The current book I'm reading is driving me mad (quite literally.) I've had to put it down a few times and take deep breaths.

I know there are two sides to almost every story, but I have trouble seeing that when it comes to infidelity. And when that infidelity is related to having "suppressed your lesbian side" by getting married to a man, I am surprised that I have such little sympathy, given those actions are often driven by societal pressure and both internal and external homophobia.

I totally get the suppression part, I do. I've spent most of my adult life bottling up certain parts of me. But I've remained single instead. I didn't up and marry a man because I was so "scared" (as the main character in this book is) of who I really am. When a person does something like that they not only hurt themselves, they hurt other people (especially their spouse) as well.

Another part of the book that is upsetting is something that also happens in real life. One of the straight women (also married) in the story is intrigued by a lesbian she meets and giggles a lot and thinks how "neat" it would be to see what it's like with another woman. This infuriates me even more because it's all a matter of "play" to the woman. She doesn't want love, she wants an experiment and uses her fantasies to fuel her love life with her husband.

This kind of attitude (much as the kind that goes with a straight woman wanting to have her cake and eat it too) is incredibly painful to a lesbian who is single and honest as possible and trying to find real love. You can't go into traditional marriage because you want to deny who you are and then one day finally be true to yourself and yet still want to stay married to a man while you "date" your girlfriend.

Arghhh! I just want to scream so much right now, even as I desperately want to understand (maybe even empathize) since the far far right instill these beliefs (the kind "ex-gay therapy" supports) that to can lead to marriages ending and thereby possibly threatening a very sacred institution...the very thing homophobic organizations like N.O.M. say gay people do.

the best finds in cozy places...

 

It used to be I couldn't read when I was sad. Now, it seems, even when (or especially when) I'm not myself, it's most when I need to read. 

I have grown quite fond of ebooks, but it's still print that comforts me most...and old book shops that make me feel just the slightest bit close to Heaven.

This quote really applies to getting away from yourself by reading:

 “Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”

― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Mostly odds...

It's been a while since I've read a Kate Sweetney novel (or, in this case, novella) so I'd almost (almost!) forgotten just how adorable, sweet and goofy her stories can be. This is the second smile-inducing read I've had the pleasure to experience this week.

I'm so glad Ms. Sweeney writes frequently (plus, more importantly, very well) so there's always more to look forward to with much eagerness. The Hypotenuse of Love (short as it is) is right up there with her wonderful Winds of Heaven.

Unless, you've been in a place where what you are is still an anathema to more than half the world you just can't imagine the solace you can find in words that help you feel less like a freak and more like a human whose only major crime is wanting to love (and be loved back) just as much as anyone else in the world.

I've gotten past more than I thought I would in 2014, so I hope 2015 is the year I finally stop seeing being gay as a big deal and maybe even find someone special. I'm open to that happening, but since experience has shown me it probably won't happen, I'm content to get my romance from reading.

Some movies (even silly, but thoroughly lovable ones) are of such great comfort to the soul it's hard to find the right words to describe their impact. I am so glad I watched Bringing Up Baby to get out of my funk. It doesn't hurt that I baked brownies too and fixed myself a glass of coconut milk. I've seen the movie dozens of times and yet I never get tired of all its wonderful zaniness.

I laughed like I always do, but this time I cried at the ending, which I never noticed before is so incredibly romantic and sweet. Is there anyone more adorable than Cary Grant when he's flustered? :)

And the chemistry Grant and Hepburn share starts almost from the very beginning, but it's only toward the end where they finally seem to be on equal footing, even if they both almost end up in a gigantic pile of brontosaurus bones.

My second favorite part, that one that gets me every time is when Susan (Katherine Hepburn) and David (Cary Grant) are fighting the wild leopard, not the tame one who is Baby. "I won't leave you David! I love you!" Susan cries when David tries to fight it by himself. It's such a terrific scene because Susan is being selfless and serious for the first time.

But it truly is the ending that makes me cry:

"I've never had a better time," David says after Susan comes to the museum and apologizes for everything that has happened since the moment he met her.

"But...but I was there!" She responds, sounding startled because she is, after all, fully aware that, despite her best intentions, she's pretty much made a mess of all their time together.

