All along the watchtower

Taking the HP "pretexting" scandal as its jumping-off point, this Washington Post article has a few interesting stats on how many companies monitor employee email and webs use, how many people are fired because of it, and so on.

One of the longer passages talks about IT tools to monitor such things. But this assumes an awfully naive employee base. If you know my employer is monitoring my internet use, just go to something like a PDA-based platform. They can't monitor something that's not on their network.

This Australian article is actually more interesting and detailed, covering the monitoring performed by companies like Google.

Counting down to the Republican defeat: Foley's folly

Florida GOP congressman Mark Foley resigned from Congress today after word got out about emails he sent to a 16-year-old page. (A page is a sort of intern attached to the Congress itself rather than to a particular member's office, and pages are commonly high-school aged kids.) The messages were sexual in nature. Just so you know.

The best part:

Foley, as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, had introduced legislation in July to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet.

Foley (Wikipedia page) was thought to be a lock for re-election. Now he's toast.

'JT LeRoy' fraudster still milking it

Laura Albert had a tea party (when? The article doesn't say; so much for the five Ws) to "celebrate" the release of the Paris Review with her "interview."

Not one of the high-profile official Paris Review interviews; in this issue they give that treatment to Stephen King. No, the Albert interview is called an "encounter." Lots of bio info, judging by the online excerpt.

it's Bad Behavior Friday™! : School shootings edition

Guns at school -- that's what we were lacking in the old days. If only we'd shot the principal, or held the cheerleaders hostage, things might have been a little more exciting. Don't forget this other plot -- hello Wisconsin!

In New York they're agog over revelations that the state attorney general talked with her lover about bugging her husband's boat to discover evidence of his adultery. The AG is going on the offensive, demanding an investigation into how the conversation -- whether it rises to the level of conspiracy is yet to be decided -- became public. Typically for the eastern seaboard, the background of the players has all kinds of weird shit -- tax fraud investigations, personal attacks in books, etc. That's all so no one will pay attention to the fact that the Republican state attorney general was fucking someone not her husband. Because the Republicans are all about family values and 9/11.

I just know 9/11 is in there somewhere. Someone call Bernard Kerek.

Speaking of the cops, somebody shot a Brinks guard and hijacked the other guard and the truck this morning in Oakland. The interesting thing is that a police spokesman said:

It's very alarming, very scary to think that a suspect would have the audacity and gall to pull something as heinous as this in broad daylight.

What?! This is Oakland! That guard makes the 114th murder this year in Oakland -- a city of 600,000.

The loser throws beer to the winners

Courtesy, BoingBoing, here's an LA Weekly article about people who gather on the beach at the US-Mexico border to play beach volleyball using the border fence as the net.

Awesome. It works because you can see through the fence, which is composed of a bunch of closely-set vertical girders. Wouldn't work, unfortunately, in Belfast or Gaza.

Today's debut fiction deals

Two new deals, one of them ("significant") for six figures. I'll give you a clue -- the six-figure deal is not the one for a short story collection.

Possibly posting

Really busy teaching a class at work yesterday and today -- but possibly easing up in the afternoon. Anyway:

A lot of good stuff on GalleyCat yesterday and today.

A big mall is opening in downtown SF today, and the local paper is having multiple orgasms, no doubt anticipating beaucoup advertising dollars far into the future. Speaking of the Chronicle, the "back page" was moved inside today, on E7. At first I thought it was because of advertising for the mall, but no -- it was because of advertising in general. They've sold the back page to advertisers instead of running Jon Carroll and Leah Garchik on it. Disgusting.

My snarky point is also sour grapes

This month I've been posting the first-novel deals reported by Publishers Marketplace, drawing attention to what seems like a trend in novels about young Asian women. The last entry was too much for a reader, someone I really like and respect, so I'll try to come clean about my intentions.

Partly I'm trying to make a point about what seems like a focus on the lives of exotic young women; my point, if I have one, is that I can't understand why the publishing industry seems to really like this subject. These aren't classified as chick lit books (which Publishers Marketplace actually classifies under Women's/Romance) but literary novels. The other main subject they seem to be buying novels about is adolescents and coming-of-age stories. The epitome of this trend -- though it shows no sign of abating -- is the now-discredited novel by Kaavya Viswanathan, about an over-achieving Indian-American teenager.

Admittedly, there's some sour grapes to my attitude too. I didn't sell my novel, which is not, unfortunately, about either of those now-hot subjects (though it has a coming-of-age subplot, but whatever). So boo hoo for me; my immaturity often gets the best of me, even though I'm too old for it. Apologies for any offense.

Where to get your superhero costume

Courtesy Metafilter, here's where to get your superhero costume: Spandexman.

This is funny because just yesterday Terry Gross was interviewing Ben Affleck on his movie Hollywoodland, about George Reeves, who played Superman. And Affleck was describing the costume that Reeves wore in the Superman films and TV shows -- rubber shorts and an embroidered wool sweater in which, he said, Reeves suffered greatly under the extra-hot Klieg lights of the day. I don't suppose Spandex would be that much cooler but at least it would look cooler.

Previously:Oh, super

Today's first-novel deals: Asian women still fascinating

As we see from the two most recent book deals for "debut fiction" -- i.e. someone's first novel or story collection -- adolescents and exotic young Asian women continue to fascinate. I don't have any trouble understanding the latter -- just check the back pages of your local free weekly newspaper and see how many of the ads for escorts are for Asians -- but I really do wonder who's reading all these coming-of-age books.

Adventures in the Constitution: we're actually arguing about habeas corpus now

In Salon today a civil rights activist talks about his fights to get Guantanamo prisoners the most basic civil rights. The concept of habeas corpus is so deep in our consciousness it's almost hard to explain, like telling a fish what water is. It's so basic to the simple rule of law that it's hard to imagine what it's like without it.

