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Quick Tips: His and Hers Ideas for Romance
© Copyright,
As seen in the February Issue of Main Street Magazine/ Quick Tips
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Quick tips February 2011
His and Hers Ideas for Romance
Marriage is not a noun; it's a verb. It isn't something you get. It's something you do.
It's the way you love your partner every day. -Barbara De Angelis
Romantic Ideas
for Men
1 Draw her a warm bubble bath. Wash her back (& everywhere else). Take your time. Then towel her dry and carry her off to bed.
2 Give her a full body massage without expecting anything in return. You’re sure to get your reward the next night!
3 Little things go a long way. Hold her hand, link her arm through yours while you’re walking together, place your palm on the small of her back when standing beside her. Those tender gestures won’t go unnoticed.
4 Brush her hair at night. This can be very sensual. Be sure to use a brush, not a comb. And don’t pull. Be gentle. If you encounter a tangle, hold the hair above the tangle, then work it out.
5 Tell her you love her. Seems obvious, but many men overlook this. Women like to hear it. Often. Make her an audio tape and secretly slip it into the cassette player for her to
find.
Romantic Ideas for Women:
1 Do something different. Instead of a massage, graze your nails lightly down his bare back (if you have good nails). It will send shivers of pleasure through his body.
2 Let him pick one fantasy a month for you to fulfill. Make up a list for him to choose from (that way the fantasy will be something that you’re not opposed to). Then plan it out as an official “date.”
3 Have some sexy (but tasteful) pictures taken and give them to him as a gift. It’ll be something unexpected and special–meant for his eyes only.
4 Personally write him an erotic story. He’ll see a new and exciting dimension to you after that.
5 Put on some sexy clothes, turn on the music, then slowly strip the clothes off layer by laye
r while he watches.
Quick Tips for Writing Love Letters
Be in a good mood when writing a love letter. Never try to write a love letter when you're in a bad mood, not only will it be more difficult to write, but your bad vibes will make their way into the letter.
· Write a love letter anytime. Don't wait for a special occasion to write one. Anytime you want to spice up your relationship is a great time for a love letter.
· Your love letter should look appealing. Fountain pens look nicer than ball point pens. Plain paper is fine, but try to choose a better grade of paper stay away from lined paper or paper with lots of designs printed on it.
· Think about why you're writing. Do you want to say you had a good time, are you asking for a date, are you expressing your affection, do you want to know how they feel about you or do you want to say I miss you?
· Always hand write your love letter even if your writing is sloppy. Never type it unless your handwriting is truly illegible. Don't underline or write any words in all caps; it's like yelling.
· Only say what you really mean. Don't make promises you can't keep and don't write anything you may regret later. Once the letter leaves your hands there is no guarantee it will stay private.
· A one page love letter is great. Love letters aren’t meant to be long. As you get more comfortable, your letters may get a little longer but don't write a book.
· If you're writing an erotic lover letter, talk about yourself as well. If you wish to arouse you can write about how hot, wet, positions and lingerie.
· Re-read your love letter to make sure it says what you mean. You may want to write a rough draft first.
· Use a thesaurus to find unique romantic words for your love letter, such as:
~ Openers – Dear, Dearest, My Love, Dearest Love, My Beloved, My Sweetheart, My Darling, My Sweet, Darling
~ Middle – cherish, idolize, embrace, hold dear, adore, caress, desire, fondle, fascinate, passion, smitten, enchanted, captivated, treasure, stroking, touch, infatuated, precious
~ Endings – yours sincerely, with love, all my love, truly yours, love, till we meet again, your sweet peach
QUOTES
© Copyright,
As seen in the February Issue of Main Street Magazine.
Printed in
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QUOTES
You know you are in love when you see the world in her eyes,and her eyes everywhere in the world.
- David Levesque -
What Is It That I Love?
If asked why I love her I would sayIt’s the sway in her hips, the thickness in her thighs.
It’s the lust in her lips, the love in her eyes.
