Monthly Archives: March 2008

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Advice to VA Festival of the Book authors from a local gal

March 13, 2008 5:26 pm , 3 Comments ,

Seriously, writers. How psyched are you to be coming to Charlottesville, Virginia? Can you believe the Festival is almost here, practically on top of us, like the imminent eruption of a volcano? Can you believe that in just TWO WEEKS you will be consorting with local people and students in a sedate, literary atmosphere? Can you stand it? God, I’m excited.

I want all you writers to enjoy yourselves in Charlottesville so you will return some day soon with more deep thoughts and dollar bills. I want you to spend your Festival of the Book time not only talking about books (bleh, right?), but also absorbing some local flavor. In keeping with this sentiment, I invite you to a sleepover at my house lasting Wednesday through Saturday nights. If you haven’t already booked a hotel, please come over. I will serve a continental breakfast between 7 and 11 every morning. I don’t think the Omni does that. At least not on paper plates.

I also want to offer you dining advice. Whether you’re in the mood for Spanish, pan-Asian, diner, French, gastro-pub, or Mexican food, we have a restaurant for you. I will escort you to the finest restaurants in town in exchange for a free meal. If you want to survey the culinary territory in advance, cVillain has the best restaurant gossip. You can also check out the C-Ville restaurant listings, but they haven’t been editorialized. Please write to me before you try to eat out on your own.

Bookstores! We have a bunch, but the best one to get lost in is Daedalus on the Downtown Mall. New Dominion is right around the corner from Daedalus if you’re interested in buying books nobody else has handled or possibly sweat upon while running on a treadmill.

Coffee shops! Writers have an uncanny ability to sniff out coffee shops when they’re on assignment out of town. But I like C-Ville Coffee. Wireless access, cute barristas, and no hipsters* (because the manic kids climbing on the giant wooden turtle have run them off).

I need advice on what additional advice to offer. What more do you writers need besides food and books and places to laptop? We have a sex boutique, but I really want you guys to keep the weekend clean. We have some Thomas Jefferson odds and ends, but I’d prefer you to focus on me. Oh! I almost forgot booze. We have plenty of places to drink booze, but stay away from the UVA bars unless you are a 21-year-old literary prodigy who also likes Jagermeister. Come downtown with me. I will show you where the mature intellects hang out. In Eliot Spitzer’s pants! HAHA!

*Although – full disclosure – sometimes I wear my skinny jeans.

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It’s a Mimbo day

March 13, 2008 9:55 am , Leave a Comment ,

Nothing but blue skies and Mimbos. What is Mimbo, you ask? You can find out for $89.99. On the other hand, if the word “widgetized” means nothing to you, then Mimbo might remain a dream you will never realize.

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Giving birth in hot tubs (this post is for my lady readers)

March 13, 2008 8:40 am , 7 Comments ,

Giving birth in hot tubs = not cool. I Stumbled upon a birthing stories website yesterday and was horrified to find pictures of a lady in a bathing suit delivering a child in her patio hot tub. Her husband and daughters looked on while she pulled her one-piece aside and pushed out a baby. Later she wrapped herself in a bathrobe and went to take a shower.

Hot tubs are for drinking beer out of cans and making out, NOT for soaking in afterbirth. I’d link you to the website but I don’t want to offend the mother. Plus she’d know immediately that I am less of a woman than she is. Babies are cute and they make me laugh and cause my uterus to flutter, but the second I start thinking about birthing one of them they all start looking like slippery little ogres.

I also saw a scary video yesterday of a puppy who thrashes to death metal music. That video and the hot tub birthing pictures combined to ruin my night. I was looking forward to relaxing under the spa jets with my puppy in one arm and my newborn baby in the other, and suddenly all I could see was blood and teeth.

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Glutton for sugar, then punishment

March 12, 2008 2:21 pm , 2 Comments ,

“Ms. Murray,” says the dentist, “are you sure you don’t want to split these four fillings into two appointments?”

“Hell no,” I say. “Recline my chair. Shoot me up with Novacaine. I’ve cleared my morning. Let’s do this.”

Fifteen minutes and five long needles to the mandible later, I’m listening to the dentist’s iPod playlist through headphones and settling in for three hours of drilling and filling.

“You guys are doing awesome,” I say to the doctor and his Russian assistant. I close my eyes and feel the cool water of the technician’s hose mist my cheeks. The fresh water has mingled with my saliva and I am lightly showered with all the fluids in my mouth. I breath in the tooth decay being vaporized by the drill. I feel the corners of my mouth crack with the pressure of the suction hose. I tap my feet to the bad country music coming through the headphones.

“This is even better than getting my wisdom teeth taken out,” I think, “and that was pretty great.”

