Would book readers (or anybody) watch a reality show about unpublished authors?(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There are a lot of bad ideas for reality shows, but this one might be the worst. Italy has a reality show for unpublished writers who want a book deal (details here). As an unpublished author who watches reality shows (though I deny that I watch reality shows to my intellectual friends), I don’t want to watch other unpublished authors compete against each other on a reality show. I think it’s a really bad idea for a bunch of reasons.
First of all, reality shows have lots of arguing. Roommates argue with each other. Spouses argue with each other. Contestants stranded on islands argue with each other. Housewives argue with each other. Even judges argue with each other. Without arguing, a reality show doesn’t have much of a chance to thrive. So a literary reality show would have to have lots of arguing.
The novelist judges could argue with each other. They’re probably pompous, and they could make literary insults that most people wouldn’t understand. Nobody feels bad when a pompous author gets insulted. Contestants could also argue with each other, but I’d feel bad as a viewer watching unpublished authors with their only chance at success arguing with each other. If I wanted to see unpublished authors argue with each other, I’d join a writer’s group.
There’s also a lot of humiliation on a reality show. Contestants embarrass themselves and don’t even know it. Contestants embarrass themselves and don’t even care (meaning that they SHOULD be embarrassed but aren’t). I’m not sure I want to see authors embarrass themselves just to get a book deal. If authors are going to humiliate themselves to get a book deal, it should be done in private.
I could never be a contestant on a literary reality show. It’s not that I’m too good for a reality show. If there were ever a reality show where I thought I had a legitimate chance to win, I’d seriously think about it. But I’m a quiet guy who clams up around unfamiliar people, and I really hate cameras. As I’m getting older, I’m getting a little less quiet and a little more cranky (or crankier), but I’m not ready for a reality show yet.
I really don’t want to argue or humiliate myself on television. I’d rather never get a book deal than do that. At least on my blog, if I embarrass myself with my writing, I did it to myself and can’t blame producers for manipulating the environment or selectively editing the footage. My early writing on Dysfunctional Literacy is embarrassing enough (and maybe my current writing is embarrassing and I just don’t know it yet). I don’t need the help.
Plus, I don’t want anybody to see my writing process. Sometimes I like my finished product. I think I’ve gotten it right a few times on Dysfunctional Literacy. But my writing process is ugly. I write, get mad, write later, throw a fit, and then give up for a while. My friends think I’m a nice, patient guy, but really, I’m a jerk when I write. My family knows that I’m a jerk when I write. I don’t want the hundreds of viewers who would watch a literary reality show to know that I’m a jerk when I write. I don’t want them to see my rambling disorganized thoughts before I revise/edit and tie everything together, and I don’t want them to see my red-faced raging when I get frustrated. My writing process is messy (and I’m a jerk when I write), and I’d rather keep all of that private.
We’ll know if the Italian literary reality show is a bad idea if no other country tries it. If nobody in the United States tries to make their own literary reality show, then it’s truly a horrible idea. In fact, even if the United States tries its own version, it’s probably still a bad idea. A bad idea is a bad idea, even if other countries try it, and I don’t need to watch it to know it’s a bad idea.
Would you go on a reality show if there were a possibility to get a book deal? Would you watch a reality show where the winner gets a book deal? If you watched it, would you cringe (or is that the whole point)? Would you buy a book from an author who got a book deal from winning a literary reality show? And what kind of reality show would you go on if you absolutely had to be on one?
This was a great novel, but my fond memory has almost nothing to do with the book itself.
Most readers remember the great books for their content. That’s not always the case with me. I forget most of the details about most books I read after I’ve finished reading them. I’ve even forgotten the details of the great novels. But I have wonderful memories of a lot of great books, not for the characters or the prose, but for what was going on in my life when I read the books or the circumstances in which I read them.
Below are three books that I know I liked a lot. I don’t remember much about these novels, but I have great memories about reading them.
The Shining – by Stephen King.
I was a teenager, and it was summer, and I had never read a Stephen King book before. In front of me, I had a choice of three books: Carrie, The Shining, or The Stand. I chose Carrie because it was the shortest, and I read it in a day or so (no great accomplishment). Then I read The Shining while on vacation, some of which was during the ten-hour-a-day drives in the car. I got car sick easily, so I sat up front with the window open.
The Shining was so great that I’d read until I got nauseous (from reading itself, not from what was going on in the book) and then I’d lean against the open window with the 65 mph wind in my face until I felt better, and then I’d read until I got nauseous again. The rest of my family was scared that I’d throw up in the car, but I didn’t… that time. It was a great accomplishment, to read that much in the car without throwing up. I was proud.
When The Shining movie came out, I could tell who had read the book first and who hadn’t. People who hadn’t read the novel thought that the “Heeeere’s Johnny” scene was cool, and those who had read the book thought that scene was kind of stupid. Everybody, however, liked saying “Heeeeere’s Johnny,” even if we thought the scene was stupid.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
When we were reading To Kill a Mockingbird in my 8th grade English class, I brought in another paperback that I was reading at home, Some Kind of Hero by James Kirkwood(?). I liked it in 8th grade (but it was made into a really bad movie with Richard Pryor later on), but I don’t know if the book still holds up. Anyway, I was showing a friend in my class a page that had the f-word on it (not because it was the f-word but because it was used in a funny way).
My English teacher (who also taught German) confiscated the book, read the page I had been showing off, and then wrote something inside the book. When he returned it later, I saw that he had circled the f-word and written in the margin “verboten.” I don’t know German, but I know what “verboten” means. For the next couple weeks, I stuck with To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in English class. I think it holds up fairly well, and it was made into a slightly better movie.
The Pillars of the Earth– by Ken Follet
I read this before Oprah even had a Book Club (it’s important to me that everybody knows that). I don’t always enjoy or finish long books, but I got into this one a lot. It was different from Follet’s usual spy stuff. But the reason I remember this novel is because I was reading it when I met my wife (but not at the exact moment when I met my wife).
The night I met my wife (I didn’t know she was going to become my wife), I gave her my phone number. I didn’t ask for hers because I didn’t think a woman should give out her number to a (possibly creepy) guy whom she had just met. I thought there was a chance she’d call, but I knew she’d make me wait a few days (which she did). I was reading The Pillars of the Earth while I waited (but not every waking moment while I waited. I had to go to work too).
