This is what he looks like while running from the camera to keep from getting his picture taken:

He’s a much better photographer than he used to be, too:

I haven’t not been posting on my blog because I hate you all but because I’ve been incredibly busy remodeling the NM house. My family room currently looks like this:

(That doorway is new, BTW. Before, there was a 30″ door linking the formal living/dining room and the family room. It was really odd. Now there’s a much wider open doorway. It makes both rooms seem much bigger!)

And the living/dining room isn’t that much better.

We’ve taken out the weird overlook in the master bedroom, so we gained 63 sqft of living space in the bedroom (where the bed is now), which we used to move the bed and then make a huge walk-in closet.

New floor where bed is:

New wall to new closet:

The front of the house ius VERY different, too. THe lower deck is new, replacing the one that was falling off the house. The entrance is new. And I had the contractor take out the second front door and replace it with a window, adding more light and removing weirdness.

Like the new entryway? That’s fresh after the new tile job! (That I did!) The closet is also new.

Last weekend, I drove to Texas to pick up my cabinets. I’m going to finish assembling them tonight. (Whew, what FUN!) And then I need to install them in the guesthouse bathroom, install the floor tile there and in the half bath, and get the plumber to come back again. *sighs* This is crazy, crazy stuff.

I promise a full before-and-after scrapbook when this is done!

There’s a blogger who reads POD books and evaluates them. Recently, she’s been hammering them pretty hard, including posting a number of opening lines that made her put down the book. Now, in order to be fair to POD (I think her point is that crap is everywhere…), whe has a new contest in which entrants are supposed to guess whether the work is vanity or traditional publisher.

Assuming that all the publishers are large and well-respected, it is possible for them to publish crap. It’s also possible for crap to sell very, very, very well. And it’s also possible for an otherwise decent book to have a few crappy lines. And some of these might not be crappy at all in context. Also, the fact that there are SOME crappy commerical books doesn’t mean jack about the average quality of vanity versus commercial fiction. There are depths of incoherence to which commercial fiction NEVER sinks. And there are many, many fewer good vanity books. If this wasn’t true, there would be no editors–major houses would choose books by lottery. They aren’t stupid. The fact remains that there is an enormous divide between the average commercially pubbed book and the average vanity book. Enormous. And a few crappy or out-of-context lines from commercial fiction won’t change that any more than 1 in 100,000 vanity-published books that turn out to be really, really great will change it.

Nevertheless, I will take my guesses.

(BTW, I didn’t think all the previous ones she listed from POD sources were crap. I think some of them were humor that she didn’t get. But that’s just me.)

(1) This is where I came in. Not the beginning, but the middle. I’ve spent my life feeling like I was born at eight years old and I’m about to die at nine, living my life as one long 352-day experience, with all of the abuse and anguish of the year as though it just happened moments ago. But the reflection in the mirror reassures me that I’m actually thirty-nine. I’ll say vanity. Not sure–it has the self-centered, overly self-conscious tone and substancelessness of much lit fic today…but I’ll say vanity.

(2) Francesca takes him, leads him, into the bedroom and opens herself like a rose. Michael stares at her flower and smiles, mounts her like an animal. His smile widens as her rose becomes his. His smile will fade in approximately two weeks when he begins to see the thorns. Flower AND animal? Vanity.

(3) He walks back to our bedroom, muttering and moaning that life blows, in a scary-nervous voice. The idea of broads shoving bucks in my trunks excites me. Now I have a boner, standing at the bathroom mirror in my white underwear. Look at this fucking thing. I wish I knew how to get rid of them. I need to hit the library. Time to get my mind off the boner and back to the hair. Commercial…but BROADS? I mean, who calls women broads? Could be vanity.

(4) He’s got twenty bucks and a true dilemma: buy groceries or buy porn. Porn last longer; he goes with the smut. Kenny has never been considered impractical. Could be either. I’m not sure why she’s going for “crude! everyone will think it’s vanity!”–crude stuff has been selling commercially for years. I’ll say commercial.

(5) So my friend, he buys milk and eggs and sugar and a carrot, all the ingredients for a carrot cake. And Vaseline. Like he’s going home to stick a carrot cake up his butt. Okay. This is actually funny. Could very well be commercial. I don’t know.

