OK, I’ll start and you chime in. The Nook is taking a rest while I actually hold a physical book, and this one’s a doozy at 600-some pages in hardback. I picked it up on sale at B & N the other day, and for a celeb bio, it’s just OK. The title – Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America – is a bit of a reach, isn’t it? I mean, the guy only made a handful of movies to begin with, and he hasn’t been filmed in almost 20 years. Compare that to his contemporaries of the time: Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood. Hm.

Of his filmography, I’ve seen Bonnie and Clyde, Reds, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Dick Tracy and Bugsy. I saw his breakout film, Splendor in the Grass, years ago, but I don’t remember much about it other than his character, Bud, being a self-absorbed louse. Compared to what the aforementioned actors have accomplished in the same time span (roughly 50 years), I can’t say that I necessarily agree with Beatty’s alleged seduction of the country. Now, seduction of actresses in the country (and the world) — that’s a totally different kettle of fish. If they had an Olympic event for that, shewww…

Still, it’s fascinating how easily he rose to fame, as if the cosmos directed the ascent. And he was an absolute doll to look at, no arguing that point. The fact that he’s been married to the same woman (actress Annette Bening, his first and only wife) since 1992 is admirable, too, especially by Hollywood standards. All that being said, I was a bit disappointed that there is no insight into his present-day life (this was by design and agreement ahead of time), and several of the key players in Beatty’s prior life would not cooperate. That, to me, gives the book a Kitty Kelley-esque flavor, which isn’t the greatest attribute when you’re writing an authorized bio. At least Beatty himself agreed to be interviewed.

Some facts you might find interesting, providing you are A) a classic film buff of any age, B) over 50, or C) either or both:

1. Henry Warren Beatty is Shirley MacLaine’s little brother. Their surname is actually “Beaty,” the spelling of which Warren altered when too many people were pronouncing his last name “Beet-y.” MacLaine is their mom’s maiden name.
2. Warren was incredibly difficult to work with on set, mostly due to his exasperating tendency to “think things to death.” More than a few directors wanted to jump off buildings because of Beatty’s constant over-analysis and unrelenting questioning of motivation and line deliveries.
3. His first Hollywood conquest was the beautiful Joan Collins, whom I believe had just as much in the gorgeous department as Liz Taylor back then. He left her for Natalie Wood, followed by a hundred others, one of which got him into a lot of trouble.

I’m only partway through, so I’ll save my final judgment for the last page. I’m enjoying it well enough, until I decide to download the next installment of The Dresden Files.

So…what are you reading? Give us a title and brief commercial. Maybe I’ll end up reading it, too.

Submitted for your approval:

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The Romance of Proctology. There is a reason for the absence of a photo on the cover.

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Just what you need: your fears leaping out at you.

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He was seriously awesome.

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I would seriously buy this.

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Sometimes, you'd just rather not know.

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Note to self: Jake's birthday is coming up.

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OK, everybody get to work.

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Possible addition to your research library, RD?

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Yes indeedy!

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Glad I could help. Happy Sumday!

For the first time in, oh, fifteen years or so, I watched the Oprah Winfrey show, tuning in yesterday completely by accident while confined to the couch. It was an amazing revelation.

Like many of my friends (and UNlike 99% of the men I know), weight issues have ruled my consciousness — indeed, my very existence — since I was a young teenager. Concern gave way to obsession, and as is almost always the case, obsession bred despair. Losing and gaining the same 25 pounds every six months since 1980 can take a toll on a person.

Enter Oprah and her guest, author Geneen Roth. When she told the audience that Roth’s book “opened [her] eyes” and allowed her to make sense of everything surrounding her 40-year battle with weight, I was curious. Cuz girls, you know it ain’t about food, or being hungry. It’s never about being physically hungry for people like us, is it? There’s always a hidden agenda with food.

As is Oprah’s style, she made sure everyone in attendance had read the book as well, and audience members were definitely part of the show. There were many personal stories that sounded awfully familiar. Several women had been charged with videotaping themselves going through their daily routines for a week or whatever. Wow. Revealing. Even more shocking were the admissions by some women that when they lost a hundred pounds, they were still unhappy. To someone like me (the last time I wore a size 7 was 1974), that was a difficult concept around which to wrap my reptilian brain. It was then that I decided I must see what is in this book.

