Dept. of Words of one syllable

Flat prose of the month goes to this headline in the Iowa City Press-Citizen:

Man uncovers possible hoax
Book not what it seems to be

I am on the edge of my fucking seat after reading that headline.

The story (courtesy GalleyCat) concerns an allegedly non-fiction book entitled "An Incomplete History of the Art of the Funerary Violin" which is described as being about "the funerary violin and the Great Funerary Purges that almost wiped it out." An Iowa City bookstore employee is being credited with skepticism over the existence of anything called a funerary violin. Apparently someone concocted an elaborate website defending the book and saying there is too such a thing, but the website itself is also a hoax.

This fails to excite me on the level of the Frey and LeRoy hoaxes. Could it be that the book's publisher, Overlook Press, simply mistakenly classified a novel as non-fiction?

In other exciting news:

Although San Jose has gargantuan potential for blossoming into a serious world-class city, the majority of its citizens couldn't care less.

That's from San Jose's own alt.weekly. Pretty bad when you have to harsh your own town like that: "a suburban wasteland forever in search of a city." Sounds like someone needs to get laid.

funerary violin, literary hoaxes, Iowa City, San Jose, Gary Singh

Halloween haters

Who else hates Halloween?

• The French
• The British
• Fundies (unless they evangelize the trick-or-treaters)
• New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast
• This anti-globalization activist ("Hershey's Kisses. Nestle's Crunch bars. M&Ms. It's not that I don't like their taste. No, the problem is that it is no exaggeration to say that forced child labor went into the making of much of these chocolates. Illegal child labor is a major problem on the West African cocoa farms from which companies like Hershey, Nestle and M&M Mars buy their cocoa beans.")

hates Halloween, anti-Halloween

Deals: domestic fiction still rules

Let's catch up on the deals for "debut fiction" as reported by Publishers Marketplace.

Click the image above for a look at all the deals for October, 2006.

Total number of deals for "debut fiction": 18.
Books with a domestic setting: 7.
Books with a non-US setting: 5.
Books about illicit love affairs: 4.
Books with an adolescent protagonist: 3.
Books with twenty-something protangonists: 3.

books, book deals

Street Patrol in the Castro, early 90s

In the early 90s I was a member of Queer Nation, an activist organization which organized each chapter in small grops called focus groups. These were formed ad hoc around slices of identity or around a particular issue or function, and they tended to be named with humorous acronyms. The women's group was called LABIA, which stood, I think, for Lesbians And Bisexuals In Action; a group meant to welcome new members to QN was called WINQ, Welcoming In New Queers. Groups were also formed for specific purposes; it was on this date 16 years ago that GHOST, or Grand Homosexual Outrage against Sickening Televangelists, led a protest against televangelist Larry Lea, who had vowed to "exorcise the demons" from San Francisco on Halloween night. (Read more news articles about the Larry Lea protest.)

After a series of gay bashings in the Castro, someone formed a Guardian Angels-like safety patrol called DORIS SQUASH which was later renamed simply the Street Patrol. (A history of the Street Patrol is on the GLBT History website; I also published an article in Frighten the Horses in Spring 1991 by Street Patrol "queen" Ellen Twiname.)

One of the big weekends of the year for the Street Patrol was Halloween, when hundreds of thousands of revelers pack a few blocks in the Castro District for a disorganized street party. Due to the event's fame, people come from all over the region to gawk at costumed revelers; people also come from all over to bash gay people. Also, the later it gets, the drunker the crowd gets. So there's a large police presence, but since the police and the gay community have always had a distrustful relationship, the police prefer to stay on the edges. This meant that the only people doing security inside the event itself were the Street Patrol.

I was in the Street Patrol from fall 1990 until sometime in late 1992 or early 1993, and this was a way for me to attend Castro Halloween without having to dress in costume (though the SP did have a uniform of sorts: a Street Patrol t-shirt, usually worn with a leather jacket, and a fuscia beret). About a dozen of us marched two-by-two through the party, and especially around the edges where bashers might target a lone pedestrian, from about 9 pm until the last stragglers had departed -- way after 3 a.m. It was crowded, exciting, exhausting and, as it got later and later and the number of drunks grew larger and drunker, a pain in the ass.

I remember one exciting moment when we did apprehend a psychopath who was brandishing what turned out to be a screwdriver. But to tell you the truth, most of the protecting we did was protecting the drunks from themselves or each other. They would get in stupid fights -- it wasn't gay-bashing so much as two or three drunken queers jabbing at each other -- and we would break the fights up. I also like to think that our presence discouraged some gay bashing.