(6) Harry locked his mother in the closet. Harry. Please. Not again the TV. Okay, okay, Harry opened the door, then stop playin games with my head. He started walking across the room toward the television set. And don’t bug me. The bad spelling and punctuation wouldn’t make this vanity, but the passage is either missing something or it makes no freaking sense. I’ll guess vanity. But it could still be “street lit.”

(7) “And your point is what? I don’t even care. If you do have a point, keep it to yourself.” She pauses. “No, I do care, tell me.” She pauses again. “No, never mind, just get out.” He starts to leave. “Wait.” He looks back. “Never mind, just go.” He walks out the door and slams it behind him. “Wait!” she yells. Could be either.

(8) “And the fact that you’re not from the campus, that takes it over the top. Because there’s nothing that excites me like the idea of perceptive, intelligent women living in a university town yet having no connection with the school. Just living in the same town, right there, not needing to have anything to do with it. The idea of the intelligent woman in the university town. What is she? Why is she there? It’s a stimulating idea.” Erg. Could be either again.

(9) Acid-induced cloud, I’m all out there, man. I’m feeling the love, the glove, the shove. Let’s shove together. Shove off, man. We’re falling now. You see? Never gonna crash. Slash. Trash. Take the stash. Dig it. Smooth, baby. My guess? Drug scene from a commercial novel. More common in vanity books (whole confessional genre).

(10) Malcolm never made the same mistake twice; he either got it right the first time or he’d spend the entire weekend correcting some half-assed attempt at success, well into mistake eighteen or nineteen. Commercial. May not be my style, but…what’s wrong with it?

(11) His tongue, his tongue, his tongue, so wet and wild, like having a small animal in my mouth, a slithery reptile making its way, now, down my neck, down my body, down, down, down. Oh, ugh. Sounds just like a lit fic love scene. I hope it’s vanity.

(12) No one’s ever held my foot before, Ellie thought, blissfully. Her foot in his hand gave her an inexplicable feeling of safety and belonging that she had never before experienced. I think I love this man, she had thought as the two of them sat silently and her foot melted in his wonderful hand. Foot MELTING. Vanity, I hope.

(13) The bird’s singing became so insistent that I began asking Michael to repeat every word he said. I was a bit annoyed, a bit amused and more than a bit surprised by the bird’s behavior. When I felt I could no longer act nonchalantly about the situation I said to Michael, using an appropriate New Yorkese expression, “What is it with this bird, anyway?” To which Michael matter-of-factly replied, “Oh, that’s George” as if that was all the explanation required for my understanding of the creature’s behavior. “What do you mean, oh that’s George?” I said. “Are you telling me you know this wild bird and that you call him George?” Michael did not offer detailed verbal clarification. Detailed verbal explanation. Vanity.

(14) The rubber met the road. Actually, the rubber was on me, and I was going down a different road: the Hershey Highway. Traffic was light. I hit the gas. I was home in no time. I would hope this would be vanity. (Who the heck under 50 calls them RUBBERS now, anyhow?) But it could be either.

(15) The bell rings, and it’s an incredibly ugly-sounding bell, and I wonder why? Why don’t they have beautiful tones ringing us on to our next class, but I doubt that anyone gives a shit so I’d say that’s why. Copy editing too awful to be commercial. Vanity.

(16) Melanie was hosting another Mary Kay party when I got home, and the ladies were all spread around the family room, evenly spaced like digits on the face of a clock, with that fat-assed Laurie blocking my wide-screen, right at twelve o’clock. Pissed me off something fierce. All I wanted was a little time with my man, Frasier. That Niles Crane? That’s funny shit, man. What is this, Housewives With Potty Mouths? It just doesn’t quite match up. Let’s say vanity.

(17) “She took everything from you. Everything. Everything. All I wanted was a family. That’s all. All I wanted. A family. A family.” Saliva spewed from his mouth and mucus bubbled from his nostrils. Harder and harder he struck, ignoring the pain ripping through his head. “Why? Why? Why!” Vanity.

