July 16, 2012
Follow me to Tumblr!
You can still find me, cyberly speaking, at the venues listed here--Heroes and Heartbreakersm Goodreads, Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.--but I've taken to very short blog snippets on Tumblr. Please follow me there.
May 28, 2012
This blog is going on indefinite hiatus. Very few of you read it, and I'd rather reach a larger audience. If that mean spreading myself across multiple social media platforms, so be it. As a result I've provided handy-dandy buttons within two tables below for all the places you can follow me.
My tweets tend toward the political, and I'm progressive. Most of my library database is on Goodreads, and as it is becoming more and more the readers' social media outlet, I've just begun to post reviews there. Goodreads will more or less replace this blog, at least for now.
| Goodreads | Google+ | Huffington Post | My Jam | |||
My Facebook offers some personal nuggets and funny stuff. I try to keep my political stuff on a FB group I started earlier in the year. Google+ seems to be a more visual sort of social media outlet, so I try to post mostly photos, although when I post a review or a piece of writing somewhere, I'll link to it from g+. I pin at both Pinterest and Loveit, but since the latter is in beta, I didn't create a button. If you are a Loveit beta tester or would like to be, I'll be glad to share an invite and/or my home there. If you have a page on the Huffington Post, feel free to use the button below to link to mine. Finally, I post a weekly song to This Is My Jam. Nobody else uses it, but I try and curate my selections thoughtfully.
Though I've reviewed at Publishers Weekly since the late 1990s, other than a feature article I wrote last year, reviews remain without bylines. But it's a huge part of my work life, so feel free to link to PW, and if you are a subscriber, each week you can access upwards of 80 new reviews.
 Writer |  Blogger |  Member |  Reviewer |
After a substantial injury-related hiatus, I'm back on Heroes & Heartbreakers, with four posts in recent weeks. I've not written anything for some time at NBCC, but it's particularly interesting to those interested in literary fiction. Finally, the green leaf will [eventually] take you to my Amazon profile page, and the hundred plus reviews I've written.
And now I'm off to Goodreads to review Tiffany Reisz's The Siren.
April 17, 2012
My Second Shot Scheduled
Tomorrow I'll be having a second stellate ganglion injection in my neck. I haven't a clue if it'll be as painless as the first one, or if it'll provide more, less, the same effects as the first one. More, please...lots more.
April 15, 2012
Catch-Up Links
While I was on medical hiatus, I stopped writing for Heroes & Heartbreakers. I continued my work for Publishers Weekly and, as I felt well enough, wrote some brief reviews for Amazon and Amazon Vine. Here are the links you missed, beginning with a link from my return to the H&H rotation:
- Kindle Magic (or How to Organize Your Kindle) article by Laurie Gold for Heroes & Heartbreakers
- Vine review of Lustfully Ever After by Kristina Wright (Erotic Romance)
- Vine review of Dermacontrol Foam Wash by Cetaphil (Skincare)
- Vine review of Apron Anxiety by Alysssa Shelasky (Memoir)
- Vine review of Paris in Love by Eloisa James (Memoir)
- Vine review of Curly-Q Dinnerware Set by Rachael Ray (Housewares)
- Review of Women's JB-6210-F "Victory" Pink Stainless Steel Diamond Watch by Just Bling (Jewelry/Watches)
- Review of Colored Gemstones by Paul Deasy (Reference)
- Vine review of Mio, Mango Peach by Kraft (Water Enhancer)
- Vine review of Fruit Design Post-It Notes by 3M (Office Supplies)
- Review of Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie (Biography)
- Review of Conan O'Brien Can't Stop (documentary) DVD, directed by Rodman Flender
April 14, 2012
RSD
When I checked in during January, I'd been put in a cast for a broken hand. Well, the cast came off, I went to Occupational Therapy, but instead of recovering properly, I was diagnosed with a rather rare malady called RSD, Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome, AKA Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome. Here's what that means: When injured, the sympathetic nervous system clicks on like an automatic light switch. Occasionally, when the injury involves an extremity like a hand or foot, it doesn't turn off. That's what they believe has happened to me. If you've got allergies you know that your body thinks it's fighting something dangerous, releases histamines, and you get allergy symptoms. RSD is kind of like that, only with the nervous system.
