Another fun event I missed
While I was puttering around the house, locals were whooping it up on Bernal Heights, where a permanently closed half-mile grade is the site of occasional Soap Box Derby races for adults. The tradition, a fine example of San Francisco DIY culture, goes back at least to 2000.
Piccadilly peccadillos
"Young sluts" prowled London's West End, unable to keep their hands off American soldiers and airmen during WWII, says a report. Not prostitutes, just lonely, horny gals with nothing to lose.
While the popular impression of the influx of GIs was of an alluring group of men who were "overpaid, over-sexed and over here," it transpires that they were not the sexual predators worrying Whitehall. Rather, the US troops proved to be irresistible to many British women, often living alone because of the war, and who in bleak wartime Britain were only too glad to grab the chance of some fun.
American troops wrote home in such colourful terms about being propositioned by prostitutes and "good-time" girls in the West End of London that the US military demanded action be taken to curb the "debauchery." So bad was the West End considered to be that US troops who caught venereal disease became known as "Piccadilly commandos."
"Living alone because of the war" -- that's a nice euphemism for women whose husbands and boyfriends had probably been killed at Dunkirk.
The erotica of Republicans
From FishbowlNY comes word that the New Yorker has uncovered a novel by Scooter Libby -- yes, the indicted one -- entitled "The Apprentice."
Nothing to do with New York real estate or eager business grads-cum-TV stars. This book is set in Shogun-era Japan and reportedly includes prostitution, homosexuality, bestiality, incest, and just about everything else gay marriage is supposed to cause. Yow.
Thanksgiving
All right, let's be positive.
This is a great year for grapes in California, leading some to suggest 2005 will be one of the best vintages ever. Even for someone like me whose appreciation of wine is, like my appreciation of opera, enthusiastic but entirely uneducated, this is a great thing. It was a cool summer, too -- I guess everything worked out.
San Francisco health outreach workers are teaching junkies harm reduction, leading to a reduction in fatal overdoses.
After the NYT published a ruefully humorous piece 10 days ago on the frustrations an author encounters when a book is published -- publishers' attention to the book is scattered, fewer reviewers tackle the book, and so on -- GalleyCat published several followups, including this glowing account of a publicist who far surpassed an author's expectations.
A possible new definition of 'humane'
Colorado Gov. Bill Owens supports "a non-lethal fence that had monitors on it" along the U.S.-Mexico border as a "humane way to solve the problem" of illegal immigration. Owens noted with approval that Israel is doing the same thing along the West Bank, and everybody knows how humane that situation is.
immigration, Bill Owens, illegal+immigration, borderfence, West bank fence
Bush just had the worst Presidential week since the emergence of the stain on Monica Lewinsky's dress, so why do I have a crushing headache this morning? Because of the looming fight over the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel "Scalito" Alito (as MSNBC's First Read has it). Right-wing Christian foamers such as the American Center for Law and Justice (a Christian-right anti-ACLU) and the anti-feminist Concerned Women for America love him -- that's all you need to know.
Let's be clear about this. There is no more right or wrong side, there is no moral high ground. This will be a matter of sheer power politics; it's going to be like a sumo match, with the two sides meeting head on. I'm sending $500 to People for the American Way and then covering my ears for the next two months.
Humans being, doing and going
In this Seattle Times article about complaints about dating from men in their 40s and 50s:
"I'll meet a woman and the first thing she'll do is ask 'What do you do?' They'll weigh your wallet," says Scott Abraham, a 53-year-old Seattle counselor who says he's given up on dating. "I have a friend who's a doctor, but he never wants to tell women that because he'll be treated differently. We went out one time and he said, 'OK, tonight, you be the doctor.' He's a good-looking guy, but that night, I got all the attention. I had my choice of three or four women. He said he sold cars and he got no attention."
I have my own theories about why people ask "What do you do?" of people they've just met. I think people are reluctant to get too heavy and talk about really meaningful things with strangers, and the fact is that most people just don't find their work that meaningful. It doesn't really say that much about them -- except maybe how long they went to school and how much money they make as a consequence. There must be doctors who don't make huge amounts of money, though -- I'd love to go around saying "I'm a doctor" and then follow it up with "But I work at a community clinic and I only make $40,000 a year" and see how it changes things.
Of course, this whole notion of "She's only interested in me for my money" is the premise behind tons of fiction and movies. "Let's Make Love," for example, where a "billionaire" who is the subject of a satirical off-Broadway revue falls in love with one of the show's stars but hides his identity until he's sure she loves the real him. And you can probably think of countless variations of this.
But that's hilarious, the doctor saying to his friend "You be the doctor tonight."
Cinematique
Went to Good Night, and Good Luck, gorgeously shot in black and white. It's really worth it. David Strathairn stars; writer-director-producer George Clooney plays a supporting role. See this BBC piece, this BoingBoing posting, and trailers on Apple.com. Great soundtrack too!
Police in a Dallas suburb have confiscated 22 ersatz candy bars laced with psilocibin and other drugs and arrested two 19-year-olds. The candy bars were packaged in gold foil and a paper wrapper complete with an attractive drawing of a mountain spring and the word "Nirvana." They retailed for $150 each, which sounds like a deal to me. After all, who knows how many drug-fueled hours they put into tweaking that wrapper design -- which MUST be made into a t-shirt quickly.
Strangely, the arrests happened in a town named The Colony (map). What a disgusting name for a town.
Dry, cool days at home
In an odd development this week chez nous, the furnace and the water heater, which stand next to each other in the basement, ended their lives in an apparent suicide pact. On successive days -- what were the odds? This led to a few days in which we take showers at the house of our friends Sara and Martha. Last night while we took turns in the bathroom, our hosts screened for us an obscure documentary of the 1960 Democratic primary in Wisconsin, Primary -- not because they wanted us to quickly leave, but because they know we share their odd fascination with obscure documentaries.
Speaking of the 60s, lately the NYT has gone nuts for Rat Pack-related stuff. Last Wednesday Caryn James wrote about a new film, Where the Truth Lies, which fictionalizes the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership. Today there's a prominent interview with Jerry Lewis. And on the same page of the newspaper, in a completely unrelated article about NBC newser Brian Williams and his coverage of Hurricane Katrina, the writer uses the name of Joey Bishop -- a fictionalized version of whom is the main character of my as-yet-unpublished novel Make Nice. I take these persistent mentions as a sign that the time is ripe for my book. Editors, shake a leg!
Lit up
Rachel Kramer Bussel, whose interviews on Mediabistro with publishing figures have been mostly junior personnel up to now, scores today with an Harcourt's Editor in Chief Becky Saletan.
Writers, agents and others are madly emailing each other the humor piece from Sunday's NYT Book Review, "Publish and Perish," which follows the emotional ups and downs of a newly published author.
Read the Galleycat blog entry on it and today's followup.The tour concludes, the sugar high ends, and the author begins to enter withdrawal. He calls the publicist several times a day. "I call this stage infantile narcissism," said Lynn Goldberg of Goldberg McDuffie Communications, a public relations company that deals with many big-name authors. "They're completely self-absorbed, and they can't understand why they're not selling more books or getting on TV."