(18) “Don’t dick with me, cockface–or cock with me, dickface–or whatever the hell it’s supposed to be. You no good dickface.” Probably commercial. Mean to be humorous.

(19) He wished for the thousandth time in his life that he had a dog, a golden retriever, maybe, for travels like this and to keep him company at home. But he was frequently away, overseas much of the time, and it would not be fair to the animal. Still, he thought about it anyway. Babbling stream-of-consciousness. Could be anything.

(20) I feel all the longing of this earth tugging at my sleeves. All the hope that has vanished from every soul seems to pass through me on its way to another place, and I drift with it as it goes. I want to be here. I want to be there, too. All I want is a little omnipresence. Cheesy but saved from awfulness by the humor of the last line. Could be either.

(21) “Don’t cry for me. Don’t remember me. Don’t take anything with you that might bring an image of me to your mind. I want to be forgotten. I want to disintegrate. Move on and leave me behind. Just don’t take the Mercedes when you go. Other than that, forget me.” If humorous, commercial. If in earnest, vanity.

(22) The next night I brought her flowers. I was hoping she would hit me again, call me names, tell me how worthless I am. I rushed home from work every day, hoping. But she wouldn’t do it, not even when I asked. That’s when she really started cheating on me. She said whipping me made her feel bad about herself. Vanity. This is a “descent into S&M confessional novel”–a dime a dozen in the vanity world, not common commercially.

(23) Hers contained a desire beyond sweetness and attention, it fed a longing, beginning to flower green and yellow into a crocuslike lust, the soft petals opening into her awkward adolescence. I hope it’s vanity. I fear it is not.

(24) John, 18, hated his face. If his nose were smaller, his eyes a different brown, his bottom lip pouty . . . As a kid he’d been punched in the mouth and looked great for a couple of weeks. Written by a woman. I’ll guess vanity because of the “18″ inserted like a news story.

Check it out.

Really, really weird. The Smoke doll.

I don’t make a good liberal. I don’t make a good conservative. I’m not at all good at toeing ANY party line, as you can well imagine. *g*

I like my steaks (medium!) and am unapologetic about using leather and would wear my grandmother’s fur coat, too (though I wouldn’t want any furs manufactured in China). And I love the global marketplace (with a few caveats) and think it’s the SINGLE most likely factor to raise standards-of-living in the Far East and, when labor becomes to expensive there, is Africa’s best hope, as well as further raising the standard of living in consumer nations. I am also a privacy fanatic, mainly because it is now so phenomenally easy for any predator to get personal information about you or for someone to steal your identity.

But I am interested in conservation and was trying to find out more about the 2008 Toyota Prius (premilinary reports say it will get 94 miles to the gallon in the city). My DH and I are both drive-into-the-ground types. If we were making several million dollars a year, we still wouldn’t replace our cars until they were dead–WAY too much guilt for extravagance! We kept his ‘92 Ford Tempo until 2004, when the AC died and would have cost $600 to fix when the car was worth only $400, and that was a dinky car when it was brand new, a tiny compact that didn’t have automatic locks or even cup holders. But eventually, my ‘95 Mazda Protege will die, and though neither of us will be driving to work (I work from home, obviously, and DH will ride a bike except on really bad days since we’ll live less than 2 miles from his office down very minor roads), we’ll probably still want two cars. I think we’ll do a one-car experiment for a while first, but I doubt that it’ll work. *g*

So, anyway, I’m thinking that the minivan will be used mainly for hauling things (I use it all the time and love it! Reason #32 to get a minivan and not an SUV: you can put a 4×8′ sheet of plywood flat in the back of a minivan.) and long car trips and the new car will mostly be used for driving around in the Washington DC/VA/MD area for 90% of our driving, so I’m thinking that going super-gas-conservative is the way to go–first, for the environment, of course, but second, because Toyota’s trying to lower the price difference between hybrid and all-gas cars to $1,500-2,000, so that the choice would make economic as well as environmental sense. Which would be GREAT. The hybrids are made for higher-mid-range consumers, so they come with many of the extras that I’d normally pay for standard, and yes, you can get heated leather seats. Yay! I love the leather for cleaning and the heat for my muscles–it makes riding in a car much more pleasant, especially when I’m hurting.

