Though I think it means the same thing.
Then I segued into Narcos, about Pablo Escobar and the drug cartel, which was more challenging because it uses so much Spanish that I had to study the subtitles. I knew I was in trouble when I typed federales into my last manuscript.
And Netflix can scratch whatever itch you have. Like in my case, I’m still in mourning over Downton Abbey, so I discovered The Crown, which features some of the most gorgeous interiors on the entire planet.
Let me just say, Buckingham Palace beats Downton Abbey, hands down.
Watch two minutes of the show, and you will get three hundred decorating ideas, none of which you can afford, including the fresh-cut flowers.
Just go with Edible Arrangements.
I wonder if the Royal Family has one of those in the kitchen and I bet they’re avoiding those weird cherries, like the rest of us. You know, the ones that stain the pineapple a nice carcinogenic red.
And of course, the binge-watching thing is its own reward, and if you work eight or nine hours at a stretch, like I do, you will cover the entirety of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, which is ninety years in ten episodes.
It’s like dog years.
So Netflix is getting me through my final draft and the postelection season.
And at night, I read before bed, instead of watching the TV news or checking out social media.
A real book, instead of Facebook.
And you know what?
I’m happier and healthier.
Isn’t that what life is all about?
The End.
Like a Rolling Book
Lisa
Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Yay?
I’m of two minds about this, which is so Dylan of me.
My initial reaction was sheer delight because I’m a huge Dylan fan.
In fact I have a major crush on him.
I have almost all of his albums and I read four books about him, including the one he wrote about himself. When I first heard that he had won, I fired off a tweet that said something like, “I’m so happy that Dylan won, all of the arts are connected!”
I know, right?
I was stating an essential truth of pageant-level depth.
Welcome to Twitter.
I do believe that all of the arts are connected, and his lyrics are poetry, and poetry is certainly literature, and the thighbone is connected to the leg bone.
Ipso facto, Dylan gets the Nobel Prize.
If you follow.
And you know how fans are. Fans get happy when their team wins. Even if it happens because of a bad call, a fluke, or just sheer good luck.
We call that winning ugly.
But it’s still winning.
And we love to win!
Go, Dylan, go!
But after the initial excitement subsided, I started to wonder if this was a good thing. I saw the reaction online from fellow authors, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and people who love books in general. And I began to think it was a shame not to award the prize for literature to a wonderful author, rumored favorites like Philip Roth or Margaret Atwood.
In college, I took a yearlong course with Philip Roth, and he’s a brilliant author who made me look at literature in a whole new way.
Didn’t he deserve that prize?
Yes.
Because he gave me an A.
Plus many readers, including myself, like to buy prize-winning books, and it’s helpful to guide people to quality books. But now that opportunity is missed.
The Nobel Committee says they gave Dylan the prize for “having created new poetic expressions within the Great American song tradition.”
But maybe it’s too smart by half to award a prize in literature to songs, even a body of remarkable songs.
Songs are wonderful, but they’re not novels.
I know this because I’ve written thirty novels, and they are each about a hundred thousand words long.
And they don’t sound like anything unless you read them out loud.
You can’t hum them like Mamma Mia.
Or stop humming them like Mamma Mia.
Previous winners of the Noble Prize for Literature have been Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I don’t know if any of those guys can sing.
But honestly, neither can Dylan.
The Nobel was established by the will of Alfred Nobel, and it awards prizes for Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Economic Sciences, and Peace.
More STEM-heavy than I had realized.
You know what’s conspicuously absent?
Music. Songs.
So what does that say about Nobel’s intent in his will?
What would he, the inventor of dynamite, have wanted?
To explode the literary world?
So I started to wonder if my initial reaction had been because of my crush.
Dylan didn’t say anything for several weeks after the announcement was made that he’d won this incredibly prestigious prize. The Nobel Committee tried to contact him, but was unable to, and when reporters asked him about that at a concert in Oklahoma, he answered, “Well, here I am.”
Maybe the Committee couldn’t get concert tickets?
And then, when he was asked if he would go to the award ceremony, he answered, “Absolutely, if at all possible.”
Now he’s starting to sound like my ex-husbands, Thing One and Thing Two.
I searched in vain to see if Dylan simply said, thank you.
No.
Oops.
And no word from him on the million-dollar prize, either whether he will accept it, donate it, or use it to mix up the medicine with Johnny in the basement.
But I figured out a surprise ending, a way for everyone to come out of this perfectly.
Dylan should have been given the Nobel Prize for Peace.
He has written and performed so many antiwar songs that they defined more than one generation, and his music really does build empathy worldwide and unite the entire globe.
Not a bad idea, huh?
Bob, call me.
Sniff Test
Francesca
Every woman has one department at the shopping mall that calls to them, nay, sings to them, like a choir of angels, radiating a warm, golden light from the top of the escalator.
For me, it’s fragrance.
I’m hypnotized by those glittering little bottles on glass countertops, each one with a secret inside, winking at me from across the room.
I’ve always loved perfume, ever since I was a little girl, when the crystal bottles on my mother’s dresser seemed like magical potions.
And whenever I smelled them on her, I knew she was going somewhere glamorous, mysterious, and as-yet-off-limits to me.
Douleur exquise!
Now that I am grown-up, perfumes are the closest thing I have to fairy godmothers. Scents have the power to turn me, a regular girl in dog-hair-covered yoga pants, into whatever sort of woman I want to be.
Bibbity-bobbity-spritz!
I’ve accumulated a lovely perfume collection of my own, but there’s always more to be explored. And the best thing about the fragrance department can be summed up in one word:
Testers.
Makeup departments have testers, but often you twist up the lipstick to find its head all deformed and tacky, maybe a stray piece of lint stuck to it, and you have to ask yourself: