So this morning, BFF Kay, her husband Bob, and their son Aaron came over for breakfast and gifts. It was a great time.

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

That is the question.

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.

Of course, getting the git lists from my family also entails the giving of my git list to them — especially to the Thriller. Are you reading me today, Lambikins? I ask because reading is on the menu this morning. E-reading, that is.

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.

It’s no secret to my family and friends that I possess slightly more than a passing interest in the Beatles, to include their history, their influence on popular culture, what inspired them, and the occasional darkness that fed their collective genius.

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.

And in spite of its niggling annoyances (I love the word “niggling”), it’s a great read so far.

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…

But, all annoyances aside, I am having a ball reading his anecdotes. Truly, it’s like being in a room with your 85-year-old great uncle who has wonderful stories that are a total gas to listen to. And a great storyteller he is. Curtis’s prose and style are entertaining and never boring; I can hear his adorable Bronx accent in every line.

~

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

I was typing a text message this evening, and typed “Og” instead of “Of.” It instantly reminded me of Og Mandino.

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