I am sure I gave out my e-mail address to bookseller Barnes & Noble innocently enough. I ordered some books online. B&N would e-mail me a confirmation; with the confirmation number I could track the progress of my purchases toward their final destinations. It was so long ago that I don’t remember whether there was a pre-checked box where I consented to receive the occasional e-mail from them; then again, their e-mails were infrequent enough that I found them inoffensive. I usually heard from them around the holidays (when many businesses demonstrate their profitability for the year). It was a manageable number of contacts.

Not anymore.  Now I have been hearing from B&N all the time. I am beginning to delete some of their e-mails unread. I am beginning to notice the Click here to unsubscribe hyperlink just below exhortations to follow B&N on Twitter, Facebook or via another offering: “BN’s Buzz.” (Note: they want to be “BN” not “B&N.”)

There is a phrase for this phenomenon: B&N is “beating its list,” and B&N is thrashing me to within an inch of my life. It does not bode well for our virtual relationship. I don’t run like that.

I counted thirty-four titles B&N was hawking, broken out into eight categories (not genres, mind you:  that would be assigning B&N too much credit). Topping the lists were some recommended “Summer Reads.” The featured title was Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel Life In the Time of Cataclysm–because what would I rather read on the beach than a book premised on the conceit that “When the earth’s rotation mysteriously slows, days grow longer, and nature is thrown into chaos.” (Full disclosure now: I have not read the book, but on general principles, does literary fiction need another novel describing a different dystopia? I find it almost ironic. Another dystopian book just beats an overworked premise to death. Or maybe, the dystopian oeuvre should become a bona fide genre of its own. But, I digress.)

In the Sunday Washington Post, Chris Cillizza runs a column titled “Worst Week in Washington.” (Last week the award went to attorney general Eric Holder who is facing contempt of Congress charges for refusing to hand over documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious.) This week, I would like to serve up B&N as a candidate for top honors for beating its list. For sending me so many e-mails, B&N, you are having the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something.

Screenwriter and memoirist Nora Ephron passed away yesterday at the age of seventy-one. The cause of death was reported as leukemia.

A segment on WABC-TV’s Nightline last night called Nora Ephron “the Aaron Sorkin of romantic comedy.” I liked that.

Ephron had a connection to the District. She was married for some years to D.C.-native and Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein (who, along with fellow journalist Bob Woodward, broke the Watergate scandal).

I once wrote an epic poem whose protagonist was one of my mother’s cats. To allay my boredom during downtime at work I began to pair parts of the poem with thumbnail sketches. The project was longer than a comic strip but shorter than a graphic novel. I had a friend at the time who was literary agent and she told me that if I submitted the work to her as a manuscript that she would try to sell it to a publisher as a children’s book.

Before events ever got that far, I had to change the name of the cat: Horton was already taken by an elephant. Then, I was told the cat had to be fat. Then, I was told Horton’s family needed a father. Then, I had to change the text from metered, rhyming poetry to prose. Then, I had to hand over the illustration duties to somebody who had a track record as a commercial artist. Then, I no longer recognized the product. After half a dozen editors pronounced the product dead on arrival, it did not bother me in the slightest when the agent pulled the plug on the project. I no longer viewed the book as being my own.