iphone | Elena Mauli Shapiro

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I am not real people; I like to tell stories and sleep a lot.

Posted on September 13, 2010 | 3 comments

My health has kind of sucked lately, which unfortunately means I haven’t written anything in a while. My ideas for my next book are sort of suspended in amber right now while my body is being an ass. But, I got another blurb for 13 rue Thérèse and it is totally huggable, check it out:

13 rue Therese is a wildly imaginative, multifaceted, confection of a novel. Like a master magician, Elena Mauli Shapiro gently introduces the beguiling Louise, and asks us to participate in solving her many mysteries. Louise’s story, we are warned, has ensnared many great minds. By the novel’s heady conclusion, we too have fallen captive to this most mischievous and provocative heroine.

–Maria Semple, author of This One is Mine

What a lot of great adjectives! I eat them up. Nom nom.

Meanwhile I got a confirmation e-mail for my reading at Litquake’s Lit Crawl on October 9th in San Francisco and I am very excited about it. Not least because the e-mail included stuff to paste on my blog. Because I am a big dork, I love to paste stuff. Witness:

If you click on that cute little sticker, it will take you to the Litquake site listing all the cool events for the whole festival. The specific event I will be reading at is listed here. I also put it on my Events page. Lit Crawl looks like a ginormous literary progressive, like bar-hopping with stories. After the whole shabang, I have been invited to this party for which my name was put on a list. Whoa. I am also having business cards printed (a couple of people at the Sacramento panel asked me for one, which totally confused me, until I realized that I look like a grown-up, and technically maybe even a professional, and that I should have one). Plus I finally broke down and acquired an iPhone. All these things are harbingers of definite adulthood but I refuse to pay attention. (Adults have great toys though. Did you know that the primary function of the iPhone has nothing to do with telephone calls and everything to do with Pacman and taking goofy videos of your cats?)

Speaking of adulthood, when signing up for the iPhone, I had to go through this big security rigmarole during which I was asked about my mortgage and car loans. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Real people with real grown-up jobs at which they have to wear real grown-up clothes and use hilarious words like “synergy” and “productize” and “thinking outside the box” have mortgages and car loans! I am not real people; I like to tell stories and sleep a lot. I know: I am a bad, bad American. Maybe it is because I am a native speaker of French but I cannot hear the word mortgage without being overly reminded of its etymology, which comes from the French “mort” and “gage,” literally: DEATH PLEDGE. Oh dear. Why would I want to sign up for one of those?

While we ponder that, here is another sticker for the road:

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Posted in publishing

Tagged adulthood, blurbs, iphone, Litquake, public speaking, publishing

The cell phone is dead; long live the cell phone.

Posted on June 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

This week I found my cell phone in the bottom of my purse clutching a tiny empty bottle of Valium and displaying the text message GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD. Rest in peace, valiant purple Motorola flip phone, and feast well in Valhalla.

So, I have to get a new cell phone, and I am facing a dilemma. I know that the days of having a plain flip phone with number keys are over, because people keep texting me, and texting them back takes me like twenty minutes without access to a keyboard. I am always tempted to call people back when they text me to expedite the proceedings, but then I never do, on the off chance that they are messaging me from a movie theater or a funeral. So, I surrender. I need a phone with letter keys. Really, I should get an iphone. Yet I pause at the threshold of such an acquisition, like a tremulous virgin unsure whether the man to whom she is about to give herself is the right one.

The iphone is a wondrous invention. Ever since my husband acquired one, his patience knows no bounds. Because of this thing, he can sit in perfect calm while I agonize for twenty minutes over whether I want the blue dress or the red one, while I get fidgety when he does the same thing with USB drives at Fry’s. He says I should get an iphone for the tranquility of our marriage, and I agree. So, why so much anguish and hand wringing? I do have a reason, but it makes me sound about 200 years old. Please loosen my corset, I feel I am about to suffer a paroxysm of the vapors.

When I am at home, I am almost never separated from the electronic teat that is my laptop. I keep it by me even when I watch television, should I want to look something up on google or read a funny article during a commercial break. The only time I am apart from the world’s sum of knowledge in aether form is when I leave the house. If I get an iphone, I will lose this last disconnect. The aether will literally be on me at all times, inescapable. Frankly, I fear this. There is a crotchety old lady inside me who insists that occasional boredom is good for the soul. Perhaps she is not entirely wrong. Why would I ever stare dreamily out the train window when I could have my nose in some engrossing app? My husband says that an iphone would be good for my writing because I could take notes whenever and wherever an idea strikes me. My response: but an idea will never strike me again! I will be too busy looking at LOLcats!

So, you see my quandary. But what quandary is that? My fate is inevitable. The aether reaches for me and already I feel myself swoon.