Occasional showers and thunderstorms...

That 's the weather forecast for today. It's dark(ish) and smells like rain. I am finding it very difficult to stay awake, let alone focus on anything work-related. We're also going to have to re-air last week's Zorba Paster because whoever it is that posts it to the download site didn't post the whole show so when I tried to download it I got the first 60 seconds... we're going to get calls. At this point they can all bite me. If I didn't run last week's show they'd get an hour of silence and then they'd really be upset... Dream Engineer has informed me that my lovely boss has actually ordered the part that we're missing (finally) and the computer that changes the channels will be fixed soon. Like most broadcast stations we have some programs that are live from the satellite and some that are recorded and aired later. It's sort of like if you have TiVo - some shows you watch and some you tape and air later. Since the most recent lightning strike the "TiVo" part has been broken and I've been downloading all of our shows from a website designed just for that. The problem is, of course, it takes a lot more of my time this way, and the people who post the shows don't always double-check. Oh, and the "TiVo" part is also what keeps our clocks synched to NPR so with the drifting of time we're running about 5 seconds behind. 5 seconds isn't a lot of time if you're, say, in line at the grocery store or underwater or something but if your whole goal is to sound like you're on par with NPR it's usually a good plan to make sure your clocks match.

Just a few more days.

I've been trying to read more of Mockingbird, and I think I know what my snotty little problem is with it... I don't (generally) like biographies. I think they read as though they have not been edited. If you're writing a novel and you try to cram as much unnecessary information in one paragraph as most biographers try to do your editor has a fit and bloodies your copy with his little red pen. Writing should have clean lines. I don't think that every writer can be (or should be) as clean as Hemingway, but ok, read this:

"A.C. Lee's reason for moving his wife and newborn child, Alice, less than two years old, from Bonifay, Florida, to Monroeville was that he was now financial manager for the law firm Bugg & Barnett, handling their majority interests in the M&R" (38).

A couple of things... find something (anything) other than six commas to punctuate that sentence. If all you can do is use a comma, don't write complicated sentences. Also, either the child is a newborn or she's less than two years old. Both descriptors are unnecessary and imply very different things. Moving a couple of states away (even that long ago) with a three month old is a very different thing than moving with an eighteen month old. And if that's not the most important thing then don't describe it twice! Just say Alice. And contextually the sentence is clunky.

I'm just being a snob, right? I'm being too picky? It's just that I start to get into the narrative and then I get banged in the head by the writing and it's pissing me off! And I, frankly, don't care - even in the context of a biography (which I don't generally like anyway) - about most of the stuff that happened before she was born. I don't even really care all that much about the fact that my parents moved to Oklahoma and then back between their wedding and the time I was born. And Harper Lee' s father was (reportedly) quite unconcerned with their family origins - something that is apparently rare in the south - so why do we care? Where was the editor??

To Kill a Mockingbird is a really beautifully written book. I have never published anything, let alone anything as beautiful as that book. Reading this biography, and knowing that Harper Lee is not someone who grants interviews or is interested in anyone knowing anything about her makes me really sad for her. I imagine her reading the advance copy he sent and being sort of pissed off about it. I'm sure that factually it all holds up - as well as any segmented story that has to be pieced together can - but if you could write as well as Harper Lee wouldn't it piss you off if someone wrote about you and it was clunky? Even if it was fine by biography standards, wouldn't you want it to be better somehow?

I should be nicer. The author was in town and the nice women at the bookstore got him to sign a copy for me even though I wasn't there for the reading. On the other hand, part of the reason I was called on to lead these discussions is because I can't read a book without being a little critical.