Category Archives: Lauren

July 01, 2011   Lauren   fun, Lauren, opinion, pet peeves, writing  
20

Since you asked, Vampire Weekend, I do.

Reading news can be a dangerous thing.  Horrible stories abound and good news seems to come around rarely (or gets taken for granted enough that it doesn’t get publicized), so when you have the chance to read a story that ultimately isn’t really that big a deal, it can be kind of refreshing.  Still, sometimes you’ll catch a headline that just shakes you to the very core.  Like this one, from Galleycat:

Oxford Comma Dropped by a University of Oxford Style Guide

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!  Rest easy, serial comma fans, because it turns out that was just from the U of Oxford PR department.  The Oxford comma is still in favor in Oxford after all—or at least from the part that gets to make these calls.  Nonetheless, I was deeply saddened.  I know plenty of people have good reasons for hating the serial comma.  I know I’m an over-comma-er.  My mother was a newspaper editor when I was growing up, so I’ve heard it all before.  I think serial commas are clearer, and they please me aesthetically.  Sometimes it means the difference between saying what you want to say and saying something much more amusing.  They’re not always strictly necessary, but I can’t support a rule that says “only use this if you think people might get confused if you don’t,” because I think people rarely recognize when the things they are saying can be interpreted more than one way.  I like consistency.  You can have my serial comma when you pry it from my cold dead hands.  Or you can have it in this sentence where it’s helpful, pleasing, and attractive.  See?  Wasn’t that nice?

The other somewhat outdated stylistic choice I cling to is two spaces after a period.  You’ll likely note that these sentences are followed by single spaces.  And that’s true as you’re reading them, but not as I’m writing them, because the designers of HTML are trying to hurt my soul.  I’ve heard the answers.  I’ve been berated by people who work in jobs where such things matter.  I know people who know things about fonts and the history of typography who have explained persuasively that single spaces are just the right thing to do.  I can’t.  I won’t.  I just believe in two spaces.  I find it easier to read.  I find it more attractive.  I’m stubborn and ridiculous.  But if double spaces are wrong, I don’t want to be right.

I’m not a writer (other than emails, pitch letters, rights list blurbs, and Facebook status updates, the extent of my writing is this here blog), but I’m still not ready to let go of these things.  In what ways are you writers out there attempting to halt the tide of language evolution?  Anyone willing to join Team Serial Comma and Double Space, or do you all think I’m insane?

Update: Apparently the HTML auto-conversion that single spacifies doesn’t work if you use the Paste from Word function in WordPress.  Victory for Double Spacers!  (Surely now by going in to update this that single spacification will kick in.  And, yes, I am the sort of person who uses made up words like spacification but gets all sad about where people put commas.  Tragic, I know.)

The other somewhat outdated stylistic choice I cling to is two spaces after a period.  You’ll likely note that these sentences are followed by single spaces.  And that’s true as you’re reading them, but not as I’m writing them, because the designers of HTML are trying to hurt my soul.  I’ve heard the answers.  I’ve been berated by people who work in jobs where such things matter.  I know people who know things about fonts and the history of typography who have explained persuasively that single spaces are just the right thing to do.  I can’t.  I won’t.  I just believe in two spaces.  I find it easier to read.  I find it more attractive.  I’m stubborn and ridiculous.  But if double spaces are wrong, I don’t want to be right.
June 24, 2011   Lauren   canon, fun, Lauren, lists, reading  
12

List time!

As you know well if you’ve read this blog around year’s end, we’re awfully fond of lists around here.  And judging by the proliferation of lists on the internet, they must appeal to a vast number of others as well (unless the internet is written purely for the sake of us at DGLM, in which case, thanks!).  So I was delighted to come across this Guardian list of greatest nonfiction books.  Unlike with lists of novels, where I usually feel pretty confident that I’ll come out OK if I go through to see how many I’ve already read, this one’s pretty daunting.  I’ve partially read Said’s Orientalism for a class, have always pretended to myself that Decline and Fall is coming up real soon on my list (plus Sally Draper read parts of it that time), and I’m pretty certain I once got assigned Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and claimed to have read it.  I minored in philosophy in college, so I’ve read parts of some of each of those texts, plus all of The Symposium.  Likewise, I’ve dabbled in a number of the politics books for classes.  Like most people, I imagine, I’ve read Anne Frank’s diary, and like most English majors, I hope, I know all about Virginia Woolf’s very own room.  I think I may have read Ways of Seeing for a class as well. But of everything on this list, all 100 titles, I’ve read only two in full, purely because I wanted to: Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Philip Gourevitch’s riveting and heartbreaking We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families.