When she called me, and I told her what I was reading (it wasn’t the first thing we talked about), she seemed impressed. She had heard of the book before but hadn’t read it. Even though she likes Oprah, she didn’t read it years later when Oprah selected it for her club. My wife doesn’t like other people picking out her books for her. We don’t have that copy of the book anymore. I kind of wish that I’d have kept it.
*****
These aren’t the only books that I have fond memories of. I have a lot more, but enough about me! What fond memories do you have of the great books you’ve read? What fond memories do you have of stupid books you’ve read? And finally, what fond memories do you have of mediocre books you’ve read? In other words, what fond memories do you have of the books you’ve read?
Despite living in sin with Danielle for a few weeks, there was a lot that I didn’t know about her. In fact, when it came to her past, I had an astonishing lack of knowledge. Even when I was 25, I didn’t believe in judging people too harshly about their pasts, especially when it came to a hot chick who was willing to live in sin with me. The only thing that had concerned me was what Danielle had called “crazy shit” in her life, and she seemed to have toned that down since the slutty blonde furniture incident. But then Vin had shown up at the Mexican restaurant, and things had gotten weird.
Vin sat back smirking in the booth with his arm resting on the top of the seat. I’ve never trusted smirks. I’ve caught myself smirking a few times in my life, and it was always to hide some insecurity. I didn’t know if Vin was insecure, but I was sure he wasn’t trustworthy, and the smirk confirmed it.
Even with the smirk, he kind of looked like me. He was tall and thin, but his hair was gelled back a little, and he had cool stubble. I always wished that I could have cool stubble, but mine looked too wolf-man-ish, so I always had to stay clean shaven. Vin’s voice was low and quiet, and when he’d called Danielle a bitch and threatened to hit her, nobody else in the restaurant had heard.
I wasn’t sure how Danielle and Vin had known each other. I didn’t know if Vin was an ex-boyfriend, a high school acquaintance, or a former Nero’s customer. He could have been her brother (except they looked nothing alike), and I wouldn’t have known. I wasn’t sure if he’d been serious in his threat, or if that was just the way Danielle and her friends talked to each other. Danielle had seemed scared of him, but I didn’t know if that was physical fear or a dread of what Vin would tell me. I didn’t even know why Danielle wanted me to talk to Vin, especially when she’d seemed so uncomfortable around him. Vin wanted to tell me about Danielle’s past. I was very interested in Danielle’s past. But I didn’t want to hear it from him.
Vin watched me intensely as I sat across from him in the booth. He had controlled the conversation earlier when Danielle had been with us. Then, I hadn’t been sure how to play it. Since Danielle knew him, I had let her take charge and she had done nothing but take his verbal abuse, but without her now, I actually felt more comfortable. It was kind of a high pressure situation, but I do better with those when I’m not being watched by people I know.
“So you’re Danielle’s new meal ticket,” Vin said to me. He was way too eager to talk about her.
“Do you remember my name?” I asked.
Vin stopped. His smirk remained frozen, and he shook his head.
“It happens all the time,” I said. “It’s kind of frustrating. I’m a quiet guy, so I guess people think I’m forgettable. I’m Jimmy.”
I extended my hand across the table and kept it there. “Are you going to shake it or not?” I said.
Vin slowly clasped my hand and then gripped it too tightly just to show he could. It kind of hurt, but I tried not to show it.
“Since I’m a quiet guy, it takes me a while to warm up to people,” I said, while massaging my hand underneath the table. “I usually don’t talk to people I don’t know.” I paused. “And I don’t know you.”
Vin still smirked, but at least he wasn’t talking.
“Do you like football?” I asked.
Vin frowned and shook his head again, like he was still sizing me up.
“That’s too bad. I like football because that’s how I get to know people,” I said. “I have a bunch of weird hobbies, so it’s tough for me to find common points of interest with other people. But everybody talks about football. That’s the great thing about football, I can talk to a bunch of people that I have nothing in common with.”
Vin’s smirk was gone, replaced with some bizarre sneer that I interpreted as bewilderment.
“It’s funny,” I continued. “The only reason I could talk to Danielle at first was because of football. She was wearing one of her football t-shirts when we met, you know, the ones that are a size too small.”
Vin smirked again. “Yeah, Danielle’s got some nice…” And he finished with a crude remark about one of Danielle’s finer physical attributes. He wasn’t the most subtle guy I’d ever met.
“She was wearing a football t-shirt,” I reminded him. “That meant I could talk to Danielle about football. That was what we had in common. Then, from that, I learned that she liked to read books. And from that, we started dating.” That was a very inaccurate version of how Danielle and I had met, but I figured Vin didn’t deserve to hear the truth.
“She reads books?” Vin said. Then he followed that with an expletive.
“You’re wrong about her,” I said. “She really reads books, real books.”
Vin uttered a couple more expletives to show that he didn’t believe me.
“She finished Sense and Sensibility a couple weeks ago. It’s by the same woman who wrote that.” I pointed to my/her/our copy of Pride and Prejudice on the table.
Vin grunted a couple more words, but now he didn’t seem so certain she didn’t read.
“She’s even read Atlas Shrugged.” That accomplishment would have impressed a lot of people, but it was lost on Vin.
“She reads poetry too,” I said.
Vin shook his head but was silent. I decided to use an example that Vin would appreciate.
“She recites Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton to me while we lie together naked on the balcony.”
That got his interest. Yeah, I was pushing it, but I couldn’t help it. I would never do anything naked in public, but Vin didn’t know that, and he knew that Danielle was the type who would.
Then I decided to go for it. I didn’t know why I was lying to Vin, except that it kept him from talking too much. I’m not usually a good liar, but I can say outlandish stuff in my monotone voice, and people will believe it for a while, until they have time to think about it. It’s one of the few benefits of having a monotone voice.
“You know…Danielle has found God,” I said. “She accepts Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior.”
Vin’s mouth opened wide, and I wasn’t sure if he was stunned or about to call my bluff. He started to speak, probably to say something profane either way, and then he stopped himself.
“I’m back!” Danielle said cheerfully, returning from the restroom. She slid her hand against my shoulder. “You become friends?”
I was almost disappointed. I felt like Vin was just starting to warm up to me. But Danielle’s eyes were no longer red. And she still had her glasses on with her hair pulled back. That was a good sign.
“I invited Vin to go to church with us next Sunday.” I smiled widely as I made eye contact with her.
“It’s too late for him,” Danielle said with no change in her tone.
“What… religion are you?” Vin asked me.