Todd Oppenheimer, the author of "The Flickering Mind: Saving Education From the False Promise of Technology," recalled: "I wrote long memos and pitches and lists of contacts to the in-house publicist. I left no stone unturned." And the publicist? "She'd say, 'I'm on it, Todd. Every hour I talk to you is an hour I'm not publicizing your book.' "
Meanwhile, the Buzz your Book class is being offered again. Seems expensive, but if I had a book coming out next year, I would go for it.
Then again, this whole trend toward authors taking the reins of their own publicity in their hands -- it reminds me so much of how we're all supposed to take part in "volunteerism" because the government has abdicated its responsibility to administer social service.
Finally, this NYT article about a staged reading of a lost Kerouac work is entertaining. Kudos to Thunder's Mouth Press for publishing it.
Rachel Kramer Bussel, Publish and Perish, Becky Saletan, publishing, writing
Get back to work!
U.S. workers spend (or waste... or steal) more than half a million person-years each calendar year reading blogs.
No word on how much time is stolen writing them.
Bush's awkwardness with English is contagious
From a Friday press conference held by Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor Fran Townsend:
Q.: I guess what I'm asking is, could you give us, say, the top ... three lessons that you think you've taken away from this exercise so far?
MS. TOWNSEND: Let me caveat it this way. I'm reluctant to say it's the top three, because when I come back in here in a month to give you an update because you want more information, you're going to say, those aren't the three you gave me last month.
Elsewhere on the Republican front, a "GOP strategist" quoted by MSNBC says, in a metaphor-rich comment:
"We are fighting too many fires, and taking too much friendly fire right now," the nauseated GOP strategist tells First Read. "There is really nothing [the White House] can do other than wait for it to pass, maybe catch a lucky break and rebuild." Some smart Democrats are starting to figure out "they have to do more than attack and sit there. If they start figuring that out as a party, we're toast."
And that's not counting the hurricane-reminiscent "wait for it to pass, maybe catch a lucky break and rebuild."
Somebody gets religion, somebody loses religion
Courtesy Pheret, this Newsweek article about how best-selling porn writer Anne Rice is now "writing only for the Lord." The article goes on to say that Rice, one of New Orleans' best-known authors, moved out of there more ahn a year ago and now lives in Republican Orange County, Calif.
Gah -- people's feeble bargains with God. Look, I'm a Christian too, I go to church almost every fucking day, and I don't feel I have to "write for the Lord." Give me a fucking break!
'Civility stems from abundance' (?)
Remember the tales of 16-hour-plus trips on Texas highways when Houston and its southern suburbs were evacuated for Hurricane Rita? (Seems like ages, but was actually only a month ago.) Buried in this article about the sources of traffic snafus is this statement by one evacuee:
"Civility like generosity comes from abundance," Dyess (an evacuee) wrote. "People who believe they are in danger will lose their civility proportionately to their fear, regardless of how much education you give them. Do you really think evacuation is about altruism?" Dyess said. "No, it is every man for himself. When people in that situation are moved by tragedy that has happened to others, they will offer help, but only out of their abundance."
Wow, that statement speaks volumes. But I don't think it's a given that people in an evacutation behave selfishly. When tens of thousands of people headed out of Manhattan -- first on Sep. 11 and then, a few years later, in the massive blackout in 2004 -- there were many stories of people taking care of one another, of shopkeepers offering free water and even shoes. But those people were on foot. The Texans, by contrast, were in their cars, and you know how people's behavior (including mine) changes when they drive cars.
Previously: Texans freak at disorganized evacuation.
Kulcha blog
Cris and I went to the Opera last night, seeing Doctor Atomic, a new John Adams composition with really fantasic staging and choreography.
I thought the first act was absolutely great -- the work explored the psychological pressures and moral quandries of the men racing to stage the first test of an atomic weapon in July 1945. Since the level of tension in the first act was high, I expected it to intensify unbearably in the second act, which was to end with the first atomic explosion. But contrary to expectations, the dramatic tension drained away in the second act, partly because of the prominence of recorded sounds and music, often taking focus from the orchestra.
Still, it's great to live in a place where even the mainstream arts groups strive to do new things, and you don't have to go to some bohemian venue to see exciting new work.
Dept. of shameful admissions
According to a British survey, one in three London-area consumers has bought a book "solely to look intelligent."
I don't think I've ever bought a book just for that reason, but I can remember one time, at least, when I decided to carry a book I already owned in order to look more intelligent. I was in my mid 20s and slacking at a delivery job. On one occasion my truck was being repaired at a dealership on the Peninsula, 15 miles south of the city, and one of the head salesman for the company I worked for gave me a ride down there since he had sales calls to make in that direction. I had to chill for an hour in his car during the sales call on the way to pick up the truck, and I brought along a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason so the sales guy would know that I wasn't just some punk truck driver. Oh, the shame of this memory -- that I felt I had to impress some sales guy. But at least I had already read the book.
Remember that scene in Woody Allen's "Play It Again, Sam" where he "casually" dangles a medal (which he supposedly won at a track meet or something, but which he actually purchased in a junk shop), in front of a woman at the beginning of a blind date so she'd be impressed with him? Same thing. The shame!
Something to do
If you're still looking for something to do tonight, here are some improvisers:
Moment's Notice -- music, dance & theater
Deanna Anderson & Kim Criswell
Brenton Cheng, Vitali Kononov, Alina Mikhaylova & Ilka Szilagy
Catherine Debon, Julie Feinstein, Stefanos Georgantis,
Jenny Schaffer & Owen Walker
Tickets: $8-10. October 22, 8.00 pm, Western Sky Studio 2525 8th Street, Berkeley. 415 831 5592
Dept. of Thinking out loud
Very nice overheard at the Cirque du Soleil, by MJK's "roommate."
And I loved this post by Badger, on vacation in San Diego:
About Sea World. It is our dystopian future -- in the future we will always be in places like that, standing in line for 2 choices of lunch... with gross music and advertisements inescapable... we will live there and never be able to leave. They search you at the gate to make sure you don't bring your own food, there's nowhere to experience unmediated "reality". Never ever! You think you've found a quiet spot and some fool starts yammering with a canned "interaction experience" right into your ear! The best moments were when the auditorium would empty out. Seriously... the "show" would be over and everyone would leave on cue, even though Shamu was still leaping just the same (but without the loud Interaction Experience.) Then the microphones would go off. About 5 or 6 people would linger down by the front to continue watching. We talked with the trainer of the blind walrus after everyone else had left. But how eerie! They all left because it was The End. Narrative trains people.
Video iPod's killer app: porn
Tim Goodman, the TV critic for the local paper and one of the few smart, good writers they have left, is absolutely right about the "video iPod":
The new iPod-as-TV seems, on the one hand, stupid, and, on the other, pointless. Are we to believe that people who have lusted after big-screen TV sets for the past eight years or so are going to give that up just to watch what amounts to a thumb-nail sketch of "Lost"?
Please. There are early adopters and there are the easily led. They are not always the same people.
Besides, it's clear that the killer app for the iPod-as-TV is porn. Once the minxes can be downloaded at iTunes, you've got yourself Daddy's new Christmas present.
