Many years ago, maybe five, a young teacher from New Jersey wrote me about my book, Every Secret Thing. We had some mutual friends, we became friends, I watched as he went on to publish his own PI fiction (the excellent Jackson Donne series). I dropped in on his blog, forgave his love of the New York Yankees. (Yankee love, is, in fact, much easier to forgive than Met love.) Over time, I noticed that the young writer, Dave White, had a pronounced fondness for a television show called HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER. “Oh you crazy kid,” I thought.
Flash forward to February ’09. I am on an American Airlines flight that is supposed to be leaving Guatemala City, but there is a light in the cockpit that won’t go off. During the two-hour flight delay, which resulted in a cancellation, they show us several CBS comedies, including an episode of HIMYM. I am charmed in spite of myself. It is a sitcom, a very sitcomy-sitcom, with catch phrases and a laugh track, but it is also told in a wonderfully nonlinear fashion, in which various characters recount the same story according to their own memories and/or priorities, which are never the same.
Flash forward to today. I am in the San Francisco airport, downloading another episode of Season 2. Season 1 and half of Season 2 have helped to make my flights in and out of Sydney pretty painless. (As have my books and my Kindle and the inflight film “Quantum of Solace,” which put me to sleep twice. This is a perverse compliment, as I have learned that only action films I genuinely like can put me to sleep on a long flight. I slept through three showings of The Bourne Ultimatum on a flight from Johannesburg to Washington D.C.)
I have to think that the producers of HIMYM — that’s what the kids call it — would pay me to go away; I am so not their demographic. At any rate, if anyone’s online on Memorial Day (and if so, why?), stories of unlikely obsessions, guilty pleasures, television DVDs* that you can’t stop watching, etc., after the jump.
*Any mention of The Wire is expressly prohibited. I’ve just come from a writers festival where that topic was very much in the air. “Every night, I ask my wife if I can put it in again,” said a young writer, referring to his DVDs**. One writer’s spouse, upon meeting me, proclaimed I was “famous” for being married to the person to whom I am married. I’m pretty sure I’m not famous, but if I’m famous for that — dang, kill me now. The only Baltimore girl to achieve fame via matrimony that I can think of is Wallis Warfield Simpson.
**He was a lovely, charming and particularly interesting young writer, who, at a low point in his writing career, went on a big Australian quiz show and became one of only a handful to walk away with the “lot” — cash and prizes totaling more than $650,000 AU dollars.
I worked for eleven years (1988-99) as a lobbyist and spokeswoman for the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, the state service organization for bank regulators. During that time, I was obsessed — OBSESSED — with the Animaniacs, and later with Pinky and the Brain. Even now, I’ll watch it whenever it’s on.
“What are we gonna do tonight, Brain?”
“Same thing we do every night, Pinky — TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!”
On my worst day, it still cracks me up.
I wish my obsession was as benign as the Animaniacs. For me, it’s any of the HGTV house-buying shows. I’m living vicariously, it seems.
Oh, one of my good friends was indoctrinating me into the HGTV channel not that long ago. It was the equivalent of someone saying, “Hey, that heroin (Bravo) is good, but have you considered crack cocaine (HGTV)?”
I may be perverse…and, growing up with four brothers,
always a feminist, but it seems to be a certain TV writer/producer/former journalist is FAMOUS because he
is married to you. I mean, I knew your “work” before I was aware of his. And since everyone believes in the
deepest recesses of one’s soul, that as far as opinion
matters, “It is always about me.”
Doris Ann, back from Omaha where this year there was no side trip to South Dakota.
Ah, Luisa, if only it ever worked that way.
This was my first experience in which my matrimonial status was part of everything I did. At one session (with a delightful writer, Gary Bryson, who has written an intriguing first novel called TURTLE), I was asked during the Q&A what my SO and I discuss over dinner.
“Laundry.”
Stranger still, because my SO had testified before the U.S. Senate about the state of American newspapers, I was interviewed for a documentary on this same subject. Granted, my old newspaper is, I’m sad to say, one of the more hard-hit, and I was actually working in newsrooms when they started publishing online (ahem), but it was still odd, being filmed reading The Washington Post on my Kindle.