It’s the softness of her skin,
the silk in her hair.
It’s the twist in her walk; it’s the sweetness in her talk.
It’s the way she loves me that makes me love her each day. That is what I would say.
- Justin Hutchins -
I can forget my very existence in a deep kiss of you.
Byron Caldwell Smith
The sobs and tears of joy he had not foreseen rose with such force within him that his whole body shook and for a long time prevented him from speaking. Falling on his knees by her bed. He held his wife's hand to his lips and kissed it, and her hand responded to his kisses with weak movement of finger. Meanwhile, at the foot of the bed, in the midwife's expert hands, like the flame of a lamp, flickered the life of a human being who had never existed before... Count Leo Tolstoy
True love is: A guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot, who calls you back when you hang up on him, who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat, or will stay awake just to watch you sleep... wait for the boy who kisses your forehead, who wants to show you off to the world even when you are in sweats, who holds your hand in front of his friends, who thinks you' re just as pretty without makeup on. One who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares and how lucky he is to have YOU... The one who turns to his friends and says, that's her- that's my girl!---Tilly Rivers
A Novel Idea
Irrational Behaviour
By CURTIS SITTENFELD
Maile Meloy called her first novel “Liars and Saints,” but there was a fair amount of evidence she was being ironic, at least about the saints part. There was also a fair amount of evidence that Meloy sympathized with the sinners, an impression reinforced by the title and contents of her new story collection, “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.” Almost all her characters are flawed: lawyers, Montana residents, unfaithful spouses, rich and eccentric older women, young women who are close to their fathers in nice as opposed to creepy ways, and multiple combinations thereof. They are people who act irrationally, against their own best interests — by betraying those they care about, making embarrassing romantic overtures and knowingly setting in motion situations they’d rather avoid — and Meloy’s prose is so clear, calm and intelligent that their behaviour becomes eminently understandable.
Beth, a recent law school graduate who appears in the first story, “Travis, B.,” is teaching an adult- education class on public-school law in Glendive, a small town on the eastern side of Montana. The problem is that she lives and works a nine-and-a-half-hour drive west, in Missoula. “I’ve never done anything so stupid in my life,” she tells Chet, a ranch worker in the class, about having accepted the teaching position, which she did out of anxiety over her student loans. Twice a week, Beth leaves her Missoula law firm at midday, makes the drive, teaches the class that evening then turns around and spends the night driving home.
“There are deer on the road, and there’s black ice outside of Three Forks along the river,” she explains to Chet, who has quickly developed a crush on her. “If I make it past there, I get to take a shower and go to work at eight. . . . Then learn more school law tomorrow night, then leave work the next day before lunch and drive back here with my eyes twitching.” The bizarreness of Beth’s situation is matched by its plausibility; a kind of banal, daily desperation animates many of Meloy’s characters, including Chet, who first shows up in Beth’s classroom not as a real student, but as a lonely person who on a random night happens to stumble into the school because it’s one of the few buildings in town with its lights on.
While the American West is clearly close to her heart, Meloy — who is 37, grew up in Montana and now lives in Los Angeles, and has won prizes from The Paris Review and the American Academy of Arts and Letters — bravely plunks down her characters in a wide range of times and places, including a 1970s nuclear power plant, an East Coast boarding school and Argentina. All these settings are equally convincing, granted verisimilitude by Meloy’s eye for the casually perfect detail: the knee-to-nose stretch, performed while lying in bed beneath a Charlie Parker poster, that a boarding-school girl learns from her roommate; the party in Buenos Aires where an appearance by the Prince of Wales sends the guests into a frenzy and a woman’s pearl necklace breaks and scatters on the floor. Meloy does her research — either that, or she’s lived many lives — but it never feels as if she included information just because, by God, she spent time unearthing it and now wants to make use of her hard work. Rather, she includes tidbits about, say, the playing cards used in raffles at the nuclear power plant because they’re organic to the stories.
