Karen Finley interview

Here's a nice Karen Finley interview on Bookslut, a site which just keeps getting better and better.

Finley talks about her play George and Martha, which played in NY in Sept. 2004 and was recently published; it's reviewed here in the Boston Phoenix.

Karen Finley, George and Martha

Dagger eyes

My wonderful friend Christine, who is a painter, is also a wonderful writer. In a recent entry on her blog, she describes the scene at a relative's wedding:

The bar opened, and the bucks gathered around. A tier of slender young ladies swished and giggled in bright strapless gowns, click-clicking in impossible heels. The children bunny-hopped across the perfect lawn, while the aging Dominant Family, calcified in their dysfunction, counted one another's cocktails with dagger eyes.

She has a novel she's been working on -- one and off, mostly off -- for the last, um, let's say decade. I would do almost anything to see it finished one day, but she's pretty busy with activism in addition to her art. At least I get to read her blog.

'Pritchard is everything I want'

Thanks to this BoingBoing post, I find a pice of fiction on Salon (fiction on Salon? since when? who knew?) with a theme I roundly endorse.

Martin was a mouth breather. Jim lacked ambition. Rennie's head was too big. Craig licked my face like a dog.

But Pritchard. Pritchard is everything I want. And I'm not going to apologize about the way I met him.

That said, I do like licking people's faces like a dog.

The story, The Perfect Man by Lauren McLaughlin, joins a very small list of works prominently featuring my last name, including James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walty Mitty" and the 1987 Kevin Costner-Gene Hackman thriller No Way Out in which the name was attached to the bad guy's repellent assistant. In fact, the name is almost always used for a character who is either evil or (as in Thurber) a pretentious windbag.

So many books

Courtesy Galleycat, here's a nice piece in the Village Voice on independent publishers Soft Skull, Akashic Books, and others.

An article in Sunday's Guardian, an essay asks whether large advances and the resulting high expectations are ruining both the careers of young writers and the quality of published novels. (The piece features a list of Booker Prize winners, plus several which were "pipped to the post" -- which I discovered means "narrowly defeated").

independent publishers, publishing, books

Another, better list

Now that the controversy over the NYT Book Review's Best Fiction of the Last 25 Years is dying down, here comes another list, and this one I can really get behind. Playboy picked the 25 Sexiest Novels (thanks to Marilyn for the link), and I was cheered to see not only classic erotica (Story of O; Vox; and my fellow Cleis Press author Molly Weatherfield's Carrie's Story) and novels which might appear on any list of the best books of the last several decades (Lolita; Portnoy's Complaint; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles; Fear of Flying).

But the best part? Missing from the list was "9 1/2 Weeks." The fact that they left that off gave the list instant credibility with me. And I totally love that they included Judy Blume's Forever.

Of course, they could have included queerer choices, but it's Playboy, whatta you expect? I'm also surprised they left off DeSade, since they do include Fanny Hill (1749), but again -- too intense for Playboy's readers.

best books, Playboy, erotica

Holiday mornings are quiet

Holiday mornings are so quiet in the city. Get up at the usual time and you'll find the streets deserted, the pavement cool, the sun still low in the sky. It's like a dream world.

Now that it's 10 a.m. the city seems to be revving up more. Sitting next to my kitchen window I can hear a little more traffic noise, the neighbor lady doing her usual obsessive cleaning, someone hammering. The weather continues sunny but still very cool. It's wonderful that it's not heating up the way it did last summer at this time.

I think I'm just going to putter around the house today.

Today's fake: "Walking Fat Man"

Almost a year ago I posted a brief entry about Steve Vaught, a 400-lb. ex-Marine who decided to walk from San Diego to New York to lose weight and get his head straight. Earlier this month he finally made it, having taken more than a year for his hike.

But apparent discrepancies in his itinerary have led to loss of a book deal and divorce for the poor sap. Worst of all, though he claims to have lost 100 lbs., even the documentary filmmaker who tracked him across the U.S. says he doubts it. "If he lost more than 40 pounds, I'm a rock" said the filmmaker.

Last cherry blossom of spring

Having got my digital camera working again, I went out into the garden this morning. The only decent pictures was this one, of the very last cherry blossom blooming at the end of the longest branch of our cherry tree.

Click on the picture for a larger version.

Reasons to live in New York: tribute to Spalding Gray

A piece in today's New York Times tells of an upcoming special event, a limited-engagement tribute to Spalding Gray entitled Leftover Stories to Tell. The show, featuring several well-known performers, will be performed in New York May 31-June 4 and in L.A. June 14-18, and that's it. For fans of the seminal performance artist it's well worth getting on a plane and going to NY or LA just for this.

Author has his own train, gets rock-star welcome in Siberia

Author Paulo Cohelo, whose books of New Age mumbo-jumbo are said to have "struck a chord with Russians," is making his way across Russia in a special train. Crowds of 1000 greet him at remote stops, "weeping for joy."

Every dog has his day.

The old me

Puttering around in the basement on Saturday morning, I found a big folder full of old stuff, and scanned and posted on my snapshots page pictures of me from the 70s, including a page from my high school yearbook where a girl in my English class has written:

I will never forget you because you certainly know how to flatter a girl.

Our fucked-up society, part umpty-leben-teen

Speaking of class-F celebrities, remember the Scott Peterson case? If you were one of the hundreds of thousands of jobless, disabled or otherwise unfortunate people who paid attention, you may remember one of the colorful distractions along the way: an alternate juror who became a full jury member during the course of the trial, a mysterious woman who was dubbed Strawberry Shortcake because of her flamboyant appearance, including dyed red hair, huge earrings, and several tattoos.

That eye-catching appearance was not her only bid for attention. The now 36-year-old woman is named Richelle Nice, and it turns out that since Peterson's murder conviction she has been exchanging letters with the former fertilizer salesman.

Nice said she was amazed at the tone of the letter. She said Peterson has been polite and charming, often showering her with compliments. He even commented on her choice of a breast cancer awareness stamp.

Peterson also seems more concerned about how the trial affected her than himself, she said. "He talked a lot about those autopsy photos and how hard that must have been for the jurors to see," Nice said.

In other words, he demonstrated beyond a doubt that he is a charming psychopath. Of course, Nice herself also has a few screws loose. Not only did she initiate the correspondence but she has exchanged "more than two dozen letters" since the mofo was convicted 18 months ago.

The result?

In December, Nice suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, she said. The mother of four boys now lives with her own mother.

Of course, the phenomenon of women becoming pen pals with killers is well known. Peterson himself gets 25 letters from women a day. But I've never heard of a juror doing it with the guy she voted to convict.

Today's fake: major-league calling-in-sick

I'm pleased to say I do not watch "Survivor" and do not recognise the person in question, but "a recent winner" of the show "lied to get time off from his job as a state highway worker to join a promotional tour for the reality TV show in Europe last year, an investigation found."

"Recent winner" -- I love how unspecific that sounds, as if the writer couldn't care less about exactly which "season" this fellow "won." It's lower down in the story, but still -- who really fucking cares.

Anyway, piecing together the timeline, it seems one Chris Daugherty won a million dollar prize in 2004, returned to his job "working on roads" (another vague phrase) at the Ohio DOT, then was asked by Survivor's producers to go on a promotional tour of Germany and Italy. So he took the time off and then filed for various forms of time-off-with-pay, including sick pay for "depression" and -- this really takes the cake -- military leave, not because he was in the military but because the Survivor promotional tour visited a US military base along the way.

So just to review: the guy won a million dollars, then was so cheap he wouldn't even take time off without pay. And claimed he was "in" the military, while there are probably guys working for the Ohio DOT who are in Iraq right now getting their legs blown off.

