Girl Detective

#49 in my 2007 movie challenge was The Illusionist. Like The Prestige, it is about magic shows in the 19th century, was well reviewed, and stars a famous actor (Edward Norton, Jr.), a hot young thing (Jessica Biel), and an older, skilled character actor (Paul Giamatti). My friend B wondered if she liked this movie less than The Prestige because she was in labor when she watched it. B, I don’t think it was the labor; I found The Illusionist boring, predictable, and overlong. I nearly stopped watching towards the end, and I didn’t care about any of the characters. The Prestige made me think. The Illusionist made me annoyed.

My husband G. Grod thinks that Jessica Biel’s lips are natural. Awful Plastic Surgery and I think otherwise.

When I lived by myself after college, I had few belongings, and I cleaned my apartment weekly. It was usually both tidy and clean.

After I married, I cleaned bi-weekly, and usually kept things tidy.

After I had my first child, and after the first sleep-deprived, bewildering months, I cleaned about once a month, and had trouble keeping things tidy in our small apartment. The influx of baby clothes and toys made things more difficult. Our place was mostly clean, but cluttered.

After I got pregnant with a second child, things really went south. Cleaning fell to the bottom of the priority list. We’d moved into a two-story house with a finished basement. While we didn’t have a lot of square feet, it was still double what we’d had before. We had more clothes, and more toys. We’d accumulated more things, since we had more space to put it in. Our house was neither clean nor tidy.

After I was diagnosed with post-partum depression, my sister Sydney kindly offered to help by paying for a cleaning service. I gratefully accepted, though I was stricken with guilt. Shouldn’t I clean my own house? But since I was struggling inwardly with my emotions and outwardly with parenting, I decided to accept whatever help was offered, and try NOT to feel guilty about it.

Then, as my depression lessened with treatment, my guilt crept back. Shouldn’t I be able to clean my own house? Especially since I now would have a few days to myself with the boys at daycare? I decided to have someone in once more, and see how it went.

It went beautifully. She cleaned while I organized. I got around to projects I’d put off for years. I realized why I’m so bad at cleaning my own house: I can’t just clean. I stop to put things away, or I do laundry AND clean, or I slow down when I have to figure out what to do with something. The benefit of having someone else clean was I could set the priorities (bathrooms, then kitchen floor, then dusting, then vacuuming) and she did them efficiently in that order. She had no connection to what was in her way. I could spend time on the things that usually interrupt my attempts to clean while she cleaned. It was a good combination.

I still feel unreasonably guilty that I am not able to cook, clean, read, write, and care for the boys even if just part time. But seeing that it’s a tandem working relationship, with me organizing while someone else cleans, feels like a much better, and healthier, interpretation.

More discouraging recall new for parents. Veggie Booty, a staple snack in our family that Guppy particularly loves, has been linked to cases of Salmonella. Throw out any bags of Veggie Booty in your house, and keep an eye on your little ones for symptoms.

We have no Booty in the house right now, and though 16mo Guppy has eaten it regularly for many months now, he hasn’t gotten sick.

In the Twin Cities, Northwest Airlines has a lock on the market. This often means decent prices, sometimes means awful prices (my family always gripes; they urge me to move to the hub city of a better airline), but doesn’t leave us much choice. It does, though, allow for nonstop flights almost anywhere, a bonus when traveling with kids. My NWA experiences have been better than not, but this recent piece at Freakonomics has me concerned about upcoming travel.

I am thankful that no deaths or incidents are listed, but this recall is discouraging. How many toys that are labeled non-toxic may actually (perhaps accidentally) have lead paint? These toy trains are in the home of nearly every child I know. (Link via the Freakonomics Blog.)

RC2 Corp. Recalls Various Thomas & Friendsâ„¢ Wooden Railway Toys Due to Lead Poisoning Hazard

From “How Many Ways Can You Spell V1@gra?” by Brian Hayes at American Scientist (link via Arts & Letters Daily):

At the deepest level, spam is a social and economic phenomenon rather than a technological one. The senders and the intended recipients are people, not computers. Nevertheless, there’s the potential for some interesting computation in the making of the stuff, and even moreso in the defenses that help keep it in check. Cre@tive spe11ing is part of this story, and so is the automated production of meaningless drivel. On the defensive side, tools from statistics, pattern analysis and machine intelligence have been brought to bear. Twenty years ago, who could have guessed that the most widely deployed application of computational linguistics and computational learning theory would be fending off nuisance e-mail?

The spam filters on my private email address are great. Those on Gmail are pretty good. Email I send to friends who have Hotmail are periodically bounced back, presumably because their filters are too touchy. I stopped allowing comments here because the noise/signal ratio was too high; I was spending far more time deleting spam than I was responding to comments.

Hayes’s article made me wonder, as I have many times before: to what circle of Dantean hell will spam creators be consigned?

#44 in my 2007 movie challenge was Pretty in Pink, part of the “Too Cool for School” John Hughes box set that my husband got me for Mothers Day. I’d had an inexplicable craving to watch the Hughes movies again, but I worried that Pretty in Pink wouldn’t have aged gracefully. I was pleasantly surprised.

Yes, the dazzling array of “volcanic ensembles” shows 80’s teen fashion in all its painful glory, but the story is a timeless one. Ringwald plays Andi, a senior in high school whose mother ran away a few years before. She lives with her shiftless but loving father on the wrong side of the literal tracks. Her best friend is Duckie, played by Jon Cryer, whose obsession with fashion is exceeded only by his unrequited love for Andi. Andrew McCarthy is “richie” Blane (Duckie: “That’s not a name! It’s a major appliance!”) who develops a crush on Andi, and tries to assure her that their Cinderella story will work. James Spader plays the deliciously nasty Steph, who tries to shame Blane out of dating Andi. The tension centers on whether Blane and Andi will go to the prom. Surprisingly, this conflict is not as superficial as it sounds. The ending does a pretty good job of having it both ways. Andi goes to the dance alone, where she meets Duckie, who redeems his movie-long annoyingness by telling her Blane came alone, and urging her to go with Blane when he tries to apologize. Blane and Andi make out in the parking lot to OMD, and, I assume, live happily ever after.

The story works because Ringwald is believable and like-able as the outcast girl who is scared to hope things might get better. Cryer is hilarious, and his lip-syncing to “Try a Little Tenderness” still has the power to wow me. Annie Potts is sympathetic as Andi’s older, weirder friend Iona, and McCarthy does a good job being the cute nice boy who’s “not like the others.”

One of the extras on the “Everything’s Duckie” edition of the DVD is an extended explanation that borders on apologia for why they changed the original ending, in which Andi and Duckie danced together. Test audiences didn’t like it, and neither did Ringwald, who felt affection for, but not chemistry with, Cryer’s Duckie. The cast got called back six months later to reshoot. McCarthy was in a play for which he’d shaved his head and lost weight. That’s why the cute boy is suddenly not as cute in the final scene. It’s not that he’s been pining for Andi, it’s that he’s gaunt and wearing a bad wig.

I can understand why many people, especially those who root for underdogs, believe that Duckie should have been the boy at the end. I agree with Ringwald, though. They didn’t have spark, and it’s a Cinderella story. The poor, nice girl needs to end up with the cute, nice, rich boy. Otherwise the message is an uncomfortable “stick to your own class, babe,” which would have made for a much darker movie, like John Sayles’s 1982 Baby It’s You.

I was sad to see, though, that Andi’s transformation of Iona’s “dreamy” prom dress was still as ugly and unbecoming as I remembered. The Duckie/Blane argument may go on forever, but I’ve never met anyone who liked the dress at the end better than the original.

I did my fair share of griping about the third (and now final) season of Veronica Mars, so I don’t want to be a hypocrite. Yet the final six episodes of the season/series were a welcome and entertaining reminder of why I started watching this show. (To be precise, though, I think I watched because my friend The Big Brain told me to).

The third season meandered and squandered excellent secondary characters, like Wallace, Mac, Dick, and Piz. It killed off two of the funniest ones, Sheriff Lamb and Dean O’Dell. These absences were all the more strange because season three also saw a lessened presence for star Kristen Bell. After two seasons of appearing in almost every scene, Bell needed a break. Unfortunately, she was like gravity for the show. When she was offscreen, the story and characters spun out of control. Additionally, season three was divided in two in case it was canceled midseason (it wasn’t), and took a long hiatus after Veronica solved the second long story mystery, the dean’s death. Many viewers didn’t return when VM resumed six weeks later. I nearly didn’t, but again, my friend The Big Brain told me to watch, and I’m glad he did.

