Organizing your writing life

RIP ANNA NICOLE SMITH: No matter what you thought of her, it's quite sad that Anna Nicole Smith has died this afternoon at such a young age. She was only 39. After losing her son last year, giving birth to a baby girl with disputed paternity and lawsuits galore, she was tabloid fodder to the extreme. Last night, she was on Entertainment Tonight and her speech was so slurred she could barely put a coherent sentence together. My guess is that she died of a drug overdose. I remember when I first saw her in the Guess jeans ads. I thought she was pretty and it was nice to see a model with some meat on her bones. After the Guess campaign it was all downhill. She married the old man with one foot in the grave and another on banana peel and then went through years of legal wrangling over his multi-million dollar estate. After the Supreme Court ruled in her favor, she was on the verge of getting something like $88 million. Her reality television show was one of my favorite train wrecks, and you couldn't escape those "TrimSpa, baby" ads even if you were living under a rock. I always wondered if most of her ditsy persona was an act, sort of like the one Marilyn Monroe created. I guess we will never know, but at least she's at peace. God knows what will happen to her baby.

I'm not going to get too deep into American Idol from last night. Jennifer has done a sweet job of recapping what was basically a "filler show" before they start the Hollywood round. They showed a few more people who were good enough to get through from all the audition cities, including Akron and Ashlyn. You might have read that Akron was ordered off the show when it was revealed he'd been busted for pot. Sweet-faced little Ashlyn was arrested for putting sugar in ex-boyfriend's gas tank. I think she should sing Heart's "Crazy On You" for her Hollywood round. Of course, there were plenty of horrible, mentally challenged people showcased including WES, who showed up in blinding yellow satin shirt and sang his own tune, "Don't Hurry, Don't Worry." Olivia Newton John looked like she was about to vomit in her mouth it was so bad.

So, that leaves me to talk about Lost, which returned after a long hiatus to finish out its third season. The audience had been promised more answers with last night's show, but of course "answers" is a relative term in Lost-world. What we did find out is that the island is some kind of medical research facility and that Juliet, the oddly sympathetic Other, was actually a captive on the island herself. Most of the show was devoted to her backstory -- lord, how those do drag on -- and how she had created some kind of drug to make barren women pregnant. Juliet was recruited by a shadowy bio-research firm allegedly based in Portland, but when pressed, the director admitted "it's not quite in Portland." Duh. Okay, now that I think about it...we didn't find out shit. They seriously need to start wrapping this show up. I am totally losing interest. Or, ABC could pay my ass to come Hawaii and write them out of the corner they've backed themselves into.

I'm off to see Reb Livingston and Carly Sachs read poetry at Emory tonight. More soon.