Identity Theft

When I read a newspaper, one of the first things I turn to is the Letters to the Editor. But, I’d never actually written one myself until the Arkansas Democrat Gazette did away with their Sunday Book Section. That got my attention.

I quickly penned a thoughtful, courteous letter explaining my great sense of loss and sent it in.

A few days later, I got a call. It was a woman from the newspaper, wanting to verify my identity. Sometimes, she explained, people write letters to the editor and sign someone else’s name, so before we print your letter we need to be sure that you are actually the one who wrote it.

Well, I can understand that. I’ve read some letters I’d be pretty upset to see my name at the end of. But a nice, polite letter about the Books Section?

And how would I prove my identity? I could just fax or e-mail them a copy of my drivers license, she told me. “That’s a little extreme,” I said. “I hate to just give out personal information.”

She said that she noticed from my e-mail address that I worked at Harding University. A copy of my Harding ID card would do.

So, I sent it in. I don’t think anybody’d want to steal my identity at Harding, do you? If they do, maybe they’ll only take the part of me that has to grade Freshman Comp papers.

It is fruit . . .

Last weekend, we went out to eat at one of our favorite restaurants. At the table next to us sat a young boy, about four or five years old, with his parents and his grandmother. The little boy was enjoying his dessert when he stopped with a bite of apple cobbler mid-air and said, “You know, grandma, I could eat this stuff for breakfast.”

Sounds good to me.

Me, too!

Passages like this are why I absolutely love Anne Lamott:

“Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life—wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean. Aren’t you? I ask.”

I’ve had those same thoughts, I’ve just never said them so beautifully.

Dessert Psycho

I recently received this e-mail from a friend:

If all of the eight desserts listed below were sitting in front of you, which would you choose (sorry, you can only pick one!) Trust me...this is very accurate.

Pick your dessert, and then look to see what psychiatrists think about you.

REMEMBER - No Cheating. Make your choice before you check the meaning.

Here are your choices:

1. Angel Food Cake

2. Brownies

3. Lemon Meringue Pie

4. Vanilla Cake with Chocolate Icing

5. Strawberry Short Cake

6. Chocolate Cake With Chocolate Icing

7. Ice Cream

8. Carrot Cake

No, you can't change your mind once you scroll down, so think carefully about what your choice will be.

OK - Now that you've made your choice, this is what the researchers say about you... SCROLL DOWN---No Cheating!

1. ANGEL FOOD CAKE -- Sweet, loving, cuddly. You love all warm and fuzzy items. A little nutty at times. Sometimes you need an ice cream cone at the end of the day. Others perceive you as being childlike and immature at times.

2. BROWNIES -- You are adventurous, love new ideas, and are a champion of underdogs and a slayer of dragons. When tempers flare up you whip out your saber. You are always the oddball with a unique sense of humor and direction. You tend to be very loyal.

3. LEMON MERINGUE -- Smooth, sexy, & articulate with your hands, you are an excellent caregiver and a good teacher.. But don't try to walk and chew gum at the same time. A bit of a diva at times, you set your own style because you do your own thing. You shine when it comes to helping others and have many friends.

4. VANILLA CAKE WITH CHOCOLATE ICING -- Fun-loving, sassy, humorous, not very grounded in life; very indecisive and lacking motivation. Everyone enjoys being around you, but you are a practical joker. Others should be cautious in making you mad. However, you are a friend for life.

5. STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE -- Romantic, warm, loving. You care about other people, can be counted on in a pinch and expect the same in return. Intuitively keen. You can be very emotional at times but a true person in every way. You like to do things for yourself and help others learn about themselves.

6. CHOCOLATE CAKE WITH CHOCOLATE ICING-- Sexy; always ready to give and receive. Very creative, adventurous, ambitious, and passionate. You can appear to have a cold exterior but are warm on the inside. Not afraid to take chances. Will not settle for anything average in life. Love to laugh.

7. ICE CREAM -- You like sports, whether it be baseball, football, basketball, or soccer. If you could, you would like to participate, but you enjoy watching sports. You don't like to give up the remote control. You tend to be self-centered and high maintenance.

8. CARROT CAKE -- You are a very fun loving person who likes to laugh. You are fun to be with. People like to hang out with you. You are a very warm hearted person and a little quirky at times. You have many loyal friends. You were meant to lead and teach others. A wonderful role model.

The problem with tests like these is that the developers always forget about people like me. See, I’d probably get a small brownie, a sliver of chocolate cake, top it all off with ice cream, and then I’d lick the cream cheese icing off the serving utensil after the carrot cake had been served.

Anybody want to analyze that?

Booking It--Too Much Info

Have you ever been put off an author’s books after reading a biography of them? Or the reverse - a biography has made you love an author more?

