Middle Of the Week, Huzzah!

Thanks to my fellow Flickr Fiction blogger, Chris, for this completely time-wasting exercise in aristocracy.

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Venerable Lady Tadmack the Deipnosophist of Westessexchestershire Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

Dearling, please hand me my diadem. Oh, wait. You want to know what a deipnosophist might be? You're not sure I am one? Tut, tut. The word deipnosophist is derived from Greek elements meaning 'meal' and 'wise man,' so we can assume it means someone wise in mealtime conversation...it could also just mean a gastronome, but if you spout it at a dinner party, I guarantee no one will ask you to which meaning you refer... everyone else will silently be trying to figure out if you've insulted them or not.

Meanwhile, why no, I am not a Deip·nos·o·phist n. (d ī p*n ŏ s" ō *f ĭ st) -- I am dreadful at dinner conversation, which is why I eat at my computer. But still - everyone needs to be the lord or lady of something... even if it's just rumors.

I am really loving the t-shirt of the week thing going on at ye olde Bookshelf. Like many others, I am not a fan of conjecture with regard to Hogwarths & Co... I don't even want to think about HP-Finis until Book 7 is in my sweaty little paws ... but it chortles me no end that you can get total strangers to argue with you about it just by having an opinion and a t-shirt. Yay for readers! When roused, we're such a scrappy, shirty lot.

I guess we writers are also rather scrappy. This week, Simon & Schuster's Sobol Prize was cancelled, due to a lot of people expressing patent disbelief that one should have to pay an $85 entry fee for a contest meant to reward agentless authors with a $100K book contract. The idea that after winning, one must also have a Sobol-picked agent also sort of guaranteed that S&S had a lock on the author, body and manuscript, which, in the sharply competitive business of publishing, didn't necessarily mean good things for the author. How smart is it to have an agent who is totally involved with one house? So, yay, writers. Way to save that $85 entry fee to spend on postage for your query letters and sample chapters instead of on yet another contest to potentially exploit people desperate to get fulfil their dream of getting published.

I remember cringing through my high school production of 12 Angry Men, which, in the interest of the myriad girls in my drama class was renamed 12 Angry Jurors. How horrified I would have been, had playwright Reginald Rose appeared in our musty high school auditorium with the ugly mottled green carpet and theater seating, to watch us struggle through what is supposed to be one of those marvelously critical studies on the human psyche in the face of stress and responsibility. Seeing me as an incoherent, raging Juror Number Five (sound and fury signifying... um... nothing much, I fear...) I think Mr. Rose might have decided never to write again...

Students in Birmingham, Alabama had a simillar experience (only their play was most excellent) when Harper Lee attended their high school adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.How cool is that!? Yay for the future writers and playwrights of Birmingham, Alabama, and for Ms. Lee, who was gracious enough to come out of her usually quiet life to honor the students with her presence and be honored in turn.

Philosophy isn't a subject that most young adults spend much time on, but UK author Lucy Eyre has an original take on the notions of Socrates and other philosophical greats that might make philosophy identifiable again as something other than a line of cosmetics. The book, If Minds Had Toes sounds both whimsical, silly and deep, and worth looking at as reading for the more clue-full young person in your life.

All right... back to work.
sigh.