• I just feel like reading one of those . . . oh, you know what I mean: they have the words on slices of tree, and then they’re put together with ribbon and glue and cardboard and whatnot.
• Oh, and I’m looking for a writer’s colony: on that offers scholarships and doesn’t turn up its nose at crime fiction. Six weeks would do it if I just want to polish up the Santa Monica story. I might need as long as 10 weeks to finish the one set in Phoenix, which my “psychic advisor” said I should do. (She said that will bring my storytelling back in a circular fashion to Los Angeles. Hm. I’d been wondering whether my Phoenix characters knew my L.A. people. Maybe they should.)
And I checked: the Thurber House wants humor writers, and I doubt that sardonic remarks in my dialogue count. (I’m famous for focusing on dialogue to the exclusion of plot—and sometimes even description. Remember what J.D. Salinger’s character Buddy was told by one of his siblings? “Too clever.”
To which Seymour responded that cleverness was Buddy’s equivalent of a wooden leg, and that it was a bit impolite to bring it up.)
• After we saw the latest Harry Potter movie* today we came home and I read the Popper book that Darrell gave me (skipping to the political essays in the back; life is short, and one must try to be mindful of that and eat dessert first). The sun is too strong in the bedroom some afternoons, so I crashed out in “Camp Joy” in the living room: a sleeping bag on the floor, with the reading lamp brought down from its table; this type of thing makes my husband sigh with relief that he didn’t marry someone weird. I had a nice nap in Camp Joy. When I woke up several hours later my husband had left his office and taken up his usual post in the armchair here in the front room—with his laptop on and his headphones within reach.
I opened my eyes and said, “I ust don’t like Plato all that much.”
“Then don’t use Play-Dough,” he responded.
“No, I mean . . . oh. Shut up.”
And he laughed. “You’re a bit old for it, anyway.”
“Am not. You’re never too old for Play-Dough.” Which is true. Unlike that greasy stuff my mom used to get us when we were kids, Play-Dough will dry and become something permanent. So if you liked what you made at your friends’ houses, you could let it dry out and keep it. At our place our creations just sat around until we finally wanted to make something new, and had to destroy the older things: by then, the greasy modeling clay would be slightly dusty, as well—particularly if it was one of my brother’s very careful, precise, elaborate projects.
Namaste, kids.
* Review later.
Short version: It was like the movie version of The Two Towers from Lord of the Rings, inasmuch as it’s a “middle” sort of movie that leaves one wanting more closure; they even skipped Dumbledore’s funeral! It’s not that I exactly disagree with the decisions they made when they cut so much out of the book—though not having the ministry of magic appear at all seemed rather short-sighted, and to gloss over Harry’s breakup with Ginny is to leave out something fundamental to his character. Rather, it made for a serviceable place-holder movie to advance the plot toward the two finale movies. In a perfect world, this book would also have been divided into two parts so that there would be a total of nine.
But the special effects? Lovely. There’s an interesting trick at the beginning that affects one almost like the Star Wars ride at Disneyland: visuals so convincing that you start to feel something in your stomach, as if you were on a roller-coaster. I thought it was silly when they tried to do that with the Knight Bus a few movies ago—probably because I liked the Knight Bus better the way it was in the book—but it really worked in the The Half-Blood Prince.
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Do not frown on Dialog. George Higgins, who was one of the best crime novelists of all time used virtually all dialog, and good dialog. “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” and his best novel, “The Digger’s Game” were almost all dialog… and did a terrific job.