Reading through the rest of the list, I can flag any number of things I feel I should read (A Brief History of Time, The Communist Manifesto, The Medium is the Massage, The Prince, The Periodic Table) and a few I think I even genuinely want to (In Cold Blood, Slouching Towards Bethlehem).  For the most part, though, it looks to me like a lengthy and, while perhaps edifying, boring homework assignment.  So help me out here, readers:  which of these have you read, and of those, which would you really recommend?  I actually love all kinds of thoughtful and educational nonfiction, and feel a silly amount of pressure to be “well read,” but at this point in my life and with the near infinite number of book options and finite number of hours, I’d prefer not to read anything else merely because it proved to be important.  I think I have enough of an education to have a good sense of why some books matter in the grand scheme of things and why they find themselves in the canon, but since no one’s asking me to write essays about them anymore, I just don’t have it in me to read them solely for that reason.  For a moment, let’s categorize greatest simply as most enjoyable or entertaining or moving.  By that rubric, I’d definitely keep Gourevitch on, but I’m not sure I could say the same for Orientalism, which is a bit of a slog. What do you think still belongs on this list?  What would you add?  What would you definitely remove?

June 17, 2011   Lauren   great books, Lauren, memory  
8

Sharing is caring

One of NY’s greatest pleasures is that it’s a pretty literary city. With American publishing centered here, on just about any night you can probably find a great literary event going on. Last night I went to a reading and panel featuring new children’s books, and it was a fun event. But I had an ulterior motive:  one of the authors was signing a book I’ve read, loved, and must share with my sister. Not only is it a book about sisterly love, it’s precisely the sort of book she and I used to share back when we still shared a bedroom. In fact, when I first read it, I was reminded of a short story in a horror anthology we were obsessed with when we were younger. My first thought when I read the last sentence of the novel was that I loved it. My second was that Katey would, too.

Even though we no longer share a bedroom or even a state, Katey and I still share books.  I think I’ve mentioned before that I try to give her my favorite books I’ve read in the past year for her birthday and Christmas. I also never visit her without at least a book or two in tow, no matter how little else I’ve packed.  And when she and her family come visit me in July, there will be a stack of great reads waiting. When she bought a new bookcase recently and posted a blurry photo on Facebook, I tried to spot things I’d given her and tag them. It was like a Word Search for book nerds. And she’ll reciprocate: I think there are already five books lined up for her to bring up for me next month.

I’ve always been a book sharer and love trading off with friends or giving them recommendations, but it’s Katey who I think of with every book I read. All books end up sorted in one of two mental lists:  give to Katey or Katey wouldn’t like. We don’t always love the same things, but where books are concerned, we completely understand each other.

Am I alone in this? Anyone else have a kindred soul whom they just need to share books with? Or do you spread the word to everyone equally?

June 10, 2011   Lauren   children's books, fun, Lauren, memory  
7

Rumpusing in the Night Kitchen with some Chicken Soup with Rice

Today, my friends, is the 83rd birthday of one Maurice Sendak—among the greatest children’s book authors and illustrators the world has ever had the good fortune to know.  If you don’t know who Maurice Sendak is, get thee to the nearest child’s bookshelf with haste.  (If this involves breaking into the neighbor’s house, I’m sure they’ll forgive you when you explain that you needed badly to read it.)  Unquestionably, that shelf has Where the Wild Things Are on it, which, if not my favorite book from childhood, is certainly in the top 10.  (My other favorites include The Monster at the End of This Book, The Giving Tree, Green Eggs & Ham, Caps for Sale, and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, in case you were curious.)  What kid (American kid?) doesn’t know about Max and the Wild Things?  I’ll admit I didn’t see the recent film adaptation—it looked lovely, but I thought Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers combining forces might just be too much for me, and I was afraid to let them ruin such a classic.

