Blogorrhea Junior

Fetishes

I'd said earlier that I wasn't going to write about this, but it makes me feel so much better about my normalcy that I might as well. That, and I feel sort of legitimized by seeing it in Critical Mass, the blog of the national book critics circle board of directors. So what do I do when I sit down to write something? I get a cup of tea (or a glass of ice tea in the summer), make sure the room and my desk are reasonably neat (knowing it won't last), either turn the radio off or put some inspirationally appropriate instrumental music on random repeat on the CD (mostly Celtic music for Prospero's Daughter), turn off the phone, and start to sweat blood (on a bad day) or go into a trance of automatic writing (on a good one). Honest.

Well, sorta. Right now, my desk is scattered with electronic gadgets, recently unpacked books, my wallet, old papers, an empty ice cream pint (Ben & Jerry's Heathbar Crunch) I just finished off, two empty glasses (ice tea from this morning and milk from lunch), a bottle of water, a stack of blank CDs etc. etc., and the radio is blaring obnoxious pop, and yet this is blog post number three for the day. (Hah! you thought I was doing these all week, didn't you! Surprise!) So even that little ritual doesn't follow. The only time I've ever had a real ritual is when I was first writing Prospero's Daughter, and I staggered blindly out of bed in the morning (I was freelancing then, also known as "unemployed"), made tea, turned on the computer juice and wrote in a blind haze, though I was not yet awake. Apparently this was Mary Lee Settle's technique too.

Other people, it seems, are touchier and more delicate fleurs, according to Rebecca Skloot over at Critical Mass. Who knew both Jack Kerouac and Francis Bacon had to start out on their knees? I can't imagine picking the fleas out of my cat as a pre-writing ritual, but apparently Colette found it soothing, if not inspiring. Sam Johnson, W.H. Auden and I also share the tea fetish, though I suspect they drank a lot more than I do. I also like to write in bars and cafes, and it seems nobody else much does that, at least according to these two lists.

Mostly, all I need to get writing is a lack of social obligations and the willpower to stop procrastinating. That's the hard part. It's the damn procrastination, of which this bloody blog is a big part. And housework. The freaking housework: schlepping the laundry out to be done, shopping, dusting and vacuuming, making the bed, cleaning the bathroom, cooking. And I know I've said this before, but I need more friends who are writers who understand me dropping off the face of the earth for a while, like Balzac:

When Balzac had a new work in view, he first spent weeks in studying from real life for it, haunting the streets of Paris by day and night, note-book in hand. His materials gained, he shut himself up till the book was written, perhaps two months, absolutely excluding everybody but his publisher. He emerged pale and thin, with the complete manuscript in his hand, not only written, but almost rewritten, so thoroughly was the original copy altered, interlined, and rearranged.

Now that's my idea of the writing life. Bad enough I have a part time boss I have to appease now. Since I was so broke when I wrote Prospero's Daughter, I couldn't afford to go anywhere anyway, and staying home and writing helped me save money. I'd go out and forage for neck bones to make soup with every now and then (seriously; them was some broke days), and then I'd glue my butt to the chair and write 7-15 pages a day. Heaven. And the book went through, oh, probably at least a couple of revisions while I was doing it, just like Balzac. Same technique.

I should start keeping track of my word counts for blog posts, just to see how much of this crap I'm churning out in my procrastination. Then maybe I can start counting this as a ritual. Grumpy Old Bookman was making fun of Holtzbrinck's bright new idea to have its authors do blogs to help sell their books—not an entirely bad idea, but the stupid part, as M.J. Rose explicates so well, is that they don't expect it to take much time: “In terms of effort on the author's part, a successful blog needs to have at least three posts a week, and it only takes a few minutes [to] post a new message, so it won't take them much time.”

