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May. 15th, 2023 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatPeople can be annoying at times, can't they?
Sigh. I'm irritable, but I'm always irritable before a trip and when I'm anxious. I get irritated at myself, other people, and well the trip for making me anxious. At least I've figured that much out. Go me.
I was reading an article about Dean Koontz last night on petz's journal - I don't remember where she got it from. My take-away was - dear god, that man's anxieties make mine seem relatively tame in comparison. He's afraid of flying and won't do it - since he was on a plane once with horrible turbulence and a nun shouted that "everyone was going to die", and he won't go on a boat - because he was on one once that got stranded due to a hurricane. And he has a huge fence to keep out rattlesnakes. (This puzzled me - how would a fence keep out rattlesnakes? They can burrow - right? Also climb? I mean it's kind of hard to keep snakes out - or so I'd think.
In other words he doesn't leave his property in Orange County - well except to jump between houses. The man has too much money. Note to self - don't buy anything by Dean Koontz. (Not that I need to - I have a ton of books in that genre already that I've not read. I read Dean Koontz in the 20th Century, and a little in the early 00s, basically in my 20s and 30s. Then stopped. He wasn't really to my taste. I like Stephen King better - more interesting characters. Koontz is tighter than King and more plot centric, King is more character centric.) Koontz was a teacher first - then his wife agreed to completely support him for five years - to see if he could getting his writing career jump started - he did it in two. I give him credit - it would have taken me longer than five years.
Anyhow, at least I'm not afraid of planes, trains or boats. I'm not really afraid of cars. I just don't want to drive them - for understandable and logical reasons - which if you knew, you wouldn't want me to drive them either. Actually whenever I explain these reasons to anyone - their immediate response is "please don't drive, and thank you for not doing that." Honestly, we have enough insane drivers on the NY Streets, we do not need one more.
***
On the book front? I'm currently listening to Viola Davis's autiobiography - Finding Me on audible. And she pretty much redefines poverty or what it is like to be dirt poor. I'm glad I didn't listen to this right after listening to Harry's Spare. She describes growing up in a house that had no water, no heat, no electricity. That was infested with rats. And being so cold, so dirty, and so filled with shame whenever she went to school. At one point, she ended up peeing in her seat (she was in kindergarten and six years of age), and the teacher sent her home - but they refused to clean up the urine. So she returned the next day to her chair set in the corner with the dried puddle of urine still in it.
She also talks about how the rats ate the faces off her dolls, and she was afraid of going into the kitchen because it was infested with rats.
This was in Providence, Rhode Island and Cedar Falls.
Davis is an excellent reader and her story-telling skills are adept. I don't know if she wrote or worked with someone to do so - but it is well written.
I'm engrossed.
Regarding Spare? Per the New Yorker, we now have proof that Harry hired a ghost-writer. Notes from Prince Harry's Ghost Writer.
"I was exasperated with Prince Harry. My head was pounding, my jaw was clenched, and I was starting to raise my voice. And yet some part of me was still able to step outside the situation and think, This is so weird. I’m shouting at Prince Harry. Then, as Harry started going back at me, as his cheeks flushed and his eyes narrowed, a more pressing thought occurred: Whoa, it could all end right here.
This was the summer of 2022. For two years, I’d been the ghostwriter on Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” and now, reviewing his latest edits in a middle-of-the-night Zoom session, we’d come to a difficult passage. Harry, at the close of gruelling military exercises in rural England, gets captured by pretend terrorists. It’s a simulation, but the tortures inflicted upon Harry are very real. He’s hooded, dragged to an underground bunker, beaten, frozen, starved, stripped, forced into excruciating stress positions by captors wearing black balaclavas. The idea is to find out if Harry has the toughness to survive an actual capture on the battlefield. (Two of his fellow-soldiers don’t; they crack.) At last, Harry’s captors throw him against a wall, choke him, and scream insults into his face, culminating in a vile dig at—Princess Diana?
Even the fake terrorists engrossed in their parts, even the hard-core British soldiers observing from a remote location, seem to recognize that an inviolate rule has been broken. Clawing that specific wound, the memory of Harry’s dead mother, is out of bounds. When the simulation is over, one of the participants extends an apology.
Harry always wanted to end this scene with a thing he said to his captors, a comeback that struck me as unnecessary, and somewhat inane. Good for Harry that he had the nerve, but ending with what he said would dilute the scene’s meaning: that even at the most bizarre and peripheral moments of his life, his central tragedy intrudes. For months, I’d been crossing out the comeback, and for months Harry had been pleading for it to go back in. Now he wasn’t pleading, he was insisting, and it was 2 A.M., and I was starting to lose it. I said, “Dude, we’ve been over this.”
