America today

Here's a good one, courtesy Space Waitress: The FBI questioned a man after someone spotted him reading a news editorial entitled "Weapons of Mass Supidity" in a coffee shop. He rightly concludes: "It seems like a dark day when an American citizen regards reading as a threat, and downright pitch-black when the federal government agrees."

Does everyone remember what to do if the FBI calls, or comes to your door? Here's a nice refresher: Know Your Rights, and another: Just Say No to the FBI and Police.

Do I think cops are a good idea when a drunken neighbor is beating on my front door screaming threats, or when people are running riot after a football loss? Sure. But as the Sf Chronicle's Jon Carroll wrote yesterday, this whole War on Terror thing is way out of hand.

So far, we've cracked down on a whole bunch of visa violators. Now I hate visa violators as much as the next guy, but wouldn't it be great to get actual accessories to the actual terror attack? John Ashcroft: inept fascist. He can't even run a police state right.

I'll take Dictator Targets for $1000

A Pentagon agency is setting up a web-based betting pool for people who want to make wagers on the likelihood of assassinations, coups, terrorist attacks and other catastrophes, the Asociated Press reported (link to SF Gate).

In a news conference Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota criticized the market:

"The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque," Wyden said.

Dorgan described it as useless, offensive and "unbelievably stupid... Can you imagine if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in ... and bet on the assassination of an American political figure, or the overthrow of this institution or that institution?"

Who's behind it? None other than John Poindexter.

Echo of Stephanie

A reader wrote me about Stephanie, a former girlfriend who died in a car wreck in 1999, and sent me this picture of her and the rest of the on-air staff. That's her standing with her hand on the desk.

He writes:

I went to Boston College with Stephanie (and was also a) dj at WZBC. Her shows were so... I hate to say touching, but they were. They were very personal, romantic, geared towards her audience, inspirational, ecclectic for sure. ... She and I were eventually banned from being in the dj booth at the same time because we would get so much shit for "immaturity." Stephanie and I did news together (which no one ever listened to or realized the station had) by just grabbing various shit off of the AP machine. Her delivery, and dead serious alert tone (done completely comically of course) would literally have me on the floor. Stephanie was someone who could make me laugh till it hurt. During the begathon to raise money for the station, her spots were so fucking funny. The recording she did for the sign off of the station nightly, which she made for just me to play was so amazing. She was just so funny and such a crack up.

Way back then

Yesterday was a day off, so I went to the huge and understuffed San Francisco Public Library. One of several new or refurbished buildings that line the Civic Center Plaza, the library is an attractive hodgepodge of styles which nonetheless probes to be a spectacularly inefficient library-- if you believe the critics. I went to the periodicals department on the 5th floor, loaded some microfilm into an ancient viewer, and typed in several news stories reporting on the October, 1990 demonstration protesting the visit to SF by evangelist Larry Lea. The Texas preacher wanted to "exorcise" the "evil spirits" he said held sway over San Francisco -- on Halloween, which is practically a national holiday here (if San Francisco were a nation). A grand time was had by all.

I had two amazingly nerdy customers this week at the l.n.c.b.. The first was an 11-year-old boy who, while his mother checked out her purchases, earnestly explained to her some arcane point having to do with "Lord of the Rings" and Sauron's powers and the Ring and all. The second was when some schlub returned a Monty Python boxed set of DVDs and bought a huge box of "Windows XP Server" software and manuals. Only a real nerd would have a boxed set of ten Monty Python DVDs, and only a truly deadly one would exchange it --unopened -- for software. And boring server software, at that. The damn box of software weighed a ton; it's the first time I've double-bagged something.

One down, many to go

Last week I sent off a query about my novel to a prospective agent -- the first one I've tried, someone whose name I got from a client of his -- and today I got back a nice but short email: no dice. So my summertime fantasy of going from no agent to having an agent in exactly one week is over. Now starts the hard work of gathering information about other agents who might be interested, and sending queries to them. I'll try not to be tiresome about it, for I fear the process of sending out queries and getting negative answers has a very good chance of becoming extremely tiresome. How about this: I'll make a scorecard.

Eat at Mick and Jimmy's!

I love this story from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (link courtesy poyner.og/romenesko). It starts off to be a story about how a small Minnesota town is advertising itself as the alternative to mass-mall culture with the slogan "Secede from Starbucks Nation." The story goes on to cite many of the charms of Excelsior, including its claim that Mick Jagger was inspired there to write the song "You Can't Always Get What You Want." According to the town wag, who really is named Jimmy, he met up with Jagger at the town's pharmacy after they played a gig in the burg in 1964 (they really did play there) and in complaining about receiving a regular coke instead of a cherry coke at the soda fountain, uttered the now-famous phrase.