"Well, that's why it was so good!"

The very last scene, despite the wacky dinosaur set-up, is also especially memorable because it has its most heartfelt, mutually reciprocated moment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B16rhVK5Av0

A solid enough read and definitely sweet and touching in many parts without being sugary, Ruth Gogoll's take on The Christmas Carol didn't grab me quite the way her other novels have (Taxi To Paris, for instance.) It isn't so much that it's not a good story as it feels like something's missing and that it's much shorter than its actual length.

The love between the main characters does not have enough time to flourish, no matter how sincere, and I would have loved to see them get to know each other, truly know each other, before everything else happens. Even so, I find an "okay" Ruth Gogoll tale (most of her work is top notch!) is still better than many other titles in the lesfic genre.

One of the best...

Michael Hann, The Guardian

 

I'm listening to Pink Floyd's latest release Endless River (it's mostly instrumental and I love the "comforting sway of swelling synthesizers and the soaring Gilmour guitar that are sometimes unexpectedly moving"* ) while reading a sweet and likable novel called The Music of Mary Frances. The best therapy for when I'm down...low-key music and a good book. Pitchfork refers to the album as being "lazy" at times, but that's why I like having Endless River in the background as I read. If it were too commanding I wouldn't be able to concentrate.

* allmusic.com

I think about how much I love anything zombie and I wonder if it has something to do with the deadness inside of me that comes to my aid and surfaces during trying times. 

I see someone I like (whom I'm not supposed to) and I steel myself so well (it's taken time, but I think I've perfected it) I am almost positive the feelings are gone...even if they aren't really. With enough determination and acting, you can even convince yourself you no longer care.

The Living Dead 2 (as well as its predecessor The Living Dead) is full of high quality writing, sometimes bordering on beautiful. For me, the stories that appeal most are the ones that combine suffering with survival, even if that survival comes with the high cost of detachment. 

For more perspective on zombie fiction and The Living Dead anthology read here:

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/09/zombie-round-table-what-is-the-appeal-of-zombie-fiction

Sunday stuff...

Oh my gosh! So true...from today's New York Times:

|                                   

We Now Conclude Our Broadcast Day

Recalling the Imperfect Radio and TV Reception of the Past

By DANA JENNINGSDEC. 19, 2014

Inside

Photo

Remember when you had to wait for the TV to warm up before you could watch it? Credit Getty Images

Continue reading the main story

Also from today's New York Times:

Many years ago, when I was an innocent lamb making my first appearance on a right-wing radio talk show, the host asked, “If you don’t believe in God, what’s to stop you from committing murder?” I blurted out, “It’s never actually occurred to me to murder anyone.”

Even though I believe in God, it's long irked me that some people think atheists aren't moral people. If anything, a person not believing in God (and therefore possible eternal damnation in Hell) and still doing the right thing means she's doing the right thing for the right reason, not because of some fear of punishment:

read more here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/books/review/living-the-secular-life-by-phil-zuckerman.html

Okay, so I am addicted to Google Play Books and discovered a book by Havelock Ellis that has some rather interesting insights on sex. 

I don’t know to how to quote what I found intriguing without sounding rather crude (the book is surprisingly graphic for the late 19th century). In less crude terms, I’ll say what I think Ellis is saying and that is this: sex may seem highly biological and messy (he uses “evacuation” instead of the much more common modern term that also starts with “e”) but it has to be more if it comes with such a high intensity of emotion.

I can't believe how many times I've been experiencing something in my own life and then pick up a book that I have just started reading  and it's like the passage was meant for me to see:

The relation of love to pain is one of the most difficult problems...why is it that love inflicts, and even seeks to inflict, pain? Why is it that love suffers pain and even seeks to suffer it?

Picking up the book to read more of the "Love and Pain" chapter from one of this books I find myself more fascinated with the non-personal related aspects of it all and get sucked into the leaning and human interest parts. Reading and learning has so often been able to pull me out of myself and realize how universal alienation can be.

I am so glad I still have more Kayla Bashe stories to read. She is an amazing author and I love the way her characters care about each other and touch readers' hearts.