In 1991 the CBS show 48 Hours sent a camera crew along with us, and we were in a show on neighborhood safety in spring 1992.

Street Patrol, Queer Nation, Castro District, Halloween

Let's hear it from the anti-Halloween forces

Since I stopped walking the Castro on Halloween with the Street Patrol -- maybe I'll write about that this week -- I have Not Done Halloween. You know what I hate about Halloween parties? People in costume getting in your face and demanding you guess who they are. Dude, I have no fucking idea! You're in a fucking mask! Why don't you tell me who you are?

Somebody else is unamused by the holiday (thanks, Anna!).

And here comes Rep. Duncan Hunter, whose big claim to fame (of which is has none) is that he is chair of the House Armed Services Committee, announced today he shall run for President. Just like that last fellow -- dude, I have no fucking idea who you are, now go have another beer!

Duncan Hunter, Halloween

Don't mess with them

Flea on a maddening book about girls in sports.

Violet Blue on her good name.

BoingBoing all over a story about a guy who produces fake boarding passes.

Scientologists invade UK

From a piece, alternately funny and scary, in the Guardian:

Dorothy asked me to demonstrate to other students what I had learned using wooden blocks and Plasticine. Once she asked me to explain the "communication cycle" to Sam, a nine-year-old boy who sat alone at the back of the classroom. Instead I showed Sam how to make a monster out of the playdough. Dorothy intervened.

Dorothy also asked me to practice auditing with a teddy bear, and watched as I asked the bear if it could recall an experience that made it happy.

Scientology

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- water boarding edition

Cheney says water-boarding "is a no-brainer for me" if doing it means saving lives. The White House said he wasn't really talking about water boarding. In fact, the exchange on a talk radio show was:

"Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" (the talk show host) asked.

"Well, it's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said. "But for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president for torture. We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in."

Oh -- right -- "a dunk in water." Probably what Cheney was thinking about was those Dunk The Geek tanks at fundraising picnics, right?

In Orange County, eleven people are being charged with voter registration fraud after they turned in registration forms marked Republican -- though the people signing up were under the impression they were registering as Democrats! The case happened in the same congressional district where a Vietnamese-American candidate's campaign is being investigated for sending a letter to 14,000 Latino households falsely saying that it is a crime for immigrants to vote. Seems like somebody down there has been reading too many political thrillers and Nixonite memoirs.

In New York, a woman went to a shrink's office on a job interview and was groped "in a menacing and lustful manner." The shrink is the author of a book titled "How to Pick the Right People."

How much you want to bet the guy's lawyer will announce his client has just entered rehab?

Dreams die hard

Here is a posting from an anonymous blog, quoted in its entirety. I won't even list the URL, but -- pardon my emphasis:

New job!

Hey, just a quick post to update everyone. Just got a part-time job at Barnes & Noble, which I start on Monday. The pay is not the best, but I get health insurance after 60 days, yay! (This will be the first time I've had health insurance since graduating from college two and half years ago.) I'm definitely excited to not be in an office and dealing with computers for a while.

Also have a new tutoring student who I'll be helping study for a test to get into a private middle school. Should be fun.

Screenwriting expo was fantastic this weekend! I'll be posting about that pretty soon.

A guy who graduated from college two and a half years ago, and the best thing he can do is get a part time job at B&N for the insurance; meanwhile he spent at least $180 for a pass to Screenwriting Expo. At California's minimum wage of $7.25, that works out to a little less than 25 hours of shelving books and running the cash register -- say, four shifts, and probably a week's work if he's a part-timer. So he just spent a quarter of his monthly income on Screenwriter Expo.

I think anybody who saw the film Adaptation with its scene in the Master Screenwriter class led by a fat blowhard understands something of the pathetic situation -- or nature -- of the nation's tens of thousands of would-be screenwriters. Since I'm an unpublished novelist -- and in fact I worked for a few months at Borders a while back -- I am hardly in a position to mock. Still, I did wait until I had a real job again before paying to attend a writers conference. Maybe it's the unrealistic people who become -- or want to become -- screenwriters.

Another American movie

I went to see Little Miss Sunshine.