Chris Daugherty, today's worst person in the world.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™!

As of tomorrow, driving 80 mph will be legal in the wide-open spaces of west Texas.

You know, no one ever says "western Texas" or "eastern Texas." I think that's because all of Texas is western, even east Texas.

In L.A., an "agitated woman" climbed into a building's air duct and it took "an urban search-and-rescue team, heavy rescue vehicles, six fire companies and two ambulances" to extract her. This demonstrates why it might not be a bad idea to hire, in addition to those big hunks of man (and woman) who populate the fire departments of America, a few really small people who can shimmy into small places and rescue stuck cats, burglars, and crazy-ass people.

New York is agog over a recent shooting. The alleged perpetrator is a psychotic nightclub bouncer "obsessed with martial arts" who "took his job way serious." He is alleged to have shot not only four club patrons in a recent fracas, but is now suspected in three other, unrelated murders.

Memo to the nightclub bouncers out there: stop hurting America.

In the U.K., nutcase politician George Galloway -- think of him as a cross between Ralph Nader and Elton John -- says if someone tried to shoot Tony Blair, it would be "morally justified." He also offered to go into a boxing ring and "take on both Bush and Blair at once," saying:

They are the sort of men who are ready to fight to the last drop of other people's blood. They couldn't personally punch their way out of a paper bag. They send other mothers' sons to their death, and I find them both deeply repugnant.

I don't know about Blair, but I'm not sure I'd like to take on Bush. I'm sure he bites.

Too much of a good thing

A couple years ago I went to a remote mountain valley for six weeks to work on a novel. To cut costs I got a "half work, half pay" package whereby I spent three hours every morning in the kitchen chopping vegetables and other prep work. For a ten-day period in the middle of May the quartermaster decided to use up the dozens of cases of apples that had been in cold storage all winter, so every day I spent at least 90 minutes chopping apples. We had apple pie, applesauce, apple cider, apple bread, apple cookies, apple soup and just about anything else you could do with an apple.

And they were damn good apples, too. That fresh-pressed apple cider was about the best thing I ever tasted. Still, we were all kind of glad when the apples were used up.

In a fascinating article in the June Poets and Writers, Copper Canyon Press marketing director Joseph Bednarik talks about a glut of literature:

In a statistical mood, I once estimated how many "good poems" were being produced by recent graduates of MFA programs. Keeping all estimates conservative, I figured there had to be at least 450 poets graduating nationwide each year. If each MFA graduate wrote just one good poem a year for ten years, at the end of a decade we would have 24,750 good poems—not to mention 4,500 degree-bearing poets, each of whom was required to write a book-length manuscript in order to graduate.

Bednarik goes on to add fiction writers to the army of scribblers, and asks, "Where is the readership to support this prodigious output?"

His conclusion: If you're a writer and you want your work to have an audience some day, better get off the internet and start reading. And something to love: "Every MFA program should require all potential graduates to convert at least one eight-year-old into a passionate reader."

writing, reading, MFA programs

Nice big reviews

My friend Katia Noyes' Crashing America got a nice long, serious review (for once!) by George Csicsery on Bookslut.

In the new Summer 06 issue of BookForum, they focus on first novels -- of famous novelists, that is, not you or me. Everyone from George Eliot to Wm. Burroughs.

Daniel Mendelsohn tackles Philip Roth's latest, Everyman, in the NYRB. And Orhan Pamuk's essay in the previous issue is definitely worth reading.

books, Katia Noyes, writers

Is an asterisk racist?

As the rumors around Barry Bonds' alleged consumption of steroids during the years 1998-2001, to boost his athletic performance and/or speed his healing from injuries, have hardened into what seems like a fairly substantial (if circumstantial) case, some have said he's getting a much worse shake than Mark McGuire or other ballplayers. Today the SF Chronicle faces the issue head on in a major front page story -- one that is already being pushed down the SFGate main page as the Enron verdicts come in.

As I've attended games at Whatever-It's-Called-This-Year Park this spring -- including two games when Bonds was due to tie or surpass Babe Ruth's record -- my interest in seeing him blast the ball into the bay did indeed surpass my cynicism. After all, whatever happened in the past, this year he's clean, right? Every hit this year is equal to anybody else's.

Barry Bonds, baseball, steroids

Art lofts confidential

From the reinvigorated Abby G blog:

Tonight, a friend and housemate nearly reduced me to tears by saying, in so many words, that, lacking proof of productivity as a visual artist, I might not qualify to take up permanent residence in the 13-person warehouse collective I've been calling home for the last three months. ... Fighting back tears, I motioned weakly to the slop-stained trash compactor adjacent to the moldy sink. "It takes a real artist to hand scoop all the garbage out of there when the bag is torn and everyone else ignores it like it's not their problem."

Hey, we call that material. Should have affixed it to a canvas.

Tonight: Michelle Tea, Gary Amdahl in Chicago

I just noticed this reading coming up tonight: in Chicago at 7:30 pm at Hopleaf, 5148 North Clark Street -- readings from Michelle Tea, Gary Amdahl, Elizabeth Merrick. Sponsored by Bookslut.

Gary Amdahl, Michelle Tea, Elizabeth Merrick , writers, literary events

Those nutty Republicans

Foaming conservative TV star Bill O'Reilly attacked a college president when he refused to appear on O'Reilly's show, saying he was "afraid" to appear and suggesting he "needed to be fired" for refusing to censor a student publication. The administrator replied, "Bill O'Reilly doesn't know the First Amendment from the back of his own hand, which is a shame because he takes full abuse of it." (Link courtesy MediaBistro's "news feed.")

The administrator, Univesity of Oregon president Dave Frohnmayer, referred to a 2000 Supreme Court decision that directly contradicts O'Reilly's claims that a university can shut down a student publication funded by student fees.

I wonder if Frohnmayer is related to John Frohnmayer, the NEA chief under Bush I who, in 1990, became a center of controversy when he forced the NEA to deny funding to several artists who used sexual or gay-friendly themes in their work. The unfunded artists, who included Karen Finley, became known as the NEA Four, and the case led to Congress ending NEA funding for individual artists.

censorship, Bill O'Reilly, demagogues, Dave Frohnmayer

Worst nightmare: Your mother is a prominent internet columnist

You know how relieved we all are that our aged parents are so clueless they would never even find the Google search page, much less be able to uncover all the embarrassing (but only if your parents find it) information about us on the web? Imagine a graph, with one ascending line labelled "Computers easier to use" and another ascending line that intersects it at some point labelled "Baby boomer generation parents know how to use computers anyway" resulting in a quickly descending index of "Aged parents too clueless to Google you." In other words, the younger you are, the more likely your parents will read every single word you ever posted.

Distressing. But how about this one: your kids will grow up to read everything you have ever posted. As time goes on and storage and search capabilities grow more powerful, this becomes more and more likely. (Hello, Wayback Machine.)

But worst of all must be the fate of someone like Anne Lamott's son, whose entire life including his conception, gestation and birth has been the subject of his mother's revealing books and essays. The cute tyke of the late 90s is now a sullen teenager, but that doesn't stop his mother from exposing every moment of their all-too-typical parent-teen arguments on Salon.com.

I sort of like Anne Lamott and the risks she takes. She's willing to be the daffy leftist Christian on a left-wing website. She doles out advice on childraising and writing and comes up with some terrific lines (on right-wing Christians: "This is the type of thing that makes Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the dog dish") and generally projects a self-deprecating image. But as yesterday's column shows, she doesn't realize that it's time to stop going back to that family-drama well when your kid is old enough to drive.