Graveyard Sparrow offers intriguing mystery, but it is the love that blossoms between Katriona and Anthea that pulls you into the story, head over heels. Whether they are about loneliness or love, so many of the passages get it just right:

--It was hard enough to interact with people in the first place. But when you weren't sure what they wanted to share and what they were hiding, interaction became nearly impossible.

--She thought she wanted Anthea around for the rest of her life. If she holds onto me any longer, people will think we’re betrothed, Anthea thought.

Also a huge plus is that Graveyard Sparrow takes place during the Regency era and, for all its dark side, has a charm and character well-suited to its time. This is a must-read for anyone who likes their romance chaste and their plots compelling. :)

Except for reading Elle for the book reviews, most of my adult life I have shied away from fashion magazines, not because of the fashion itself (though I know nothing about nor care for it that much) but because of the sex articles.

The degree to which some details are shared doesn't offend me (to each her own, right?) so much as it makes me feel completely inadequate and unadultlike. Sometimes, I feel as clueless as I did as a pre-teen.

Growing up, I used to think it was cute that my mom had to spell out words like "bra" and "sex," until, looking back now, I realized I knew little about either because they were two words that dare not ever speak their full name in our house.

I stopped believing in the stork around the same time I stopped believing in Santa, but still I had no clue about sex (no clue!) until middle school. I guess I thought babies popped up from flowers like in an Anne Geddes photo shoot or that two adults (as the narrator in Paul Zindel's Pigman imagines about his parents) bumped into each other accidentally in the bedroom and (bam!) a baby would soon be on its way into the world.

Just when it seemed it was time for my parents to finally explain, to finally explain it for real, "family life" (that was what they called it in the early 80s in my middle school) came along and 7th grade health class turned the silliest possible rumors about sex (you don't even want to know what some of the kids were saying) into sterile, sometimes uncomfortable, biological truths.

I had read a forbidden copy of Forever before middle school, but I honestly didn't get what the two characters did together. I thought it sounded funny more than anything else. It seemed about as romantic as a science experiment with rabbits gone horribly wrong.

My parents meant well, I'm sure, as they were both shy and sheltering when it came to that other "s" word. But I doubt they would have been able to get away with that approach these days. It seems like the age kids find out about sex (though hopefully aren't actually having it) gets younger every year.

My mother would still never dare talk about sex, or "s-e-x," with me now and not just because there's nothing to talk about and I would be mortified to, even if there were. Just as she doesn't seem to truly believe (much less accept) I'm gay, no matter that it's been almost twenty five years since I tried to come out, she seems to believe if you don't talk about something, it doesn't exist.

Maybe I've picked up some of that along the way because instead of reading the articles with interest, I kind of snap through the pages fast until it feels safe again to look at the magazine. How adult is that?

I'd like to say upfront that I have never been that fond of poetry, which is odd for someone who likes music a lot. Maybe it comes from too many years of having to read it against my will in school or maybe I was exposed to too much of the dark side of it...I'm not sure. I do know I love Emily Dickinson, but that's about it.  My poetry expertise is seriously lacking.

 

Even so, I like _My Strength_ because it's sincere, often sweet and very much for anyone needing to find inner strength wherever they can. Sincerity and sweetness can go a long way for someone who truly needs both in their lives during trying times. All the proper poetry technique in the world means nothing to me if there is no heart to it and Debra George's poetry definitely has lots of heart.

 

My three favorites from this collection are "Anger" ("This will be the last that /Anger causes me dismay/Just keep in mind that /anytime you go to that dark place"), "Crazy" (Captured in the middle/ nothing's funny yet you giggle/ Feeling out of place but you/ still try to act civil) and "Disgust" (But you’re in another place, /and they take that as being rude.)* There is an honesty to them, an easy to relate to quality about the whole collection that I like a lot.

 

The author herself writes in the beginning: "I wrote this for all of those who encounter emotional challenges in their everyday life. We are all human and experience a spiral of different feelings." One of my favorite passages is from "Yearning: "...just the feeling alone is the entity that carries you."

 

_My Strength_ is meant for those of us who get exactly what she's saying. I'll keep this on my Kindle app because of that. After all, one reason many of us read is because it gives us great comfort to know we're not alone in our thoughts, even the most isolating or odd ones....

