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Melissahttp://www.missmeliss.comWriter, voice actor, dog-lover, and bathtub mermaid, Melissa is the Associate Editor-in-Chief at All Things Girl. To learn more about her, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter (@Melysse) or Facebook. You can also listen to her podcast, "Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub" at Bathtub Mermaid or on iTunes.

Lit-Ra-Chur (Booking Through Thursday)

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When somebody mentions “literature,” what’s the first thing you think of? (Dickens? Tolstoy? Shakespeare?)

Do you read “literature” (however you define it) for pleasure? Or is it something that you read only when you must?

I’ve been pretty insular lately, so I thought I’d take a break from writing medicare advantage articles to actually participate in a meme. It’s not Thursday, but if you don’t tell, I won’t either.

Literature, at least in my personal lexicon, does include Shakespeare, Dickens and Tolstoy, as well as Melville, Fitzgerald, and Hawthorne, but it also includes the Bronte sisters, Austen, Woolf, Cather, Alcott, and George Sand. Not to mention Dickinson, Emerson, Whitman, Plath and Thoreau. I don’t believe something has to be part of a “great books” program in order to be literature, but there’s a reason the classics are, well, classic.

Staying power is one part of what distinguishes literature from, say, general fiction, but it’s also not the only factor. I believe literature is still being created. Consider the beauty of the language in Memoirs of a Geisha, for example, or the works of A. S. Byatt.

As to what I read for pleasure. I read a bit of everything. I like the classics. Curling up with Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre on a dismal weekend evening is just as restful as breezing through a couple of Star Trek novels, and the latter are often just as provocative as any of the works I studied in school.

As I write this, I’m in the middle of two books – one is the middle novel in a trilogy of Trekfiction, the other is the latest in the Kushiel’s Legacy series by Jacqueline, and I’m about to begin reading Pride and Prejudice.

As a writer, I learn from everything I read. Not just the stuff that we used to write essays about.

August Rush

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August RushAugust Rush
Available on DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-Ray
Get it at Amazon

Fuzzy and I haven’t yet invested in a plasma tv and a plasma mount with which to suspend it from the wall or ceiling, but that doesn’t stop us from enjoying movies. Recently, we rented August Rush because we never managed to see it in a theater, and we both loved it.

August Rush is an urban fantasy about a cellist and a rock star who meet, have a one-night stand, and are forced apart. She (the cellist) gets pregnant and her over protective father puts the baby up for adoption while she is in the hospital after an accident. Eleven years later, the child, a musical prodigy who has refused to leave an orphanage because he believes he can hear his parents, decides he has to find them.

We then follow the cellist as she searches for the child she never agreed to give up, and never knew was alive, the rock star, who is searching for the cellist, unaware there is a child, and the boy, Evan, who is given the name August Rush by a street musician who takes him in, and becomes the catalyst for the blooming of a musical prodigy.

Of course the movie ends with August conducting an urban rhapsody (symphony for orchestra and wind chimes) in Central Park, and there’s every sign his parents will find him, especially since he’s run into his father already, they just weren’t aware.

It’s a charming tale, with great music and wonderful performances from all three principals – Freddy Highmore (August) Keri Russell (Lyla, the cellist), and John Rhys Myers (as the rock star).

Goes well with a dreamsicle, and a hot summer night.

Crispy

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Sitting at Cracker Barrel with Fuzzy yesterday morning, each of us reading, I watched him eat bacon, and thought, “the bacon I made with the microwave bacon cooker was better than this.”

A few months ago, I received a totally enclosed microwave bacon cooker, and even though we don’t eat bacon all that often, I was incredibly happy to have it. You see, this unit, which looks like a cross between a sifter and a water filter pitcher, is the only such contraption that IS totally enclosed.

It’s also really easy to use. You drape the bacon over the internal blades, close and fasten the lid, and stick it in the microwave on “high” for about thirty second per slice (a little more or less depending on the desired end-result and the thickness of your bacon), then unlock, and pull the blades out, leaving all the nasty grease in the well at the bottom. You can then pour off the grease (into a safe container, never down the sink), and make more, or just use hot soapy water to clean the cooker again for next time.

I don’t often wax rhapsodic about appliances, but this microwave bacon cooker really is as wonderful as it sounds.

In fact, as I was reading this morning, and came across characters talking about bacon for breakfast, I thought, “Oh, I want to have some, too.”

And I did.

Lost in a Good Book

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I often find that if I’m really into a book, I come away from my reading time feeling disoriented if the weather or the mood doesn’t fit with whatever I just read.

Right now, for example, I’m halfway through Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Scion, the fourth in the Kushiel series, and there’s been some mention of an attendant who recently came from one of the houses in the Night Court, and while, for this person, the experience was something akin to attending one of our massage therapy schools, those familiar with these books will understand that such a place is more like a very elite brothel, though all arts are taught, not just sexual ones.

I mention this because when I put the book down, I was half expecting to see candlelight and fabric hangings instead of my very modern surroundings.

I’ll be reviewing this book over at All Things Girl, along with it’s immediate sequel, sometime in the next couple of months.

For now, though, I really want to fill the tub with water and bubbles, light candles, and read the other half.

Music Review: Dreamland, Brent Spiner & Maude Maggart

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Dreamland
Brent Spiner, Maude Maggart
Get it from Amazon >>

I’ve always been a fan of audio dramas, and have fond memories of rainy winter Sunday evenings, when my mother would make soup or stew, and she, Ira, and I would sit around the kitchen table and listen raptly to the radio plays that were broadcast on the local NPR affiliate. Or maybe it was the Pacifica affiliate. Either way it was a nice break from worrying about heating bills, the merits of tanked vs. tankless water heaters, and any number of other modern subjects.

