Doesn't the title of this post sound like a Harry Potter book? Jeffrey and I were talking about "The Great Subtitle Takeover of 2010" the other day as we watched an episode of The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert often invites novelists onto his show to promote their books. According to Jeffrey's and my extensive research (including and limited to the titles promoted on Colbert's show), every book that has been published in the year 2010 has a subtitle.
Examples:
Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions
by: Mark W. Moffett
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future: Twists and Turns and Lessons Learned
by: Michael J. Fox
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by: Stewart Brand
A Game of Character: A Family Journey from Chicago's Southside to the Ivy League and Beyond
by: Craig Robinson
Perhaps it's just a sudden infatuation with the anatomically named punctuation mark: the colon. (Is it redundant for me to insert a colon before writing "the colon?" I don't want you to be confused.)
Colons (the punctuation mark and the body part) can sometimes add trouble to one's life. One B-list movie star (Denise Richards) found herself in trouble when she tried to use a colon in her reality TV show's title. She called it, "Denise Richards: It's Complicated."
Celebrity bloggers and comedians immediately began referring to the series as "Denise Richard's Colon, It's Complicated."
Anyway, the whole reason I started this post with such nonsense was to try and get over my writer's block. Since I finished my last final last Wednesday I spent 2 days in a sleep-coma, and then wasted no time scurrying to my local library to catch up on my reading.
Confession: I hadn't read a book for leisure since Christmas break. I was beginning to forget how to read words that didn't end in some wholly scientific suffix, like -ology or -itis.
Since then I've been happily immersed in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. (An aside to grammatically conscious readers--I know that one is supposed to underline the titles of books, but Blogger doesn't have an underline function; therefore, my books have been turned into short stories by my inappropriate quotations. Apologies to the authors.) An unforeseen backlash of such happy circumstances: (Colon used, but not followed by a subtitle--I will not be a follower. I am not a lemming.) I've become disenchanted with my own blogging. Anderson and Atwood and other great writers spend so much time searching for the proper word in every instance, putting together each carefully groomed syllable with its mate until whole strings of prose like poetry march across the page in concert. Then I think of myself sitting on my uninspiring couch, thinking only superficial thoughts, and only revising my words by automatic spell check (if you're lucky).
Anyway, after living in the shadow of my insecurity for a few days, I've ventured back out into the blogosphere after realizing that anyone in their right mind who compares my blogging to Sherwood Anderson's writing is--well, not in their right mind.
Finally, revenge has come to the Test Nazi. You may remember the Test Nazi from a few posts ago when I told of her anti-cheating antics. When talking with one of my dental school buddies about the situation with this woman, he told me his story...
Clayton rides his bike to school most days and upon arriving at school is often sweating from exertion and the toasty San Antonio weather. He usually stops by the bathroom to grab a few paper towels to wipe his face with on his way into class. He followed this routine exactly on the day of our exam which the woman would be proctoring. After he had mopped his brow with the paper towels quite a few times, the woman came by to hand out the tests and greedily grabbed up the paper towels, certain in every bone in her body that they were filled with hints or answers to the exam in question. As she snatched them up she cried, "You can't have those!" Clayton responded, "They're just my sweat rags. I'll take them to the trash if you want." The woman dropped the soggy towels in disgust and wiped the perspiration on her capri pants.
Revenge comes for the Test Nazi.
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