Great, another war

Just what we needed: suddenly Cambodia and Thailand are at each other's throats. Rioters in the Cambodian capital burned the Thai embassy, thousands of Thai citizens were flown out of Cambodia, and the border between the two countries was closed -- all because a Thai television star is alleged to have said that the revered Cambodian landmark of Angkor Wat "belongs to Thailand."

Though the actress, Suwanan Kongying, has denied making the comments, blaring front-page headlines inflamed the passions of Cambodians, who resent the economic and cultural dominance of their larger neighbor. While Cambodia has struggled to recover from years of war and brutal repression, Thailand has emerged as a major force in the regional economy. Cambodia remains dependent on imports from Thailand, and Cambodia has been swept by a wave of Thai music, movies and television serials such as those featuring the popular actress Suwanan.

Can't we all just get along?

The naked city

For me and my writer friends, this article from The Morning News -- a "web-based broadsheet" I'd never heard of until I saw the link on Romenesko -- gives us all a glimpse into the rarified world of New York publishing. Ordinarily I would find stuff like this depressing, but the author takes such a sardonic look at it all, I enjoyed it anyway. Maybe it's her theory that there are 20 good stories submitted by unknown writers to the New Yorker every month. That's only half of one percent, but hey, that's twenty a month. I'm just glad there's that much good writing about.

Speaking of stories, I heard someone interviewed on "Talk of the Nation" today -- an author named Neal Gabler -- who said there were three big reasons why so-called reality TV shows are so popular. First, people are exhausted by narrative; second, the reality shows offer a genuinely open-ended narrative which, because it hasn't happened yet, is always in doubt; and third, there's something at stake, whether it's a million dollars or a potential fiance.

I was struck by the first reason, that people are exhausted by the ubiquitous presence of narrative. It's an idea that's occurred to me before. Think of the thousands of stories we see on television and in movies, read in books, and see in other venues like the theater. No matter how long the work is, whether it's the 22 minutes that a network sitcom gets between commercials, the three solid hours of "The Two Towers," or the hundreds of pages of a Dickens book, that's thousands of expositions, complications, turning points and climaxes. I was impressed by this for the first time a few years ago when UPN was running "Star Trek: The Next Generation" night after night, week in and week out, until they had run all 278 episodes about three times each. After that kind of exposure to pure narrative -- when the only thing that changes from episode to episode is the plot itself, with the characters and the basic setting (the spaceship) remaining the same -- the patterns of the teleplays start to emerge, and I started to see the extent to which it was all formulaic.

Surely the human imagination suffers some sort of fatigue after years of narrative. I'm not even talking about the tens of thousands of characters you are presented with. I'm just talking about the thousands of narrative arcs you have to digest. After a while you have to think, "Enough already -- I'd rather watch paint dry!" And voila! It's reality TV to the rescue. (Gabler's ideas are also referred to in this article from The Witness, and don't miss this interview.)

Protests continue

"Several hundred" protestors braved the east coast cold snap and marched in Washington during Bush's State of the Union address last night. Meanwhile, except for the Bay Area, polls show the public is more amenable to the idea of war after Bush's speech.

The next big antiwar protest in San Francisco will be Sunday, Feb. 16 at noon. It was moved from the previous day to avoid a colorful conflict with the annual Chinese New Year's Day parade, foiling funsters who hoped to foment farces.

Back to silence

I hadn't been back to zen meditation since sometime in November, a combination of laziness and avoidance of Y., the new practice leader. Last night, though, I got a call from John, the friendly guy who was the temporary practice leader over the summer. He didn't call to "corral" me back, he said, but to simply ask after my well-being. But knowing he'd be there this morning, I got up at 5:00 a.m. for the first time in more than two months, and went to meditate again. The dreaded Y. wasn't there, so I was able to sit in peace. It was certainly worth it to see the expressions of surprise from everyone else.

Now, at 7:30 p.m., the missed sleep is catching up to me. But if I go to bed now, I'll wake up at 1:30 and won't be able to get back to sleep for hours. So I'll wait a while longer before hitting the sack.

This afternoon I saw my friend and fellow novelist Katia. She's one of the people to whom I gave the first draft of my novel, which I completed on New Year's Day, to read and comment on. She had some very technical craft-related comments to make, and I was really glad to get them, as no one else has made those kinds of comments -- feedback only another novelist would be able to give.

I'm very grateful to my friends and to my partner Cris for taking the time to read my lengthy first draft. Everybody's busy these days and it's great to have people who believe in me and support me so much that they're willing to sacrifice their time. Thanks, guys!

Finally, there's this article on Tibentan monks visiting Savannah, Georgia. Excerpt:

The dozen Tibetan monks that walked on the Tybee Island pier last Sunday morning had never seen an ocean before.