And although what Roth gives in the way of practical tips isn’t necessarily new to repeat diet offenders, seeing and hearing how the book changed people on a non-food level was new to me — and believe me, fiends, I’ve read every diet book ever published. Much of what she said was highly personal with regard to figuring out why those of us who run the diet treadmill always fail. (Again – it’s *never* about the food itself; food is just the drug of choice to numb or escape other, more sinister issues.) You can read a partial transcript on Oprah’s site.

Heavy.

So I ordered it from half.com. I’m totally disappointed it wasn’t available for the Nook, though. What’s up with that? #1 on the NYT Bestseller List, and you can’t download it? Sheesh. Guess I’ll have to just open the thing and turn the pages myself. The nerve. Anyway, I’ll provide a review in the near future. I know there’s no magic bullet in this fight, but what I heard yesterday suggests that there are ways to move emotional roadblocks that habitually impede progress. That would be a step in the right direction for many of us.

Hey, it’s Tubesday. One day closer to school starting. It’s this time of year when I’d just as soon get the days overwith so I can get going. May as well jump into the fire right now as delay the inevitable. Hot tea, soup, and a bowl of oatmeal all day yesterday, and I still feel like ten miles of bad road. That just bites, honestly. Maybe it’s a tooma.

FO

Last night, after all the work was done and the Thriller went downstairs to read, I hit the sofa and channel-surfed. I came upon the last segment of Ken Burns’s Twain biopic on PBS. I was really surprised.

We generally tend to think of Twain as a sage; an American literary papa whose humor and talent for spinning yarns enchanted the world — and I do mean the world, as he toured extensively around the globe, giving talks and reading from his novels. But what I didn’t know was the freak show of guilt and personal tragedy that made up most of his adult life.

An inventor, he spent lots of time with the likes of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. He invested heavily in a contraption called the compositor, designed to make newsprinting more efficient. He actually staked a great deal of his wife’s personal fortune on its development, but it failed miserably, and his family lost nearly everything. It was for this reason that Twain embarked on his world speaking tour. He needed to recoup $200,000 in debts and save his beloved wife and daughters from the embarrassment personal bankruptcy would cause.

It was decided that his daughter and wife would go with him, but other daughter Susie would stay home. Susie fell ill while the others were in England, so Twain’s wife and daughter sailed home to take care of her. They were no strangers to losing a child, as they had lost a son years before. It was during that journey home that Susie died. Livvy (Twain’s wife) found out about it when she reached the States, and Twain himself was unable to attend the funeral services. Thus began the downward spiral into depression and loss.

Not long after, his wife died, which pretty much sealed the deal for him. Robbed of his soul mate and two of his children, he sank into despair and was, understandably, never the same. Never really happy again. How tragic.

I learned that his ambitious novel, A (Connecticut) Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, is an encapsulated representation of his own life. It starts out lighthearted and optimistic, and ends darkly. I must buy that today for my Nook.

It’s a fear that lives in the back of many minds, I’m sure: outliving all your loved ones. My grandmother Johnson lived to see her husband, sister, mother, father, and worst of all, all three of her sons, die. All the more reason to enjoy your family every day. Tell them you love them. Don’t lose touch.

Next week I am going to visit my cousin Glenn, who lives near Dallas. I haven’t seen him in probably 35 years. Perhaps we can talk about Mark Twain.

Happy Wegsday — now go hug your mama.

The first item to remember is that this thing reads like a real book. That is to say there is no “backlighting” on the screen. What you see in the pale afternoon light is what you get. It’s like reading an actual book in the evening — you’re going to need to shine some light on it.

I think the hardest thing for me to get used to was that it is not a computer or smartphone. It doesn’t act like one with regard to feel, light, response or speed. So a minor realignment of expectations is necessary at the get-go, especially if you have a fast touch-screen phone or tablet computer that you’re accustomed to using. I’m assuming it’s pretty much that way for all e-readers.

This is a relatively accurate representation (on my monitor, at least) of the brightness of the nook screen. This photo was taken in the early evening, with one lamp turned on in the living room:

clicky

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Here’s a view of when I sat right next to the lamp:

Better.

