Six Quotes from Bridget Jones's Diary

Some of my favorite quotes from Bridget Jones's Diary: A Novel
by Helen Fielding, in no particular order.
And I love the movie, too! :)

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as one part of your life starts looking up, another falls to pieces.

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As women glide from their twenties to thirties, Shazzer argues, the balance of power subtly shifts. Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian.

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“It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.”

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Resolution number one: Obviously will lose twenty pounds. Number two: Always put last night's panties in the laundry basket. Equally important, will find sensible boyfriend to go out with and not continue to form romantic attachments to any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobic's, peeping toms, megalomaniacs, emotional fuckwits or perverts. And especially will not fantasize about a particular person who embodies all these things”

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Being a woman is worse than being a farmer there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturised, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised.


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Oh God. valentine's Day tomorrow. Why? Why? Why is (the) entire world geared to make people not involved in romance feel stupid when everyone knows romance does not work anyway. Look at (the) royal family. Look at Mum and Dad.”

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Bookish Pics

SteamPunk Mini-Book from Saimba



Cozy Kid's Nook From ooh_food on Flickr

Book Club I Font from Bygg Studios


From The Magic Forest Tumblr












"Literary Devices" by Grant Snider

Professor Snape Tweets the Super Bowl

Professor Snape was being quite witty on Twitter about the Super Bowl Sunday, especially when the lights went out! And he picked a good game to watch, since Professor Snape surely has an affinity for the dark and moody Edgar Allen Poe, whose poem "The Raven" inspired the name of the winning team from Baltimore, Poe's hometown.

Cross-Posted at The Illuminated Dungeon

@_Snape_

Somebody just used a Deluminator at the Super Bowl. #lightsout

— Professor Snape (@_Snape_) February 4, 2013

Too bad Muggles can't just cast Lumos. #lightsout #TurnOnTheLights

— Professor Snape (@_Snape_) February 4, 2013

The Muggles haven't figured out that this stadium power outage was caused by wizards yet. #lightsout

— Professor Snape (@_Snape_) February 4, 2013

I was hoping that when the power outage ended a cage would descend & we'd learn the players had been reaped for The Hunger Games.

— Professor Snape (@_Snape_) February 4, 2013

I bet Baltimore will win but San Francisco will get the snitch.

— Professor Snape (@_Snape_) February 4, 2013

Congrats to Ravenclaw for winning the Super Bowl.

— Professor Snape (@_Snape_) February 4, 2013

Super Bowl? They had a Sirius Black out.

— Professor Snape (@_Snape_) February 4, 2013

Eat Like a Hobbit with Denny's Second Breakfast

For those of you who have seen "The Hobbit" several times and still crave more essence of Middle Earth, Denny's Restaurant chain has a new menu that allows you to raid Bilbo's pantry like the Dwarves in the movie.

from Huffington Post

For the record, that includes the Hobbit Hole Breakfast, Shire Sausage Skillet, Frodo’s Pot Roast Skillet, The Ring Burger, Gandalf’s Gobble Melt, Dwarves’ Turkey & Dressing Dinner, Lonely Mountain Treasure, Radagast’s Red Velvet Pancake Puppies, Bilbo’s Berry Smoothie and Lone-Lands Campfire Cookie Milk Shake.

Gandalf and Radagast Enjoy Second Breakfast


The ever-amusing Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central has tried the menu and reviewed this during his "Hobbit Week": "Eat like a Hobbit because at Denny's you can't eat like a human." LOL

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Reading Humor into Things

Poe Boy Via Pinterest




From Books Direct Tumblr  

From Random House Books, Via Pinterest

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From "The Best of Book Spine Poetry" via BookRiot





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From Grant Snider on Incidental Comics





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From SomeEcards

Rowling's New Middle-Class Characters are not Magical, but Monstrous

pic: happiness-in-a-box

J. K. Rowling is starting her publicity push as her new book The Casual Vacancy comes out on September 27, which is next Thursday.