It's pretty funny and the actors are fun to watch, especially Steve Carell from "The Office" in the role of a gay, suicidal literature professor plopped down in a cutely disfunctional nuclear family. And it's always fun to watch Alan Arkin, an old pro. There are several good laughs, and it's competently directed by a pair of first-timers. And that's impressive, because filming slapstick well is not that easy.

The script is the problem. None of the characters go much beyond a stereotype -- the tightly wound, repressive suburban dad, the foul-mouthed grandpa, the sullen teenager; they're just amped up a bit (grandpa snorts heroin, the teenager reads only Nietzsche and has taken a vow of silence). Everyone emotes on cue and fulfills their role, but they almost never do anything unexpected; they don't really live. The mother figure (can't even remember her character's name, which says something) is the least neurotic, but at moments in her life when she should be torn apart, she merely exhibits stock sadness or anger.

I blame this on the script rather than the actors, because the script demands that the story keep plunging ahead no matter what; it doesn't really give the characters time and space to break out of their molds. The teenager has a meltdown, but is back on the bus in precisely 90 seconds. When they do do something strange or out of the ordinary, it's merely a function of the script, with the purpose of providing entertainment or making the characters consciously zany. Most big gags are telegraphed in advance -- spoiler coming here -- when Grandpa dies on the big car trip and they can't take the time to process hospital paperwork, the family steals the body from the hospital room; I could see that coming a couple of minutes in advance. It's the way the actors get the body out of the room and back into their vehicle that is the real entertaining part.

But it's still distinguished from a run-of-the-mill American movie by not having any guns, car chases or explosions. These days that's saying something. So go see it for a few laughs, have low expectations and you'll probably enjoy it.

Little Miss Sunshine, movies, Steve Carell

PK of the day

A San Diego man who became "reviled" for opposing a hilltop cross died of liver cancer yesterday. He was a Lutheran pastor's son who "lost his religion" and endured "years of death threats, hate mail and legal wrangling" for his opposition to the Christian display.

I fought in Vietnam and I thought I fought to maintain freedom and yet the cross savers in this city would have us believe all of the veterans' sacrifices are in vain, that the Constitution is something to be spit on... The real message is equal treatment under the law, and religious neutrality. That's the purpose of why I did it. It has nothing to do with me being an atheist. The fact is, the Constitution calls for no preference and that's why every judge ruled for me.

Paulson, atheists, PKs, First Amendment

That's a Kemah lodge you won

A former Houston Rockets basketball player with a tongue-twisting name -- Hakeem Olajuwon -- has purchased a historic mansion on Clear Lake southeast of Houston. Satellite view of the mansion.

So, here's what's funny. The man's last name is pronounced oh - LIE - ju - won. It provided the excuse, about 20 years ago, for a long shaggy-dog joke about someone winning a fishing lodge, either in a glamorous Florida location or in the decidedly downwardly mobile town of Kemah, located on Galveston Bay at the mouth of Clear Creek. The joke ends with the prize winner being told which prize he had won -- not the Florida lodge: "That's a Kemah lodge you won." Ha ha! It's only funny because it sounds like the basketball player's name.

I lived in the area for five years as a teenager. The West mansion is not actually in Kemah, but is a few miles away. Close enough to revive the joke, though.

The strange thing is that Kemah is no longer a slum, but is now the location of a glamorous casino and a touristic "boardwalk" amusement park.

Countdown to tomorrow: 'Embattled' GOP congressman plays fag card

Nothing scares 'em in the heartland like using the words "Democrat" and "homosexual" in the same sentence:

An embattled Indiana congressman has launched a new campaign ad that warns a vote for his Democratic opponent could trigger a shift in House leadership and advance a "homosexual agenda."

In the one-minute radio ad paid for by Friends of Rep. John Hostettler, an announcer impersonating Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" character says a vote for challenger Brad Ellsworth would be a vote for California Democrat Nancy Pelosi as House speaker.

"Pelosi will then put in motion her radical plan to advance the homosexual agenda, led by Barney Frank, reprimanded by the House after paying for sex with a man who ran a gay brothel out of Congressman Frank's home," the narrator says.

That's from an AP story. Try reading that last sentence out loud. Quite a mouthful, isn't it?

It's a good day when even bigoted congressmen from Indiana are running scared.

Hostettler, Barney Frank, Republicans, Indiana

Unclear on the concept: New Orleans cracks down on prostitution

Workers who come to New Orleans to rebuild the city are patronizing too many prostitutes, an AP story says. The funniest paragraph says:

"Everyone talked about the increase in prostitution, street hustlers, panhandlers," Anderson said. "We keep telling people to visit us, telling conventions to come to town, so we need to have the streets look cleaner and safer."