Why was this one line so important? Why couldn’t he accept my advice? We were leaving out a thousand other things—that’s half the art of memoir, leaving stuff out—so what made this different? Please, I said, trust me. Trust the book.
Although this wasn’t the first time that Harry and I had argued, it felt different; it felt as if we were hurtling toward some kind of decisive rupture, in part because Harry was no longer saying anything. He was just glaring into the camera. Finally, he exhaled and calmly explained that, all his life, people had belittled his intellectual capabilities, and this flash of cleverness proved that, even after being kicked and punched and deprived of sleep and food, he had his wits about him.
“Oh,” I said. “O.K.” It made sense now. But I still refused.
“Why?”
Because, I told him, everything you just said is about you. You want the world to know that you did a good job, that you were smart. But, strange as it may seem, memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people, and at this point in the story those people don’t need to know anything more than that your captors said a cruel thing about your mom.
Harry looked down. A long time. Was he thinking? Seething? Should I have been more diplomatic? Should I have just given in? I imagined I’d be thrown off the book soon after sunup. I could almost hear the awkward phone call with Harry’s agent, and I was sad. Never mind the financial hit—I was focussed on the emotional shock. All the time, the effort, the intangibles I’d invested in Harry’s memoir, in Harry, would be gone just like that.
After what seemed like an hour, Harry looked up, and we locked eyes. “O.K.,” he said.
“O.K.?”
“Yes. I get it.”
“Thank you, Harry,” I said, relieved.
He shot me a mischievous grin. “I really enjoy getting you worked up like that.”
I burst into laughter and shook my head, and we moved on to his next set of edits."
So basically, he hired a really good ghost-writer. Which makes sense. I figured that the book was way too well-written for it to have been by Prince Harry. I've read or listened to a lot of bios - and this by far the best written one, but that's because it's the one written by a ghost-writer.
And apparently Harry had it written to feel heard.
Making my way through Rebecca Ross's "A Fire Burns Endless" - which is book 2 in her Cadence duology. It's faster paced than the previous novel - mainly because there's less exposition and more action. We're more in the middle of the story now.
It's an interesting take on the fae and how magic works. Different than anything I've seen of late.
***
Had a weird ass nightmare about trying to find a place to put a bunch of Christmas Candy that I took from my brother's stash. I was trying to put it in a cabinet of sorts, but also had clothes to put in it and nothing fit in the drawers.
I think it's travel worries? No clue.
Sigh. I'm irritable, but I'm always irritable before a trip and when I'm anxious. I get irritated at myself, other people, and well the trip for making me anxious. At least I've figured that much out. Go me.
I was reading an article about Dean Koontz last night on petz's journal - I don't remember where she got it from. My take-away was - dear god, that man's anxieties make mine seem relatively tame in comparison. He's afraid of flying and won't do it - since he was on a plane once with horrible turbulence and a nun shouted that "everyone was going to die", and he won't go on a boat - because he was on one once that got stranded due to a hurricane. And he has a huge fence to keep out rattlesnakes. (This puzzled me - how would a fence keep out rattlesnakes? They can burrow - right? Also climb? I mean it's kind of hard to keep snakes out - or so I'd think.
In other words he doesn't leave his property in Orange County - well except to jump between houses. The man has too much money. Note to self - don't buy anything by Dean Koontz. (Not that I need to - I have a ton of books in that genre already that I've not read. I read Dean Koontz in the 20th Century, and a little in the early 00s, basically in my 20s and 30s. Then stopped. He wasn't really to my taste. I like Stephen King better - more interesting characters. Koontz is tighter than King and more plot centric, King is more character centric.) Koontz was a teacher first - then his wife agreed to completely support him for five years - to see if he could getting his writing career jump started - he did it in two. I give him credit - it would have taken me longer than five years.
Anyhow, at least I'm not afraid of planes, trains or boats. I'm not really afraid of cars. I just don't want to drive them - for understandable and logical reasons - which if you knew, you wouldn't want me to drive them either. Actually whenever I explain these reasons to anyone - their immediate response is "please don't drive, and thank you for not doing that." Honestly, we have enough insane drivers on the NY Streets, we do not need one more.
***
On the book front? I'm currently listening to Viola Davis's autiobiography - Finding Me on audible. And she pretty much redefines poverty or what it is like to be dirt poor. I'm glad I didn't listen to this right after listening to Harry's Spare. She describes growing up in a house that had no water, no heat, no electricity. That was infested with rats. And being so cold, so dirty, and so filled with shame whenever she went to school. At one point, she ended up peeing in her seat (she was in kindergarten and six years of age), and the teacher sent her home - but they refused to clean up the urine. So she returned the next day to her chair set in the corner with the dried puddle of urine still in it.
