An Afternoon Quickie

I'm in the airport, and no, I'm not figuring on joining the Mile High Club.

Just hanging out and figured I'd do a quick Meme. This one's from Travis over at One Word, One Rung, One Day and it's a simple one: grab the book you are currently reading, flip to page 56, and give us 2 - 5 lines. Since page 56 isn't the best for quotes, I am going out of bounds here and going from page 51. This is an excerpt from Dearly Devoted Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay:

(Dexter is meeting his sister, a police officer, for lunch)

'Because I am an inhuman monster, I tend to be logical, and I had thought that her new assignment would end her martyrdom as Our Lady of Perpetual Grumpiness. Alas, even her transfer to homicide had failed to bring a smile to her face. Somewhere along the way she had decided that serious law enforcement personnel must reshape their faces until they look like large, mean-spirited fish, and she was still working very hard to accomplish this....'

'...She called in her location and status and then sat across from me with a frown.

"Well, Sergeant Grouper," I said as we picked up our menus.

"Is that funny Dexter?"

"Yes," I said, "Very funny. And a little sad, too. Like life itself. Especially your life, Deborah." '

If you haven't read the Dexter novels, I would enthusiastically recommend them. The writing is as enjoyable, if not more so, than the story. Now that's my kind of book!

I still owe JaneyV a meme. Hopefully soon, Janey!

Introducing.....

Three posts in one day?? I KNOW!!! Don't faint on me!!

My gorgeous, lovely, hilarious, free-spirited, friend Ed over at The Big Picture According to Ed has FINALLY posted, after having her blog up for several weeks!!!

Ed is my sister-in-spirit, a fearsomely honest, admirably frank, unfailingly loyal woman who shares my passion for self-improvement and brutal introspection. Her writing is refreshingly free-form; a stark contrast to my own tightly-reined style, shackled by my obsessive attention to grammatical and punctuational rules and regulations.

Ed is a passionate woman with an eternal focus on The Big Picture. She detests "minus-work," dishonesty, and has zero tolerance for narrow-mindedness or self-centeredness. If you can measure up enough to earn her friendship, you will be blessed with her loyalty for life.

She's going through some rough times right now, especially with her husband of almost 10 years; ironically, her aforementioned loyalty and honesty is her Achilles Heel. But with her unwavering faith in the importance of The Big Picture, it's bound to work out as it should.

Please visit her blog. She needs a bit of encouragement to light a fire under her ass! When she sees those comments coming in, she'll be hooked. I know it!

So go on! Scram! And tell her Mom In Scrubs sent ya.

Just don't forget to come back....=)

Fun Quiz

Here's a fun one - I love english and grammar, and detest improper usage, at least for myself. It's part of my compulsiveness. Here's a great test; it covers many of the usual grammatical foibles:

Your result for The Commonly Confused Words Test...

English Genius

You did so extremely well, even I can't find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don't. You have an extensive vocabulary, and you're not afraid to use it properly! Way to go!

Take The Commonly Confused Words Test at HelloQuizzy

Enjoy, and let me know how you do!!

Book Review, "Haunted"

If I have something positive to say about all the time I've been spending in airports and on planes lately, it would have to be the amount of reading I can get done. Without hassle.

If I have a long layover, I'm drawn inexorably to bookstores for, unlike other retail stores in airports, the prices of books are not inflated. Sure, there are no bargains either, but paying cover price for a paperback isn't insulting to me., and the payoff is generally worth the up-front fee.

I recently splurged and bought Chuck Palahniuk's latest paperback, "Haunted." It was the cover art and the title that got me:

Besides, this is the guy that wrote "Fight Club," a movie that I didn't know was a book first, and which I've never seen but I've heard was excellent with a great twist. I love a great twist; especially when I don't see it coming!

I'll admit that I bought the book because I like ghost stories, and if they're twisted, so much the better. I knew that there would be an emphasis on the human predicament here; what I didn' t realize was that there would be no paranormal focus at all.

OK, fine, whatever. Letting go of my ghost-story hopes, I dove into the book.

It took me a while to get into the rhythm of the book, and make no mistake, this book has rhythm. While some stories just pull you in and sweep you along in their undercurrent, this book was more like a spell being cast, a meditation, a play in 32 acts, each act divided into two parts.