Anyhow, I found treehugger.com while I was looking around, and I enjoyed reading it. Some of their declarations are more than a little silly (the failure of the EV1 is the result of a CONSPIRACY!!!! A CONSPIRACY, I tell you!), but a lot of it’s interesting and fun. Since my new house is decidedly modern, I like many of the design sections, too.

I was also reminded of the existance of Apartment Therapy. Personally, I wouldn’t give up my couple of acres for any apartment, but it’s a neat site, too.

This time Cheryl reviewed it–my third reviewer for AAR.

Interestingly, she loved the beginning and didn’t like the second half. I honestly think the second half is by FAR the strongest part of the book. So do most people who have read it and responded.

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Cheryl thought that Alcy’s running away was “boneheaded” and “reckless” and thought she should have confronted Dumitru about stealing her money. Okay. So there’s a guy who is knowingly and deliberately stealing a fortune from you, who has already made it clear that for the sake of his land, he will gladly lock you up for the remainder of your natural life if necessary…and so the best way to go about dealing with the situation is to tell him “the gig is up”? Alcy might have just tried to ignore it, but she didn’t have the personality for that–she would have blurted something out the next time she saw him. This wasn’t a Big Mis. She knew exactly what he was doing. What would talking have accomplished except getting him furious at her?

Alcy knows that she could face a life of incarceration if she tries to fight him. She knows the danger she faces in running away, and she knows how sheltered and unprepared she is, but she really would rather die than face the possibility of spending the rest of her life locked up in the keep. This isn’t harebrained or reckless. Sure, she’s heartbroken, but she is weighing the possibilities and chooses the one she sees as the least dangerous for HER. Just because someone disagrees with you and you know they disagree doesn’t mean that if you just talk about it, you’ll come to an agreement. The best–the absolute best–that Alcy might have expected from such a scenario is a big fight that ended in sex while they STILL disagreed and her pretending to cave just so that she could sneak off the next morning when he didn’t suspect it.

When Dumitru catches up, she is proven right–it takes BOTH their lives being put into all kinds of danger for him to change his mind. She isn’t being foolish. She’s stuck between two terrible choices and chooses the least terrible.

Damn Dumitru for not keeping his pistols dry and his eyes on the woods because he’s being distracted by his wife. Damn Alcy for stepping out on a spit of land for a drink rather than keeping her escape routes clear. Damn them both for not thinking clearly while they were coming down with an illness. But don’t say that Alcy should have just argued with Dumitru. She knew it wouldn’t work, and she was proven completely right when he caught up with her. (Don’t damn Alcy for not realizing there would always be an HEA–just because there IS an HEA at the end of a romance doesn’t mean that EVERY path would lead to it.)

The thing is, the H&H WEREN’T truly close before–they had an approximation of closeness, but they kept themselves apart from each other. They weren’t yet really in love. They were in a honeymoon kind of stage where they make everything peachy and pleasant and swallow any small disappointments and enjoy each other and smile, smile, smile because it really could be so much worse and they are practically giddy with relief that it wasn’t. Alcy wasn’t any more forthright with Dumitru than she’d been with anyone else–her honesty wasn’t soul-bearing but reflexive. And there’s a HUGE difference between the two!

I have no idea how this is a cliche, either, any more than an arranged marriage is a cliche. *sighs* It would be a cliche if Alcy tried to run but got treed by wolves or something of that sort–but though she’d exhausted and saddle-weary, she’s doing just fine on her own until Dumitru shows up and would have made either Orsova or a village farther upstream without a problem.

But I suppose people will read things into what books that simply aren’t there.

Okay, so I finally have my foreign-language newsletters working, and thanks to Rosario’s proofreading, I have a Spanish language site up.

Now all I need to do is update my blog sidebar…

Classic Quickie: I’m sure that hippies and anarchists will find this compelling and fascinating. I’m neither, so I think Thoreau is a twit. His great mantra is no compromise–ever, at any time. But societies are built upon compromises and cannot function without them, and a serial killer could just as easily use Thoreau’s own words to justify his actions–believing them just in his own mind–as Thoreau does his own. He’s also a paranoid fool, and he doesn’t realize that other people pay his taxes because they think him the village idiot to be watched over by the community. They aren’t too far from wrong, either.

