.

October 4-9, 2005

Where Fat Girls Haven't Gone, Staci Backauskas,
I'm always on the look out for fiction with plus-sized protagonists. In this book, heroine, Giletta Montrose, a truly big beautiful actress with attitude takes on reality TV. The title refers to the name of the series wherein she gamely attempts various stunts that "fat girls never do" such as: kayaking in the Hudson River, parachuting from an airplane, dancing in a music video, and competing in a beauty pageant where all the other entrants are standard-beauty-contest-zero-sized.

The reality show format gives the book a "what next?" quality as Giletta constantly skates on the edge of humiliation and physical injury (in one scene on real ice skates!) She always manages to pull it off and look fabulous, with more than a little help from "gal Friday" production assistant, would-be screen writer Madison, who alternates narrating chapters. A full review of this book and fat fiction in general coming in a week or so to my web site.


Fat. The Anthropology of an Obsession, Don Kulick & Anne Meneley, Ed.

Fascinating series of essays by anthropologists about the wildly diverse meanings of fat in different cultures. The Peruvian fat-sucking vampire legend described on the back cover sounds like tabloid fare, until you read Mary Weismantel's essay, White, where she describes the deep sorrow expressed in these Andean folk legends. The vampire is a white predator--earlier versions had him riding a horse, now it's mirrored sunglasses and SUVs. He kidnaps and drains native people of the fat that keeps them alive, discarding their damaged bodies so he can grow wealthy from the last drops of their life force. The legend arises from a population living on the brink of extreme hunger on a daily basis. It doesn't take an anthropologist to see how these stories express the feeling of their very bodies being stolen to make others wealthy.

This book is a banquet of wildly diverse, entertaining, and profound explorations of the meaning of fat and body size in many cultures.

One such essay, Anne Meneley's Oil , explores the significance of extra virgin (and other!) olive oils in Tuscany. This article has changed my life! Never again will I touch that "light" olive oil-- evidently it's the dregs sold to the fat-fearing American market as "lite". Aiiiii!

Rainbows, crystals and enlightened crickets

September 26-October 4, 1975

Rainbow: The stormy life of Judy Garland, Christopher Finch
An excellent biography of Garland--one of the few books I bought to read over again.

The Crystal World, J.G. Ballard
Very tedious, a cross between Camus and Edgar Rice Burroughs with a dash of Conrad for atmosphere finally finished on Oct after 3 days. I do remember that this book was about everyone, everything turning into crystals. Not exactly fast moving.


September 26 to October 4, 2005

Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism, Jacqueline Ilyse Stone
This is a scholarly book I might not have attempted it, if it hadn’t been written by a very close friend. She suggested that, as a Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist, I might find it easier to start with Chapter 6, which contains the biography of Nichiren. So I read the first chapter and then the sixth, and found it very rewarding. I’m not enough of a serious scholar to read it straight through. It may take me awhile to finish the rest because I have to let it sink in as I read!

By the way, the original enlightenment idea, essentially, is “. . . the proposition that all beings are enlightened inherently. Not only human beings, but ants and crickets, mountains and rivers, grasses and trees are all innately Buddha.” Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism, p. 1.

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.