Speaking of which, I’m having an ethical dilemma. In airport bookstores, I sometimes see books that I want, but not enough to pay full price for, so I then buy them on my Kindle. But that seems wrong to me, as the bookstore has shouldered the cost of having the book in stock. So I’m instituting a new one-for-one policy: If I’m inspired to buy a book while in a bookstore, I must buy one book from the store. Today I purchased Jane Hamilton’s LAURA RIDER’S MASTERPIECE, and even hand-sold a copy of OLIVE KITTERIDGE. (I saw a woman consider this and Anne Enright’s THE GATHERING, and told her she couldn’t go wrong with either. “But what if you had to read only one?” I picked OK, but only because the Enright book is more depressing, and it’s hard to know what strangers want.
Yeah, it makes you loath matrimonial status, well, _status_ all together, if only for this…
I guess TV, show biz, has a different audience, wider of course, but not as enduring (could use the excuse of the second language here, but I actualy can’t think of the right word).
Wouldn’t know what to say about the ethics of it, but I can’t think of myself reading a plastic… thing, instead of a book. Sorry for being so Mediaeval. On the other hand, a lot of books cost a lot of money and take up a lot of room!
Don’t ask me about copyright, royalties and name quoted, cited or even mentioned
Remind me never to go book shopping with you, you would hand-sell me at least four meters of good stuff, ehm, 13 ft.
I was laid off for 18 months. Since I’m naturally a night person, that gave me the opportunity to stay up late and indulge my BBC addiction. I HATE soap operas. Having said that, one Sunday night I watched Eastenders. I had tried to watch every so often over the years but couldn’t stand the fact it was soap opera. Long story short, I got hooked. So badly in fact that I found you can go on the BBC site and get synopsis ( I don’t know the plural spelling) of each episode. Since we get OLD reruns on my PBS station, I am still about 6 years behind, but I do look ahead. When I was sick last year I spent a whole day reading ahead for several years. The great thing is, that on Sunday nights Eastenders is followed by “Are you being served?” one of my all time favorite, get you in good mood, silly shows.
Watching Mistresses on BBC America. They just showed the first two seasons and I’m in withdrawal not knowing when season 3 will be starting. I was told by a British friend that I shouldn’t watching it, I believe her words were “Zelda, you’re so intelligent, why do you watch that show?” I told her that I watch it because it’s fun! I’m also hooked on Antiques Roadshow, and getting away from tv, Chipotle burritos and Rice Krispy treats
In the last year, I’ve given up watching TV in favor of reading, writing, and online classes. A lot of shows that I would never miss (Hi, Top Chef!) have had and entire season and I haven’t seen one episode. That said, I’ve just spent a lovely sleepy afternoon drifting in and out of consciousness watching the marathon of Deadliest Catch. Ice Road Truckers is another guilty pleasure. I don’t know why I like those shows so much…maybe it’s because they are so far removed from my own life, and I’m happy I don’t have to do that for a living?
By the way, I didn’t know you two were married for a good while. It was a pleasant surprise to find out, because I think y’all are both cool.
My current TV obsession is The Ace of Cakes. I think that I must have Baltimore issues.
I’m embarassed to admit that I have never seen one of the shows mentioned in the post or in any of the comments other than the one of which mention is expressly prohibited. Yes, definite Baltimore issues.
(As an aside, I was just in Charm City for the first time in years last weekend and had what I thought was an INCREDIBLE crabcake from a place on Harford Rd. called Koco’s. Now I have to figure out if it really was that awesome or if 5 years of withdrawal had an effect on my judgment!)
I am online on Memorial Day because it is a cold and rare gray and wet day in Colorado and I am putting off going to the gym. Just another 1/2 hour of procrastinating and it will be too late to get to the gym and get back in time to meet friends for dinner as scheduled!
I like me some Pink Lady And Jeff reruns.
All through college I was a TV addict. This was the height of the sitcom craze and NYPD Blue and other great shows. I would watch TV almost continually from 5pm to 11pm. It was bad. Then I moved away and lived without cable for a year, which is also about the time TV started sucking for a while so I got out of the habit. Then one night I was bored out of my skull and for some reason the only channel I could get was WB and they were having a Gilmore Girls marathon.