Unlike most children’s books, which I associate mostly with my own love for them, Sendak’s books are, to me, clear reminders of particular people.  If I’m not mistaken, Where the Wild Things Are is my mother’s favorite picture book.  When I think of it, I invariably think of her—of how good she is at reading aloud and how much love for books she instilled in me as a child.  If not for her and her passion for books like this one, I might not be in publishing right now.  I might not think that books are important and magical and transformative.

My sister is the one I associate In the Night Kitchen with.  It’s not actually one of my favorite childhood books, and I’m not sure if it’s one of hers either.  I don’t remember it very well, in fact.  I can’t recall anything that happens, though I imagine it involves a kitchen at night.  But I do very strongly associate it with her, because I’m pretty sure she owned it and lorded it over me that it was hers, not mine.  As the youngest of three, she may not have had as many major classic picture books as my older brother and I did.  Green Eggs & Ham is one of the best things that ever happened to words, but I’m pretty sure no house needs three copies, so it’s fairly likely that the one we had was technically given to our brother.  So we had the greatest, most wonderful collective bookshelves, but poor girl probably didn’t get to claim so many of those as her very own.  It’s almost certain that what I’m remembering is some kind of retribution, because she wasn’t a particularly possessive kid—certainly nowhere near as much as I was (let’s be honest: am).  I probably made her beg to read The Giving Tree, which I took great pride in my ownership of seeing as it had been inscribed to me by whichever friend of my parents gave it as a gift when I was born, so she punished me by withholding In the Night Kitchen.  I promise we’re much better at sharing books in adulthood!  All of that to say, the book is probably really great, but I’m not sure if I’ve read it!

Chicken Soup with Rice is another story entirely (no pun intended).  I don’t think we owned that one at my house, but my friend Talia had the Nutshell Library edition, and I seem to remember reading it at school as well.  I coveted it and contemplated buying the Nutshell collection for myself well into my teens, in part because it’s a wonderful book, and in part because tiny things are adorable.  And I read, and re-read, and re-read that book at every possible opportunity, because I felt a compulsion to memorize it.  I have a vague memory of being a tad bitter about September’s entry, which I never felt was quite as good as the others.  As a September baby, I took this very personally, but not enough to trump my love for the book, and my pride in remembering all the words.

SO, happy birthday, Maurice Sendak, and thanks very much for the memories!  Any of you have Sendak memories to share?

June 03, 2011   Lauren   Lauren, marketing/publicity, opinion, social networking  
1

A different kind of pitch

A few weeks back, John blogged about a New York Times essay on author brand-building.  Inspired by the same piece, The Awl—one of the greatest things the internet has done for humanity—found some amazing YouTube videos of authors hawking others’ wares.  These days I feel like I hear (and, let’s be honest, talk) more about brands as extensions of individuals than about the term’s traditional product- and corporate-oriented definition.  In some ways that makes me sad for us all, to be sure.  The intrusion of marketing psychology and corporate speak into the realm of the individual has always felt a touch Orwellian for my liking.

On the other hand, I’d love to see authors finding new revenue streams, since they should get to be just as disgustingly, appallingly wealthy as musicians, actors, athletes, and the other people who provide us entertainment.  That said, actually, Mickey Spillane pushing Miller Lite kind of makes author Twitter accounts seem more…honest.  Do I think Mickey Spillane cared if I drank Miller Lite or that Kurt Vonnegut believes sincerely in the value of a Discovery card?  Not at all.  No more than I think that Britney Spears or David Beckham wants me to drink Pepsi.  (It occurs to me that I really have managed not to watch commercials for quite some time—thanks, technology!—since the reference I just pulled out is presumably a touch outdated.  Unless they both still shill for Pepsi, in which case, let’s just ignore this parenthetical and pretend that I’m totally with the times.)

