Thursday, August 20, 2009
I have considered compiling all my anecdotes onto business cards, which I can wordlessly hand out as I meet people, or keep as party favors. And if I have already told someone a particular story, I can avoid wasting my breath or wearing down the other person's time and patience with something that they diligently memorized the first time upon hearing it, because it naturally was hilarious the first time around.
Sample One:
Once, when I was dressed up as Cha!Cha! the tree frog (working at Rainforest Cafe during high school), I socked a junior high kid and screamed, "I'm gonna fucking call security!" at him as he and his hoodlum friends ran away after having spun me around as I stood greeting guests at the front of the store (I couldn't chase after them, for my feet were too big, even though I only had three toes), thus forcing me to break the rules that giant, bipedalling animal characters do not assault people, nor do they speak- ever.
Labels: anecdote, animals, assault, business cards, frogs, kids, Rainforest Cafe, regular people, rules, speaking, working
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 7:37 PM]
Lauree Bats 32% With The BBC
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Instructions: Copy this into your NOTE...S. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tag other book nerds...
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte –
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - X
6 The Bible-
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens-X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy- X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare-
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger-
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind -
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams –
26 The Scarlett Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne- X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll-
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame-
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens-
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -
34 Emma-Jane Austen-
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden- X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne – X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving-
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery- X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan-
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel-
52 Dune - Frank Herbert-
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons-
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen-
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon-
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -X
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck – X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov-
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas-
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding-
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie -
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens- X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker-
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce-
76 The Inferno – Dante-
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray-
80 Possession - AS Byatt –
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens –X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker- X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom –
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton-
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams-
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas-
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare- X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl- X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo-
Labels: Alice Walker, BBC, books, Charles Dickens, CS Lewis, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Orwell, Harper Lee, James Joyce, Jane Austen, quiz, Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Winnie the Pooh
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 6:26 PM]
Purgings, Part II
Monday, August 10, 2009
Caesar: The Civil War
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Tales From Ovid
The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
Old Christmas
The Catcher in the Rye
It
The Erotic Poems
The Iliad
Pieces of My Mind
Byron's Poetry
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
Flappers and Philosophers
The History of Sexuality
Selected Poems
Collected Poems
Over to You
Breakfast at Tiffany's
The Stranger
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpson Got Away With Murder
Naked Lunch
Selected Poems
Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders
The Stand
The Castle in the Attic
Candide
The History of the Peloponnesian War
The Complete Plays of Sophocles
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
The Oresteian Trilogy
Four Plays by Aristophanes
The Consolation of Philosophy
Labels: Albert Camus, Andy Rooney, books, bookshelf, Homer, J. D. Salinger, Julius Caesar, Malcolm X, Michel Foucault, Ovid, Roald Dahl, Stephen King, Thomas Hardy, Washington Irving
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 5:46 AM]
Hollywood Cannot Be Found In Any One Place
Sunday, August 02, 2009
This morning I thought I needed to sell my books, not so much because I thought I needed to sell my books as because selling books is what other people do when they need to clear space or make emergency cash appear. The former at the moment presents less urgency than the latter, though in perusing my shelves for titles I could abandon I forgot entirely any original purpose, as I got lost flipping through the things I had read some years ago and, in certain cases, had not opened since.
I pulled out What's The Matter With Kansas?, which I read freshman year of college after the author appeared on The Daily Show, when the show was relatively mild and Jon Stewart was slightly less jaded with life. Most of what the author wrote in 2004 applied to politics five years before and applies five years after, a snippet following a quote of one of Ann Coulter's windblast comments being illustrative:
Coulter instantiates this thesis about the rich not by opening a copy of Fortune or Cigar Aficionado but by turning to what's on TV. See, there's all sorts of filth, put there by liberals. We know the liberal elite hate the common people because of what we see on the TV, what we read in highbrow modern fiction, all of which can be laid at the doorstep of liberalism. On the other hand, we know that the GOP is the true party of the workers, since the hard-guy Republican Tom DeLay is "more likely to have a beer with a trucker" than the wealthy senator Barbara Boxer of California. We know it because the two social possibilities of American life are mimicking the liberal "beautiful people" of Hollywood or embracing "the working-class hillbillies who go to NASCAR races," that favorite litmus test of the populist right.(Frank, Thomas. What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2004. pgs. 117-118)
Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.
Why should I sell that? "Frank" is parked between "Foucault" and "Freud", who are succeeded by "Gaiman", "Gibbon", and "Gide". I decided to part with one of two copies of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but then:
It is Sunday; ergo, the bookstore is closed. Schade.
Labels: Ann Coulter, beer, books, bookshelf, economics, hillbillies, Jon Stewart, Kansas, liberalism, NASCAR, politics, quotes, television, The Daily Show, Thomas Frank, Tom DeLay, working-class
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 7:11 AM]