The prospect of the same losers owning exactly two televisions -- one six feet wide, the other three inches -- suggests it's a good time to be an optometrist.
In Florida (where else?), we have the prize for ... what do I want to call this? The prize for "never has so much graphic detail gone into mapping out a more trivial incident" (though I guess it wasn't trivial for the guy who got killed).
This news story (courtesy Obscure Store) is about a 93-year-old man who hit a guy with his Gold Chevy Malibu (excellent detail) and then drove three miles with the body stuck in the windshield. The story features:
- two detailed maps
- photo of the car windshield (minus the corpse)
- photo of the driver.
Plus three reporters are credited with the story. They were all over this story in St. Petersburg, Fla. That's the kind of thoroughness lacking in the search for the WMDs.
Oh, the excellent detail picked out by Obscure Store: the driver went through a toll plaza, paying his toll, and the toll taker thought the body sticking through the windshield was a "Halloween prank."
And then, because I'm too lazy to watch my own TV and blog about it, I'm going to refer you to someone else's blog entry about a funny thing they saw on TV last night. It is pretty funny, though, and worth reading.
Republicans, an endless source of disgust
If you're tired of hearing about Rove, DeLay, etc. etc. etc you can always focus your dislike on Ellen R. Sauerbrey, Bush's anti-abortion nominee to an important Sec. of State post.
And who least needs to win $853,000 in a lottery? The Republican head of the Senate Budget Committee, Sen. Judd Gregg. (Maybe he can use some of that money to have a few extra consonants removed from his name.)
Lit up
Some literature-related stuff:
An interview with Jonathan Lethem on The Morning News.
Revealed: Well-known litblogger Laila Lalami, aka Moorish Girl, is gorgeous. (Right-click on the picture and Open In New Window.) She's promoting her book Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. In a related post, Bookslut remarks on how publicists are taking advantage of Zadie Smith's good looks. And if you want yet more pretty writers, just look at these photos from LitCrawl by Derek Powazek.
The LitBlogger Co-op is pushing a novel titled Mutual Life and Casualty -- looks interesting.
Millions for fluff, while serious books get a "nice" deal
A terrific post by Frances Dinkelspiel, contrasting the amount of money paid to a historian (a real one -- not The Historian) for a serious book on Sacco and Vanzetti with the million dollars paid to a rich girl for a fluffy novel about a male nanny (titled, of course, The Manny.)
She manages to be respectful to both authors but concludes:
If I am any way typical, enjoying both serious nonfiction and lighthearted chick lit, I should rejoice in America's ability to juggle both genres successfully. But these deals actually depress me. It's a reminder of how this culture values entertainment above everything else. Yes, I know that sales of books like Peterson's make sales of books like Boyle's possible. Yes, I know there is room for both. But I am waiting for the day when a publisher pays $1 million to a historian.
Probably around the same time the Pentagon has that bake sale to raise money for an aircraft carrier.
Frances Dinkelspiel, Kevin Boyle, Holly Peterson, book deals, publishing
LitCrawl stars
Pictures of friends reading at LitCrawl:
Katia Noyes
Pam Rosenthal
Charlie Anders
Previously:
LitCrawl wrapup
About last night
Uh, guys? It's called writing.
TVNewser quotes the president of CBS News:
We have to figure out a way to incorporate point of view, even while protecting the notion of fair-minded journalism dedicated to accurate reporting without fear or favor. Put another way, point of view and even bias have to be something we report on even while we fight to recognize it in our own reporting and story selection.
But isn't point of view inherent in any story, even a news story? Think of Murrow on the rooftops of London; think of Kurt Anderson in Baghdad for the New Yorker. You have people seeing and describing events in English -- that's point of view. That the head of a news organization forgets what real reporting is shows the poverty of the mainstream media.
I think he is tacitly acknowledging the fact that modern news is sterile, that reporters striving for objectivity have instead removed anything from their reporting that could identify it as having been contructed by a human being. Could this be why newsbots like Google News, Ananova and others have been successful? People can't tell the difference between their constructs and actual human labor.
Newest ideas from the minds of Hollywood.
Start 'Em Young -- Mariel Hemmingway -- who starred as the 17-year-old lover of Woody Allen's character in the 1977 film Manhattan -- in a comedy series in which she tries to keep a teenage starlet daughter (played by the Olsen twins) from sleeping with co-stars Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas.Ashton Kutcher has sold Fox an idea for a comedy series, based on his relationship with years-older star and mother Demi Moore, called 30-Year-Old Grandpa.
-- news item
Spam of the month
I inadvertently opened one of the spam messages that Yahoo's spam filter didn't catch, and saw this (actual size screencap):
If you look closely, you can see that the large letters are made up of very small characters. You can highlight the characters and paste them into a text editor. The word NEXT, for example, was done like this:
rui4c 0093 i6kf7p0oji rzqaw jd8ah l3718tlumcdp
d6kkli h47y 0hfqe1rhqq l1bvc ictg7 co9l5wneohvc
5y3sqw 6nym e7jb ghiu4 b7pvh nxno
774a8z0 75z0 r95p x5l2kqnbb burv
099p34f 7mr2 g8pond8d8 2ewv6ui xdgk
wdun 68 ciet k9v135mmr 2wa1j imqg
et6b m7mh2qb icwg7zy0b r0lg15o anut
sdv0 l0b83o t09u dmrx3pj tcyg
ri3k rcocqw 1dt2 c5zqr41c1 5eco
qn48 kkipph uus1 96gg4 5tp0n zzpp
27ru uqzbx wdn7gjmaz4 afmmu 3unja pe0j
wmut azgum nu88koomd8 x2j26 38b6r pq6i
l1bk dayr rhqsxbxcv1 nqlpa 3207e jp8v
What won't they think of next.
Stephanie redux
Reacting to the entry I posted Saturday, another friend of Stephanie posts her recollections as well as the text of "Hey Stranger," Stephanie's best-known work.
I have to laugh when I realize how many links there are back and forth between my blog and Christine's, especially that one entry. Somewhere tonight, some web bot will try to follow all the links back and forth, find itself in an endless loop, overheat and explode.
Sinister little building
I love going to the dupe shop, which is located in an anonymous little industrial strip building on a major thoroughfare. It's the kind of place where, if you didn't know it was there, you'd miss the driveway altogether. Then if you actually find yourself in the parking lot, the building itself is utterly without characteristics, not to mention signage -- just a cement and steel one-story tilt-up job, seventy yards long and 90 feet deep. There are a number of doors off the parking lot, some with letters only, some with meaningless company names like Inferix or Alltara -- whatever it says, it all seems more like a front for some secret agency or other.
Not that this affects the dupe house's ability to do the job quite well and on time. But I know that guy's wearing a toupee!
Have fun, my book!
Forget this novel that's making the rounds. Think of it as your college student kid who's out in the world. When it needs attention, you'll get a call. Meanwhile, plop yourself down in front of that computer and write that next book editors are asking for. Don't fret. Write!!
Good advice. There's nothing I can do about it now. No news may very well be the lack of bad news.
