Catching up on a little reading...

In the early 90s, when I was working at the U.S. General Accounting Office, I sometimes brought a bag lunch from home and took it down to the dungeon-like lunchroom that had been set up for library staff. Usually there would be a woman sitting there, intently reading the Washington Post, too busy to talk to anyone else.

I admired her dedication. She started with the front section and worked her way through every page, in page order, section by section. I seem to remember her running her index finger under the type, making sure she caught everything. Then one day I realized that K. wasn't reading that day's Washington Post, but one from three months previous.

When I asked her about this, she said, "I didn't get to read it then, so I'm reading it now." Oh, I thought, she must bring papers to work that she missed reading at home. That's a good idea. No fear of losing a fresh paper in the shuffle to and from work. But the next time I saw her, she was reading another Post from almost exactly three months before from that day's date.

"I'm three months behind," she said, when I asked her why. "So I'm reading them in order." She then explained that she wouldn't read any current issue until she had finished all the previous issues. K. was still doing this when I left a couple of years later. Her news was always three months old—the weather forecast was for the wrong season, the movie listings were useless, the people in the obituaries long buried.

If I had more time or imagination, I would make K. a character in a short story. But I don't, so I'm leaving her here (though I imagine that Joyce Carol Oates, if she had read this far, would already know K.'s fictional destiny).

What brings me to write about her is that I have a similar relationship with the New Yorker. I subscribed to the New Yorker full of hope and excitement a couple of years ago (taking advantage of the unbelievable offer of $25/year). The best magazine in the United States would soon be coming to my mailbox. I eagerly started reading the first issue that arrived, but too soon the next arrived, and then the next.

I tucked a couple of issues here and there—in my beach bag, in a reading basket in the bathroom, in the car. But it was no use. It felt like I was waging a losing battle, each new arrival a fresh defeat.

I let the subscription run out. Now a pile of two-year-old New Yorkers hovers above me on a tall shelf. I can't throw them out because they're too full of good writing to just toss them into the recycling bin.

Another bargain offer to the New Yorker arrived in the mail last week; I was so tempted to check "yes" and mail it back, but that pile of unread NYers taunted me. I tell myself that I don't want to turn into K., so I let them gather dust. Yet perhaps such neglect is a fate worse than hers, for at least she tried to continue the task, no matter how desperate or impossible it grew to be.

Am I Tipper Gore?

After my last post, in which I tsk-tsk-ed the appropriateness of Lady Gaga's videos for her tween/Nick Kids' Choice fans, and I had a letter published in the Washington Post last week suggesting that they should keep the "Kids Post" section of the paper kid-friendly even on the days it doesn't run, my son asked me a question.

"So, are you becoming one of those outraged parents?"

"What do you mean?" I asked, innocently.

"You know, like Tipper Gore."

Ouch. This is an especially sore point with me, not only because I am a writer who believes in artistic freedom, but because I am a librarian by training. Whether non-librarians realize this or not, you almost have to take a vow in library school that you will offer up information freely and uncensored. The question was posited in my introduction to librarianship class (called "The Block" in those days): if a teenager asked for information on how to commit suicide, would you give it to him or her?

I, surprisingly, was in the minority of those who were hesitant to hand over such material. My suggestion of also tucking in a pamphlet or phone number for a suicide hotline was met with hoots from some of the most ardent students.

I thought I was done with that question until I applied to be a reference librarian at a local public library a few years later. Facing a circle of librarians and managers, I was asked what I would do if a teenager asked for information on how to commit suicide.

"Well," I said, breaking out in a light sweat, "I guess I would help them find the information, but I would worry about them. I might also want to steer them to information on depression or suicide prevention." Wrong answer. Scribbles were put down in notebooks, the head librarian frowned. Later, after the interview questions were done, I was asked if I had any comments or questions. I said that I would like to revise my previous answer about the suicidal teenager.

"I realize, now, that really this is a question about censorship, and whether I feel that it's my place to censor the information that people access, and the answer is 'No, it's not.'" The head librarian smiled and nodded, and I was later offered the job (which I ended up not taking).

Yet I couldn't help wanting to add a parenthetical postscript, a whispered aside, "I'd give them the information, but I would wonder why they were researching it. If a teenage boy said he wanted to know how to hang himself, how could I rightly and forthrightly offer him instructions without trying to hear why he wanted it?"

The local libraries are so crowded and short-staffed now, it's unlikely that there would be time for such a conversation anymore.