Though it might seem strange to praise a writer for the things she doesn’t do, what really sets Meloy apart is her restraint. She is impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope. And she’s balanced in her approach to character, neither blinded by love for her creations, nor abusive toward them. In an allusion to the collection’s title, a character wonders near the end, “What kind of fool wanted it only one way?” The person asking this question is a man considering leaving his smart, appealing wife of 30 years for the much younger woman who gave swimming lessons to his now-grown children. Such a man isn’t particularly likable — in fact, the opposite — but it’s a mark of Meloy’s even-handed character development that you find yourself agreeing with him, thinking, Yeah, what kind of fool? In the end, everyone in these stories retains at least a sliver of humanity, whether it’s an 87-year-old who in her youth cheerfully appeared in movies under the Nazi studio system or a father who wordlessly offers his teenage daughter as sexual enticement to persuade a plaintiff to remain in a lawsuit.
Meloy’s restraint also comes through not in the way she plots stories, which is boldly, but in how she chooses to reveal her plots, delivering shocking twists in as low-key a manner as possible. In “The Girlfriend,” the fact that the protagonist’s daughter was murdered is revealed in an aside. In “Two-Step,” Naomi, a medical resident, talks to her friend Alice about Alice’s suspicion that her husband is having an affair; and though the story is told from Naomi’s perspective, it doesn’t become clear until nearly halfway through that she’s the one with whom the husband is cheating. Meloy drops this bomb understatedly, noting of Naomi that “she had told her husband that she was leaving him, with the understanding that Alice would simultaneously — or at least soon — be told the same thing. It had been a difficult week.”
Thanks to Meloy’s spare, subdued style, the death and infidelity running through these tales don’t take on as grim a tone as you’d expect. Only one story, about the murdered daughter, really makes you want to slit your wrists; and, indeed, a wry humor appears regularly. An Argentine aristocrat observes that another man “was a bore; not even failure could make him interesting.” Or, as one wife tells another, “the whole soul mates idea . . . is really most useful when you’re stealing someone’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours.”
Meloy is also the author of two inter connected novels and an earlier collection, “Half in Love.” Personally, I prefer her stories — “Half in Love” is wonderful too — but she’s such a talented and unpredictable writer that I’m officially joining her fan club; whatever she writes next, I’ll gladly read it.
© Copyright, 2011 Main Street Magazine/Rain Enterprises
As seen in the February Issue of Main Street Magazine.
Printed in Canada, ISSN: 1920-4299 by Rain Enterprises
To find out how to receive your free copy of MSM check out
www.mainstreetmagazine.net
By CURTIS SITTENFELD
Maile Meloy called her first novel “Liars and Saints,” but there was a fair amount of evidence she was being ironic, at least about the saints part. There was also a fair amount of evidence that Meloy sympathized with the sinners, an impression reinforced by the title and contents of her new story collection, “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.” Almost all her characters are flawed: lawyers, Montana residents, unfaithful spouses, rich and eccentric older women, young women who are close to their fathers in nice as opposed to creepy ways, and multiple combinations thereof. They are people who act irrationally, against their own best interests — by betraying those they care about, making embarrassing romantic overtures and knowingly setting in motion situations they’d rather avoid — and Meloy’s prose is so clear, calm and intelligent that their behaviour becomes eminently understandable.
Beth, a recent law school graduate who appears in the first story, “Travis, B.,” is teaching an adult- education class on public-school law in Glendive, a small town on the eastern side of Montana. The problem is that she lives and works a nine-and-a-half-hour drive west, in Missoula. “I’ve never done anything so stupid in my life,” she tells Chet, a ranch worker in the class, about having accepted the teaching position, which she did out of anxiety over her student loans. Twice a week, Beth leaves her Missoula law firm at midday, makes the drive, teaches the class that evening then turns around and spends the night driving home.