Knowing this, there is every chance that, had I known to look for it, I’d have fallen in love with Brent Spiner’s newest brainchild, Dreamland, a CD that is more than just music, but really an audio musical with a healthy dash of noir-style characters and settings, and some great American standards, performed by Spiner and his co-star for this production, Maude Maggart.

I’ll confess that, even though I’m not generally given to collecting autographs from actors, no matter how much I enjoy their work, I paid the extra $10 over the $19,99 base price of the Dreamland cd to have Mr. Spiner not only sign it, but also to add the phrase “To MissMeliss” in strong silver writing on the front, because I am that big a geek.

But I digress.

Dreamland is the story of one man’s dream. I’ve often said that I dream not just in technicolor, but in full surround sound with a studio orchestra and backup singers. Apparently, so does the protagonist of this story, because when we meet him he’s preparing for bed in a hotel room, and is asking for a 9:30 AM wakeup call.

For the rest of the 50-ish minute CD, we, and he, are living within the dream, and, as can happen in small-d dreamland, scenes transition abruptly, time is either stretched or compressed as needed, and songs are used to punctuate feelings, but also to further the storyline. At one point, our hero offers the heroine a lift, but instead of car, he has a train. Such is the stuff of dreams.

Spiner’s vocals seem richer and healthier than his previous disc, Ol’ Yellow Eyes is Back, which included similar types of songs. I especially liked “The Moonbeam Song,” and “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” but everything was quite pleasing. Of course, he also wrote the script, so it makes sense that he would pick songs he sings well.

Ms. Maggart (who is also Fiona Apple’s sister), has a lovely voice, and it’s so refreshing to hear a female lead who isn’t an over-shrill soprano (though as a mezzo myself, I may be biased). Her “I Remember You” is sheer magic.

Many of the other characters in Dreamland were voiced by Mark Hamill (yes, that one), but you’d never be able to pick out his voice if you didn’t know ahead of time that he was part of the project.

In an age of wall-vibrating dance beats, it’s nice to spend a quiet hour listening to something like Dreamland, and enjoying music from a time when songs were so much more singable than they are now. The only thing missing from the audio experience, for me, was a rainy day.

Dreamland may be purchased at Brent Spiner’s website, The Real Brent Spiner, and he takes paypal.

Shelved

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While I’m on the subject of shopping for bookish things, instead of reading books, I should add that we’ve pretty much shelved the plan to make the library into a library, and are now shopping for bookshelves that will work in other rooms, which has become an important issue, since I hired a cleaning lady who starts on April 3rd, and she can’t vacuum my bedroom if the pile of books that stretches the entire length of the window is still there.

We considered using the free pass to one of those directbuy clubs to look at their stuff, but most of the bookshelves at formal furniture stores are a bit beyond what we can spend when you consider the amount of shelving we need.

I’ve decided that we should all be independently wealthy.
Who’s with me?

Sometimes, I Write Stuff, Too

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Entry cross-posted from my main blog, MissMeliss: Escribition.

…or at least links to them

As I posted, I’ve become more active in my favorite e-zine All Things Girl, and they’ve given me the title of Sr. Editor. The mid-issue update will go live on April 1st (no, really) but in the meantime I’ve got some stuff in the March/April edition already:

Sun Hats and Fresh Tomatoes is a brief nostalgia trip to my grandfather’s garden.

and I also reviewed the book

Midori by Moonlight, by Wendy Nelson Tokunaga.

As well, today Pink Nighties, a new erotic e-zine is having it’s launch, and I have two pieces in that, as well as a “senior editor” credit:

Chai is the first part of a short story that will be serialized there over the next several issues, and there’s also a
Product Review (bear in mind it’s a sex-positive, erotic fiction zine when considering that piece).

Enjoy!

Games People Read About

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Hearing a couple of golfers mention Cobra golf gear in Starbucks the other day, made me think about the way sports are depicted in fiction. You don’t see a lot of novels where there’s a dead body draped over the front of a Zamboni, or where love affairs take place in the SkyBox of a major arena, but sports and games are often used in fiction. Here are some of my favorites:

  1. Harriet the Spy: Notebook Tag. The game in which you run around trying to knock people’s books out of their arms, until you are the last person left.
  2. The Dick Francis mysteries: Almost everything he ever wrote involved horse racing in some fashion, either because the protagonist was a jockey or trainer, or because a murder took place in the turf world. I used to read these like candy.
  3. The Harry Potter books: Who can resist the lure of Quidditch – I mean the notion of any sport played on airborne brooms is pretty cool.
  4. Sara Paretsky’s work: Hockey is prevalent in at least one of the adventures of V.I. Warshawski, and Paretsky always weaves in mention of the Chicago Cubs.

Your turn: If you’re reading this, tell me about some of your favorite uses of games and sports in fiction.

Technology and Magic

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Arthur C. Clarke, aged 90, died this morning at his home in Sri Lanka, and while I can’t say I was a total fan of all his work, how can you not mourn the passing of the man who said that “Any technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic” ?

The New York Times has a piece about him here, but it might require a login to read.

So many icons of the geek world have died in the last six months – Gary Gygax among others. I’ve never really been a D&D fan, but I recognize his contribution to a hobby my husband loves (a bit unhealthily at times.). Honestly, all this death is enough to drive one past addiction and right into drug rehabilitation.

As for me, I’m thinking tonight might be a good time to curl up by the fire with some vintage science fiction, as a sort of private memorial.