The Casual Vacancy Hardcover from Amazon
The Casual Vacancy for Kindle on Amazon
The Casual Vacancy Audo Book on Amazon

Guardian UK has an in-depth article about Rowling's views on just about everything, including the book. I find it very interesting that a book about small-town politics is timed perfectly to coincide with the elections in the U.S. right now, where the vast majority of Rowling fans happen to live. No real surprise though, LOL.

Some excerpts:

Rowling: "Obviously I need to be in some form of vehicle to have a decent idea," she laughs. Having dreamed up Potter on a train, "This time I was on a plane. And I thought: local election! And I just knew. I had that totally physical response you get to an idea that you know will work. It's a rush of adrenaline, it's chemical. I had it with Harry Potter and I had it with this. So that's how I know."

. . . "I'm interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society," Rowling says. "We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it's quite a satisfying thing to do, isn't it?" But it requires obliviousness to the horrors suffered by a family such as the Weedons, and the book satirises the ignorance of elites who assume to know what's best for everyone else."

. . . "We're a phenomenally snobby society," Rowling nods, "and it's such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny." The book is so funny I was halfway through before noticing that every character is, to a varying degree, monstrous.

. . . Whodunnits are her literary guilty pleasure – "I love a good Dorothy L Sayers" – but then again, she doesn't really feel guilty about that: "There's no shame in a Dorothy." She hasn't read Fifty Shades Of Grey, "because I promised my editor I wouldn't." She doesn't look as if she feels she's missing out. "Not wildly," she agrees drily.

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Reporter Decca Aitkenhead: I am required to sign more legal documents than would typically be involved in buying a house before I am allowed to read The Casual Vacancy, under tight security in the London offices of Little, Brown. Even the publishers have been forbidden to read it, and they relinquish the manuscript gingerly, reverently, as though handling a priceless Ming vase. Afterwards, I am instructed never to disclose the address of Rowling's Edinburgh office where the interview will take place. The mere fact of the interview is deemed so newsworthy that Le Monde dispatches a reporter to investigate how it was secured. Its prospect begins to assume the mystique of an audience with Her Majesty – except, of course, that Rowling is famously much, much richer than the Queen.

. . . When I tell her I loved the book, her arms shoot up in celebration. "Oh my God! I'm so happy! That's so amazing to hear. Thank you so much! You've made me incredibly happy. Oh my God!" Anyone listening would take her for a debut author, meeting her first ever fan.

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J.K.Rowling on her personal life:

Rowling grew up near the Forest of Dean in a community not unlike Pagford. "And this was very much me vividly remembering what it was like to be a teenager, and it wasn't a particularly happy time in my life. In fact, you couldn't give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it."
Her mother, a school lab technician, was diagnosed with MS when Rowling was 15. "But it wasn't just that – although that did colour it a lot. I just don't think I was very good at being young."

. . . fame has had its upsides; meeting Barack Obama and the legendary Democrat speechwriter Bob Shrum were the two greatest starstruck moments of her life.

. . . Having always longed to be a writer, she now found herself in charge of a business empire stretching all the way to Hollywood, as the Harry Potter films began smashing box office records. "And it's a real bore. Should I be more diplomatic? Oh, I don't care. No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing. That sounds hideously ungrateful because it's made me an awful lot of money, and I'm very grateful for that. But it's not something that interests me, and there have been lots of opportunities to do things that make more money, and I've said no."

Hmmm . . . I'll be glad to take some money and power off her hands so she can have more time to write. LOL

But what about the book? If you don't wish to see SPOILERS then skip the following excerpt from Decca Aitkenhead's synopsis:

The pompous chairman assumes the seat will go to his son, a solicitor. Pitted against him are a bitterly cold GP and a deputy headmaster crippled by irreconcilable ambivalence towards his son, an unnervingly self-possessed adolescent whose subversion takes the unusual but highly effective form of telling the truth. His preoccupation with "authenticity" develops into a fascination with the Fields and its most notorious family, the Weedons.