When they reached the end of the pier, they stopped for a moment. They glanced to the left, the right, and ahead toward the horizon, as far as their eyes could see. Then all 12 turned around and walked back to the van they had just climbed out of.

"What's wrong?" asked their escort, Murray Silver, who thought that showing the monks the ocean for the first time would be a momentous and special occasion.

One of them replied with a question: "Is it going to do anything different than it is now?"

I never get tired of going to Google news and searching on the word "monks."

Yo

I love the "NextBlog" button. Once out of forty or fifty times, it comes up with something truly amazing. That's how I found this blog {Warning! Adults only!}, a blow-by-blow account... No, better rephrase that... A detailed account of the working life of a New York stripper and (apparantly) part-time porn star. Here's a short PG-rated sample. Commenting on the man who was the guest of honor at a bachelor party they were entertaining at, she writes:

he helped out & partook, but kept his cool. we do admire that. he was one of the good ones. I could just tell. he appreciated our beauty, but we knew this one really loved his woman & only had eyes for her. sometimes that makes guys act very hostile, but this one handled it like a real man.

Isn't that special. The strippers have hierarchies of behavior for clients at bachelor parties. It's not that I'm surprised they have standards of comparison, it's that I'm surprised that some men are capable of acting more decently than others. I always figured that if you and your friends were the types to invite strippers to a bachelor party in the first place, you probably felt you were so macho and so fucking special that no rules applied whatsoever.

 
Pass rice to Bush

And speaking of the President, I got a piece of email from a friend inviting me to send a bag of rice to the White House because:

In the 1950s, Fellowship of Reconciliation began a similar protest, which is credited with influencing President Eisenhower against attacking China. Read on:

"In the mid-1950s, the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, learning of famine in the Chinese mainland, launched a 'Feed Thine Enemy' campaign. Members and friends mailed thousands of little bags of rice to the White House with a tag quoting the Bible, 'If thine enemy hungers, feed him.'

"As far as anyone knew for more than ten years, the campaign was an abject failure. The President did not acknowledge receipt of the bags publicly; certainly, no rice was ever sent to China.

"What nonviolent activists only learned a decade later was that the campaign played a significant, perhaps even determining role in preventing nuclear war. Twice while the campaign was on, President Eisenhower met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to consider U.S. options in the conflict with China over two islands, Quemoy and Matsu. The generals twice recommended the use of nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower each time turned to his aide and asked how many little bags of rice had come in. When told they numbered in the tens of thousands, Eisenhower told the generals that as long as so many Americans were expressing active interest in having the U.S. feed the Chinese, he certainly wasn't going to consider using nuclear weapons against them."

I don't know if that's true or not, but it makes a nice story. In any case, if you want to send a little bag of rice to the White House asking Bush to send it to Iraq instead of bombing the fuck out of them, you know the address. Supposedly everyone is to send a half-pound of rice in each bag. I wonder what Dick Cheney would make of that.

A glimpse of the underside

In my daily activities, as I go shopping, putter around town, I do encounter the poor and the homeless. But I'm not in many environments where most of the people around me are poor.

I had that experience today after I dropped my truck off for servicing. I decided to go downtown to see a movie, and went to a bus stop for the number 9. The number 9 goes from a working class neighborhood in the far south of the city to downtown, via neighborhoods that are almost all working class; the highlight of the trip is when it swings right by San Francisco General Hospital, the place of last resort for health care for poor people.

So the bus was packed with the lumpenproletariat for its whole route. And lumpen they were. Predictably, an argument broke out between two macho dickheads, but I was surprised by the way the other people on the bus reacted. Instead of sitting in silent acquiescence of yet another shot of minor violence, several people began yelling for the guys to stop it. "Don't do that here!" shouted one person. "There's women and children on this bus," said someone else. "Take it outside!" someone else called. "You can't do that here!" said a fourth person. Flummoxed by this popular uprising, the two hoodlums cut it out. I don't even think they got off the bus; they just chilled out. I was impressed by the way everyone on the bus reacted together to stop the fight.

 
 

Scot or not?

Downtown, I finally saw the second Lord of the Rings movie. I enjoyed it and I think it's very much worth seeing. But one thing I couldn't get over is that the actors playing two different characters, Sam and Merry, had voices that sounded exactly like that of Colm Meany, who played Chief Miles O'Brien in "Star Trek Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine." In fact, "Sam" actually looks like Meaney; but Sam is played by Sean Astin, who is actually the son of John Astin (who played Gomez on The Addams Family) and Patty Duke. So he's not even from Ireland or wherever. So much for that theory.

What is it good for?