Well, I know that had me ROTFLMAO. I mean, yeah, if you're going to just post a paragraph about where you're reading, but that's not very effective marketing. Your website can do that. As Rose points out, "For a blog to be successful it has to have passion, voice, commitment, creativity. It takes a lot for  the writer to bring fresh ideas to a blog on a continuing basis," as Jen well knows. I applaud her efforts. I've already given up. I'm going back to my comic proposal and my novel. Just let me get some tea . . . and clean the desk up a little . . . and just pack up my laundry . . . Oh wait, there's the phone.

Salvaging

I just got the last of my folks' stuff that I'd decided to keep. This last batch happened to be books (and a strong box), so none of it was breakable. Oddly, the boxes all arrived in fine shape, as though they were too heavy to toss around. Maybe that's the secret of having your packages treated well: put a couple of bricks in them if they're too light, so they don't get passed like a basketball in the Final Four game.

Anyway, as I was surveying what I'd unpacked, I started thinking about overlapping libraries because of a conversation I had with Dr. Em. Though we're both big readers and also like science fiction, very few of our books overlap. And though Jen and I have some serous overlap in our libraries, especially in fiction, many of the books she thinks are great and recommends to me, fail to move me, and vice versa. Now you'd think that I'd have either some serious overlap with the people I grew up with and learned to love books from, or that they would have a lot of books that I'd want, but that turns out not to be the case.

What's really interesting about this circumstance, at least to me, is how books speak to different people in different voices, and even at different times, calling to each reader's obsessions, no matter what the author intended in crafting the book (yeah, yeah, old Reader Response news, I know). Once when my mom was visiting, I gave her Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow to read because I thought it was such a great story about the utter failure of words to communicate intent, emotion, or meaning without shared assumptions (and sometimes even then). What she saw in it was the sneaky insidiousness of the Jesuits setting off to convert everyone. We were talking at cross purposes about two different books inside the same cover—highly ironic, given what I'd gotten out of the book. But that should have tipped me off for what I found when I had to go through their books.

My folks had a home library of about 500 books, hard- and softcover, trade paperback and pocket books. They collected books for what was in them, not for what their value as either objects or collectors items. Dad and I had always shared science fiction books with each other, and later on, when I got interested in them, Mom and I shared mysteries, but those were either paperbacks we mailed back and forth and then gave away, or library books. When I went off to college, Mom got interested in some of the history I was learning, so our libraries started to overlap there, especially in church history and odd little corners of medievalism, and in some of the women's fiction I'd rediscovered thanks to Virago. Eventually, due to space limitations, they started to rely more heavily on the local libraries and paperback exchanges, like the one at the Greenbush post office. When it came time to clean out their shelves, there turned out to be very little I wanted.

What I sent home was less than a shelfful, some of it sentimental keeps (like Mom's copy of the Harper edition of The Family Mark Twain, which was my first exposure to him), some of it because it interested me (Winston Churchill as I Knew Him by Violet Bonham Carter, which I suspect has amusing anecdotes in it), some of them because they're nicer editions of books I already own (The Folio Society editions of Animal Farm, The Best of Dorothy Parker and The Wit of Oscar Wilde and the Greek Myths). And there's Norman Davies Europe: A History, which I've been coveting since it came out; Christopher Hibbert's Cities and Civilization, which might be useful for a book I'm contemplating; and John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope.

Then there's all the odd medieval stuff: a lovely if out-of-date (in scholarly terms) Folio Society boxed set of hoary European dons: Geoffrey Barraclough's The Crucible of the Middle Ages, H. St. L.B. Moss's The Birth of the Middle Ages, R.W. Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages, John H. Mundy's The High Middle Ages, and Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages (known as The Autumn of the Middle Ages in its more recent and better translation); Zoe Oldenbourg's Massacre at Montsegur; Richard Gough's History of Myddle; and a little book called Jewish Legends of the Middle Ages, translated by Claud Field. Sadly, I think Mom collected a lot of the medieval Folio Society books for me to have when she was gone, although there are stickies in a couple of them, on pages discussing divisions of clergy and laity and the introduction of celibacy in the early church—areas of interest that we shared.