Interesting question! I don’t think I’ve ever disliked anyone’s work simply because I’ve learned more about them, but the opposite is often true for me. I’ve had my appreciation of beloved novels enhanced by a better knowledge of the author. I’ve liked works and then enjoyed them even more after reading about the author. Occasionally, I’ve even really disliked a work, then after getting to know more about the author’s life, done an about-face and come to appreciate the novel tremendously.

It’s not that I’m engaging in or advocating biographical criticism, but I do think that it helps to know where and when an author lived, the struggles she came up against, the political or social or familial events that were shaping her life experience, or maybe even what the author stated she was trying to do with her work.

What do you think?

Sunday Funnies

First Lines, Part II

Okay, here's the next 25 Best First Lines of all time:

26. 124 was spiteful. � Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. � Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)

28. Mother died today. � Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. � Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. � William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. � Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? � Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." � Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. � John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

35. It was like so, but wasn't. � Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

36. �Money . . . in a voice that rustled. � William Gaddis, J R (1975)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. � Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. � Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

39. They shoot the white girl first. � Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. � Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. � Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. � Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; � Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. � Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. � Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. � Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. � C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. � Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. � Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. � Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

The Rat Pack Is Back

Last week, we went to see The Rat Pack Is Back at the Robinson Center in Little Rock. I enjoy all types of music, so when my husband heard this show advertised and said it sounded good, I eagerly ordered tickets.

I was really expecting it to be an older crowd, but, boy, was I surprised at the actual turnout. To my right was the expected group of red-hat ladies, but my husband sat next to a boy about 12 or 13 years old. I saw older men in expensive suits and a couple of twenty-something guys in toboggans with tattoos all over their arms. There were women in minks and pearls, and women in blue jeans. I guess it goes to show that music is ageless and classless. Well, some music.

We had pretty good seats. We weren’t right up front, but we were in the center, and I think that’s a good thing when you’re going to see impersonators. We were far enough away not to be able to see their faces clearly, so it was easier to buy into the illusion. The Dean Martin impersonator looked exactly like him from a distance. He really had the mannerisms down, and he could sing well, but he just didn’t quite sound like the original. (And I should know. I used to beg to get to stay up until 9:00 to watch his variety show. My Mom usually let me, and now that I actually get all the jokes, I’m a little surprised that she did.) The Sammy Davis, Jr. impersonator was great. I don’t think he was quite as small as the original, but his voice and dance moves were right on target. But the best was ole Blue Eyes. He looked exactly like him (at least from a distance). He sounded exactly like him. You could easily forget that it wasn’t really Frank Sinatra.

And, of course, the Joey Bishop lookalike was there to liven up the night with jokes. He really played the audience and had us all laughing. Finally, he started a blonde joke. “A blonde walked into a library . . .” he began, and the primed-up audience began to laugh prematurely. “What?” he stopped. “It could happen . . .”

Can't Buy Me Love?

Newspapers are cutting Book sections and laying off employees. Neighborhood bookstores are closing right and left. Tanking book sales mirror a tanking economy. All’s gloom and doom, right?

Not if you’re the publisher of Harlequin Romances. Sales in the 4th quarter of 2008 jumped 19%. That’s right—19%.

I can hear those publishing moguls now: “Let the bodice ripping continue!”

Fessin' Up

After yesterday’s Liar, Liar post, I started thinking. I’ve already listed for you the books I’m embarrassed I haven’t read. And I told you that, although I might stay really quiet during a conversation about a book I haven’t read and hope everyone just assumes I’ve read it, I don’t outright lie about it. But, like the preachers say, you can be guilty of the sin of omission.

When I was a young reader, I remember hiding a few books I was reading—Go Ask Alice, Mr. and Mrs. Bojo Jones, The Exorcist—feeling pretty sure my parents wouldn’t be happy with my choice. But maybe that’s something you don’t grow out of.

During the first semester of my doctoral studies at Ole Miss, I took a Studies in Romanticism class. It was great. We read classics from the British Romantic era and compared them with modern representations of that time—rewrites, movies, copy-cat genres, etc. The purpose was to compare actual representations, themes, and artistic intents of that era’s authors with modern perceptions of that time.

But one thing we were assigned to read was a historical romance novel set in that time period. And it was a real bodice ripper. The professor was even embarrassed. He admitted he’d committed the cardinal sin of teachers—assigning something he hadn’t read or previewed. He was searching for something in that genre, someone suggested this one, and since he had so much else to do, he just took their word for it.

The problem for me? It was part of a series. The heroine was a twin, and the novel ended with the twin’s romance beginning. And of course you know what I did. Yep, I read the whole series. It was embarrassing, but I just couldn’t help it. I bought them in secret and attempted to keep the covers hidden, but one day my husband saw one and said, “What in the world is that? It doesn’t look like what you usually read.”

He’s right. It wasn’t. But man, you can learn a lot in doctoral studies.