Simply put, it means you have to acknowledge whether you are detaining someone, and what the charges are. If there isn't a reason to hold them, you have to let them go.

But if you're a lawyer trying to defend some of the biggest scapegoats since the Red Guard put dunce hats on victims of the Cultural Revolution and marched them through the streets of Shanghai (Speaking of which -- how I wish I'd found this site when I was pissing my pants over the Electoral College two years ago. Unfortunately, the t-shirts are no longer for sale) you start to understand what it's like without this basic right to rely on.

Coming soon: someone has to strenuously explain the concept of "separation of powers" to Antonin Scalia.

Today's fake: undercover 24-year-old relives high school for book

A 24-year-old private school and Stanford graduate talked administrators of a public high school into letting him attend the school disguised as a teenage student, and wrote up his experience in a non-fiction book called High School Confidential. Now that the book is out his "classmates," now college age, allege the book is full of exaggerations and lies they deliberately fed him after reading him as a fake.

Added interesting bit: school administrators initially refused to admit that Claremont High in Southern California was the school the author attended (he fictionalized the name in the book, but sharp-eyed readers figured it out). It was only after an anonymous source in the school office tipped off the student paper that the whole story came out.

Oh, super

Recently I've been working on some short stories about superheroes. Clearly I'm on the back side of this meme, though. Just this year:

Deborah Eisenberg's short story collection Twilight of the Superheroes -- which, admittedly, is actually about Sep. 11 and not actually about superheroes

A new NBC series permiering tonight, Heroes, which is about superheroes

The b-grade reality show in SciFi Network, Who Wants to Be a Superhero?

A Call For Submissions I was forwarded a couple of weeks ago for a new anthology of stories about queer superheroes.

Except for the last example, all the people who developed those works started two or three years ago. In 2004 I was doing... let's see. I was changing jobs, and I was trying to get an agent for the novel I had just finished, the one about the really current cultural phenomenon (i.e. circa 1960), the Rat Pack. I am so on top of this zeitgeist thing.

Actually, I'm having a lot of fun with these new stories. I hope people aren't tired of superheroes in two years -- you think?

Keeping watch over their flocks by day and by night

The whole of a Sep. 21, 2006 Associated Press story, worth repeating:

Somebody's watching you
September 21, 2006 12:00 am
By STEPHANIE HOO and RAY ZABLOCKI
The Associated Press

You may think you're alone as you sit there on a park bench scratching your nose or adjusting your pantyhose. But increasingly in today's America, someone is watching you.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. In parking lots, your local mall, office lobbies, city streets.

Authorities say the cameras help catch criminals and stop terrorists. Civil libertarians say they are an invasion of privacy.

Either way, consider this: Personally, do hidden cameras make you feel safer or more on edge?

"It's taking away people's normal lives," says Fruilan Cruz, a janitor at the fortress-like New York Stock Exchange, where his every move is recorded by hidden cameras as he sweeps up each day. There are even cameras in the lampposts, he says -- "Everywhere."

Indeed, New York's financial district is awash with cameras as well as police vans and security barriers, which guard a city still on edge five years after 9/11, when terrorists brought down the World Trade Center.

It's not just New York. Chicago has spent about $5 million on a 2,000-camera system. In Washington D.C., Homeland Security officials plan to spend $9.8 million for cameras and sensors on a rail line near the Capitol.

And yet, many visitors here don't realize they're being monitored.

"What? I didn't know," says tourist Patricia Garrett, when shown the half-dozen cameras mounted on the side of the stock exchange. "That's kind of creepy."

Garrett, from Orlando, Fla., is a shift manager at an Arby's that has a security camera -- only it doesn't work. "We actually just got robbed a few days ago," she says.

Might cameras that do work stop crime? "Yeah," she says sarcastically. "If people ever check on them."

Most of the cameras are set up not by police but by private companies protecting their property. And these private cameras often videotape more than simply a building's entrance or lobby, civil libertarians warn. They may also cast their gaze outward to the public streets and sidewalks, to the park across the way, even into someone's apartment.

"Right now there are no restrictions in place that prevent a private individual and a private entity from filming from its own property what goes on in whatever is within sight," says Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "And given the technological advances, you could film for miles."

Further, there is a blurred line between private and police use, since police can request access to privately filmed footage. Police surveillance is subject to more limitations but can still be misused, she says, pointing out that some images from police cameras have already popped up the Internet.

"So how can we be reassured that they will never abuse the public trust on this issue? It has happened, and it seems they've done nothing to ensure accountability."

The New York Police Department didn't respond to requests for comment.

The privacy fears are overblown, says Robert McCrie, professor of security management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

"I don't believe the public has an expectation of privacy when they're in public areas," he says. "Certainly not when they're coming into places of public assembly, like theaters or arenas or bus stations," he adds. "I think that's simply something that we accept, and we're not giving up freedom by agreeing to such a measure."

He points out that some crimes are disappearing because of cameras and other police technology. Armed gangs no longer storm into banks, because they know technology will thwart and catch them, he says.

If anything, cameras will become standard in public places, he adds.

"Yes, it's a surveillance society, but it's got benefits for people."

Whatever your own point of view, the cameras are here to stay -- and they're becoming ever more stealthy and high-tech.

McCrie says cameras will eventually be able to track suspicious individuals -- for example, if they set off hidden bomb detectors while going through a subway turnstile -- with images immediately flashing up on a police officer's personal digital assistant.

"So when security or the police respond, they know exactly whom to follow," he says. "That's where this technology is going."

New York already has 1,000 cameras in the subways and 3,100 cameras monitoring city housing projects, and it is in the process of installing 500 more around the city at a cost of $9 million. Thousands more could be added if the city gets $81.5 million in federal grants to create a surveillance "ring of steel" modeled after the tight security measures in London's financial district.

It's a "Big Brother" scenario made real, for better or for worse.

The Surveillance Camera Players lead tours every Sunday pointing out the cameras that have popped up all over New York.