“Episcopalian” Danielle said immediately. I almost did a double-take because we had never talked about this. Then again, she’d been through all my stuff. If she found my porn on the first day (she did), she also would have found the religious stuff (not that the two were anywhere close to each other in the apartment).
“A-pisco-po-what?” Vin exclaimed.
“Catholic-lite,” I said.
“Episcopalians have money,” Danielle said.
I expected Danielle to sit next to me so she could be away from Vin, but she returned to her side of the booth and motioned for Vin to scoot over. He budged a little but not much, and when she sat down, they were close. Their sides touched. They looked comfortable together. Vin smirked again and kept his left arm up so that it was around Danielle’s shoulder, and I eyed the couple in the booth across the room and how they seemed attached as well, and I felt the jealous anger in the pit of my stomach like I had at the Halloween party.
“Honey,” Danielle said, looking at me. She had never called me that before. “Would you please go to the car and get my bag? I have some pictures I wanna show Vin.”
Here she was sitting next to Vin in a booth, and now she wanted me to go to the car. This didn’t feel right.
“You didn’t bring your bag,” I said.
“Yes, I did,” Danielle countered.
“No, you left it at the apartment,” I said. I really didn’t want to go the car and leave them together. And I knew the bag wasn’t in the car. I knew it.
“It’s my bag,” Danielle said with narrowed eyes and gritted teeth. “I know if I brought it or not. Now… would… you… please… go get it!”
I knew her bag wasn’t in the car. She probably knew I didn’t want to leave them together, but she was sending me out anyway. Vin seemed to be enjoying the argument. I figured Danielle would eventually win this dispute anyway, so I turned to Vin and shrugged.
“She’s so confident, even when she’s wrong,” I said.
“It’s in there,” she said, more sweetly this time.
I got up and decided this wasn’t the time for a parting hug or kiss, and I walked slowly to the front of the restaurant toward the parking lot. I turned for one final view of Danielle, and she was staring with her cheese-eating grin at Vin, who was smirking at me. He did a slight wave with his hand over Danielle’s shoulder. I knew Danielle was up to something. Her mood had changed way too much way too quickly for her not to be up to something. I didn’t like the idea of not knowing what she was up to. I wasn’t a fan of Danielle’s “crazy shit,” but I had the feeling that something “crazy” was about to happen.
*****
To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: Library Girl .
And to read “The Literary Girlfriend” from the beginning, start here.
ADVICE TO STUDENTS: When you ask for permission to use the restroom, don’t carry a book with you.
My daughter told me this week that she asked her teacher, “Can I go to the bathroom?”
Her teacher said, “I don’t know. Can you?”
Some things never change. 40 years ago, we asked the same question, and our teachers gave the same response. I’m sure 40 years before that, students and teachers did the same thing. I’m sure nothing will change 40 years from now.
One side of me knows that precision in language is important, but another part knows that a teacher has to be kind of a jerk to use the “I don’t know, can you?” response. This isn’t being judgmental. If anybody deserves to be a jerk without being judged, it’s a teacher. I’m sure teachers at some point became tired of explaining the difference between “may” and “can” every time a kid asked to use the can, so this was a short, snide, and sweet way to do it.
Plus, saying, “I don’t know, can you?” really annoys kids. That has to be the main reason why teachers do it. Teachers spend eight hours a day being annoyed by kids (and probably being annoyed by parents and principals too). When teachers have an opportunity to annoy a kid back, they have an obligation to do it. Kids should be annoyed as frequently as possible. Being annoyed by adults builds character. Being annoyed by adults teaches students how to be annoyed by adults once they become adults.
Maybe I’m a lazy parent. When my kids ask me something like, “Can I get on the computer?” I say either “Yes” or “No.” I don’t say, “I don’t know, can you?” I don’t even ask them to phrase the question correctly. Maybe I should teach my kids to be more precise with language, but my parents didn’t teach me to be that precise. They left that up to my teachers. My parents taught me not to use profanity in public (but it was okay to listen to George Carlin albums at home). I think that was the right way to do it. Let the teachers say “I don’t know, can you?” It might be one of the few joys of their day.
Asking a teacher about going to the restroom can be awkward, even without the pressure of phrasing the question properly. In 7th grade, I asked my history teacher if I could use the bathroom (I don’t remember how I phrased it). He looked at the copy of the book I was carrying, Shogun by James Clavell (a really big book), and said, “You gonna take all day?”
I put the book back on my desk and then asked my teacher again. This time, he gave me the hall pass. I learned never to hold a book when asking to use the restroom. I think today that’s called a “teachable moment.” I don’t remember anything else that I learned in that class.
Teachers have been saying “I don’t know, can you?” for generations. I thought that teachers would have come up with some new material over the last 40 years, but I guess it makes sense that they’re still using the classics. Everything is new to a kid. When I was in elementary school, a teacher said, “I was a poet and didn’t know it.” I thought I had a clever teacher. A few years later, I realized he had been a literary thief. Teachers can say stuff like “I don’t know, can you?” and “I’m a poet and didn’t know it” every year and kids will think they’re using fresh material. Teachers already have enough to worry about without trying out unused material on a new generation. I don’t blame them for sticking with what works.
Everybody has had a teacher that said something annoying. What kind of annoying material did your teachers use? What “teachable moments” did you benefit from the most? Have you ever gotten punched out for using the phrase “teachable moment”? What books did you take with you to the restroom? If you’re a teacher, what annoying questions do kids ask? And finally, if some kid asks you, “Can I use the restroom?” how do you respond?
This is a pretty good mystery novel involving a French book seller, but I don’t think Amazon was ever mentioned.
I’m not an expert on French books. I don’t speak or read French, and from what I understand, most French books are written in French, so there’s a pretty good chance that I wouldn’t understand French books if I tried to read them. Then again, I’m American, and we Americans are notorious for not knowing anything that’s not about the United States, so maybe French books are written in English and I don’t know it because I’m an ignorant American.
Even though I don’t read French books, I’m writing about France because the French have an interesting bookselling law that is very different from bookselling laws in the United States. From what I understand, the French only allow a 5% disparity in book prices, which means that Amazon can’t undercut other stores with huge discounts (this law was passed in 1981, before Amazon was even a gleam). Amazon can’t even offer free shipping. No free shipping? Without free shipping, what’s the point?