“There are deer on the road, and there’s black ice outside of Three Forks along the river,” she explains to Chet, who has quickly developed a crush on her. “If I make it past there, I get to take a shower and go to work at eight. . . . Then learn more school law tomorrow night, then leave work the next day before lunch and drive back here with my eyes twitching.” The bizarreness of Beth’s situation is matched by its plausibility; a kind of banal, daily desperation animates many of Meloy’s characters, including Chet, who first shows up in Beth’s classroom not as a real student, but as a lonely person who on a random night happens to stumble into the school because it’s one of the few buildings in town with its lights on.
While the American West is clearly close to her heart, Meloy — who is 37, grew up in Montana and now lives in Los Angeles, and has won prizes from The Paris Review and the American Academy of Arts and Letters — bravely plunks down her characters in a wide range of times and places, including a 1970s nuclear power plant, an East Coast boarding school and Argentina. All these settings are equally convincing, granted verisimilitude by Meloy’s eye for the casually perfect detail: the knee-to-nose stretch, performed while lying in bed beneath a Charlie Parker poster, that a boarding-school girl learns from her roommate; the party in Buenos Aires where an appearance by the Prince of Wales sends the guests into a frenzy and a woman’s pearl necklace breaks and scatters on the floor. Meloy does her research — either that, or she’s lived many lives — but it never feels as if she included information just because, by God, she spent time unearthing it and now wants to make use of her hard work. Rather, she includes tidbits about, say, the playing cards used in raffles at the nuclear power plant because they’re organic to the stories.
Though it might seem strange to praise a writer for the things she doesn’t do, what really sets Meloy apart is her restraint. She is impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope. And she’s balanced in her approach to character, neither blinded by love for her creations, nor abusive toward them. In an allusion to the collection’s title, a character wonders near the end, “What kind of fool wanted it only one way?” The person asking this question is a man considering leaving his smart, appealing wife of 30 years for the much younger woman who gave swimming lessons to his now-grown children. Such a man isn’t particularly likable — in fact, the opposite — but it’s a mark of Meloy’s even-handed character development that you find yourself agreeing with him, thinking, Yeah, what kind of fool? In the end, everyone in these stories retains at least a sliver of humanity, whether it’s an 87-year-old who in her youth cheerfully appeared in movies under the Nazi studio system or a father who wordlessly offers his teenage daughter as sexual enticement to persuade a plaintiff to remain in a lawsuit.
Meloy’s restraint also comes through not in the way she plots stories, which is boldly, but in how she chooses to reveal her plots, delivering shocking twists in as low-key a manner as possible. In “The Girlfriend,” the fact that the protagonist’s daughter was murdered is revealed in an aside. In “Two-Step,” Naomi, a medical resident, talks to her friend Alice about Alice’s suspicion that her husband is having an affair; and though the story is told from Naomi’s perspective, it doesn’t become clear until nearly halfway through that she’s the one with whom the husband is cheating. Meloy drops this bomb understatedly, noting of Naomi that “she had told her husband that she was leaving him, with the understanding that Alice would simultaneously — or at least soon — be told the same thing. It had been a difficult week.”
Thanks to Meloy’s spare, subdued style, the death and infidelity running through these tales don’t take on as grim a tone as you’d expect. Only one story, about the murdered daughter, really makes you want to slit your wrists; and, indeed, a wry humor appears regularly. An Argentine aristocrat observes that another man “was a bore; not even failure could make him interesting.” Or, as one wife tells another, “the whole soul mates idea . . . is really most useful when you’re stealing someone’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours.”
Meloy is also the author of two inter connected novels and an earlier collection, “Half in Love.” Personally, I prefer her stories — “Half in Love” is wonderful too — but she’s such a talented and unpredictable writer that I’m officially joining her fan club; whatever she writes next, I’ll gladly read it.
© Copyright, 2011 Main Street Magazine/Rain Enterprises
As seen in the February Issue of Main Street Magazine.
