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The Midlife Second Wife ™

~ The Real and True Adventures of Remarriage at Life's Midpoint

The Midlife Second Wife ™

Category Archives: The Reading Life

Want to be a Renegade? Enter to Win this Free Book!

26 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Special Events, The Reading Life, What's the Buzz?

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Amy Jo Martin, DigitalRoyalty, Social Media

Be the Queen (or King) of all the social media you survey with this handy book. SPOILER ALERT: there are photos of—and tweets from—Shaquille O’Neal inside!

If you use social media to further your business or enhance your brand profile, please keep reading. If your use of social media is purely recreational, but you would like to understand how it affects the ways in which information reaches us, thereby changing our cultural landscape, please keep reading. And if you claim not to use social media at all yet you are reading this blog, well, you just told a teensy little white lie, now didn’t you? Don’t worry. I won’t report you to the FBI-U (Federal Bureau of Internet Users). That agency probably doesn’t exist. And yet, you never know…*

The regular readers among you are aware that I attended the whopping big BlogHer12 conference in New York City last month. I’m still amazed by how many critically essential connections I made there, and by how much useful knowledge I gleaned. I’ll be writing a post soon, for example, about a wonderful new phenomenon known as the midlife blogger (Hey! That’s me!). But today I want to tell you about an energetic, inspiring, and game-changing woman that I met at my very first BlogHer session, on Pathfinder Day. I was trying to find my path in this labyrinth of social media, and Amy Jo Martin is helping me do it.

I had the pleasure of meeting the awesome Amy Jo Martin after her talk.

Amy Jo is the author of Renegades Write the Rules: How the Digital Royalty Use Social Media to Innovate. And with more than 1.2 million followers on Twitter, she knows whereof she writes and tweets. (Forbes Magazine named Amy Jo to its list of “Best-Branded Women on Twitter.) Because I learned so much from that BlogHer session with Amy Jo—and I’m learning so much by reading her book—I’d like to share that knowledge with you.

This Friday, Sept. 28, I will choose, at random, a Facebook fan of the Midlife Second Wife.** The lucky winner will receive an autographed copy of Renegades Write the Rules. If you’ve previously “liked” The Midlife Second Wife on Facebook, you’re already entered. But if you haven’t, and you’d love a chance to win this fascinating book, all you have to do is go to the blog’s page on Facebook and click “like.” I’ll announce the winner here and on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, on Monday, Oct. 1, and I’ll tell you a bit more about the book. Now isn’t that a great way to start a new month?

Really, that’s all it takes. “Like” the Midlife Second Wife on Facebook, and you have a chance to win. Just think, you have a chance to become a renegade and a member of digital royalty. Because even renegades know that it’s good to be the Queen. Or King. (Both are fine. We’re nothing if not inclusive here at TMSW!)

*Guess what I just learned? To be absolutely positively certain that my made-up agency is non-existent, I Googled it and lo and behold! I discovered that the FBI actually has an organization called iC3—the Internet Crime Complaint Center. You’ve now been warned. Remember Google’s original tagline: “Don’t be Evil.” And to paraphrase Amy Jo, perform “random acts of your own Shaqness.” This footnote has been brought to you as a public service of the Midlife Second Wife. You’re welcome.

**Here’s how the drawing will work. I will print out my Facebook list of “likers” and create an entry card by painstakingly cutting each name into a separate bit of paper. I’ll then put all the bits of paper in a beautiful box, and ask the Midlife Second Husband to draw the winner. (I’ll have removed his name and mine from the pool in advance.) Although I can’t afford to have accountants from Price Waterhouse verify the results, I do hope to video the drawing with my iPhone and share it here.

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Turning Another Page: Introducing “An Open Book — TMSW’s Library”

09 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in The Reading Life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Books, Essays, Life, Nonfiction, Reading

One of the first posts that I ever wrote as The Midlife Second Wife, nearly one year ago, included reference to a book. So profoundly have books influenced my life that it doesn’t seem enough to fill our home with them, bring volumes back from the library, or download tomes to my Kindle. No, I need a place on the blog—a library, if you will—where the books that have been important enough to me to mention in my posts can be found readily by my own readers.

Today I bring you An Open Book: The Midlife Second Wife’s Library. I do not bring it to you complete, because it will take some time for me to stack the shelves, so to speak. And it will be an evolving project, with new titles added all the time. So I ask your patience while I get this new project underway.

The title for the blog’s newest page comes from a favorite book of mine, Michael Dirda‘s An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland. I’ve recommended this book to so many people that not only have I lost count, it seems I should share in the royalties. The book is, quite simply, wonderful. It’s the lively story of a young boy coming of age in Lorain, Ohio (my late mother’s hometown, by the way), who discovers the joy of reading, and how that passion changes his life. Born into a world where the majority of its inhabitants work either at the steel plant (as Dirda did for a time) or the shipyards, Dirda breaks free from that blue-collar cycle and enters Oberlin College. (I’m also an Oberlin graduate, although I attended some years after Dirda.)