But that's all. The rest of their books—Dads WWII, British Empire and American West histories, and spy fiction, Mom's mysteries and fiction—I gave to the local library, boxes and boxes of it, or in the case of all the Time-Life sets, will sell at auction along with Mom's opera and classical LPs, which are legion. It just strikes me as strange that I should have had so little in common with my folks, literarily, in the end.

I learned to read in that house, from those two people, but much of what I read while I lived in that house is gone now. There was a set of fairy tale books that I'd give my right arm to find again, that contained lovely color plates and was, I think, mostly Norwegian fairy tales, but it also had Norse folklore in it, with stories about Odin and Thor and Loki and Freya, that first got me interested in mythology. I think those were the first books I loved, and like most things, I love them more because they're gone.

New Book: A Little Sadness For the Things Gone

This is a slightly goofy little project. The artgeeks in the production department at AKRF decided to put together a mosaic of "tiles" decorated by people in the company. Of course, I jumped right on this and was going to make a little book with my favorite quote from The Idler about work ('With a very few exceptions the world of jobs is characterized by stifling boredom, grinding tedium, poverty, petty jealousies, sexual harassment, loneliness, deranged co-workers, bullying bosses, seething resentment, illness, exploitation, stress, helplessness, hellish commutes, humiliation, depression, appalling ethics, physical fatigue and mental exhaustion.''  -Tom Hodgkinson, The Idler), but I kept having second thoughts. It seemed, well, a little snarky, even for me. So I dug through my poems and decided to set this one instead, because it's about how quickly places (especially New York) change, and how discombobulating that can be. It seemed appropriate for a company that's instrumental in changing the face of New York.  Here's what the finished product looks like:

You can follow the process at my Flickr account here.

"Your Papers, Frau Jackson?"

I don't know whether to chalk this up to small town cops, The South's conservatism, or the more insidious erosion of civil rights by Bush and his minions. I don't know whether to laugh at the absurdity or cry in frustration. If I'd been the one busted for this, I'd be handing somebody their ass along with a fat lawsuit for unlawful imprisonment and search and seizure. However you slice it, it's a shameful story and the perfect example of the utter ridiculousness and ineffectuality of so-called Homeland Security. From Grumpy Old Bookman via Bookslut.

On August 10th, Joshilyn Jackson, author of Gods in Alabama, was busted in her hometown of Austell, Georgia (pop. ~6,500), thanks to the Patriot Act, for a clerical error. She had recently been informed that she'd neglected to change her social security card from her maiden to her married name thirteen years ago, and had amended the situation by losing four hours of her life at the Social Security office to fill out a form after being threatened with arrest and loss of her driver's license (which was in her married name). The Social Security administration, despite her compliance, went ahead and revoked her license and issued a bench warrant for her arrest, dangerous criminal that she is. (Well, she writes professionally; that's incriminating, the pen being mightier than the sword and all that.) Lucky for her, most of her support system (husband, best friend, lawyer) was out of town at the time, so she got to languish and collect material.

What's significant and frightening and Kafkaesque about this whole episode is that it's (a) the result of a clerical error that would, pre-Patriot Act (not even pre-9/11 which is not a relevant event here) have been straightened out by annoyed phone calls and letters, not an arrest. Ms. Jackson is, after all, a U.S. citizen, born and bred, and we used to not arrest U.S. citizens on whims like this. Now we do. And (b) it was all because of papers. I won't even start on the fact (as Ms. Jackson does) that this all evolved because she changed her name after marriage; that's a whole other issue. But this thing about now having to prove who we are at every moment of the day is getting way too fascist for my blood. Bad enough my research on the internet leaves a trail (wonder what they'll make of me looking up fake IDs to find that link to the NJDMV scam below?) that corporate American can't be trusted to not turn over to the Feds without a warrant.

