But Call Me Betsy

You know that guy who was in the British version of The Office and also in the newer Sherlock series? He's a Casper Milquetoast kind of guy--nondescript but attractive in this bland way. He's in a new show that I read about in US Weekly this weekend. If you ever have to choose between getting your viewing or book recommendations from say, The New Yorker or The New York Times and a weekly pop culture mag, I say, go with the cheap mag. They gave a thumbs up to his new show, Fargo , a series based on the Coen Brothers films, which happens to be one of my favorite movies, in large part because the main character is a pregnant cop, and the pregnancy part of the story has little or nothing to do with the plot. We watched the season premiere the other night and it was engaging, to a point, but also kind of boring.  Billy Bob Thorton is the bad guy, and Dan's stance is that he's holding it all together. My only concern is that they've created this really sad sack of ...

Checked out the Glowing Girls or the Luminous Girls from the library and it's an interesting story. You slowly begin to realize that the serial killer character, Harper, is time traveling to get his victims--all women from different time periods in about a 70 year time span and in the same location. The location happens to be Chicago, so that's compelling to me, but the time travelling aspect is less so.  His mode of recovery is this old house where he goes as a haven. He goes in the house, and time stops, and then he can think himself into another decade, with the limitation of those 70 years--he can't move beyond the 1990's, I guess probably because the author decided not to also try to figure out what kind of cars we're driving in 2090. And then there's this one victim, Kirby, who survived his attack, and has become a cop or a private investigator who is  highly motivated to figure out the identity of her would-be killer. How, though, will she make this lea...

Once a month, the Plainsboro Library has a book sale. On the days they don't have a book sale, they still have some crappy novels out on this one table (stuff like every Danielle Steele and Maeve Binchy novel ever written and other bodice rippers). But I happened to be out and about on Saturday, and so popped in and discovered that they have a basement where the books are stored, and it's around eight full shelves of books in all categories, and the books are in good shape, and written by authors with some literary merit. And they are cheaper than the one at the Princeton Library. I bought 9 books for $6.50. Here is photographic evidence. Some of the books are gifts, and some are for the beach. The full list is: Mystic River, Ooku (for Luke--this is a kid's anime book), Candace Bushnells's Lipstick Jungle (trash for the beach), Civilwarland in Bad Decline (short stories by  George Saunders for Adam at work), Walter Mosley's A Little Yellow Dog (my favorite titl...

Blogger allows you to look at the next blog on the list and I had some time to kill yesterday after work and so I did that and realized anew that there are a hell of a lot of mommy blogs out there. Like, 90 percent of the blogs I saw were mommy blogs. And they were kind of sad mommy blogs, where the writer was this woman who's about 26 and married to her college sweetheart, who has a crew cut. Both are attractive, and you can see that she was probably a popular girl in high school, and the guy is handsome in this new car salesman way and you can also see how he will start to get heavier and heavier and his neck will thicken with time until he will become this formerly handsome guy. And they are on their first kid, a boy named Caleb and in every baby picture, Caleb's nose is slightly running, but they are posed in front of their new house and everything is okay. And each post is about how great everything is--how they had an Easter egg hunt and Caleb found the blue egg, and ...

Just finished another round of fiction story selections for Philadelphia Stories , and was reminded again how quickly a story can get rejected for seemingly minor reasons. Don't get me wrong--I read the whole story every time, but if I'm not intrigued or hooked by the beginning, it's going to take a while to reel me back in. If the first sentence is weak or if the first paragraph limps along and the subject matter seems cliched or even if the title feels off, I am already rejecting it in my head. This is because there are 15 other stories to get through, and if yours isn't standing out in some way, I'm ready to move on to the next one--the one that doesn't immediately remind me that I'm reading a made up story by a struggling writer. In the body of the story, there are a few things that will make me race to the finish and not in a good way. I'm not a prude, but if there is a scene that appears out of nowhere that includes graphic sex or violence, I f...