After diagnosing me, my hand doctor sent me off to a pain management doctor, who put me on Lyrica, which has an unfortunate side effect of causing some patients to lose vocabulary...not a great thing for a writer. She thinks it will abate, and I believe it is starting to do so. Forgetting the word "cord" or how to spell "who" scared the crap out of me last week.
The problem with RSD is that it's a race against the clock; you've got about six months to get it under control or it can get really bad...with symptoms jumping to the other hand, permanent changes in skin texture, my hand turning into a claw, and, quite frankly, a lifetime of pain.
My RSD was diagnosed fairly early, although I'm guessing the unforgettable pain I felt in my fingers while in the cast is when it began, which means the clock is really ticking now. So far I've had one stellate ganglion injection, and am going to have a second on Wednesday of next week.
The shots are administered while under heavy sedation. The needle goes in about two inches to the left of the voice box, and for most people, the doctor is led to the correct spot by first injecting iodine dye. Unfortunately, I am allergic to iodine dye, so apparently during the first shot she brought me out of sedation and asked me questions to help her administer the medicine in the right place.
I did not have the immediate, rock-star results some people experience. Whether that's because she didn't quite hit the sweet spot, I don't actually have RSD, or that it's going to take a lot of injections, I'm not quite sure. All I know is that my flare-ups are no longer three days. They last one day instead (I had one yesterday and I was a useless human being because I lost all ability to cope). I can bend my pinky all the way so that the it goes into the "fist" position. My ring finger no longer feels quite as much like a log as it did, and I can actually get a ring over my knuckle, which means the swelling that causes a lot of the pain has gone down. My pinky and ring finger don't shake quite as much. My joints don't seem to be turning blue and filling up with blood as much as they did either, another good sign, but I have a small niggle at the back of my mind: Am I the victim of wishful thinking?
With the exception of yesterday afternoon, I have not taken any of the hydrocodone prescribed because how can I tell if I'm getting better if pain meds are covering up the pain? My husband understands the logic, but both he and the doctor think I'm wrong to not take the medication. She assures me I won't end up like House, but I'm just not going to get back on them after taking so many between November and March.
If the shots appear to help at all, I'll have more, possibly up to six, and the doctor might actually go in and burn the nerve. I don't want that. As I told my mother, who is increasingly anxious on my behalf, so far the treatment is not as bad as it sounds. Yes, the prep for the shots is much like what happens before a general anesthetic, and there's no doubt if I didn't have that fucking iodine dye allergy (discovered in high school when they injected it via IV for a brain scan while looking for tumors to explain headaches) that I'd feel more confident in the efficacy of the shots, and the efficacy by degree as well: Are the shots working at all? Would they work better if she were visibly able to place them?
Meanwhile, all my editors--at PW & H&H--are very patient and understanding. A couple of days ago my first H&H blog entry in about seven months was published. It's called Kindle Magic (Or How to Organize Your Kindle Library. It's had about 700 views, not great, but not horrible either. It's amazing how easy it is to get used to low expectations.
I'm trying to get on with my life, whether or not this treatment succeeds. I'm forcing myself to use my hand and wrist as though the pain were not there because lack of use makes it worse. I'm typing. I'm carrying bags that aren't too heavy, although when I last did that on Thursday, my hand shook for a day. I put on earrings, bracelets, rings, and a necklace each day, even if I'm staying home, not only for the therapeutic value to my small motor skills, but also to remind myself of beauty. And I do my best to make sure my mother and daughter understand I'm not scared, so they can chill out until I tell them to worry.
That's all for now
January 30, 2012
Offline Again
Since my last post, I've exchanged one cast for another, larger cast. When my doctor removed the original cast, my hand still felt wrong, and my suspicions were confirmed when X-rays revealed a broken bone. He put ma in a larger cast, further delaying my recovery from shoulder surgery in December. Worse is that my finger--the break is in the area of my index finger, around where carpel meets metacarpal--feels better elevated, which, depending on where I'm sitting, causes pain in my shoulder to kick in. At times I need to lie down simply not to hurt. I'm spending a lot of time that way. It sucks.I see my shoulder surgeon tomorrow. I last saw him three days before hurting my hand, so it'll be interesting to see his reaction. As for me, having only the use of my thumb makes even the most rudimentary of skills almost impossible, but it's stretchy pants and camis with shelf bras for the foreseeable future...and as little time online as possible.