I don’t know how much to say about the war -- I should say “the coming war,� or “the war that everyone expects to happen.� It’s in the news all the time now, and on my mind. But it’s difficult to put my thoughts and feelings in words. Maybe if I try to make some simple declarative statements. The following is true of my feelings or true from my biased perspective:

1. I don’t want the war to happen, and I attended a peace march last weekend as a sign of my opposition. I also wrote Bush a letter a couple of months ago. Aside from those actions and a few desultory comments to friends and in my weblog, I haven’t done anything about my feelings of being opposed to the war.
2. I’m opposed to the war because I feel it is needless, because of the suffering it will cause, and because I believe the economic impact will likely extend the recession the U.S. is in. (Some commentators say the U.S. is actually now climbing out of the recession and that if we fell back in it would be a “double-dip� recession. Others say we’re pretty darned close to a depression; but I don’t think the government would ever admit that unless it were painfully obvious, because they don’t want people to become pessimistic and stop spending. Consumer spending is the only thing that is keeping the economy going now.)
3. Judging from the two above comments, my anxieties also extend to the economy, which is natural because I’m unemployed, but I think even if I still had a job, I would feel the same way, which is to say, nervous about the economy and the effect of a war.
4. In addition to the usual and already large enough number of casualties most people anticipate, I think there is a small but significant chance that as part of, or as a result of, the war, there will be a major catastrophe. Not necessarily a nuclear bomb going off, although that is possible, but at least a very large chemical weapons attack somewhere that will kill thousands of civilians. The horrific nature of such an attack could make it one of the touchstones of the early 21st Century. In fact, one reason I’m forcing myself to state how I feel about current events is because I fear that the war will be more momentous, in a bad way, than people seem to expect, and that I’ll want to look back someday at how I felt.
5. By saying I fear the war and/or its aftermath will be worse than most people expect, I refer to the fact that there is actually very little doomsaying in the press. No one is seriously talking about the possibility of, for example, a major chemical weapons attack on a city -- say, Tel Aviv -- and the suffering it would cause, much less the consequences. By consequences I mean that if Tel Aviv were to suffer such an attack, Israel -- which is widely acknowledged to have nuclear weapons -- might very well retaliate by nuking Baghdad. This is the “worse than most people expect� to which I refer.
6. I don’t feel the American presidential administration really wants to recognize the very real lack of support for the war. All the polls show support for a unilateral war is low; support for a multilateral war is higher, but still soft, especially when asked with the qualifier about letting the weapons inspectors do their work, or the one about the U.N. officially voting to make war. Despite this lack of support, I feel the President and his advisors have blinders on and are rushing toward war as fast as they can.
7. I think the war can start anytime -- even this weekend. News reports have started using words like “imminent.� This increases my foreboding.
8. In response, I have the urge to do something dramatic, like shave my head and go sit zazen in front of the Chevron building for the duration. I also have all the other urges, of course, including to see movies, work on my book, masturbate, clean the house, take a road trip, etc. etc. There’s something I always remember when I think about the last war, and that’s how Christine, on the day the Gulf War started, responded by completely repainting her room. (She still lived on Valencia St. then.) This urge to do something constructive, even on the most private level, is something I admired greatly. By contrast, my own urge to demonstrate, and in silence, is theatrical and unconstructive.

Winchester Cathedral, you're getting me down

Several religion stories caught my eye today.

First, the head of the Anglican church in Sydney, Australia is challenging the authority of the worldwide Anglican communion, the archbishop of Canterbury. Sydney's Anglican Archbishop, Peter Jensen, is one of many Anglican prelates opposing what they see as creeping liberalism in the Protestant denomination, which is called the Episcopal church in the U.S.

Next, we go to Louisville, Kentucky, where the head of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. has asked conservatives not to hold a meeting to organize opposition to a church study on continued "enforcement of church bans on homosexual ministers and wedding-like ceremonies for gays." Almost every mainstream Protestant denomination is fighting the issue of gay ordination; see this story from St. Paul, Minn. on recent Lutheran developments.

Finally, for comic relief, we have the octogenarian head of a fringe Christian radio station declaring that the "church age" is "dead." He says all true Christians should leave their churches because God no longer speaks through them.

Plunging right ahead

"The Bush administration faced new problems today in its confrontation with Iraq as China and Russia joined U.S. allies France and Germany in rejecting early military action." So says this Washington Post story from today's paper. But administration officials continue to push war, and the NYT said today that:

Mr. Bush opened his remarks with a lengthy and impassioned case for action against Saddam Hussein, making it sound as if war was imminent.