Can you write a novel in tweets? I hope not. Can you write a novel in fifteen minutes a day while also being distracted and Googling things like "novel in 15 minutes" and checking Facebook every three minutes? I should always decide I'm going to write when I have several other unpleasant things to do, such as paying bills, because when I have another task in front of me that I don't feel like facing (writing), I will allow myself to attack those third tier annoying things I've been putting off. Why is that? Note: I am currently resisting the  Googling of:  "Reasons for Procrastination" or "Writer's block" or "Death of David Foster Wallace." Which might lead one to believe that I don't want to write fiction anymore, and so what is my problem? Is it an identity thing--like, that I have thought of myself as a writer for so long that I wouldn't be able to figure out who I am if I'm not writing? No, it's not that, b...

I hope I am not jinxing anything by saying that I'm almost finished with my capstone project for Penn. I took my last class a year ago in the spring--a feminist theater class that I really liked--and  then thought I might get to the final project in the summer, but didn't. I then thought I could do it in the fall semester, but the project got lost again in moving to a different city and starting a new job and living with this guy Dan, and all of those adjustments. But this spring, I worked on the project more and had lots of good feedback from Professor Zhuraw, my first reader (even though she sometimes yells at you over email by writing to you LIKE THIS AND WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH SEMI-COLONS?) and so I think I might finish this time (unless Rebekah reads this and gets mad and refuses to sign off on this, but she has a good sense of humor and so I am praying to God that's unlikely).  I didn't work on my fiction as much as I told myself I would. I thought that having ...

Catching up on the fiction in The New Yorker , and so just read Jonathan Lethem's story from April 7, "Pending Vegan." Have I read any of his novels before? I have a vision in my head that he has a book with fat stars on the cover or am worried that he might be the guy who wrote Incredibly Loud and Too Close, or whatever that title is for the book about people trapped in elevators (I am joking, of course! I know that it's about 911. I have zero interest in reading it, even though it might change my life. I feel weirdly resistant to reading books from a kid's point of view, as I think it's really hard to do well without sounding saccharine. There are exceptions, like Mark Haddon and Ian McEwan in Atonement and Dorothy Allison, but get off my back, will you?). Okay, I just Googled him and he's written nothing else that I've ever read, though he is a prolific and successful writer. This story is about an anxious taking his twin girls to Sea World. T...

19 and Counting is this show I see sometimes while I'm at the gym about a religious family with a thousand kids. In the five minutes I could stomach yesterday, the parents were playing mini golf with their daughter and her boyfriend. They had this ongoing discussion about how the guy was a terrible mini golfer, like he couldn't get the ball in the hole, and then, at the same time, they were talking about how the girl wouldn't even allow him to hold her hand. Two teens explained how they were going to wait until they got married to do any of that stuff, let alone kiss on the mouth. The parents were laughing and joking around about how terrible the boy's stroke was and no one acknowledged the parallel. The girl  just said how she's fine with not holding hands or doing any of that icky sinful stuff because she's not a touchy feel-y person. Or maybe she's not into him, which is a distinct possibility. I mean, what if she's gay? Would that be okay? They would...

Enough with the videos on Facebook that are supposed to make me cry or render me speechless with wonder, because they almost never do. I mean, I still click on them sometimes, but usually only if the subject focuses on a dog or a cat supposedly doing something interesting, and then the interesting thing is usually not all that interesting. It's usually the animal walking on its hind legs.  But what I see more and more now are links to older videos, as kids born in the nineties discover stuff that happened decades ago. For example, there was a link this morning  to Jane Goodall releasing a chimp into the wild. Jane Goodall spoke at my alma mater in 1991. That's when she was kind of in the cultural spotlight. I didn't watch the video link, because my guess is that she lets the chimp go and then it comes back and leaps into her arms again. I guess if you're still in your teens or early twenties, you may not realize that there are historical milestones most people older t...