This can't end well. But knowing Lamott, however it does, you can bet she'll write about it.

Anne Lamott

The Antichrist is alive today

Scariest headline of the week:

Ryan Seacrest Goes from 'Idol' to Empire

Hail Ceasar! Don't forget to release poison gas on the internet when you take command.

And over the weekend, Rudolph Giuliani showed what butters his bread: he stumped for lobbyist Ralph Reed, who's running for... what... lieutenant gov. of Georgia. The former head of the "Christian Coalition" is also a former bag man for Jack Abramoff.

And for a minute there, back in 2004, I kind of liked Giuliani. He's not a foamer on social issues like a lot of these Republican fucks, and he seems like a fundamentally okay guy. But now he kisses Reed's ass -- that's no good. Fuck him.

Speaking of Abramoff and his cynical alliance with evangelical Christians, details of his bogus "US Family Network" organization -- little more than a front to launder influence payments from groups like Russian oil magnates -- are coming out. (permalink for that story -- click on that to read the whole thing with no registration.) There was something on NPR this morning about it, in addition to this story from the Topeka Capital Journal. This story is a perfect example of the way Republicans have screwed their naive evangelical allies six ways to Sunday -- and they're just barely starting to realize it.

Footnote: the subject of the Kansas paper's story is the involvement with the US Family Network of Rep. Jim Ryun. Ryun is a former Olympian and distance runner who captured the world record for the mile in 1966, making him a hero to my then ten-year-old self. No matter how naive childhood hero-worship is, it's sad to see them not only grow up but succumb to greed and stupidity.

Ralph Reed, Tom DeLay, Republicans, US Family Network

Cross-post the love

I'm spreading myself thin on my other blog, about Bangalore, and on SF Metblogging where I just posted something on tonight's Giants game.

The tension continues

Last week, more than 12 hours after their awards ceremony had transpired, I complained that the Lambda Literary Foundation had not got around to posting a list of the winners on its website. Guess what? It's now more than three days after the ceremony -- and still no posting.

I sent an email to the "contact" mailbox on the site, and the next day -- more than 48 hours after the event -- I got an email back. "We sent an email press release to our email list Friday morning -- why haven't you signed up for our list?" said executive director Charles Flowers.

Oh -- I have to sign up for a special email? Who knew? Yeah, I'll be sure to do that -- next time.

But that was the whole message. He didn't even include the text of his "email press release" so I would finally have the information. So I still don't know, and neither do you -- unless you were one of the smart ones, I guess.

God knows how much money they spent on the luxurious awards banquet held Thursday night -- but they don't have time even to post the winners on their own website. Talk about an awards ceremony that amounts to little more than jacking off.

Update, 2:00 pm -- Results are finally up.

Let us pray

I mentioned to Cris this LA Daily News story about some Christians who staged a media event at a Hollywood Chevron station to ask God to lower gas prices. (Link courtesy Chr. Today)

Cris said, "Yeah, here's God's answer: 'I gave you all them dinosaurs -- then I killed all them dinosaurs -- now you got gas. You figure out the rest.'"

How I love her.

gasoline prices, prayer

Do independent bookstores have a future?

Long, thoughtful and very good piece in the Guardian about the fight for survival for independent bookstores. Though oriented entirely to England -- where bookselling sounds even more cutthroat than in the U.S. -- it no doubt has much to say about the issue in general.

bookstores, bookselling

Buy more porn now

You know that book I mentioned a few months ago -- the half-serious, half-parody porn book I issued under a pseudonym? You can now purchase Lesbian Camp Girls at lulu.com as a POD book. Or just $4 for a PDF download.

Excerpt:

"Oh, yes," Casey said. "Put your head there. It feels nice."

"Listen, Casey," Lisa protested, trying to sit up, "I don't know if we should do this." At the same time, the feeling of Casey's breasts against her cheek thrilled her. Those beautiful tits, so perfect. She'd give anything to have tits like that. And Casey was offering them to her.

She struggled. This was crazy, it was insane. What was she doing with her head against the chest of another teenage girl, no matter how beautiful she was, no matter how much she turned her on?

No! Those thoughts were wrong! Then why was her mouth opening readily to accept Casey's nipple, why did Casey's deep breathing make her own heart start beating faster? Could it be that she wanted Casey too? Could it be that she was really one of those girls -- a lesbian?

She felt Casey move her crotch against her. She felt Casey's hands on her shorts. "Take these off," the other girl breathed. "I want to feel you against me."

"Yes," Lisa gasped, feeling herself blush invisibly. No one could see them in this darkness. What did it matter what they did?

Erlbaum agonistes

Janice Erlbaum, author of the smashing memoir Girlbomb, posts a wonderfully honest entry about the highs and lows of writing -- the fear, self-loathing and active struggle that go into producing good work, in contrast with what being a writer looks like from the outside.

When I see those ads in the NYR or the Atlantic or wherever about MFA programs that promise you bullshit like "life the life of a writer in New York" (that's the ad for the NYU MFA program, if I remember correctly) I have to laugh. Erlbaum really is living the life of a writer in New York.

Disheartening, to open September - November 2004, and read words I could have written yesterday. God, I'm so fucking angry. I wonder if I will ever get past it. I try so hard to be a good person, and I'm just furious all the time. I'm so overwhelmed. Reading myself as I struggled with various projects -- I think I got the first scene done, now all I need is the backstory... -- realizing that none of them bore fruit. Book after book after book, of anger, fury, fruitless writing. Nightmares, complaints, food that takes forever to come. I should stop overscheduling myself, cut down on seeing people, stop saying yes to things I know I don't want to do. Changes I never make.

Yep. And yet -- Garrison Keillor is right to say "quit complaining; writing is no harder than anything else." It's true that people are too melodramatic about the struggle -- for example, the oft-quoted maxim "Writing is easy, you just open a vein and bleed onto the page." That's the kind of thing Keillor means, I think. You can be too romantic about both the difficulty and the rewards.

You know what the real reward is? It's not the fun of doing a reading and having people applaud, though that's great; it's not the ego-boosting Lunch With Your Editor, something that happens maybe once every five years (that's what people probably are thinking when they see "live the life of a writer" -- yeah baby, lunch on the editor!). It's that glorious feeling of having worked all day, through struggling with characters and pacing and dialogue, and you keep at it, and finally you reach a state of grace and finish a story in a burst of energy and inspiration. And then you go outside and look at the sky and feel as if you've just had the best sex ever. That's why we do it.

writers, Janice Erlbaum, struggle

Bad Behavior Friday!™ -- novelists division

The Onion posts a short bit: Novelist Thinks People Shrug 10 Times More Than They Actually Do. In this case the title is almost as long as the blurb itself and really says it all, as far as the story is concerned.

Miss Snark reposts a Publishers Weekly story about a libel judgement against a man for writing a book in which he alleges his ex-wife -- whom he names -- plargarizes her books and once hired a hit man to kill him. The wronged author, who is obviously well quit of her ex-husband, got $230,000 in real damages from the publisher of the libellous book, print-on-demand outfit AuthorHouse.