Be sure to click on that last link and on this one. Bush appeared at a St. Louis factory where he spoke in front of a painted backdrop of boxes whose labels read "MADE IN AMERICA." In front of Bush was a small pyramid of actual boxes with tape and paper labels covering portions of the boxes. When reporters lifted the tape, they saw that Bush "volunteers" had covered up the prominent legend "MADE IN CHINA." Here's a photograph of the event.

Early 20th C. futurism for the 21st Century

An architect suggests that a 1908 design by famed architect Antonio Gaudi might be right for the WTC site. (Link courtesy metafilter.) Wow!

For comparison, here are the nine latest official entries in the competition sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., and just to refresh your memory, here's the New Yorker's archive of 11 Sep-related coverage.

Why it's important to vote, no. 2435549132

This column from Monday's L.A. Times recognizes the 30th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision by remembering what it was like when abortion was illegal:

At any one time, 15 or 20 women lay in the county hospital septic abortion ward, an additional half a dozen at Harbor. They were too sick to talk, but Mishell knew the common thread: usually unmarried and abandoned by the man, uniformly, suicidally desperate. They jabbed into their uteruses with knitting needles and coat hangers, which Mishell sometimes found still inside them. They stuck in bicycle pump nozzles, sometimes sending a fatal burst of air to the heart. They'd try to insert chemicals -- drain cleaner, fertilizer, radiator-flush -- and miss the cervix, corrode an artery and bleed to death. Mishell once put a catheter into a woman's bladder and "got a tablespoon of motor oil."

This is why we have to vote, to make sure Bush is defeated in 2004. He will probably have the opportunity to appoint two more Supreme Court justices during his first term. Making sure it's also his last would give us a chance to reverse some of the crypto-fascistic laws and regulations he's promulgated.

I don't use the word "fascism" lightly. But I can't think of any other word that better characterizes the collection of laws, regulations and practices the Bush administration has enacted, especially since they got the carte blanche of 11 September. In response, the ACLU is initiating a major campaign to fight creeping fascism.

Meanwhile, here's a wonderfully archetypal account of the rise and fall of a tech worker. With a few variations, it could describe almost any laid-off tech worker, including me.

Hello? Anybody see those hundreds of thousands of demonstrators?

A couple of days after the large peace demos in San Francisco, Washington and elsewhere, Bush raised the pressure on Iraq yet again, making a war seem all the more inevitable. It couldn't be clearer that the demonstrations that took place over the weekend completely failed to communicate anything to the war-hungry administration. You can't help but conclude that they simply want a war and that nothing can dissuade them at this point. But who knows, maybe this new poll, which today announced that Americans continue to be skeptical about a war in Iraq, will make some kind of difference. If they're not paying attention to opinion polls, what are they paying attention to?

To change the subject: Here are some fabulous photographs of Kamagasaki, Osaka in the 1950s -- a far cry from the glittering consumer jungle that we envision when we think of Japan. But even today,

Kamagasaki is the largest slum in Japan. Located in the south end of downtown Osaka, Kamagasaki is a one square kilometer "city within a city". It is home to some thirty thousand day labor workers, some three thousand homeless, and close to ninety yakuza offices. There are almost no social benefits for the people in Kamagasaki, and like the elderly workers that live here, the town is dying.

That's from another site hosting an exhibit of modern-day photos of the same neighborhood. )Links courtesy randomwalks.)

Blogger of the month

The widely syndicated rad-lib cartoonist Tom Tomorrow's site contains not only links to his familiar work but a terrific blog that says everything about today's issues I'd like to say, only I'm not as well-connected and articulate. Today's post quotes a FAIR story pointing out that mass-media accounts of the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on the annual celebration of his life, invariably omit the still-controversial radical views on peace, poverty and class that marked King's later work:

There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?" These are words that must be said.

Slowly walking

I got my laptop back from Castro Computer Services in tip-top shape. They installed a new 20GB hard drive and copied the contents of my old one onto the new one. No more annoying clunking noise, random crashes, or glacial behavior.

Courtesy of RandomWalks, here are lots of pics of the big peace demo in S.F. on Saturday. Of course, the local paper also covered the event. My estimate of the crowd: 100-150K.