We drove to Lambertville yesterday for a couple of hours to see the sights. In case you haven't heard of it, Lambertville is a small town near the Delaware River, somewhere off of I-95, very close to New Hope, so it's on the border of Pennsylvania. It's a cute town--not a cute little town, because it has a vibrant downtown and thriving antique businesses all over the place. Also, they have a Green Street consignment shop there; so you know it's a real place. The houses are great; these old Victorian style homes vs. the identical condo enclaves you see in Plainsboro and elsewhere.  I'm sure there's an extensive and history for the town, something about how the Lamberts came and conquered it and massacred the native people while wearing Daniel Boone raccoon hats and set up the first post office in 1881, etc. Oh, actually, I just discovered that you can read all about it on the Lambertville Historical Society website. In my brief skimming of the text, I learned ...

Yesterday, Dan, Luke, and I took the train to NY to meet Dan's family to celebrate his mom's 75th birthday. I always forget that you can be in New York in a heartbeat by jumping on a train--we hardly ever go. You have to buy tokens to park in certain sections at Princeton Junction, and for some reason, you must purchase these with cash, and they don't give change. I didn't read the instructions properly, put in a twenty dollar bill, and got back four tokens when, of course, I only needed one. Total scam--I'm sure that happens to people all the time and then you seldom end up using the extra tokens. Luckily, a lady came by and bought two of mine. We were fortunate also to get the top row of the train, which Luke was gunning for. We got into Penn Station with no problems and headed to Bryant Park to meet everyone. It was a quick walk and the day was so warm and beautiful that I thought about leaving my winter coat hanging on a tree for someone else to find. Seeme...

I just discovered the coolest, nerdiest thing--I wanted to write this blog post about "Under the Sign of the Moon," which is the latest Tessa Hadley short story in the March 17 issue of The New Yorker.  I was basically going to write something about how I didn't understand the story--and then lo and behold, the online version has a section called, "This Week in Fiction" where they interview writers about the stories that have just appeared. I haven't read the author's explanation yet, so I'll say that the story starts with this older woman, Greta, who is on the train, going to visit her daughter in Liverpool. While she's traveling, she meets an odd young man dressed in this old-fashioned way, who seems to take an interest in her that's beyond the normal polite conversation. There's something about him that's unsettling, and he seems like he's spent lots of time in the company of older people. She tries to avoid him so she can just...

I see Kathy B. every day and she's the best. Here she is discussing her typewriter as captured by Adam's Videolicious app (the jury is still out about whether or not we like this app).

Stealing Sugar seems like it should be a title for a young adult novel about a girl and her quarter horse.  But what I'm talking about is this part of me who still remembers being poor in Chicago--not poor like impoverished or needing food stamps, but poor like having five dollars in my checking account and a week left until pay day, living off of a waitress' salary and tips and somehow managing to pay rent and never really having any savings to speak of except for the annual $20 my grandma used to send me for my birthday. And honestly, until Obama was elected and offered that tax break to buy a new house and I got $8,000 back, I never had more than $1,000 in savings. Getting that lump sum all at once somehow made it easier to squirrel the money and spend a part of it on house renovations. But why then, when I'm nearly out of Sweet and Low for my morning cup of coffee, does my mind first go to the arduous task of stealing packets from the coffee shop? Not like a lo...

Went to the public library yesterday and was over-joyed to discover a new book by Sara Gran. She's a youngish writer whose heroines are often damaged (and sometimes they are heroines on heroin) and her endings can be shattering--I think I've written here about  Dope and Come Closer . One of those--I forget which one--ended with the first person narrator dying, which I thought was a cheat. But she writes interesting plots with main characters who are damaged but not hopeless and never cloying and always active in trying to get what they want. This latest is the second in a series about a female detective named Claire; it's called  Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway.  I had a bad moment last night when I was reading it and wondered if maybe I had just erased the memory of having read it before from my mind. Like, I knew that I'd read one of her Claire books, and had this fear that I'd already read this one but that my memory is so bad, I didn't recognize an...

