Just Checking In

Getting weird emails from Google and Blogger about my blogs, so just writing a placeholder post, in hopes that it will keep this blog from disappearing, if that is indeed a danger.

Police Log

[no link to the local paper so as to preserve geographic anonymity]

At 6:22 p.m., a B Street resident called to report harassment from a friend. The woman said she went to breakfast with a man who then took her home to meet his wife. The wife was not home when she and the person arrived. The man then asked her if she wanted something to eat, which she thought was strange because they just ate. Police advised her that there was no criminal activity. She responded that she thought the person was being a bad friend and wanted to end the friendship.

Maybe she would have felt better if he'd asked her to give him a blow job.

Sextuplets

I'm not an infertility blogger, but I have to wonder how artificial insemination could lead to sextuplets. (Reading it, I just assumed, perhaps skimming over the "in," that it said in vitro, and I was outraged that anyone would implant six embryos, but now I'm just confused.)

Knocked Up

It wasn't as funny as The 40 Year Old Virgin.

It was still pretty funny.

Especially the shrooms in Vegas scene.

Which was really, really funny.

I love Paul Rudd.

Better not to think about politics or plausibility.

D couldn't decide which campaign sponsored it: Brownback, Rudy, or Hillary.

It was occasionally slow. And predictable.

But it was funny.

And I love Paul Rudd.

(In other news, I got a new phone, which was kind of traumatizing, though I'm getting used to it, except that the front screen stays dark except when it's open, so you need to open it to see if you have messages, which is kind of a drag. S got the same phone as me, so I put glitter flower stickers on mine, which is so unlike me--not the glitter flowers, but putting stickers on my phone. M got S's old phone. She is super-excited and has already changed all the settings, covered it with stickers, and sent me a text with a smiley face. I didn't know you could send texts with smiley faces.)

Blindsided by a Diaper

As we know (how do we know? well, I know because I'm me, and you presumably know because you've heard me say it before, only it is late and I don't even know why I'm blogging at this hour, but I'm certainly not going to try to find out where I said it, so, alas, no link, but let me assure you, I've said it...OK, must abruptly exit this parenthesis)...where was I? Ah, as we know, I am over anthologies (got this one in galleys, and had to THROW IT OUT it was that bad, and I would never throw out a book, but it was a galley, and I just couldn't bear to have it in my house anymore) (no, it wasn't a galley, it was...what do they call it when they send you a book that looks like the book but the table of contents has no page numbers and there are lots of typos and a sticker on the front saying it is a whatever it is and you can't do certain things with it? come on, Dawn, help me out, what are those things?). OK, the point. The point is that I am over anthologies and I'm pretty much over parenting too--not the doing of it (yes, you've heard me say that before too), but the writing about it. So there is absolutely no way in hell I am going anywhere near this book (i.e. you might call this post BeccaDoesn'tRead rather than BeccaReads).

Nevertheless (you needed a paragraph break there, didn't you?), I am oddly intrigued by the subtitle, which is, of course, the same old anthology subtitle in its Number-Noun of Identity-"Reveal" [though this one, thank goodness, omits "the truth"]-Topic format [though, thank goodness again, this one does not formulate its topic as a string of Additional Nouns]. But what is interesting here is that the number is "Over 30" which makes me wonder if this is a book about thirtysomething Nouns of Identity ("Men and Women," in this case) or if there are in fact 31, or perhaps 32, essays in the book, in which case who on earth thought "Over 30" was a good idea?

Parents, Kids, and Networking Sites

M hasn't made it to Facebook yet, but I joined LinkedIn this week. Weird, very weird.

The Glass House

Visiting Fallingwater was a highlight of my life, and I am certain that visiting the Glass House will be another. Just reading about life there makes me tremble with excitement. So not me, but so eminently desirable.

The Muggwaps

New from Dorrance Publishing (typed verbatim):

A book about the differences in each of us; A woman rescues defective stuffed animals in this tail of family, unity, and love.

(M and I debated whether "tail" was purposeful. We think perhaps it is. But maybe not.)

Jonathan Lethem and Ian McEwan

This passage from Lethem's review of McEwan's new novel gets it exactly right on what it's like to read a great novel (obviously I'm in the "delicious agony" camp) (Atonement is one of the novels I experienced like this, another is Salman Rushdie's Shame, also Julia Glass's first novel, and, though not every sentence, The Portrait of a Lady) (I think I need to read some Jonathan Lethem) (and catch up on the Ian McEwan novels I've missed):

Among the encompassing definitions we could give “the novel” (“a mirror walking down a road,” “a narrative of a certain size with something wrong with it”) is this: a novel is a vast heap of sentences, like stones, arranged on a beach of time. The reader may parse the stones of a novel singly or crunch them in bunches underfoot in his eagerness to cross. These choices generate tension: in my eagerness to learn “what happens,” might I miss something occurring at the level of the sentence? Some experience this as a delicious agony, others distrust it. Our appetite for Ian McEwan's form of mastery is a measure of our pleasure in fiction’s parallax impact on our reading brains: his narratives hurry us feverishly forward, desperate for the revelation of (imaginary) secrets, and yet his sentences stop us cold to savor the air of another human being’s (imaginary) consciousness.