Can I just say: dude, this is the main reason the roman à clef was invented -- so you can trash people. But you have to fictionalize it, ya know (or as Miss Snark would put it, yanno).

libel, writers, AuthorHouse, Miss Snark

Lambda Literary Awards

Well, the Lambda people are unbelievably slow in posting the winners of the annual literary awards for queer authors and queer-themed books, but from various blog postings I gather that:

• Charlie Anders won in the transgender category for Choir Boy
• Ali Liebgott won in the lesbian fiction category for The Beautifully Worthless
• D. Travers Scott won in the gay male fiction category for One of These Things Is Not Like the Others
• David Rakoff won the humor category for Don't Get Too Comfortable

Lambda Literary Awards, D. Travers Scott, Ali Liebgott, David Rakoff, Charlie Anders

Quick, before it melts

 
Perhaps the idea is to have the election before the President's poll numbers drop any farther -- though in the case of the House seat of disgraced Rep. Tom DeLay, Texas Republicans have decided to punt -- the party will appoint a local hack to fill out the term of DeLay, who quits for good on June 9, rather than hold a special election.

Not sure that NASCAR theme is a good idea -- don't they realize people only watch it for the crashes?

Link to the photo courtesy Amy's Robot.

R.I.P. Leigh-Ann Hussey

I just learned that a former co-worker at Sybase, Leigh-Ann Hussey, was killed Tuesday in a motorcycle crash.

Leigh-Ann was not a close friend of mine, but she was typical of the sort of person who worked at Sybase in the early 90s -- sort of weird, artistic, oriented toward alternative subcultures -- that made it an interesting place to work. She was in a band, rode motorcycles, and had interesting relationships.

Folks like her always had something else going on that they would much rather talk about than databases. I can think of at least a dozen other people -- all of whom were part of an email alias there called Troublemakers -- who were similarly alterno. The strange thing is that so many of them still work in high tech while pursuing their outside interests.

So long, Leigh-Ann.

Little things of note

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz links to that funny Al Gore-on-SNL video in a discussion of why Gore's not running in 2008.

The MPAA has censored a poster for a new documentary, "The Road to Guantanamo," because the all-too-real image of a bound man with a hood over his head wouldn't be "appropriate for children" to see in theater lobbies.

A strangely popular name for girls? Nevaeh, which is "heaven" spelled backwards. WTF? "The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh." Dog almightly.

Welcome, summer!

It was cool and overcast last night in the Mission as I attended the Mission Creek Comix Art event (see that link for my SF Metroblog post, with links to pictures); it was dark and foggy this morning. After so many days of sunshine, and the brief hot day we had on Saturday, I'm always secretly grateful when the fog comes in and restores the normal order of things. San Francisco's -- my neighborhood's -- balance of fog and sunshine is just right. I wouldn't like living in Arcata nor Sacramento.

Come to my reading tonight!

Like a sex machine

Annalee Newitz's latest column is about a visit to an internet porn shoot where some of the performers are machines with names like "the chopper." Seems like Violet Blue just the other day mentioned these girls, but I can't find the post. Maybe I'm wrong.

Confidential to Ms. Newitz: Would you consider changing your standard bio? The "surly media nerd" tag is getting old for me. Just my two cents.

Hey, this is tonight:

In San Francisco - Wednesday, May 17, 6-10 pm: the first Mission Creek Comic Book Art Show, at Queen's Nails Annex gallery, 3191 Mission St.. Co-curated by Shannon O'Leary, the show will celebrate the release of Girl Stories by Lauren Weinstein and Fortune's Bitch by O'Leary and Eric Koepfle.

It will be great.

Strike a pose -- uh, are you sure you want that one?

In the name of all that is holy, what was the art director thinking when he or she posed this "supermodel author" with a bowl under her chin for her dating how-to book? (Link courtesy Galleycat)

And to make it even clearer, what's the first thing she says in this interview? "I'm on my knees." She doesn't mean she's on her knees in the picture, but then again, it's a closeup.

If you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, then it's probably better you don't know.

bukkake, supermodel, Janice Dickenson

Erin: back on earth

Congratulations to Erin Petersen, the NASA Bedrest Study girl, who successfully completed her 90 days in a "negative 6 degree head down" position on Monday. An article about her appeared in Seed that day, and she was in other publications and on CNN the week before. Her blog is here.

NASA, bedrest study, Erin Petersen, stardustholiday

Somewhere in hell

On the front page of the Wall St. Journal today -- the online version of the story is pay-only, so I won't even bother linking to it -- is a story headlined "A Problem for Hot Web outfits: Keeping Pages Free From Porn." The piece starts off:

Denver -- Working quickly, Photobucket.com employee Jeff Gers can look at nearly 150,000 images on his computer screen during an eight-hour shift, or about 300 a minute. His job is to find and destroy anything that might cause offense, a task that's getting harder all the time.

Every day, nearly four million new images pour into Photobucket, a Web service that allows people to store images and videos online, share them with friends and display them on other Web sites. He's come across pornographic snowmen, camera-phone snapshots of young people's anatomy and, quite frequently, an animated cartoon of a girl lifting her skirt. Occasionally, he sees child pornography.

The future of one of the Web's newest and most vibrant businesses lies in the hands of people like Mr. Gers. Photobucket is among the biggest sources of photos that appear on MySpace.com.... MySpace's ability to sell advertising, its primary source of income, depends in part on scouring the site for objectionable material.

Can you imagine anything more hellish than that guy's job? Not the occasionally "objectionable" images he might see -- it's everything else. It's like that scene in The Fifth Element" when Milla Jovovich gets to "W" in the encyclopedia and all these images of "war" start pouring across the screen -- only damned souls like Mr. Gers see everything. And they can't stop -- must keep up the pace! There's probably some electronic monitoring tool counting the images as he scrolls past them.

From lower in the article (I love how predictable WSJ features are -- they always revisit, at the end of the article, the person or scene shown in the lede):

In January, Photobucket installed a team of nine "content moderators" -- including Mr. Gers -- who sit in a windowless office in downtown Denver staring at images all day long. The moderators work in eight-hour shifts and are expected to sift through 200 images a minute (!!!!), plucked at random from images being uploaded to Photobucket's servers.

The moderators scroll down screens filled with pictures, looking for obvious nudity as well as nuances like see-through underwear, body paint, silhouettes and thongs.... A bare bottom is not OK, but a bare bottom showing even a tiny sliver of thong underwear is fine. A cartoon that uses the word "nigga" is OK but one that uses "nigger" is not. Nipples and genitals painted or tattooed to look innocent are definitely flagged.

"That's something the computer wouldn't catch," said Mr. Gers, 24, as he zapped a picture of two snowmen sculpted into a sexual position. ... "Some days I wish I had a bottle of bleach under my desk so I could wash my eyes out."

I'll bet he does. Then there's the bit about how Photobucket is opening up another shift of "content moderators" in Iowa, because people from flyover country have "mainstream American sensibilities."

Imagine the reactions of Europeans -- who regularly see nudity on television ads -- to this practice. They'd fucking die laughing.

I mentioned the WSJ story to a software engineer co-worker, and he said he interviewed in 1996 for a job at a web hosting company that distributed porn to as many as 2000 websites. He asked the owner why the salary was 2x the standard salary, and she replied, "Burnout. Most people burn out on this job after three or four months." And that's for website maintenance -- back end work, if you will. (Sorry.)

MySpace, content moderators, censorship

Cut, Mr. President. Mr. President? That means stop.

Yesterday before Bush's speech on immigration, CNN accidentally cut to a feed of Bush warming up or giving a sound check or something (link courtesy Wonkette -- YouTube clip approx. 1 min.) -- It's of limited entertainment value, but the momentarily startled look on Bush's face, as a director apparently cuts him off, is priceless.

See, if we were a fly on the wall in cabinet meetings, we'd get to see Cheney do that to him every day.

Bush, soundchecks, bloopers

Life in the 21st Century

A breakfast dialogue:

Me: Did you see that article in the NYT Magazine yesterday about digitizing books?

Cris: I scanned it.

She just kills me.