And don't give me crap in the comments about false IDs aiding terrorists. False IDs don't generally show up 13 years after marriage, which is how long it took SS to notice this discrepancy. And if it took them that long to notice one in a citizen, how long is it going to take them to notice the new fake IDs floating around (many sold by clerks in the local system, such as New Jersey's DMV)? I feel safer already, thanks. This was so clearly a case of not-a-terrorist that I'm tempted to say somebody did it out of spite. Austell is a small town where everybody knows everybody else. She belongs to the PTA and is a soccer mom. I daresay that Ms. Jackson's got some local notoriety, too, since she's just published a book and was on her way to a TV interview at the time she was busted. Obviously, these are all terrorist activities. Why didn't somebody just check with her first to see if she'd complied before arresting her? The slapped handcuffs on her, for Pete's sake.

[cover your ears] DON'T YOU PEOPLE HAVE ANY COMMON SENSE WHATSOEVER? WHY ARE YOU WASTING OUR TAX DOLLARS THIS WAY?

In a similar vein, a friend of mine at work was out photographing infrastructure (including subway stations and ConEd substations) for Columbia University the other day, with permission, and walked right by an occupied Dept. of Homeland Security vehicle, took her pictures, and left, without even being questioned. DHS didn't know what she was there for, only Columbia. When she walked by the car, the guy inside was scrutinizing a bottle of ibuprofen. I feel so safe.

Call for Proposals

I'm posting this for the folks at the Feminist Press, with whom I've been working for the past couple of months on another aspect of this project.  Please feel free to copy and pass on to others who might be interested.

Girls and Science—Call for proposals

The Feminist Press, in collaboration with The National Science Foundation, is exploring new ways to get girls and young women interested in science. While there are many library resources featuring biographies of women scientists that are suitable for school reports, these are rarely the books that girls seek out themselves to read for pleasure. What would a book, or series of books, about science that girls really want to read look like? That is the question we want to answer.

You’ll find several requests for specific proposals at our website. One calls for scientific detective stories based on the life, research, and discoveries of real women scientists. Another calls for stories featuring real young women—aspiring gymnasts, ice skaters, actors, dancers--using a knowledge of science to help them become really good at what they do. A third recognizes how popular Manga and graphic novels are with girls, and asks for imaginative new collaborations between Manga writers and artists to create adventures about girls who use real science to accomplish their goals. If any of these three book ideas interest you, please check out our website (www.feministpress.org) for more information about deadline and how to submit proposals.

But we do not want to limit our exploration. If you are a writer and have an idea for a book or series of books that is guaranteed to get girls excited about science, we want to hear from you. You may want to create a girl detective series featuring a set of friends—from geeks to sports nuts to mechanical geniuses—each with a knowledge of science that helps in solving crimes. You may want to create a story about a shy girl who goes on field trips with her favorite aunt, a forensic anthropologist, and helps to solve problems as she learns to think like a Dr. Bones. You may want to tell the story of a young science fiction writer who needs to study different fields of science in order to create her adventures. Whatever your vision, if you can write like a dream and can create works that are guaranteed to instill a curiosity about science in girls and young women, send us your proposals. We want to hear from you.

All proposals will be reviewed. Several proposals will be offered standard contracts.

Publisher: The Feminist Press at City University of New York as part of a National Science Foundation grant. (see feministpress.org)

Deadline: October 31, 2006

Format: Proposals should describe the project, the plot, characters, and length. No more than ten pages please.

How to submit: Electronic submission (word doc) to fhowe@gc.cuny.edu with the subject line "Girls and Science." Please include in the body of your email your address, phone number, email address and a short bio. Please also attach a brief sample of your writing (about five pages), and a resume that includes information about publications.

Flux Factory Exhibit Photos

Woohoo!  Photos from Nick Normal, the curator of the Flux Factory auction and exhibit that Stories from the Ruins appeared in. Big exhibit! Lots of stuff! So we're a little lost in the crowd, but then, so is everyone else. Here's a shot of our wee book, though you can't see it face-on. There are more photos to come though, and I'll post any with our book. In the meanwhile, here we are. Click for a larger picture and follow the red arrow:

And Yet Another Book Meme

From Dr. Em. I can't resist these things.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag five people.