And Tipper Gore is a sore point with me, as well, because I didn't think that her crusade was all that bad years ago—as a parent I appreciate the "Explicit lyrics" tag on albums and songs, which resulted from it. No one objects to the rating system on movies; I'm sure most people can agree that they wouldn't want a seven-year-old walking into a Quentin Tarantino movie.

Yes, I know that 99 percent of rock songs are about sex—no need to stop the presses for that revelation. It's the songs about violent sex I object to, the humiliation of women, the glorification of murder, especially in rap lyrics. While I defend the right of the artists to sing what they want to, I don't want to buy it and I'd like to shield children from it.

In wanting to get to some kind of conclusion here, I looked up Tipper Gore just now on Wikipedia. The song that started her crusade, "Darling Nikki," is from "Purple Rain," which I still think is a fantastic album and movie. In context of the movie, Prince is denigrating a woman because he is hurt and mad; it's supposed to be a nasty song. I understand that—the song never bothered me. But I wouldn't want little girls to prance around singing it, magazine in hand. That's not censorship, that's good sense.

Gag Lady Gaga?

Last week, while casting her votes online for the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, my daughter chose "Papparazzi" by Lady Gaga as her favorite song. There wasn't much competition, really, since the other choices included "I Gotta Feeling," which she is sick of, and something by Miley Cyrus, whom she claims not to like. And, she has the song on her mp3 player (the original, not the KidzBop version).

My teenager remarked to me later, "But have you watched her videos? They're kinda nasty."

So, after she was in bed, I sat down and watched the video for "Papparazzi" in addition to her MTV Music Awards performance of it. There are a lot of disturbing images in each one—at the end of the MTV performance, she ends up with fake blood coming out of her eyes, hanging from a wire like she's dead. The music video features images of murdered women—one with a bullet hole in the forehead, one lying in a pool of blood, one whose face is wrapped in Saran Wrap. You get the idea. In the middle of the video are flashes of Lady Gaga seated with other women dressed in what looked like S & M leather ensembles, licking each other's faces.

I didn't really like the music video—in fact, it has diminished my enjoyment of the song since I picture those dead women when I hear it now. I have no problem with adults watching it, but I'm queasy when I think of the tween girls who like "Papparazzi," the song, trying to find the video for it.

Years ago, parents were worried about the influence of Britney Spears, all tarted up and marketed to tweens. I don't think Lady Gaga is marketing herself to tweens, but tweens have navigated to her because they like her music when they hear it.

So, do I want her censored? No, not really. But I wish those videos weren't as easy to find and access as they are. I typed "Lady Gaga" into Google just now, and her official web site was the second link listed; click on it and you see a screen for the "Music Video World Premiere" for "Telephone." If you open it, you'll see what looks like a bad prison movie; within seconds, the prison guards rip off Lady Gaga's clothes and throw her in a cell. (It does say "Parental Advisory EXPLICIT CONTENT" in a small box in the lower corner of the window.)

What is it with Lady Gaga killing people at the end of her videos? So far, in the three videos of hers that I've watched, they've all ended in murder, two of them by poison. Does she want us all to share her fetishes, her narcissism, her psychosis? Even if it's just entertainment, it's weird and nasty stuff. And it's not for kids, obviously.

So, despite the fact that "Papparazzi" is a popular song, I don't think Nick should have put it on that list; kids don't need to be pushed in her direction. That's not censorship—it's just showing well-needed restraint.

Farewell "real sex"—hello "bleak and depressing"

In a post last February, "On getting free HBO for a month," I described the HBO program "Real Sex" and made the startling conclusion that the people featured on the show don't seem to be well-read intellectuals.

Despite my lack of graphic detail about the show's goings-on, that post became one of my most popular for awhile. I know this because Sitemeter (that little green box at the bottom of the page) lets me see the search terms people have used to get to my blog. And there were a lot of "real sex," "HBO real sex," and "dirty real sex" searches for awhile. The searches were from all over the world (Sitemeter lets you see the countries from which the searches originate), though most were from the United States.

Sitemeter also lets you know how long the reader stays on the page. Not surprisingly, those who were looking for "real sex" but found my blog instead stayed for average of "0 seconds."

I've decided to take off the "Free HBO" essays and polish them for publication elsewhere, but I don't worry that people won't still accidentally find my blog. Recently there's been a rash of searches using terms like "bleak depressing music," which has led readers to my post, What is the most depressing song ever? Fortunately, these readers tend to linger a little longer than those looking for "Real Sex."

The most surprising statistic in this is that every search originating from a European country recently (5 out of the last 100, the maximum Sitemeter tracks) were for "depressing music" or some variant. I hope that once the winter is over and the cold and the fog lifts, such yearnings will go away, even if it means less traffic to my blog.