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Truthfully — I could stand for the screen to be a leeeeetle bit brighter. But that’s likely just my horrible eyesight. Not a deal breaker. And the text renders beautifully outside in the sunlight — no screen glare or whiteout issues.

The page turn transitions are nice, but again, it’s not like swiping to the next menu on your Droid or iPhone. I’m not a page ripper in real-book life; I take my time, so this was no biggy. I shot a quick & dirty Flip video, illustrating both ways to advance the pages:

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The Wi-Fi connection is cool — it picked up the wireless signal in my house right away. I also got the 3G for on the road, which will be nice. Here’s a shot of searching the B & N store, again with no direct light shining on the screen:

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Again, you’re going to need a lamp or a book light to read in the darkness. B & N sells a clip-on model called the Lyra for $15, but my cheapy little GE book light did the job, too. I turned off all the lights, pulled down the shades and took this photo:

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You can change fonts and sizes, of course. (I don’t particularly love serifs, so I chose the smoothy font.) The pictures above show the “large” version of the font.

I haven’t had it long enough to measure battery life with the Wi-Fi and 3G on, so maybe Helen or BoomR could comment on that. I look forward to taking this little gem on the road.

Yay, it’s Finkday for all you people with real jobs.

I’m leafing through a delightful — albeit rather snarky — book, written 15 years ago for the purpose of setting straight those of us who occasionally subscribe to (and unwittingly disseminate) erroneous information. Call it “Conventional Wisdom Takes a Hit.”

In his book, Everything You Know is Wrong (a slightly impertinent title, with the cover photo to match), Paul Kirchner delivers the real goods on dozens of longstanding “truths” in the areas of science, history, entertainment and culture. Behold a partial list:

• An airplane’s black box is black. No, it’s orange. Why make such an important piece of evidence so hard to find after a crash?
• CIA agents are globe-trotting adventurers. Actually, less than 5% are involved in covert operations. The majority spend their lives analyzing brain-numbing trivia.
• The US Constitution refers to a wall of “separation between church and state.” Nope. In fact, that phrase is nowhere to be found in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. It was actually mentioned by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to a committee of church men, during his tenure as President of the US.
• Charles Darwin claimed that man evolved from apes. Not quite. Darwin claimed that man and apes evolved from a common ancestor, and the split in species occurred about 5 million years ago.
  
• Henry Ford invented the modern automobile. Actually, that credit goes to Germany’s Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz. Ford didn’t invent the assembly line, either; Ransom Olds did it in 1902. Rather, Ford’s feat was making the automobile affordable for the average citizen.
• Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death. Negative. What happens is that after death, soft tissues shrink as they dry out, exposing a bit of extra nail or hair length, which might give the illusion of growth.
• Jumping up in a falling elevator might spare you a grisly death. Nice, but the math doesn’t work. After three seconds of free fall, the elevator would reach a downward velocity of 96 feet per second. An ambitious leap might reach 14 feet per second, leaving you plummeting at 82 feet per second. You’d still be just as dead.
• (Mama) Cass Elliot choked to death on a ham sandwich. Nope. She died of a heart attack. The coroner found no substance blocking her airway.
• Mattress/pillow tags that say “Do not remove under penalty of law.” While these tags definitely exist, their message is not directed at the consumer. Rather, it applies to the retailer, and is intended for the protection of the consumer (although I’m not really sure what that means…).
• Olympic gold medals are made of gold. Negative. They’re made of gold-plated silver. The real gold is in the subsequent commercial endorsements. (Actually, I found that gold medals used to be made of gold, but they stopped that practice after 1912.)
• The Pennsylvania Dutch came from Holland. No. “Dutch” in this case is a loose translation of “Deutsch,” as in Deutschland. The “Pennsylvania Dutch” emigrated from Germany.

Some of the “corrections” I read were surprising, and there were others I’m not sure I agree with (more research needed). But an interesting diversion nonetheless. I hope your day is replete with interesting diversions.

Regardless, his lawsuit just skyrocketed the book to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List, so there went that effort. Oprah’s people are probably kicking the cat right now too, since the tattlefest debuted at the top of the Times list.

*drumming fingers, drumming fingers, drumming fingers*

I must buy it.