Terri Weedon is a prostitute, junkie and lifelong casualty of chilling abuse, struggling to stay clean to stop social services taking her three-year-old son, Robbie, into care. But methadone is a precarious substitute for heroin, and most of what passes for mothering falls to her teenage daughter, Krystal. Spirited and volatile, Krystal has known only one adult ally in her life – Barry – and his sudden death casts her dangerously adrift. When anonymous messages begin appearing on the parish council website, exposing villagers' secrets, Pagford unravels into a panic of paranoia, rage and tragedy.

Pagford will be appallingly recognisable to anyone who has ever lived in a West Country village, but its clever comedy can also be read as a parable about national politics.

Shirley Jackson: Life Among the Savages

One of my favorite books while growing up was Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson, a chronicle of an unusual mother raising four boisterous children in a decrepit house in rural Vermont. Since the book is so humorous, I didn't realize that the author also wrote horror stories until I was in high school and read "The Lottery," which is Jackson's most famous story about a small town that turns against someone in a brutal and shocking way.

 According to the Bennington, Vermont, Village Website:

On a bright spring morning in 1948, she walked down the Prospect hill with a baby stroller for a round of village errands. An hour or so later, Shirley Jackson pushed the stroller up the hill with newspapers, the mail, groceries -- and a story in mind. Once home, she set her toddler into the playpen and wrote "The Lottery" in less than two hours. It was posted to her agent that evening, and published in The New Yorker three weeks later (June 28, 1948).
The story created an immediate uproar. "The Lottery" describes a communal rite in a tidy Yankee village quite like the author's own. As generations of readers were shocked to learn, community order in the fictional village is nourished by solstice blood. The New Yorker's inbox was filled with complaints and subscription cancellations. Shirley Jackson became a national sensation.

Jackson is also known for her creepy novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived at the Castle, so it probably comes as a surprise to some readers that she had a very domesticated life as an eccentric stay-at-home mother married to a snarky college professor.


In Life Among the Savages, and again in the sequel, Raising Demons, the voice is not that of the perfect mother stereotype of the 50s and 60s - her children and critics alike agree on that point. According to her biography Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer, which I highly recommend, Shirley drank every afternoon, often lost track of just where her children were, and was surely not the world's best housekeeper - but then she never claimed to be. In some ways she reminds me of Betty Draper from Mad Men, classically educated and intelligent, leaning towards plump after childbearing, definitely living in the over-sized gothic house. But unlike the rather shallow and perfectly coiffed Betty, as well as the Donna Reeds and Mary Tyler Moores depicted on TV at that time as motherly stereotypes, Shirley Jackson was nearly the only woman at that time in Bennington Vermont who also had a job that paid money. She was a writer. And she was a famous writer of unusual talent - the Stephen King of her day. Yes she made tuna casserole, sorted socks and cleaned out drawers, but then she would sit down at a typewriter, light a cigarette, and write amazing stories for the Saturday Evening Post and Harper's.


Pages from Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer
About one thing there's no doubt: Shirley Jackson enjoyed the hell out of being a mother, and she was rather ahead of her time in writing down exactly what her children were saying and doing, no matter how odd or unnerving that was. She wasn't afraid of being honest, so her dialogue is timeless, and that makes these stories of family life refreshing even today.

...Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books.

...There was a door to an attic that preferred to stay latched and would latch itself no matter who was inside; there was another door which hung by custom slightly ajar, although it would close good-humouredly for a time when some special reason required it. We had five attics, we discovered, built into and upon and next to one another; one of them kept bats and we shut that one up completely; another, light and cheerful in spite of its one small window, liked to be a place of traffic and became, without any decision of ours, a place to store things temporarily, things that were moved regularly, like sledges and snow shovels and garden rakes and hammocks. The basement had an old clothes-line hung across it, and after the line I put up in the backyard had fallen down for the third time I resigned myself and put up a new line in the basement, and clothes dried there quickly and freshly.

...From the girl's room, small voices rose in song and I listened happily, thinking how pleasant it was to hear a brother and two sisters playing affectionately together; then, suddenly, the words of the song penetrated into my hot mind, and I was out of bed in one leap and racing down the hall. "Baby ate a spider, Baby ate a spider," was what they were singing.

