1) Let’s hear it for old coffee pots, the ones that are never washed until the next brew, so that the coffee–be it Starbucks or Red Diamond–has that nasty, murky, muddy flavor to it.

2) Police have caught the “Hot Coffee Robber.” From Dallas Fox News:

“Police say Irving pours himself a hot cup of coffee, walks up to the counter to pay and then throws the coffee in the cashier’s face as the cash drawer opens. In all the cases, the cashier was not seriously injured and was treated on the scene. Witnesses said Irvin was seen leaving one of the crime scenes in a 1996 white Toyota with Texas license plate 196 NYT.”

From Guarian books:

“For the first time in more than two decades, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez is returning to his hometown which he immortalised as Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

I added some news links. The Week is especially useful.

On one of Brian’s posts at the truthcave, wishydig posted a link to a linguist blasting the Da Vinci Code (thanks, Michael). I hope nobody does this to my book:

“The writing goes on in similar vein, committing style and word choice blunders in almost every paragraph (sometimes every line). Look at the phrase ‘the seventy-six-year-old man’. It’s a complete let-down: we knew he was a man — the anaphoric pronoun ‘he’ had just been used to refer to him. (This is perhaps where ‘curator’ could have been slipped in for the first time, without ‘renowned’, if the passage were rewritten.)”

Then, “Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better.”

I just started Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and one mark of his style is his omniscient voice that floats around in time. One reason this works so well is narrative delay, in which Marquez introduces something–a hook–and then delays explaining it in order to create tension. In the opening chapter, Dr. Urbino’s friend has committed suicide and has revealed a shocking secret in a letter. Marquez doesn’t tell us what the secret is for thirty pages, but putting in this mystery earns him pages and pages of back story. The hook spans the chapter, but there are smaller ones. Urbino goes home and finds a parrot stuck in a tree, a strange enough detail to pique our curiosity. Marquez keeps us in suspense for several pages of back story about the parrot, the doctor’s wife, and the condition of their relationship. Urbino then goes inside, too upset about the letter to do anything right now (which reminds us of the big hook, though we still don’t know what’s in the letter), and Marquez throws in a line of foreshadowing about the future importance of the parrot, then goes into more back story about the house and Urbino’s wife. The writing in this novel is saintly, so of course it’s great literature, but it’s heartening to me as a writer to be able to see Marquez using the same low-brow plot devices that you find on Grey’s Anatomy (or in a Thomas Pynchon novel–see my earlier post about Vineland).

This movie, based on a play by Tracy Letts, is worth watching, though it’s quite gruesome. Nearly all of it takes place in a cheap motel in Oklahoma, where a woman (Ashley Judd) is hiding out from her abusive boyfriend. She meets another dude, who is AWOL, and who is convinced the government has implanted bugs into his blood. The bugs infest the motel room, and both characters become more and more paranoid and start scratching at their skin and pulling out teeth. A lot of my neighbors in Indiana are into meth, so this story really rang true for me. Sigh.