Stephanie Hoo is asap's business and technology writer. Ray Zablocki is an asap audiovisual reporter.

Katia the lit star

Saturday night with Catherine and Jenny to see Katia read at the New College Writers series. She read from her novel Crashing America and gave a talk about the process of writing it.

I was very gratified that Cath and Jenny, who are actors and performers, found Katia's discussion of her process so interesting. They were really rapt. Of course, Katia used to be a dancer, so they could relate.

Fake of the month: author defends book

It's phase two in the cycle of Fake Memoir Disease: "The author defends her book." (This follows phase one, "Shocking allegations of fraud," and preceeds phase three, "Publisher now says book was originally presented as a novel.")

Our contestant this month is Kathy O'Beirne, whose memoir "Don't Ever Tell" is about "childhood rape, physical abuse and incarceration in Ireland's notorious Magdalene laundries."

Aside from the publishing scandal, this is a classic example of the post-feminist dilemma of feeling guilty for doubting a tale of rape and abuse. In the last 25 years of the 20th Century we were taught always to give credence to these stories, because it is so difficult for the survivors (we were also taught not to use the word "victims") of rape and abuse to tell their stories at all -- and that it is very important for the stories to be told. And all that is as it should be. At the same time, we're not supposed to raise the possibility that any of these tales might be false, even though they occasionally are, because that risks returning to the bad old days when women weren't believed and were silenced, which made it possible for abuse and rape to continue. So when doubts are raised, it's almost transgressive to do so.

It makes for a very emotionally and politically charged atmosphere. Since Ireland is famously backward when it comes to 20th Century social movements, perhaps they may not have been through something like this on the scale of the Tawana Brawley scandal of the 1980s, in which these dynamics were played out on the main stage of the New York media.

If and when highly visible accusations of rape and abuse are disproved or admitted to be false, everybody loses. The supposed victim is utterly discredited; some of this discredit rubs off on other, legitimate survivors; the general populace doubts more. Even if 999 out of 1000 stories of rape are true, the other 1 muddies the water for all the rest.

This is why it's important for such memoirs to be true. It's not enough for them to just be good stories or have good entertainment value. They actually have to be true, and if some details have to be fictionalized to protect someone's privacy, then it should be clear which details those are. The analogy with photography is instructive. Nowadays you can fake anything with a camera and some computer software, and a few high-profile cases have made the whole medium of photojournalism, much less photography in general, suspect in the eyes of some. That's not what we want.

My weekend posts are weekendish

All week long I pretend to be a combination of BoingBoing, GalleyCat, Wonkette and several worse writers. But on weekends I don't have much energy for the kind of nervous work-avoidance web-surfing I do at my desk at the d.b.t.s.; all I have to report on is my rather mundane activities. Today is special because we're going to buy a new car. And the old one we're giving to a guy in exchange for painting our house. That's the way we do things around here.

Best thing of the weekend: Katia's reading and talk tonight at New College. See note above! It starts on the early side, at 6:30!

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- severed body part edition

A New Jersey doctor has been charged with stealing a severed hand from a medical school morgue and giving it to an exotic dancer. The stripper kept the hand in a jar of formaldehyde and dubbed it "Freddy."

The doctor's name was not Freddy. Some gratitude.

This next story could have been the headline of the month. You know what the greatest headline ever is? "Police find man's other leg." But the Oregonian blew it with the mild "Another Body Part Found On Shore Of Columbia."

A drunken Chinese tourist wanted to hug a panda, so he jumped into a zoo enclosure and was bitten on both legs by the six-year-old bear-like creature. So he tried to bite it in retaliation, "but its fur was too thick."

'Love Full of Life' opening

Finally, here are my photos from the preparations for Christine's opening last weekend in Joshua Tree.

I took another disposable camera's worth of pictures at the reception itself -- but I seem to have lost that camera. Fortunately, Rick was taking photos at the party.

Previously: Dateline Desert

Obscure superhero of the week: Hawkgirl

Hawkgirl (or Hawkwoman, in later, more P.C. times) was Hawkman's girlfriend (later, wife). Her lame-ass costume includes a huge head-dress/helmet that seems to owe more to a 70s Farah Fawcett-style hairdo than to any notion of functionality; what look like very large but vaguely shaped red earrings; a yellow bikini top; some extremely lame-looking (and badly proportioned) panty-briefs; and green leggings.

In the earliest incarnation everything, including the girl herself, looks a little smaller and easier to handle.

I never understood what the deal was with Hawkman and Hawkgirl/woman, whose only important superpower, that of flight, seemed to be somewhat limited by the sheer size of their wings, not to mention the headgear. With that rig on, it's a wonder they could fit through a doorway, much less fight evildoers, so most of their action seemed to be limited to plucking people by their collars from the street.

Adventures in the 21st century: dumped wife finds husband's new sex-changed MySpace page

After making my last entry I entered the word "fake" in Technorati, and man is that a great way of uncovering rants. My favorite was this page by a woman who says she hasn't heard from her husband in three years, only to find his new MySpace profile, post sex-change operation. (Note: may be offensive to people who generally support transsexuals, but it's just too funny and raw not to quote.)

then I put two and two together... he just recently was able to take a trip to Thailand and get a sex change operation. And I know he ain't working, so I was thinkin, wait a second he's been collecting money from the VA, and I bet it ain't single pay, cause there's no way in hell he'd be able to afford all that shit on single pay..... So yeah I fucking payed for his fake cunt, cuz he wanted to be a fucking woman. And while he's been living it up, I've been struggleling...... He's told me that the divorce papers are in the mail... Yeah right fucking asshole is just collecting more money while I suffer and have no food, and no gas......And collecting money that he wouldn't have because of me!!!!!!!!