Meanwhile, in the book I'm working on now, my character's stuck in Bangalore, and the rainy season is about to begin.
LitCrawl wrapup
Here's the SF Chronicle story on Saturday's LitCrawl, and here's Frances Dinkelspiel on the event.
I will be expanding the essay I read, as it has just been accepted for Cleis' "Best Sex Writing" anthology for next year.
About last night.
Last night's LitCrawl event at Good Vibrations, featuring readings by me, Badger, Carol Queen, Pam Rosenthal, Greta Christina and the estimable Violet Blue, was packed with people, truly fun, and a big success. Read Badger's account of the event.
What I didn't tell people is that I had written my piece that day. Though I stood at the side editing the piece while others read, I thought it came off pretty well. I appreciated the kind words of people who commented on the piece as I posted it. I didn't mean for the primary impression of the piece to be that I'm no longer getting any, but more of a reflection on what it means to be a "mere" customer versus someone in the in-crowd, and how truly fortunate I was to have a paradisical sexual period, the kind that most people merely fantasize about.
But there's also a side of me that's half mischievous, half passive-aggressive, to the point of being a killjoy, that makes me want to go to an erotica reading and read a piece that is both erotic -- featuring as it did fucking, fisting, blow jobs and sex work -- and also a downer. People laughed throughout my piece but as it neared the end the laughs stopped coming and I think people were sort of "What the fuck just happened with that?" by the end.
That trickster part of me likes confounding expectations. Remember that moment in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" when the organizers of an anti-war demonstration invite Ken Kesey to address a huge crowd, and he not only twits all their expectations by delivering an utterly confusing off-topic rant but manages to deflate all the rah-rah antiwar energy that had been built up during the rally. Something evil in me admires that.
Then I walked down Valencia St. past other venues during the second round of readings, and every place was PACKED -- there were hundreds of people packed into every venue, shoulder to shoulder in many cases, listening to writers read. The third-round reading I went to at the Lone Palm featured my friend Katia Noyes and five other writers including the really famous Bharati Mukherjee. And that was super packed too, though I got there early enough to get a seat at the bar. I found myself next to this drunk woman who had no idea an event was about to be held and finally starting asking people what was going on. She thought she was just going to have a couple drinks after work, and here came a hundred people and a literary event. She was one of those soulful emotional drunks; she was so moved by the readings that she held my hand through half of it. But ask her a question and she would say something completely tangental. I hope she got home all right.
LitQuake, LitCrawl, Carol Queen, Violet Blue, Greta Christina, badgerbag, Good Vibrations, Katia Noyes
What I'm reading tonight
In the afterword to my erotic short story collection Too Beautiful and Other Stories, I told readers that if they lived outside a large city and wanted to live out their sexual fantasies, they had two choices: start their own scene, or move someplace like San Francisco where, I wrote, there really are people like the polyamorous, polysexual people I depicted in my stories. There really are sex parties here; there really are s-m lesbians, orgiastic gay male sex bashes, experimentally minded bisexuals, couples who live in daddy/boy arrangements, and so on. Comely young people with rebellious attitudes and artistic callings leave their home towns and come someplace where they can be among other rebellious, artistic folk. Their willingness to experiment in writing or art extends to experimentation in relationships and lifestyle, and so the bohemian scene that began in San Francisco after World War II is sustained to new generations.
When I first came to San Francisco in 1979 to be part of the postmodern dance scene, I quickly met these bohemians, and some of my first lovers were former strippers. But it took a two year stint in the late 80s living outside the country to make me realize how much I missed the city's anything-goes atmosphere, and when I came back I was ready to plunge into the underground.
I gained my real initiation into the sexual demimonde as so many have: I became a San Francisco Sex Information phone volunteer. At the same time, 1990, I started my magazine Frighten the Horses, and I joined Queer Nation. Suddenly I was part of a network of creative sexual revolutionaries. I met strippers who did performance art, sex writers who worked in galleries, prostitutes with zines or rock bands, polyamorist activist Ph.D. students, and painters who bought art supplies with the money they earned lap dancing on weekends.
Among these cheerfully transgressive youths was a woman in her mid-20s, Stephanie. I met her in Queer Nation's bisexual affinity group, and when I learned she was a comix artist I asked her to do some illustrations for Frighten the Horses. So it was through this connection that, after knowing each other for a few years, we became lovers.
In addition to being a comix artist, Stephanie also worked at the Lusty Lady, a somewhat unique strip club in North Beach. The unusual thing about the Lusty --aside from the fact that it is unionized and owned by its workers, is that unlike most of the strip joints around town, the workers don't perform lap dances or have physical contact with the customers; instead, they dance and pose behind thick Plexiglas.
While Stephanie and I were going through the same getting-to-know-you flirtations that all lovers do, I asked her about her work at the Lusty. I didn't want to come off like a typical slobbering male, so without actually saying so I tried to make the conversation sound more like I was doing research for my writing or for Frighten the Horses. I asked respectful, sympathetic questions about hours and working conditions, the relationship between workers and management, the ins and outs of working in the "booth" where dancers had one-on-one encounters (albeit still separated by Plexiglas) with customers. Of course, behind the polite façade I hid behind, I wanted to know what any man wants to know about a stripper's job: Is it a turn-on, or is it just like any job where you feign interest for the customer's sake? Is it interesting or even arousing when men masturbate in response to a dancer, or is it merely objectionable and gross? And most important of all, is there any reality to the pornographic stereotype that the girls turn each other on and have hot girl-on-girl action in the locker room?
I wanted to know all those things, but I didn't have the nerve to ask them at first. It took quite a while before I finally satisfied my curiosity about the ins and outs of working at the Lusty. By then we had been lovers for months. If I arrived early to pick Stephanie up at the theater at the end of her shift, I walked around the theater mingling with the customers but reveling in the secret knowledge that I was not one of them. I wasn't just a customer; I was getting what they only fantasized about. Listening to her talk about work, I came to share the perspective of Stephanie and her co-workers that the customers were, more or less, to be looked down on, or at least pitied. In our intimate conversations, and once at an offsite spoken-word performance organized by the dancers, I laughed with them at the customers' foibles, at the gulf between the customers' stereotypical fantasies and their schlubby reality.
The most flattering confirmation of the difference between them and me came one day when I was, as usual, early to pick up Stephanie. I wandered into the one-on-one booth, put a twenty into the slot, and began chatting with the performer. I didn't say anything about being a dancer's boyfriend, I just chatted as if I were making small talk at a party instead of talking to a naked chick under glass. After dubiously making sure that I really wasn't there to jack off, she relaxed and just started chatting with me. After a few minutes she said, "You don't seem like a regular customer," and then I admitted that I was, in fact, in the boyfriend category.
Only after several years can I see the irony of this situation. Secure in my knowledge that I was somehow different than -- even better than -- the men who were the run-of-the-mill customers, I presented myself as different. The performer, in response, treated me exactly as she would have any other customer: She confirmed and reflected what she assumed was my fantasy. And I had, in fact, paid her for this. So by attempting to set myself apart from and above the louche customers, I had done nothing more than become one.