 

*Just a side note: I put the breaks in as they appeared in the Kindle edition on the

iPhone app.

Bread, specifically David Gates, is exactly what I need right now. I love his gentle voice (that goes so well with his kind face) and I need a good cry and if a person can't cry over songs like "If" and "Lost Without Your Love," then what songs can you cry over? I swear...if actresses need help getting ready for a scene where they have to sob, they should just listen to David Gates.

 

I found this article on him very interesting, especially since its focus is on "Diary" and why it's such a rare kind of song for pop:

 

“Diary” actually surged as high as #15 in 1972. Maybe the one thing that Gates overlooked when assessing the song is that is the lure of a great twist ending. It’s the kind of a thing that’s a little easier to pull off in a movie when there are a couple of hours to set the surprise up. It’s a much tougher task in a song, but Gates pulls it off while still delivering a resonant story of unrequited love.

 

http://www.americansongwriter.com/2013/09/bread-diary/

 

The lyrics to "Diary":

 

I found her diary underneath a tree
And started reading about me
The words she'd written took me by surprise
You'd never read them in her eyes

They said that she had found
The love she'd waited for
Wouldn't you know it?
She wouldn't show it

When she confronted with the writing there
Simply pretended not to care
I passed it off as just in keeping with
Her total disconcerting air

And though she tried to hide
The love that she denied
Wouldn't you know it?
She wouldn't show it

And as I go through my life
I will give to her my wife
All the sweet things, I can find

I found her diary underneath a tree
And started reading about me
The words began to stick and tears to flow
Her meaning now was clear to see

The love she'd waited for
Was someone else not me
Wouldn't you know it?
She wouldn't show it

And as I go through my life
I will wish for her his wife
All the sweet things she can find
All the sweet things they can find

It seems perfectly fitting that someone who writes and sings as David Gates does has remained married to his high school sweetheart since 1958. As the article above points out:

 In one of the noblest gestures under extreme duress in pop music history, somehow this guy musters up the strength to give this couple his blessings: “And as I go through my life/I will wish for her his wife/All the sweet things they can find/All the sweet things they can find.”

I think that's why I like the song so much...because it captures true love, which is wanting the person you care about to be happy, whether she feels the same for you or not.
\

Sometimes I actually fantasize about doing this:

 http://www.wikihow.com/Fake-Your-Own-Death

I don't know why I didn't know it's against the law to do so...so I guess that's out for me. I would never intentionally break the law, but I so want to just make a completely fresh start with my life. I've f**d it up very much.

I'm so out of sorts with my parents these past few weeks and someone I like now hates me (though she's too much of a lady to say so) and the more I try to do the right thing, the worse I make it. 

The road to Hell really is paved with good intentions. People can't read your mind or your emotions so all you have to show for who you truly are is how you behave and I behave like an idiot more times than not. 

Still, I will not give up on trying to be a better person and starting over:

  http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/emotional-fitness/201001/10-ways-and-reasons-you-can-start-over

I am truly enjoying this book. Entertainment Weekly critic Melissa Maerz reviewed it recently, giving it an A-:


For hardcore film obsessives, there's no movie so thrillingly obscure as one that doesn't exist. ''Lost movies appeal to our sense of doomed artistry,'' a film scholar tells our heroine, Ceinwen Reilly, in the absorbing debut novel Missing Reels. ''We build up heroic concepts of certain directors. Then, when their work is lost, we imagine what we're missing as even better than the movies we have.''

That sums up Missing Reels' romantic view of cinema nicely, although these words might be hard for Ceinwen to hear. She's living in New York during the 1980s, when the revival-house scene is booming. And when she's not dressing up like Jean Harlow to work as a shopgirl at Vintage Visions, or forcing her gay roommates/BFFs to watch Shanghai Express, she's hunting for her own lost classic, The Mysteries of Udolpho, a silent film that may or may not star her downstairs neighbor Miriam. When Ceinwen meets Matthew, a dashing British mathematician, Missing Reels starts to feel like a classic movie itself: There's a dramatic screwball romance and an exciting hard-boiled mystery, as well as one too many monologues. There's also enough trivia to delight any cinephile. Glancing at Ceinwen's outfit, Miriam says that if she really wanted to look like Jean Harlow, she wouldn't wear underwear.