Supposedly, the French read a lot more than Americans do. It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s true. But with this law, I’m also pretty sure that the French spend a lot more per book than Americans do. One of the reasons I like reading is because it’s cheap entertainment. A good book from a used book store is hours of entertainment for virtually free. My best bargain ever was a hardcover copy of Different Seasons for 25 cents. I read the heck out of that book. Yeah, the publishers and authors don’t see a cent of my purchase if I buy a book that cheap, but at least I’m reading.
I am what is called in some parts of the United States a “cheap bastard.” I don’t pay full price for new hardcover books. I don’t even pay half price at used book stores. But if a book is really popular or sounds really intriguing, I might pay 10 or 11 bucks on the e-reader for a digital copy. If the United States ever enacted a law similar to the law in France, I wouldn’t start spending more money on books. I just wouldn’t buy the books covered under the law.
Yes, I have some sympathy for book store owners, but my own self-interests come first.
I like browsing through book stores, but I don’t like paying high prices for books that I see while browsing through book stores. It’s easier to browse through a real book store than it is to browse through an online book store. When I was a kid, I browsed through stores like Walden’s Book and B. Dalton Booksellers (in the malls). These were replaced by giants like Barnes & Noble and Borders. France wants to make sure their small book sellers don’t disappear. I’m glad that France is doing that, but I’m also glad that the United States isn’t. I’m a “cheap bastard,” and I like my cheap books.
A similar law probably won’t happen here anyway (at least not until maybe there’s another presidential administration). President Obama seems to like Amazon, and his Justice department has sued Apple and a bunch of book publishers for colluding against Amazon (I’m not a lawyer, so I probably didn’t phrase that correctly). I’m pretty sure a country that sues book publishers for collusion on book prices won’t then force book stores to… collude on book prices.
I like a lot of things about Amazon. I like reading book samples before deciding whether or not I purchase a book. I like discounted books on the e-reader. I like being able to self-publish digitally for free (it’s a lot easier to do than I thought it would be). When I had a fairly serious neck injury a few years ago, the only way I could hold a book without lots of arm/neck pain was with a Kindle. So I have a bias toward Amazon and e-readers and cheap books. But at the same time, I like browsing through real book stores more than I like browsing online.
But enough about me! How would a law like France’s affect your book reading habits? Do you buy high priced hardcover bestsellers when they come out? Is a 5% discount really a discount? What facts did I (an ignorant American) screw up? Which kind of store do you enjoy browsing through more, traditional or online? What’s the best bargain book you’ve ever bought?
WARNING!! There’s not much silence, but there is a lot of PROFANITY in this episode.
Even though Danielle and I had issues, there were a lot of things we didn’t talk about. We never talked about her spiking my drinks and getting me drunk at the Halloween party. We never talked about me being an asshole when I was drunk at the Halloween party and the rude things I had said. We never talked about me paying all of Danielle’s bills when she made a lot of money (maybe more than me). We never talked about when Danielle blurted out “Love ya!” one night, or why she never repeated it (or why I never said it back). I never asked her why she was talking to Linda, Kirk’s girlfriend (though she probably wouldn’t be his girlfriend for much longer now). I was enjoying our relationship (or whatever it was) too much to risk it by talking about these things.
But all issues have to be resolved sometime, one way or another.
We were eating lunch early Sunday afternoon at a Mexican restaurant with a football game on all of its televisions. Despite Danielle’s reluctance, we needed to discuss what to do for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I usually flew home for at least one of the holidays but had delayed making flight plans because I wasn’t sure what to do with Danielle. We didn’t have the type of relationship that I thought of as permanent, and I didn’t want it to end early because I scared her off with family talk, but I also didn’t want to insult her by not inviting her to meet my family. I was proud that Danielle was my girlfriend. I wanted her to meet my family. But it wasn’t something worth pushing too hard.
Danielle was in librarian mode, with her hair pulled back, thick glasses on, a kind of drab blouse buttoned up most of the way, and my/her/our copy of Pride and Prejudice set on the booth table for everybody to see. A couple our age sat near us side-by-side in a booth. Danielle and I were opposite each other, face-to-face.
“What does that mean?” I asked Danielle, directing my eyes to the nearby couple.
Since the couple was slightly behind Danielle, she casually accidentally knocked her copy of Pride and Prejudice onto the floor, leaned sideways over to pick it up, and casually accidentally glanced at them.
When she sat back up, she said, “Maybe they don’t want to watch each other eat.”
“Do you think that’s weird?” I asked. “Or is it weird that we sit face to face?”
“You’re a careful eater,” she said.
“So…, “ I began, searching for a smooth transition and failing. “I need to know what to do about Thanksgiving. No pressure.”
She fiddled with Pride and Prejudice for a couple seconds before she said, “I’m not sure meeting family is a good idea.”
“My dad would like to meet you,” I said eagerly. “I’d really like my brothers to meet you too.”
Danielle grinned. “Are you trying to show me off?”
“Damn right I am!” I said.
She hesitated. “Maybe,” she said slowly.
“The football t-shirts,” I said. The way she had said “Maybe” was really a reluctant yes. “Definitely wear the football t-shirts.”
We were discussing possible flight dates and how to minimize her financial loss from not working when she looked up at something behind me and said, “Fuck.”
I turned (not so casually accidentally) and saw a tall lean guy walking directly toward us. I repositioned myself for a better look, but before I could, he already was standing directly over us at our booth. If Danielle’s expression hadn’t changed so suddenly, I wouldn’t have given this guy a second glance. He was tall and thin with slicked or gelled short auburn hair. He had taken long strides, and when he stood over us, his arms stayed at his side with his hands in his jacket pocket.
“Danielle?” he said quietly.
“Vin,” Danielle muttered, eyes shifting from him to me.
“What the fuck?” he said, his voice clear but quiet. Customers at other tables wouldn’t be able to hear what he was saying. “I didn’t recognize you.”
Vin sat down without permission next to Danielle, and she surprised me by scooting over.
“Who’s this?” he asked, looking at me.
“Jimmy,” she said, staring at her plate.
I was about to offer my hand and introduce myself, but he kept talking.
“This is the guy you’re fucking?”
Danielle looked down at her plate and said nothing. I decided not to introduce myself.
“And what’s this?” Vin picked up Pride and Prejudice, flipped through it, and snorted a laugh. “This doesn’t even have any pictures.”
Danielle’s face went blank. I couldn’t believe how this guy was talking, and I couldn’t get any sense of what her sudden silence meant. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I kept quiet too. This Vin guy was rude, but nobody around us heard what was going on, so even though he was disturbing us, he wasn’t really causing a scene.