I hope his fake cunt gets all cheesy and moldy like fucking rotted cottage cheese!!!!! Wanting to be a woman....Well hun you ain't no fucking woman, you may have gotten the surgery, but you will never be a fucking real woman like me!!!! You'll always be a lil confused boi with a fake twat!!!!!!!!! Then you fucking preach about being a reborn christian or whatever the fuck you fucking bible thumper ass, and u dont take the time to look in the mirror to see that your a fucking HYPOCRITE!!!!!!!!!

Today's fake: memoirist Kathy O'Beirne

Acording to GalleyCat, attacks are increasing on a memoir by one Kathy O'Beirne, "Don't Ever Tell," in which she said she had been enslaved in a Magdalene laundry and abused by Catholic clergy. Her family members are leading the charge, which makes sense in a way "because of the allegations she was making against our father," said O'Beirne's brother, allegations which included beatings and sending the author (or, perhaps we should say, the book's protagonist) to institutions.

So far the publisher is standing by the book, and why not -- the longer you can milk a controversy, the bigger the sales. Who cares if it's true or not? (I say that tongue in cheek -- actually I think it does really matter if memoirs are true.)

Fiction debuts continue to focus on children, exotics

Three new deals for "debut fiction" -- i.e. someone's first novel -- were reported on Publishers Marketplace:


It seems that publishers continue to be fascinated with adolescents, and the more exotic they are ("mixed heritage"?! What does that mean, a Windows user and a Mac user?) the better.

About the novel "Fresh" there is no info on PM, so I searched and found this:

The novel is set in a chicken packing factory in Glasgow. The main character is alarmed to learn that his psychotic elder brother has been released from gaol, especially since he owes him money.

A Scottish chicken packing factory -- promising setting! No, really. Much more interesting than one more third world village!

Photos from Christine's art opening

I still haven't digitized my photos from this weekend, but for those of you breathlessly awaiting visual confirmation of the event, Eric Hamburg has posted his.

If you're looking for the "World Famous Crochet Museum," it's in the bright green converted fotomat booth seen in the background in some photos.

Previously: Dateline: Desert

'Walking Fat Man' -- out of deals, out of money, out of chances

From time to time during 2005 I posted about this guy walking across the US from San Diego to New York. The desperate ex-Marine had ballooned to 410 pounds after being injured in an auto accident and was miserable, so he figured he could do the one thing he'd been good at back in the Marines: march. Walking 3000 miles might force him to lose weight, and it'd give him a chance to think over his life.

So he set out in April 2005 with almost no preparation, quickly got injured and wrecked his equipment, started over, dealt with more injuries... Eventually he got the book deal you'd expect, and someone jumped on and did a documentary of his crossing, which he completed in 13 months. During the trip he often wrote (in an online diary, natch) about how his wife back home was supporting him. He also often defended himself against detractors who, he said, sent him negative email (though we never saw any). Along the way he lost some weight -- but still wound up the trip weighing 320.

But now he is broke, nearing a final divorce, has blown through all the money he got on his book deal, and now the publisher is demanding the money back because no manuscript was ever delivered (Vaught said the ghostwriter prepared something unpublishable that "contained entire passages Vaught said weren't true and put words into his mouth he had never uttered or even thought"), and the documentary has no distributor. Since he lost less than half the weight he wanted to, and is now gaining it back, he seems to have wasted the whole point of the trip.

So he blew his book deal, he blew his chance at free publicity, he blew the whole purpose of the trip, he lost his family, and he is still fat. I feel sort of sorry for the guy, but my sympathy is limited. In America if you do one original thing and get a book deal, and then don't make the most of it, you really have a problem. Maybe he should go on that "Intervention" show.

Another first novel: Families sell

A deal put up on Publishers Marketplace late Friday has a first novel about two Mississippi farming families. (Judging by the plot description, all I can say is, the writing better be really, really good.)

But note the publisher: Algonquin Books. According to this Charlotte News and Observer article:

Hillary Jordan of Tivoli, N.Y., won this year's $25,000 (Bellwether) prize and a contract with Scribner publishing house for her unpublished novel, "Mudbound."

Scribner, eh? And yet the book deal as announced on Publishers Marketplace is a pre-empt, meaning Algonquin gobbled the book up before it was offered to other publishers. I'm not insinuating any funny business, I just wonder what happened.

Conservatives breed more

Conservatives have 19 percent more children than do liberal parents, a survey concludes. The actual numbers are: conservatives have 208 children for every 147 borne by liberals.

That's no surprise. Conservatives don't use abortion, and their "family friendly values" prize reproducing. It's better for the economy, they think, and basically they simply have nothing better to do, while liberals are more likely to be doing something interesting with their lives.

Besides, I'll be there are plenty of children being born to liberals single parents that aren't getting counted.

Doesn't worry me too much. Just compare American Roman Catholics in the mid 20th century with Catholics today. Sixty years ago they were incredibly influential and having babies like crazy. Today half of all Catholics -- and the proportion of Catholics has dropped, I'll bet, though I can't find stats at the moment -- marry non-Catholics. Catholic churches are closing, they're having incredible trouble finding people to go into the priesthood, and their influence (despite the strange fact that more than half of the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are Roman Catholics) has flagged.

So not only will many of the spawn of conservatives rebel against their suburban upbringings and become shaved-head vegan punk rockers, but Mormonism -- which spurs much childbearing, according to the story -- will someday soon become discredited, because -- let's face it -- even for a religion, it's pretty ridiculous.

Dateline: desert

I'm writing from a McDonald's in 29 Palms, Calif, the only place I could find wireless access in this town. $2.95 for two hours -- not too bad, considering I'd spend more than that on coffee in any cafe in SF that has free wireless.

Last night's art opening in Joshua Tree -- 10 miles west of here -- went perfectly. Since the reception was being held in the open sandy courtyard between two converted garages that were the gallery space, it was important that the wind die down, and it did, so that the evening was perfectly cool and peaceful. There was a great crowd there, me and a bunch of other friends of the artist tended bar, and in general it was a great evening.