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I’m not interested in becoming a reputable movie reviewer

March 8, 2008 6:43 pm , 8 Comments ,

Therefore I can admit that I am psyched about seeing 10,000 BC tonight at the cinemaplex near Taco Bell. From the moment I glimpsed a preview for this film about prehistoric mammoth hunters, I knew I had to see it in the theater. I feel like all the decades of improvements in film technology, CGI, and digital post-production have been building up to tonight’s realistic depiction of a saber-toothed tiger eating somebody in a loincloth. I also spent many hours reading the Clan of the Cave Bear series when I was a kid, particularly the sex scenes. I just have a thing for prehistory and I am too lazy to be an archaeologist. I like movies and books to do the work of my imagination. Full review to come!

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Local lit talent neglected at this year’s book festival

March 8, 2008 1:28 am , 1 Comment ,

This year the Virginia Festival of the Book assembled, as usual, a spectacular forum of literary luminaries from all over the world. Unfortunately the festival recruiters inadvertently overlooked a handful of Charlottesville authors. Here are the local writers who I think deserve to be featured in the festival next year. Recruiters, take note.*

1. Daniel J. Meador – Meador may be best known for being a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia School of Law, but he is also the author of three novels: His Father’s House, Unforgotten, and Remberton. Additionally, he wrote the memoir At Cahaba, a fascinating account of Meador’s childhood in an Alabama ghost town plagued by floods. The book is especially interesting considering its degree of visual detail, constructed purely from memory. Meador has been legally blind for several decades.

2. David L. Holmes – Recent recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Award at the College of William & Mary, Professor Holmes is also the acclaimed author of the 2006 book of American religious history, Faiths of the Founding Fathers. Always a professor first and a writer second, Holmes has still managed to make a literary name for himself in the field of religious studies. He is currently working on a sequel to FotFF in which he explores the poor church attendance of Ronald Reagan, the Quaker origins of Richard Nixon, and the spiritual lives of the rest of the post-World War II presidents.

3. John Grisham – Much like J.D. Salinger, this local recluse rarely gives interviews, publicizes his books, or leaves his Charlottesville estate, hence we are forced to speculate on what Mr. Grisham, a writer of obscure legal thrillers, even looks like. Is he young? Old? Married? Does he have UVA basketball season tickets on the floor of John Paul Jones Arena? We will never find answers to these questions until the Festival of the Book lures Grisham from his misanthropic hidey-hole.

4. Jocelyn Johnson – Every time I suffer from another hysterical pregnancy, I think of Jocelyn’s terrific short story Pseudocyesis (PDF). And as a special bonus, her husband Billy Hunt is the official photographer for C.L.A.W. – the Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers.

5. Matthew Farrell – Farrell runs the Hypocrite Press, an independent local publishing company devoted to “the underground subculture of downtown Charlottesville.” Publishing the prose of playwright Joel Jones, the cult Robitussin saga Concerning Big Fun by Gus “The Gus” Mueller, a brand new book of C-Ville short stories, as well as Farrell’s own “literary-satirical” fiction, Hypocrite Press makes virtually no money, but it maintains its artistic integrity. “And isn’t that what’s important?,” says the girl who is holding out for a six-figure book contract.

* PS I have also cleared my schedule for the end of March, 2009.

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Mas Tapas is racially delicious

March 6, 2008 11:59 pm , 10 Comments ,

In honor of the Spanish bacon dinner I enjoyed earlier tonight, and to make up for yesterday’s poorly written guts chronicle, I will tell the true story of a Mas evening two summers ago, witnessed pre-blog.

In summer, we sit on the patio at Mas, the trendy Spanish tapas restaurant two neighborhoods down. Everyone who first hears of Mas Tapas says, “Topless? It’s a topless bar?” It was only funny when I said it.

The restaurant was built on a run-down corner in the up-and-coming section of Charlottesville. Belmont was where the poor folks used to live before their neighborhood was gentrified. It was almost like rich folks started moving in so they could use the big city word “gentrified” without having to live in Brooklyn. Charlottesville struggles with a creative exodus to the five burroughs, but Belmont remains our haven of neighborhood stroller chic – an integrated six block radius within walking distance of downtown. Belmont is where houses climbed in worth by an average of $200,000 in two years, and where you still don’t want to get caught alone, sans pepper spray, in the middle of the night on certain streets. But Belmont is also where natives won’t bother you for hosting a keg party in the front yard of your renovated Victorian mansion.

So this Spanish tapas restaurant landed in the middle of Belmont and it was immediately hard to get a table on most weeknights. We arrived after 10 pm in the waning summer heat. The university was out on break, therefore we didn’t see the rich kids from the dormitories who had been turned onto Mas by a review in their school paper. When we arrived at the restaurant to meet our friends, recently engaged, we found out that we were celebrating the fiance’s birthday. They had already been sitting on the Mas patio for two hours, drinking sangria and eating bacon-wrapped dates.

Read More →

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Fascinating piece of local news from the C-Ville Weekly

March 5, 2008 11:22 pm , 2 Comments ,

I am disturbed, bewildered, and perhaps a little inspired by a news item featured in this week’s C-Ville Weekly newspaper. Here’s what happened.