From my new biography of Malory by Christina Hardyment (with pictures and everything!) that was just sitting on the table waiting to be shelved. Since this was gacked from Dr. Em, it somehow seems appropriate, Arthurian that she is. I wonder if this might be a book we overlap on?

Winter was approaching. Aware that this siege was going to be a long haul, Henry ordered the pavilioner to build log huts bound with withies and roofed with turf for the men, rather than just canvas tents. As they sat round their fires all through December they will have heard the story of how Robert the Devil, Duke of Normandy, used to look down from the castle's walls to watch Arlette, a beautiful young washerwoman, working away at the river's edge far below. Arlette became his bride and in 1627 gave birth to a son called William, who would win the accolade of Conqueror in 1066.

The Nefarious Post Office

I wasn't going to blog about this but having shared the story with Dr. Em, and finally gotten up the courage to open the last of my packages to see how much of the contents survived (about half), I thought I might be doing a public service by posting it. It would have been much worse if I didn't already have a lot of my mom's hand-painted china and if I'd cared more about the antique Limoges which was the primary victim, or God forbid, if it were worth more. (I'm still afraid to see what the bastards did to my box of Hummels.) Bad enough that the PO managed to smash the two most valuable pieces of it (two covered casseroles worth $45 ea.) Here's the letter of outrage I'm sending to various postmasters and the Postmaster General:

To Whom it May Concern,

In May and June of this year (2006), I mailed 18 very well packed boxes full of china and glass in separate batches from the Greenbush (48738), Harrisville (48740) and Oscoda (48750), Michigan post offices. All were shipping-suitable boxes sealed securely with strapping tape, their contents wrapped solidly in newspaper and bubble wrap. All were insured and marked fragile.

Every single box mailed had at least one item and usually several  not just cracked or chipped, but smashed to bits, as though somewhere along the line, the box had been heaved onto the ground from, say, the back of a truck. Every single package, no exceptions. At least one arrived with the corners split open (see photos). In some, the damage was so bad that I got slivers in my fingers from trying to unwrap the pieces I'd wrapped with newspaper and strapping tape. (See photo of 12" casserole below)

And today, I received merely the fragment of a box: nothing but the flap with the address and some bits of strapping tape on it has apparently survived the latest passage. This would be bad enough if it were an isolated incident. But this has become a pattern and it’s completely inexcusable and unacceptable.

Nor is this something you can blame on the shipper’s poor packing. My parents and I have been mailing packages like these back and forth for thirty years from this location, none of which ever arrived broken. I also recently packed a large collection of dishes and other breakables for a crosstown move in New York City; nothing was broken. When we pack articles for trade shows at my job, I'm asked to do the packing because nothing gets broken when I do it, so I know how to pack, and I packed these boxes personally and with great care. And no matter how badly they had been packed, it’s extremely unlikely that 18 boxes mailed in three separate batches would all sustain this amount of damage unless there was a pattern of extreme carelessness in at least one of the facilities they passed through. I'm probably not the only person to have this problem.

What the hell are you people doing with parcels? Somewhere in your system, you've got a clerk or a couple of them who do not give a shit about how they treat people's goods. Eighteen months ago, when my mother died, I mailed a similar large batch of parcels full of equally fragile items, all of which arrived intact, so this seems to be a recent problem. Somewhere in the system between Greenbush and New York in the last eight months, you’ve hired an extremely careless shipping clerk or two, who needs to be either fired or retrained or reassigned—and certainly needs to be disciplined. I suspect the problem is in Detroit, since this is where the latest debacle took place.