January 23, 2012
What's Going On?
I started having pain in my left arm this summer. I thought I had pulled a muscle, so I rested it for a couple of weeks. It didn't help, so I saw a shoulder specialist, who took X-rays and explained that it was referred pain from my shoulder. He gave me a shot of cortisone and sent me to physical therapy. Though the physical therapy worked to an extent, my second visit to that doctor showed me he didn't really understand what was going on with my shoulder.
My physical therapist recommended another specialist, whom I learned was in partnership with the shoulder specialist my husband saw a couple of years ago when he had trouble with his left shoulder. (He had had shoulder surgery shortly before we got married because his shoulder kept dislocating. Though his surgeon had long ago retired, he referred his patients to the specialist my husband saw a couple of years ago.)
Although I didn't know it at the time, it turns out it's my husband's doctor is the top shoulder specialist in the city. Luckily he saw me right away, looked at my older X-rays, and gave me a 2nd shot of cortisone, one which actually worked for a few days. Both my physical therapist and I noticed an immediate improvement in my shoulder, but a week later it had started to regress. So I went back to the doctor, who indicated that the shot had been as much for diagnostic purposes as it had been for pain. We talked about it, he sent me for an MRI, and after getting those results, scheduled surgery for a few days before Christmas.
Everyone in my side of the family has a very low threshold of pain, so after surgery when the doctor said my shoulder had been really messed up, I was actually relieved. Not only was there a tear in the rotator cuff, but the bone spur he had expected in my shoulder had actually broken off, leaving everything inflamed and disgusting. I had just started physical therapy again, a week after my surgery, when my husband, daughter and I went to see A Dangerous Method. I missed the last step going down a large flight of stairs and landed directly on my left wrist. After trying to ignore the pain through lunch, I noticed a huge blood clot had developed on my wrist, and we ended up at a nearby doc in the box. Two hours later I learned nothing had broken but that my left arm, hand, and fingers were badly sprained. They splinted my hand and wrist and sent me on my way.
When, a few days later I realized I kept re-injuring my hand, my husband suggested I see a specialist. He agreed that nothing was broken but I left his office with my wrist hand and fingers in a cast. I am supposed to have the cast removed this week, and I hope most of the swelling, pain, and general ickiness will be gone. I did take a break from PW duties for the last week in December, and have muddled through my last three reviews using DragonDictate, a voice recognition program I am using to write this very blog entry. I wish I had had Dragon Dictate back in November when I researched and wrote my 1st publishers weekly feature article, which required me to interview 20 authors, then writes eight hours a day for two days to complete the piece.
All of this explains why I've not blogged in months, but this weekend, when I went to look something up in my old blog, I discovered it was gone. Blog-city.com apparently went off line on December 31. I did not know they were going bye-bye, because all their e-mails to me must have been sent to my old AAR address, which has been defunct for 3 years.
This had a very disheartening effect on me; that's more than 6 1/2 years of writing, including probably 100 reviews. Even worse was discovering that I did not have complete archives for the blog. When I switched from PC to Mac this summer, I needed to jettison old files, all of which I had backed up. Unfortunately, the process of transferring files did not go entirely as planned, and not everything made it through the process. Among the lost files was a huge XML file containing the old blog in its entirety. I contacted blog-city.com's owners this weekend, and have requested they try to send me another backup. In the interim, I decided to upload here on blogger the files I did retain, which includes everything from the original blog's inception in 2002 to early 2007. There is simply too much good stuff for me to let go entirely, and it's a shame that all those links from AAR and Heroes and Heartbreakers are now useless. But by my uploading the blog here--each month is a single entry--I will feel better. I can only hope that those missing months can be accounted for. As for the password-protected portions of blog, I have no clue whether or not they were/are included in the archive files, but I'll soon find out. So far I've uploaded August, September, and October 2002.
As for my injuries, I plan to work through any remaining discomfort associated with my shoulder and arm in trying to get back into online writing. The hand may slow me down, but now that I know that anything I do to my shoulder cannot damage my shoulder, I'm going to grin and bear it.
See you here and there!
November 14, 2011
Paul Simon Giveaway Results
Congratulations, Lynne Welch, for winning this Paul Simon Giveaway. A copy of the 40th edition Bridge Over Troubled Water is on its way to you!