Killer glaciers

Evidently Al Gore -- that's actually him, right? -- was on Saturday Night Live last night. Myf posts the YouTube link. Seriously funny and perfectly delivered -- though it does give one pause when one realizes just how thin a line there is between a television personality pretending to be a newsman (Stewart, Colbert), a newsman or actor pretending to be a politician (Scarborough, Thompson), and a politician pretending to be a politician (Gore in this case).

If he'd done that at the White House Correspondents Dinner instead of Colbert doing his thing, now that would be worth celebrating.

Today's fake: help train the troops, play an Iraqi villager!

A couple weeks ago the NYT ran a story on how the military is training soldiers at an elaborate facility which includes a whole false village, where dozens of people play Iraqi villagers, insurgents, police and others the Americans are likely to encounter on their "tour" of Iraq.

Today my friend Christine, who lives quite close to the Marine base in question, listens in as the locals gossip about participating in the experience. The scene: The Beauty Bubble.

As Jeffrey finishes her foil-wrap, Mrs. Cowboy entertains him with tales of songs around the campfire and watching the sunsets from the third-story balcony of her fake house on the far side of the base, the side we otherwise never get to. She laughs about the two young women who have been assigned as wives to a villager, a poor fellow they order around mercilessly.

That is awesome.

Ripped from the pages

Strange situation down in Houston where a gay-themed poem was literally ripped out of the biannual literary magazine of the University of St. Thomas, a small Catholic institution, by student staffers after the magazine was published.

Seems the poem, entitled Lusting Chaos, had been accepted by the magazine's "poetry committee" (editing a literary magazine by committee -- now there's a bad idea) but ultimately rejected by the faculty advisor. Nevertheless someone (the poem's author says it wasn't him) snuck the poem into a pile of accepted work and it wound up in the finished product. Staffers only discovered the mistaken inclusion at the magazine's release party in the library.

It doesn't say when the tearing-out took place, but it could be that everyone at the party had a rip-roaring time.

literary magazines, Houston

Winner, stupidest phrase of the week: 'internet blog'

It's not just the headline writer's fault; the phrase appears in the text of the story itself:

LAPD starts internet blog
...

"I see the blog, which is first and foremost a department blog, as an opportunity to communicate with the public and educate them about what we are doing at the LAPD," Bratton said Thursday.

"But I also see it as an opportunity for me to respond to those issues where I feel the department is being misrepresented," the chief added.

Yeah, those are two totally different things -- propaganda and spin. I see the difference too.

Triangle award winners

Congrats to the winners of the Triangle Awards in LGBT books and writing. The winners included:

Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction went to Mack Friedman, Setting the Lawn on Fire (University of Wisconsin Press).

Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry was Richard Siken, Crush (Yale University Press).

Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry was won by Jane Miller, A Palace of Pearls (Copper Canyon).

Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction was won by Tania Katan, My One-Night Stand with Cancer (Alyson Books).

The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction went to Martin Moran, The Tricky Part (Beacon Press).

The Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction was won by Patricia Grossman, Brian in Three Seasons (Permanent Press).

The Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay Fiction went to Barry McCrea, The First Verse (Carroll & Graf).

book awards, Triangle Book Awards, fiction, poetry , non-fiction

It's Bad Behavior Friday™!

A lady in L.A. is suing the Angels baseball team because she didn't receive a tote bag in a recent giveaway -- despite receiving four of the bags when she wrote to complain. Most bizarre statement in the story:

"They claimed they didn't have any more bags, but my client said there was a mountain of bags stacked so high a show dog couldn't have jumped over them," said Alfred Rava, Cohn's San Diego-based attorney.

A show dog? Yeah, that's exactly the picture that comes to mind.

A worker at Stanford Hospital stole millions of dollars of equipment and outfitted a room in his home as a hospital suite, allegedly so criminals could receive under-the-table medical care. How did cops draw that conclusion? Because the equipment, and the fully furnished "hospital room," were discovered when cops raided the house and discovered a meth lab. The house is located in East Palo Alto, a poverty-stricken town adjacent to Palo Alto where generations of Stanford students have scored drugs.

Hey, the NY Daily News is always good for a Friday story: In yet another case of a "shock jock" DJ being fired for shooting off his mouth just a little too much, a guy known as Star "says he never really intended to hunt down and molest the 4-year-old daughter of a radio rival." Too late -- he's fired, and a local prosecutor from the child abuse division is looking at the case.

But hey, it's a free country, right? Did he really go too far? Judge for yourself:

In a running diatribe that began last week and continued on Monday, Star, who hosted a morning show with Buc Wild, offered $500 for information about where he could find Envy's children.

Star, who bills himself as "The Hater" and is a self-professed former high school bully, said he planned to perform deviant sexual acts on the Caseys' 4-year-old daughter.

He also said he had a gun -- and offered listeners $500 to tell him where DJ Envy's daughter goes to school.

Star didn't stop there. He insulted DJ Envy's wife -- and pelted her with anti-Asian slurs.

The pelting was merely figurative, after all.

Aw, let him have the last word

From the transcript of Bush's statement on electronic eavesdropping:

Q Sir, how is collecting phone calls not an intrusion on privacy?

(No response from the president.)

.... END

Maybe reporters should try asking questions through the phone. At least somebody's listening.

Bush, eavesdropping, intelligence gathering

Tizzy in teacup at L.A. book panel

Courtesy Violet Vixen comes a link to a strange Susie Bright posting about a panel she was on with Karen Finley, Dennis Cooper and someone named Craig Ferguson, who seems to be some kind of television personality who has just written a novel -- the kind of person people in L.A. would be very impressed with, sort of like if one of the Google founders had written a novel and then appeared at Kepler's. Apparently Ferguson made a few obnoxious comments timed to irritate the gals -- a tactic that annoyed Susie and, she says, Finley and the audience in general.

Addressing Ferguson after the fact in the form of an "open letter," Susie writes:

We three knew who you were, but I don't think you got the memo on us. You were sitting next to the contemporary equivalent of Brecht, Jean Genet, and Dorothy Parker -- artists whose cultural influence and impact have made them a legend among their peers...

Let's pause to let that sink in. If, as I suppose, she means that Finley = Brecht and Cooper = Genet, then the only possible conclusion one can draw is that Susie Bright is calling herself the Dorothy Parker of her generation.

I will leave that judgement to others, but I wonder if Susie realizes that it's fine to claim some kind of exalted standing for others whom you wish were more highly regarded, but when in the same breath you include yourself in the same boat, you instantly sink the whole comparison, not just for yourself but for the others whom you intend to elevate. Because otherwise someone might mistake you for a self-important twit who makes grandiose claims for herself.

I'm sure the TV fellow misbehaved, but that is no doubt part of his shtick -- perhaps he wants to be known as the Normal Mailer of his generation -- and three or four years from now he will be one of those has-beens on The Surreal Life. Susie getting her panties in a bunch is probably just the kind of reaction he hoped to provoke.

As for Cooper and Finley, they probably just shrugged, went home and got back to work, vowing not to agree to appear on any more panels.

Craig Ferguson, Susie Bright, Karen Finley

Today's bonus fake: a 'fictional author,' a non-existent 'foundation'

You might have noticed a half-page ad in Wednesday's New York Times headlined DON'T BELIEVE 'BAD TWIN' -- It consisted of a statement from a "Hanso Foundation" which "for over thirty years has stood for compassion and innovation," and went on to warn about a just-published thriller which supposedly defamed the organization and its founders.

