The Lover's Dictionary

Boy meets girl.  They fall in love.  They move in together.  Things happen.  Fiction is filthy with novels with this basic theme.  The trick is, how does an author make his or her work stand out from the others?

Make a dictionary out of it.

David Levithan created The Lover's Dictionary to tell the story of the relationship between an unnamed man and woman.  Words are defined with moments from the couple's relationship and arranged in alphabetical order.  This makes the story of the relationship move backward and forward but Levithan left a few tiny forward-moving clues within the alphabetical entries.  Certain entries build slowly to create the picture of a scene within the other definitions and meanings of words or phrases.

The dictionary entries remind of the photo challenges people do where they take a theme for the day (black, silence, movement, etc.) and put their own interpretation on the idea.  Like this entry:

breathtaking, adj.

Those mornings when we kiss and surrender for an hour before we say a single word. (p 40)

See? There are so many wonderful entries in this book.  I scribbled many into my ratty little quote journal. 

(Poor little quote journal.)

Some of the best entries are arduous, blemish, breach, breathtaking, celibacy, corrode, deciduous, elegy, ephemeral, epilogue, fallible, fraught, hiatus, indelible, justice, kerfluffle, livid, love, macabre, peregrinations, placid, recant, rifle, sacrosanct, traverse, and yearning.

My favorites are livid (a gut-punch, seriously) and sacrosanct (absolutely beautiful).

When you finish reading the book, from A to Z, go back and read the entry for "epilogue" - what do you think it means?  What do you think he's writing?

Beauty and the Beast: 3D!!!!!

As I've said elsewhere, on various platforms, Disney's Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite movies.  Maybe because of the Ashman/Menken score, maybe because it's my favorite fairytale.  So when Disney put B&B back in theatres, I merrily went off to the movie theatre with Jackie and Mediazombie.

It was in 3D.  I didn't really care - I'd have gone if it were plain, old 2D - but it was good in some sections.  The "Be Our Guest" sequence did have some nice 3D effects, as well as "Kill the Beast."  Obvious new smoke effects stood out.  I was glad that Disney didn't recut the movie to insert any new sequences.  They could have - "Human Again" was originally written for the movie, taken out, used in the Broadway musical, then fully animated for the DVD release - but it was nice to watch the movie just like I did the first time.

Idea for marketing:  Sing-along showtimes?  We all commented that we wanted to sing all the songs.

Preview goodness:
1. The Pirates! Band of Misfits - completely dense, unfunny-looking ClayMation children's movie (and apparently changed now that some groups took offense to a leprosy joke - needless to say, the Wallace-and-Gromit crowd aren't old enough to know what leprosy is)
2. The Lorax - wan't my favorite Seuss book but nice to hear Danny DeVito again
3. Star Wars - fail
4. Brave - looks like so much fun, complete with Scots accents (and Billy Connolly!!  Kevin McKidd!!  Emma Thompson!!!  Kelly MacDonald!!); WANT to see this
5. Finding Nemo 3D - awww, cute!

In which I discover Instagram (and consequently love my iPhone a little more)

I finally downloaded the Instagram app to my iPhone.

First pic?

Yup.  Knitting (and a cute little project bag from Jennie G).

Stop SOPA/PIPA: Hit your email.

Go to Wikipedia (they are blacked-out today, January 18) to protest the SOPA/PIPA legistlation in the US), put your ZIP code in, and email your representatives.  Takes like two minutes.

EVERYONE NEEDS TO DO THIS!  DO IT NOW!

Iowa Nice

So it's Caucus time...bleah.  But in other Iowa news, remember that whole Stephen-Bloom-thinks-we're-all-stupid-hicks article he wrote?  UI President Sally Mason wrote an open letter and some of Bloom's colleagues wrote an article for the Gazette.  The ISU journalism director weighed in, too (Bloom just needs to start looking for another job - not go on Brian Williams and act like a condescending jerk and talk about how no one is "getting" his "satire" -  because, tenure or no, he's in hot water - I never met anyone who actually wanted him for a professor, even before this).  Here's another response (it drops the F-bomb, FYI).