Printed in Canada, ISSN: 1920-4299 by Rain Enterprises
To find out how to receive your free copy of MSM check out
www.mainstreetmagazine.net
Main Street Music Scene
February 2011 Issue, MSM
The Top-Earning Musicians Of 2010
What does it take to become one of the highest-paid musicians of the 2010s? A career that peaked in the '80s. Nearly half of the artists that make up this year's list of the top-earning music acts have been around long enough that they could have appeared on the soundtrack to Back To The Future.
In Pictures: The World’s Top-Earning Musicians
That U2, AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna could collectively make an estimated $372 million between June 2009 and June 2010--a little more than half of the $700 million that the top 10 acts in music brought in--highlights the way that the music business has changed over the last decade. Apple's iTunes aside, few young consumers have shown that they are willing to pay for music that they can easily get for free. Album sales have plummeted by more than half since 2000, taking away a lucrative earnings stream for musicians and one of the ways that artists have traditionally broken through into the mainstream.
All of which makes the success of Lady Gaga all the more unexpected. The 24-year-old New York City native went from playing gigs on the Lower East Side to selling out Madison Square Garden within 30 months, thanks to an album that sounded like the best of early Madonna and videos that seemed to come from another dimension where wearing sunglasses made out of burning cigarettes makes perfect sense. With a worldwide tour and million-dollar endorsements with Polaroid, Virgin Mobile and Monster Cable, Lady Gaga netted an estimated $62 million over the last year, the seventh highest on the list. Madonna, meanwhile, came in below her, at No. 8 with $58 million.
Eighties super group U2 made more money than anyone else in music last year, netting an estimated $130 million on the strength of a worldwide tour that sold 1.3 million tickets at an average price of $94 a seat in North America alone. The band, which recently postponed some dates on the tour until 2011, will likely end up in one of the top spots on next year's list as well. Fellow classic rock staple AC/DC followed U2 with $114 million after finishing up a tour that grossed $2.3 million a night.
Acts that began their careers in the '90s--back in the days when it was still relatively easy to make money from recorded music--round out the rest of the top 10. With a net of $87 million, Beyonce once again proved to be the highest-paid female musician and No. 3 overall, though more than half of her total earnings came from endorsements with companies ranging from Nintendo to L'Oreal and from her growing fashion line. Kenny Chesney, whose $50 million in earnings landed him at No. 9, was the highest-paid act in country music last year.
Musicians may be less likely to break the $100 million mark in annual earnings next year, however. The concert business, which has long stood out as the lone bright spot in the industry, is wilting. Live Nation, which recently merged with Ticketmaster to become the most dominant force in the live music business, now serves as an industry bellwether. It recently announced that ticket sales for its top 100 acts dropped 9% for the year, amid a 17% drop in the concert business at large, and it expects sales to fall further.
The real drop in music industry earnings may be yet to come. "Everybody was surprised by how well the business held up last year, despite the economy crashing around us," says Gary Bongiovanni, the editor of Pollstar, a concert trade publication. The biggest fear of some promoters is oversaturation of the market, as the same acts tour year after year without a new album to support. That may soon lead to a decline in both ticket sales and ticket prices. "In today's world artists have to tour to make money because they can't just sit at home and collect their royalties and expect to make their mortgage payments," Bongiovanni says.
Printed in Canada under ISSN: 1920-4299
All copyrights reserved
The Top-Earning Musicians Of 2010
by David Randall
What does it take to become one of the highest-paid musicians of the 2010s? A career that peaked in the '80s. Nearly half of the artists that make up this year's list of the top-earning music acts have been around long enough that they could have appeared on the soundtrack to Back To The Future.
In Pictures: The World’s Top-Earning Musicians
That U2, AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna could collectively make an estimated $372 million between June 2009 and June 2010--a little more than half of the $700 million that the top 10 acts in music brought in--highlights the way that the music business has changed over the last decade. Apple's iTunes aside, few young consumers have shown that they are willing to pay for music that they can easily get for free. Album sales have plummeted by more than half since 2000, taking away a lucrative earnings stream for musicians and one of the ways that artists have traditionally broken through into the mainstream.