Just another crackpot advertisement, you figure. You don't know the half of it. Turns out the ad, along with a television ad and the book itself are just part of a promotion by the producers of the "Lost" television series. Go to the book publisher's page and you see a straight-faced "Note From The Publisher" professing "great concern" over the allegations. Then scroll to the bottom of the page and see:

Bad Twin is a work of fiction and all names, characters and incidents are used fictitiously; the author himself is a fictional character.

Uh... what? Click on the author's name and go to his author page and see:

It's all just a big shuck, expensively arranged. Perhaps one of the more harmless examples of viral marketing -- would anyone but those who are already fans of the show care? -- but it seems strange that a reputable publishing company -- albeit one that mostly does books by celebrities -- would risk association with all the hoaxes and fakes going on in the lit world these days.

fakes, hoaxes, Hanso, viral marketing

Bush: I will make you fishers of men

Bush on the latest leaked revelations about the extent of electronic surveillance:

We are not mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans.

Hmm. Neither mining nor trolling. What's left?

Fishing
Plumbing
Probing
Digging
Excavating
und so weiter

I liked that "trolling," though. Presumably he didn't mean trawling (pictured here), in which millions of organisms from plankton to dolphins are gathered up in huge nets. No -- they're not doing that.

So what did he mean by "we're not trolling?" Oh, okay:

trolling: a fishing method in which lines with baits or lures are dragged by a vessel at a speed of 2-10 knots.

Feel better?

Bush, surveillance, trolling

Today's fake: now with extra cheese

A freelance writer has lost his gig with NBC, the New York Times reported, for ripping off dialogue from one of NBC's own shows. The unidentified writer composed the script for a short introductory feature shown before the Kentucky Derby last weekend. The featurette highlighted the bravery of a horse trainer who survived a firey airplane crash:

In the script, read by NBC's Tom Hammond, Matz was extolled because he "ran into the fire to save the lives of three children." Hammond paused dramatically and added, "Ran into the fire."

Man -- that's writing. And the producers of the recently cancelled show "The West Wing" would agree. In one episode, centered around a bombing:

Martin Sheen, who plays President Josiah Bartlet, delivered a speech praising the rescuers who "ran into the fire to help get people out." He paused and added dramatically, "Ran into the fire."

You know, if you've got to steal, steal from the best.

But this raises something that I've always wondered about. That guy who survived the airplane crash -- never mind his subsequent heroism -- that's the kind of event where people would look at the fact he was able to run at all, and say, "Man, was he lucky." Oh yeah? How lucky is it to get into an airplane crash in the first place? It's safer than driving, as we're constantly reminded.

Similarly "lucky" people would be miners who survived mine disasters, soldiers in Iraq who come home missing a leg, and the Houston area teen who contracted rabies while sleeping after being bitten by a bat (but only if he survives). Yeah, those are some lucky folks.

Me -- I've got a good job, a house, a great partner, and I live in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Good thing I'm not also "lucky."

television, fakes, plagarism

Oil, gold, and now paper

Oil isn't the only thing that's going up. Galleycat cites a report that says the price of paper is rising, leading publishers to put out fewer books. They can't afford to put out everything "and hope something sticks," the thinking goes.

Despite the fact that this might make publishers more reluctant to publish me and my friends, my reaction is: good! Let's have less crap published. Of course, the way it works is, instead of selecting for quality, publishers will now do only sure-fire moneymakers. Still, I can't help but think this is a good trend in the long run. Once a book does get published, it has less competition for space and attention.

publishing, paper, books, Galleycat

What are you working on? : Noel Alumit

Just posted in my series of interviews with writers talking about their current projects, San Francisco playwright and novelist Noel Alumit, who says of his novel Talking to the Moon:

Originally, the novel had this non-linear structure with raunchy sex scenes. But when my father passed, I decided to honor him with this project. He became the only reader I cared about. So I completely retooled the book. The way it was written, my father would have stopped reading at page 10. I changed the structure, softened the sex scenes. I think he would have enjoyed this version more.

writers, Noel Alumit, Filipino American writers, playwrights

Bush's poll numbers: the stain beneath your feet

There's a great Dilbert cartoon in which some sales guy asks Dilbert whether he can make a decision on a sale, and Dilbert responds, "Let me explain the org chart..." He starts drawing on the whiteboard, and several minutes later he's written down off the board, down the wall all the way to the floor. Finally he says, "Okay. You see that stain on the floor?"

The sales guy says, "That's you?"

"No," Dilbert says. "That's my boss. I'm right under the stain."

That's about where Bush's latest poll numbers are now. He's the stain on the floor -- and we're under the stain. (The picture accompanying that article makes the president, dressed in a light grey suit and shot from below, look like a cross between the president of a Central American country and a televangelist.)

Or didn't you hear yet about the Boston Globe story about the 750 obscure (yet not secret) "presidential signings" that Bush has signed, documents that (he says) allow him to ignore parts of laws he doesn't feel like obeying -- in essence, a line-item veto that allows him to order the Defense Dept. and anybody else in the Executive Branch to ignore laws he says don't apply to him as Commander in Chief.

See? Bush: stain. Us: under that.

Another major indy bookstore threatened

Just a few days after the owner of San Francisco's A Clean Well Lighted Place announced he was selling the 22-year-old store, an even more venerable Bay Area institution has announced it's closing its flagship store. Cody's will close its Telegraph Ave. store on July 10 "citing decreased sales and competition from chains," blah blah blah.

From a bookselling email:

The Telegraph Avenue store was part of and witnessed some key moments of
modern American history. Telegraph Avenue was the center of many demonstrations during the Free Speech Movement in the early 1960s, which grew into the antiwar movement. In 1989, a pipe bomb was found in the store during the contretemps about The Satanic Verses. (Despite the attempted bombing, staff voted unanimously to continue selling Salman Rushdie's book.) And (owner Andy) Ross and the store have been vocal promoters of independent, local bookstores--protesting against "huge mass merchants and disembodied Internet retailers."

Cody's two other stores, including a gleaming new store off Union Square in San Francisco opened just a year or two ago, will remain open.

Yikes! It must really be bad when a large independent bookstore at the doorstep of a major university can't stay open.

bookstores, publishing, Cody's

Reading: Maximum City

I'm reading this remarkable book about modern Bombay, Maximum City, by Suketu Mehta. This review by the Times of London pretty much sums it up:

Maximum City is, in all senses, a revelation. (The book depicts) Bombay as a city of such tensions, violence, corruption, fanaticism, fatalism, humanity and beauty that it is almost impossible to imagine why it does not implode in chaos. The extremes are as jarring as they are incongruous. Millionaires, film stars and mobsters lavish luxury on themselves with a ruthless selfishness unmatched in any medieval court. Only streets away, millions of destitute immigrants struggle to exist in shacks pitched on pavements, beside railway tracks or over putrid rivers of sewage, battling against bureaucrats, criminals, degradation and the raw unfairness of daily life in pursuit of dreams and imagined riches. Hatreds, religious and ethnic, define unseen boundaries between caste and creed, between haves and have-nots. Riots, murders and the daily maiming of rivals make existence more precarious and unpredictable than anything known in India's dreary, benighted villages. Politicians lie to win votes and incite to keep office. Despairing officials and principled judges exhaust themselves in the attempt to impose order. Overworked police torture and cheat...

Shocking. I wish there were such a book about Bangalore, but that's probably like reading a book about New York and wishing there were a similar book about Denver.

In the spam box: spam names of the week

You know, my GMail spam box is just a constant source of entertainment.