But you know what I do believe?  I believe that authors want me to read their books.  They really, really, really want it.  And not just so they’ll get paid.  They want me to read because they’re passionate about what they do for a living.  And because they just want me to read in general, because they care about the written word and storytelling and narratives.  So, you know what?  I’m going to brush aside that last vestige of cynicism that lingered about as I talked to authors about the importance of authenticity and connection in social networking.  Trusted “authorities” have always been used to shill—and authors are traditionally undercompensated for the good they do for us all—but it’s not really shilling if you genuinely believe in what you’re selling.

May 27, 2011   Lauren   fun, Lauren, reading, suggestions  
5

A sunny Friday afternoon

So as you all know from reading the blog all week, BEA has just wrapped up, which means I’ve spent most of my week at the Javits Center.  Happily, I spent much of that in the one room in the place that’s sunny:  the International Rights Center.  It’s an unoriginal thought to be sure, but it remains surprising that a building made of glass has so little natural light.  Of course that also means that I have about a thousand (give or take) unanswered emails to take care of, and that’s before I even contemplate doing the follow up from my meetings, so time is a touch on the short side today.

It’s also short because today marks the return of publishing’s greatest tradition since the death of the three-martini lunch:  summer Fridays.  That hallelujah chorus of angels you hear is all the people in NY publishing frolicking in the sunshine having left their offices at 1.  I’ll be joining them as soon as I clear my inbox and desk of the appalling number of contracts that piled up while I was out (I know: good problem to have!).  One of my favorite things to do of a summer Friday is head home, ride my bike to Prospect Park or Coney Island, and read a book from cover to cover in the sunshine before meeting up with some friends for al fresco dining and drinks.  If you’ve never been in NY in the summer (and can handle a pedestrian city with humidity issues), it’s really the most glorious place.  Sunshine, warmth, free movies in the parks, and outdoor margaritas really bring out the best in us, and the transition from dreary winter through rainy spring to gorgeous summer is the best time of year to find people who aren’t wondering why on earth they live here.  It also helps that summer means getting out of town, and there is no time a New Yorker more loves New York than when he or she is just coming back from being somewhere else.

So in the interest of actually getting out of here before sundown so I can welcome the summer Friday back into my life, I’m asking you to do the heavy lifting for me:  what should I read, guys?  I’m looking for books that are fun, light, and not so dense that being distracted by a cool breeze will make me forget what happened on the last page.  Fiction or nonfiction, YA or adult, virtually any category will do!  I just need something that I can and would want to read in one sitting that will fill me with joy rather than ennui.  Books about death or intractable political conflict are best for rainy days, I find.

May 20, 2011   Lauren   canon, characterization, fun, gender, Lauren, writing  
5

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman who Looks an Awful Lot Like James Joyce

It was a frequent source of frustration to me that when it was time to read aloud in English classes, teachers tended to want to dole out the male parts to the boys and the female parts to the girls.  In freshman English class, I had a bit of a tiff with my teacher, who thought I ought to read Juliet, but I frankly wasn’t interested.  Mercutio’s the only one who comes off well in that whole ridiculous affair, as far as I’m concerned, and Juliet is far too pathetic for me to want to give her voice.  He told me that if I could make a compelling case, I could read the male part.  I cited that quite useful bit of information that since all the parts were played by men in the beginning, it was no less authentic with regard to the characters’ genders than the world premiere.  He caved, and I didn’t have to do the silly swoony balcony scene.  Ever since, despite no interest at all in acting or performing of any kind, I’ve been on the lookout for good female characters, and I find I’m often left wanting.  If I were an actress, I think I’d be kind of pissed.  The guys get all the good roles, and the ladies get to be people that matter primarily in relation to them: wives, mothers, daughters, mistresses.  Forget that.  Fortunately, I think that in an age where so much of publishing is made up of women, from publishers to editors to agents to authors to readers, even the books that are not setting out to make a point about gender can have some pretty great female protagonists.  And it sometimes looks like television, at least, is starting to make similar changes.

So I was delighted when Michael sent me this LA Times piece on Daniela Comani’s gallery exhibit which takes major canonical fiction with gendered titles and reverses things.  I hate Of Mice and Men, sorry Steinbeck fans, but would I love Of Mice and Women?  Well, probably not.  Still, it’s an interesting idea to think about how things would change.  Monsieur Bovary and Lord Chatterley’s Lover would probably not be so controversial, would they?  Unless, of course, the genders of the lovers stayed fixed as the originals, which would add a whole new layer—it would be interesting to contemplate which issues overlapped in the possible versions and which were made radically different.