OMG I was hooked. It renewed my desire for television. And right after that I found TV on DVD at the library for free. I was pissed and angry and jobless and had just had my heart crushed by a girl and Gilmore Girls was my savior along with Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and Homicide. On the surface these all seem like shows I would normally pick but it was more random than that. Out of all of the thousands of offerings at the library, these were the only shows I was able to get in the order I needed them when I needed them.
Now it’s Big Bang Theory and to a lesser extent How I Met Your Mother.
Well – along with Tara I gotta say the Food Channel was pulling me in for a year or two there…I’m pretty much past it now, but Rachel Ray just thoroughly pulled me in, right up until her show became more ‘produced’. In contrast, I never could watch much of Ms What’s-her-name’s show…the Italian daughter of the guy who made King Kong a decade or so ago…because she does the soft-focus, multiple camera angle, unbuttoned blouse thing.
I’m no kind of cook, but Rachel got me trying a thing or two in the kitchen, so I cannot offer any higher praise!
Another guilty obsession that lasted for a few months was a website that shows mostly naked women. The focus was ordinary people (more or less!) who send in their images – and what one sees is mostly ridiculous or unintentionally funny. None of it was beyond soft-core; the website’s business plan is apparently to pull one onto the free (soft core) site, then to entice one onto their pay-site… featuring these same women, only in greater detail!
The hook was, each day they’d have a fresh crop of 6 or 8 people, and 4 or 5 images of each. Gosh, you don’t want to miss out, right? But of course, after a few weeks of furtively looking in on the place (and then erasing the computer’s cache), the inescapable truth that there’s nothing new under the sun (or the moon!) re-asserted itself
by the way – I get the HIMYM acronym (it was defined, afterall!), but I confess the HIBOW prefix ‘lost me at the bakery’*
and two other obsessions I have include Jon & Kate Plus Eight (short version: I love Kate!), and Nancy Nall’s visit-every-day website.
*when I was a kiddo, my mom ALWAYS watched Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and they had a bit where they played secret agents in trench coats, and Dan Rowan would go on and on in great detail about what ‘the plan’ was, and at the end, Dan would ask Dick Martin if he understood, whereupon Dick would say “You lost me at the bakery” – and Dan would say “But there was no bakery!” – and it made me laugh every single time!
“The only Baltimore girl to achieve fame via matrimony that I can think of is Wallis Warfield Simpson.”
Betsy Patterson?
I second the motion for Freakazoid! We’ve been watching that whole era of shows with the boys recently, and Freakazoid is the only one that engages all of us. My wife and I were amazed at how many references or running jokes we’ve been doing all these years that came from there; some we’d known were from it, but others had slipped into our daily conversation without attribution…
Guilty pleasures? I don’t really feel guilt, but I suppose, compared to some of the, ahem, Baltimore-related complete series on my DVD shelf, I should feel at least a little silly in noting that the complete “Man From UNCLE” and “I Spy” are on the same shelf as well.
Meanwhile, I’ve had a reverse-obsession. I’ve had the Rockford Files on DVD for a while and thought that would make the perfect dressing room series. (I watch DVDs as an incentive to do things like apply moisturizer, brush my hair, etc. I’m not very good at being a girl, much less an aging one.) But while I think Rockford works great in reruns, consumed on a one-a-day basis, it’s not as good back-to-back.
A show like HIMYM presumes a certain level of obsession; it’s filled with in jokes for regular watchers. I think this might go hand-in-glove with the Internet, but I haven’t thought that through yet. Older shows, such as Rockford, were written for a different era/audience. Granted, people had to follow nighttime soaps obsessively, but other dramatic shows were written as a series of one-offs. Sure, some characters resurfaced on Rockford time and again, but their old storylines weren’t important IIRC.
