Novel Eye

Wow! Looking back through some of these--I should not type a batch of posts late at night. Barely legible. My deep apologies! Gomen. Also--I am not mad (well, not related to this anyway). Apparently there IS a spell check bug in Blogger. They are working on it. I thought it was my computer at home but it doesn't work here at work either. I'll try to proof read a little better.

Just went through friend's posts. I'm sorry Matt, I'm sorry Joan. I don't know what to say. Life just sucks sometimes--more than anything.

Spell check and proof my posts. Add good tags and group for easy viewing major topics such as book reviews, film, tv, personal, observation. I'd also like to clean out my bookmarks and burn everything I've downloaded and make discs for friends--like good 80's alternative for Musing... This is beyond what I should do, like make a website, set up an Etsy shop, make a portfolio. I made a vo tape. Perhaps it is all possible after all.

Tama Janowitz is a very good writer. She just doesn't write about a world I'm interested in--because it seems so horrible and conspicuous in its consumption in the world in which I live. The conspicuous consumption of Lily Bart's world is so distant that it is easier to be entertained, but perhaps one grew out of the other and if so, what is growing out of this?

Just before Christmas I purchased on impulse "The Maltese Falcon" mentioned below, and "Cakes and Ale" by W. Somerset Maugham. I love Maugham's style. I think "Of Human Bondage is one of the most amazing pieces of writing. I hadn't read this one so I grabbed it, even though we were moving and we didn't need more books. Like much of Maugham there is real emotion struggling through the satire. The story is about an older writer who is asked for his recollections on a famous writer who has just died so that a hack writer can write the approved biography--approved by the surviving widow, the second wife. The older writer is Maugham, the hack may or may not be Hugh Walpole. The famous writer may or may not be Thomas Hardy--Maugham denied it. I will say that I guessed it must be Hardy before I read the Wikipedia entry for which I was quite pleased with myself. I had no idea it might be Walpole but that sort of proves the point. Also singled out for mentio...

Don't worry. This isn't going to be a rant like that last one. This is actually about two books I just read. I've been reading odd books because I'm trying to weed things in our new place and I have a box of books that I've picked up here and there and I'm not sure if the books are worth keeping. So I'm making a point of pulling books out of that stack. And thus I came to read Mary McCarthy's "The Company She Keeps." I have read nothing else by McCarthy, despite or perhaps because of her having written about VietNam. As she was or had once been a communist, she would have been forbidden (or as forbidden as my father got about books) in my house. All I really knew of her was that she famously said of Lillian Hellman, "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'," because I did read a great deal of Hellman in high school (despite her communism) and did a monologue about her. (Sidebar: The film "Julia...

I stupidly read a one-page interview with Paris Hilton today, and it actually made my teeth hurt as though I'd been sucking on sugar or ice. I really, really wish I could erase it from my mind.

Last week I sat down at the computer at 11:30 on Saturday night, just for a few minutes (which turned into about 45) and left the TV running in the next room, because I wasn't going to be working long, right... So something comes on the station--and it takes me a bit to figure out what it might be--Bill and Hillary's Halloween Party (old episode, writer's strike and all) but I had realized it must be SNL by the time Barack Obama had made a cameo as himself to say the lines, "Live from NY..." And I'm listening all the while. And nothing was funny! Absolutely nothing. Well, the host was a newscaster who's name absolutely escapes me and he sort of poked fun of himself in a monologue that was ok, but he could have been doing that on the Daily Show or Olbermann and it would have been the same. And the audience wasn't laughing either. Oh, they cheered when Obama came on, but that's not the same as laughing. AND this is without me actually having to ...

Well, it's taken me years, but I finally did it. I finally made a voice-over demo! And like almost everything, it did not warrent the worry I put into it. I have been virtually promised work for a year by one production company if I only had a tape to show around. The work I've done already THIS YEAR for said company nearly paid for it. And yet, I hesitated because I wanted it to be "perfect," whatever that might mean. Perfect script which showed off every aspect of my voice, all kind of accents, etc. In the end, it is a straightforward commercial tape with a little narration and a single "character" voice. No accents, no cartoons. The only odd thing is the inclusion of a poem at the end because I have already been hired to read poems, so it seemed a strange necessity--a bit of originality and differentiation. Plus it's at the end, where most prospective employers won't even hear it. It will remain linked at the side. If/when I do a webpage--which se...

So the same week that we watched The Good German, we went to see the play Copenhagen. When we chose the movie, we really didn't think about the connection. It's not like we thought to ourselves, "Oh, let's watch something else about the atom bomb, Germany and WWII." I'd always wanted to see Copenhagen and it was a good production. Will LeBow, Boston's resident theater God was Niels Bohr. John Kuntz, Boston's resident clown, challenged himself with the role of Heisenberg. He received very good reviews and my husband said (we saw him afterwards) that he would have never guessed that John would sound, well, like a queen offstage, based on his role onstage. I know John peripherally, but he'd recently been in a show with Mirror's wife. We actually ran into Mirror, his wife and another mutual friend at the show. Very fun, at a not so fun play. It's about a mysterious meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941 when Denmark was under Ger...

