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