...Sometimes in my capacity as mother, I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children, little individual creatures moving solidly along in their own paths and yet in some mysterious manner vividly reminiscent of a past which my husband and I know we have never communicated to them; I remember the little shock of familiarity I felt when I first saw Jannie skip down the front walk, and the sense of lost years slipping past, unrealized, when Laurie came home chanting "O-U-T spells out, and out you go, down to the bottom of the deep blue sea, with a dirty dishrag turned inside out" . . .

A New Fantasy Series: Castle Crabapple

My good friend Colette Bezio, who is a librarian, writer, humorist, and illustrator extraordinaire, has just published Book One in her Castle Crabapple series.  Congratulations and I wish her great success!

Amazon Link: The Witches of Castle Crabapple (Volume 1)

Sample Chapters, Color Pages, and More Here


Also please Like the Facebook Page and follow her on Blogger

From CreateSpace

Who will be the next Princess of Crabapple Valley? Miggin is sweet but clueless. Druzilla is brave, brilliant, arrogant and nasty. Will they really Influence each other, as the queen hopes, or will they tear each other and the kingdom apart? The potential princesses slug it out with magic and mud as the servants rampage, monsters run amok, and the very castle trembles.

The Witches of Castle Crabapple is a light, comic fantasy and the first in a new series, suitable for middle grades and up. Fans of Patricia C. Wrede's 'Calling on Dragons' series, Eva Ibbotson's children's books, and the Harry Potter series should enjoy a visit to Crabapple Valley, where the witches wreak havoc, magic is only a rhyme away, and the swineherds are all certain to marry princesses.

About the author:
Colette Bezio lives in Wisconsin where she works at the Muehl Public Library in Seymour. She has worked as a freelance comic strip writer for King Features Syndicate, and her writings and illustrations have appeared in many publications.

Edward Gorey Exhibit at Columbia University

Andrew Alpern has been collecting Edward Gorey's books, artwork, and other "ephemera" for 40 years, and he was a friend of the writer. Now he has donated 700 items to Columbia University where they are staging a show to honor Gorey.

From the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library: Gorey Preserved

Kempner Gallery
March 5 - July 27, 2012

The Rare Book and Manuscript Library presents a major exhibition of works by the idiosyncratic illustrator, designer, and writer, Edward Gorey (1925-2000). The exhibition draws from the large and important collection of Gorey's works donated to the Columbia University Libraries by noted architectural historian Andrew Alpern in 2010.



The extensive collection, which contains over 700 items, includes nearly every edition of every work published by Gorey, in addition to illustrations for dust jackets and magazines, etchings, posters, and design ephemera. By any measure, this is a major gathering of Gorey's work.

The exhibition also includes original, limited edition etchings, posters, books written and illustrated by Gorey, books written by others but illustrated by Gorey, books whose cover art was created by Gorey, foreign translations of Gorey books, postcards and Christmas cards, theater-related materials, Dracula-related materials, LP record jackets and CD cover art, Metropolitan Opera and New York City Ballet-related items, various stuffed creatures, photographs of Gorey, and a fur parka that he owned.

During the panel discussion, Alpern also contributed some of his memories to fill out Gorey’s personal side. He described Gorey’s effortless and encyclopedic knowledge of books and movies, his “low-key” charm, and his distinctive fashion (fur coat, scarf, big beard, high-top sneakers). He remembered a particular visit to Gorey’s home in Cape Cod when they drove around in Gorey’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle with the license plate that read OGDRED—from another pseudonym, Ogdred Weary.



Alpern took issue with several obituaries of that described Gorey as “macabre”; while some of Gorey’s art was dark, he said, the man was anything but. Alpern remembered him this way: “Friendly, outgoing, often outrageous, enthusiastic, with a voice that soared and swooped all over the octaves, and expressive hands and fingers that reinforced his words with elaborate gestures, and heavy, clanking rings. Edward was nothing if not instantly noticeable, with a distinctively odd appearance, and equally odd attitudes and ideas: perhaps the quintessential New Yorker in that regard.”