The last six episodes were standalones. While the weekly mysteries weren’t that strong, the cast interactions were as good as ever. Veronica finally got a nice boy in Piz (though my friend Rock Hack thinks they did a bad job of making him Indie Rock Boy), told an annoying Logan to go to hell, and in general was her sassy, smart, kick-ass, girl-detective self for the remainder of the season/series. The second to last episode had Paul Rudd in an excellent turn as a has-been rocker, and the last episode finished with a dark, sexual storyline that harked back to season one. I choose to view the repetition of certain story elements (secret society, viral digital spread of a sex video, Veronica tracking down the guy who messed with her) as homages to great stories from season one, rather than rehashes of same.

During season three, I griped. In retrospect, I think the loss of focus felt like fingerprints from the interference of VM’s new network, the CW. I was reminded of the permanent downshift in quality that took place when Buffy the Vampire Slayer switched networks.

In the end, Veronica Mars, the character and the series, finished strong. The creators did a good job of ending in a way that gave closure, while leaving the door open. Creator Rob Thomas had an interesting idea for the fall. Rather than start with fall of the following school year, he suggested they jump ahead four years to Veronica in training as a government operative. Sadly, the CW decided to shut the door on both ideas.

Veronica Mars was never a ratings winner. As Nathan Alderman noted at TeeVee, though, it lasted three seasons, when it could have been canceled immediately. Season one still stands as one of the best, cohesive television seasons I’ve seen. While seasons two and three never attained that former glory, they still featured one of the most clever heroines on television. Veronica was a teenage, noir, girl detective. She was a strong, unique character, and I’m going to miss her come the fall.

This article from The Edge (link via Arts and Letters Daily) elucidates how and why many adults choose speculative beliefs over scientific findings:

…resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy.

My husband G. Grod sent me a link from Boing Boing to Merlin Mann at 43 Folders on “The strange allure (and false hope) of email bankruptcy“. This was the first I’d heard of the term, though Mann posted previously about it, and it may date from as long ago as 1999, according to this WaPo article. The popular lit agent/blogger, Miss Snark, periodically referred to “hosing out her inbox” in a similar bid to start fresh. Mann has another suggestion for managing email that he calls the “email DMZ“.

The WaPo piece notes that many tech-savvy and email-inundated people are backing off from (or even out of) email in favor of the telephone. Since having baby Guppy 16 months ago, I’ve attempted the opposite, as I found phone calls more difficult than email.

As I noted recently, though, I’m buried in my inboxes, both at home and for the blog. They’ve swelled to a grand, cringe-inducing, and possibly paralyzing, total of 580. Mann captures my feelings on this, exactly:

Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a fucking pebble!”

To all the kind friends and family who have emailed me, I will again quote Mann, in reply to you.

I’m not prepared to declare bankruptcy just yet, but if you were kind enough to email me a pebble some time over the last few [YEARS], there’s a very good chance that I still haven’t found the time to do something appropriately nice with it. Which makes me feel awful. I sincerely apologize if your lovely pebble is still in my very large pile.

I’m currently on a sort of break, so I have the usual hope/delusion that I’ll be able to “catch up on everything” that this piece from the Onion skewered so wonderfully. Please be patient if (when?) I don’t get through all 580 pebbles in the next few weeks.

If you have sent me an email recently and I haven’t replied, it’s not you, it’s me. I’m swamped. Buried. I’ve got more than 350 emails in my inbox, and less time each day to manage them.

I read and appreciate each one, and thank you, thank you for all the kind words and thoughts. I do hope to reply, and soon, but digging out of 350+ is going to take some time. (Funny, the backlog dates from around the time Guppy was born, over 15 months ago.)

The last three movies I watched–Babel, For Your Consideration, and Infamous–were disappointments. All three had moments, but not enough to feel good about the time I spent on them, or to recommend them.

By skimming reviews from trusted sources like Time Out and Ebert and Roeper, I can get a pretty good idea of what I’ll like and what I can skip. I need to be more careful in the future. I have little time to myself, and I don’t want to spend it on mediocrity. I’m glad that I saw a few excellent movies recently, like The Lives of Others, Shadow of a Doubt, and Infernal Affairs, that remind me to keep trying.

The Peter Principle is the idea, first formulated for business, that people rise to the level of their incompetence. Most mornings I struggle with the clashes between my sons, 3yo Drake and 15mo Guppy, plus try to meet my basic needs, like breakfast and coffee. Both are either lukewarm or stone cold by the time I get to them.