I know I've written about the list problem that exists online now, but it still bugs me. BuzzFeed and related faux news sites have created this love of lists that goes beyond the "10 Things That Will Drive Your Man Wild in Bed" type articles that Cosmo has had on every magazine cover since they launched. Now, you can get these short snippets of life saving-ish advice via numerous shared links on Facebook, and the titles are usually a tempting promise to make a real difference or tell you something you must know---  "15 Short Cuts to Saving Money while Losing Weight," or "How to Sleep Better to Improve Your Brain Power" or else their just weird and possibly topics you could try to work into any dead conversation to liven it up like, "What Abraham Lincoln Kept in his Beard." But then you click on the link and the lists are cliche ridden and not startling or interesting at all. The title will be like, "How to Be Happier Every Day," ...

I'm getting my hair cut today for the first time in almost a year. I just don't go for regular hair cuts. I don't know why. Partially, it's because I spent most of my kid hood wishing for really long hair, like Jane Seymour long, like to the floor long. And so I would never cut it and it would grow, but it would be all straggly and crazy. And then I would decide to get it cut and remember what it's like to have a hair style, but then slowly forget as the cut grew out and I started to want it long again. I really couldn't tell you how much of wanting it long was because I liked it that way, or because I thought guys liked it that way. I had a dream last night that my hair was to my waist and it surprised me, because and I hadn't realized it had been growing for that long. I'm a little embarrassed to go to this new hair cutting guy, because I feel like I need to explain to him that I realize I have a bad dye job. That my hair is multi-colored and not in ...

Dan noted the other day that we have a shelf in our refrigerator that contains only pudding. He is not wrong, but let me explain.  We bought three different kinds of pudding the other day to accommodate everyone's preferences--almond milk pudding for him, peanut-free chocolate for Luke, and low-fat tapioca for me. He called it the pudding shelf. He's been noting lately that since we moved in together, he gained about five pounds, because my grocery shopping habits tend to skew towards those of a twelve year old with her parent's credit card, whereas his skew toward a hummingbird (i.e. I return with treats like yogurt covered raisins and ice cream, and he returns with dried fruit and twigs). If you ask me, he needed to put on a little weight--mostly because it's humiliating for me to be with someone who weighs less than I do. On the whole, I eat better now that we are together, because I have actual meals at dinner time vs. microwave popcorn and cheese. He cooks almos...

I'm reading a short story from the March 17 issue of The New Yorker by T. Coraghessan Boyle called "The Relive Box."  I haven't finished it, because I keep getting interrupted by my book (Moss in No Country for Old Men got killed off last night with no fanfare. I knew that might happen, but his murder was so understated that I wasn't at first sure if he was killed or if it was a different victim). And I also haven't finished the story because I'm not in love with tales that have a futuristic angle. For example, I love George Saunders' short stories, but I didn't love that one story where you could buy those Russian slaves as decorations--can't think of the title now--they seem like an almost too obvious critique of how shallow and disconnected our culture has become. In any case, this story so far takes place in the not too distant future where you purchase a devise called the relive box. This is like a DVD player that allows you to sit quietl...

Oh, by the way, it's April Fool's Day, so beware of bad jokes. I am still not done with No Country-- maybe 35 pages to go, but it occurred to me yesterday, as I was reading the italicized first person chapters that (I think) are the thoughts of the sheriff, that I could write more of my fiction in other voices. I almost never try on characters who are not like me, which means, essentially, that my stories all center around some quirky white girl of varying ages who is searching for a home or connection.  I never write a story where the main focus is an older black man from Africa. And I probably never will, because to do that well, you have to be a genius. I actually don't even like it when authors write in other genders; more specifically, when a male author tells the story from the first person perspective of like, an aging female prostitute. I don't mind it so much if the story is told via the third person perspective--Stephen King does this in a couple of his ...