Meanwhile, one show that I re-watch once a year: The Comeback with Lisa Kudrow. The first episode is very off-putting, but once you start to get what Kudrow (and the creator) are doing, it gets better and better, and builds to a rewarding finale.
as someone who has never had cable, and whose only dvds have been given to her for promotional purposes , i felt somewhat less than equipped for this thread.
i only became aware of That Show a few months ago (yes, i live on neptune), and frankly, started to get the dvds from the library due to the LL connection (it had to be *that* good, right? because She would not suffer someone who produced crap, let alone *marry* someone who produced crap). then I got addicted to the most highly pilfered item in the history of the DCPLS (literally) and had to join netflix so i could get past S1,D2. i was recently in a program called Operation Homecoming, [primarily]for veterans and sponsored by the NEA and Boeing, and someone mentioned Generation Kill. i had no idea of the DS connection and as i watched the first episode, thought, ‘man, these people have ripped off the whole [That Show] feel.’ hilarity ensued when i watched the credits…and then the whole colesberry dedication came together–i don’t remember what book of LL’s that was. And then when i saw S2 of That Show, and met ziggy, another piece fit…as baudelaire would say, i had ‘correspondances’…but all of this is relatively recent, and due to a case of mistaken identity, ultimately–but my true guilty pleasure is the watching of football games, a major time suck, and has been for years. i am not much of a tv watcher, but can really burrow into the sofa from august to nearly feb. also must watch the draft, combines, and all else associated, and read about trades in off-season. why? i grew up watching it, and i love it, and football has been one of the few constants in my life. my brother won’t even argue anything i have to say about a damn thing that is football related, which in my family is saying something. watch college ball too, but not as closely–primarily only follow my league, which is PAC10, and does not receive as much airtime in the east. one of the only things my family will agree on is the Trojans, uber alles. i also think that part of the reason i watch it is so that i will have something safe to talk to my parents about, since we are incapable of reasonably discussing almost anything else. very hard to come from an entire family of know it alls.
//karen
brian,
i hope you are doing that on a personal computer…i can’t tell you the number of folks escorted from the building for looking at similar websites at the office. and FWIW, clearing the cache ain’t enough, brother. you’d have to sledgehammer your hard drive to reasonably keep a forensic computer specialist from sniffing that, or nearly any other activity, out.
//karen
karen -
Re personal computer rather than work computer – to again refer to Rowan & Martin:
You bet your sweet bippy!
I would peak in (at home!), in the evening after the young folks had gone off to bed, usually after a game of chess (Windows chess is ruthless; if I set the difficulty higher than 4 – on a scale of 1-10 the thing just hunts me down and kills me without any ceremony), and then clear the cache because we have a 13 year old son who finds plenty enough to gawk at without my help!
Anyway – thanks for the sound advice.
i have just checked, and am currently #26 in the library waitlist queue for Olive K, so i may just get it this year. not a problem, since there is no shortage of as yet unread books around here, including A&I by same author, but #26 is an improvement…
brian, i don’t know why i find the combo burrito of chess and that website so funny, but i do. reminds me of some friends who worked in a research lab, and while waiting for some complex genetic tests to run, would regularly check out jailbabes.com…
//karen
And you know, come to think of it, I’ve shifted more to Hearts and Freecell (I have a 95% winning percentage at Freecell, but Hearts hovers around 55%) and away from chess…
hmmmmmm; I suppose after the opposing Queen (and her blasted knights!) got finished kicking me around, the idea of looking at some unclad person with even MORE reason to be embarrassed was appealing
I admit, I love the conversations within conversations here. One day, perhaps we’ll have a TMP gathering.
Laura, you know I love you and think highly of your SO. However, every time I hear David being introduced by an interviewer as “the brilliant David Simon”, I want to tease you about it and do wonder if you give him a hard time. The first time I heard it I thought “how nice.” The next time I thought “how unoriginal.”
How I Became Obsessed With How I Met Your Mother. (Upon reflection, HIMHIMYM would have been funnier.)
Diane, I think Betsy Patterson was well known in Baltimore before marrying Jerome Bonaparte and is virtually unknown outside Baltimore today. More trivia question than fame, perhaps? Mrs. Simpson, on the other hand, changed history.