“Your glasses? This book? I can’t believe people buy that shit.” He held up the Jane Austen book and looked at me. “You know she’s not reading that, right?”
I was raised to be a polite person, and the problem with that was sometimes I wasn’t prepared to deal with rude people quickly. I’ve always tended to back off and let the rude person do what he or she wanted until I got pushed too far. I had my limits, but my limits and Danielle’s limits weren’t the same. I’d always tried to deal with rude people politely, but rude people either didn’t pick up on subtle hints or they didn’t care.
“This is kind of a bad time, Vin,” I said. “We were talking about something important.”
“I bet,” he said, waving the book around. “This isn’t who she is. I bet you don’t know shit about her.”
“Vin… don’t,” Danielle said.
“What?” Vin said. “Tell him about you? Why wouldn’t you want me to tell him about you?”
Even with her glasses on and her face down, I could see her eyes were red. I had seen her with red eyes a couple times, but I had never seen her this withdrawn.
“You believe that shit?” Vin said to me. “All the year’s I’ve known her, and she doesn’t want to talk to me. And the fucked up part is that I never did anything wrong.”
“We were in the middle of something,” I said.
“Danielle’s always in the middle of something,” Vin said. “And it’s always fucked up.”
“I…I need to use the lady’s room,” Danielle said, finally looking up. “Mel-Vin, would you please scoot over?”
“Don’t call me that again, bitch.”
I expected Danielle to say something harsh back, but instead she said very quietly, “Sooooorrrry.”
Then she fluttered her eyelashes at him and said, “Would you please move over, Mar-Vin?”
“Bitch, talk to me like that again, and I’ll knock those glasses off your face.”
“Hey!” I said. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I was going to do something.
“It’s okay,” Danielle said, her grin starting to form, but it was shaky. “This is how we talk to each other, my friends… that you wanted to meet.”
“Yeah, that’s how we talk to each other,” Vin said.
Vin shifted over and let Danielle out of the booth. I stood up and was about to tell her that we could just leave, that we didn’t have to put up with this Vin guy, but before I could say anything, she said, “I think you should talk to Vin. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
As she turned toward the restrooms, I tried to find something, some kind of expression in her face, but I got nothing. I had no clue what she was about to do or what she expected me to do (except talk to this Vin guy). I didn’t know if she just needed a few minutes to pull herself together. I didn’t know if she expected me to handle Vin myself and get him to leave before she returned. For all I knew, she was going to pass the restroom and leave the restaurant altogether (I wouldn’t have blamed her!). All that I knew is that I had been befuddled and useless while Vin was verbally mistreating her. I had sat there and let her take it.
And now she was walking away. There was no hug. There was no kiss. Danielle just wandered off, leaving me to talk to Vin all by myself.
*****
To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: A Lack of Subtlety .
And to read “The Literary Girlfriend” from the beginning, start here.
This book might not be a surprise, but the second choice will SHOCK you!!! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Maybe it’s arrogant to suggest that a great book be rewritten. For one thing, it’s not going to happen. A great book is never going to be rewritten, so making the suggestion is a waste of time. Plus, a great book is usually written by a great author, and I’ve never written a great book, so therefore I probably have no business suggesting that a great book be rewritten. Those are both fair points.
However, some great books have qualities that make them tough for me to read. I know these criticisms are more of a reflection of me as a reader than on the authors who wrote the great books. But sometimes I wish a great book could be rewritten just to help me enjoy it more (or make it easier for me to read).
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
I’m not going to complain about the length. I’ve done that before, and others have too. My problem is the Russian names. For some reason, I have a tough time keeping track of Russian names. Epics with American or English names are difficult enough for me to follow. But Russian names give me a headache, except for Vladimir Putin. I don’t care for him too much, but I like his name. If War and Peace were to be rewritten, maybe the translator could start by Americanizing all the names.
Before he died, I was hoping Tom Clancy would do his own rewrite of War and Peace in his Clancyesque style. Pierre Bezhukov could have been renamed Peter Ryan. Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky would be renamed Prince Andy Brewer. The characters would still be Russian, but the names would be Americanized to help someone like me keep up. Every weapon from the early 19th century could be described with intricate detail. A bunch of ironically dismissive comments about the growing United States could have been made by both French and Russian characters. The book could have been called Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace by Tom Clancy. I might have been able to read that, but I wouldn’t have bragged about it afterward. Maybe somebody else can do it now.
I don’t really want an abridged version of War and Peace because that would just be a shorter version with the same Russian names that give me a headache (maybe the headache wouldn’t hurt so much). I can read long books (I currently choose not to). I used to read long books. If there had been an Americanized version of War and Peace when I read long books, I might have finished it.
The Fault in our Stars by John Green
DISCLAIMER: I haven’t finished this book yet, but I’m reading it now and plan on finishing it.
I’m not sure The Fault in our Stars is a great book, but it has a lot of really passionate fans, and to them it’s a great book, and I can understand why. For a YA book (if you agree with that classification), it’s pretty deep, and its emotional scenes are intense. Some of the dialogue and narration is very… I’m not sure what the word for it is. Trying too hard to be clever?
I know lots of teenagers (most of them are smart with pretty good vocabularies), but nobody I know (even adults) talk like characters in this book. Some readers love this book for that. I find it distracting. In its defense, some scenes are emotionally difficult to read, and the distracting style made it easier to detach myself from the characters, making the emotionally difficult scenes easier for me to read, but I’m not sure that was the author’s intent.
Also, I’m probably not the author’s intended audience. I’m almost 50, and the book was written for an audience slightly younger than that.
Maybe John Green could write an old fart’s version of The Fault in our Stars, but if he did, I’d probably cry when I read it, and I don’t like to cry when I read. Maybe John Green did me a favor. Still, I’d kind of like a different version with the same characters where I didn’t feel like they were trying so hard. But that’s probably not going to happen, so I’ll finish the version that I have.
*****
I’ve struggled with a lot of books in my life, but I wasn’t interested in them enough to want a rewrite. Asking for a rewrite is a sign of respect. I really want to enjoy every aspect of these books that I want to read, but there’s something keeping me from doing that. With that in mind, what great book do you think could use a rewrite? What kept you from enjoying the great book that you’d like to be rewritten? What do you think of my choices? Or is this just a bad topic? It happens sometimes.
