Thursday, June 19
Even a Caveman Can Do It
I have mentioned, gentle readers, the daily rag known as Metro in these pages before, the subway equivalent of Skymall, but with slightly more news. It is so designed as to have exactly the right amount of content, or lack thereof, for a distracted commuter with a short attention span on a twenty-minute trip down the Lex. You may be surprised I'm not lugging around some authoritative doorstop such as Liturgies of the Primatial Sees or The Collected Laundry Lists of Hans Metterling, but I submit it's very hard to concentrate when wedged between a large male person in a business suit and eyeshadow and a spastic female lunatic with St. Vitus's dance. (Welcome to New York.)
Anyway, boredom and my quick reading speed--I tend to run over letters rather than really actually absorbing them--usually compels me to read just about anything even of remote interest, and beyond, usually running across all sorts of lunacy. One item that came to mind was an interview with the famous purveyor of trashy novels and elderly young person Jackie Collins (whose first romance novel the late Dame Barbara Cartland is said to have condemned as "nasty, filthy and disgusting,"* and was subsequently banned in the Union of South Africa), who apparently is inflicting yet another book on the unsuspecting world this year.
Most of what the item said I've since forgotten, but the authoress (?) indicated that she thinks of herself as a storyteller (uh huh), and that in any age she would have been doing what she thinks she does best. She was quoted as saying something along the lines of "If this were one hundred years ago, I'd have been sitting around the campfire saying 'Hi, I'm Jackie, and this is my story to tell."
Let that soak in for about five second and do some veery simple chronological arithmetic. Sitting around campfires. She does realize they had books back then, too, doesn't she?
*Isn't Wikipedia wonderful?
Anyway, boredom and my quick reading speed--I tend to run over letters rather than really actually absorbing them--usually compels me to read just about anything even of remote interest, and beyond, usually running across all sorts of lunacy. One item that came to mind was an interview with the famous purveyor of trashy novels and elderly young person Jackie Collins (whose first romance novel the late Dame Barbara Cartland is said to have condemned as "nasty, filthy and disgusting,"* and was subsequently banned in the Union of South Africa), who apparently is inflicting yet another book on the unsuspecting world this year.
Most of what the item said I've since forgotten, but the authoress (?) indicated that she thinks of herself as a storyteller (uh huh), and that in any age she would have been doing what she thinks she does best. She was quoted as saying something along the lines of "If this were one hundred years ago, I'd have been sitting around the campfire saying 'Hi, I'm Jackie, and this is my story to tell."
Let that soak in for about five second and do some veery simple chronological arithmetic. Sitting around campfires. She does realize they had books back then, too, doesn't she?
*Isn't Wikipedia wonderful?
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