Oh, yeah, spoil the fun for the conventioneers. Why do you think people go to conventions in big cities, you dopes?

Speaking of which, the SF Chronicle's rather lurid series on forced prostitution in San Francisco continues to draw criticism. In addition to these letters, a large group of Korean-American and other Asian American people and groups signed an op-ed yesterday.

And just for fun: drug dealers in Colorado allegedly hid drugs in Elmo dolls.

Rant of the day

Speaking to a magazine industry convention, Robert Kennedy Jr. lashed out against "a negligent press in this country," adding "We know more about Tom and Katie than we do about global warming... We're the most entertained, least informed people in the world."

Robert Kennedy Jr., press, media, journalism

Do as we say, not as we do

Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzalez admits US actions overseas have hurt America's image, but says the reason is because "we need to be out there more, talking about what we are doing and why."

In other words, the problem is that we haven't done PR effectively. It's understandable, isn't it? The Bush administration has governed by doing whatever it wants to and then putting a frame around it and a scrim across it until people see only what they want us to see. The prisoners at Guantanamo are desperate terrorists; the US effort in Iraq is going better than we are allowed to see; and never have they used the words "Stay the course."

Good kisser

Joining that post from Badger I blogged earlier today, another great blog post: Violet Blue on relationships and boundaries. Just in case you wondered if she has anything left to say after all the other stuff she does. Man.

I just got home from the Miranda July appearance at Theater Artaud, a show which repeats tomorrow night. July made that film last year Me, You, and Everyone We Know; she's an enormously appealling actress and seems to be something of a darling of the artsy set, since even the New Yorker is printing her short stories. Her piece, which is a mixture of live and taped performance, has to do with relationships and heartbreak. It was cute but pathos-ridden and a little manipulative and frankly I just didn't need a story about a lost little kitty. I walked out and came home and hugged my cats and my own lover.

Miranda July, Violet Blue

A secular 'cathedral of minds'

I was moved by this paragraph by Badger, emphasis mine:

Drove T. home and looked at her books, huge numbers of them, all nicely arranged in clumps -- women's history, medieval history, philosophy, poetry, fiction, science unread. Confessed I wanted to do so in order to understand her mind more clearly (as far as I could.) I could never match the philosophy. Shelves of "unread" shown and explained with enormous disclaimers and apologies. I felt so happy as I recognized many old friends among the books and thought with interest of the dense clouds of other books related which branched off from the points of recognition I could find. & a bit awed at the scope & depth of feminist histories & knowledge & envious & determined also to get there. (In depth & volume & also, orderliness.) Then fiction -- extremely enticing. A whole wall of anthologies. I have more scribbled recommendations. Oh if only I could find and keep all the green virago paperbacks. (And all the women's press sf black and white ones.) And read them, of course. In the fiction especially I felt honored and full of love as if in a beautiful cathedral of minds. We talked about feeling comforted by their presence all around. & scared we wouldn't have time to read everything. & yet happy that there were always more wonderful books beyond imagining that someone would tell us about suddenly & to devour.

One thing I love about this is the way it expresses a yearning for connection through reading with both a specific person ("to understand her mind more clearly") as well as with ideas and the authors of books. The way Badger trusts the ocean of knowledge as it's expressed in books -- the way someone might say that a certain brand of sneakers always feel comfortable, she seems to have a sense of trust and reliance upon ideas and knowledge itself.

I find this perspective uplifting and inspiring because I have a hard time seeing things this way. German society was highly educated, and knowledge was prized and respected, but look what happened in the 20th century.

How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?

Guess who's been hanging out with Mark Foley in the undisclosed rehab location?

In other news, congrats to Shannon now that the new expanded edition of her comic Pet Noir is out. I spent an hour with Shannon today taking publicity photos of her around Precita Park. Unfortunately I uploaded all the photos to her laptop and have none to display. But they came out very cute.

Dept. of I didn't know whether to laugh or cry

Watch this 5 minute short film by the BBC on the hopeless and sometimes ridiculous attempts by US forces to train and work with Iraqi army and police. Music by Hank Williams, I believe.

Dept. of I didn't know whether to laugh or cry

Watch this 5 minute short film by the BBC on the hopeless and sometimes ridiculous attempts by US forces to train and work with Iraqi army and police. Music by Hank Williams, I believe.