Pictures will be up by Monday evening. (I forgot my digital camera and have to have the instant camera pix converted.) Watch this space.

This morning Christine treated us all for brunch, and I'm about to go out to the Twentynine Palms Airport to watch Philip's cousin Rick take a birthday ride in a glider. Later there is supposed to be some hiking.

It really is just perfect weather down here. Perhaps a little cooler than mid-September usually is -- just right.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- 'Republicans, the other white meat' edition

Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio has agreed to plead guilty to several federal charges in this year's Ambramoff-and-the horse-you-rode-in-on lobyying scandal. Ney withdrew from his congressional race earlier and the six-term congressman's 18th district is now rated a toss-up -- just one reason the Republicans are sweating this year.

Former prosecutor Nancy Grace, now a TV personality, badgered a guest on national television early this week. The 21-year-old guest, whose son's kidnappingg, was slow to respond to Grace's increasingly vicious line of questioning which implied that she had something to do with the boy's disappearance, and after the taping was over, killed herself. Then Grace aired the interview anyway.

Grace is refusing to apologize. Her broadcast has garnered plenty of controversy.

Two pork companies in Oklahoma have agreed to pay $445,000 in federal fines for violating environmental laws. Quoting from the story: "The complaints filed against the companies accused them of allowing lagoons containing pig manure and urine and other waste products to leak into ground water at five Oklahoma farms. Seaboard also is accused of allowing the release of excess amounts of ammonia -- considered a hazardous substance -- from a central Oklahoma farm."

Somehow I have the feeling that the $445,000 is a drop in the bucket to the pork producers.

Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Pope?

Interesting phraseology on the signs in a Pakistani demonstration against the Pope for his ill-advised quoting of a 14th century Byzantine emperor's characterizations of Islam.

A large banner addressed to "Mr. Pope" was followed by a sign reading JIHAD IS HUMP OF ISLAM. Hmm, let me think about that for a while.

Neither famous, nor good, nor tough

Alexander Chee, whom I knew when he lived in SF in the 90s and a poem of whose I published in Frighten the Horses, is now a gainfully employed novelist and creative writing teacher at real colleges. He wrote in his blog a couple days ago about his early efforts at writing and working at magazines and how he came to take himself seriously enough to apply to MFA programs. Along the way he drops some names of people who are now famous, or at least terrific writers -- Dale Peck, K.M. Soehnlein, Deborah Eisenberg. (I find these names impressive; I guess if you live in New York and are involved with the literary scene there you get to know people who are more famous than you do in San Francisco. The writers I know here are not as famous; this is more a measure of my own lack of success than of the relative importance of San Francisco writers. In any case, I would not dream of throwing around the names of the people I know, but perhaps if they were more famous, I might not be so scrupulous.) But anyway, the point is not that he knows these famous people nor that he feels no compunction about mentioning them, or even that he is a published novelist and successful teacher and can speak authoritatively about both, but that in his early days he seems not to have been as afraid as I was.

There was a very, very brief moment when I considered going to a writing program. I had graduated from the Univ. of Texas with a degree in film criticism and was trying to figure out how to escape from Austin, which I knew even as a 21-year-old to be a cultural sinkhole. (It was ten years before Richard Linklater made the film Slackers, but the fuck-it-all-let's-just-get-stoned Austin ethos was just as, if not more, pervasive.) I was a fan of the Beat writers -- what young American would-be writer isn't? -- and had heard of the newly formed writing program at Naropa University in Boulder, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I believe I even got their catalog, but never got very close to deciding that going to a writing program would be something I was actually entitled to do.

For decades now I've been trying to capture in writing the self-abnegating attitude I had then about myself and my talent -- an attitude I still have, since it's hard for me even to write the phrase "my talent" without being embarrassed and looking for another, less pretentious word. I was convinced that to even apply for a special program for writers would be to pretend I was more special than I knew myself to be. And this was less about my writing or my creativity than it was about my personhood. I just didn't think I deserved to go to a writing program; no one was urging me to, and I could not, as the pop-pyschology phrase goes, "give myself permission" to do it.

But I think the word "entitled" is also relevant, in the sense that some people whom we all know behave with what we call "a sense of entitlement" -- they feel they somehow deserve special consideration everywhere they go, and they never feel as if they are automatically disqualified from doing anything. By contrast, my view of myself when I was in my 20s was the exact opposite: I did not think I was entitled to do anything out of the ordinary.

I now realize this is just internalized self-hatred. It was if I were a one-person minority group whom society needed to repress, and had figured out a way to make me do it to myself so it wouldn't have to bother. My view of myself as undeserving became self-fulfilling. It took me about twenty years longer than Chee or his cohort -- the thousands of graduates of writing programs who were strangely lacking in the compunctions I felt -- to take my writing seriously.

During those years I distracted myself with a great many things, pouring my creative energy into performance art, theater and music -- realms I knew I would never be particularly good or successful at, but which I pursued because they were fun to do. And I knew at the time that those things would be a dead end, and they were. That's twenty years I can never get back.

Finally I found a medium that would permit me to, at least, develop a little craft; so I did that for years. Finally I figured out a way to write straight fiction; it took me until I was 47 to finish a first novel; it didn't sell. Now I'm 50; it'll take me another year to finish my second novel, and even if that sells... You get the point. I'm like a pitcher who didn't have the courage to even try out for a minor league team until his early 30s -- no matter how talented he may originally have been, his career prospects are extremely limited.

Despite knowing that I will probably never have time to become a great writer,or even to have a successful career as one, I have to keep trying. Because finally I have faith that it is what I should be doing. I'm sorry it took me twenty extra years to get to this point; if I had followed my instincts and gone to Naropa or to New York in 1979, I would have become a better writer sooner. This faith I finally have in my writing basically boils down to a hope that my self-hatred did not wipe everything out -- that somewhere inside me, underneath the layers of repression and cliche and cultural garbage there is at least one original thing I might say. And that I might still have time to uncover it.

