LBJs

*My appearance at the Virginia Festival of the Book has become less insubstantial. I'll be doing a reading (from The Verb To Bird, presumably) at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, March 19th, at the Cavalier Best Western. That's the first night of the Festival, so it'll be a chance to kick out the jams and get the party started. Or at least to snarf down a bunch of the refreshments before the rest of the guests show up.

*I'm listening to Robyn Hitchcock's beautiful, haunting "Linctus House" at the moment, and it remains one of my favorite RH tunes, despite the fact that I have no earthly idea what he's going on about. It does contain one of my favorite lines: "If we understood each other, there'd be no need to talk..."

*I had my first interview last week, with Albemarle Magazine; judging by the ads, I'd expect the subscribers to have disposable income that they might cheerfully blow on a book or two. I'm reminded, however, of my experience in the palatial manse of Barry Bergman, the founder of Record Bar. Barry had sold the chain to an enormous European company for some ungodly number of millions, which he spent on a huge house north of Chapel Hill. I had the good fortune to be a friend of the place's caretaker, as well as a Record Bar employee in my own right. Thus, when Barry & his wife moved in and needed someone to sort and file all their CDs, my friend decided I had the proper qualifications. I did the sorting--an enormous job, given the huge number of CDs they'd acquired from artists, promoters, and labels over the years--and as an extra reward (in addition to my usual hourly rate at the Bar) was invited to spend an evening there with the caretaker, her fiance, and Kelly, but without our hosts. Kelly and I spent much time marveling over the master bathroom (his and hers showers), the brushed-steel fixtures in the kitchen, the automatic vertical blinds on the window in the master bedroom, the Warhol of Mick Jagger that hung over the stereo system (which looked like something out of Close Encounters, but with a bigger special-effects budget), the garage (containing a blazing red Ferrari and a creamy white '57 T-Bird--my appreciation for Barry's taste went up a notch there) and the hot tub, but the thing we couldn't get over was the absence of books. The place must have had thirty rooms, and we found books in exactly one of them--a single small shelf of them, perhaps four feet long, with a paperback dictionary, a thesaurus, and a couple of Jackie Collins-style romances. I cannot imagine having that much money and not filling room after room with books. Then again, maybe there's a reason why I don't have that much money...

*We let the boys watch Jaws with us on Friday. Hmm. That was a weeeeeeeeeee bit more gory than I'd remembered. It doesn't help that the PG rating has been almost entirely devalued since Bruce the Shark hit the screen. Nowadays, "PG" means "Disney, but there's a fart joke." Teens lump G and PG movies together now, and unless something gets at least a PG-13, it's not going to bring in that perfect demographic: people with money, but no mortgage or rent. Admittedly, I'm not always spot-on where ratings are concerned. I showed The Man with Two Brains at Dixon's ninth birthday party, forgetting that it was rated R. (There are two shots of naked breasts; don't ask me how I forgot that...) Then again, when The Score, last summer's Brando-DeNiro-Norton caper flick, gets an R, it's hard to judge anything; the film has limited violence (one fight involving a baseball bat, and lots of shooting to little effect), one character smoking a joint, and a terrycloth-robed Angela Bassett spending the night at DeNiro's place without benefit of matrimony, but why on earth was it rated R? Because the word "fuck" is spoken with regularity. And that word, goodness knows, is far worse than watching Robert Shaw writhing and spitting blood in the maw of a Great White...

*Last night Kelly and I played Scrabble with her mom, Ruth, and the game was freakish. On my first turn, I played a bingo (a word that uses all seven letters, for those of you haven't yet read Stefan Fatsis' wonderful Word Freak): PASTORED. The game then started closing up, with a very tight board, and nobody could score much. I had all the vowels, Ruth had all the consonants, and Kelly couldn't get a good spot for her words to save her life. In the end, I had a choice of two plays: either build down from the Q to the triple-word square in the lower left corner, or build over from an E next to the left-side triple-word square. Problem was, the former play was QUO; it was worth 36, but I wasn't sure the word was in the dictionary. If I played EYE in the latter place, I'd score only 18, but I knew the word was legit. I also knew I had the game's last U, and that both blanks were out, so nobody else could use the Q easily. I decided to play it safe and try for the 18 with EYE. Kelly promptly laid down her own bingo, FASTENED, on the first E, and ended the game. Some days it just doesn't pay to play it safe...

*We went to the Target in Fredericksburg on Saturday. We'd never been before. Danger, Will Robinson, danger...
3:09 PM

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