I got down there at 11:10, stood for 90 minutes on Spear St. with a bunch of Episcopalians and Quakers, then finally found my friends from St. Francis Lutheran. The morning was unusually cold, and the chill lasted as long as the shadows. We stood near a thrown-together "Brass Liberation Orchestra" that played disorganized versions of hymns, folk songs and just about everything *except* marching band music. Sometime around 12:30 we finally started moving. The folks from my church quickly left me behind; I didn't want to just stream through the crowd, so I just went as fast as the people in front of me, reading the protest signs and just sort of chilling out. After a while I decided to walk kinhin style, and found this not only made it easier to walk but it centered me and kept me from being too impatient and irritable in the crowd. After a couple of hours, I got really tired and hungry, and as we were near the Walgreen's between 4th and 5th Sts. by then, I ducked inside for some ibuprofen and chocolate. After that, it was hard for me to get back into the meditative state of mind, but I stuck with the march until it turned off Market St. I never planned on going to the rally, having decided long ago that I was in no mood to have some speaker, even if it was Martin Sheen, tell me what I already knew. When we got to 8th St. I bailed out, footsore and now warm from the sun. I ducked into the Civic Center station to get away, but everyone else had the same idea, and I wound up walking several blocks until I could get on a bus going down Mission St.

Update: Here are a lot of photos of the march (v. large page with lots of photos).

That night I went to the Berkeley Symphony. There's nothing like a big concert of classic music or opera to make me feel like civilization is worth preserving.

To go

I was reading the 16 Jan 03 New Yorker when I came across a Calvin Trillin piece contrasting experiences ordering takeout food in New York and San Francisco. Trillin was in town to visit his daughter Abigail, a family law attorney, and her children. In the piece -- which is so lightweight it makes you wonder what kind of dues you have to pay before you get to the point where the New Yorker will just print whatever the hell you want to submit -- Trillin alleges that here in San Francisco we actually refer to takeout food as "carryout." He goes on to use that term for the entire piece. This baffled me. After living in San Francisco for almost 24 years, I use the term "takeout" and have never heard anyone insist otherwise. But when you call or walk into a restaurant, you just say, "I want to order to go" or "something to go." I've even heard the term "takeaway" used, and that's more a British usage. But not "carryout."

The piece goes on to praise what Trillin claims is the unique burrito produced in San Francisco's Mission District, and happily describes the widely-recognized logo of Taqueria La Cumbre: "a heroic painting of a sort of Latinized Ava Gardner wearing crossed bandoliers and carrying both a bugle and an unfurled Mexican flag." Yes, we love it.

All you need to know about publishing these days

The news that the next book in the Harry Potter series will finally be released this coming June was front page news today -- in the business section. Yes, the New York Times, which probably does more than any other general-interest publication to keep track of the publishing industry (which is, of course, largely based in New York), and usually does so in the Arts section where such news belongs, published this story just below the fold, complete with a postage stamp-sized color protrait of the series' author, one J.K. Rowlings.

No, I'm not tempted to start writing kids' books. Writing mysteries is one thing. Writing for kids, I'll leave to somone else.

In other news, the SF Chronicle today published this hilarious story about the penguins at the zoo. It seems they imported a few penguins from another establishment, and these convinced all the S.F. penguins that it was time to migrate to South America. So they endlessly swim laps in their pool, and have been doing so for weeks now.

Upcoming anti-war demo

Here's more on the upcoming anti-war demo:

From: 	Ethan Flad

Sent: 	Tuesday, January 14, 2003 8:20 AM

To: 	SF Bay Episc social justice

Subject: 	interfaith vigil Sat morning prior to big anti-war march



Friends -- as you all know, this coming Saturday large anti-war

rallies will take place here in San Francisco, in Washington DC, and

around the country. I received a report from the anti-war rally in LA

last Saturday, which was apparently wonderful gathering of 20,000, and

we are expecting 50 to 100,000 here in SF this weekend.  As some of

you may know, many people of faith will be gathering at 10am that

morning (see below).  Please come and join us -- many of us will be

standing under the Episcopal Peace Fellowship banner -- and pass on

the details to your friends.  peace, Ethan



Website editor/producer, "The Witness" magazine

http://www.thewitness.org

Since 1917, giving voice to a liberation gospel of justice and peace

************************************************



PLANS FOR SATURDAY, JAN. 18

NATIONAL MARCH IN SAN FRANCISCO

Pre-March interfaith prayer service on Spear St. between Market and

Mission streets (right above Embarcadero BART stop) from 10 -11 am.

Bring banners, signs.... The march will gather at Justin Herman Plaza

at the foot of Market St. at 11 a.m. After an opening rally, we will

march at 12 noon down Market St. to the San Francisco Civic Center for

a rally beginning at 1 p.m.

Group names endangered national parks

One of the most beautiful places in the world, Joshua Tree National Park, is on the list of the top 10 endangered national parks, says the National Parks Conservation Association. Some of the stressors: off-road enthusiasts, rock climbers, and nearby development. This 28 Oct 02 L.A. Times article lays it out pretty well.