The film-snob debates in this book will remind you why so many great relationships are built upon shared passions. That's true for Ceinwen and Matthew, and maybe also for Farran Smith Nehme and you, if you're a movie buff. Once named GQ's Film Blogger of the Year for her classic-film criticism site, Self-Styled Siren, Nehme knows how to mix real-life history with fictional directors, actors, and films, making the true stuff just as compelling as the imagined. By the end, you'll be desperate to see The Mysteries of Udolpho. So maybe it's a good thing that like all the best movies, it doesn't exist.

--November 28, 2014-Entertainment Weekly

Some great quotes about unrequited love...

Just like I don't think anyone in her right mind would "choose" to be gay knowing all the pain that goes with it, I don't think anyone ever chooses to fall in love (or like or crush or whatever you want to call it) with someone who doesn't feel the same. 

These are just some really "I get it" quotes about unrequited love. I've written about this before, but then deleted the posts, as if deleting words could somehow delete feelings...if only. :(


"Unrequited love is a ridiculous state, and it makes those in it behave ridiculously.”
― Cassandra Clare

 "What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.”
― Ann Brashares, Girls In Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood 

“There is nothing so mortifying as to fall in love with someone who does not share one's sentiments.”
― Georgette Heyer, Venetia 

“I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know from personal experience, however, that you should not keep telling a girl that you like her after she tells you she isn't into it. You should not keep riding your bike by her house either.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
(I don't think it's ever a good idea to tell someone how you feel, but I found this interesting anyway.) 

“Let her remain where she is. A constellation away.”
― Eric Gamalinda, My Sad Republic 

 “I get what it's like to want something, but to try and force yourself to really believe that you don't.”
― Cora Carmack, Losing It

 “Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.”
― Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950
  
And from a song called "Tears You Apart" by She Wants Revenge:

It's cute in a way, till you cannot speak

And you leave to have a cigarette, knees get weak

 escape was just a nod and a casual wave

 Obsess about it, heavy for the next two days

It's only just a crush, it'll go away

 It's just like all the others it'll go away

 Or maybe this is danger and you just don't know

 You pray it all away but it continues to grow

All-Story Love magazine featured (during its time) short stories and columns that are still quite entertaining, if a little dated. The story below was first published in April of 1951.


http://www.unz.org/Pub/AllStoryLove-1951apr-00058

Anyone who comes out to an ultra-conservative family member or friend (or reads the news on a daily basis for that matter) will tell you that she is no stranger to hearing "you're going to Hell if you do not change." There are days, though, when it feels like you're already there.

Your family won't accept you unless you "recant," some of your friends no longer want anything to do with you and, still in 2014, you see at least one article a day online (or in the paper) quoting a super-religious far right person comparing us to something loathsome. 

Really, I can't honestly imagine Hell being any worse than being alone with your own thoughts at night, trying to negotiate with your own parents so that you can be someone they actually want in their home for the holidays. And, on top of that, knowing (true, there's no actual proof, but you can just feel it in your bones) that someone you truly admire no longer can even look at you because they find who you are so counter to their beliefs.

I want to say to people like Bruce Barron, "Please. Please. Stop saying your rights are infringed upon by my wanting to fall in love with, marry and grow old with another woman. You can believe whatever you want, you can even write a column about those beliefs, but you should not have the right to deny me or my hypothetical/imaginary/ hopefully future wife the right to marry or live where we want to." 

It's exhausting to be this frustrated, even angry, and to have trouble letting go of all this angst. I think the holidays bring it out in me, that to be with my family for Christmas I have to be someone I'm not. Even worse, there is hardly a day goes by where I don't believe I am going to Hell.

I just want to add that I know I write about this issue a lot in my blog, but one reason I do is because of horrible things like this:

 
"We will fight these vermins called homosexuals or gays the same way we are fighting malaria-causing mosquitoes, if not more aggressively." — Gambian President Yahya Jammeh

Last Friday, a group of Gambian human rights activists supported by the RFK Center visited HRC's headquarters in Washington, DC and described atrocities going on in their country, many of which are carried out against LGBT people by the President of the Gambia, Yahya Jammeh – will you help put a stop to this?