Postscript: I just realized, by merely mentioning "HBO's Real Sex," I'm going to garner renewed traffic to this blog from people who didn't really want to get here. If you're one of those and you've read this far... oh, wait, you already left 20 seconds ago.

Back in the old days...

So, I became a reporter for a daily newspaper in North Carolina in the mid-1980s, before there were cell phones, digital cameras, high-speed modems or the Internet. Lacking such technology wouldn't have been so bad if I had been in the Winston-Salem Journal's main office—reporters there had computer monitors on their desks hooked into a mainframe computer. They could send stories with a push of a button.

But I was in a bureau office in the northwest corner of the state, 90 minutes from the main office. I was given a portable Radio Shack computer to type my stories on. It wasn't a laptop exactly since it only held three medium-sized stories at a time and its screen held only a few rows of type, yet the field reporters were wowed by its portability; it was the best thing we could use at the time.

I could slowly send a story from my bureau office via a modem, but out in the field, if I needed to get a story in before I could get back to the office, I would have to pull up to a pay phone, dial the paper's toll-free number, then attach a cup to the phone receiver to transmit the story from the laptop. The story would make long chirping noises as it went over the wire, like a fax machine on valium.

I was lucky. I saw reporters for other newspapers still calling in their stories, slowly reading them out for the intern on the other end to transcribe.

If none of the paper's photographers was available, I took pictures on my cheap, automatic 35mm camera, popping out the film when I was done. If there was no rush, I mailed it back to the Winston-Salem office. But if the story was going to run the next day, I'd drive over to the bus station in Boone (actually, it was just a local motel) and put my film on the bus; someone in Winston would pick it up.

I would check in with the main office at least once a day. But without a cell phone, I wasn't immediately available to anyone. While I was in Asheville one August day to write a feature on a New Age-y organization there, a plane packed full of cocaine landed near Boone, and became one of the largest drug busts in that part of the state. My editor frantically tried to reach me, but I was out of earshot, not knowing why everyone was so upset when I called in late that afternoon. I think they went with a wire story that day, supplemented by one of our reporters in a nearby bureau. It should have been my story. Still, my story on the New Age-y people got me my only above-the-fold front page, in that Sunday's paper.

Things are faster, easier, more accessible now, yet I'm not sure they're better or that stories are better written. My old bureau office, which covered two counties (with others, occasionally, as needed), has closed, folded into another bureau to become the Northwest Bureau office. I think that reporter must cover at least four counties now. Spread thin, is how I'd describe it. I'm not sure how you'd get to know all the people in local government or be in so many places at once. Maybe the reporter makes his rounds electronically, reading local blogs for gossip, chatting up people on Facebook, emailing interview questions. It's the only way I can imagine that he or she can be in 10 places at once—unlike when I used to walk around Boone, even in the deep snow, to visit the sheriff, the mayor's office, the Registrar, hoping to catch wind of something, to hear something I wasn't supposed to hear.

(The picture at the top of this post is one of the pictures I took with my cheap camera, which ran in the paper; it was for my favorite story I ever got to write for the WSJ.)

Why I really became a reporter

I’d like to say that the reason I became a reporter at a daily newspaper in North Carolina was because I had a burning desire to investigate injustice, to promote knowledge, or even to see my name in print. But that’s not exactly true. I mostly became a reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal because I was sick of being a waitress at the Pizza Inn in North Wilkesboro, N.C.

It was the only job I could find after I moved back home in January 1985. Actually, there was first a one-day stint as a waitress at the Dodge House restaurant, where patrons blew smoke in my face all evening and hardly tipped me. It wouldn’t have been so bad except that I was only making two dollars an hour and, even worse, it turned out that the job also required me to clean the restaurant toilets once every shift. I balked at this and the manager, who was originally from India, said, “You think I didn’t have dreams, too?” I had no idea how he’d gotten from India to this deep-fried/fine dining restaurant in a nowhere corner of North Carolina, but I never got a chance to ask him. I quit at the end of my first shift.

Before the Pizza Inn, I also cleaned a movie theater for a few mornings with one of my mom’s co-workers, a secretary who came there before work for some extra income. It was taxing, disgusting work. We always spent the first few minutes trying to get hardened gum off the floor.

It turns out that a lot of people in Wilkes County worked extra jobs. Two of the waitresses I worked with at Pizza Inn came straight from the Tyson’s chicken factory. Legs tired, feet aching, they stood for another four hours. And yet, amazingly, they didn’t complain about it. They seemed to accept it as their lot. Or they were happy for the extra money because they were trying to build their savings or pay off debt. Most were young and energetic, but there was one woman whose feet swelled so much from standing all day that her doctor told her that she was going to have a stroke if she didn't get off of them. The grim reality is that she didn't have health insurance and her son had needed life-saving surgery, which she was still paying off, she said, when their house burned down.