All of which makes the success of Lady Gaga all the more unexpected. The 24-year-old New York City native went from playing gigs on the Lower East Side to selling out Madison Square Garden within 30 months, thanks to an album that sounded like the best of early Madonna and videos that seemed to come from another dimension where wearing sunglasses made out of burning cigarettes makes perfect sense. With a worldwide tour and million-dollar endorsements with Polaroid, Virgin Mobile and Monster Cable, Lady Gaga netted an estimated $62 million over the last year, the seventh highest on the list. Madonna, meanwhile, came in below her, at No. 8 with $58 million.
Eighties super group U2 made more money than anyone else in music last year, netting an estimated $130 million on the strength of a worldwide tour that sold 1.3 million tickets at an average price of $94 a seat in North America alone. The band, which recently postponed some dates on the tour until 2011, will likely end up in one of the top spots on next year's list as well. Fellow classic rock staple AC/DC followed U2 with $114 million after finishing up a tour that grossed $2.3 million a night.
Acts that began their careers in the '90s--back in the days when it was still relatively easy to make money from recorded music--round out the rest of the top 10. With a net of $87 million, Beyonce once again proved to be the highest-paid female musician and No. 3 overall, though more than half of her total earnings came from endorsements with companies ranging from Nintendo to L'Oreal and from her growing fashion line. Kenny Chesney, whose $50 million in earnings landed him at No. 9, was the highest-paid act in country music last year.
Musicians may be less likely to break the $100 million mark in annual earnings next year, however. The concert business, which has long stood out as the lone bright spot in the industry, is wilting. Live Nation, which recently merged with Ticketmaster to become the most dominant force in the live music business, now serves as an industry bellwether. It recently announced that ticket sales for its top 100 acts dropped 9% for the year, amid a 17% drop in the concert business at large, and it expects sales to fall further.
The real drop in music industry earnings may be yet to come. "Everybody was surprised by how well the business held up last year, despite the economy crashing around us," says Gary Bongiovanni, the editor of Pollstar, a concert trade publication. The biggest fear of some promoters is oversaturation of the market, as the same acts tour year after year without a new album to support. That may soon lead to a decline in both ticket sales and ticket prices. "In today's world artists have to tour to make money because they can't just sit at home and collect their royalties and expect to make their mortgage payments," Bongiovanni says.
Healthy Relationships
Five Secrets to a Healthy Relationship with Yourself
By: Katy Berezny
Guess what? I am finally learning to love myself. As hard as it is to put myself first, I am trying very hard to. I know by reading that many will agree and some may even laugh. Really it is very serious.
You see when you grow up finding happiness in making other people happy; you will always look for that one full filling thing. You will never find it. I know this from experience.
Sometimes you tend to look to others to make you happy. You’re still missing the whole point in the one full filling thing that you alone must find. Although things surrounding you can have an impact on your happiness, happiness is still found within yourself.
Tip #1 - To Love Yourself
How can you expect others to love you when you don't even love yourself? Perhaps you are always down on yourself which reflects lack of love. Growing up in abusive environments can leave you with lack of love for yourself, simply because you don't know how to. In order to truly love yourself, you must forgive yourself.
Tip #2 - Forgiving your Past Faults
Not to talk religion but I believe in God and I believe He forgives. If He can forgive then who are we not to forgive? That includes YOURSELF. If we can learn to forgive ourselves for mistakes that we have made, we will have a sense of freedom within. Holding unforgiveness causes bitterness, which is self destructive. You cannot have a healthy relationship with unforgiveness, that includes one with yourself.
Tip #3 - Self Respect and Dignity
Now this is a touchy subject for me. I partially grew up in a home with no self dignity. I had no self respect in the way I acted and dressed. I had a 'could care less' bad attitude, while I walked around in my skin tight daisy dukes. Now we cannot possibly love our self or respect our self for that matter, if we flaunt our bodies like that. If we cannot do that, we surely cannot expect anyone else to respect us. Lacking self respect is dangerous and could get you into a lot of emotional and even physical trouble.