Interesting quote from Richard Roeper in his op-ed in the Lake County News-Sun (formerly the Waukegan News-Sun — remember, Mavis??):

Oprah isn’t offering comment on any of the claims Kelley makes in the book — but wouldn’t it be awesome if she booked Kelley as a guest? It would make the James Frey beatdown look like a love-fest.

Heh.

Happy Tubesday. It’s almost the middle of the week, yippity.

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So which one is it? I’ve gone back and forth within the last 24 hours. My contract with Verizon allows for a discount upgrade this Sunday. I will choose by then. I really had my mind made up to get the Droid until I read this article in the Guardian, which suddenly found me wanting a nook all the more. Guy made me laff, too:

The lack of a cover immediately alters your purchasing habits. As soon as I got the ebook [reader], I went on a virtual shopping spree, starting with the stuff I thought I should read – Wolf Hall, that kind of thing – but quickly found myself downloading titles I’d be too embarrassed to buy in a shop or publicly read on a bus. Not pornography, but something far worse: celebrity autobiographies.

Hey, what’s wrong with celeb bios? I like ‘em…

Of course, there are far more important things in life to think and worry about than which toy I want. But at the moment, I’m having trouble coming up with an example.

Fink (pretentious wonk) out.

Not surprisingly, three of us gave/got books for Christmas. We all love it. Mine was especially fantastic!

The cover alone sparks interest. The subtitle of the book is What Your Teachers Never Told You About Famous Novelists, Poets and Playwrights. That alone’s enough to get me reading. As a writer, I am keenly interested in what makes/made other writers tick. This collection apparently answers the burning questions:

Was Kafka a nudist perv?

What happens when poets attack?

What’s up with Arthur Conan Doyle and his belief that if you looked hard enough, you could see fairies?

I’ve got some great reading material for the drive to Detroit tomorrow, as well as some startling revelations to share in future blog posts. Thank you, Kay and Bob!

I hope everyone’s having a wonderful holiday. Happy Christmas Eve to all my fiends.

Fink, smelling the delectable Christmas stew cooking

I am dealing with Christmas git lists this morning, because I adore lining up the shopping trip, getting the gifts, wrapping them all pretty, putting them under the tree, and especially watching my family open them. There’s an old cliché that says, “The joy is in the giving.” It’s not cliché to me.

clicky

Do I want a Nook? You know…I think I do.

Now, ye purists, hold thy steeds. Before you stop reading to click on “Add Your Comment,” let me say that I adore books. Books on the shelf, I mean — the ones made of paper and cardboard and cloth. I have a huge collection of them, many of which I’ll keep forever to pass on to my grandchildren. However, there are times when I’m in a place (riding in the car, in a hotel, in a restaurant while traveling, waiting after school for evening rehearsals to start, etc.) when I think it would be nice to have a selection of stuff to read, without having to have schlepped it all into a bag before leaving. Or maybe I’m in a place where I don’t want to drag a book bag around.

I think it just might be the best of both worlds, this Nook.

Now, I can hear my dad (and some of my friends, probably) saying, “We never had Nooks. We carried our books around and actually opened them and turned the pages and felt the paper.” I know, I know. And sometimes it’s fun to be a bit of a purist. I’m a pedantic schoolmarm on Church Latin and English vowel production (in rehearsals), spelling, some areas of grammar/usage, and certain store brands. Gotta have the real thing in its most pristine form. But books on an e-reader? I think it’s a great idea as an auxiliary tool. Bring it on.

I will always buy books for myself and for others. But having a little white frame containing over a million titles for books, mags and newspapers that I can carry around in my purse with me? That also sounds like fun.

There. I think I pretty much talked myself into it, ja?

What do you think of the Nook? I’d probably go for it over Amazon’s Kindle reader because of the Wi-Fi and the capability of sharing books with friends.

OK. Time to get started — Mavis’s birthday feast is today and the food isn’t going to cook its own self. If only they had an e-cooker. Shazam!

FO

PS – I positively, absolutely cannot come up with 400 more words for the thesis. I give up. I’m turning it in on Tuesday as-is.

However, this decades-long quest has also revealed some uncomfortable truths about them. Shouldn’t surprise me; everyone has their unlovely side. But John Lennon’s was of such an unappealing variety (to me, anyway), I have trouble reconciling my scream-till-I’m-hoarse, gaga teenage dreamy picture of him with the man he actually was. Unfair of me, really.