Buy my car -- please!

See the Craigslist posting. I'd like to sell it Sunday afternoon. Email me here or via Craigslist if you're interested.

Dept. of Schadenfreude: Republicans fasten helmets

Republicans are already starting on the recriminations, and they haven't even lost yet. Thus this delightful coinage: "Pre-criminations," according to one conservative.

Look at the fur fly: It's the evangelicals' fault, says former Rep. Dick Armey: they're "bullies" and "thugs." No, it's Foley's fault, says Xtian Right leader Tony Perkins (Family Research Council). Meanwhile, former speechwriter David Frum hasn't lost his touch:

There is a bit of a battle between people who say, Hey, your tax cuts wrecked our war and people who say, Hey, your war wrecked our tax cuts.

You mean you can't have tax cuts in the middle of a four-year war? Wow! Who knew? That's like saying you can't safely drill for oil in a wildlife refuge -- or that you can't simultaneously defend the Constitution while at the same time destroying it. If that kind of thinking took hold, they'd be in real trouble.

Around the web

MSNBC.com has a sex columnist (Sample: "(My) fantasy is of me being a teenage boy on a date with a girl when all hell breaks loose and her girlfriends wallop me good!" Reply: "Well, you could try carrying a Playboy into a concert by a riot grrrl band...")

Ford is about to produce the last Taurus, drawing to an ignominious conclusion the model that saved the company in the 1980s. Ford never did understand how to manage brands -- just look what happened to the Mustang in the 80s and 90s.

Campaign shenanigans: The FBI is investigating the use of confidential information by a Colorado gubernatorial candidate, and the California state AG is investigating a House candidate for sending a letter to 14,000 Latino voters falsely saying that voting by immigrants is a crime. No surprise: both idiots are Republicans. Update: The latter joker is being dumped by local Republicans.

Even the stingrays are getting pissed off now

In what can only be described as a freak accident, an 81-year-old boater in Florida was in critical condition after a stingray jumped out of the water, flopped into his boat, and stabbed him in the chest with its barbed tail.

Pretty soon we're going to start hearing stories about deer rampaging into a small town, going into city hall, and pinning lawyers to the wall with their antlers. Or birds crashing through the windows of skyscrapers to peck out the eyes of managers with window offices.

Day 1 post Habeas Corpus

Thus sprach Olbermann:

We have handed a blank check drawn against our own freedom to a man who has insisted again that "the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values" and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "unlawful enemy combatants" and ship them somewhere -- anywhere -- but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "unlawful enemy combatant" and ship you somewhere -- anywhere.

And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was president, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was president.

Desperate politician calls opponent's romance novel 'porn'

The Democratic candidate for Texas state comptroller, a hapless fellow with "$0 in campaign money," has gotten a little attention for attacking a 1990 romance novel written by his opponent, Republican Susan Combs. Calling "The Perfect Match" pornographic and posting excerpts on his campaign website, Head has earned the wrath of thousands of romance authors and their fans.

"I told him I was a Texan, a Christian, a voter, a grandmother and I have written 46 novels," said Houston romance writer Patricia Kay. "I said, 'You are not going to get my vote.' The truth is," added Kay, 69, "I probably would have voted for him because I'm a registered Democrat."

Another author asked:

"Is a written depiction of two adults falling in love and expressing that love physically pornographic? I have always felt that my books promoted conservative, family values like love, fidelity and marriage."

Wow -- so, if the people get married before they consumate their passion, they're natural Republicans? Makes you wonder just how many people fit that description.

New deals for debut fiction

Let's catch up with the Publishers Marketplace annoucements for book deals for "debut fiction," as they classify it:


Hmm, the first one seems like genre fiction to me, but then again... a "nefarious posse" ... I've always wanted one of those.

The key word for the next three is all "family." The last one sounds rather fun.

Not so bad news

Workers at a Florida WalMart walked off the job this morning to protest new workplace restrictions that would have put scheduling in the control of a computer, without worker input, and forced employees to be available for any shift -- so that parents, for example, would find it impossible to know whether they would be able to pick up their children from school.

Sen. Larry Craig (R. - Id.) is gay, according to a Democratic blogger. Link courtesy Wonkette. Craig has (or had) a 100% "pro-family" rating from the Christian Coalition.