Right now, Gambians are being imprisoned in deplorable conditions just because they are suspected of being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT). Some of these individuals have even been held for over a month without any contact with the outside world and have no access to a lawyer. It is believed that they are being tortured, and there is tremendous fear for their lives and their safety.- source: HRC, Human Rights Campaign

I remember, in the early 90s, when I was in college some friends and I (all of us English majors) wondered about the lesser known books from the same time period of the classics we were reading. When we were in school, you would never have a problem finding a copy of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, of course, but just try finding a novel by a contemporary of his from the mid-1800s. Were they even still in print?

Thanks to sites like Project Gutenberg, archive.org and Munseys.com, you can find oodles and oodles of long-forgotten potboiler bestsellers from way back in the day. To dig even deeper, you can go to unz.org and read old issues of magazines that contain book reviews and top-selling novels lists. If you see something you like, all you have to do is go to Amazon or Google Play to download a free copy to your reading device.

A Lady of Quality (so different from The Secret Garden) by Frances Hodgson Burnett is just one example of hundreds and hundreds.

It's very hard to tell from the picture below, but unz.org is a fascinating way to delve into the past, with a wide array of choice in periodicals (even some old Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazines are free!)

 

 

I spent most of last night in a funk, because of the weather and because of a chance encounter where I work. Really, though, I only have myself to blame for letting it fester inside me, even for a second. 

I so dislike the things some married people think they can say to single people. The next time I bump into someone I haven't seen in a while who says, "You're still single?" (like being single is a disease or something equally bad) I'm worried I might actually reply, "You're still married?"

And the worst thing is I happen to know this person is wildly anti-gay and would be appalled if she knew I dream of marrying a woman, not a man. I don't know if "irony" is the right word, but if I lived in a state where lesbians can't marry, I think it would be.

This made me laugh, partly because a lot of it's true:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ashleyperez/24-things-single-people-are-tired-of-hearing

And, also, dear well-intentioned married people (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt) please (most of all!) do not pity singles! The only time I really mind being single and gay is the rare time when a casual acquaintance says they know someone I'd be perfect for and we could meet over lunch or dinner if I just say the word.

One time when I politely declined, the woman (having her nephew in mind) said, "Okay, but at your age you can't afford to be picky."

That kind of peeved me...I wanted to say, "I'm not picky, I'm a lesbian," but I didn't want to be confrontational and, quite frankly, I don't think someone should have to come out to a relative stranger to explain saying no to a date.

Okay, my rant is now over. :)

Here's to a good Monday!! "Velocity of Love" is very mellow and a nice listen for a bad day (or a good one.)

Also, some tips for a better Monday are here:

http://www.wikihow.com/Beat-the-Monday-Morning-Blues

Sunday, this and that...

The Wall Street Journal reviews (slide show style) the book Rock Covers by Robbie Busch and Jon Kirby in this weekend's edition:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-art-of-rock-album-covers-1417808393



I also love that there's an article on Peggy Lee in the same issue:

The Voice of Experience

Peggy Lee had an essential duality—soulfulness lurking inside the manufactured blond goddess.

By  David Freeland          

“Fever,” of course, was the 1958 pop smash that, as Mr. Gavin observes, “define[d] [Lee] permanently.” The song, a heavily rewritten version of an earlier hit by rhythm & blues stylist Little Willie John, embodied the coolness and sophistication—as in those opening finger snaps reprised spectrally during Richards’s gathering—that distinguished Lee and helped bring a new standard of restraint to pop vocalizing. Dusty Springfield, Bette Midler and Diana Krall are just a few of the later performers who would credit Lee’s less-is-more aesthetic as an influence.

For all her subtlety, though, Lee retained a sense of swing, a rhythmic fluency grounded in the idiom of the blues. Peggy Lee’s essential duality—the soulfulness lurking inside the manufactured blond goddess—is a main theme of Mr. Gavin’s probing, perceptive account. As the author reveals through numerous interviews with family members, friends and former associates, Lee’s abundant contradictions, so beguiling in performance and on record, bubbled over to engulf her life, trapping everyone in her world—including, most sadly, Lee herself—in a web of delusion and instability.