Best friends Jerald and Joseph were partying at Rivals Sports Bar & Grill one warm, average night last March. At Rivals they met their new buddies Sunshine, Big Mama, Candy, and “the Mexican.” The gang then caravaned downtown to visit the amply-stocked bars of the Atomic Burrito (RIP) and Miller’s. But Joe and Candy stayed in the car, presumably to hook up. When Candy passed out, Joe walked to the bar to meet Jerald, Sunshine, and the rest of his crew. But by then the crew had a new member – Joseph Ray.

As the night wore on, Joseph Ray and Joseph realized they didn’t like each other. On the crew’s walk back to the parking lot, this tension reached a violent crescendo. Despite Jerald’s best attempts to hustle his friend into a vehicle and prevent him from engaging in a drunken street brawl, Joseph Ray still managed to pull Joseph from his truck. Then “the Mexican” and Joseph Ray started “whooping” Joseph, who promptly curled up in a fetal position. Jerald saw that Joseph was being double-teamed so he ran around the truck and heroically defended his friend.

“If you know someone was a friend of yours,” Jerald said later, “you just ain’t going to let them get whooped up on without giving them some help.”

After Jerald broke up the fight by throwing Joseph Ray onto a parked car and elbowing him in the eyeball, the two best friends jumped back into the truck to make their getaway. That’s when Jerald realized that he had “a ball of guts” dangling from his body. Joseph Ray had apparently stabbed Jerald, causing his guts to dangle. Now the case is going to court.

Someone please alert John Grisham about the trial of the century.

In court, [Jerald] Gibson showed his scar. “I got stabbed right there and they had to go in and pull all my internals out and fix my insides.”

Jerald Gibson, I salute you and the lengths you go for your friends. I wish your guts a speedy recovery.

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A book business insider discusses chick lit

March 5, 2008 11:54 am , Leave a Comment ,

I just found this Radar interview between Emily Gould and Sloane Crosley. Crosley is a New York-based book publicist whose first collection of essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, debuts next month. Sloane wins me over with her chick lit remarks reproduced below. Even though my first novel has only been published in my dreams, I still prepare myself mentally for the pink cover marketing blitz that will inevitably be attached to it (in my dreams). It’s hard to be a woman writing women these days without being branded a chick lit author, but Sloane has a healthy perspective on this lazy marketing strategy.

Radar: [Your story] made me think of your book as a sort of useful counterpoint to chick lit—like, “this is how it really is to be a single twentysomething girl in Manhattan; it’s not all madcap hijinx and Cosmos and love triangles” (though sometimes it is those things; rarely Cosmos). But you also must have been aware that you were treading into some heavily trafficked territory when writing about being a bad bridesmaid, etc. Are you wary at all of being lumped in with books on the pink shelf?

Sloane Crosley: It’s such a massive lump at this point. I might have been more worried five or 10 years ago when the concept was first being identified, coined, and marketed. But now it seems like if you just pick up a pen and have breasts (not that anyone I know is actually picking up pens with their breasts, in case that’s confusing), then people are predisposed to think what you produce as chick lit. And if it’s in the first person? Forget it. Since the stereotype has grown so widespread it’s almost pointless to be fearful of it. It’s out there, it sells a lot of perfectly good books to the people that want them, and there’s no getting around it. I know mine’s not the same, so hopefully it’ll be okay. For one thing, it’s the details of what an individual life is really like that can save a book from the Cosmo trap, especially in the essay format. Plus, it’s not like I have a giant martini glass on my cover with, you know, a miniature sparkling stiletto in lieu of an olive.

It’s funny, at Vintage we reissued Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? with a new cover, a decade after it was first published, and some tiny paper reviewed it as if it had just come out. It was fascinating because they condemned it as trafficking the same territory as the “pink shelf” books. And I thought, this is Lorrie Moore, damn it. How far have we let this thing get that there are to be no more plotlines about female friendships or the opposite sex or coming of age or self-reflection at all? I think the only way to avoid the label of which you speak would be to write a novel in which a woman sits in a room painted black, speaks to no one for 400 pages, and keeps a gun in one hand and a scotch-stained copy of The Executioner’s Song in the other. Even then, she’d probably have to use a pseudonym.

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Everything an online social network should be

March 5, 2008 11:07 am , Leave a Comment ,

Congratulations to the brains behind the presumably fake Frrvrr.com.

Frrvrr uses cutting-edge technology to identify topics you might be interested in based on your browsing history, public records, health records, email activity, legal filings, and web profiles. Frrvrr then directs you to those topics and connects you with similar-minded people.

It’s enough to strike fear into the heart of every web surfer.

When you sign up, Frrvrr’s AvaTroll Accelerator™ will download itself onto your desktop and begin cataloguing your web history, or “webtory,” from the past eight months. Once it gathers all of your information, it creates a personalized avatar of you based on the snapshot of you gleaned from web usage and sites visited.

No one wants to look into that mirror. Frrvrr is the absurd conclusion to the booming personalization business. Technology will know you better than you know yourself. You’re not surprising anyone with your love for awfulplasticsurgery.com. That love was mapped out years ago when your web surfing algorithm incorporated your encrypted medical records. And incidentally, we think you’re gay.

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