It's another paradox. Love a place for its desolation, silence and pristine beauty. But if you visit too often, or tell your friends, then increased traffic puts it at risk. As for nearby development, the fact is that people love living in the desert, so much so they've turned Los Angeles and its environs, and ditto Phoenix, into horrible wastelands of sprawl. So they have to find the next nice place, and hey, look what's just down interstate 10 -- Palm Springs, near the southern border of J.T. Nat'l Park. The area's remoteness is the only thing that's saved it up to now. But L.A. sprawl has reached 80 miles east and is now most of the way to Palm Springs. Yechh, as they used to say in MAD Magazine.

If you lived here, you could move

A piece in the Times today reveals the paradox of San Francisco life:

As a forlorn landlord told me that day, three or four years ago anybody could get a job here but nobody could find a place to live. Now the opposite is true.

The article goes on to say that apartment listings on craigslist -- which is the first place anybody looks now -- have gone up by a factor of ten.Maybe now is the time to lease that little writing studio of my own. Oops, I don't have a job now, and I can't afford to pay rent on another place. That's the other paradox of life in San Francisco -- either you can't afford to do the art you came to the city to do, or you don't have time to do it because you're too busy earning money to support yourself.

Meanwhile, nightly reports on the news get us all used to the idea that war in the Middle East is inevitable. Here's the logic: 1. There's a massive naval and troop buildup taking place now. 2. You can't keep all those troops in the area indefinitely, at least not as long as a year, which is how long the U.K. wants to wait for U.N. inspectors to do their jobs. 3. Therefore, you have to attack. (Update: THis article from USA Today discusses the "invasion timetable.")

If you don't cotton to that logic, the usual suspects are planning another of their big anti-war demonstrations for San Francisco, L.A. and Washington, this Saturday, Jan. 18.

More Ripley

I'm not a big reader of mysteries or thrillers, but the Ripley novels of Patricia Highsmith have been favorites of mine for many years. I first heard of Highsmith in the mid-70s, when Wim Wenders made his wonderful movie The American Friend (1977), based on "Ripley's Game." At the same time, the Village Voice Lit. Supp. published a big feature on the author. A Texan who lived most of her life in New York and in Europe, Highsmith was most famous for writing "Strangers on a Train" (subsequently made into a 1951 Hitchcock film) until people started making movies of the Ripley books. I saw the Wenders film several times, relishing Dennis Hopper -- he had not yet made his American comeback -- in the Ripley role.

Highsmith's most successful books -- the ones published before 1980 or so -- tended to feature amoral, alienated anti-heroes as protagonists. Her books never focus on "who done it;" they're character studies of psychological pressure and the breakdown of the inhibitions that keep ordinary people from resorting to violence to solve their problems. The five Ripley books show a young, not-yet-sophisticated American who eventually becomes a wealthy, sophisticated expatriate through a series of murders, assumed identities, and art frauds. As he grows older, he only resorts to violence when interlopers of various stripes -- usually more gauche than he -- threaten his comfortable life in the French countryside.

In 1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Matt Damon in the title role, was a big hit, and introduced the Ripley character to a new generation of film viewers. (I doubt the 1999 film was as successful as the Wenders picture in attracting readers to Highsmith's work, though -- Damon and the Venitian setting were just too glamorous.)

Now comes word that John Malkovich is starring in a new version of "Ripley's Game," to be released in April. That'll be worth seeing. Malkovich, as did Hopper before him, has the requisite weirdness and suggestion of sociopathy, where Damon was just a bit too sweet.

Everybody's a critic

While I'm not a real fan of either the Lord of the Rings movies or those recently produced by George Lucas, I found this satirical article very amusing. And speaking of the latest LOTR flick, Anthony Lane's description in the Jan. 6 '03 New Yorker is a classic:

In essence, the worthy folk of Edoras, under their king Theoden, have retreated to Helm's Deep, where they are beseiged by Orcs, Uruk-hai, and other evildoers who come bearing hard consonants. It is a close and vicious fight, but at last the long vowels of Theoden and Aragorn, aided by the soft fricatives of Gandalf, carry the wordy day.

Meanwhile, this Salon article discusses why we need movie critics at all.

I majored in film criticism in college. (My degree, from the Univ. of Texas, was actually in Radio-TV-Film with a concentration in film crit.) One day I had to write a paper on whether film criticism was necessary. I was in a bad mood that day, and wrote several pages about how film critics were probably mostly like me: nerdish wannabes who didn't have the guts to actually try to be filmmakers and who would rather sit on the sidelines making potshots. My professor, who was a cheerful guy who always encouraged me, was astonished at this screed and gave me a B, which, looking back on the piece, was probably more than I deserved. In fact, of the writing I saved from that period, almost all of it now embarasses me, and I'm surprised they gave me a degree at all, much less one "with honors."