A friend of a friend (and mother of an only child) once remarked that parents find out how many kids are too many for them after the fact. It’s best to be cautious and not assume that one is having kids, plural. I think about this remark a lot lately, as well as the Peter Principle, and wonder if two kids put me in over my head.

Maybe it’s their ages, maybe it’s their developmental stages, maybe it’s just me. I’m muddling along as best I can, reading Siblings without Rivaly and Raising a Thinking Child. Having a second child, like having the first one, was a huge life change with dramatic impact, both physical and emotional. Some friends say things get better, others say they merely become harder in different ways. Hope and self-learning–they’ve pulled me through life, and they’re pulling me through the screaming and fighting that makes up so much of parenting for me right now.

#27 in my 2007 movie challenge would have been Batman Begins, but I couldn’t stay awake for the ending. (I was more impressed when I saw it in theater.) So #27 is The Lake House, or “Magic Mailbox,” as NYT film critic A.O. Scott quipped. Ebert and Roeper liked it when it came out last year, so in spite of the mixed reviews of others (unlike the guy in Metropolitan–which is an adaptation of Austen’s Mansfield Park; I didn’t know that!–I read reviews and read books/see movies) we decided to give it a try. I’m glad I did. This was a sweet romance. Bullock and Reeves inhabit the titular house at different points, but they share a dog and a mailbox that defy the space/time continuum. I was surprised at how decent this was, and that it didn’t suck. While those sound like faint praise, they’re not. There was a nice theme about Jane Austen’s Persuasion running through it, and while they didn’t get the parallel exactly right, it was pretty close. This was a gentle, heartening movie that was good at the end of a frazzling day. The weird things that bothered me? The actor who played Reeves’s brother, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, had a very strange hairline. And Keanu Reeves in a turtleneck sweater, or perhaps any man, for that matter? No. Just, no.

#16 in my 2007 book challenge was Elizabeth Gilbert’s spiritual memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert is an engaging, believable narrator, and is direct about her own foibles, an essential ingredient to a good memoir. The book is by turns funny and sad as it details her bad divorce, worse rebound relationship, and the crushing depression that spurred her to plan a year abroad, with four months apiece in Italy, India, and Indonesia. I found the segment on India the most compelling. Throughout, her transformations–emotional, physical and spiritual–are related with clear and intelligent prose.

….when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt–this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight. (115)

I have two small reservations about the book. One, Gilbert used male pronouns to refer to God; I would have preferred gender neutrality. Two, Gilbert relates that she was raised in a Christian church and chose to study and practice Eastern religion as an adult.

I think this is a little like growing up in one small state in the US, then saying the whole country is terrible, and moving to Japan. Christianity is not a monolith. Even the various sects are so complex that they vary by church, and by individuals within each church. There is a long and interesting history of physical practices, meditation, and even feminism, WITHIN the broad umbrella that is Christianity. One need not leave the country, or even one’s church or sect, to learn about and practice them.

I am by no means discounting the value of Gilbert’s spiritual choices. I loved reading about them, and they have given me much to think about; I highly recommend this book. But one need not go East in search of meaning and unexplored territory. As Gilbert herself notes in the book, there are many paths up the mountain.

Sometimes Bunty feels as if the whole world is trying to climb on her body. (17)

Bunty….is irritated….(does she actually possess any other emotion?)…., disguising her thoughts with a bright artificial smile….Bunty maintains a Madonna-like expression of serenity and silence for as long as she can before her impatience suddenly boils over and she yanks the bars of [Gillian's] tricycle to hurry it along….

Is this a good mother? (19-20), Behind the Scenes at the Museum

A good mother? Maybe not. But a flawed, normal human that I can empathize with? Yes, yes, yes.

Poor Bunty, the main character’s mother in Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum. She was abandoned by a fiance, married to a pet-shop owner who has a series of affairs, and gives birth to a gaggle of girls for whom she feels scant connection. This might seem unempathizable, until we learn about the dearth of affection Bunty received from her own mother.

Nearly every day I fight the urge to shake off one or the other of my sons, as they cling like barnacles to my legs and cry out for affection beyond what I’ve given already, and beyond what I feel I possess. Just yesterday, I took 3yo Drake out to the sidewalk to ride his tricycle. I was quickly frustrated because he didn’t want to ride it; he just pushed it back and forth. To complicate matters, 1yo Guppy also wanted to push it, so several screaming fights ensued. I’m happy to say my screams weren’t part of the chorus, though they did clamor rather loudly in my head to be let out.