Though I learned that it was not, of course, true that the dancers had pornographic interactions in the locker room, they did have relationships of various types outside the club. The spoken word evening that I mentioned above was only one example. They'd go to dance clubs or the Folsom Street Fair or 12-step meetings together; on one occasion Stephanie told me of going to a local sex club with several other dancers to celebrate one girl's birthday. They went to each other's art openings, performances and readings. Some became lovers. Stephanie had an on and off affair with a woman who worked at a massage parlor; I'd introduced them, and on two memorable occasions the three of us went to bed together.
Even our one-on-one affair was enough to blow my mind. Stephanie was a perfect lover. She was generous with her affections to the point of self-denial; she was experimental and willing to do anything I proposed. When I told her, early in our affair, that getting a blow job had never been my favorite way to come, she took that as a challenge. We did s-m; we did role-playing; we went to sex parties together; we had sex on drugs; we had threesomes. She never said no, and she came up with plenty of ideas of her own. She was the lover every man fantasizes about.
Perhaps the best story I have from those days is about a co-worker of hers. "There's a girl at work," Stephanie told me one day. "She's a dyke, but she said once in a while she feels like getting fucked by a real prick. I told her I was with someone who was cool and would respect her boundaries. Do you want to do it?"
Did I want to do a threesome with two bisexual San Francisco strippers? Well, sure I did. But while my first reaction was to grab Stephanie by her shoulders and shout "When?! Where?! Can we do it right now?!" I sensed that if I acted too eager I might not be considered cool enough to participate at all. It's the old rule: if you want someone, act like you don't.
So I said, "Oh... sure... sounds like fun. Yeah, sure."
Typically for modern San Francisco, it took us a few weeks to iron out everybody's schedule. During this time Stephanie would check in with me on a certain date, and I would answer back in the laconic voice I'd chosen for this particular interaction. I was so successful in maintaining my cool that she even asked me if I really wanted to do it, so I had to assure her I did, still maintaining my cool all the while. Eventually it was all arranged, and we had a curious ménage a trois in which our dyke guest consented to penetration by my cock -- "It's so warm!" she exclaimed in surprise, having gotten accustomed to silicone and plastic -- but would not kiss me, went down on me but would not let me go down on her. Her own girlfriend, she said, had requested these limits. Stephanie had no limits imposed, however, and fisted the girl while I watched.
It's difficult to recount these events without seeming boastful. Mostly I was simply appreciative of all the affection and outré experiences Stephanie bestowed on me. I tried to enjoy it while it lasted, and it did last a long time. Each of us plumbed the depths of our desire, coming up with new positions, new partners, new fantasies to enact.
But after a few years, we'd done everything we could think of, and then what do you do? What do you do when all your sexual fantasies have been fulfilled, when there are no more barriers to push through, no more taboos to transgress?
The answer is, you do the things that you don't particularly want to do, but because everyone else talks about them, you do them. It may surprise the reader to find that, in our case, this was no more than buttfucking. Anal sex is something that I'm sort of neutral on and she had never learned to do or appreciate, so we had never gone there. But in the last months of our affair -- when, as in any long-term relationship, the little annoying things were mounting up, the unresolved arguments and hurt feelings, making it harder to be together -- she seized on the idea that things weren't going well because she hadn't broken through this particular barrier. So we tried, and as usual when neither person really wants to do something, the result was a failure. And the worst part was that, after all the crazy outré stuff we'd done together, this act -- the act that neither of us really wanted to do -- was the first time we were actually embarrassed.
The other thing about getting to a far point with a lover is that you tend to take for granted all the great stuff you did on the way there. At least I took her affections for granted -- she never did. When we broke up after four years, she told me with great bitterness, "You don't know what you're giving up."
She was right. Only since our breakup -- two years after which, she died in a traffic accident -- have I come to know what I'm missing. Because while this is San Francisco, and there are still plenty of artistic, polyamorous bisexual people around, I'm in my late 40s, and all those youngsters are with each other. I increasingly feel like part of an older generation that has been passed by.
I still visit the Lusty Lady from time to time, partly to keep in touch with that memorable affair, but also because it's one of the few places where I can go and talk to someone like Stephanie, sexually open, willing to participate in any fantasy. But now I am, like everyone else, just a customer.
Bummer of a literary debut
This piece on debut novelist Sean Rowe (Fever) starts out with a wild red herring of the guy getting hit by a frieght train. Once we're done with that, it settles down into a wry list of why getting his novel published hasn't been the turning point in his life he expected: He's still broke, friends wish for his failure, ex-lovers seize betrayal opportunities, and you'll become a media whore. Wow, things are rough all over.
In other news, my friends at Cleis Press asked me to contribute to a nonfiction anthology about sex. Deadline's tomorrow. I'm trying to decide whether to take some speed and bang something out, or just get real and tell them I don't have anything. If I were Marilyn, I would definitely choose the former (not that she needs any simulants to produce a few thousand words at the drop of a hat). Marilyn is amazing. She wrote a novella over the weekend or something. Same thing with Rachel K-B -- these women are amazingly prolific.
Banned book redux
A few days ago I mentioned an Austin, Tex. school that lost a $3 million donation for refusing to pull Annie E. Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain" off the reading list. Now Alex Chee writes about a campaign for authors to send the school library signed editions of their books by way of support.
I think I'll refrain from sending them signed editions of my erotica books, but if my novel gets published, a copy's getting saved for them.
National Book Awards nominees
Fiction
E.L. Doctorow, The March (Random House)
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (Pantheon)
Christopher Sorrentino, Trance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
René Steinke, Holy Skirts (William Morrow)
William T. Vollmann, Europe Central (Viking)
Nonfiction
Alan Burdick, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin)
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred A. Knopf)
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Times Books)
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Houghton Mifflin)
Poetry
John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander (Ecco)
Frank Bidart, Star Dust: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Brendan Galvin, Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (Louisiana State University Press)
W.S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press)
Vern Rutsala, The Moment's Equation (Ashland Poetry Press)
Chickens clucking, coming home to roost
Who says the MSM (MainStream Media -- i.e. the television broadcast and cable networks, and the major newspapers and magazines) haven't been awakened? Who says they're lying down?
This is what the CIA leak case, which could produce indictments any day now, is all about. Did the people around the president actively try to discredit that man who came back from Africa, to say the yellow cake story was a phony? Did they try and kill the messenger? Did they use to enormous media power of the White House to discredit the ambassador, his mission and his wife at the CIA, who suggested him for the mission?
And, in doing so, did they abuse the office and the power to which the president was elected? Did they break the law? Did they conspire to punish a critic of the war, even if their weapon was the destruction of his wife's undercover career by identifying her to the public? Did they lie about their actions to government investigators to a grand jury or even to the president himself?
That's not some nutcase on a blog, or some obscure columnist. That's Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball" program introducing what may have become the political Main Event for the last three Bush years: the widening scandal over the lies jused to justify the invasion of Iraq.
HOWARD FINEMAN, NBC CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's the point of the lance of this whole thing. Right now, my sense, in reporting this, Chris, is that the Bush political family is at war with itself inside the White House. My sense is, it's Andy Card, the chief of staff, and his people against Karl Rove, the brain. (There are) submerged -- but now emerging -- divisions within the administration over why we went into that war, how we went into that war and what was done to sell it.