This makes me wonder, as an author, how much thought do you give to your character’s gender?  Do you ever consider flipping?  Do you always stick to what you yourself know or do you prefer to write from the opposite perspective?  And have you ever tried to write something gender blind and then assign a gender later?  In theory, it shouldn’t matter, but in practice, how much of the characterization would shift depending on the direction?

May 13, 2011   Lauren   fun, holidays, Lauren, reading  
8

Spooky times

So, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but did you guys realize what today is?  It’s Friday the 13th.  And in case you haven’t heard, the world is also ending next weekend.  I had assumed the Mayan calendar/2012 stuff was nonsense, but I didn’t realize it was because we’re actually not making it out of 2011.

Still, you’ve got a week left for reading, and you might as well get yourself in the spirit of things with something really creepy and unsettling.  For me, I can go for a good horror schlockfest now and again, but don’t tend to find them genuinely frightening.  More campy, nauseating fun.  I usually find psychological horror and real life situations most intensely disturbing, but they tend to keep me up at night contemplating rather than willing sleep to come while refusing to close my eyes.

I wasn’t always that way, though.  The scariest book moments I can recall are all from my childhood.  I grew up in a somewhat creaky 100-year-old house, so hauntings were a particular source of terror.

I once made the mistake of starting to read Robert Bloch’s Psycho, on which the film was based, while idly flipping through bookshelves when I was reasonably young.  I didn’t make it very far, if I remember correctly, because I was too creeped out—I think mostly by the idea of reading something I knew was scary—and not kid’s stuff scary.  Real adult scary.  I had dreams for a while after that that related somehow to Psycho, even though I’m reasonably certain that I still had no idea what happened in the story.  The dreams made no sense, as dreams are wont to do, but I distinctly remember that Psycho was the name of the bad guy I was afraid of and at one point he morphed into a sneaker.  Sounds funny and non-threatening now, but does it help to know he was a man-sized sneaker?  A man-sized sneaker who was chasing me around a really old house?  No, probably not.  At any rate, I still have never seen the film (I know!) or read the book, because I’m a tad traumatized.  I suspect sneakers are not a part of it.

Actually, as a child, I was both a total chicken and completely unwilling to accept that.  I used to read and re-read and re-read this big non-fiction picture book of notorious crimes, even though it gave me nightmares.  If I caught a glimpse of it on the shelf in the living room, I sort of had to look at it, because I was worried there was something I might not know I should be worried about yet.  (Knowing is half the battle?)  This meant, of course, that I grew up afraid not of being murdered, but of specific dead murderers.  I recall my mother explaining that I had no reason to be afraid of Jack the Ripper, even though they hadn’t caught him, because he’d have died in the meantime.  I don’t think it helped—what if he’d lived to be really, really, really old?  People can live to be 100, you know.  And some people are still very spry at that age.  I’m pretty sure I thought that fleeing to America and hiding out in the suburbs would have been a very good way to avoid getting caught.  I think I was still too young for my mother to also explain that I would have been fine anyway, seeing as I wasn’t a hooker.  I was also afraid of Lizzie Borden, Burke & Hare, and just the general possibility that I might own something that was secretly made out of human skin.  Sometimes I’d read the part about the Great Train Robbery last, as a sort of freak-out palate cleanser, because it wasn’t nearly as terrifying as the prospect that famous historical murderers were actually secretly still alive and coming to get me.

But the book that hands down wins the prize for terrifying me so much that I couldn’t cope with sleeping with the lights out and contemplated moving all my dolls so I couldn’t see them from my bed was a short story collection called Thirteen.  It featured the big name kiddie horror novelists (Christopher Pike, RL Stine, Caroline B. Cooney) and a bunch of others, and some of the stories still would probably creep me out if I read them today.  I read a lot of the works by the major authors in the collection, generally.  I was a devoted Christopher Pike fan for years, though I remember being sort of unimpressed with the story in this collection.  “Lucinda” by Lael Littke and “The Doll” by Carol Ellis were the two that really clinched the sleepless nights for me.

