MOMMY, TELL ME A STORY

Blog number 105                                               July 26, 2007
I am into titles of movies or books and poignant or poetic first sentences of stories.  I simply love them. 

That last sentence reads like that because I have just put down a novel concerning a sixty year old English woman and she talks like this. 

Many, many years ago, while reading "Shogun," sitting on a park bench in my beloved Sacramento, I suddenly realized that I was thinking as if I was a character in that book.  I have since found that without fail, I always do that.  Horrible sentence, that last one.  But what's a Mother to do?

Anyhow, back to titles and first sentences.  What made me think of this is that while in Barnes and Nobles a few days ago, going to the loo, I passed a shelve of books, one of which had the title, "The Nymphos of Castle Rock."  What a phrase.  Brings up all kinds of visions, doesn't it?  Does the title infer that in the Western desert town of Castle Rock, there inhabits a bevy of nymphos?  Or is it that there are only five nymphos (three wouldn't work as well). And the story is about their lives?  Or are there only two and the story is about their trials and tribulations as they try to cope with what is mainly a masculine trait? 

I had a dear neighbor once tell me that women enjoy sex just as much as men do.  I didn't say anything, but I thought, "Well..., NO!"

Curious thing.  While spell checking, my computer wanted me to capitalize "nymphos."  It doesn't give me a chance to teach the spell checker to spell it the way I want to.  So I overruled it.  Hope I'm right.

"Shogun" was fun to read, but right in the middle, before the terrific end, the protagonist goes through a love thing.  Totally unnecessary and distracting.  In fact, Kavi - my AKA second son, once told me that he didn't finish Shogun because they started getting all lovey dovey.  I told him it gets through that, to just pass it by without reading it, but I don't think he ever did.

And this reminds me of a great novel concerning the Vietnam war that had a political message every other chapter, without fail.  "The Thirteenth Valley." 

The main story was engrossing.  The political stuff was like being in a political science class room listing to a droning teacher on a warm spring day.  I finished that book by not even looking at every other chapter and I missed nothing. 

Same thing happens with the Jane Roberts' Seth books.  When Seth is writing, the information is fascinating and straight forward, but when Jane is writing, it comes through like nonsense.  Uninformative and nonsequitur.  Fortunately, when Jane is writing, it is in italics, so it is rather easy to just skip over those parts even though occasionally it looks like you may be losing something.  But don't worry, you never are.

It used to be when I was young, all movies had what was then called. "the obligatory love scene."  They were totally unnecessary and boring.  We all knew they were in there to attract women to the movie, or rather because movie producers thought women so shallow as not to find the plot interesting, so they thought a love scene would satisfy them. 

Nowadays we have the obligatory sex scene, which doesn't advance any plot in any way, but still, every movie must have them.  For the same reason we used to have love scenes.

I once saw a movie starring Frank Sinatra about a war going on in an Asian country.  First he would fight ferociously and then on the weekend, he would be with his lover in a hotel away from the fighting.  Time!

I was watching a boxing match on the telly one afternoon and as an experiment they put microphones on the referee.  At one time, one of the fighters put his gloved hand over his right eye and turned sideways, saying, "Time out.  Time out."  The other fighter actually backed away, but the ref said, "There is no time out." 

I guess that when in sparring, they can do that.  The fact that the other boxer responded to it shows that it is pretty ingrained.