I Am Innocent.

Innocent, I tell you. Despite appearances, Miss Jane did not write Arlington’s current primary race, though a part of her is simply longing to do so. The situation positively scintillates with narrative potential: a teeming field of earnest aspirants, an implied favorite, and now a mini-scandale trumpeted by that tireless observer of our political scene, Arlington Yupette. It is remarkably like Miss Jane’s second effort, and quite enough to bring a blogger out of drydock. A novelist? One will have to wait and see.

A scene involving all five remaining primary candidates trapped in the elevator of the County building? (Have they ever gotten up that blueberry yogurt stain, Miss Jane wonders?) One must ruminate upon the possibilities.

Confidential to Anonymous

Darling, no one else is reading this page any more — I had all but forgotten it myself until I was pointed to your odd counterpart — and scarcely anyone can be reading that little litany of spleen either. Perhaps you could try writing and publishing a fast-paced, engaging work of pulp fiction.

Regarding your thoughtful note, you forget, once again, that we do not “out” people on this blog, or rag on them by name. But do be assured that everyone has a life and has been quite enjoying it, doing interesting, varied things, except for poor dears who are spending their recreational time trolling their own blogs. One thinks of von Neumann’s Catastrophe of the Infinite Regress.

Miss Jane has said what she has to say on this matter and will read no more mail on the subject. Recess bell! Everyone go play, darlings! Share the monkey bars and don’t shove!

Alms for the Poor

I had about considered this blog closed, but my dears, how amusing the morning mail has been! Someone who rather appreciated having a walk-on portrayal in one of my little efforts shared this site with me, since not only does it mention Yours Truly in a couple of posts, but gracious, the site owner needs help desperately.

Yupette, darling – what ever are you wearing in that profile photo? You must have had a dreadful night. Was there a keg party or some similar activity favored by the twentysomething set? I cannot fathom why you let yourself be photographed looking like that.

But fortunately, Miss Jane has a small line in grooming folk for public appearances — and being generous, she will offer a helping hand. Yupette is free to lift this little graphic, devised by Miss Jane with the accommodating Yahoo tool, and use it as her profile photo until she is feeling quite the thing, and can do her hair for the photographer. I think it captures the feel of Yupette’s quaint little site.

Right click, darling, left click on “Save As,” and pop it into the helpful little My Pictures file on your computer. Then you can upload it to your blog. I am not sure if Blogger will let you cut and paste an image: Miss Jane has never tried.

There – no one has ever said that Miss Jane shirked aiding the needy.

Dear Me, Not Again!

It is so rare to get a new comment on this blog that it rends my heart to reject the most recent one, inquiring about the next date of publication; but rules are rules. One did specify clearly in the beginning that there would be no outing of persons choosing to remain anonymous, or pseudonymous. Speaking of Anonymous, am I hearing from the same Anonymous who was morally certain Miss Jane was a Log Cabin Republican? Pace; no one else bothers to write. Patience is a virtue.

P.S. As Miss Jane is enjoying some well-deserved and much needed downtime at the moment, I trust the public will forgive today’s illustration. Fang agreed to come over from the first book and visit, but she will keep drinking from the toilet bowl and the pesky software won’t provide for shutting it.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Helas! What a week. One has been legally admonished. (Or is it truly legal? Friends with paralegal certification have been heard chortling hysterically in the background.) One has suffered undue contumely. One has endured horrid robocalls.

Humble moi, somewhat becalmed in writing due to circumstances beyond her control, turns her contemplation to the feast of dainties offered by the county’s soap-opera twists and turns. If there are readers who any longer care, is there a clear preference for the most novelworthy contretemps afoot this season? Opening sentences spring up in one’s head: “You could be forgiven for not having noticed there was a Treasurer’s race in the County. Most people in most counties don’t think much about the treasurer until they get a tax bill — even though that’s the one thing that’s certain, as they say, aside from death. In this race, we were dealing with both.”

All right, as they used to say in the parlor game, who, where and with what weapon?

Or are there more possibilities in tricycle racing? “Sprawled ten yards from the finish line, legs tangled in the stunted pedals of a twisted pink tricycle…”

Batter up!

Ethnic Stereotyping, or Stereotaping

Some of the recent raucous accusations of ethnic elitism from the county’s peanut gallery have called to mind a recent conversation. An out-of-state fan remarked by e-mail on Miss Jane’s use of the random Yiddish phrase by her saucy femme fatale, and suggested that it whiffed of the book. Ironically, of all Miss Jane’s ethnic characterizations, it is these which are most frequently lifted from life. If Smitty is occasionally perplexed by the idioms of a lady from Scarsdale, his redactor has heard most of those turns of phrase in context, some in identical situations. It has been, if not yet a long, a satisfyingly varied life. One cannot claim to perfect literacy in all the cultures of this mighty nation, but one never recoils from exposure.