June, I’ve gone right up to the borderline (and perhaps even crossed it), so I hope you’ll permit me to draw a veil over the household. My SO has a very high profile these days and one could argue that any profile of me must include information about him. (I do, however, wish I could find a way to correct the frequently made error that he created “Homicide,” an assertion that short-changes the brilliant Tom Fontana.) But it does seem to me that women’s personal lives are almost always delineated in cases where men’s lives would not be. And there’s definitely a subtext when reporters ask women: Are you married? Do you have children?
Quick, folks: What did Michelle Obama actually do while her husband pursued his political ambitions? And “lawyer” is not precise enough.
Since you used the word “obsession” and then prohibited us from mentioning a certain series, you’ve tied my hands. I’ve spent hours online about that show, bought the book, printed out interviews, and watched friends eyes glaze over when I’d start in about the wonders of the show. My obsession led me to you, and now I’ve read almost everything you’ve written (just beamed LS in yesterday). So that’s my base point.
To a MUCH lesser degree, I went in a streak with SATC when it came out in a box set. No chat rooms, though I did get the companion book.
I got Firefly for my birthday and watched the set in two days. I love and still miss Veronica Mars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Gilmore Girls.
Current shows, my current huge obsession is 30 Rock. I also adore Weeds (coming back soon!) and Big Love.
“And there’s definitely a subtext when reporters ask women: Are you married? Do you have children?”
Oh so true. Today have have news that a woman (to become only the third female and the first Hispanic) to be nominated for the Supreme Court and what will the press ask about her? Her family status, her hair style, her fashion sense. It’s so absurd!!!
“Quick, folks: What did Michelle Obama actually do while her husband pursued his political ambitions? And “lawyer” is not precise enough.”
I think Michelle’s legal work somehow touched on the hospital, yes? (how’s THAT for imprecision?!)
And, I got to shake Michelle’s hand, during the primary campaign – and put to the test the LL question (back in the day) of “what would you say to a famous person when you get the chance?” – and probably hit the middle of the bell curve…
Laura, these digressions have been fun to read. I’ve been trying to recall if you’ve had another entry that got so many responses.
Linda,
Sorry about the censorship! <g> And it’s interesting to me that’s how you discovered my work because, in my experience, people who follow that path are more likely to be disappointed. I think some have expected something closer to a novelization of the series, which my work is not, for better or worse.
Well, nuts to them. I’m LOVING LS! You made me spit out a mouthful of cereal and almost choke to death, laughing at this great line: “My father believed in unconditional love, but only under certain conditions.” That one snuck up on me.
I guess you’d qualify as an obsession, since we’re all here. How’s THAT feel?
LS WAS good stuff! I have been avoiding starting What the Dead Know, because I know that I’ll like it, and it will pass all too quickly. Meacham’s Andy Jackson biography came first, and then just as I was contemplating opening up WTDK (signed by LL in Carmel), I veered into Cannadine’s Andy Mellon book, which I’m now hip deep into….so I’m learning what THOSE dead knew, anyway…
Yes to Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, but especially Freakazoid!, which lasted two seasons and at its best, was the best at anarchic cartoon brilliance.
Guiltiest pleasure: TRUE LIES. I can’t really explain why I love this movie so because there is so much that is wrong with it (Jamie Lee Curtis licking the stripper pole, “men, can’t live with ‘em/can’t kill ‘em”, Arab terrorism stereotypes, Ah-nuld) and yet…I love it so. But then James Cameron is never less than interesting, even when he is bad.
But we’re free to mention another Baltimore based tv show that was on network for several years and had a character spin off to Law and Order – SVU?
Absolutely — as long as you get the creator right. (Tom Fontana, with Barry Levinson.)
<i>”…this (is) a Gosselein-free zone”</i>
I suspect I’m glad I have <u>no</u> idea to whom this refers.