I’ve already made one claim (which was honored) for a piece I fortunately could replace, but the rest were irreplaceable so there’s not much point. Most of the boxes contained irreplaceable hand-painted china painted by my now-deceased mother. Some pieces were my grandmother’s antiques of nothing but sentimental value which I’ve now been robbed of by one (or more) of your clerk’s carelessness. I insured the boxes with the hopes they’d be treated with some respect—not because I ever expected to have to collect the insurance or because I could ever hope to replace the articles. Hundreds of dollars of irreplaceable items have been lost but no amount of money will ever make up for my emotional attachment to them.

I am asking that this pattern of incompetence be investigated and stopped, and I am sending copies of this letter to the postmasters at all the involved post offices and in Detroit, as well as the Postmaster General. It’s too late to save my treasured objects, but maybe it’ll save someone elses. In the meanwhile, the Post Office has permanently lost my business for shipping anything fragile.

Baking Touristas

Way past time to post about the lovely visit I had with Roger and his friends Jane and Sharon (who are now my friends). Roger picked the hottest weekend to visit, so we didn't do much but hang out at the waterfront of Chelsea Piers and drink, but we had a fab time anyway.  I haven't seen Roger in years and first met him through Cathy and Betsy in South Carolina. In the meanwhile, he's moved to Atlanta (which means he's used to all that evil weather we were having). So it was really a pleasure to hang out and catch up. And here are he and Sharon (left) and Jane on the Pier.

Roger's traveled a lot and recommended a hotel in Barcelona I'm going to have to check out, though I'm a little dubious about it. I mean, do I really wanna stay in a place called Hotel California? Even in Spain. Of course, we all immediately had to beginning singing the song the moment Roger mentioned it, which was when I knew I was going to like Sharon & Jane. Actually, I figured I'd like Jane when I realized the week before that she was as bad as I am about teasing people.  Three very fun people. Hope to see more of them, in the near future. Hear that? Don't be strangers (or at least not stranger than you are, you three!)

Another Book Meme

From "closeted humanities type" Radioactive Banana, who turned me on to the wonders of the Literature Map, which is sort of like browsing a bookstore where the authors are sorted by similarities of style and plot. (Could I have gotten another dependent clause in there? Probably, with some work. Sorry, I've been writing all day and I'm slap happy.) Jen beat me to it, but I found it first, even though she was tagged. The bad thing about a meme like this is that it attempts to narrow down to just one the books the matter to an individual, and that's not really possible to somebody who's really a serious reader. Books are like pot, they just lead to harder drugs (and the first one is free . . .). So my answers are more like the Biblical list of begats than definitive answers.

1. One book that changed your life? Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. I remember reading it in a fascinated and outraged gulp in my first year of college for a history class on the 1960s (in 1978) and thinking that, though it described all phenomena I knew and had observed in my life or my mother's, I now suddenly realized what they meant. And that it was just wrong. I had the same reaction when reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, and Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing. But I can't not mention Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, because that was the first science fiction I ever read, at the age of 9 or 10, and I haven't stopped since.

2. One book you have read more than once? Oh, gosh, that could be anything on my shelves. If I'm not going to reread a book, it gets given away, either to the local library or left somewhere with a bookplate from BookCrossings in it. At this very moment I'm rereading Robert Heinlein's Number of the Beast for the umpteenth time. I reread the first three Spider Robinson Callahan's books when I'm feeling low (see below), and Samuel Delaney's Dahlgren every ten years or so. I used to reread Lord of the Rings every spring. Dunno when I quit doing that. Dr. Em was talking today about how she'd realized that holding onto old books means holding on to old ideas from a past part of your life and I think that's somewhat true. But sometimes I reread a book just because it's so beautifully written. Like Virginia's Woolf's The Waves, or Spenser's Fairie Queen.

3. One book you would want on a desert island? The big, fat Norton Anthology of English Literature, any volume. I mean, if we're not being practical. Otherwise, I'd want a good survival manual with a section on makeshift desalinization equipment.