Professional Milestone
Today marks a professional milestone for me; Publishers Weekly published my very first—and bylined—feature article. Here's how it happened.
One of my PW editors, Rose Fox, emailed me a few weeks ago and asked if I'd be interested in working on a feature article for the upcoming romance issue of the magazine. The topic? Author online self-promotion. With a two-week turnaround time and a brief to include authors from a variety of imprints/lines/publishers, and a list of publicists for the major publishers, I jumped in.
Emails back and forth to the publicists, my suggestions and theirs, and I put together a list of more than 20 authors. They represented all romance subgenres, included debuting and long-published authors, those who kept it strictly professional online and those who treated readers to personal or off-the-cuff commentary, those who started blogging for fun and those who began to blog as part of a plan to become published. Some intrigued me for other reasons; one because she found a unique way to promote herself by not actively promoting herself, another because she'd sold a quarter of a million ebooks before being picked up by a mainstream publisher, and a third because of her pop culture connections. I did not know most of the authors, but some I knew from my years at AAR.
Twenty interviews later, with 36 pages worth of Q&A and follow ups, I sat down to actually write the article. It took me two eight-hour days to complete it, and another couple of hours to come up with the sidebar of do's and don'ts Rose asked me to pull out of the article itself and use to create a sidebar, along with quotes from the interviews to match.
My draft was due to Rose on Monday, November 14th; because I'd exceeded the 2,100 word count by 500 words (what else is new?), and didn't have a clue if it was any good whatsoever, I emailed it to her the Friday before so she would have plenty of time to edit (and I could rewrite if necessary). And then spent a sleepless night wondering if she'd hate it or approve.
I woke up at 5:30 that Saturday morning from the pain of a dreadful, full-frontal headache, presumably a tension-release headache like those that plagued me after finals all throughout college and graduate school. I checked my email and discovered a couple from Rose. First, and I'm totally channeling my one-time baby-sitter Sally Field here...she liked it, she really liked it! Next, she asked me to secure print-ready cover art for the article. I took a migraine pill and went back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that I hadn't fucked up my chance to prove I could write a magazine-quality feature article.
Over the next few days I gathered up all the print-ready cover art, and went through Rose's edits to clarify certain points. As always, her edits transformed my lowly draft into something terrific. Today the print version of the magazine went on sale, and those with subscriptions to PW can access it online.
The payday for the article is roughly the amount I receive for a year's worth of reviewing, and while the money itself isn't what's important, that my writing is worth it means a lot to me. It only took me fourteen years to get a gig like this; hopefully it won't be another fourteen years to get another.
November 1, 2011
Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin
Calvin Trillin
Grade: B
"Calvin Trillin is a wonderfully funny storyteller, whether or not his stories are true or fictional. He's a quintessential New Yorker, but his appeal is universal, if more than a little ethnic. I'd read previously many of the essays included in this new compilation, but re-reading them was just as funny the second time around. The essays, some of which are more than thirty years old, remain funny today; many that were written in the Reagan era could have been written last week. The included essays are short enough and filled with enough gems of humor that they simply cry out to be read aloud, and in this instance my husband was the happy recipient."
October 29, 2011
Paul Simon: Graceland or Bridge Over Troubled Water Giveaway
Last night we went to a Paul Simon concert. It was amazing. This teeny little 70-year-old man whose songbook is nearly as old as I am, with horrendous arthritis, entertained a happy audience along with his eight-member band for more than two hours.
The concert began with an opening act: The Secret Sisters, two sisters from Alabama who performed old school country music. I am no fan of country music, but they captivated me with their harmonies, the songs they sang, and how they connected with the audience. T Bone Burnett produced their first album, and they are currently at work on their second. If you want to be transported musically to Mayberry, and I mean that as a compliment, consider The Secret Sisters.
After this astonishingly good opening act, Paul Simon strolled onto the stage, to a standing ovation, and proved throughout the concert just why he deserved it. Though I would have liked a few more of his Simon & Garfunkel songs, his solo acoustic version of Sounds of Silence answered a question I've had for years: How good would a S&G song be without Garfunkel? Very good indeed, because his guitar playing was so lyrical.
Each of his band members played multiple instruments; one of his two guitarists played a saxaphone, the keyboardist played either the marimba or the vibes, and one of the two percussionists played the washboard in a Zydeco piece. And let me say this: Audiences love Jewish boys who sing gospel (cue Marc Cohn's Walking in Memphis).