She also talks about how the rats ate the faces off her dolls, and she was afraid of going into the kitchen because it was infested with rats.
This was in Providence, Rhode Island and Cedar Falls.
Davis is an excellent reader and her story-telling skills are adept. I don't know if she wrote or worked with someone to do so - but it is well written.
I'm engrossed.
Regarding Spare? Per the New Yorker, we now have proof that Harry hired a ghost-writer. Notes from Prince Harry's Ghost Writer.
"I was exasperated with Prince Harry. My head was pounding, my jaw was clenched, and I was starting to raise my voice. And yet some part of me was still able to step outside the situation and think, This is so weird. I’m shouting at Prince Harry. Then, as Harry started going back at me, as his cheeks flushed and his eyes narrowed, a more pressing thought occurred: Whoa, it could all end right here.
This was the summer of 2022. For two years, I’d been the ghostwriter on Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” and now, reviewing his latest edits in a middle-of-the-night Zoom session, we’d come to a difficult passage. Harry, at the close of gruelling military exercises in rural England, gets captured by pretend terrorists. It’s a simulation, but the tortures inflicted upon Harry are very real. He’s hooded, dragged to an underground bunker, beaten, frozen, starved, stripped, forced into excruciating stress positions by captors wearing black balaclavas. The idea is to find out if Harry has the toughness to survive an actual capture on the battlefield. (Two of his fellow-soldiers don’t; they crack.) At last, Harry’s captors throw him against a wall, choke him, and scream insults into his face, culminating in a vile dig at—Princess Diana?
Even the fake terrorists engrossed in their parts, even the hard-core British soldiers observing from a remote location, seem to recognize that an inviolate rule has been broken. Clawing that specific wound, the memory of Harry’s dead mother, is out of bounds. When the simulation is over, one of the participants extends an apology.
Harry always wanted to end this scene with a thing he said to his captors, a comeback that struck me as unnecessary, and somewhat inane. Good for Harry that he had the nerve, but ending with what he said would dilute the scene’s meaning: that even at the most bizarre and peripheral moments of his life, his central tragedy intrudes. For months, I’d been crossing out the comeback, and for months Harry had been pleading for it to go back in. Now he wasn’t pleading, he was insisting, and it was 2 A.M., and I was starting to lose it. I said, “Dude, we’ve been over this.”
Why was this one line so important? Why couldn’t he accept my advice? We were leaving out a thousand other things—that’s half the art of memoir, leaving stuff out—so what made this different? Please, I said, trust me. Trust the book.
Although this wasn’t the first time that Harry and I had argued, it felt different; it felt as if we were hurtling toward some kind of decisive rupture, in part because Harry was no longer saying anything. He was just glaring into the camera. Finally, he exhaled and calmly explained that, all his life, people had belittled his intellectual capabilities, and this flash of cleverness proved that, even after being kicked and punched and deprived of sleep and food, he had his wits about him.
“Oh,” I said. “O.K.” It made sense now. But I still refused.
“Why?”
Because, I told him, everything you just said is about you. You want the world to know that you did a good job, that you were smart. But, strange as it may seem, memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people, and at this point in the story those people don’t need to know anything more than that your captors said a cruel thing about your mom.
Harry looked down. A long time. Was he thinking? Seething? Should I have been more diplomatic? Should I have just given in? I imagined I’d be thrown off the book soon after sunup. I could almost hear the awkward phone call with Harry’s agent, and I was sad. Never mind the financial hit—I was focussed on the emotional shock. All the time, the effort, the intangibles I’d invested in Harry’s memoir, in Harry, would be gone just like that.
After what seemed like an hour, Harry looked up, and we locked eyes. “O.K.,” he said.
“O.K.?”
“Yes. I get it.”
“Thank you, Harry,” I said, relieved.
He shot me a mischievous grin. “I really enjoy getting you worked up like that.”
I burst into laughter and shook my head, and we moved on to his next set of edits."
So basically, he hired a really good ghost-writer. Which makes sense. I figured that the book was way too well-written for it to have been by Prince Harry. I've read or listened to a lot of bios - and this by far the best written one, but that's because it's the one written by a ghost-writer.
And apparently Harry had it written to feel heard.
Making my way through Rebecca Ross's "A Fire Burns Endless" - which is book 2 in her Cadence duology. It's faster paced than the previous novel - mainly because there's less exposition and more action. We're more in the middle of the story now.
It's an interesting take on the fae and how magic works. Different than anything I've seen of late.
***
Had a weird ass nightmare about trying to find a place to put a bunch of Christmas Candy that I took from my brother's stash. I was trying to put it in a cabinet of sorts, but also had clothes to put in it and nothing fit in the drawers.
I think it's travel worries? No clue.