There was my GILMORE GIRLS addiction. I put so much material about the show into my second book (a fairly complete summary of nearly two whole seasons… 4 and 5 maybe?) that my editor had to give me a stern talking-to. I believe only a paragraph remains, a bitterly ironic reminder of my original towering opus much like the legs of stone in the desert in “Ozymandias.”
whew. we can still discuss the brady bunch and the partridge family. no idea the numbers in the jackson or osmond families.
now i am going to have to listen to S3, D2 of That Show, wherein one DS says [in the commentary] something about Homicide, and corrects himself–he said (i thought), ‘…when i wrote HOMICIDE–i mean, when i published HOMICIDE…’ but i could be wrong. it was 0400 hrs. and i wasn’t taking notes. it wouldn’t have caught my ear at all if it weren’t for TMP.
lol–TMP reunion party, brought to you by the nice folks at Aracept…
//karen
brian-
have to confess, i never heard of that couple. and i have the sneaking suspicion that is not an altogether bad thing. but—i guess you have to decide how much you want them to suffer. i am very busy killing someone right this minute–in a fictional way, of course–and i have no doubt they would have preferred a round in the head than what they are getting. can women technically be cuckolded? i’ll have to fact check–but anyway, ’tis the cheated-and-put-upon wife doing the deed. tidy, but there will be suffering involved, gay-ron-teed.
//karen
<i>I declare this a Gosselein-free zone</i>
Works for me.
Except to say: Brian, I was spinning it into a murder plot, too.
READ THE DORTMUNDER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
**desperately wants to get his hands on Jack’s original manuscript**
Interestingly, June, it’s not even the top entry of the month. But your question piqued my curiosity and I just reviewed the stats: Television did, in fact, drive one of the most commented-on entries (That 70s Show, back in ’06), but the two biggest comment-magnets were about grudges — a rant about a stupid comment in a profile of Stephen Hunter, and my confession that I still have problems with the Indianapolis Colts.
TMP types like grudges, apparently. That’s what makes them my kind of people.
ETA: The one-word resolution challenge is coming on strong as this blog’s most popular feature, although I suspect that’s because of the nice shout-out from Lisa Belkin this year.
<i>I was asked during the Q&A what my SO and I discuss over dinner.
“Laundry.” </i>
I laughed hard. I mean, of course.
Put me down as another Animaniacs fan, BTW.
“Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?”
But stay away from Real Estate porn aka HGTV. It is truly addictive, especially House Hunters International. Although I have to say HHI was a lot more interesting when it was less about rich white people looking for mansions in Costa Rica and more about cool young folks looking for flats in Copenhagen or Budapest.
And don’t even bring up Jon & Kate in our house unless you want to reignite a long smoldering argument between the male and female members of the household. (I can’t stand Kate).
Oh, JD – I LOVE Kate! She’s marvelous – and funny.
Jon, he’s a big ….(inhale)
never mind!
I declare this a Gosselein-free zone. So, to recap, there are two forbidden topics:
1) Any television show about people with more than seven children.
2) Any HBO show based in Baltimore.
Hate to get strict, but that G-couple is taking over the world. They’ve got People, Us, OK. They cannot have my blog.
well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander; anyway – up ’til last night I was ignoring all the tabloids, and really – a little marital discord might be counted on to goose the gosling..err, Gosselin ratings…
still, one wonders What Would Laura Do? If this was an LL plot –
the Faustian bargain of a protracted big-money television deal where unblinking cameras capture who-knows-what, without end, and then some manufactured (inevitably untrue and inescapable) narrative goes forth – capturing the entire family in amber –
who would get murdered?
Jon?
Kate?
The Other Woman?
(my bet on The Killer is – the Executive Producer, and/or The Envious Sister In-Law)
Donald Westlake tackled reality television in his last Dortmunder novel and I honestly think no one can do it better. GET REAL, IIRC, is the title.
thou hast tantalised thy followers with a booke as yet writ small…
i wonder if the dortmunder imperative takes the record for number of exclamation points?
btw, the leonard interview was interesting, particularly his dicussion of characters and their development–and for his uninhibited bad attitude about writers who can’t write…
//k
There is a used copy of Westlake’s “Get Real” available on Amazon for the bargain price of one thousand bucks! So both folks in the biz (like our LL) and rich folk can read it now. That’s okay. I have plenty to keep me occupied until the official publication date.
linda,et al.,
according to the Shorter OED, a cuckold is ‘a man whose wife is adulterous.’ it did not offer any suggestions for its opposite condition.
however–further down the page, is “cuckquean”–and as a noun, it is “a woman whose husband is adulterous.”
so–it is not entirely surprising that the word we all know is the one that refers to a man with a wicked wife, and the one most of us have never seen in print refers to a woman with a philandering male–
i’m sure that if one corrupted the word ‘cuckold’ to fit, folks would understand what was meant, even though it would be incorrect–but if ‘cuckquean’ were substituted, i am not sure how many people would get the meaning, w/o additional explanation/backstory–but it would be right.