Really, it is vexing to be told one is ethnically condescending. For every gentleman who has asked Miss Jane if there is a real Dvorah and whether her telephone number may be obtained by a smitten reader, there is a lady who wishes that someone like Shelley Selby would cross her path. A European-born professor of the humanities sent an encomium to Mercedes de la Roja. As the last two were crafted of the whole cloth, I think Miss Jane can be exonerated of any zeal to tarnish the image of minorities, or indeed to make any statement at all about the relative value of this culture or that gene pool. A novelist is but a portraitist and her characters sometimes walk into her parlor and request a sitting. Heavens, look at Margaret Ellen Stannard, blonde and fetching with her name straight out of a Midwestern family Bible! Morality police, take note.

Embarras de Richesse

As it happened, I was sketching another post under this title when the most recent communication from Without arrived. (Without what? you ask. Read and decide.) Rather than post it in the previous thread, which is getting worn out, I reproduce it here:

Can’t Afford Arlington has left a new comment on your post “Je ne regrette rien”:

Jane Barcroft is nothing more than a small but important part of the Arlington Elite’s successful effort to gentrify Arlington, starting with attacking anti-gentrification activists and characterizing them as crazies and terrorists.

Here I felt that the year was yielding an awkward surplus of matter for a writer of potboilers, stretching from slapstick to subversive, but what we have here is a surplus of people who regard humble moi as an “important” part of a wicked conspiracy. Is it not delicious? Or… is it even a surplus? I resist temptation, resist it mightily I say, but the desire to quote myself grows more intense with every one of these truculent posts. Has life truly imitated art? I feel as if I have been here before, in a gossamer dream, or in Chapter Seven.

Will someone ever comment on my witty dialogue? Or on the naughty bits?

Je ne regrette rien

Or so sang the great Piaf. I utter the phrase in a less global way; after reading the news of the day, despite accusations of all sorts of nefariousness from readers who have clearly taken deep offense, I apologize for nothing. Behold this

I have used no one’s actual name, depicted no offenses so contemptible, and most important, I write with far more grace and empathy than Mr. Crichton. If my novels were ever to be filmed, their success would be in the hands of the actors, not the people who do the animatronic special effects. (Even the redoubtable Fang would require no more technology than the little trouper who performed so many decades ago in the role of Toto.)

Limbo Rock and a Hard Place

I ask the reader’s pardon for a little pawky humor, but really, there are times when one must make a stand. I am holding a post from my most recent dissatisfied interlocutor, who is steadfastly insisting that I am things which primary sources, as the scholars say, do not substantiate:

- Republican;
- Plural;
- “Elitist,”
- in cahoots with the police;
- “out to make Arlington a country club,”
- out to eliminate “liberals, affordable housing, poor people, minorities,” and “social activists who refused to conform;”
- malicious (I will admit to mischievous).

Yet Ms. Puce (as we shall call him or her), who asserts all these things so repeatedly and stridently, refuses to answer a few trivia questions which would demonstrate at least some familiarity with my small pulp romps and undermine her queer claims. I fling the gauntlet down to you, Ms. Puce, I fling it. Answer my questions, or I will assume that you are some sort of cybernetic drone, a la Star Trek, programmed only to repeat a roster of peculiar accusations.

(1) What is on the floppy disk that arrives at the Spectator office, and why does Smitty wonder if it could be a motive for murder?

(2) Smitty spends Chapter 9 of Murder Across the Board in conversation with two positive, resourceful characters. What are their respective ethnic groups?

(3) The baseball stadium is considered a negative in Murder out of the Ballpark because it will destroy A. A lovely view of the monuments from a posh high rise; B. One of the last modest-priced housing co-ops in Arlington.

(4) And, for a bonus: Which Department of the Arlington Government is decried as “corrupt from the top down, or incompetent from the inside out”? (Hint: Chapter 11, page 102 of Murder Across the Board.)

Posts repeating the old accusations will be held in Limbo until the answers arrive.

Votes, Vice and Versa

I have been anticipated in a post I was composing by a visitor who mentions that yours truly did indeed receive a couple of write-ins in the recent hotly contested election. One has no illusions of political viability, but one is bounced by the bit of newspaper publicity – and the fact that one’s pseudonym made it through the winnowing out of “fictional characters.” Perhaps this is persuasive evidence that one is not fictional.

Alas, other posters are less amiable, and allege that I am not Miss Jane at all, but a “small group of malicious individuals with an elitist agenda. And vice versa.” One must take the good and the bad together, but how does one become the vice versa of “a group with an elitist agenda”?