Alphabetizing

Among other attributes, one of the main qualities that got me hired at the l.n.c.b. was my familiarity with the alphabet. I was asked to take on, from time to time, sections of the store where the alphabetizing was particularly bad -- meaning that customers had torn up the section and books had gotten reshelved in the wrong place -- and clean them up. One of the most egregious sections is the poetry section -- so bad that I spent part of my lunch hour working on it, and then after my shift was over, I actually went back and worked on it for another 35 minutes, off the clock. Why? Because it's bad enough that no one buys poetry, but if they did go looking for poetry, it would be tragic if they couldn't find what they were looking for. The work of Charles Simic was for some reason spread all over the S's. Wilson, the several Williamses, and Whitman were all entwined, along with a stray Louise Gluck. Mary Karr was all over the place, and Kenneth Koch was hiding among the M's. I tried to put things back in order, but the poetry section was too large to be made perfect in just an hour -- which is, I guess, a blessing.

I found another news story about Clear Lake, the amorphous suburb in Texas where I went to high school, and where I set many of my erotic stories involving teenagers. (You won't find Clear Lake on any map; Clear Lake City (not an incorporated city, by the way) is more or less the center of it, but much of that is in fact an incorporated area of Houston, which is actually 25 miles north. It's all very confusing and not worth figuring out, but if you really want to, use Yahoo maps to find Webster, TX, and then Seabrook, TX, and the Clear Lake area includes those towns and everything in between.) Mysteriously dead teenagers with the wrong friends are the victims in this story. One of the teens is named Tiffany, of course. I'll try to run updates (here's an AP story) of this story, which should have some legs, though not as long legs as the story of Andrea Yates who lived in the same neighborhood -- that's the insane housewife who drowned all her kids.

I celebrate these horrific tales because they fit my mental picture of the place, a desperately sterile suburb practically coated in bored teenagers and middle-class angst.

Egads

And having just sent off my first query to an agent, in what may be a long attempt to get my novel published, I come across this article from New York magazine, about how new authors with first novels are treated nowadays. Strangely, it's actually easier to get a big advance for your first novel -- but if it doesn't come close to making back the advance, you can be finished in publishing, just like that. No one else will touch you, because you'll never be a "first novelist" again.

No pressure there, eh? I foresee a lot of people getting name changes or resorting to pseudonyms. "Sure, it's my first novel! Mary Jo Schultz has never had a publishing contract before, no sir!"

There's more at the Book Babes column on poynter.org, focussing on the part journalists play in the book publicity machine. It doesn't give me much confidence when the columnist writes:

Schaper asks a simple question that cuts to the heart of all the idealistic blather about books as a vehicle for ideas. "If nobody knows your book is out there, where is its value?"

Man, talk about a cutthroat attitude. "The idealistic blather about books as a vehicle for ideas." If she were in charge, I guess she'd kill the New York Times Book Review and just cover books in the business section once a week along with the rest of the "Information Industry."

Update: and here's something on the same theme from the newspaper The Scotsman: First Impressions Count In Publishing, reacting to and extending the New York article. The anecdote about an author's mother fishing his manuscript out of a garbage can and sending it to an agent is quite touching.

Into the future

Two minor milestones achieved this week: 1.) I finally sent a query letter for my novel Make Nice to an agent. I got the name of the agent from a writer I met up at Holden Village in June. Whether this will turn out to be beginner's luck and I get an agent on the first try -- man, that would have to be unbelieveable luck; either that or my novel is more impressive than I think -- or (more likely) it's just the first in many queries. My friend Katia has sent out about fifty queries over a year and a half, trying to get her novel represented.

And 2.) I put out another issue of the church newsletter I edit. It contains a piece I wrote up at Holden, to be published in their newsletter as well, about walking their labyrinth and how it's like writing a novel.

Speaking of books, my friend Qiron has used iUniverse to publisher her book Feminist Folktales from India. Qiron, a brilliant law graduate who speaks several languages, has been toiling in as a technical writer for several years, and is one of many Sybase alumnae. If I had a dollar for every technical writer who used to work at Sybase, I could buy myself a damn fancy meal. Fortunately for me, Cris still works at Sybase, so we can buy ourselves a fancy meal once in a while anyway.

Why English teachers grow old

A man in Pennsylvania convicted of disorderly conduct was sentenced to read Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird and report on it. Sounds like a neat idea? Then why are librarians and English teachers cringing? Because they hate the idea of reading and writing as punishments. Reading and writing are supposed to be empowering, uplifting, fun. Using literature to punish somebody practically guarantees that person (an adult in this case, but more often a student) will avoid reading and writing like the plague in the future.

Nevertheless, I'm bringing the news story to work today at the l.c.n.b.. The staff needs the laughs, in my opinion.

A friend today told me she saw my name in Plyllis Burke's book Family Values and wondered if that were me. Yes, it was I carrying that sign at the Basic Instinct protests reading BUTT-UGLY DOUGLAS GO HOME.