I'll say one thing--it sure was a heck of a fun major. But I did learn something about writing and about film -- not enough about either, but just enough to be dangerous. I still don't think film criticism is necessary, but consider when I actually made that claim -- in 1977, when we were in the middle of a golden era of American and European film. I had a good time back then writing about the new Robert Altman and Woody Allen movies; what people write about now, I have no idea.

Why voting matters, no. 4321516682

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said today that separation of church and state is an overrated idea not necessarily dictated by the Constitution. Speaking to an overwhelmingly supportive crowd in Fredericksburg, Virginia at a "Religious Freedom Day" rally, the Reagan appointee suggested Supreme Court decisions which erected the church-state wall of separation had gone overboard. Additional links:
   - Washington Post

(Updates with more links will follow.)

Slaughter makes killing. Ha ha!

A mystery writer I've never heard of named Karin Slaughter just got a "seven figure" contract for her next two books, says this Publishers Weekly article. I know that mystery writers, in addition to authors of certain screenplays and retired Presidents, are some of the few writers who are treated royally these days by the publishing world, but it impressed me that someone I never heard of, with only two books to her name, got a million bucks to write two more. I did a search on her name and came up, first, with this interview on her own website. (The so-called bio therein is a worthless paragraph-long piece of P.R.) It's fine as far as it goes, but what I really wanted to find out was, what was this woman's career arc? Has she published 62 short mystery stories before this, or did she just start tiddling her typewriter keys and hit the jackpot?

Still searching, I came up with several interviews with Slaughter, all of them more or less mystery-fan oriented, but I didn't found out what she'd done before this except for a single reference. She said she tried to write a piece of historical fiction; she refers to it as a "story" but it might have been a book or even just an idea for a book. In any case, she says her agent was not successful in selling it, and so she started writing mysteries.

That's it? Just one failed story, then unlimited success as a mystery writer? I'm not saying she isn't a talented writer. She must be, to stand out among the crowd of people writing mysteries these days. But she also seems to have been incredibly lucky for her first book to be a hit and to get a million-dollar contract based on that and the second book.

Today's strange search result

Sure, I do a vanity search on Google once in a while. Mainly it's so I can find reviews or other online mentions of my books. I'm used to seeing references to people named "Mark Pritchard" all over the English-speaking world. One of the best known is an English composer/recording artist who's been doing techno for many years, but there are literally dozens with web pages about their various walks of life. There seem to be a lot of academics, but maybe it's just that academics tend to have their own web pages. Anyway, today I was pleased to find there's even a Jewish Mark Pritchard.

After coming back from the desert on Saturday, I've spent the whole week doing home-related things. Today we turned half the office upside down so that a new piece of furniture could be moved into the room -- things like that.

The advertisements I mentioned last month -- the ones produced by Arianna Huffington alleging SUVs support terror by consuming oil imported from countries with shady reputations -- have been released. View the ads online here.

The price of fantasy

The Sunday L.A. Times magazine of 12 Jan 03 has a very interesting article on the health risks taken by performers in Southern California's porn industry. Curiously, the article seems to think the problem is that "the industry is unregulated." I think the problem has more to do with supply and demand on the one hand and the lack of unions on the other. There is an endless supply of young talent for porn, youths between 18 and 30 who have a sense of invulnerability that's typical for young people; as long as there are more of them than there are roles, they'll remain disposable.

What they need to do is unionize, but:

Deborah Sanchez, supervising attorney for the Los Angeles City Attorney's special enforcement unit, is sympathetic to the plight of porn performers but sees little support from the public. "This reminds me of all the other types of businesses that have traditionally been oppressors--the garment industry, for example," Sanchez says. "The difference is, there are unions for garment workers" these days.

Mainstream Hollywood actors have a union that oversees wages, health insurance, retirement benefits and residual payments. Screen Actors Guild officials say they would never allow their members to work on an adult set.

Some adult-film actors know that they are entitled to employee protections such as workers' compensation and overtime, but they see no way performers could organize. "You would have to get every actor and actress in adult to sign up at the same minute," says an actress who goes by the stage name Wendy Divine and has worked on Vivid and K-Beech productions for several years. "Even if that happened, the studios could easily find replacements. They control everything."

Oh, come on, you guys. If the farmworkers and the garment workers could do it, you can do it.

Now, a note on the following entry. It's fucked up in the way that only Blogger can fuck things up. From time to time entries get concatenated, and it's happened again. I was trying to post something entirely different.

Author makes killing. Ha ha!