What we're fascinated with: Booker shortlist edition

Nominees (the "shortlist") for the U.K.'s Booker Prize have been announced:

Sarah Waters, THE NIGHT WATCH
Kiran Desai, THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS
Kate Grenville, THE SECRET RIVER
M J Hyland, CARRY ME DOWN
Hisham Matar, IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN
Edward St Aubyn, MOTHER'S MILK

(Courtesy GalleyCat)

Of the six novels:

• Three are concerned primarily with family life.
• Two of those are about pre-teens growing up poor -- one in Ireland, the other in India.
• Four are set in the past (18th century to the 1980s); two are set in the present.
• Four are by women, two by men; in each, the main character is of the author's gender.
• One, Hisham Matar's "In the Country of Men," is a first novel.

Columbian women on sex strike

Women in the violence-torn Columbian city of Pereira have declared a sex strike to get the men to stop killing each other.

Today's book deal: somebody just got rich

Today's deal for debut fiction -- i.e. someone's first published novel -- is a "major deal," which according to the Publishers Marketplace classifications, means $500,000 and up.

And who is author Julie Buxbaum? Google search; Friendster page. A Harvard law grad who is, according to a piece she just published in their alumni mag, "intentionally unemployed." And from the scale of the book deal she just got, permanently so. That makes her prostestations of poverty pretty thin:

"It must be nice to have a trust fund," they say in response, or "I wouldn't mind having a boyfriend willing to support me." I correct them. No trust fund. Boyfriend yes, but I still pay half the rent, the utilities, the bills, bills, bills. I am eating my nest egg. It tastes bittersweet. I tell them I am using this time off to not only write, but to supplement my education, to read all of the classics I missed the first time around.

Now she'll have lots of time to read, isn't that nice? I only hope she doesn't end up like that other Harvard overnight success.

Incoming! unpublish(ed|able) ms. edition

A "technology entrepreneur" has created a $100,000 prize for the best unpublished, unagented novel manuscript, the NYT reports. The submissions web site (of course there's a website) will accept "up to 50,000 manuscripts," charging an entry fee of $85 each.

Whoa, that's 4.25 million dollars!! Now that's what I call a technology entrepreneur.

There will be a first, a second and a third prize, plus seven honorable mention prizes. I wonder what the other 49,990 losers of the putative "Sobol Prize" will be offered -- editing services, perhaps? Expensive writing workshops? Software that purports to write your novel for you?

The possibilities are endless, because you can never go broke underestimating the misplaced hope of bad writers. In any case, there's obviously at least one real winner here -- the (nota bene) for-profit corporation Mr. Sobol has created to run the whole thing.

Fake of the month: More details on LonelyGirl

Virginia Heffernan of the NY Times, who did as much as anyone to publicize and stoke the LonelyGirl15 hype, publishes a detailed story on Jessica Rose -- if that really is her name -- including the pathetic detail that once the hoax began to unravel, one of the men behind the hoax "offered his photographs of Ms. Rose as proof of his involvement in the Lonelygirl15 videos."

Because, you know, that's probably the most successful thing he'll ever do. That would be "Grant Steinfeld, a software engineer in San Francisco":

And he's got a blog, though it is limited entirely to photographs of swimmers, none of which seem to be J. Rose.

The other bizarre detail is that one of the other men -- of course you knew it had to be middle-aged* men behind the whole thing, not a teenage girl or any females whatsoever -- is supposedly named Ramesh Flinders, which sounds like nothing so much as one of those names in my GMail spambox.

* Update: The LA Times story has all the men as being in their mid-twenties -- except Steinfeld, whom it doesn't mention at all, despite having more details than the NYT story.

What is reality: Cirque du Bangalore edition

Tonight in Los Angeles there will be a "Pitch Slam" in which people will be given 90 seconds each to pitch their idea for a reality show to a panel of several producers.

The mind boggles. I so wish I could be there for that.

Speaking of entertainment, I was entranced by a posting on the Bangalore Metroblog about child street performers with an awesome photo of a tightrope walker who looks about 9 years old. This brings to mind a version of the old joke:

Onlooker: Hey kid, you're being exploited! Why don't you go to school?
Performer: What, and leave show business?

Lit up: twin blowers edition

Twelve thousand people signed up to read a "novella" on their phones. (r.r.; use dwan8@dodgeit.com/dwandwan or go to bugmenot.com for another userid/pwd.) The story doesn't say how long the tale is, only that each episode is no more than 160 characters long -- to fit into the maximum length of a text message.

The Age (Australia) has a profile of J.G. Ballard, whose new novel Kingdom Come has just been released.

Also in The Age: Sylvia Kristel, the Dutch model who became a 70s porn icon after she starred in Emmanuelle, has published a memoir. Of her notoriety, she is quoted as saying: "It was all very agreeable while it lasted."

Today's fake: LonelyGirl15

The specter of LonelyGirl15, a vlogger whose videos of her so-called life garnered a larger viewing audience than many network TV shows, has been revealed as a fake character created by a Hollywood team. All the facts aren't in yet -- no doubt the shadowy figures behind the LG edifice will dribble them out slowly to sustain fan interest -- but her fake status is no longer at issue.

Update: LonelyGirl actress is identified.

I feel securer: Arabic PhD barred from returning to job in SF

An Egyptian-born San Francisco State University professor left the U.S. to renew his visa. Instead of renewing it, a consular official cancelled the visa, without which the PhD can't return to his job or his family in San Francisco. No explanation given.

It might have something to do with the fact that his name is Mohammad Ramadan Hassan Salama. It brings to mind that Gary Larson cartoon -- now being ripped off by a Comcast TV commercial -- in which one deer is speaking to another deer which has a large target painted across his rump, saying "Bummer of a birthmark, Hal."