Tip #4 - Self Confidence and Endurance
Sometimes we have to encourage ourselves to be all we can be. Although it is nice coming from others, we really need to do it for ourselves. It makes us stronger and builds our faith up to where we know we can finish the race. Push yourself with balance. Do not overdue it, but set goals and desires, then have the endurance and confidence to reach and accomplish them.
Tip #5 - Trust Yourself
Sometimes when we hurt others, we lose trust in our own self. We fear we may hurt someone again so we tend to be secluded or shy away from things or people. It may seem like lack of trust in others, but usually it is a little of both. Perhaps we have crossed a line in the past and we are scared that we may have to face that again so we lack trust in ourselves to face the problem or situation at hand.
I hope these tips have helped you. We all learn from experience. Talking out your problem with others will help you to overcome a lot of the walls that are building between you and yourself. Remember also to make time for you as well. Do something you enjoy. Wake up with a smile on your face and a song in your heart, and you will be alright!!
© Copyright,
As seen in the January Issue of Main Street Magazine.
Printed in
To find out how to receive your free copy of
Eating Out
Who Knew?
By: Tilly Rivers 
Location:
www.sushistami.ca
Atami Sushi is located in the
The restaurant seats 60 people in the dining room, and 30 people in our private parties room, the Japanese Restaurant is a full service Japanese Sushi buffet serving lunch and dinner daily. However, if you are like me, for the most part the word “buffet, or “all-you-can-eat” means hot plates of cold food that people have picked over. NOT so at Atami- they bring you a menu and a slip of paper where you write down your order, and make it FRESH and deliver it to your table. Now that is my kind of buffet!
The Guo family opened the restaurant in October 2009 with a vision to serve the freshest and best quality sushi buffet in Hamilton. Personally, they have not only accomplished it in
Food- 5 out of 5-
-Service- 5 out 5!
© Copyright,
As seen in the January Issue of Main Street Magazine.
Printed in
To find out how to receive your free copy of
A Novel Idea
Multiple Lives
By Lucinda Rosenfeld
Readers be warned: Before sitting down with Dan Chaon’s ambitious, gripping and unrelentingly bleak new novel, you might want to catch a “Seinfeld” rerun or two. Jerry and the gang’s quips will be the last laugh-lines you’ll get for a while. The book opens with a Northwestern University dropout named Ryan — one of three alienated main characters — shivering in the passenger seat of a car, his severed hand sitting next to him in a Styrofoam cooler.
The misery and suffering continue from there.
“Await Your Reply” — it’s a strangely benign title for a very un-benign book — features drownings, car accidents, hangings, arson, deaths by freezing and by toxic fumes, torture and suspicious heart attacks. All that’s missing is a mauling by a Doberman pinscher. (Though, for the record, Chaon — who will never be accused of writing “domestic novels” — began his 2004 novel “You Remind Me of Me” with just such a mauling.) What’s more, all the characters are morbidly depressed and, if still breathing, seriously considering altering that fact. Since the action takes place largely in the sleepy towns and cities of the Midwest (with side trips to Ecuador, the Ivory Coast and Arctic Canada), I felt at times as if I were watching an unfunny Coen brothers movie. By Page 200, I was also completely hooked — a credit both to Chaon’s intricate and suspenseful plotting and to some of the most paranoid material to hit American literature since Don DeLillo’s “White Noise.”
The book is essentially three separate stories that link up in the final pages. Ryan of the Severed Hand, a middle-class kid from
In the second story line, Miles, a lonely man in his 30s working for a mail-order magic operation in Cleveland, lives in pursuit of his charismatic, paranoid schizophrenic identical twin brother, Hayden, who vanished some 10 years earlier — and possibly murdered their mother and stepfather. Here, Chaon deftly shows us how a mentally ill sibling, even one in absentium, can continue to dominate the “normal” members of his family, preventing them from getting on with their own lives. Objectively, Miles realizes that Hayden is insane and past the point of rescue or read option into mainstream society. Yet Miles is never entirely convinced that Hayden’s conspiracy theories are hokum. What if Goldman Sachs really is out to kill him? Chaon nicely handles Miles’s childhood recollections of his brother — and shows how Hayden, despite his delusions, outwits Miles at every turn, even when discussing his illness. “Oh, spare me,” Hayden says at one point. “Is that what Mom told you? That I became a so-called schizophrenic because I couldn’t handle Dad’s death? I know you don’t like me to cast aspersions on your intelligence, but really. That’s so completely simple- minded.”
