PAULA WHYMAN

Just in time for the back-to-school rush, this authentic outgoing answering machine message from a school in Australia. Telling it like it is.


Hard to imagine this is real, I know. But...fun to think it might be.

Take a listen to this fabulous interview with author A.S. Byatt by Charlotte Higgins at The Guardian. Byatt is one of my favorite writers (you're beginning to think I have too many "favorites," but when one considers the vast number of published authors, really, my list still seems insignificant). In this interview, she touches on everything from how difficult it must be to grow up the child of a children's book author ("children's writers want to prolong their own childhood") to the difficulty with defining one's identity in the absence of a religious framework.

It's her discussion of the latter that I find most intriguing. She refers primarily to Western society when she says that the map of the world provided by religion is gone--that religion itself has "gone away," leaving only an interest in "ourselves." She talks about the various frames for trying to understand ourselves--how to work out identity--and finally identifies the "blogosphere" as the place where people are attempting self-definition. She says that everyone needs a mirror to "tell you who you are"--and that we are finding that mirror on Facebook. According to Byatt, Facebook has, in that sense, replaced God.

If we do look to Byatt's "blogosphere" for self-definition, that presents an interesting problem. Because the identity people construct, their online "persona," is just that: a construct. A fiction. Is that the primary mirror through which you see yourself, this fiction you've created?

For the sake of argument, how is this different from any other locus of self-definition? Isn't any self you put forward a fiction, exclusive and exclusionary, by definition? Shaped by you, both consciously and unconsciously?

I would think that, more than any other medium, the web's sheer pervasiveness, and the possibility of spending so much of one's time and "relationship" energy there, could make it the overwhelming source of one's self-definition.

I'm obviously not a scholar of philosophy, and I'm not a psychologist, I only play one on TV. But if Facebook (etc.) really is where we locate our primary sense of self, that seems dangerously reductive and illusory.

Byatt thinks someone should write a book about it. I think she's right.

In this enlightening interview with novelist David Mitchell at The Rumpus, Mitchell is asked about the sheer variety of his work. He tells interviewer Alec Michod that writers are like duck-billed platypuses "and critics are taxonomists, and to us duck-billed platypuses the question of whether we should be considered as an egg-laying mammal or what is a pointless exercise... A novelist’s job is to write a novel, not worry about how it fits into one’s oeuvre..."

I've always wondered what to call myself: fiction writer? humor writer? food/travel/grocery list writer? At some point, I settled on..."writer." But now I'm thinking duck-billed platypus might be a more descriptive label.

Mitchell comments on maturing over time as a writer: "...the older you get the more familiar you become with your own ignorance. Your writing, hopefully, has more spontaneity and verve as you age. Now it can take painstaking weeks...to excrete a single sentence. It can be like having a hemorrhage, but one hopes the quality is superior the greater the excretion."

Mitchell's hemorrhages are a good deal better quality than most. His latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His earlier acclaimed novel, Cloud Atlas, was shortlisted in 2004.

Introducing the Krispy Kreme Cheeseburger

The Machine Shed, a Wisconsin restaurant, expected to sell about 3,500 Krispy Kreme cheeseburgers in three days during the Wisconsin state fair. About a quarter of the customers have been paying an extra buck to add chocolate-covered bacon to this sandwich, which consists of exactly what it sounds like: A cheeseburger served on a Krispy Kreme donut instead of a bun. There are other things it sounds like, but we are too polite to say.

Lazy blogging today, as I'm freshly back from vacation and not-so-freshly overwhelmed with minutiae, as well as, let's see, what's the word for lots of stuff that's actually not minutiae? Plus there is a pile of school forms sitting on my desk already...and two lists of school supplies and, how did this happen?? no camp this week or next? (What was I thinking?)

Anyway...seeing as how I'm blogging about the suburbs (at Semi-Charmed Life) and mocking it...gently...(at Bethesda World News), I thought I'd provide a few songs from my own personal suburban playlist for your listening pleasure.

Here, to start, Ben Folds says it all:

Ben Folds, Rocking the Suburbs

Next, since my draft novel is set in 1980, I'm going to prescribe some Foreigner to help you capture the suburban "white-boy" faux-angst that Folds is talking about, but 1980-style. I suggest Double Vision and Hot-Blooded.

When you've worked yourself into a self-righteous froth, you're going to need to spend some of that energy, and what better way than with a little Eddie Van Halen air guitar: Try Running With the Devil and Jamie's Crying.

And now that you've perfected your Eddie guitar-face, you'll need a Van Halen antidote to bring you back down. I recommend Van Halen, by Nerf Herder.