It’s never good to see your girlfriend dancing with another guy. The girlfriend and the guy dancing might say it’s harmless, but it really shouldn’t happen. However, I knew that’s what I was going to see. I knew it. I had just pissed off Danielle, and she was vindictive. She even told me she was vindictive when we first met, and I had witnessed it (toward other people) a couple times. I had just embarrassed her, and I was sure calling me an asshole in front of Kirk and a few other guys wasn’t going to be the end of it. Nothing good was going to come from this. But I had to see anyway.
Danielle was on the other side of the high-ceilinged, open living room, dancing with Jerome to the song “Scary Monsters,” and my first impulse was to rush across the room and belt him. Yeah, Jerome was the host and had always been nice to me, but he also knew that Danielle was my girlfriend, and guys don’t hit on girlfriends, at least not when the boyfriend is in the house. That was a lack of respect.
I was tempted to punch him out, but even in my sluggish condition, I remembered that I punched like a girl, and he was a few inches taller and he was broader and he could probably kick my ass even when I was having a good day, and even if he couldn’t, he could hire a lawyer to sue the hell out of me if I accidentally hurt him. I’d rather lose a fight than get sued.
I shook my head and held back. I watched Danielle dance wildly in her Jane Austen Victorian style dress. Between us were a bunch of women in slutty costumes (nurses, vampires, French maids, etc.) and a bunch of guys in half-assed costumes trying to dance with them . The room was dark with some strobe light action, so my view wasn’t the best, but I could see enough. I had never seen Danielle dance before. We’d been living together for a couple weeks, and she danced for a living (a different kind of dancing), and yet I’d never seen her like this. I could have watched her all night, except I was pissed off she was with another guy.
Then I noticed that the look on Danielle’s face was vacant. Even from where I stood, I could see that she didn’t make any eye contact with Jerome. It looked like he was trying to impress her, but she didn’t seem to notice. She just liked to dance and do her own thing. She wasn’t dancing with Jerome. She was dancing next to Jerome. And suddenly, I wasn’t pissed off anymore, except at myself.
Danielle was having fun, and I was thinking that maybe it was good that I wasn’t out there with her. I would have been self-conscious. I would have been aware of people staring at me (even if they weren’t), and that would have carried over to her. She would have tried to compensate for my stiff dancing, and that would have made things worse.
But then I remembered I was dressed up as Frankenstein’s monster! If anybody had an excuse to be a stiff dancer, it was Frankenstein’s monster. Ugh! I had wasted an opportunity to be a stiff dancer without anybody thinking twice about it. It would have been fun. Halloween was the one time it was okay to be a stiff dancer, but I’d wasted the moment by being an asshole. It was too late now. I stood in the doorway and looked at the floor.
A few minutes later, I was wobbling to the restroom when I bumped into a guy with an eye patch for a costume. To me, nothing was more lame than a guy wearing an eye patch as a Halloween costume.
“Why the long face, Frankenstein?” the lame pirate said. “Hahahaha!”
“It’s not Frankenstein,” I said, deciding between arguing with a lame pirate and using the restroom. “It’s Frankenstein’s monster. Frankenstein was the scientist who created the…”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard it in the other room,” the pirate said, waving me off. He had been watching football with me earlier, and that annoyed me even more.
“Then get it right, you one-eyed mother… fu…” I grumbled behind his back.
After I used the facilities, I returned to the TV room and was relieved (not in a bathroom kind of way) that the pirate wasn’t there. I wanted to watch football and get myself calmed down and then smooth things over with Danielle before we left. She was just having harmless fun, and I was just going to make things worse by going in there like I was a stalker.
Just when I was relaxing (and maybe falling asleep), the pirate was in my face, waving a plastic toy bag of a kid’s monster mask in front of me.
“See? See?” the pirate said.
I shook my head and focused on the picture in the middle of the bag, a cartoon of the Frankenstein monster’s face and in giant gruesome letters “FRANKENSTEIN MASK.”
“It’s not Frankenstein’s monster,” the pirate said. “It’s Frankenstein.”
“The bag is wrong,” I said.
“The bag was made by professionals,” the pirate said. “The bag is never wrong.”
“The bag is wrong,” I said.
The pirate laughed bitterly and tossed the bag at me before walking away. “Whatever.”
The bag in my face and his “whatever” pissed me off and I rocketed (or stumbled) out my chair. I felt dizzy from getting up too quickly, but I still said, “It’s Frankenstein’s monster!”
“You talking shit to me?” the pirate said.
“It’s Frankenstein’s monster!” I said again.
“I’m tired of you talking shit about Frankenstein and your sack head.”
“It’s Frankenstein’s monster!”
“No one gives a shit!”
“Then say it the right way!” I yelled. My legs were wobbling, and I was seeing yellow dots, and the pirate either had two eye patches or there were two pirates. That wasn’t a good sign.
Suddenly Danielle was in front of me, pushing me back. “What are you arguing…?” but she couldn’t finish the question.
Kirk was in the room again too, looking at me strangely. People were peeking in from various doorways to see what was going on. Danielle’s mouth was open, but she didn’t say anything, and I realized that I was making a scene and it was embarrassing her. All this time I’d been worried about her behavior, and I was the one acting like an asshole, and even worse, I was being a loud asshole, and I couldn’t seem to stop.
“You need to calm down,” Danielle said, and took my hand.
I was about to say something about Frankenstein’s monster, but the pirate did it for me.
“How did Frankenstein get a hot girlfriend?”
Danielle rolled her eyes and turned on the pirate. “It’s Frankenstein’s monster!”
“Damn,” the pirate said. “Even the librarian’s talking shit to me.”
“I’m Jane Austen, douchebag.” And she held up her copies of Pride and Prejudice and Emma.
“Oh yeah?” the pirate said, looking her over. “Your glasses are an anachronism.”
“Your eye patch was made in China,” Danielle said.
“Your… you…” The pirate threw his arms up in frustration. “Dammit!” The pirate gave up and staggered out of the room.
I was about to laugh, but Danielle turned back to me, and I knew I’d better keep my mouth shut.
“What’s wrong, Jimmy?” Kirk asked, getting really close.
“He’s been an asshole all night,” Danielle said.
“Are you drunk?” Kirk asked. “You been drinkin’?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just… sleepy… and pissed off. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Shit!” Danielle said suddenly. Then she looked at the ceiling and blew out some air. “Shit! Shit!” Then she looked at Kirk. “I have to talk to you.”
They moved to a corner and spoke quietly and I couldn’t hear them over the music from the other room, and I wanted to hear what they were saying because I knew they were talking about me, but I was also aware that a lot of people were watching us now, and my inhibitions kicked in. Don’t cause a scene, I thought. Don’t make it worse. But I was also ticked off that Danielle was talking to Kirk instead of me. So I stood there stupidly and kept quiet.