Oprah redux
Six months ago, a group of authors wrote television personality Oprah Winfrey pleading with her to resume featuring living authors on her "book club" of the air, which from 1996 to 2002 spurred sales of middle-aged-female-friendly fiction. Last month Winfrey relented, announcing that her presentations of living authors would resume. But she threw a curve: her first selection was not a novel, but a memoir of addiction, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, which today a Salon writer took pains to object to.
This whole brouhaha over what Oprah Winfrey decides to talk about on her TV show really amuses me. Not that she wants to talk about books with her audience -- God love her. But it's that so many other people feel it's their duty to advise her on what she should do. Look, I'm sure lots of people do watch Winfrey's show, and a lot of them did buy the books she recommended, and many of them probably even read them. And if they gained some appreciation for modern literature and became finer human beings because of it, fine -- though I'm not sure they really did. (Are these the same people who go apeshit when she gives away cars? Did the utterly hysterical reaction -- as rebroadcast on news shows that week -- of those receiving the cars suggest they had, over the course of several years of reading modern literature suggested by Winfrey, somehow deepened their understanding of the human condition and become finer people? And if so, how would the reaction of people who hadn't spent years in the Oprah Book Club be different -- would they be more hysterical? Less so?)
But I have the feeling that this is not so much about about... how did those hundred authors put it... "inviting all readers into the community of literature." It's not even about the divide between literary and popular fiction and the "type" of people who read each (or both), as most commentators suggested.
It's about two things: First, money. Getting Oprah's recommendation for your book was considered a life-changing moment for authors; it was better than getting a MacArthur grant, which after all is just a monetary prize and an honor, whereas an Oprah endorsement translates into real sales. In fact, I'll bet there are savvy authors who, if they were given the choice between getting a Pulitzer Prize and an Oprah Book Club pick, would seriously consider the latter, because there are simply more people who will buy their book because of it.
And the second thing I think this is really about is a real apprehension about the commercialization and McDonaldsization of culture, a reluctance to see everything branded and marketed and cross-promoted and stamped with a logo. The idea that it is actually possible that there are some things in life that don't benefit from being commercialized and corporatized. It probably doesn't make sense to try to fight that battle for books, whether they're regarded as difficult or "literary" or as commercial and dumb, because all books today are, let's face it, commodities. Even Dave Eggers, who publishes his own books now and makes a virtue out of being quirky and different, even his books are commodities. And you can't draw a magic circle around some and say these are special and mustn't be sullied.
But there must be something in this culture that you can make a stand on.
Previously: Authors beg Oprah to restart 'Book Club'
Salon's Laura Miller on the Jonathan Franzen controversy
USA Today: Franzen regrets brouhaha
Oh, and by the way, about those cars: the lucky recipients had to pay tax on them, of course -- up to $7000.
Reality comes crashing down on J.T. LeRoy hoax --
Famous, and famously "shy" author, revealed as construction
After this exhaustive investigative piece in New York magazine, it'll be hard to take seriously any claims that J.T. LeRoy, supposed author of Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, is anything but the figment of the imagination of a 39-year-old musician named Laura Albert -- who has posed in the past as "Speedie," part of LeRoy's entourage -- to promote her band Thistle.
Also:
Village Voice, June 2001: The Cult of J.T. LeRoy
The Morning News, June 2002: Looking for LeRoy
Bookslut, December 2003: Interview
Gawker, 7 Oct 05: Figument of Gus Vant Sant's imagination?
Houston Press, 25 Aug 05: Coal Miner Mother of a Mess
If this is how he parties mid-week, what does he save for the weekend?
I don't know what my favorite bit is in this news story (courtesy Obscure Store) about cops nabbing a naked man covered in shit whose brief caper Thursday night through a small town had the locals agog. It's either the car full of teenaged girls he asked for a ride ("The girls wisely rolled up their windows and left," reported a police spokesman -- now that's a story they'll tell for a long time) or the fact that he tried to fashion a "primitive loincloth" from a rope and a strip of leopard-print vinyl he had torn from a lawn chair. (Is there any other kind of loincloth? I guess the loincloths that sumo wrestlers wear.)
Or maybe it's that he tried to pass off he feces by saying "he was partying with girls the night before and somehow ended up rolling around in tomato paste." Perhaps he was thinking of this Spanish tomato fest.
Shiny objects of desire -- 20th century division
When this consumer product was introduced, it impressed its audience so much that twelve thousand were ordered the first day -- a huge number in 1955.
Was it the transistor radio? Color TV? An electric guitar? No, it was the 1955 Citroen DS, which celebrated its 50th anniversary yesterday in Paris.
I live in a city
Last night I rode BART across to the Oakland Coliseum station to see my friends Catherine and Jenny perform. They're part of a loosely organized circle of Action Theater improvisers and they do these pieces several times a year, always on a shared evening with other performers. The show was held in a remote industrial location called the Milk Bar, a throwback to the industrial gentrification pioneering of the 1980s when lots of people had dance and theater spaces in former factories, before real estate people caught on to the idea of "lofts" that could be sold instead to upper middle class buyers at $800,000.
The walk along the BART line and up a deserted industrial side street was properly adventuous. Even when I reached the building itself, it was hard to tell how to enter or which was the right door; I and another would-be audience member walked through a parking lot, from door to door of the former factory, until we found the right one. I was very early but there were already a few people there -- most of them performers, but the food and drinks were already laid out; I regretted having eaten in the city before getting on BART. While waiting I read Steve Erickson's Our Ecstatic Days, the first hundred pages of which are really amazing. I noticed the last time I was at a large independent bookstore that the hardback is already remaindered, so you ought to go down to your local bookstore and pick it up cheap. It's one of those books that make you think, wow, I could never do this, this is really great. It's also very sad, I sat there before the show nearly in tears.
My friends' performance was fine. The people before them were terrible in the sort of stupidly casual way that's typical of performers in their late 20s, who have fantastic bodies and skills and are busily squandering them doing absolute crap.
At intermission my friends left and took me back to BART on the way so I didn't have to walk back. It wasn't far but it was deserted and a little scary, since I don't run as fast as I used to and have probably descended to the level of prey relative to the threatening classes.
This morning: sunny and cool. I hung around until Cris woke up, and gave her coffee.
Gay bashing victim to perpetrators: You are cowards
At an Austin, Tex. sentencing hearing for two men who pled guilty to several assault charges in the sexual assault and beating of a gay man, the victim faced his attackers and called them "cowards, not real men, pathetic," and "spineless." He continued:
"You don't want the world to know you are rapists," the victim said. "You don't want the world to know you rape faggots."
And:
A police affidavit says that during the assault, one of the assailants told the victim that the book of Leviticus in the Bible "says to put to death any man that lays with another man, and tonight we are passing judgment on you for being a faggot and a queer."
"That was quoted by you, Darren," the victim told Gay in court Thursday. "Like all religious fanatics, you pick and choose religious verses to fit your hatred and fit your crimes."
As the two men were led away, one's mother called out to her son "I'm very proud of you."