We were paid the standard waitress minimum wage of $2.13 an hour, with the expectation that patrons would tip our way past the real minimum wage of $3.35 an hour. That hardly ever happened. The management pushed us to promote the buffet table, which was cheaper for them than individual orders, and most patrons took us up on the offer. That meant, however, that the waitresses were only serving them their drinks and handing them an empty plate to fill and most people didn’t think of that as service. In fact, they found it annoying when we came back to check on them once or twice after they had their plates and drinks. Begrudgingly, we’d get an occasional quarter or two when they left.

Unlike the other waitresses there, I had a way out. I started sending my resume to small town newspapers all over North Carolina, along with photocopies of my few precious clips from the Spokane Chronicle, pretending I knew what I was doing. I also started to study for the GRE, with the new thinking that school would not be a place to study whatever I wanted and to find myself, but instead a place where I would train for a career (surprisingly, this had never occurred to me in all my years as an undergraduate).

And so, when I got the call from the Winston-Salem Journal, I trotted out of there with hardly a day’s notice.

The Pizza Inn is gone. It’s been a Mexican restaurant for years. I bet the waitresses there are still paid the waitress minimum wage, which remains at $2.13 an hour. I just hope that people in my hometown have gotten a little more generous with their tipping. And that the lady with swollen feet finally paid off debts before the job killed her.

Should E.F. Blevins or EF (Beth) Blevins be my new penname?

Right away I'm going to tell you that this is a garbage post that you probably shouldn't read.

It is the first and probably only post I'm going to write specifically for an Internet search engine. I am trying to see if "E.F. Blevins" is a searchable term and how easily it is found, before I consider changing it to my penname.

As I wrote months ago, there are a lot of Beth Blevinses already floating around on the Internet. Since then, through a daily Google vanity search for "Beth Blevins" I've discovered many more, even after subtracting those I already knew about: Beth Blevins the doula, the realtor, the "gather the women" promoter. And still more pop up every day. There's a Beth Blevins who's in a graduate journalism program, using "Beth Blevins" as part of her byline. A Beth Blevins who writes diddits on movies (whatever that is). And then there are all the Facebook Beth Blevinses who come onto FB each week, and/or add new friends.

I'm OK with being EF Blevins or E.F. Blevins (despite the fact that someone told me it sounds too much like JK Rowling). I like not being so easily identified as one gender or another. I'm not so sure I like the way some people will pronounce it: "Eff Blevins!"

I suppose I could eventually be known as "the writer formerly known as Beth Blevins."

Oh, wait, I forgot to see if anyone else is going by E.F. Blevins. I'll know in a few minutes, after this is posted, and after I start to search for it.

The problem with reading two books at once

As mentioned in a previous post (The writer, reading/listening), almost since our kids were old enough to understand one sentence following another, we've listened to books on tape during family car trips.

At first, we reserved them only for long journeys—I often remember past trips by the stories we heard along the way (our drive to Canada and back took as long as Fellowship of the Rings; now, when I think of traveling Montreal, I also sometimes think of Frodo traveling to Rivendell). But then we found it was nice to have a story to look forward to whenever we got into the car, even when we were just going to the grocery store.

We were able to keep the narrative going somehow, perhaps because it was such a defined space and we were a truly captive audience. The seatbelts click and the story starts again. Only occasionally did we need to back up a bit to catch up.

We've also always read to our kids aloud at night, from toddler to almost-teenage. This has never been a conflict before, listening to one story in the car, another at night. Until recently, when E-girl and I listened to City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau and read When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. Both are mysteries written for children, presenting puzzles for the reader to figure out.

One night, about a week into both narratives, E-girl said, "I keep getting them confused." It was hard to remember sometimes which story had the man under the mailbox, which had the confused grandma. So we stopped listening to Ember until we finished the other book. Perhaps what made it even more difficult is that When You Reach Me keeps referencing A Wrinkle in Time, so we were having to keep three books separate in our minds, reminding ourselves that Linah and Doone couldn't time travel.

Today I went to the library and checked out two books on CD: Treasure Island and The People of Sparks (the sequel to Ember). I also checked out The People of Sparks on paper; we have a paper copy of Treasure Island already. I guess this is the way it will have to be for awhile, as long as we're listening to suspenseful or exciting books. The only problem for me, now, is that I will be competing with professional voice/actors when I read aloud at night.

