(no subject)

More place-holders for myself more than anyone else - and when I find the time and mental energy to read them.

1. Dorothy Park Interview in the Paris Review about not being Witty

2. George Bernard Shaw's satirical war on ridiculous women's hats after a night at the Opera.

Work...tough, I'm not a morning person, so getting up at 6 am each day and having to be functional at 8 is draining. I don't know, you'd think I'd have gotten used to it by now - all my long-term jobs are 8-4 or 8:30-4:30 (with hour long commutes, depending on trains, it ranges from 48 minutes to an hour and 20 minutes.) Also feel overwhelmed at work and frustrated...but have turned off my emotions regarding it, so feel nothing...just a calm
daze.

Bit depressed today. Feeling lonely. Adrift. And cranky. Probably period related.

Didn't watch anything last night but the Tony Awards, so am woefully behind on Mad Men and True Blood.

Mad Men

Mad Men was brilliant this year from start to finish, hardly a poor episode in the bunch. And the final episode reminded me a great deal of Luis Buneul's That Obscure Object of Desire for some reason, also a lot of 1940s and 1960s noir films. Jon Hamm literally could have stepped out of a 1940s noir film.
( spoilers for season finale of Mad Men )

(no subject)

1. Is it just me or is Firefox always out of date and requiring updating? Actually all software and browsers appear to. Anyone else want to strangle the people programming these things? Apparently they don't have anything better to do than keep updating software and computer programs regardless of whether or not it needs it.

2. Current romance novel Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas (Gamblers #2 - in her Gamblers series) reminds me a great deal of an Everybody's All Human Spike/Buffy or Spike/Willow fic that I read ages ago. The writing is even similar. Starting to wonder if Kleypas was a Spuffy fanfic writer. Wouldn't be the first person to do it. By the way, they are doing this. I noticed there's a self-publishing collective/press that the Twilight fanfic writers are using - when I was searching for info on 50 Shades of Grey. I don't blame them for doing this. Everybody's All Human fanfic or RFP fanfic is easy to turn into a non-fanfic romance novel. All you have to do is change the names and tinker with the descriptions, and voila! Canon fanfic or close to canon AU fanfic is impossible - you have too many things derived from the original work.

The writing of this book...is sloppy, which is the other reason its reminding me of fanfic.
She's trying to do dialect, really shouldn't do that unless you are Dickens, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, or Zora Neal Hurston. Dialect is wickedly hard to do well.
And slang...lots of slang. Historical slang is even harder. It can come across as silly.

But I am admittedly intrigued by the characters...a mousy spinterish (sigh at the ripe old age of 25...seriously, one wonders about these writers - even back in the Victorian Age, 25 wasn't that old) writer from the country, and a jaded cynical somewhat rough and tumble yet insanely rich gaming den owner. It's basically Jane Austen or possibly Charlotte Bronte meets the Artful Dodger by way of Heathcliff. No clue how they're going to get together neither is attracted to the other one.

I've decided that the reason every woman has to be below the age of 31 in these books and every guy below the age of 40 is that...for the women, it's a little hard to come across niave and innocent when you are in your 40s or even your 30s for that matter. And..self-righteous 20 somethings are easier to deal with than self-righteous 40 somethings, you know the 20 something will grow out of it eventually, not so much the 40 something...

Also, for some bizarre reason the people who write these books think women over the age of 35 are old and wrinkly and not attractive to men. (I'm 45 and have less wrinkles than a lot of people I know who are in the 30s, and until recently, had less gray hair. I may die it next year...a lot of my friends had to in their 30s and 20s.) Also what is wrong with wrinkles? We all get old. Three things you can count on: getting old and wrinkly, dying, and taxes. Plus there are younger men who are marrying older women.

I challenge you to find me a well-written romance novel about a woman over the age of 40, that was not written by Nicholas Sparks or the guy who wrote the Bridges of Madison County.
(Those books are too sentimental for my taste). And...who has not been married, widowed, divorced or had children. I can find non-heteronormative novels, but I'm not sure I can find mature heterosexual ones.