A Book Blog
Live Last read · last published · next check
It started when I mentioned Cynthia Heimel’s humorous book, Sex Tips for Girls. She includes a six-page section on how to give a blow job. And then Ellen mentioned “fellatio” in a comment: the comment disappeared. I found it in the trash; I rescued it. It disappeared again; I rescued it again. And then the […]
It started at the grand opening of a club. I was given two tickets, and what else was I doing on a Friday night? I begged Captain Nemo to come with me, but the only club he liked was a dingy warehouse where we had once heard 10,000 Maniacs and Talk Talk for free. Anyway, […]
I used to think I could walk down the street and identify people on Prozac (by which I mean antidepressants in general). It turned out I was wrong. The handsome, impeccably dressed middle-aged man who held the bus door open for us appeared on the street corner one morning wearing “beggar clothes” (tattered jeans, a […]
Why, one wonders, this sudden interest in sex? As a woman of a certain age, I already feel I could write an instruction manual. But as I laughed over Cynthia Heimel’s Sex Tips for Girls (1983), I was astonished by her detailed instructions on how to give a blow job. There’s no casual hopping into […]
“The eighties weren’t our fault.” – Cynthia Heimel (1947-2018) Rearranging my bookcases is one of my favorite pastimes. I never know what I’ll find, and today I ferreted out a treasure trove of Cynthia Heimel’s humor books, Sex Tips for Girls; But Enough about You; If You Can’t Live without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead […]
We are experts on polluted cities. We learned from living in cities plagued by air and water pollution, the smoke from the factory stacks, the chemicals lobbed into the river, the destruction of inner-city neighborhoods, and flight to the suburbs and exurbs. Suburban life is complicated. There were no trains or buses from the far […]
Before everyone emailed and texted, before the invention of the talking refrigerator, most of us lived more or less off the grid, Our idea of high tech was the princess phone. But until I got a laptop computer, my life revolved around the typewriter. I happily typed papers, articles, essays, reviews, letters, and lists on […]
When we moved into a 100-year-old bungalow in a lovely midwestern town, I was delighted.. The sun was brighter and the sky bluer than in the bustling post-industrial city where we used to live. That city was referred to as “the big dirty” by truckers. And the air was dirty, sometimes filthy, though the water, […]
Several years ago, I won an award for an essay. It’s lovely to win an award, even if you just get a plaque or certificate, which you immediately lose, and which surfaces years later in a filing cabinet. Later, I won an award I’d never heard of. Of course it was an honor, as all […]
Last night I went on a date. We went to a movie, or you could say two movies. At the first theater they wouldn’t let us in because we were 30 minutes late. At the second theater we were an hour late and still got tickets. “Now it’s date night,” I said to Captain Nemo.. […]