4. One book that made you laugh? Spider Robinson's Callahan books always send me into paroxysms of laughter, no matter how many times I've read the jokes. He is THE WORST PUNSTER in the world and I hate him for it. That's why I buy all his Callahan books. I know it's just rewarding him for bad behavior, but dammit, he's really funny.  Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, too.

5. One book that made you cry? Well, this hardly counts as a qualifier as I cry at nearly anything, but for sheer tragedy it would have to be Keri Hulme's The Bone People. The latter is one of those books that I've kept on my shelf but never managed to read again because it is so heartbreaking and yet it is absolutely wonderfully written. I see it in the stores now and then and sort of look at it the way one would a big, hairy tarantula, thinking "Wow, that's really amazing, but I'm not touching it."

6. One book you wish had been written? Well, I sort of wish some bloody historian had gotten off their hump and written the book on medieval heralds, minstrels, jongleurs, and other wandering musicians and storytellers so that I wouldn't have to. It's a hell of a lot of work and requires several languages and poking around in dusty old records and really, nobody's going to pay me to do it now, though it would have made a halfway decent dissertation topic, I think. I'm still convinced the court minstrels were spies at least part of the time and it wouldn't surprise me if some of the others were too. I've been waiting 20 years, and yet no one's taken the hint.

6a. (I'm adding this one myself for aspiring authors) One book by someone else you wish you had written. Virginia Woolf's The Waves. It's the perfect blend of poetry and fiction and the most perfect piece of poetic fiction I've ever read. It is hallucinatorily beautiful and a work of genius. It makes me sick with envy.

7. One book you wish had never been written? Easy. Mein Kampf. Not that it would change anything because bigots will always find a reason to hate, but it might have meant Anne Frank would not have had to write in her diary some of the things she did. See how books talk to each other? I am also at one with Jen's opinion about anything by Derrida, and with Radioactive Banana's about Le Corbusier. I also wish someone had stopped Dan Brown before he committed The Da Vinci Code. Barring that, that his publicist had been stifled. Hemingway's in there somewhere too, but he's merely overrated, not abhorrent.

8. One book you are currently reading?  C'mon, this is like a Lays potato chip. Just one? I'm a woman of many facets. So do I give you a glimpse of my cheesy pulp fiction freak (Laurell K. Hamilton's Danse Macbre), my Bloomsbury fetishist (Lytton Strachey's new biography by Michael Holroyd), my inner geek (John Brockman's What We Believe but Cannot Prove), the poet (Seamus Heaney's new District and Circle), my current research (Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics), my serious side (Anne Patchett's The Patron Saint of Liars), or my student of human behavior (Against Depression, by Dr. Peter D. Kramer). Take yer pick.

9. One book you have been meaning to read? Aiiiieeee! So many books, so little time! My bloglines list of saved reviews from Powell's daily reviews has 17 new books saved on it and my list from the London Review of Books has four more, my wish list at Powell's has six and E-reader a couple of dozen. Not to mention the couple dozen on my shelves already. One book I've been meaning to read? Please. Oh, okay. Here's one from my shelves: Torture: A Collection edited by Sanford Levinson. Because I can't seem to wrap my head around why supposedly sane people think this practice has any use or allows the torturer to retain the right to call himself human. Now if I can just screw my courage to the sticking point to actually open it . . .

10. Now tag five people. Dr. Em. Erica (I know you're reading more than manga). Mrs. Hamill, whom I suspect reads far more than she lets on. Roger, because he's such a thoughtful guy. And I would tag Rob, except he's still getting his blog set up, and Jen's already done it and that Jen-Luc Piquant is such a snob. I find it odd that, although Jen and I have very similar libraries (that's how we became friends) and quite similar tastes, we overlap here on so little. I'll admit though that Gaudy Night has also introduced me to other authors I wouldn't have known about it, and it's a book I read over and over again too, but that's about it. Hmmm. Maybe our books need to talk to each other a little more. Or we do.