I frequently berate myself that I SHOULD be playing with the children, and that I SHOULDN’T have expectations of how that play should go. One part of me, the Bunty-self, can’t believe that riding a tricycle is so fracking difficult, and wonders why Guppy can’t be distracted by bubbles, and why he insists on spilling bubble juice over my lap, and trying to drink it from the bottle. Another part, the person who is trying to be a good mother (and yet who feels the sting of consistent failure), says that my kids are doing what kids do, interested in what they’re interested in, and ready when they are, not when I want them to be. Yet another part reminds me that my kids are clothed, fed, safe, healthy, learning, and mostly happy. I can’t be failing if all these are true.

So me as mother is a messy amalgam of all these parts. Perhaps I can be as compassionate to myself as I am to the character of Bunty.

#22 in my 2007 movie challenge was Borat - Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan It was sometimes hilarious, and frequently cringe inducing–I often watched through a lattice of my fingers in front of my eyes. Sacha Baron Cohen has a strange, extreme sense of humor. The DVD is cleverly and thoroughly set up to look like it’s an illegal bootleg, and all extras are titled in Borat-ese. This movie was funny, but also worthwhile because it became a comedic touchstone so quickly; it’s useful to know what everyone else is referring to.

I woke Friday morning with a severe spike in my already considerable irritability. It was not long before I was angry and cursing aloud in front of the kids, which I’ve learned is a sign of rising anxiety for me. I sent off a quick email to a retreat center to see if they had any space. We have a babysitter helping us with childcare for now, so I left soon after she arrived, and went first to a yoga class, then to my regularly scheduled therapy appointment. I returned home better, though not feeling calm, and had almost forgotten about my inquiry to the retreat center. When I checked email at home, they’d replied and had a last minute cancellation at the hermitage, their private cabin for a solitary retreat. Figuring that the universe seemed to be answering my request, I said yes, then sent off a few emails and made some calls to alert friends that G. Grod would be on his own for the next 36 hours and could use some help with the boys.

My friend Becca recommended the ARC retreat center to me, and I will thank her forever for it. I’ve now gone twice, and it is a haven. The hermitage cabin has just what it needs and no more. Since I tend to anxious overdoing, I took way too much with me, but sorted things out when I got there.

Once I could think clearly, I realized what I did and didn’t need.

Did need: book, journal, fiction notebook.

Didn’t need: laptop, City Pages, two Entertainment Weekly’s, five books to review for the blog.

I also probably didn’t need any toiletries other than sunscreen, toothpaste and toothbrush. (And I would’ve liked to have fluoride-free toothpaste, since the cabin doesn’t have running water.)

The staff at ARC is wonderfully supportive, and the food they make is vegetarian, hearty, sustaining AND delicious. There was fresh bread at almost every meal, some wonderful gingered beets from a recipe in Sundays at Moosewood. I had a restorative 36 hours. During that time, I tried and succeeded at doing only one thing at a time; I didn’t multitask. I didn’t read while I ate (or in the outhouse). I also tried, and mostly succeeded, at not making a to-do list. I did one thing at a time, and allowed myself just one, “and then”. This worked surprisingly well, probably because I was in a tiny cabin in the woods by myself and chose to limit my options to: eating, sleeping, reading, journalling, novelling, and walking.

I have a huge crush on the book I took with me, that I finished this morning in between my first breakfast (yogurt with strawberry rhubarb sauce and granola, bread and butter, coffee with almond biscotti) and second breakfast (egg scramble with cheddar cheese and hummos). It’s Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

READ THIS BOOK. It’s funny, sad, honest and intelligent and it’s got some GREAT stuff on religion and spirituality. Gilbert is instantly accessible and empathetic. My only quibble (oh, I always have one, don’t I?) is Gilbert’s overuse of male pronouns for God. A little equal opportunity time for goddesses would have been lovely.

I came back this morning rested and with some little reserve that helped me to handle the boys screaming and poking and crying that has sporadically filled the day. I really needed to get away, and I’m so thankful and fortunate that I could do so. Thanks, G. Grod. Thanks, friends who helped G. Grod. Thanks again, Becca. Thanks, ARC staff. Thanks, whoever cancelled your hermitage reservation. Thanks, Liz Gilbert for writing an awesome spiritual memoir. Everybody rocks.