Simon's lyrics are unique; many of his songs are not the typical love song. Obviously he was politically active in the 60s and what worked then is equally prescient today in the current climate. Carwash and My Little Town, in particular; the latter of which reminded me of Sarah Palin and her talk about small town virtues in a way I'd never considered before when hearing that song.
Some of my favorite moments came when Simon played songs off his landmark Graceland album. I ask you: Who among us does not adore Diamonds on the Souls of Her Shoes? The only song missing as far as I was concerned was You Can Call Me Al. He came out for two encores, and each time I hoped I'd hear it start, but after his final song in the second encore, Still Crazy After All These Years, the house lights turned up and it was, sadly, over.
In honor of Paul Simon and Graceland, I'm giving away one of two favorite Paul Simon goodies:
(1) A remastered version of Graceland on iTunes.
(2) The 40th anniversary edition of Bridge over Troubled Water, which includes not only the CD, but two DVDs. One reissues S&G's Songs of America documentary and the other is an amazing look into the history of recording BOTW. Earlier this year I watched that history documentary on cable, and loved it so much I bought this CD/DVD set...even though I saved the doc on my DVR and already own BOTW.
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If you would like to be eligible to win one of these...the winner can choose between the two...click here and send me an email. Type Paul Simon into the subject line and include in your email whether you want (1) Graceland or (2) Bridge Over Troubled Water, as well as your snail mail address so I can mail your prize if you choose the second option. If you go for the iTunes download, provide the email address associated with your iTunes account. You must live in the U.S. to qualify and I must receive your entry by midnight, Eastern Time, November 11th (I like the symmetry of 11/11/11).
October 28, 2011
New at H&H: A Kiss Is Not Just a Kiss
Yesterday I had a cortisone shot in my shoulder (ouch!), and on Wednesday discovered a desk in our house at precisely the right level to type without hurting said shoulder, so...I'm once again able to write. Which means that online today from me at Heroes & Heartbreakers: A Kiss Is Not Just a Kiss.
During my last year at AAR I wrote an ATBF column about one of my DIK reads, Lora Leigh's Dawn's Awakening. This new article for H&H rifs off that one, answering this question:
What do these things have in common?
- The Science of Kissing
- The Argument For and Against Romance Bond Mates
Click here to read A Kiss Is Not Just a Kiss, then post a comment over at H&H.
October 14, 2011
Forced Hiatus
A couple of months ago I injured my shoulder. I thought it was a pulled muscle, but when it didn't get better itself, I finally went to a doctor a few weeks ago, who put me on Celebrex. Earlier this week she sent me to a specialist, who diagnosed me and prescribed a month's worth of physical therapy on top of the Celebrex. The shoulder issue radiates pain down my upper arm to just below my elbow, and typing exacerbates the situation. As a result I'm trying to stay offline as much as possible; most of my posting for the past several weeks has been via my Droid, simply linking to various articles on FB and Twitter.
I hope to be back to full strength shortly; if not, I'll be getting a cortisone shot at the very least (epidurals were mentioned). Once I'm back to normal, look for me to start posting here again, and to return to Heroes & Heartbreakers; I have two articles I stopped mid-way through. Even more frustrating is that reading a print book makes the discomfort worse, so on top of everything, I'm depressed that my favorite pastime now hurts (the irony being that it's how I read that led to the injury over a long period of time in the first place). My Kindle is getting a major workout, but that doesn't help with the PW books I've been assigned to review as none so far have been in digital format.
Anyway, here's to hoping my forced hiatus ends soon.
October 1, 2011
Snarked on Net Neutrality
I've written before about Net Neutrality, and probably a quarter of my tweets relate to the issue. The FCC's Net Neutrality rules just went into effect, and Free Press is one of several entities to file suit against the FCC. The rules, you see, don't provide for true Net Neutrality; while they address the issue where land-based computers are concerned, they don't for wireless.
It's hard to get a handle on how much profit Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint make per cellular customer, but enough is never really enough, is it? AT&T recently eliminated the ability to buy a limited number of texts in favor of a $20.00 option for unlimited texts. I believe wireless companies make approximately a 10,000% texting profit. Another example: When I tried to change our existing plan to less than 700 minutes, I learned the 400 minute option—which would have worked for us as our daughter does most of her talking at night and on weekends— had disappeared. Like restaurants charging more for ever-larger plates, cellular providers are closing out less expensive options in favor of larger profits. And as there's so little competition, who's to stop them?