Cookie Fiorini -- Wife of a minor mobster
Dusty Mayberry -- Third-rate country-western singer
Santo Nutting -- Secretive operative for a vague shell corporation -- a name right out of "The Crying of Lot 49"
Marganita Cutsworth -- Real estate VP for a large software company
Ionela Feeley -- That strange middle-aged lady who lives in your building; has 17 cats
Inkeri Leddy -- The real name of the "Shawn" you spoke to at Dell Tech Support

What are you working on? : Ryan Blitstein

Journalist Ryan Blitstein, latest subject in my series of interviews with writers, speaks about the difference between writing news and novels:

The luxury of total control of the material I was writing about -- something that is inherently impossible when writing non-fiction -- was liberating, but also daunting, because there was so much pressure to come up with things that were actually interesting enough to carry someone across 300 pages about a subject that isn't "newsworthy" or "true" in the traditional sense.

Blitstein's latest piece in the SF Weekly is A Study in Size, about the success of small secondary schools and the difficulty the San Francisco school district has in accepting them.

Blitstein and previous interviewee Joshua Davis will be reading with me as well as Christine Comaford-Lynch on May 18 -- see the listing at the top of the page.

Boys stink

Lesbians respond differently than heterosexual women to bodily smells, according to a Swedish study. Twelve lesbians and twelve straight women inhaled air mixed with hormones -- one batch derived from male sweat, the other from the urine or pregnant women -- and PET scans on the area of their brains "though to process sexual cues" were examined. Only the straight women's brains lit up during the test.

A year ago, an eariler study by the same team ran the same tests on straight and gay men, with gay men having the same response to male sweat as straight women.

MethaPhor five six

The Boston Globe has a piece about the book packager involved in the MethaPhor scandal (link courtesy Galleycat).

I was thinking last night that there has to be a good joke that begins with the line: "J.T. LeRoy, James Frey and Kaavya Viswanathan go into a bar..."

I love this city

Today after church I met up with Shannon O'Leary, the brilliant and fabulous writer/impresario whose graphic novel series Fortune's Bitch has just begun with Vol. 1. She gifted me a copy and I really enjoyed it, and for a special reason. I met Shannon almost two years ago when I joined a writing group; at that time she was working on a novel. After several months she decided to turn her partially-finished ms. into a graphic novel, and with the first issue, it's become a reality. Way to go, Shannon!

Shannon also writes the StarryShine blog and writes and produces the Pet Noir comix.

Then in the evening I went to the SF Metrobloggers Meetup and met lucious bloggers. [photos by Lauren] I was lucky in finding parking (not once but twice, as I had to leave the event after 40 minutes, do a chore, then return), so I felt my attendance there was fated. Many's the time I've tried to attend some event or other in San Francisco and simply bailed because I couldn't find a place to park.

Another new book

Today I stopped into the Berkeley Good Vibrations and scored a copy of Best Sex Writing 2006 with my essay in it. Looks great -- I can't wait to read the other contributors' pieces.

See the top of the page for information on readings in New York on June 5 and San Francisco on June 7.

NASA bedrest study girl's minutes of fame

Erin Petersen, the girl in the NASA bedrest study, was on CNN yesterday. Read the transcript from "American Morning" (second story in segment), where they showed a taped segment (and don't miss the utterly vacuous lead-out chatter between the co-anchors at the end of the transcript:

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: How long did it take her before she felt very disoriented? I mean when I was on bed rest when I was pregnant, I just always felt like out of it and I wasn't even vertical the whole time.

MILES O'BRIEN: Oh, that's a good one. All right. I don't know.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: (INAUDIBLE) horizontal.

MILES O'BRIEN: I know what you meant.

SERWER: I have no question. It's just not a business story. Yes, really. I just can't handle this one.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: To [sic] much business. Absolutely.

MILES O'BRIEN: Just stick to your core competency there.

SERWER: I try.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: I've got a hundred questions. I've got a hundred questions for her.

MILES O'BRIEN: OK. Good.

SERWER: You do that.

And then she was on live later in the day, but I can't find that transcript Here it is, starting about halfway down.

She gets out on May 15; then starts months of physical therapy to get her walking again. She's tough!

Today's fake: Pasadena schools superintendent

A local newspaper, the Pasadena Weekly, pulled a column by local schools chief Percy Clark Jr. from its website after readers noticed similarities between several phrases and the words of a 1991 sermon by a Massachusetts minister.

Rumsfeld agonistes

In case you missed it, Donald Rumsfeld found himself in a pickle yesterday, as a former CIA agent asked embarrassing questions at a public forum. The transcript of the encounter is in that "Countdown" show transcript, first segment.

Excerpt:

MCGOVERN: --"There is bulletproof evidence of links between al Qaeda and the government of President Saddam Hussein." Was that a lie, Mr. Rumsfeld? Or was that manufactured somewhere else? Because all of my CIA colleagues disputed that, and so did the 9/11 commission. And so I would like to ask you to be up front with the American people. Why did you lie to get us into a war that was not necessary, and that has caused these kinds of casualties? Why?

RUMSFELD: Well, first of all, I haven't lied. I did not lie then.

Colin Powell didn't lie. He spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence Agency people and prepared a presentation that I know he believed was accurate. And he presented that to the United Nations. The president spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence people, and he went to the American people and made a presentation.

I'm not in the intelligence business. They gave the world their honest opinion. It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.

MCGOVERN: You said you knew where they were.

The show goes on to compare the interlocutor's accusastions and Rumsfeld's defense with Rumsfeld's actual statements -- as you'll see in the show's transcript. Courtesy Newshounds, here is video of the encounter, which took place during an appearance by the Secretary of Defense in Atlanta.

To Rumsfeld's credit, he did prevent security personnel from removing the man during the encounter.

Rags to riches

Courtesy Badger, a story about a Korean menstrual pad firm choosing transexual pop star Harisu as a spokesmodel. The choice is allegedly controversial, more so than when the same company cast famous male pop stars in its ads.

According to the story:

the sanitary pads are a cutting-edge product that not only gives women that spring-fresh feeling, but also prevents menstrual cramps.

Oh really... Badger: "How can they possibly prevent cramps? They snake out little tentacles that reach up there and inject your cervix with pure cocaine? What, what, what?"

SF cops can't protect witnesses; unsolved murder rate soars

It's Bad Behavior Friday,™ though it gives me no joy to report this latest fuckup. One of the few people every to agree to testify in a gang murder case in the last few years was assassinated in broad daylight yesterday.

To be fair, the guy had been moved out of town in a witness protection program and had been warned not to come back for his own safety. He came back to get his car fixed -- back to his own gang-ridden neighborhood -- and somebody spotted him and he got popped. So he's a stupid fuck in a number of different ways.

The unsolved murder rate is the highest in years, the SF Weekly reported in January.

SF indy bookstore institution: For Sale

A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books, which in short order became the place for high profile visiting authors to read when they came to town, and whose large space, excellent selection and late hours enabled it to continue to compete with chain bookstores -- is for sale, the Chronicle reported.

Don't bother going to their former www.bookstore.com web address -- they sold it to raise cash, and the address now yields a generic linkfarm page.

Though the owner claims "declining foot traffic" as one reason business is down, the store, located in an ugly condo-retail development in a great location: near Civic Center and just a couple blocks up from the Opera House, the symphony hall and Herbst Auditorium, the latter a large hall where famous authors often appear in the City Arts and Lectures series. There's also a cinema and a popular before- and after-theater restaurant in the complex. So I tend to doubt the "low foot traffic" complaint. Face it, I think people are just buying fewer books. And why not -- they're increasingly expensive, and while a lot of great quality is out there, it's increasingly surrounded by crap.

