The Graduate

I found this musty copy of Charles Webb's The Graduate in the basement of my grandparents house, in a pile of old National Geographics and issues of Cosmo from 1974. Jackpot! With a hand-drawn silhouette of a woman's leg across the cover and commendations by the Chigago Tribune and the New York Times promising a "Brilliant...Sardonic, Ludicrously Funny" novel, I was so excited for a campy, sexy, comedy-of-errors to read on the plane back to Arizona.

I'm not exactly sure what passed for sexy or funny in 1963, but if this was it - we've come a long way, baby.

The Graduate is the story of a college-educated, son of a lawyer who returns home after four years of schooling to loll around his parents house, depressed, bored, and suffering an existential crisis. He's ornery, lazy, and entitled, but despite an ill conceived affair with the morality-challenged wife of his father's business partner, his cannot quite fight the strong inner drive to seek out the white bread path of least resistance that has been set before him from birth.

The Ballad of Reading Milton

I read this story at the bar of old college haunt, drinking my coffee black and making brilliant and acerbic notes on the side of the page. If you squinted hard enough, ignoring the bright glare of the sun on the window outside and the packed cafe inside, you would have sworn I was living inside that Edward Hopper painting. At least that's how I choose to write - I mean, remember - it.

For those not up-to-date on the Indie Elite crowd - last year, someone from University of Texas at Austin, where the now famous writer/director (and bff of the Wilson twins) Wes Anderson once studied (see: Bottle Rocket, Rushmore,  The Darjeeling Limited and this Amex Commercial), found a short story he wrote in undergrad that was published in the school's literary magazine in 1989.  The Ballad of Reading Milton.

Gorgeous Disaster: The Tragic Story of Debra Lafave

If it gets a kid to read, who cares if it's Playboy?

Thank god for the guilty pleasure of Gorgeous Disaster: The Tragic Story of Debra Lafave. From the opening pages I was hooked - I even kept the book in my bag so I could read at stop lights in the car...it was embarrassing. I really didn't want anyone to see me with a poorly written tell-all about a teacher-student sex scandal. Not my usual genre; not a piece I will display on my shelves, and if I die tomorrow, please do not look at my search history - I usually Google things like this, and this, and not this.

Author Owen Lafave - ex-husband of the very beautiful Tampa Bay middle school teacher - means well, and I really believe that. He even includes a chapter on his top seven methods for discouraging teacher impropriety (pg 280). He tries hard to present an objective view, to tell the story of his ex-wife's claim to fame without anger or excuses. In telling story though, he only contributes to her ego, to the salaciousness of the event and the press it gathers. I suspect however, that Debra's ego wasn't the only one inflated by the media storm around the scandal.