Free Press, a national, nonpartisan group working to reform media, sends out daily emails about media-related news. Many of those news items these days relate to the activities surrounding the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger (different filings made by AT&T as various items have leaked surrounding costs and jobs, lobbying money spent on Congress, unions, and corporations to win their support, and the recent Justice Department's Anti-Trust filing) to the fight for and against Net Neutrality.
I spend a lot of time reading articles linked to by Free Press in newspapers, magazines, online journals, The Huffington Post, etc., because the issue of Net Neutrality is important to me as a writer and former web publisher. You can imagine, then, that I was more than a little perturbed when I read the following headline yesterday on the Techland blog for @Time by @MattPeckham: Net Neutrality Proponents Sued by Net Neutrality Proponents? Though Peckham eventually cuts to the chase, it's not until four paragraphs in that he addresses the issue; until then the suit is made to sound frivolous and nonsensical. Here's the lead-in that follows the headline:
The folks who just officiated over net neutrality Internet regulations, the Federal Communications Commission, are being sued by—yep, the folks who fought to make net neutrality happen. Net neutrality's advocates suing net neutrality's enforcers?
True story.
Again, Peckham eventually makes Free Press' case, along with the FCC's response, but to me the article's headline, that snarky lead-in, and the lack of context related to the issue frustrated me. What's ultimately at stake is what the creators of the Internet envisioned, not a two-tiered system that cellular providers have already begun to force on customers.
It's clear that corporate interests already have a disproportionate impact on legislation, but articles like Peckham's do nothing to dispel the idea that corporate interests now infect journalism. The media bias I fear comes from corporate America, and that's what I worry filtered through into this particular article. "He said, he said" doesn't provide readers with the information they need to understand what's going on, any more than allowing politicians and their spin-meisters from making lies without being called on their bullshit because we've so perverted the concept of equal time that lies and reality now share the stage.
Yesterday I tweeted my displeasure and early today Matt Peckham answered me in a tweet. And then he snarked me by posting about a #Superficial #Reader" and linking back to his article on the Techland Blog. Ouch!
September 24, 2011
Invicta Men's 1107 Pro Diver Chronograph Black Dial Black Polyurethane Watch
Invicta
Grade: C
When this watch became available on Amazon Vine, I ordered it for my brother-in-law to try because he is quite tall and the watch face, at 49 milimeters, is large. After wearing it for a month, he provided me with these pros and cons, first noting that the watch is a diver's watch and he does not dive...
Read this Amazon Vine review in its entirety at Amazon.
September 19, 2011
The Mashboard
It's 11:30, the DH is sleeping as he has an early morning, so it's just me listening to Rachael's radio show on KHDX 93.1 at Hendrix. I'm very proud of my very musical daughter and the unique angle she's found to entertain people. Her show is called The Mashboard, and her Monday night playlist features various mash-ups like this one—Norwegian Recycling's No Taylor, No Scar, which includes music from Missy Higgins, Men at Work, Jack Johnson, and Wyclef Jean.
I've enjoyed all of the mashups she's played tonight, even the one that features the altogether annoying Fireflies by Night Owl. If you get a chance next Monday night, you can listen on your computer like I'm doing tonight. I think you'll like it.
It's time to sign off now, and I'll do so as soon as Hulk Mash's mashup of Ke$ha, Taylor Swift, and Maroon 5 comes to a close.
Bad Logic
Yesterday morning as I flipped through the channels, I heard Senator Lindsey Graham expound the Republican talking points on why raising taxes to pay for infrastructure repairs won't fix the unemployment problem. See, it may work in the short run, but it won't work in the long run. Here's why he's wrong.
Right now we're in danger of a double dip recession because of high unemployment, which feeds low consumer confidence. Low consumer confidence means we aren't spending enough money to cause businesses to hire new employees.
Regardless of how "short term" the results might be in terms of hiring people to rebuild our quite literally crumbling infrastructure, all those newly working people would lower the unemployment rate. They would be paid real money, which they would then spend, pumping money into the economy. The result of lowering unemployment for a period of several years and the accompanying pumping of money into the economy would undoubtedly raise consumer confidence, which would pump more money into the economy, raising the demand for goods and services, thereby giving business more reason to expand their businesses.