Lit up
Today's basket of literary-themed material:
Big Zadie Smith interview with the AP, courtesy GalleyCat, which seems suddenly to have taken a drug that has multiplied the number of postings.
It shocked the Northern Calif. literary world when Kepler's, a venerable indy bookstore, closed last month. Now fans and investors have managed to reopen the Peninsula institution, which serves not only the local community around Stanford but much of Silicon Valley as well.
In the U.K., a well-known children's author was speaking to a school group of 11-12 year olds and used the word "bum," meaning butt. Next thing he knew, he was given the bum's rush. Style points subtracted for the author comparing the school's reaction to Orwell's 1984.
U.K. litmag Granta sold to a wealthy philanthopist.
For another author's tale of how she got published, see this entry in Alex Chee's blog.
It's Bad Behavior Friday™!
In Snohomish Co., Wash., police are accused of paying for hand jobs in a prostitution sting. Nearby is Seattle, where the city council just voted new regulations on strip clubs. You see the problem -- how are you going to enforce an ordinance banning lap dances without cops paying for lap dances?
Cold hard facts for lazy writers
I added the Miss Snark blog to my "best" list over there on the sidebar a couple weeks ago, but let me stress: if you are a writer who wants, one day, to have a book published, you should be reading this blog every single day. The advice she gives is invaluable. It is short on false encouragement and long on realistic appraisals of the publishing industry and why your book hasn't been published yet and probably never will be.
A writing conference is just a walking slush pile. 75% of the work there isn't publishable and probably won't be. Ever. Not even with all the seminars, classes and pitch meetings. That's just a cold hard fact.
There's a big difference between her attitude, by the way, and that of author Lynn Freed, whose essay "Doing Time" lambasted creative writing programs and students (and which I satirized in a fictional blog). Freed's attitude was snobbish, elitist, bitter and frankly spiteful, while Miss Snark (despite her pseudonym) is simply realistic. She calls people fools when they come up with a really stupid idea, not from a sense of superiority as Freed did, but because she's in the trenches every day trying to separate the good stuff from the crap.
That's what we need more of -- not just in the publishing business but in modern culture in general -- more crap detection, without the hauteur.
Know the enemy
Wonkette linked to this fascinating conservative activist's blog I'd never heard of before. What makes it interesting is that it's free of cant while (perhaps unintentionally) providing genuine insights into the way the right wing runs its business.
For example, who knew the GOP chairman had conference calls with religious right chiefs?
Meanwhile, Bush was on the defensive this morning, as the far right began to call for Bush to withdraw the Miers nomination. LA Times analysis. (And: The Conservative Voice, Why Didn't Bush Nominate My Sister?)
Cracks in the facade
Earlier this week I wrote "All you need to know about the Miers pick... (is that) Focus on the Family's James Dobson has endorsed her."
Now Dobson is showing signs of strain after many conservatives voiced their doubts on the nominee, who has never been a judge and whose background indicates some sympathy for feminist causes. Dobson is quoted in the Rocky Mountain News as saying on his national radio broadcast Wednesday:
An anguished James Dobson prayed Wednesday for a sign from God, telling his Christian radio listeners he was questioning his early endorsement of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. ... Dobson prayed he was not making a mistake.
"Lord, you know I don't have the wisdom to make this decision," Dobson said. "You know that what I feel now and what I think is right may be dead wrong." He added that he worried that his position "could do something to hurt the cause of Christ, and I'd rather sacrifice my life than do that." ...
He also confirmed reports that he received a special briefing from Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, but still will not discuss the talks in detail. "When you know some of the things I know -- that I probably shouldn't know -- that take me in this direction, you'll know why I've said with fear and trepidation (that) I believe Harriet Miers will be a good justice," Dobson said in a broadcast with co-host John Fuller.
"And John, if I have made a mistake here, I will never forget it. The blood of those babies who will die will be on my hands to a degree. Lord, if I am right, confirm it, and if I am wrong, chastise me and I will repent of it and come before these microphones."
In a press conference Tuesday, Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Denver, demanded that the White House give senators whatever information it gave Dobson.
Emphasis mine. Yes, very strange. Dobson is not a Jimmy Swaggart type. He doesn't go teary-eyed before the microphones to confess weakness; in fact, he never shows weakness. Is this angonizing all just an act? A theatrical moment to manipulate his millions of listeners into even stronger support of the nomination?
Forward into the 21st century
An ex-film student named Robert Ryang created a new trailer for The Shining, turning the creepy Kubrick horror film into a cliched family comedy. He won the contest, which put the short film on its website. A few days of virual link posting and emailing later, the guy almost has a Hollywood career.
I've seen the trailer (QuickTime movie) -- it's really funny. You might want to wait til tonight to try to view it -- that link's going to get lots of hits today.
Previously: a classic mash-up setting frames from "A Charlie Brown Christmas" to last year's hit "Hey Ya!"
Harry Caul, we have a job for you
What a strange job this is: tape changer:
A weekend contract worker to maintain recording room. The fully qualified candidate will have an acute attention to detail, strong organizational skills and an ability to prioritize tasks. Individual must work well with minimal supervision. This position pays $500/month: Saturday/Sunday split shift 10am-1pm & 11pm-1am both days.
How strange it would be to go to downtown Oakland -- deserted, windswept, the fog blowing in overhead -- at 11 pm on a weekend night to enter a dry, secure room and "change tapes." Remember the job the protagonist has at the beginning of Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman? He was a newly-minted building engineer on the swing shift in a fully automated skyscraper -- nothing whatsoever to do. So reminiscent of that.
Kill me now
BoingBoing alerts us to this Australian science news story about dolphins that can "combine both rhythm and vocalisations to produce music, resulting in an extremely high-pitched, short version of the Batman theme song."
The horror. The horror.
You light up my life
Fall is in the air. Are you feeling romantic, or perhaps just a little horny? Courtesy Rachel Kramer Bussel, here's a story about bi girls getting it on in Phoenix -- where there is certainly little else to do.
At the Portland online sex empire Suicide Girls, there's dissension, paranoia, name-calling and a lot of hurt feelings as several "models" leave the site.
In Seattle, the city council voted to impose new regulations on strip clubs that many called unenforceable -- unless you're going to have cops now paying for lap dances. Which everyone knows they expect to get for free. On Sunday the same newspaper reviewed some books on porn and its discontents.
Perhaps the strippers should move to Australia, where "even mediocre strippers could earn more than the prime minister" if the national labor relations board upholds a wage claim filed (I presume, though it doesn't say) by sex industry workers.
Letter from Japan
After I sent an email to my friend Hitoshi in Japan about the end of the SF Giants' season, he replied:
In Japan Hanshin Tigers won Central League Championship. This year they built a tall fence to prevent enthusiastic fans from junping off the bridge into the Dotonbori (a very dirty stream). But more than 60 climed the fence and jumped into the stream.
About two thousand fans who couldn't get tickets were watching the game on a large screen by the entrance to the ball park. The moment the Tigers won the champinship many of them let balloons go, which was strictly prohibited. The next moment the screen was turned off and many of them cried and asked for pardon. That was really funny.