A few people’s voices inspire in me a strong, visceral negative reaction; I can’t get beyond the sound to what they are saying. My antipathy to their voices is immediate, and causes me to leap across rooms or lunge into front seats to change the CD or the radio station. I am thankful that these aren’t frequent.

1. The Sugarcubes/Bjork. A boss of mine used to play this when we had to go on business road trips. She also liked the Sundays, and both bands plus Bjork got jumbled together into one unhappy sound memory.

2. Joey Lauren Adams in Chasing Amy. I liked the movie. I hated that Adams, who was dating director Kevin Smith at the time, was given ridiculously long, talk-y speeches. Her voice should be used sparingly, not in Smith-ish talkfests. May she never do a Tarantino movie.

3. Garrison Keillor. I call him the bad man. His creepy baritone scares me.

4. Mazzy Star, Fade into Me. Unfortunately, this is one of those 90’s hits that gets replayed all the time. The drawn out music plus the whiny vocals are like fingernails down a chalkboard.

I am an unapologetic reader of Entertainment Weekly. For all the swearing off of magazines I’ve done, there are a few that rise above the crowd to earn my attention. EW is one of those. I find it smart, funny, and a good, quick review of many things important to me: books, movies, tv and music. Sneer if you must, but in this case I’m no snob. I like EW because it embraces popular culture, though whether it’s high, medium or low is anyone’s call.

Stephen King is a columnist for EW. I haven’t read a King novel in many years, but I enjoy his “The Pop of King” and his sense of humor. In April 6, 2007’s “How to Bury a Book,” he accuses publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux of dropping the ball with its treatment of the new novel Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski. King takes issue with the cover and the title. He feels they tell nothing about, and therefore don’t sell, the book. King picked Fieldwork up on impulse, in spite of the cover and title, and was pleasantly surprised. He says that FSG has burdened the book with a smeary image and vague title because they’re afraid to market a literary novel overtly:

Hey, guys, why not put the heroine on the jacket….why not actually sell this baby a little?

I found it interesting that King also took issue with the cover and title of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, also from FSG, because I clearly remember the first time I saw that book in a store. I had to sternly restrain myself from buying Gilead in hardcover. Oh, how I wanted that book. The cover was a lovely wash of bleached-out color. It looked like the door of an old church. That plus the title told me it would be a book about religion and spirituality. I didn’t buy the book, because I managed to adhere to whatever “if I’m not about to read it next I can’t buy it, and I certainly can’t buy it in hardcover because by the time I read it, not only will it be out in paperback, it will probably have gone through a trade paperback printing into a mass market printing and I’ll have spent $25+ on a book that’s harder to read because of its lack of portability, and I’ll long for the lighter weight, and smaller pocketbook dent, of a paperback” vow I had taken at the time. I continued to visit that hardcover on subsequent bookstore trips, even after I borrowed Gilead from the library. I bought it as soon as it came out in trade paperback.

I went to amazon.com to check out Fieldwork after I read King’s column. Based on the description of the book, the cover and King’s endorsement, I would get this book, in spite of the mixed editorial reviews at amazon. (I don’t take the editorial reviews as gospel, and I pretty much ignore the personal reviews–too little signal to noise. But the ed. reviews usually point me in the right direction: check it out/meh/avoid.) I might not buy Fieldwork in hardcover (see para. above). But I would certainly reserve it from the library, which notifies them that the book is in demand, and encourages them to purchase more copies. The smudgey cover and title, along with the book description, point to a messy tale about anthropologists. The image and title both appeal to me, and make sense.

I find King’s complaints interesting. He may have a point that publishers are afraid to market literary fiction. Yet his argument sounds to me like he’s taking his opinion–that the cover and title should be more obvious in order to better sell the book–and universalizing it. Given that King is mostly a writer in the horror genre, and genre books tend to have more representative and less impressionistic covers and titles, I think he has a bias for what he likes that may not be as true for “ordinary readers,” as he believes.

Let me be clear. He is Stephen Freakin’ King, the bestselling author, many of whose books I’ve read and bought over the years. I am merely the author of this little weblog, and mostly unpublished. His opinion counts for more than mine. But since I consider myself one of the “ordinary readers” whom he validates, I wanted to voice my difference of opinion.

In the end, it feels unfair to quibble with King. He’s using the considerable power of his good opinion to support Fieldwork. In fact, his closing words are so good they should be repeated:

Under the drab title and drab cover, there’s a story that cooks like a mother. It’s called Fieldwork.