Right wing talking points, 9/11/06 version

Bush, Rumsfield -- Bin Laden:Hitler as Saddam Hussein:Tojo. I Slammo Facists. Nazis, nazis, fascists, "Democrat" as an adjective.

Bush, Cheney -- What are WMDs? Oh, they're in Iran now. We went into Iraq because of the destabilizing threat S.H. represented. Now, Iraq is so much more stable. Afghanistan too.

Bush -- Democracy good. Arabs who vote are good. Never mind they vote for Moslem Brotherhood (Egypt), Hezbollah (Palestine), extremists (Iraq). Look how stable Asia turned out (Korea, Japan, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam).

Bush: little white girls are safer!

This is what really bugs me about this country -- that people feel they have to stage everything. How much time did this girl's relatives spend dolling her up like that? Is she on her way to First Communion or what?? She has RIBBONS ON HER ANKLES.

What fucking FANTASY is this picture about??? A police state where cute, immaculate little white girls are protected by big, burly policemen while posing in front of (what I'm guessing is) a gigantic phallus, I mean flagpole.

Somewhere, right now, someone is masturbating to this picture.

Strange usage of the week

Headline:

Plane Diverted, Train Station Closed After Brief Terror Scares

"Terror scares"... a noun phrase, evidently. Think about this... It's sort of like:
'Roller coasters causing more excitement thrills.'
or:
'Hog farms raise stink disgust'

Winner, best nineeleven tribute graphic

Thoughts of terror turn to frozen treats, on New York's metroblog.

Americans still fascinated with exotic Asian girls

From the Publishers Marketplace rundown of last week's book deals, these were the only two books listed in debut fiction:

Malaysian writer and recent Michigan MFA grad Preeta Samarasan's EVENING IS THE WHOLE DAY, set in post-colonial Malaysia, the story of an upper-class Malaysian-Indian family, with a mystery at its heart (and winner of two prizes at Michigan, to Anjali Singh at Houghton Mifflin, in a pre-empt, for publication in spring 2008, by Ayesha Pande at Lyons & Pande (NA).

Wendy Lee's HAPPY FAMILY, about the complicated relationship between a young woman from China and the well-to-do New York couple who hire her as the nanny to their adopted Chinese daughter, to Jamison Stoltz at Black Cat, by Shana Kelly at William Morris Agency (NA).

In other words:

Also, if you click on the graphic to the upper right, you'll see all the deals for the month -- a new feature of this blog! -- and that the one deal signed today was for a book about a heteronormative family facing -- what else -- terror.

SFO car rental facility: safe from terrorists

Our 5-speed Volvo will be in the shop starting tomorrow, so Cris and I had to rent an car for the week. We went down to SFO, which was more convenient than getting a car downtown, for example. While we were in the car rental facility -- which is essentially a multistory parking garage -- trying to put the seats and the mirrors at the correct angle, two young men walked by. Presumably they were National Guardsmen, as they were wearing desert camoflage and carrying automatic weapons. They walked by not casually as they sometimes do in the airport terminal, but carefully, with their weapons at the ready, as if they were actually on patrol rather than thinking about their next coffee break.

Meanwhile we were wrestling with the various aspects of the little compact we had rented -- the head restraints seemed designed for giant lizards -- cursing and heaving and grunting as if we were fighting the car or fucking it. And these young men crept by with automatic weapons. Such is our world now.

Back to life

The other night I had something bad at a restaurant and got a minor case of food poisoning. It was unpleasant but relatively brief -- relative to that time a couple years ago at the FUCKING Millienium Hilton in New York where I got sick off the room service food and was sick for more than a week! FUCK!

Where was I? Oh yeah, so I was sick Thursday night and Friday I was really wiped out. By this morning I was much better, and went to the ballgame with a guy from work. Good game, too!

In other news: next week I'm going down to the desert for Christine's art opening. It hit me like a flash today that I am going to have to wear a suit to the event. I'm glad I realized it now while I can do something about it.

Millienium Hilton, food poisoning

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Up All Night edition

I was up sick half the night and am only starting to get back on my feet -- though that hasn't kept me from putting in a day of work down here at the the d.b.t.s..

So all I have for you is one thing, but it's juicy. A British woman was convicted today of holding her brother's former wife as a naked house slave for two years, beating her, refusing food, and making her clean naked. Not a sex thing, it seems -- just abuse. The 36-year-old perpetrator -- whose husband was charged as an accomplice -- tried to kill herself with a drug overdose the day the trial started, but did not succeed; indeed, the judge made her come to court to hear the guilty verdict.

Obscure superhero of the week: Katana

Katana seems to be a 1980s attempt by Americans to create a Japanese comic book character, in retrospect a dubious coals-to-Newcastle enterprise. According to the Wikipedia page, her character was part of a group recruited by Batman during a time when he had quit the Justice League, with which he is traditionally associated -- thus the name of the new group, the Outsiders.

Katana's costume, which seems to take its inspiration from the WWII-era Japanese battle flag (now known as the Japanese naval ensign), emphasizes her right tit. If you look carefully she seems to retain her left tit, so it's not some amazon thing, just a strange design choice. In another version, her costume is modeled after that of a traditional samauri warrior, with the color yellow unfortunately predominating.

If you read the fine print you see that Katana (which means what?) has no actual super (or "metahuman") powers but has a magic sword. Hmm, that would come in handy.

Stacey Levine on KCRW

For those of you in the Los Angeles area, or who want to listen on the internet, Stacey Levine will appear on KRCW radio's Bookworm program to talk about her book Frances Johnson. I've been waving the flag for this book for a while now -- cool and ironic without one bit of hipsterism, the story is set in an eerie small town and is told in odd, beguiling language. I interviewed Levine earlier this year.