Apparently it's a tradition for Tigers fants to jump into the Dotonbori. I found this account (scroll about halfway down to the section "Wild Scenes at Dotonbori") of the origin of the tradition in 1985. A 2003 story from the Japan Times is also informative.
Katrina's affect on NoLA literary culture
Galleycat reports that the Faulkner House, a non-profit that supports "aspiring writers" and preserves the French Quarter manse where William Faulkner lived for a year early in his career, suffered moderate damage, more to its financial health and long-range survivability than to the house itself. You might think about going to their website and mailing them a check.
No word on landmarks associated with Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, or others associated with the city.
Third World America
It's night time in George Bush's America -- 3 a.m. exactly -- and a woman is seriously burned while trying to steal copper wire from a live switch box -- in San Jose.
Stealing copper wire from the infrastructure -- shit like that used to happen only in, say, Africa. But then again, the same could be said for torture. Apples and oranges? God, I hope so.
Previously: Unintentionally ironic New Orleans billboard: Welcome to Africa
Lit up
More literary stuff:
An interview with thriller writer Karin Slaughter in Time
50,000 Euros to Yiyun Li for her book A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. I'm going to blog about that three more times and by then I finally will have remembered the title. Li reads tomorrow at A Clean Well Lighted Place in San Francisco and Thursday at Powell's in Portland.
The NYT book section has made Joan Didion their latest featured author, with a whole page full of free reviews of the author's books. The New York Review has a page of essays by Didion, here's a 1996 interview on Salon, and the Village Voice also has a review of Didion's new book.
Reading list
Last night I finished Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, a strange, confounding novel. The book is divided into three parts which occur in New York in 1911, in the present day, and in the future a couple hundred years from now when Manhattan is literally a theme park called Old New York and the country is suffering through some post-apocalyptic breakup. I enjoyed reading the book and would recommend it, though I have reservations about parts (especially the middle section).
Next up are Karen X Tulchinsky's The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky and Steve Erickson's Our Ecstatic Days.
All you need to know about the Miers pick
The Christian fundamentalist American Center for Law and Justice says Harriet Miers is "an excellent choice for the Supreme Court."
Focus on the Family took a slightly less enthusiastic approach, putting founding foamer James Dobson's endoresement deep in its press release: "As Lord Acton said, 'Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' Sadly, that seems to have happened to Justices Souter and Kennedy. All we can say now is that Harriet Miers appears to be an outstanding nominee for the Supreme Court."
With these two powerful right-wing groups supporting the pick, no one need doubt that she's exactly what they want -- though I heard a local Xtian talk radio person say yesterday that she's no Clarence Thomas, as if Thomas were some standard of quality. Imagine if they could find another Clarence Thomas! The country might not survive it.
There's much more at the Village Voice, including reporting about Miers' church background.
Thursday in New York: June Jordan's Collected Poems debuts
My friend Sara has gone to New York for this week's launch of Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan. The launch will be a tribute featuring many of Jordan's contemporaries, including Adrienne Rich, Joy Harjo and others.
Dept. of Schadenfreude
This morning I wondered, is it really right to take pleasure in the downfall of others -- no matter how greasy, corrupt or hateful they are?
DeLay indicted again, this time on a money-laundering charge. You know what's great about that? The news this morning was full of Bush's new Supreme Court pick; all the pre-loaded cannons from left and right were going off like the fireworks after a ballgame go off whether the team wins or loses, because it's Fireworks Night and they're all paid for. Then suddenly DeLay gets whomped again. Whoops, there goes another CRIMINAL INDICTMENT. So much for Bush trying to take the news cycle.
Coincidentally, Tony Pierce notes that two years ago today Rush Limbaugh's drug addiction was exposed.
Priest benched for opposing proposed anti-gay law
A Roman Catholic bishop temporarily removed a Massachusetts priest from his duties after the priest printed an article in a parish bulletin attacking an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment. The bishop then appeared in the priest's stead at Mass and spoke out in favor of the amendment, which anti-gay groups are trying to qualify for the 2008 ballot.
Literature still pissing people off
We recently completed Banned Books Week, an event that librarians pay attention to, but almost no one else does because the list of banned books reaches back throughout the 20th century and most of the "banning" takes place at schools. And let's face it, what goes on in schools is something that few people care about unless they happen to have kids in school and are politically active on one side or another.
Actually, the best thing about having a "banned books" list is probably that it simply gives the more curious, rebellious kids a reading list. I'm a 16-year-old and you don't want me reading The Chocolate War? That's what I'm going to get first thing. (I've read the book and it's great -- a real "question authority" anthem, with more than a hint of sadomasochism.)
El Struggle continues today in Austin, TX, where parents at a parochial school are arguing over Annie E. Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain" (which -- this falls under the "no such thing as bad publicity" rule -- is about to be released as a film directed by Ang Lee). The controversy has already cost the school a promised $3 million from a conservative donor who withdrew his pledge when the school refused to take the story off the reading list. The school's website offers a way to donate online if you want to support their stand.
Hollywood star: Who voted for Bill O'Reilly?
Courtesy DC Media Girl, here's an interview with George Clooney. The debonair filmmaker, whose new film on the Murrow-McCarthy confrontation suggests he has political attitudes, took the opportunity to respond to an attack from right-wing foamer Bill O'Reilly, but resisted comparing him to red-hunter McCarthy.
"No one ever elected O'Reilly to an office," he says. "He's never had our vote or our proxy to use against us... Plus, the media is so fractured these days that nobody can hurt you like they did years ago because nobody has as big an audience. There used to be three networks. Now there's hundreds and hundreds.
"Besides," he adds, unable to resist a tweak, "I don't believe McCarthy was ever accused in a deposition of telling a female employee she should use a vibrator."
I'll leave you with that image.
Lynndie: Reality at Abu Ghraib was worse than what photos showed England:
I mean it was just awful. They'd put curtains on the shower windows and door and locked it. And when I come up to visit one night, I mean you could hear him screaming they had the shower on to muffle it but it wasn't helping. This guy was screaming.
Interviewer: Screaming in pain?
England: Yeah. But they wouldn't let us see because they had the doors shut. And they're like "Oh, he’s enjoying his shower." I mean they never screamed like that when we were humiliating. But his guy was like screaming bloody murder. I mean it still haunts me I can still hear it just like it happened yesterday.
Interviewer: The Army, the Defense Department, even the commander-in-chief himself -- all say this was a small group of out of control soldiers, freelancing all of this humiliation, that no one was ordered, and there was no way any of this would have been approved by superiors.
England: Well, they're wrong. 'Cause it was. Pictures were out throughout the prison. The higher-ups knew. They'd seen the pictures. But they were just like, "Oh, I didn't see that."
Make Nice
How They Scored
I Saw You, Ed. by Julia Wertz
(contributor)
Best Sex Writing 2006 (contributor)
Lesbian Camp Girls
Too Beautiful and Other Stories
How I Adore You
Sara Miles's
Jesus Freak
Bob Ostertag's
Creative Life
Liz Henry, Ed.
Wiscon Chronicles vol. 3
Andrew Zornoza's
Where I Stay
Sara Miles'
Take This Bread
A Radical Conversion