The structure of the book is 23 essays, or short stories (it's hard to make the distinction here), and 21 poems. The premise of the collection is that 20-odd people converge at a writers' retreat where they have agreed to isolate themselves from any public contact for three months in order to shed the shackles of outside influence that are hindering their fulfillment of writerly destiny. It all goes horribly wrong, however, when the writers collectively focus on making sure they all emerge tragic heroes from their "unwilling imprisonment," thus sabotaging themselves and those around them in the interest of making their final story shocking and marketable.

The rhythm of the book is simple: Poem "about" a character, Story "by" that character. The poems are frequently, for lack of a better term, Haunting. The stories reveal each character's defining moment; that which led them into this situation, this temporary but utterly complete disappearance from society.

I found it difficult to get into the rhythm of the book at first. Truthfully I was several chapters in before I was able to get a perspective at all. The biggest obstacle to my submerging into the story was the introduction of each character as he or she boarded the bus, carrying the one allotted suitcase. Palahnuik describes each character and the contents of each suitcase in detail, but introduces them by the names used in the book. No character has a conventional name; they are all named around their respective life-altering event. There is Saint Gut-Free, Director Denial, Agent Tattletale, Lady Baglady, and so-on. While these names come to light later and actually stick, I simply could not form mental pictures that went with the names. It was only as each story was told that the names stuck. Maybe this was his intention?

Also, there wasn't really a defined point-of-view. At first it seems that we are seeing the story through the eyes of one of the fellow "prisoners;" indeed, maybe we were? If so, this person goes unnamed, un-poemed, and un-storied. It could be that this person is the oft-referenced, "camera behind the camera behind the camera" that all the characters struggle to be. Maybe this is the person that achieved the ultimate goal: to bring their stories to the world and profit from them? We never really know.

Each story is fraught with twisted, dark humor, and repulsive detail at times. The afterword tells of the fainting phenomenon that occured when Palahnuik would read the essay, "Guts" at live readings. And yet he manages to mix humor with revulsion and bring raw humanity into every situation.

In retrospect, I liked this book. In fact, I think I want to read it again, if only to cement together some of the information that I know I should have put together in the first place. I've been thinking about it a lot, and I can't fault a book that keeps me thinking long after I have put it down.

The killing blow for me, I think, was that I had to read this book over about a month, due to leaving it in multiple labs and falling asleep several times while reading it on a plane (no comment toward the book; I am very vulnerable to the hum of the engines of a plane and a dark cabin!). I think it would have had more cohesion if I could have kept it in "rhythm."

Other reviews I have read say that this is one of his lesser works, that Fight Club and Choke are right up there. I will definitely read those books after reading this.

In the end, it was a bit abstractly put together, a bit unfocused, and a bit gory. But I would recommend it for it's uniqueness in character development, interesting form, and thought provoking-ness.

Finally, I would recommend it for pure creep-factor. After finishing the book in the car one night, I brought it upstairs and put it on my nightstand. I did my bedtime hygeine routine, and when I walked into our darkened bedroom almost dropped on the spot in shock. This was staring back at me:

Nobody warned me the damn thing glowed in the dark.

So I chased JeepMan around the bedroom with it - he's more easily creeped out than I am....hee hee!!

Third Place!!

I'm so excited...I got Third Place over at OxyJen's blog for her "Happy 100" writing contest.

I'm thrilled for the recognition, and that I was able to meet the challenge. The challenge was to make up a story using exactly 100 words. It's tougher than you might think! 100 words isn't a lot to tell an actual story. Here is my entry:

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Frank never thought he'd see the day.

Here he was, face-to-face with his childhood nemesis. The bully who'd extorted his lunch money, planted stink-bombs in his locker, and fabricated rumors about Frank's sexuality that plagued his high school years.

Frank slid into the seat opposite the man, setting down his sharkskin briefcase, loosening his Armani tie.

He cleared his throat. "Don't I know you?"

A blank stare. The briefest flicker of horrified recognition, squelched instantly into contrived dispassion. "...I don't think so."

It was all Frank needed. He settled back, snapped open the Wall Street Journal.

"Black polish. Make 'em shine."

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Inspired, as my faithful followers have already surmised, by my frequent Airport excursions of late.

I've added a few to my blogroll from OxyJen's site, check 'em out if you have the time. I picked the ones that are my personal kind of blogs.