New! A month after coming back from Holden Village, I have finally posted an edited version of the journal I kept while I was up there.

Were my dogs tired

Last night I put in my first-ever non-training real-live full shift at the l.c.n.b.. An hour repairing the alphabetic order of part of of the fiction section, followed by two hours at the cash register, then an hour off for "lunch" (though it was 7 pm), part of which I spent on my feet as well, actually shopping in the store -- for it was Employee Appreciation Day and we got 40% off. Then I spent two more hours at the information desk, another hour "on reg" (on the cash register, that is), and a final segment putting away magazines that people had scattered about the store all day long. At midnight I left, footsore. I'm going to have to buy a new pair of sneakers for this job, the cushier the better. And take Ibuprofen before and during.

Thus I spent the last hours of a warm, sunny day. Then this morning the fog was in and the sky was cool and gray. I don't think I'll ever get tired of the sequence of warm summer days followed by cool gray summer days during which the sun comes out maybe from 11:15 to 3:00. Nor will I cease being grateful for the coolness, a soothing breath that comes without fail after two or three days of "heat." That's in quotes because a hot day for San Francisco is when it gets up to 85. If it gets over 90 the people just lie on the floor with a cool cloth over their forehead. At least I do.

Here's what I bought on Employee Appreciation Day: The Book Against God, a novel by James Wood; Advertisements for Myself, a 1959 collection of magazine pieces by Normal Mailer, which includes his famous piece "The White Negro" as well as other meditations on pop culture -- he was being sardonic about that stuff a decade before Tom Wolfe; and The Unconquerable World, the new book by Jonathan Schell.

Les Amis

Went to Oakland for a pre-Bastille Day party at the house of a friend, Catherine. Catherine is not only a good friend -- we've known each other for 20 years now -- but my ex-wife. We got married in 1984, when we were lovers; she got her green card after a couple of years, and our divorce followed that. She became an American citizen about seven years later, and works now as a drama therapist in the teen psych ward in an East Bay hospital. She has changed very little in twenty years; her French accent, despite having become more understandable, is still charming, and she looks just about as cute as she was when she was 24. Definitely still has the same figure; I know because she showed guests a lot of photos taken on a recent vacation to Hawaii with her now-boyfriend Brandy. Much of the party I just sat and watched her chitchat and play verbally with her best friend Betty, who arrived with her from France and who's known her since high school. They were so cute together twenty years ago I cast them in a theater production as St. Joan and St. Catherine in heaven, and they're just as endearing now.

If all this sounds twee and patronizing, then I'm just not diong a very good job of describing them in action. Utterly relaxed with each other, they carry on a rapid-fire stream of mixed French and English, their hands and faces flashing from gesture to gesture and expression to expression, repeatedly breaking into peals of laughter. Just two good friends talking together -- bosom buddies. As usual, I was caught between enjoying their interplay and feeling a little sad because I wasn't in the middle of their palaver -- I don't understand French -- and because I so rarely have had, in my life, a friend as close as they are to each other.

Found a job

Though I started this week at the l.c.n.b., it's pretty low pay for only 24 hours a week. So I was looking for something else. And though the church secretary job I was hoping for over the last couple of months fell though, I found another one -- that is, a secretary (or "parish administrator") job at a different church. The pay is 75% higher than at the l.c.n.b. and I'm sure the work will be both more fulfilling and less stressful. Between the two jobs I might actually make enough money to pay tax this year.

But everything is supposed to be confidential at the church job; I won't blog about it. Anyone who wishes to know about the events at the church will have to read my novels in the future; perhaps something will leak in, vastly camouflaged.

I'll start there a week from Monday. Monday and Wednesdays will be rather full, as I go from one job over the bridge to the other, but I want to keep a toe hold at the l.c.n.b. for a while, both out of regard for the friend who got me the job there and because it is another five or six hundred dollars a month.

To celebrate, I bought a pair of shoes. Actually I bought the shoes for the job interview so that was rather in reverse. Then I went grocery shopping and went home and exercised. I'm on a weight loss kick so I've upped my every-other-day exercise to five miles on the treadmill.

I can help you!

I've just finished three days of training for my new career in retail at the Large National Chain Bookstore (l.n.c.b.). I've learned to run the registers, to remove DVDs and CDs from their plastic security cases, to search for things on the in-store databases (a woman today wanted a book she'd heard of that was "short stories about tennis." We even had a copy "on hand" -- supposedly. When I took her over to the Sports section, tennis was all mixed up with hockey, soccer and wrestling, so we never found the book she was looking for), to load up electronic "gift cards," to invite people to join the company's email newsletter (3% positive response is the goal!).

My favorite moment so far was when the goth girl who was training me was saying you should recommend another book to go with the book someone had already picked up. "If someone picks up Hillary Clinton's new book, what would you recommend?"