In the novel’s third and least convincing story line, Lucy, an Ohio girl of modest means who has just finished high school, runs away with her mysterious, Maserati-driving history teacher, George, in pursuit of a new start and the vast riches he promises to secure them. But the George-Lucy plot never comes to life as the others do, because, for one thing, Lucy is a confusing character, at once hopelessly naïve (in her blind faith that, without any effort, a giant fortune will suddenly appear) and wise to the point of jaded. Regarding her disillusionment with their fugitive hideaway — an abandoned Nebraskan mansion and deserted motel next to a dried-up lake — Chaon notes, “She’d had an image of one of those seaside sort of places that you read about in novels, where shy British people went and fell in love and had epiphanies.” Really?
Chaon also repeatedly tells us how special George makes Lucy feel. “She loved the way it felt to be with him, that easy, teasing camaraderie, that sense he gave her that the two of them, only them, had their own country and language, as if, as George Orson used to tell her, they’d known each other in another life.” But there is little evidence of that closeness, physical or otherwise. Presumably, sex would play a large role in why a listless teenager, even one who has just lost her parents in a car crash and who didn’t get into college, would shack up with an older man. Yet we hardly see the two of them touch. Nor does their conversation produce any sparks. Instead, it has a stilted quality that I was never entirely sure Chaon intended. “George,” Lucy asks at one point, “is there a problem?” Elsewhere, George says, “There are probably a lot of things you don’t know about me.” Do people speak like this?
In other instances, Chaon’s prose can be sharp and biting. Regarding the old woman who owns the magic shop where Miles works, he writes that, even at 93, she “had the stoic dignity of a beautiful woman who was about to be cut in half.”
The underlying premise of Chaon’s book seems to be that, in the modern world, identity has become so fluid as to no longer necessarily exist. This will not be news to students of 20th-century French poststructuralist theory. But it is rare to see the position worked into a novel, the very existence of which would seem to throw this equation into doubt. (Do narratives not require “characters”?) Yet Chaon mostly pulls it off. As George explains to Lucy before the book’s cinematic denouement, complete with Russian mobsters: “It always comes to this. Everyone gets so hung up on what’s real and not real. . . . There isn’t just one version of the past, you know.”
Without giving too much away, not all the characters in “Await Your Reply” are who they appear to be in the beginning. The title itself derives from the notorious e-mail frauds in which a stranger from sub-Saharan
But the author doesn’t limit his assault on the idea of “I” to the prestidigitations of the wireless world. In an interview promoting his previous book, Chaon discussed his childhood feelings about his own adoption: “Generally, I was very comfortable with the idea, though I did wonder, sometimes. . . . I was sometimes aware of the sense that there was an other life out there that I might have led, or even multiple lives.” The assessment is fairly neutral. Yet in “Await Your Reply” and in Chaon’s earlier novel — in which a suicidal mother neglects her younger son, having never recovered from giving up her older one while she was still a teenager — Chaon seems to be advancing the controversial position that adoption is a tragedy for all involved: the mother who never stops grieving; her remaining children, who bear the brunt of that grief; the adopted child who can never really know him or herself; the adopting parents who are invariably betrayed. Chaon is a dark, provocative writer, and “Await Your Reply” is a dark, provocative book; in bringing its three strands together, Chaon has fashioned a braid out of barbed wire.
Purchase at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Await-Your-Reply-Dan-Chaon/dp/0345476026
As seen in the January Issue of Main Street Magazine.
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