The young reader continues his studies, going on to earn a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell University, and parlays his passion for the written word into a career reviewing books, ultimately becoming a senior editor at The Washington Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Rich with anecdotes, Dirda’s book happily romps through some of the titles that he has savored, and ends by sending the reader off not with just any reading list, but with his own, sagely compiled when he was 16-years-old.

Admittedly, this book is an exercise in nostalgia for me; I remember many of the places that Dirda recalls. And while our youthful taste in titles might have differed, I am in complete accord with Dirda’s thesis: that reading is the key to becoming the person you are meant to become.

The open book depicted in the photo illustrating this post (and the new blog page) is, appropriately, Dirda’s An Open Book. If you’re casting about for something good to read this summer, I highly recommend it. There, I’ve done it again.

Enjoy!

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On a Thin Gold Chain, Mementos from Sissy Spacek’s Extraordinary Life

06 Sunday May 2012

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in The Cultured Life, The Reading Life, The Writing Life, What's the Buzz?

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Academy Award, Actors, Coal Miner's Daughter, Films, Jack Fisk, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Sissy Spacek, Sissy Spacek memoir

My Extraordinary Ordinary Life
Sissy Spacek with Maryanne Vollers
288 pages, Hyperion, $26.99

One of the reasons I took a brief sabbatical from the blog is because I was given the distinct honor of interviewing Academy Award-winning actress Sissy Spacek for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. I met her at Selba, a Richmond restaurant, for our interview. Afterwards, we were standing and chatting when I noticed a necklace she was wearing—a thin gold chain from which hung a cluster of charms. I asked her to tell me about them, and I’m awfully glad I did; her answer gave me the lede for my article. The story, “Sissy’s Way,” appears in today’s newspaper (which has a few extras that don’t appear in the online version). I’m pleased to share a link to it here so that you can read about this extraordinary artist. You might also like to check out Jay Strafford’s review of Ms. Spacek’s heartfelt new memoir, My Extraordinary, Ordinary Life.

As a bonus, Ms. Spacek shared a little secret with me. She’s been married to film production designer and art director Jack Fisk for 38 years, so of course you know I just had to ask: “What’s the secret to a happy marriage?” Here’s what she told me:

“Marryin’ the right guy!”

Enjoy the article!

Related articles
  • Sissy Spacek: The Well-Adjusted Actress (online.wsj.com)
  • Fresh Air Weekend: Sissy Spacek, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (wnyc.org)
  • SIFF announces guests: Sissy Spacek, William Friedkin (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
  • Sissy Spacek’s Extraordinary, Ordinary Life (cbsnews.com)

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Take Three Book Titles, Blend, and Tweet

24 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in The Reading Life, The Writing Life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Books, Doubleday, Hashtags, Literary Turducken, Reading, Twitter

As if it’s not enough work to brine or deep-fry or roast a turkey for Thanksgiving, some people go whole hog and make a turducken: a chicken sans bones stuffed into a duck sans bones stuffed into a turkey. Sans bones. I remember the first time I read about this strange bird, years ago in the New York Times. Each time that I thought it would be fun to try to make one, I remembered how much work it is to clean the kitchen after just one fowl-centered feast, let alone three. But this week I discovered a no-mess, no-fuss method for making turducken, using book titles instead of birds! In a brilliant flash of Twitter ingenuity, Doubleday Books started a hashtag hat-trick for bibliophiles: the literary turducken, or, to be precise, #literaryturducken.

Readers mix together three book titles to craft a zany new concoction. In my opinion, this “top tweet” from the Kansas City Star took the blue ribbon for cleverness, erudition, and wit:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Gone with the Wind in the Willows.

I jumped right into the fray, and Tuesday night, when I should have been sleeping, began tweeting as quickly as I could think of combinations. Here are a few from my own Twitter feed:

Play it as it Lays On the Road Under Milkwood

The Handmaid’s Tale of Two Cities of Salt

ABC of Reading Lolita in the Tehran Conviction

Then I thought I’d put a little spin on the game, playing with titles containing numbers and adding a long poem and a musical theater title into the mix:

The Threepenny Opera in Four Quartets at Slaughterhouse 5

This was fun! It didn’t involve chopping onions, and it satisfied my craving to be creative at Thanksgiving during a year when I wasn’t doing a lick of cooking.

I kept at it:

The Invisible Man and Superman It’s Superman!

I’m very fond of this next one, but disappointed in myself for leaving off the article in the McCullers’ title:

Ballad of the Sad Breakfast at Tiffany’s Naked Lunch Café

I raided the theatrical canon for this one:

Krapp’s Last Tape Measure for Measure of the World

I wrote a few more, and finally sleep won out. But the next day, during our long road-trip, I not only occupied myself in the car by adding more to the hashtag, I also got John hooked on the game. He devised this one:

‘Twas in the Heat of the Night Before Christmas the Iceman Cometh

I think that, on balance, the ones I came up with during the day were sharper than the ones I cobbled together while I was starved for sleep. What do you think?