Who Cares? America doesn’t have any philosophers except for political theorists until the 20th century. Therefore, we will in the gap with the crackpot ideas of the hippies of the 19th century–the Transcendentalists. If you’re high enough, you might think that Thoreau was deep. But you’d have to be really, really high. He also had a tendency to make epigrammic statements, which, oddly enough, are almost always a lot more coherent in isolation than in context and are often quoted.

I-hate-lit rating: 2. Bad writing. Horrific logic. The only thing going for it is the tree-hugger, back-to-nature theme, which some people will find appealing. (As someone who once considered homesteading, I wanted to like it more than I did…)

Classic Quickie: Thoreau was a leech who used his frequent dining-out to keep from getting terrible vitamin deficiencies, who lived off land belonging to a friend, who sent his clothing to the laundress, and who, in general, took advantage of the modern ways of life that made his one-man defiance of it possible. He was a failure in every profession he tried, so like the fox who couldn’t get the grapes, he decided that professions were dehumanizing. He has a number of beliefs that might be made into a coherent philosophy–a dislike of debt, a fondness for independence, a dislike of things that distract one from self-examination and study–but he’s simply unable to keep a coherent argument going for several sentences together, and he flagrantly contradicts himself from one page to the next. I stroll through Aristotle, general considered to be very dense stuff; at first, I wondered if the fact that an initial reading of some pages made no sense was due to a complexity of material or thought that I’d never encountered before. But no. He simply makes no sense at times. You can often see what he is attempting to argue; however, he often utterly fails to make any sort of point.

For example, his arguments about why we should live in simple houses include:

1) The poor are slaves to their debts. Simple houses would be affordable for the poorest.

2) The Indians sleep in wigwams. We are not morally superior, so therefore superior dwellings are wrong.

3) We should adorn our minds and not our houses–architecture is trickery and an outward display when there is inward corruption.

4) The Moslems use little furniture, and so we should, too.

5) Chinese are morally inferior and have decadent houses and lifestyles (uh…yeah…), and therefore we should shun decadence.

You might notice that #2 and #5 are almost directly contradictory: that one’s house should be elaborate only if one is morally superior and that since a morally inferior group is known for its elaborateness of houses and living that one should avoid it. But that’s Thoreau for you. If he had to make sense two pages together, his head would explode. He offers little to no argument to support most of his cases. Wild affirmative declarations replace evidence. For example, he never manages to say why a nice house and a thoughtful mind can’t coexist–he declares it and mutters a bit about people being preoccupied with material things, but he never forms and argument. I honestly think such a thing is beyond him.

He also only knows one way of writing: Stream-of-consciousness. Which leads not only to incoherence but babbling at length about things no one in the world cares about–like the depths of various ponds–and coming up with cockamamie pseudo-scientific reasons for things that he observes that always link, though some unlikely route, to some Great Philosophical Declaration which is never great and rarely lucid. He reminds me of nothing so much as the father from My Big Fat Greek Wedding: “The root of the word Miller come from a Greek word, millah, meaning apple, so there you go. And our name, Portokalos, is come from the word meaning orange. So today here, we have, apples and oranges. We all different now, but in the end, we’re all fruit.”

Yep. Thoreau-style philosophy at its finest.

E.B. White, who likes him, writes:

“Thoreau’s assault on the Concord society of the mid-19th c. has the quality of the modern Western: he rides into the subject at top speed, shooting in all directions. Many shots ricochet and nick him on the rebound, and throughout the melee there is a horrendous cloud of inconsistencies and contradictions, and when the shooting dies down and the air clears, one is impressed chiefly by the courage of the rider and by how splendid it was that somebody should have ridden in there and raised all that ruckus.”

I’m not nearly so generous. Though out the reading of this book, I envisioned a unkempt, wild-eyed man raving on a box in the middle of Central Park. It is scarcely believable that this kind of mess could be produced without the influence of any drugs.

If you still want to read it–it IS famous–I suggest reading the chapters Economy; Where I Lived, and What I Lived For; Reading; and Conclusion. No one ever references any of the rest.