"How about Ann Coulter's new book?" I chirped. She nearly blushed, which for a goth girl would have been a major disaster. "Don't get me started!" she finally sputtered.

The job pays just a little bit better than the $8/hr. I was making doing data entry as a temp in 1989. The point of the job is not the money but the toehold. In case Cris loses her lucrative software job, one of us needs to be employed at a place that gives domestic partners benefits.

In any case, I immediately got a lead on another job, one which would pay 75% more, and which I could actually do along with the l.c.n.b. job.

Independence Day

For years I've resisted the supermarket "club cards" that supposedly save shoppers a couple of bucks while allowing supermarket companies to collect data on their buying habits. Gradually I noticed that practically everyone else who shopped at Cala or Safeway used the cards, and the other day I thought, well hell, I bet I could just enter a random phone number -- you can enter "your" phone number instead of swiping your "club card" -- and it'll be somebody in this neighborhood. So I entered my own exchange and four random digits and sure enough, it went through. I saved three dollars and change.

Excellent. But then I went home and entered the phone number in Google. Within less than a minute I found that the phone number I'd used is the home number of a lawyer who works for the local branch of the ACLU! I love this country!

I won't tell the phone number; make up one on your own. Just use an exchange that's common in the supermarket's neighborhood. Then the market won't be able to track your Friday night purchases of cheap boxed wine and Cosmopolitan magazine.

Of course, the credit card company will still know. If you start down the paranoid road of trying to deny people access to your data, you could drive yourself crazy. Nevertheless, there's no reason to offer up your personal information if you can easily avoid it.

Lusties take over

I missed this story over the weekend, but a fellow Troublemaker alerted me to it: The strippers at the Lusty Lady in San Francisco have taken over the ownership of the business. They became the first unionized strip club in the U.S. in 1995 -- as documented in the film Live Nude Girls Unite! -- and when management threatened early this year to close the joint, the dancers took it over instead, making it a cooperative. Just another reason I love living in San Francisco where, by the way, another employee-owned business, Good Vibrations, is the nation's largest mail-order supplier of sex toys, erotic books and media, and other bedroom-related goods. (Be sure to stop in one of their three attractive retail stores in the Bay Area!)

Reader of the month

This week's big kiss goes to my friend Dina for reading the entire ms. of my novel in less than a week, flagging typos and questions -- and did it over Pride weekend. Definitely beyond the call of duty. For thanks I took her to dinner at Spiazzino, a recently opened Italian restaurant on Valencia St. It's in that space formerly occupied by Val 21. The pasta dish I had was great, so give it a try.

Later in the evening I took my first look at some of the articles people have sent me for the next issue of the newsletter I edit for my church. Though each of the articles was written by a college graduate, they're going to need a lot of work. I cringed at sentences like "Living in Danville and working in Berkeley, it is quite a commute to attend the Foundation board meetings" (in San Francisco).

Man. Fortunately there's no solid deadline -- though I would like to get the next issue out this month.

I learned earlier today that one of the part time jobs I thought I might get, at another church, won't come through for some time. So in the meantime it looks like more hours at the Large Nationwide Bookstore Chain.

Speaking of bookstores, check out this 30 Jun 03 story from the SF Chronicle. Some neighbors in affluent Noe Valley have united to pull the locally-owned bookstore out of debt.

Back to the cool

Part of the joy of living in San Francisco is returning to the city from somewhere else, especially if it's summer and you've just been to a sweaty locale. New York's had worse heat waves, but it felt plenty hot 'n humid to me, especially last Friday when there was some kind of "ozone alert." I took that to mean the air pollution was particularly bad, a fact my eyes attested to. They got so red and swollen I had to take my contact lenses out for the duration. (Typically, I blamed myself: I'm still getting accustomed to the soft "extended wear"-type lenses. But on second thought, I think it was the bad air.) No wonder there are so many advertisements for spas, plastic surgeons and beauty treatments of various kinds -- the air is filthy, at least at times during the summer.

So coming back to San Francisco (I missed a local mini heat wave -- the only kind we ever have -- while on the east coast) and waking up to cool, sunny weather is fabulous. The yellow hills are like lemon cakes with a frosting of fog, and the garden is brilliant with flowers and greenery. Out my back window I can see the grapefruit rees in the neighbors' yards. It's so beautiful.

Today I have little to do but errands and chores. My next writing mini-project will be to put together a twenty page synopsis of my novel for the agent whose name I got from a fellow writer at Holden Village. Once that's done I can work on incorporating edits from Dina, whom I gave the latest version of the novel to just before leaving for New York. She's supposed to flag "redundancies" and anything else that jumps out at her. Then, finally, I can work on groundwork for my next book, which I've decided will be a modern-day exploration of alienation as lived in the softwear industry and in the paranoid canyons of the desert.