Women scientists pissed at conference burlesque

Scientists meeting for a climate conference in Australia were agog when the organizers tried to liven up a dinner event with a surprise strip show in which "delirious male scientists" popped the balloons that covered one performer. An attendee said:

This is supposed to be a gathering of scientists at a government-sponsored event in an already male dominated industry where it is hard enough for a woman to make inroads ... If this is the Australian Government and male-dominated scientific community's idea of conference entertainment, God help us all.

This is interesting in light of the last post, in which Violet Blue writes of another involuntary situation. Whereas airport searches are not optional, seeing them as erotic, in order to reframe the dynamics and reclaim the situation, is optional; it is, perhaps, the best you can do with a situation like that.

By another measure, the big dinner at that conference that your department paid some hard-won grant money for you to attend is not really optional either, except in the technical sense. The dinner is one of the conference events that you go for, in order to socialize with others in your field. Then as you're in the middle of it, a bunch of entertainment comes along that is not part of the deal at all. Yes, you can walk out, and some people did.

At least there weren't clowns.

Would you take that off, please?

Violet Blue yesterday posted one of the greatest things I've ever seen, an erotic take on airport security checkpoints:

I take off my earrings, my necklace, deliberately placing the girlish silver with my glasses. I'm usually still smiling now, because it's time to take off my belt. I know what's going to happen. I unbuckle the metal and leather, sliding the belt through its loops around my waist, which serves to loosen my pants and move the denim to and fro as I work the belt free. The top straps of my g-string always peek out; I can't help this. I unzip my hoodie and peel it off, revealing the light cotton tank top I always wear. And even though it makes no sense, I always take off my stripey arm warmers, because if I don't, they *make me* take them off. ...

They all watch. Then I wait for their commands, and their approval. I do what they say, unconditionally, and this is an unspoken agreement between me and the men.

V.B. mentions that, "as a post-9/11 editor" of erotica collections, she gets a lot of stories eroticizing the airport scene.

Biggest mess of the week

A lady who lives in the desert community of Joshua Tree left her cat at home, leaving a door open to the garage so the cat could come and go. When she came home the next day, two pit bulls had jumped a fence, entered the house, eaten the cat, found a big bag of dog food and torn that open and spread it all over the house, pissed everywhere, and generally tore the place up. Somehow the door had closed behind them so the dogs were in there all night.

The dogs were taken to an animal shelter; their stupid owner, if they had one, failed to come forward so the dogs were euthanized. The woman is so shaken up by the whole thing that she's afraid to live in the house anymore. All in all, a general debacle.

No laboring day

I did nothing at all, except a little laundry and other minor housework, and read Stephen Elliott's book "My Girlfriend Comes To the City and Beats Me Up," which I proposed to review for Salon. I don't know if they will agree to have me review it, but they should, since their Ed. In Chief blurbed it.

To concentrate enough to read the book, I took a ride on BART. It's a short book so a trip out to Pittsburg and back was sufficient; in fact, I finished it before the train came back across the bay. You might be wondering why I got on BART to read a book. Because there are no distractions, the seats are comfortable, and the lighting is sufficient. Yes, you have to pay money for a ticket, but you have to pay for a coffee to sit and read in a cafe, too.

I got out at Powell St. and stood blinking in the windy sun; I was a little disoriented, partly because I'd just read an entire (though admittedly short) book, and that attitude combined with my backpack made me look like a tourist. Immediately some tout picked me out and started trying to sell me something. I snarled over my shoulder "Take a hike!" whereupon he said something a little outraged in reply, but I couldn't hear him because I was wearing earplugs. Finally I decided to get a coffee, so I went across the street to the Coffee Bean place next to the Four Seasons Hotel. They have a lot of tables out on the sidewalk and the weather was just pleasant enough to sit there, even at 4:30 on a windy late summer day.

Victimizing the rich and powerful

A British artist surreptitiously replaced copies of Paris Hilton's debut CD in British stores with a CD containing his own remixes of the celebrity's music, complete with altered covers with track names like Why Am I Famous? and What Have I Done? but using the original barcode so people would buy the doctored CDs without alarms going off. The industrious artist, one Banksy, got his works into 48 different stores.

The best part? No one complained. Perhaps they overestimated P.H. and thought she was actually smart and ironic enough to put out a CD with tracks entitled What Am I For?

Today's fake: Blond Alexis

I was stunned to see this illustration on the main St. Paul Pioneer Press website, about some fake blond "Alexis" who is supposedly taking "the trendsetter role for Twin Cities women."

WTF! The nerve!

Everyone knows there is only one Twin Cities Alexis -- Girl Friday. She is everywhere in that town -- towns! And a great, funny writer. And really sexy.

Never will I settle for some blond person who looks like she ripped off her look from Xeni Jardin. Girl Friday only!

Lede of the week

From a story about the opening of dove hunting season in San Bernardino County in southern California, from the Desert Trail:

To doves in the Morongo Basin, if you are alive to read this you might not be
next week.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- bridge closing edition

As everyone in the Bay Area knows, the Bay Bridge will be fucking closed all weekend -- until 5 a.m. Tuesday! Man, is that ever going to put a crimp in my plans. I was going to be ALL OVER the East Bay this weekend.

Biggest losers? The people who planned three weddings on Treasure Island on Saturday. Caltrans agreed to let them run a bus back and forth from SF -- otherwise that would be one long-ass wedding party.

That driver who mowed down more than a dozen people in San Francisco and a nearby town earlier this week? Why, some are saying he was mentally unstable. You don't say!

In southern California, two tweakers held a man prisoner for three days in military housing on the Twentynine Palms Marine Base. None involved were in the military; the house was assigned to a Marine who was out of town -- as in Iraq.

Today's superhero of the week is Matter-Eater Lad (right), a short-lived member of the Legion of Super Heroes. He ate his way out of trouble! And people say we have an obesity problem today. Clearly they never saw Bouncing Boy.