Tad Williams

Babies full of rabies!
(Tad greeting the dogs.)

My love, you take my breath away.
What have you stepped in to smell this way?

I thieved the above from an email Melanie Rawn sent me, containing several extremely funny anti-Valentines:

But it’s pertinent…

I’ve been thinking about regrets (see the Tom Perrotta quote I posted last blog-entry.) I have almost no regrets, on account of, I was born thinking, Grab as much of it as you can! (Experience, not doughnuts.) As a child I was obsessed by the idea of caddis flies—they’re the larval form of dragon flies, and they live for years in the mud (as opposed to the adults having mere days or maybe weeks in the air) and they create themselves, or their outer casings, anyway, by sticking stones and twigs and all manner of what-not to themselves. I mean, this haunted my mind for years. It gave me a model to live by.

Since I therefore grabbed at every little piece of anything that came my way, and stuck it on me, I’ve never not lived life as fully as I could. And that’s why I have almost no regrets, I mean, in terms of actually doing the business of living, I just pounded the hell out of that sucker (that’s a Tad way of saying things.)

So, my mistakes are me and I have no regrets. Except for this:

Cigarettes, because although I LOVED smoking, it really is (she says quietly and shamefacedly) evil…

Times when I was horrible to people. I remember so many of them, they’re their own karmic burden. (I feel shame, not guilt. There’s an interesting distinction.)

And being a cow to my sister Tracie when I was a kid.

If I had a chance to choose between these things and fix ‘em in my life, there’s no competition. I’d live with shame, cigarettes and a foreshortened life any day, if only I could put right being an evil big sister. Because I was. And that’s my only true regret.

Never thought I’d be writing that about the Apple guru, but here’s the proof, from Publisher’s Lunch:

For everyone hatching secret hopes of Apple making a big play for putting books onto iPhones and iPods, among Steve Jobs' remarks in an NYT interview was this: "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product [the Kindle] is, the fact is that people don't read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."

What’s the matter, Steve, market not big enough for you? Or, as Madonna once said to Letterman: "The money's gotten to you."

Stupid Quote Of The Week # 2

“They tell me that not everything is black and white, I say why the hell not?”
John Wayne

Brilliant Quote Of The Decade:

“I’ve made a few mistakes in my life,” Ruth began. “Some of them have involved sex, and at least a couple have been pretty big….

“It would be all too easy to pick one of these errors and tell you what I should have done differently, and how much better my life would be if I’d been mature and responsible enough not to have made it. But I’m not sure I believe that. I think it would be more accurate to say that we are our mistakes, or at least that they’re an essential part of our identities. When we disavow our mistakes, aren’t we also disavowing ourselves, saying that we wish we were someone else?

I’ve been reading Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher. I wanted to worship his bootlaces after Little Children, which is one of my all-time favorite novels. The Abstinence Teacher is also extremely fine, although a bit literary for my tastes, by which I mean the narrative tension gets a bit flabby in places and the plot meanders here and there. But I could not stop thinking about the quote above for weeks – it gave me one of those rare, lucid moments when you suddenly see something entirely differently.