Quite possibly the most compendious — and most difficult to prosaically read — of any Lennon book I’ve read has to be the latest from Philip Norman: John Lennon: The Life.

[This was one of the best pictures ever taken of him. Home run on the cover, Phil.]

I’m about two-thirds through the book. It’s a fascinating, yet difficult, read. Very heavy, stodgy British writing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just a different way of telling a tale and I’ve had to get accustomed to it. The double edge lies in the recounting of the ease with which Lennon dealt out cruelty to the people who loved him the most: his wife Cynthia, his son Julian, his manager (and secret admirer) Brian Epstein, and his close friends.

He could be at one moment compassionate, giving and kind, and at another, unmercifully vicious. He often berated his closest friends, insulting and humiliating them in public. Epstein was the recipient of many of Lennon’s one-line zingers, and he habitually absorbed them with silence and compliance. When Brian made a rare suggestion in the studio one day, John snapped back at the crowded control room with, “We’ll handle the music, Brian. You just worry about your 10 percent.” He incessantly and openly mocked Epstein for being a Jew and a homosexual.

Explosive and reactionary, he was heard to tell 5-year-old Julian, “No, I’m not going to fix your f*****g bicycle!”

He also had a bizarre need to make fun of the physically and mentally handicapped. Old TV footage bears this out. I have often seen him on film, pretending to be crippled or making faces that suggest he is a palsy victim. I have countless pictures in scads of books that show it as well. Bizarre. Traceable in cause and nature, but still bizarre.

The man was human. I’m not indicting him for being a) an insecure artist, b) something other than an angel, or c) a product of his environment and upbringing, which we all are. I’m not indicting him at all, actually. I’m just stewing in my kettle of realization that our idols put on their socks the same way we do. And that we’re all paradoxical in our own fashion. It’s all good.

Of course, Bernie Schwartz is the real name of legendary actor Tony Curtis, and I’m reading his memoir, American Prince.

The first thing I had to do was get past the title. Juuuuust a bit pretentious, if you ask me, which you didn’t, so on we go.

Second: Boyfriend likes to drop names. What he thinks of Shelley Winters and Danny Kaye…well, suffice it to say I’m glad they’re not around anymore to read what Curtis has to say about them. However, Jerry Lewis and Debbie Reynolds are still alive…yikes.

Third: OK, so you’re not gay. WE GET IT. Methinks thou dost protest too much.

Fourth: Conversely, I don’t think a memoir necessarily needs the play-by-play (along with first and last names) of all the starlets the author, um, compromised. But as Curtis said in a recent USA Today interview, “What you’ve got is what my life was like. What was I going to do? Clean it up? Make everybody happy?” Bottom line: brother was what David Duchovny is, but they just didn’t have a name for it back then.

Fifth: Curtis is to anti-Semitism what Al Sharpton is to racism. Really. You can’t go three pages without reading about some guy on the street or a movie producer or director or fellow actor who looked sideways at Tony, undoubtedly because “I’m a Jew.” At least he admits to being ultra-sensitive about it, whereas our friend Sharpy McSharperton…

Tony Curtis, then and now

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Truth is, I wouldn’t want the book to read any other way. I mean, so what? So he’s Narcissus, gazing into the reflecting pool of his long-ago gorgeousness. So he’s tremendously bitter towards Universal and the movie industry in general for not giving him roles that would have let the world know what a truly great actor he was. So he slightly overstates his influence as a genuine American phenomenon of the 1950s and 60s. No matter. He has lived an amazing life and has the stories to back it up. If you’re not familiar with his work, check it out here.

OK, gotta hit the shower and then the school house. Yes, fiends, I am going into school today. There is work to be done and I’m finally in a position to not be distracted by upcoming exams. I might actually get something done today, as opposed to pacing my classroom like a caged tiger, trying to memorize outlines.

FO

Photo credit: USA Today

If you haven’t read Og Mandino, you must. I was required (meaning dragged, groaning and complaining) to read three small mass-market paperbacks by Mandino way back in undergrad school, when I took a sociology/family psychology class. What began as drudgery ended up as joy. The only bummer is that over the decades, I forgot about them.