That should do it for now.

Next time: Fleetwood Mac with a Violent Femmes chaser...

Beginning today, I'm writing a weekly humor blog for Bethesda Magazine's all-new destination website. My column, The Semi-Charmed Life: Surviving at the Center of the Universe will focus on the absurdities of life in the suburbs, especially in Bethesda and the DC area. Which basically means, a blog about anything.

The first installment is called, "In Which I Carry an Illegal Substance onto School Grounds."

If you click on the "about" link on that blog page, in addition to a picture of me sitting on a lawn mower that doesn't belong to me (thank you, Tim and Diana), you'll find a link to Bethesda World News. Bethesda World News is the new online parody newspaper I created, which I'm editing along with a band of rebel writers whose names have been changed to put all the blame on me. More on that another time.

So, stop in, take your shoes off, set a spell. But first make sure you've had a recent pedicure.

I'm a latecomer to James Salter's work, having just recently read and been bowled over by his novel, A Sport and a Pastime. It was published in 1967, and I expected it to seem quaint and dated. In short, it's not. Its exploration of a love affair between an American man and a French girl is probably the best narrative of "good" sex that I've read. Because face it, most of the sex one finds in novels these days is "bad" sex. You know the difference; I don't need to explain that. And when there is good sex (particularly if it's at all explicit), it's often badly written to the point of being cringe-inducing--even by the best writers. So...I humbly suggest Salter's book as a primer for those who are preparing to attempt a scene of that kind in their own fiction.

A volume of Salter's correspondence with longtime friend Robert Phelps, Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps, edited by John McIntyre, will be out this month from Counterpoint Press. Although I don't read literary correspondence all that often, what I've seen so far of these letters has led me to believe I'm missing out. In addition to which this kind of exchange may soon become a relic.

Robert Phelps, a fiction writer, literary biographer, and writing professor, sent an adoring letter to Salter after reading A Sport and a Pastime, and so began an affair of friendship that lasted until Phelps' death. Excerpts from the letters have appeared in The American Scholar.

In their letters, the two men commiserate about everything from travel to bad reviews. (On reviewers, Salter reminds Phelps that "they are not the only readers, they are the paid readers." Something to keep in mind.)

What interests me most are their references to the creative process. Richard Ford is quoted in The American Scholar as saying that Salter "writes American sentences better than anybody writing today." In which case, it's gratifying to know that writers like Salter can have days like the rest of us:

"I'm still at work, disheartened, on the final chapter of my book...It still eludes me...Somewhere in all that boring clay is the shape I'm looking for." Later, he describes a play he's working on: "I don't know anything about it yet except there are parts I don't detest."

I think I can get on board for that, writing a passage that I don't detest.

Phelps says that if every writer has his given form..."I sometimes think mine is the footnote....I think I am an annotator. The story exists for the scribbled notes in the margin."

Salter, on the other hand, loves "the infinities, the endlessness..." He will clearly always find something new to say, or a new way of saying it. "We must consume whole worlds to write a single sentence and yet we never use up a part of what is available."

I can't help being struck by the likelihood that this type of relationship may never again be immortalized and made public this way. Unless of course you're a person who saves emails (intentionally--not just to avoid cleaning out the inbox), and (even less likely) you're corresponding with a person who writes emails that are worth saving.

For further insight and reflections on Robert Phelps, see this essay, written by Derek Alger, a long-time student of his and editor of Pif, the online literary magazine.

It's not often that one has a chance to witness the moment where a neurosis is likely to be born. I wish I hadn't overheard this, but I did, in the ladies' room at the good Greek breakfast joint.

In the stall, mother talking to 3-year-old son. (I know he's 3, I don't even have to see him.)--

Mother: Want to go to Target next? And get a new backpack for school?

Boy: I don't want Thomas.

Mother: Thomas the Tank Engine? You don't have to get Thomas. We can find another character...

Boy: I want Dora.

Mother: Dora the Explorer?

Boy: Yes. I want Dora.

Mother: Dora's a girl. That's for girls. We'll find something good for you.

Boy: I want Dora.

Mother: Silly, Dora's for girls.

Boy: I'm a girl.

Mother: No [laughs], your sister's a girl. You're a boy. You can have Diego. Dora's for girls.

Boy: I want Dora the Explorer.

Mother: [exasperated sigh] Well, let's tell everyone in the bathroom about it...

Me: [writing it all down...]

Note to the mother: I hope you're setting aside money for the therapy fund along with the college fund.