Read the rest here:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-is-that-all-there-is-by-james-gavin-1417811803


The New York Times has a small article on an interesting documentary airing this Thursday night on CNN:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/arts/television/whose-dinosaur-is-it-anyway.html


I love Google Play Books and how you can read novels on your iPad or iPhone, scanned exactly as they would have looked to readers during their original publication. This didn't get much reception during its day, but I just started it and it looks like it had potential:

Though our parents were very strict with grades, clothing and where we could go when my sister and I were growing up, they somehow were mind-bogglingly permissive with our tv viewing. We could watch everything from "Little House on The Prairie" (no surprise there) to "Happy Days" to "Charlie's Angels" to the ABC Movie of The Week, the last possibly the most adult and scary of all.

So many of the 70s movies were dark (much more so than today's Lifetime movies), several featured big name movie stars like Tony Curtis ("The Third Girl From The Left") and Natalie Wood (1979's "The Cracker Factory") and a lot later made their way to VHS and even DVD.

I remember the tv being on in the background one night, an image onscreen that haunted me for months afterward. I tried to track it down based on what little I remember now, but so far no luck. There is this book though, plus a great list at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_films_produced_for_American_Broadcasting_Company

Saturday odds and ends...

I still can't believe that a book as violent and uncomfortably racy as Suzie and The Monsters lead me to this wonderful 18th century book. New Yorker magazine mentions it in this article about fictional music and its composers:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/24/imaginary-concerts

Our personal history (especially the cruel parts) can help keep things in perspective. I'm pretty sure (though I wasn't so appreciative at the time) that being teased in middle school actually might have been a good thing for me. It made me far more realistic than I might have been otherwise, gave me more years than most people have, to brace for the future.

From my early teens on, I just knew that I was destined to never pair off in like or love. This wasn't just something I learned from always being foisted on some poor soul's team by the gym teacher or seeing everyone's eyes avert when it was time to choose a partner for science lab. It was something I saw in other people's eyes during after-school dances and other social events, even in the ones of the kindest souls.

I'm not saying people who are different deserve to be picked on (they most certainly don't!) but I do think I was so far gone from normal there was no way I'd ever have been the kind of girl who had friends. I always brought a book with me wherever I went and would read in homeroom, between classes, after our tests were turned in. I had horribly out-of-control hair and wore unusual clothes.

I didn't try as hard as I should have to fit in, probably because I was more interested in books than in other kids. I think I might have even been prissy, in the sense that I behaved like a schoolmarm instead of a student. I was an Adam Ant song, minus the fashion sense and style. I developed such indifference (on top of my already almost pathological shyness) to all that was around in middle school the guidance counselor told my parents there might be something wrong with me.

Back then I was terrified, much more than I am today. I tried not to let the spitballs (my hair was huge!) throw me off or the nasty comments ("Did you know your picture is under 'ugly' in the dictionary?") get to me. High school improved some and college turned out to be pretty wonderful and most people agree that middle school is Hell anyway.

But there are some times now when I wish I could get that detachment back. Then again, I don't have to run away or hide anymore so maybe it's for the best. I'd like to think I relate better to others nowadays even if I still secretly want to retreat when I meet people outside of my job or an already familiar social situation.



 

So the title character from the book I mentioned the other day (Suzie and The Monsters) has almost no scruples. But her iTunes play list is rather unbelievably good.

I do not particularly like the book itself (though the writing's decent enough) but I can't stop reading because I've already added five of the songs Suzie Kew (yes, that's her full fake name) listens to as she either moonlights at a strip club, jogs with her iPod on or uses her stealthy vampire skills to hypnotize men to get past check points at various places she's trying to break in along the way.
 

If not for Suzy Kew, I'd have no idea there's a samba version of "The Pink Panther," (also check out Mancini's Meglio Stasera) that there was a ridiculously (and shamefully) likable song in the early 90s called "People Are Still Having Sex" or that vampires (at least in this case) have amazing taste in classical music (see below.)

Also interesting is this book Suzie thinks about at one point; I have never heard of The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr before: