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Alexandrie, Alexandra.

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The Nerves Are Like Telegraph Wires.

The blood is like Morse Code, and the receiving organs much like semaphore flags.

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Avon Calling…

“No…you can’t go in there. I forbid it. That is where I keep my clean sheets, and I know what you want them for.”

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Two Minute Hate

1984, a novel by George Orwell, is a tale of lusty, forbidden love trysts under the constant, watchful eye of Big Brother during the time of war with Oceania. It’s a sordid story of lusty men in muscle shirts, come-hither women in low-cut overalls and heavy, heavy makeup, and the tearing-down of walls to expose the truth: a bisexual romance so powerful it kills. Jealousy trumps truth as Winston Smith’s unrequited male lover scowls upon the seductive and perpetually horny Julia. Will this affair come to an end in a rat-filled cage?
It’s hot, hot loving over the warehouse before the ultimate betrayal. But who does it may come as a surprise.

Do you love Big Brother? Or do you love-love Big Brother?

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Book Review: The Always Friends Club Hello Jenny!

If you love to hate the popular girl cliques, “Hello Jenny!,” a delectable comedy in which the great junior high club “The Always Friends” face trials and tribulations following the return of a long-lost member. This novel is a sinfully delicious bonbon.

As the story plays out, age-old tricks are played with thirteen year old hijinks. A purloined letter is now a source for jealousy and blind rage. Instead of people hiding behind doors and in closets, we get the transformation of a large abandoned Victorian and a mother’s new paramour.

Subplots and subsidiary characters multiply. One of the wittiest subplots involves the exiled Always Friends Club president, Jenny, who can’t believe that her friends are fighting over a trip to Lake Tahoe.

Because its structure and the targets of its commentary — jealousy, greed and dishonesty — hark back to Molière, “Hello, Jenny!” offers a reassuring vision of a fixed social order, bourgeois to the core, in which virtue is rewarded and hubris exposed. For all its cynicism about posters, sleepovers and home renovation, it doesn’t rock any boats.

In between are high-flying birds like Cricket, a free spirit, fending for herself. She may have few illusions, but she still has enough integrity to recognize and respect the decency of her fellow Always Friends in deception.

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Book Review: The Winning Team

Of books deploring the quality of junior high political discourse, the most compelling is Girl Talk: The Winning Team.

Sabrina Wells, with curly auburn hair and a bubbly personality, loves magazines, shopping, and talking with her friends. A distinguished liberal thinker, she says with patent insincerity that she thinks Stacey Hansen will follow in her principal father’s footsteps as a model junior high leader.

But with as much intellectual honesty and energy as Sabrina can muster (which is a lot), she starts at square one in search of general principles that everyone in seventh grade ought to share, and then moves on to specific policies that her lunch table can argue about.

“It suddenly occurred to me that a presidential campaign was almost the same as putting on a show,” remarks Sabrina, at the beginning stages of her campaign against the formidable incumbent. “And what is really cool about this show is that I have the starring role.”

Sabrina faces courageously up to “the new politics of Bradley Junior High” in which sentimental populism, fueled by the fiery speeches of her rival, seems to be owned by the right to blow-drying one’s hair exactly the right way…every day. Although Wells clearly regards this as terribly unfair (as do I) and a result of voters’ failure to know their own self-interest, she manages to make her argument for more “quality control” in seventh-grade democracy in ideologically neutral terms.

Wells’ campaign and public relations manager, Randy Zak, a New York City native who has just moved to Acorn Falls, is cool with her spiked haircut and her hip New York clothes. Speaking eloquently in mysterious acronyms such as “ASAP”, picked up by her rock video producer father, beautifully voices her concerns about the platform of their political rival:

“We have to deal with the issues. We have to let the students know that there are things Sam and I can do for Bradley that Stacey isn’t even considering. I mean, just because she gave out free pens doesn’t mean she cares about the seventh grade. We can show people that we DO care.”

A challenging tale of political scandal; the trials and tribulations of an underdog with a penchant for seltzer water, and the toppling of a dynasty.