I think it's all right that people are buying fewer books. Overall fewer books deserve, perhaps, to be bought. While terrific books like the intimidatingly large "Europe Central" sit quietly on the shelves, consumers are cramming their bags with cheesy thrillers and Y.A. pablum. (No, not all thrillers or Y.A. books are crap, but so many of them are.) But from a retailer's point of view, they'd rather sell three $14.95 Y.A. books than one $30 copy of "Europe Central."

What if... Courtesy Mediabistro, this story which includes a prediction from Microsoft's CEO that:

in 10 years, Americans would read most of their books and periodicals on a digital screen. So far, the technology industry hasn't made a digital screen that is as good as paper, he said. That will change.

Maybe so, maybe not. But I shudder at the notion that bookstores will become more like, say, Best Buy.

What are you working on? : Joshua Davis

The rugged-looking and adventuresome Joshua Davis, journalist and erstwhile arm wrestling competitor, is the latest subject in my series of interviews with writers on their current projects.

Where (George Plimpton) did all the big league sports, I've been involved in overlooked and marginalized ones. I think there are very different lessons to be learned when you are dealing with people who do a sport as a hobby. I'd argue that their intensity for their game is more intense than the pro athlete because it's an object of desire -- something they would like to do all the time but can't. So it becomes infused with this great passion.

Davis will be appearing with me at Inside Story Time on May 18 -- see the listing at the top of this page.

Just part of the game

For you baseball fans, there's a nice picture of Giants catcher Todd Greene doing a face-plant (permalink) somewhere far from the plate as Brewers outfielder/wide receiver Prince Fielder belly-flops home for a run. According to the story:

Prince Fielder, looking almost as big as his dad Cecil, barreled into catcher Todd Greene, as Greene stood just down the third-base line awaiting Fielder, the ball firmly in his glove. Fielder walloped Greene in the head and Greene fell back toward the plate, his mask flying off. As he rolled on the ground, he let the ball out of his glove and then shook his glove off his hand so he could put both hands on his head. By the time the ump got around Greene, the ball was on the ground, and the ump called Fielder safe.

Sounds a lot like what happened to me in a softball game once. One moment I was blocking the plate with the ball in my glove with some big oaf bearing down on me, the next thing I knew I was lying on my head somewhere near the backstop, the ball rolling away.

Not to mention that climactic moment in game 4 of the 2003 Nat'l League playoffs when Pudge Rodriguez of the Marlins tagged out J.T. Snow to win the series for the fish. Photo of the play. But in that play the catcher held onto the ball despite the fierce collision; the photo clearly shows the tag being made before J.T. touched the plate. Man, that's one play I'll never forget, even though the Giants lost.

Another thing; I miss J.T., who is mouldering on the bench in Boston.

Satire is dead, #9234982311

No, it's not a headline from The Onion: Residents told to be ready 'for anything'

You know, this is pretty much "Dog bites man": Rep. Kennedy, drunk, crashes car near Capitol. That would be Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., son of the most famous Democratic car-crasher in history, Sen. Teddy Kennedy. When he staggered out of the car he blurted something about being "late for a floor vote." Only problem? It was 2:30 a.m.!

How the mighty have fallen: Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who failed to hound Bill Clinton from office, will represent an Alaskan school board in a free-speech case about a high school student who displayed a banner at a football game reading "BONG HITS 4 JESUS." There's little hope Starr will stay in the 49th state, though; he is the dean of Pepperdine Law School, located in Malibu.

Spam name of the week

Fresh in my GMail spam box, a message from someone claiming to be:

Gypping P. Widespread

Sometimes the truth is just too much to handle.

What are you working on? : Myfanwy Collins

Just posted in my series of interviews with writers about their current project, short story writer Myfanwy Collins, whom I met at the Squaw Valley Writers conference last summer. About her short story collection Freak Magnet she writes:

As I've become more confident in my writing, I've allowed my true voice to come through -- one which aims to shine the light of honesty on human relations, to say some of things that we all are thinking but maybe never put into words. That's my hope anyway. We'll see if I've succeeded.

My hope is to show women as they truly are or can be. Sometimes we are scared, sometimes we are enraged, sometimes we are filled with light, but all the time we are human.

My ears are ringing

Last night with Anna to see Sigur Rós. Here is a picture somebody took who was sitting much farther from the stage. We were in row B, which was the second row, which was, wow, really close. Thanks to Anna for the birthday present!

Doing a search on Flickr for Sigur Rós will net you many more pictures, most of them from the weekend's Coachella music fest. It looks like whoever was in row B at Coachella got a lot better view due to the daylight. (By contrast, here is what the stage show looked like.) Also -- and I noticed this from this morning's NYT piece on Coachella -- the band performed with a brass section there, while at the Marin Civic Ctr last night there was only the female string/percussion squadron chiming in (literally) and also opening for S.R.

So, the lead singer guy -- man, he really does sing that high, almost always with a pained expression on his face like he's really squeezing it out. When he's not singing, he plays his electric guitar with a violin bow, producing deep, siren-like waves of sound that quickly develop into noise. At times he strokes back and forth across the guitar strings with an almost masturbatory obsessiveness, like someone who's been jacking off for too long but still thinks he can come if he just manages to eek out the last bit of sensation in a couple of disconnected spots.

If I had to sing two octaves above my natural range and play my guitar with a violin bow, I might make anguished faces too. As for the rest of the band, the bass player had a stereotypical aloofness and the keyboard player seemed a little unsure of himself and especially of his background vocals, which in this live version were minimal.

Here's a very accurate review of the show as it was performed several weeks ago in Austin. That's another thing, these guys have apparently been on tour for months and if I had to do that show four or five times a week for months on end I might be a little grim too.

Now: bigger words

I increased the font size for main text in postings. Complaints or compliments? Comment.

Dubya your pleasure

Steve Bridges, the George Bush impersonator who played nice cop to Stephen Colbert's mean cop at the White House Correspondents' Assoc. dinner on Saturday night, gets $25,000 per appearance 10 to 15 times a month, the Wash. Post reported.

On the downside, it takes two and a half hours to make himself up like the president, and when he's done, what's he got? He looks like George Bush.

Or you could be a sperm bank donor and make $65/week. Better than a kick in the head, and you'll probably make more attractive faces while working than that comic.

MehtaPhor, act III

Thought that Indian-American girl's troubles were over? Thought the story would die down now that the publisher has pulled her book from shelves? Not even close. Readers have found plagarized passages from additional books by everyone from Salman Rushdie to Sophie Kinsella.

Perhaps we'll soon see a story like this:

Teen author also stole from Jefferson, Twain, Whitman, others

A close examination of Kaavya Viswanathan's now-infamous debut novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life" has uncovered passages from several famous American authors, according to media reports.

The Harvard Independent reported that a passage on page 164 of the novel, which is about the life of an over-achieving daughter of Indian immigrants, resembled Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. The passage reads:

"You're a traitor, Jenny!" I said.

"Am not!" Jenny replied. "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."

The New York Times reported that a lyrical passage on page 70 resembles the work of poet Walt Whitman:

"My daddy's country place is a thousand acres," Buffy said.

"Oh, that's not so big," I said.

"Oh yeah? Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? Have you even reckon'd the earth much? Do you even know how to read?"

"Yes, I can read your face, and it says loser. You may be interested in real estate, but I'm a poet. Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?"

Finally, the long sequence in pages 213-29, in which the title character is lost in a cave and menaced by a first-generation Indian immigrant named Joe is much the same as a passage from Mark Twain's "Adventures of Tom Sawyer."

A spokesperson for Little, Brown, Viswanathan's publisher, refused comment except to say "We thought the 'Indian Joe' sequence was a brilliant ethnic satire."