So what are your top scary moments in books?  And do the most terrifying still make a lasting impression on you if you read them today, or is that “cannot possibly sleep” feeling a remnant of your childhood?

May 06, 2011   Lauren   characters, fun, Lauren, lists  
8

Oh, Mama!

With Mother’s Day coming up, I’ve been thinking about the best and worst mothers in literature.  I’ve got a pretty excellent mom if I do say so myself, but so many literary characters seem a bit lacking in that department.

By far the worst, in my estimation, is Beth Jarrett in Ordinary People.  Poor Conrad Jarrett—I still can’t look at Mary Tyler Moore the same way after seeing her spot-on depiction of Beth in the film adaptation.  You toss that hat in the air, Mary, like you’re a happy, warm-hearted person, but I know deep down inside you’re awful.  I’m not buying it for a second.

There are many runners up, though.  I think we can all agree that Flowers in the Attic’s Corinne is seriously failing her children.  The mom in Carrie isn’t winning any prizes.  And if we’re counting Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest, well, I think we all know about the wire hangers.

I’m hard pressed to come up with a best.  Marmee from Little Women is close, but she did produce Amy, so that’s some points off for her.  A recent entry into the canon might be Ma in Room—it’s hard to imagine better mothering under such circumstances.  Plenty of mothers are much worse without such dire constraints.  Caroline Ingalls is pretty great, as I recall, though I remember Pa better, frankly.

But I bet you all can come up with even better options.  There must be some reallllllly lovable mom out there in the world of books, right?  Who would you nominate for best and worst literary mom?

To all the mothers out there, including Jane, Miriam, Stacey, Jessica, and most especially the world’s greatest mother, mine, have a wonderful Mother’s Day on Sunday!  If you’re in one of those countries where mother’s day has already passed or is yet to come, go ahead and have a great day anyway!

April 29, 2011   Lauren   fun, inspiration, Lauren  
6

Stylistic inspiration

Periodically some awful person will take it upon themselves to send me a link to Cracked.com.  Then I’ll go read some irreverent, informative, dubiously authoritative list about history or science or pop culture, and when I get to the end their pitch perfect recommendation engine will tell me what else I might like.  And so I’ll click that and start over, and so on, until my brain can handle no more entertainment and enlightenment.  For months after I break myself out of that loop, I’ll refuse to click on any link to Cracked because there just isn’t enough time in the world to go that deep down the rabbit hole at a single website.  Eventually I’ll break down and go back, resuming the cycle.

Most recently, I capped out at this list of styles that define their eras that were completely invented by movies.  While I do remember having heard before that the mafia actually ripped off The Godfather for their style, I had no idea biker gangs had found similar inspiration in The Wild One.  Apparently before that movie showed them how much fun lawlessness could be, they just rode around enjoying nature and singing songs about kittens.  (I may have made up that last part.)

I’m impressed that films can actually invent an aesthetic or cultural sensibility so well that life starts to imitate art to the extent that we just assume art was imitating life from the get go.  I’m now convinced, however, that books must be able to do the same thing.  Surely in twenty years time, all the vampires are going to be sparkly because they think that’s how it’s done, right?  Books don’t have the benefit of a consistent visual image, but they so often provide our only glimpse into worlds we don’t otherwise know, just as films would have done for disco and the mob.  (Admittedly, literature, or at least Puzo, must deserve some of the credit for the mafia as well.)  I don’t know a thing about 19th century England that wasn’t taught to me by the likes of Dickens and Austen, presumably much to the chagrin of my history teachers.

So help me prove that literature is just as powerful as film!  Is there anything culturally pervasive and era defining that was actually invented out of whole cloth by an author so convincingly that everyone forgot what had come before?  Indirectly, once adapted into film, this is probably not uncommon, but there must be a direct influence as well.  There’s got to be something that never happened till Shakespeare said everyone had always been doing it, right?

And if not, would one of you please make it your goal to insert small but convincing false details into a supposedly realistic work so that some person many, many years from now can find this blog entry and let us know about it?  How much fun would it be to be able to take responsibility for an entire subculture?  Maybe not a menacing, lawless one though.

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