Get thee to the library or half.com (where you can buy them for less than a buck) and check out The Greatest Miracle in the World, The Greatest Salesman in the World, and The Greatest Secret in the World. I think I need to buy them all again.

Elegantly written by one of the premier inspirational authors of the 20th century, these three books have been credited with changing people’s lives. I remember them having a profound effect on me. What I originally thought were going to be snoozers turned out to be late-night page-turners. I recommend them highly.

And now…off to rehearsal. Yay.

RF, draggin’ her tail a bit

Photo credit: OgMandino.com

Good Reasons:

• I’m fixing to bake a 3-layer marble cake. It’s Jon’s (my future son-in-law) birthday feast tonight, and that’s his fave dessert. I do love cooking/baking/general culinary fun. It’s one of exactly three things in life I’m good at. Update, 12:25 p.m. – it’s done. Yay! On to the lasagna…
• Jakey is coming tonight, too. Yay.
• I’m putting the finishing touches on some choreography I started last night.
• Simone is coming over to help assemble the lasagna. (Hmm…I think I’ll call Helen and invite her, too…)

Not-So-Good Reasons:

Oh wait. I said I was going to try to be more positive about B***on Uni*****y. Scratch that.

So I read a review on the new Brendan Fraser movie, Inkheart. Critics aren’t too thrilled with it, but it doesn’t matter. I usually don’t much care what critics have to say, as I have often liked movies that they panned. Meh. (But I will admit it is a slippery slope, transferring a book to the screen. You drag along lots of people’s contextual baggage.)

Anyway, I’ve read two of the books in the trilogy (Inkheart and Inkspell). They are very good juvenile fiction. I lost interest after the second one, but I might pick up Inkdeath and add it to the stack of about 14 books that I have to get around to reading.

Last night, I finished the first book in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. I wanted to read it before I saw the movie, which I will rent when it comes out on DVD. I love vampiric stuff, as many of you know, so it was an enjoyable read. I’ll start the next one tonight.

Don’t you just love to read?

Fink out.

Photo credit: New Line Cinema (IMDB)

I was wrong.

Right now, Mavis and I are reading the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton (come on, a girl’s got to have some reading material that does not involve research methodologies). I love all things vampiric; always have, ever since picking up Interview With the Vampire after seeing the movie back in the 90s. Her stories are great, and there’s always an unexpected deus ex machina moment, designed to assure the reader that the stories will continue. Total fun.

Anyway, while reading the first book, Guilty Pleasures, I noticed a couple of errors. You know, minor things, like transposed letters or a missing word in a sentence. I thought, that’s all right, just a typo. No problem.

However, with each successive book in the series, the mistakes began to pile up. Things like “I was loosing the battle,” and “He was smarter then that,” started to irritate me — a lot.

Hamilton’s rampant use of alright is bothersome, too, although the word has been so overused that it’s now a basically accepted part of the American lexicon. Still, why wasn’t it caught and corrected? It makes the word nerd in me absolutely howl.

Then there’s this, over and over and over:

“‘Oh, really?’ She made it a question.”

“‘You knew about this?’ I made it a question.”

“‘Are you in love with him?’ He made it a question.”

What does that mean? Of COURSE it’s a question. So, you’re asking a question, then telling the reader that you phrased the question as a question…STOP IT. I am going mental.

While I love the story lines, and Hamilton’s style is hip and smart-aleck, I can’t get past the myriad mistakes in usage and spelling, and her bewildering phraseology (not to mention an annoying penchant for committing paragraph after paragraph to describing what a character is wearing). Does that make me a bad person? I make this a question.

I went to LKH’s MySpace page the other day, and read that she doesn’t maintain it herself. But the site assures that she does read it. It also unfortunately says that Laurell “definately is enjoying MySpace.” Arg. More points off. Her own website — laurellkhamilton.org — is equally amateurish. **FAIL.**

Who knows…maybe Penguin Books thinks people who buy mass-market paperbacks won’t know the diff. But if I were a #1 New York Times Bestseller List author, I’d for dang sure make certain that everything going out to the public under my name was at least grammatically correct.

Hey Laurell — fire your editor and HIRE THE FINK!