“What?” Kirk said. Their voices were getting louder. Whatever Danielle said had made him irate.
“I thought he’d be funny,” she said.
“He turns into an asshole,” Kirk said. I was pretty sure he was talking about me.
“I didn’t know.”
“You can’t do that to people,” Kirk said. Whatever Danielle had done, it must have been bad, considering that Kirk rarely gave morality lectures (he usually needed them for his own poor behavior).
“I didn’t mean to… I didn’t…”
“You want to tell him?” Kirk asked Danielle. “Or do you want me to?”
Danielle hesitated, and then looked around at all the people in the room. She grabbed my hand and said, “We’re going home.”
“But I was just starting to have fun!” I exclaimed. I wasn’t having fun, but for some reason it felt good being belligerent.
“We’re leaving.”
“I wanna know what you two were talking about!”
Danielle sighed. “Fine,” she said, and her cheese-eating grin started to take shape. She put her arms around my neck, pulled me down, and just when I thought she was going to kiss me, she brushed her mouth against my cheek and then whispered, “When we get home, I’m going to…”
And she finished her sentence with a description of one of the most vulgar sexual acts I’d ever heard of.
“Okay,” I said. I no longer felt like being belligerent.
She took my hand, and we left without saying goodbye to anybody. We didn’t even thank the host.
“Next year,” Danielle said as we got into her car (she was driving), “go as Darth Vader.”
I’m not sure how I responded. I fell asleep (or passed out) on the way home.
*****
DISCLAIMER! I apologize for this being rushed. I felt like I had to get this Halloween party scene done before Halloween (even though I’m pretty sure that doesn’t matter to anybody else).
*****
To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: Silent Treatment .
And to read “The Literary Girlfriend” from the beginning, start here.
“Why are men horny all the time?” Danielle asked me in front of five other women.
We were in a side room at Jerome’s house during the Halloween party, and Danielle was the only one in the room (other than me) who wasn’t wearing some kind of slutty costume. There was a slutty vampire, a slutty nurse, a slutty cat, a slutty cow girl, and a slutty police officer. Danielle could have gone slut mode for Halloween and would have looked great, but instead she was Jane Austen, in a Victorian (I think) dress carrying my copies of Pride and Prejudice and Emma. With her hair up and thick black glasses on, Danielle looked like a cute librarian giving a book talk. In fact, she looked classy. I was proud that Danielle was my girlfriend. I was always proud when I had a girlfriend, but this was the first time I had been proud that a particular woman was my girlfriend.
Jerome’s house was a three story monolith 15 miles out of city limits where property was cheap and commuters willing to drive an hour each way could buy a few acres of land and design dream houses. A bunch of people in costumes stood and talked in a large open kitchen. A bunch of people in costumes danced in a living room darkened with strobe lights. Kids in costumes ran around outside in a vast backyard (but the swimming pool was blocked because it was too cold). A smaller room had a large screen TV with a football game on. A game room with a pool table, a ping-pong table, and a foosball table was upstairs, along with a bunch of unused bedrooms that stored cool stuff like guitars, swords, guns, and collectibles from all over the world.
Jerome, the host, was a few years older, single, and was an engineer of some kind talking about starting his own company. I made decent money for a guy out of college, but this guy was off the charts. I was lucky to be in his social circle. I only knew him because of Kirk, who introduced me to everybody he networked with. The other guests at the party were my acquaintances; they knew my name, occasionally talked to me on the phone, and personally invited me to all the get-togethers, but without Kirk, I wouldn’t have met any of them. I’m known as a pleasant guy, but I need an outgoing guy like Kirk to make me social. Even though I was quiet, I had short outbursts of humor, I’d bring stuff, and would help out around the parties. I might not have been social, but I could be friendly and useful.
I was concerned about how Danielle would react to Jerome. He was a few inches taller than me and could talk smooth. I knew Danielle was using me to pay her bills (that might not have been the only reason, but it was a big one), and I was okay with that. If that’s what Danielle wanted, I was a guy who could pay bills on a month-to-month basis, but Jerome was the kind of guy who could make bills go away for a long time. Even back then, I knew jealousy and paranoia weren’t good qualities in a boyfriend, but I also knew to be aware of what Jerome (or other guys) might say to Danielle.
After about 30 minutes of introducing Danielle and explaining my paper mache Frankenstein’s monster mask, I was talked out and sleepy and content to watch a football game in a side room with a large TV. A couple other quiet guys were there staring blankly, and one guy wearing a pirate’s eye patch was screaming because he actually cared about the game.
Danielle wandered from room to room talking to women and popping up where I could see her every few minutes. She brought me an iced soda (she knew I didn’t want anything alcohol-related) in a glass and kept me refilled every 15 minutes or so (even though I didn’t ask her to). I didn’t know what brand it was, but cola had never tasted that good before. I usually nursed my drinks in public, but I drained a few glasses, and Danielle kept bringing me refills between her conversations. Most of the time she talked to other women, but one guy tried to talk to her, offering his hand to shake, but she pointed at me, and the guy’s shoulders sank and he wandered off. I was proud.
The “Why are men horny?” question came as I had been checking up on Danielle. Danielle’s question wasn’t rhetorical in nature. She was asking me as an expert, and her audience eye-balled me because they expected an answer too. The first response I thought of was, “You just have that effect on men,” but I figured that would come across as vulgar rather than complimentary. My mind was fuzzy, and maybe because I wasn’t used to being up that late, but I wasn’t stupid.
“I like sex,” Danielle explained to her female costumed friends while I tried to gather my thoughts. “But I can do without it for a while. But guys, it’s non-stop. Why is that?”
She turned, put her hands on her hips, and looked me in the eye.
“Uh… I…” I stammered. “It’s biology,” I finally said. “It, you know, all accumulates and always comes back, so to speak. It never stops. If we don’t do anything about it, it makes us, um, well, it has to get dealt with one way or another.”
“What does that mean?” the woman in the slutty nurse costume asked.
“It means he beats off all the time,” Danielle said with her cheese-eating grin.
The women cackled loudly enough to make me cringe. When enough women get together, their giddy squealing can hurt a guy’s ears. Here, I had just provided a tasteful (maybe), scientific (not really) answer to Danielle’s inappropriate question, and they mocked me. Even in my annoyed state, I thought it was ironic that in a room full of slutty costumes, the woman in the Victorian garb was the vulgar one.