And that, my friends, is the "long term."
September 15, 2011
New at H&H: Fresh Meat: Theresa Weir's Orchard
***
My criticism of romances filled with darkness often goes something like this: “The book’s unrelenting darkness went entirely over the top and into melodrama, piling one bad thing onto another. Real people’s lives are not the Perils of Pauline.”
After reading Theresa Weir’s new memoir, The Orchard, I may be forced to revise that criticism. Apparently one bad thing after another can befall a person. The question is...do I want to read it?
Please click here to read my new Fresh Meat in full. Feel free to comment on The Orchard, Theresa Weir, or memoirs in general at H&H once you've read it.
September 14, 2011
Michael Krondl
Non-Fiction
Grade: B-
Michael Krondl’s Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert, takes readers on an often fascinating journey of desserts in six “dessert superpower” regions: India, the Middle East, Italy, France, Austria, and the United States. The history of food...even of the icing on the cake as opposed to the cake itself...is as terrific a way to impart knowledge as is the history of fashion. Both are surprisingly good as they give us an accessible way to track changes over time in arenas as diverse as politics, economics, religion, transportation and other technological advances, gender issues, the culture as a whole, and how societies are organized over time.
Though copiously researched, Krondl doesn’t give each of the six “superpowers” equal time, which may satisfy historians more than the casual student of history or foodie. I learned a great many tidbits about India in particular, and I’m glad now to know that they love their sweets; that because there are so many gods/goddesses and avatars, there are lots and lots of sweet-filled holidays; that sweets are more associated with boys than girls; that the lack of Western-type ovens results in lots and lots of fried sweets and none that are baked; and that the circumcision of boys does not occur at birth but rather between the ages of seven and twelve. But I wish more word count had been devoted to the particular history I crave: European and “American.” I realize this says as much about my character deficiencies as it does the book’s, but the history I did learn about the intersection of dessert and culture, gender, economics, politics, and people in Europe and the U.S. was so fascinating I simply craved more.
For instance, I already knew the American preference for milk chocolate as opposed to the French preference for darker, less sweet chocolate, but I didn’t know how Milton Hershey’s deprived childhood played into it. Or that population density...or lack thereof...along with changes in technology, the move from feudal, rural, and aristocratic cultures to urban living and the eventual growth of the middle class tied into when we ate, who prepared our savories and sweets, and for whom they were prepared. Krondl creates linkages out of changes in social economic status, democracy, even the Baby Boom, and his thought-provoking connections deserve study.
It seems obvious that if the mode of dress for an adult male is the same as it is for a 12-year-old boy (jeans, t-shirt, baseball cap), that his palette will differ from an adult male who requires a valet to dress and groom himself. It seems equally obvious that when a culture is focused on maintaining a power structure or Keeping Up with the Rothchilds, different attitudes toward food will develop in comparison to cultures simply sustaining themselves on the frontier...or those with a focus on individuality, portability, and ease of creation. These things seem obvious but only after you begin to actually consider them.
What worked less for me were all the desserts that frankly sounded quite the same to me. Yes, the actual history of the Sacher and Linzer Tortes intrigued me; I was less fascinated with the myriad descriptions of this or that fried sweet. Sometimes a donut, after all, is just a donut. Why not, instead of only focusing on how sugar is refined and how pricing affected dessert, also delve into the varieties of caramel, who invented the creme brûlée, or indeed thought to brûlée sugar?
My only other criticism is that I felt the author gave short shrift to some of the more modern history of dessert, although his insight that today’s restaurant pastry chefs are more innovative than are those at bakeries and pâtisseries was spot on. Sweet Invention wasn’t a perfect recipe for the history of dessert, but it provides ample food for thought.
August 22, 2011
Republican Autism
Think about all those wacky Republicans who signed Grover Norquist's No New Taxes...Ever pledge, and the "magical thinking," as Fareed Zakaria calls it, they exhibit, in believing the deficit can be reduced entirely by cutting spending. If the U.S. is suffering from anorexia, it seems to me that these no-tax Republicans (ie, just about all Republicans, btw), are exhibiting Spectrum behavior. Full blown autism or simply Aspergers? That I can't say, but I sure wish I could shake a snow globe and make it all go away like a bad dream.
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