I had a dream over the weekend that I ran into someone I used to work with and was complaining about my job and he said that when he was stressed he joined merchant shipping vessels for a three month tour. The pay was good and it was only three months. So he and I went down and somehow he was turned away (maybe don't ask, don't tell?) but I was taken (even though I'd be lucky if I could carry 50 pounds a foot) and I had a half an hour to go home (and it was close to my home) throw some t-shirts and scrubs into a bag, tell my husband I'd wire him money for the rent and I'd be home in 3 months. Now the weird thing is that I could see my old co-worker doing something this bizarre. He was always jumping on schemes. But me? Do I really want to leave my job that much?

Because of stupid immigration issues I couldn't vote until I was 29 so this is only my second presidential election. It is a good feeling. I enjoyed jury duty too. I remember six months ago thinking--dear, God, we're going to be tired of hearing from these people by the election. And yet, getting to the milestone made it somewhat exciting again. Betamo met McCain and Obama's people and her mother saw ex-Pres. Clinton speak but they're up in NH so they were courted. We weren't so courted.

I wish I hadn't heard anything about this before I went in, because having heard it wasn't very good I didn't find it very good. And I really would have liked to have. I think I shall have to watch it again in a different frame of mind. That said, it's like Casablanca turned on it's ear. Instead of the noble Ilsa, we have the ignoble Lena. Instead of the jaded Rick we have the weary Jake. And we have Tobey Maguire playing the kind of character you hope dies a horrible and painful death. And instead of the heroic but barely seen Victor Lazlo, fighting the Nazis, we have Lena's husband, a mid-level nobody, who was as she puts it, "Good with numbers," in a postwar world where the world has too many shades of grey. Lena does what she must to survive, to survive in a brutal, primitive place. It's so hard for us to understand today, or even, I think for older Americans to fully understand what it must be like to be in countries in the aftermath. ...

Well, not really. I just caught a new HBO series called In Treatment with Gabriel Byrne. I wasn't going to watch, because I thought it might be painful, and it was, but he said something quite good about what therapy is supposed to be--that he (the therapist) couldn't make a decision for you or tell you what decision to make, but that he could help you figure out what was bothering you about the decision. I'd go with that. I have one friend who wanted a therapist to tell her how not to be unhappy after just a few weeks of therapy and quit when he couldn't/wouldn't. I have another friend who went to couple's therapy and wanted the therapist to tell her husband all the things he was doing wrong and to tell her if she should stay. I tried, as gently as possible, to say that perhaps they had unrealistic expectations from therapy. It really didn't take and I couldn't say any more without jeopardizing the friendship. I like therapy. If I had more money I...

My husband is going to have a drawing room of his own in this new place and so many, many books will be stashed there. He hasn't finished upacking/sorting them. So I realized I was missing a few of mine and since he wasn't going to be finishing his part anytime soon I took a look at all the boxes... AND found all kinds of books of mine/ours that are supposed to fit in bookshelves that I have carefully ordered to fit the books I had!!!! I was most annoyed and asked why he can be so organized and logical at work and not at home. Because he opened all of these boxes and didn't give me mine even though I asked him to pull out all of mine. And we're talking things that are clearly mine like books on sewing and cross-stitch, not things that were open for debate like children's and reference. It's a question we've touched on many times in the past. I also know that I am more focussed at work and would never say waste an hour playing a video game or blogging be...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0465602/board/nest/94651744 It won't make much sense if you haven't seen the film (and may even disturb you profoundly), but it's really funny if you have. You probably also need to log in. EDIT: Actually, this is better, and you don't have to log in. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0465602/quotes

The morning after we watched "Shoot 'Em Up" with Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti, I watched my rear view mirror as a woman put on her make-up in the car behind me. We were stuck in traffic, and she worked on it for about 10 minutes in start and stop traffic before we got on the highway. I don't know if she continued after she got on the highway. Meanwhile, the guy in front of me kept flicking ash out of his window with his RIGHT hand???? and finally tossed the cigarette butt out too. And I thought, "Man, I wish I were Mr. Smith right now." I loved this movie. Fantastic escapist fun and very, very visually clever. Owen plays Mr. Smith a mild mannered misanthrope who's catch phrase seemed to be, "You know what I hate..." When Mr. Smith sees a yuppie (is that still a term?) take a handicapped parking spot he steals the guy's car. He runs another off the road for not using his turn signals. Obviously I don't really believe in vigilantiism and ...

I was looking at friend's posts and got caught up in David Seah's (which has the funniest gift giving solution ever). And he linked to Advertising Age, and I was thinking, "Oh, I shoud subscribe to that newsletter." And then thinking I'll come back to it, but I'm finding more and more that I don't come back to things, so I clicked on it then and there, and then started reading and started clicking--and had to just stop myself. You could do that forever.

Sorry, sorry, gomen, je m'excuse, etc. I had 264 posts for last year. 101 off of perfect. Now I'm 30 off for this year. I've decided to try for 3 per week. I read a whole bunch of other people's posts about setting realistic expectations. I added a new link under Cool Famous. He's not really famous, per say. He created my new favorite cartoon, Chowder , and voices one of the funniest characters, Fred Fredberger, on another of my all time fav. cartoons. Wicked busy at work. (Yes, I've been in Boston too long). I also wanted to get my house in order before I started taking time out to blog, but I found I still had time for video games...so I should have time to write, right? I think the house will be set after this weekend--saying I keep my husband motivated as well. Or as near as d@!nit (ha ha, the computer wants that to be an email addresss, wish it was!). I have head blogs about a lot of movies we've watched and books I've read. Some will be i...