Pandora's box of songs: music to write by

Lucky is the person who can write a short story while listening to the Rolling Stones or a Bach fugue. Or who, like my spouse, can write at the computer while listening to rock music and watching TV sports from the corner of his eye.

I've never been able to listen to music and also do anything that involves a computer or a pen. Apparently my brain doesn't multi-task that way. I write best in a quiet house.

Yet sometimes the quiet gets to me. I think of all the songs that I'll never hear because the part of my brain that writes or types is too demanding of my full attention. So, I've been searching for music that would provide a pleasant sonic background my brain won't rebel against.

It was easy to eliminate disco/techno, folk songs, and any music with lyrics. But even slow, sweeping orchestral music was too demanding.

Finally, through trial and error, I've discovered that I can write to piano music. As long as the piano is the main instrument, and there are not a lot of other sounds alongside it, my brain doesn't get distracted. I don't know if this is true for other writers, or just me. Perhaps only the sound of the clarinet will do for someone else, the french horn for another.

Maybe it's because the motion of fingers traveling across a computer keyboard and a piano keyboard are kind-of the same?

I have created a "Piano Music" station on Pandora Radio. When Pandora asked for a "seed" artist or song, I typed "Keith Jarrett" and "Glenn Gould." It has since persuaded me to add Bill Evans and other jazz pianists, as well as Chopin and Erik Satie, and it is still trying to steer me toward Philip Glass. Miraculously, I've mostly heard piano music on this station, having only to occasionally say no to the rare symphony. (I moved Beethoven to his own station, since it hurt to give him a thumbs down).

If you'd like to hear my station, (I think this will work) you can go to: http://www.pandora.com/?ext_lsfi=sf135142619270723600&ref=nf . If this doesn't work, you can create your own station, with similar parameters. Happy listening!

The lady in the bunny suit, a cream pie, Gary Larson and me

The day I met Gary Larson, I ended up wiping cream pie off his face.

Larson had come for a book-signing at the Bookseller in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where I worked as the assistant manager. It was 1984, when local, independent bookshops were still thriving and authors would visit even small towns if the bookstore was big enough. (The Bookseller went out of business years ago.)

Not long after Larson had been set up at a table piled with his books in the store's lower-level, a woman sauntered in dressed in a bunny costume and carrying a cream pie. I was at the cash register and laughed as she walked by, thinking she was here to make some kind of absurd offering to the visiting celebrity. But, without saying a word, she smushed the pie in Larson's face. "Hey, what are you doing?" he said (or something to that effect).

I grabbed paper towels and rushed down. The woman was standing there, looking perplexed and about to cry. It turns out she had called Larson's best friend, who was a reptile specialist at the Seattle Zoo and who occasionally appeared in his "Far Side" comics. "What can I do that would make Gary Larson feel welcome here?" she'd asked, and the friend had replied, as a joke, "If I were you, I'd dress up in a bunny costume and throw a pie in his face." I still can't believe she took the guy seriously.

I was reminded of this incident last week when I helped out at the PTSA used book sale. I miss that kind of tactile interaction with books. It was energizing to be surrounded by all those words, all those possibilities—I never feel that when I do a search and order on Amazon.com.

But what really brought it to mind again is that my son (I-guy) wrote Larson in early February, not expecting a reply because Larson has taken himself out of the public eye and offers no direct contact info on the Far Side web site. So, to get his attention, after the usual adoring fan paragraph, I-guy said, "More to the point of this letter, my mother swears she met you once in a very odd way." He went on to describe the incident just as I had described it to him, closing with: "Anyway, I guess I'm wondering if you remember this, or if my mother is full of it."

And he got back a reply! Not from Larson, but from one of his assistants. She said: "I checked with Mr. Larson and he confirmed that your mother remembers the episode quite accurately.... I'm happy to report that your mother did not in fact make it up!"

To offer further proof, she told him that the episode is mentioned in The Complete Far Side, Vol. 2 (p. 450). I have also since discovered that it is mentioned in the children's reference series, Something About the Author (v. 57, p. 124). In an interview in that volume, Larson says "celebrity has its price," and goes on to mention the woman who threw the cream pie: "I felt bad for her—the crowd was ugly about it." That moment and another, when he was led into a hive of too-eager fans, turned him off to public life, he says. "It used to be so simple," he laments, now "it's too showbiz."

Of course I wonder now if I had prevented the woman from throwing the banana cream pie in his face if Gary Larson would still be in the public eye—or, more importantly, if he would he still be publishing cartoons.