//karen
I have no problem with people buying used books. (Although I recommend using independents for that.) But if there’s a used copy of GET REAL and GR has a July publication date, then it’s an ARC, and I encourage people not to buy ARCs. They’re expensive to produce, sometimes more expensive than the books themselves.
I love that kind of trivia, Karen! I’m supposing it is pronounced cuck-queen? Anyway, thanks for looking that up. Can’t have too many words in the old vocabulary.
I also believe that while English has a word for men excessively devoted to their wives (uxorious) that it has no equivalent word for wives so inclined toward their husband. I guess a wife can’t be excessively devoted?
BTW, I’d be happy to be wrong about this.
i thought that ARCs could not be sold or otherwise shared prior to ‘real’ publication. is this the difference between ‘what is’ and ‘what should be’?
//k
actually, the obverse of ‘uxorious’ is ‘maritorious.’the SOED does not list it as an antonym of uxorious; in fact, it is not even *in* the SOED (which i have in hard copy, 5th ed.).
an interesting notion is that a wife’s devotion could never be ‘too much’–it is expected; however, for a man to be overly devoted is comment-worthy, and thus we have a word still in colloquial usage.
//karen
Karen,
ARCs are sold all the time. This may sound like hairsplitting, but I don’t mind so much if they’re sold as collectibles to hardcore collectors, but I hate seeing them used to undercut sales that actually benefit publishers/writers. A used book has been sold once. A library book has been purchased by the library. The ARC is a marketing freebie and it’s usually marked “Not for sale.”
Laura,
What you say makes perfect sense. I suspect that the ARC in question is being sold as a collectible, due to the death of the author, perhaps, and thus the high pricetag. i don’t know how many ARCs get streeted on an ‘average’ book (100? 1000?) but i can appreciate the undercutting of an author’s expectation of remuneration if they are ‘sold’ and such sale pre-empts a legitimate sale, where the author would see some of the money.
it ain’t easy gettin’ green.
//karen
Karen, I too want to know if women can be cuckolded. Please update us.
Gosh – I think the Blog-Mistress just gave us a peremptory command!
OK – I’ll read the Dortmunder*, but it will have to wait ’til after Burlingame’s new Lincoln, which comes after WTDK, which awaits finishing off Mellon (there’s a summery thought), which defers the Dortmunder deal to about December!
When it comes to reading (as with so many other things), I may be slow – but I enjoy it immensely!
*so far, recommendations from this place have almost always worked out
We mere mortals cannot get our hands on Get Real until July, Ms. Lippman.
I honestly thought it was a May release!
elmore leonard is on charlie rose, as i type…
CR: Do you do a lot of research?
EL: Well, my *researcher* does….
//karen
“This may sound like hairsplitting, but I don’t mind so much if they’re sold as collectibles to hardcore collectors, but I hate seeing them used to undercut sales that actually benefit publishers/writers.”
I dunno; assuming ARC = advance review copy, I gotta take issue with LL’s split hair!
But by definition – willingly parting with approxmately 30X cover-price on a book automatically makes the buyer a ‘hardcore collector’, yes? And regardless of the buyer, the key is whether the writer or publisher is the seller. If not, it must be wrong, since the seller got it for free, yes?
Anyway – that’s my $.02
I mis-read Marjorie’s post, didn’t see the high price, but I stand by what I said: Collectors tend to buy ARCs and first editions, so I’ll cut them slack because the writer/publisher aren’t being cut out of the loop. But some folks — in fact, some reviewers — sell ARCs for below-market prices. That bugs me. In fact, I don’t think Amazon or eBay should allow the sale of ARCs.