A Farewell to Arms and the Man Who Knew Too Much and Came to Dinner

O Pioneers! How Green Was My Valley of The Dolls?

Death Comes for the Archbishop, the Man Without Qualities, And Ladies of the Club …

Beloved Jazz Song of Solomon

While I was playing—and admiring the literary zip of many other tweeters—I noticed that media outlets were also paying attention. Mashable wrote about the game, as did the Huffington Post. Katy Steinmetz of TIME magazine had a great one:

The Sun Also Rises As I Lay Dying On the Road

It occurred to me that if you’re not on Twitter and hadn’t heard of this phenomenon, this post could be my gift to you: you now have a new game to play on the long ride home after your visits with far-flung family.

You’re welcome.

I hope you and yours had a lovely Thanksgiving.

Related articles
  • 20 Awesome #LiteraryTurducken Tweets Mash Together Popular Book Titles (mashable.com)
  • Literary Turducken: Thanksgiving Book Titles On Twitter (huffingtonpost.com)

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Your Kindle Can’t Do That

10 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in The Reading Life

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Amazon Kindle, Books, Reading, Steve Jobs, Twitter

I love my Kindle—its efficiency, its portability, and the way the device instantly transports me—like some digital form of astral projection—into the world of a book simply because I thought of a title and clicked a key. But the love that I have for my Kindle will never surpass my love of books.

I recently tweeted, in essence, that I was cheating on my Kindle by reading Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography of Steve Jobs in hardcover, which I bought the other day. Using a traditional media format to read about the greatest inventive entrepreneur of the digital age strikes me as an irony if ever there was one.

A slight digression about tweets. I know, I know. You’ve read me blog about them before, comparing them to chocolate. And I’m not recanting. But if you’ll permit me to mix and match my metaphors, I’d like to add that I also find these marvelous digital encapsulations of information akin to the notes that we midlifers used to pass surreptitiously in school. (Like a convert to Catholicism, there’s no zealot quite like a late-adopter.)

This morning, a tweet traveling down the Twitter conveyor belt so captivated me that I had to pass it to my neighbor in the next row by re-tweeting it. (Admittedly, a book cannot do that.) Here is what I discovered when I unfolded the intriguing morsel:

old book smell.
Did you know?

“Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.”

—Perfume: The Guide

Isn’t that a fascinating piece of new information? Isn’t that a lovely notion? And it  makes so much sense (intended pun) at every level. Most of us love books because of all that they evoke—past memories, past experiences, past sensual and tactile pleasures.

Have you ever read Pat the Bunny to a child? If not, then try to recall the very first book shipment you ever received, and what it felt like to see your name on the outside label, to open the package, and to hold in your small hands the book that you yourself selected and purchased. My own memory takes me back to St. Mary’s Elementary School in Elyria, Ohio, and the TAB book club. I can still remember those catalogs, and how I would circle each book that I coveted. It was a good day at school when those shipments arrived.

Part of a bookstore’s lure is the way that it feeds all of our senses. I’m thinking especially of an old bookstore, one that deals in rare and used books. The memories that these bookshops elicit, especially the olfactory ones, can be profound. I think that Diane Ackerman was correct to have started off her book, A Natural History of the Senses, with the sense of smell, which she calls “the mute sense.”

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary, and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the Poconos, when wild blueberry bushes teemed with succulent fruit and the opposite sex was as mysterious as space travel…Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences. Hit a tripwire of smell, and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

The aged-paper smells of an old bookshop remind me of my grandmother’s attic, where piles of folded newspapers and books commingled with old sewing patterns and scraps of fabric, and the light streamed in through narrow windows, revealing trumpets of dust motes hovering above the steamer trunks and dress forms. These objects, combined with the properties of physics and memory, are called forth by the scents of mustiness, of age and locked time. Madeleines did it for Proust. For me, it’s a bookstore.

Do you remember your first time visiting a library? I recall walking with my mother down the sandstone sidewalks to the Elyria Public Library’s children’s room. It was located in the basement of a grand old mansion. One had to walk down sandstone steps and hold on to a black iron railing to enter the space. It was a place of mystery for one who had just learned how to read, as impressive as a church, although not quite as intimidating.

Photo courtesy of Elyria Public Library, Elyria, Ohio

Smell, sight, touch, hearing, and taste. I have book memories for all of these. Even for the last one. I’m sitting in the library—I’m in high school now—and I’ve just run my Number 2 pencil through the hand-cranked sharpener that is mounted on the wall. I return to the heavy wooden table, sit down, and begin poring over my notes for a book report, absentmindedly chewing on my freshly-sharpened pencil.

No, a Kindle can’t do that for you.

An exegetical acknowledgement: The original tweet that elicited this post came from blogger Iris Blasi and was re-tweeted, where I discovered it, by the Book Lady of The Book Lady’s Blog. As we crawl further up the conveyor belt, we see that Blasi credits CuriosityCounts (by way of book editor Peter Joseph) for the image, which, ultimately, takes us all to the original source, the book Perfumes: The Guide.

Yes, it always comes back to a book.

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