A mystery writer I've never heard of named Karin Slaughter just got a "seven figure" contract for her next two books, say this Publishers Weekly article. I know that mystery writers, in addition to authors of certain screenplays and retired Presidents, are some of the few writers who are treated royally these days by the publishing world, but it impressed me that someone I never heard of, with only two books to her name, got a million bucks to write two more. I did a search on her name and came up, first, with this interview on her own website. (The so-called bio therein is a worthless paragraph-long piece of P.R.) It's fine as far as it goes, but what I really wanted to find out was, what was this woman's career arc? Has she published 62 short mystery stories before this, or did she just start tiddling her typewriter keys and hit the jackpot? Still searching, I found

Pat Robertson, hypocrite

The latest Tom Tomorrow comic draws a link between former presidential candidate and perennial fundamentalist rhetoritician Pat Robertson and African support for Al Qaeda. While this comic will be sent to millions of desktops and posted on countless cubicle and coffee-room walls over the next week or two, my question is: Why is the comic strip the most popular medium for progressive political tracts these days? Isn't anyone capable of reading an article anymore? Or are we just enamored of the ways comics compact facts, argument and irony into a bite-sized image?

Know the enemy, #1

This article on Salon.com cogently explains why politics still matters:

Clearly, though, the principal aim of hard-line religious conservatives is a tighter control on reproductive options and the enshrinement of the heterosexual nuclear family as the paragon of public virtue. Making abortion illegal is central to that goal.

Unfortunately, the article is part of their paid area, but clicking on the link will at least get you a summary.

Also very informative, and less opinionated, if journalistic even-handedness is important to you, the Dec. 20 2002 episode of This American Life. In my opinion, the weekly NPR program out of Chicago is the best documentary series in any medium, week in and week out, in the country. The Dec. 20 show, "Why We Fight," offers a multiplicity of views on the coming war in Iraq. Some very interesting informed perspectives are included. You can listen to the whole show from that link, but Real Audio is required.

I pay for Salon, but I draw the line at Real Audio. I just don't think I should have to pay for a utility that was free for the first four or five years of its existence. Yes, this keeps me from listening to a lot of stuff that's on the web, but I do draw the line someplace.

Back home again

I'm back in San Francisco. The kitchen finally done, we went to Pier 1 and bought a new kitchen table, cheap. Cris cooked some fish and vegetables and we had dinner on the new table. Fade to black.

While I was visiting my friend Chr, I joked about how I never use my blog for the thing a blog is supposed to be used for, i.e. simply posting links that your friends can check out, instead of sending them email with the URL. So in the new year, I resolve to post most of the links here, except the most embarrasing ones. Courtesy of BoingBoing, then, here is an archive of cowgirl pinups.

While visiting Wonder Valley, a sparsely populated desert community with as many abandoned as inhabited shacks, I caught the desert bug again. That is, I wanted, once again, to buy a place and move down there. It's so beautiful, it's close to the town of 29 Palms as well as Joshua Tree Nat'l Park, and there are actually plenty of artists and writers down there. In fact, I'm a little afraid it's getting too well known. When Chr moved down there ten years ago, it was truly nowheresville, and now you can get espresso. I think it's too far off Interstate 10 and too far away from Palm Springs to ever get too popular, but ... well, it's never a good idea to bet against American sprawl. We'll see in another ten years.

First draft done!!

This morning, a few minutes before 10:00 a.m., I put the last words on the last chapter of my novel, Make Nice -- the first draft, that is.

It's been a long process so far. According to my notes, I got the idea for the book on Jan. 6, 1996, and started writing in June 1998. So that makes four and a half years between first and last words. I didn't work on it steadily during that time, during which I lost and found several jobs, completed work on two books of short stories, and indulged in various other non-novelistic activities. In fact, I wrote 18 chapters, more than half the book, in the last year alone, as I figured out better ways to work, resolved plot problems and put aside any other projects. Getting laid off my last full time job in early October also gave things a boost.

I'm still down in the desert, of course (see the last entry). When I finished the last chapter and had backed the whole book up to a zip file on a diskette, I went outside the house and walked over to the scrap pile. (All desert houses have scrap metal piles, there's a law or something.) Choosing a thick metal bar and a large gong-like metal lid, I paraded by myself across half a mile of desert, clanging energetically. I walked to Philip and Rick's house, where Christine, my host, had already gone to have breakfast. They praised me, then we all ate waffles. It's a gorgeous day, warmer than the last three days. Christine and I took a walk later in the jojoba patch while Philip and Rick and company went to Desert Hot Springs.

So, this is an exciting, momentous day. Of course, there's still tons of work to do. The finished book is something like 175,000 words -- at least twice as long as any sane publisher would like, quite apart from the question of whether all those words are really necessary -- and I expect to cut at least a third to a half of that. But it's easier to cut 75,000 words than find yourself 15,000 words short, that's for sure.

Happy new year to me and to you.