I shook my head and returned to watch the football game in Jerome’s living room. My eyelids were starting to get heavy, and I was thinking about closing them for a minute or two.
Just as I sat down, Kirk started talking to me. He was semi-drunk on the couch because his girlfriend Linda wore a Supergirl costume with a skirt all the way to her knees and a shirt that went all the way to her neck. Even Danielle’s Victorian dress displayed more cleavage. Kirk wasn’t going to get any that night, so he figured he might as well drink.
“What’s with all the noise in there?” he asked.
“Drunk women,” I said.
He nodded. “Cool Frankenstein mask.”
“Thanks, but it’s the Frankenstein monster, not Frankenstein. Frankenstein created the monster, and that’s why the technical term is Frankenstein’s monster.”
Kirk looked at me like I was a dick and said, “Cool mask.”
We watched football for 10 minutes, and I got sleepier and groggier. I tried to shake my head clear a couple times and thought about going to the bathroom or taking a walk outside (but not doing both at the same time). The song “Monster Mash” was playing in the other room for the fourth time when Danielle rushed in, grabbed my hand, and started to pull me up.
“I wanna dance,” she said.
Still groggy, I resisted. “I don’t like to dance,” I said. She should have known that.
“C’mon! Have some fun! You’re not having fun!” She continued to pull, and I continued to resist.
“I’m watching football.” I was annoyed because I was having fun even though she didn’t know it. I’ve never liked it when people told me I’m not having fun. I liked to be my own judge of whether or not I was having fun.
“Dance with me!” She was almost pleading.
“I said I don’t feel like it,” I stated.
Danielle stopped pulling, and her eyes narrowed. Then she threw my hand down back on my lap.
“Fine! Be an asshole!”
And she stormed out of the living room. People in other rooms peeked inside to see who the asshole was. Danielle had not used her quiet voice.
I was embarrassed. I knew I should have danced with her. I knew it. But I just couldn’t get myself to do it. My eyelids felt heavy, and my mind was slow, and “Monster Mash” was getting on my nerves, and Kirk, who didn’t know the difference between Frankenstein and the Frankenstein’s monster, was looking at me like I was the idiot in the room. I drank my soda. I guessed that since Danielle had just called me an asshole, she wasn’t going to bring me another one.
I glanced at Kirk, but now he pretended to have not seen the uncomfortable exchange. Still, he said, with his eyes directed toward the television, “You should have danced with her.”
“I pay all her bills,” I said.
He lifted his beer and said, “I hear that.” Then he burped.
A few minutes later Kirk said, “You know, she’s gonna start dancing without you.”
Ugh, I thought. Kirk was right. Danielle was drinking, there was loud music, I had just pissed her off in front of people, she hadn’t done anything crazy for a while, and there were a bunch of guys who would love to dance with her, guys that would love to get really close to a cute chick in thick glasses and get a feel for what was under that Victorian dress. Anger started to well up in me. I’d been stupid, and now she was probably going to start dancing crazy with another guy when I was the one who paid all her bills. That pissed me off, and the anger gave me my strength and I pushed myself up from the couch to find out what kind of mess my girlfriend was going to cause.
I didn’t know what I was about to walk into.
*****
To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: The Party Scene.
And to read “The Literary Girlfriend” from the beginning, start here.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The open letter has to be one of the least effective persuasive techniques around, but it’s pretty easy to do. Writing an open letter and posting it online is much easier than gathering a crowd of people to stop traffic or shout down a politician. But I’ve never heard of an open letter changing public policy.
A few days ago, a bunch of famous authors (most of whom I’ve never heard) signed an open letter to President Obama complaining about how standardized tests in the United States have made today’s kids hate reading. According to the letter (or the people who wrote it), the tests force teachers to teach to the test rather than encourage kids to love reading. I understand where these famous authors are coming from, but this open letter is not the way to go.
First of all, writing an open letter against standardized tests is not exactly taking a stand. Not many people like standardized tests. Teachers hate them. Students hate them. Even people who aren’t directly involved in public education hate the idea of having to take a standardized test. The only people who seem to like standardized tests are the standardized test makers and politicians. But the people who dislike standardized tests (which is everybody else) don’t dislike them enough to do more than write and sign an open letter. If you’re going to write an open letter, pick a topic that isn’t so safe.
Next, the open letter against standardized testing is really bland. With so many authors signing it, you’d think somebody would have found a way to make it interesting. Instead, it’s the kind of bland, uninspiring expository piece that ends up on standardized tests. With so many authors involved, one of them should have at least added a metaphor or a snarky comment. This is the kind of writing that makes authors look bad.
Plus, the authors assume that it’s the standardized tests that make kids hate reading. I’m not so sure. I went to school before standardized tests were common, and I remember a lot of teachers that made us hate reading by themselves. If a teacher uses a curriculum of The Yearling, A Separate Peace, and A Light in the Forest, then teachers don’t need standardized tests to make kids hate reading. I’m not saying the above novels are bad books. They’re probably very good. But when you’re forced to read them at school, you learn to hate reading.
Luckily, I had my own copy of Massage Parlor II when I was in junior high school, so I loved reading. Every guy in my junior high loved reading when they had my copy of Massage Parlor II. I did more to promote a love of reading in junior high than any open letter to President Obama could ever do.
The open letter to President Obama might be harmless, but with so many authors signing it, there had to be a way to make it interesting. I don’t like to be the kind of person who complains about a problem without offering a solution, so I have an idea.
If you absolutely must write an open letter, at least make it short and interesting. Write a quick inflammatory statement, and then get out. So here is my open form letter that can be used to anybody for any subject. In this case, the authors who are against standardized testing can fill in the blanks with (President Obama) and (standardized testing) and then (your name/somebody else’s name).
OPEN FORM LETTER TO ANYBODY
Dear ____________:
You suck! And so does anybody who supports ________________.
Sincerely/ Best wishes,
____________________
*****
It might not be perfect, but nobody will stop reading it before the end. It’s almost as precise as Ernest Hemingway’s six-word short story.
I’m not the kind of person who tells people they suck, and I don’t write open letters, so maybe my suggestion isn’t very good. What changes would you make to my open form letter? How do you make an open letter about standardized testing interesting? What do you think about standardized testing? What books did you have to read in school that made you hate or love reading? Have you ever written a short story that’s less than six words?
Dysfunctional Literacy 