J. Beaman - The Magazine

I fucking loved A Million Little Pieces. It was overwrought, bloated and hyper-sincere but it was also cool and dark and heartbreaking at times. Really, I just ate that shit up. There’s a great interview with him in Vanity Fair about the soap opera/reality TV show of his last few years. I’m totally buying his new book. I like liars. I like Norman Mailer. Check this:

Mailer stood and introduced himself: “So, you’re the guy that caused all these problems. I wish I’d known you at the time that the problems began. If you would have called me, I would have explained to you how to get through all this mess!” They sat down on the couch and talked about memoirs, a genre, Mailer said, that was by definition corrupt: “That’s why a writer writes his memoir, to tell a lie and create an ideal self. Everything I’ve ever written is memoir, you know, is an inflated vision of the ideal Platonic self.”

An inflated vision. I am an inflated vision. It makes me want to write a memoir and make a ton of shit up go on Oprah and be humiliated. And, on the subject of Oprah, she does not come across well in this piece. At least from Frey’s perspective, which is suspect, but it doesn’t surprise me that she can be kind of a bitch. And that she was angry, not because she felt betrayed personally, but because she felt like Frey damaged her brand. I’m inferring most of that. Making shit up. Nothing on this website is true. Nothing.His new book, Bright Shiny Morning, may be forgettable but I think Frey isn’t forgettable. And is worth reading. From the Vanity Fair Piece:

Bright Shiny Morning is a sprawling, ambitious novel about Los Angeles, written with all the broad-stroke energy that was so irresistible to readers in A Million Little Pieces. By turns satirical, tense, and surprisingly touching, it is a portrait of a city onto which so many millions have projected so many dreams.

According to Wiktionary the first sited usage:

• 1950: Beverly Cleary, Henry Huggins, p21

  “Whatcha got in that bag?” asked Scooter.

  “None of your beeswax,” answered Henry.

And I wanted to stop there. Why? Because Beverly Cleary is the awesomest ever! Just ask Sarah. But it seems, as it often does, that usage trails back further. Some goofy earthlink website dates it to the 20’s stating, “The twenties were the first decade to emphasize youth culture over the older generations, and the flapper sub-culture had a tremendous influence on main stream America.” Makes sense, but not the most reliable looking site.

And, upon further research, it seems that according to Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Catch Phrases: British and American from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day, it was originally in the broadway musical No, No Nanette. From Wikipedia “…a musical comedy with lyrics by Irving Caesar and Otto Harbach, music by Vincent Youmans, and a book by Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel.”

So, Beverly Cleary didn’t invent beeswax but she certainly invented Beezus and Ramona, who are simply the greatest heroines in all of literature.

Thank you for coming.

Update: That janky earthlink website actually stole all of those definitions from the Antique Automobile Club of America’s website. Heh.

The term ampersand, as Geoffrey Glaister writes in his “Glossary of the Book,” is a corruption of and (&) per se and, which literally means “(the character) & by itself (is the word) and.”

The symbol & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin word for “and.”One of the first examples of an ampersand appears on a piece of papyrus from about 45 A.D. Written in the style of early Roman capital cursive (typical of the handwriting of the time), it shows the ligature ET. A sample of Pompeian graffiti from 79 A.D. (fig. 1) also shows a combination of the capitals E and T, and is again written in early Roman script.

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