Students feel entitled to connectivity: Support guy

At Stanford the dorms have "Residential Computing Consultants" -- students who take a 4-day training to become "dorm geeks" and fix fellow students' computer and software problems. This humorous piece in the San Jose Mercury News shows one beleaguered lass:

During one recent lunch break, RCC Dana Nguyen, 21, got an urgent call: A student couldn't get her e-mail. "They consider it their right to be connected," said Nguyen, bemused. She rushed through lunch, and in 10 minutes, was back in the dorm, helping.

Another RCC "fixed a dysfunctional computer (on which was installed) an illegal copy of Windows software, recently serviced in India. The client was a new student on campus, and "all she knew was that classes started tomorrow," he said. He reinstalled a new version of Windows -- and also helped her find the location of the nearest bank and Wal-Mart. Proud to help, he said "the RCC is often their first introduction to Stanford and sometimes to the U.S."

More on LitCrawl

I took a look at Technorati today to see what people were saying about LitCrawl, the Saturday night writerfest in which I pinch-hit at the "San Francisco stories"-themed reading.

This blogger was chuffed at the difficulty in parking and in the difficulty of squeezing into the always packed readings: "Shoving your way in was like walking into someone’s mouth–hot, humid, and kind of gross." Remind me not to make out with this person. Also: "Once inside, jammed between people, bags, and bar corners, you found that you were not listening to the type of famous, brilliant writer who would warrant all the ado. Nope. You were listening to an average writer who very often hadn't even published that much."

Geez! So sorry the no charge events did not meet with your satisfaction! Maybe you'd enjoy seeing David Sedaris at the Opera House later this month for $168 a ticket -- oops, that's sold out. Well, good luck with that on Craigslist.

Moving on -- but not very far -- a second blogger also found the events uninspiring. But on closer inspection it turns out she accompanied the first whinger. And she calls it "ShitQuake" -- now if only the writers she had seen were that clever.

Really, people! How hard is it to have a good time? This gal had a good time, including "magically getting a good seat" at each reading -- that would certainly help -- and this woman also seemed to enjoy herself. See, it's not that hard!

Finally, here are LitCrawl photos on Flickr.

Update: I loved this posting by a writer who does "Christian fiction." She writes:

I became curious, is there any commercial fiction included in this festival? It would certainly be okay if there wasn't. But there is. There's quite a bit of commercial genre fiction actually, including: sci-fi, travel writing, food writing, erotica, fantasy, true crime, mystery, noir, and music writing. And yet, I don't see a single session on Mom Lit or Chick lit. ... Anyway, if the Litquake organizers would like to change their ways next year and feature some Christian chick lit, I could be a part of a session called: "Chick Lit: Friend or Foe?" or "Jesus and Cute Boys?"

She also wonders, "My boyfriend suspects that perhaps few writers are ever invited to read at this festival, and it is more a matter of infiltrating Litquake." I'm not sure what she meant by that -- "few writers are invited" as opposed to... infiltrating? And I can't ask in comments, because it's a MySpace page and I refuse to join MySpace just so I can comment.

Of course, all he has to do is suck the blood of a few clients and he'll be fit as a fiddle

A few years ago when I was spending several weeks at a remote retreat center in the Cascades, the staff was very impressed by the story of the Utah hiker who cut off his trapped arm to save his life. To the macho youngsters who staffed the center, this was the epitome of toughness.

A Texas lawyer who freed himself from a car wreck didn't have to go quite that far, but he still wins the Mister Tough Guy award:

A Fort Worth lawyer spent two nights in an embankment after his car plunged off a road before a good Samaritan found him alive Sunday morning in Palo Pinto County.

Jerry Wood, a criminal defense attorney, hadn't been seen since 6 p.m. Friday night as he was leaving the Wise County Jail ... After leaving the jail, Mr. Wood ... was driving on FM4 south of Mineral Wells about 8 p.m. Friday when his car veered off the road and plunged about 40 feet over an embankment, Department of Public Safety Trooper Garry Allen said.

Mr. Wood lost a lot of blood when he used his pocketknife to cut out part of a tree branch that had become stuck in his throat in the accident... He finally made it to the top of the embankment Sunday morning. Three cars passed Mr. Wood, who was covered in blood, but the fourth car picked him up and took him to police.

Cary Tennis's uneventful vacation

Q. Sir, has anyone unknown to you asked you to carry anything on board?

A. The issue of baggage is one we all deal with. And eventually, we all realize it's up to us what we carry around and what we choose to leave behind. In my case, my unusual first name has been a double-edged sword. Not only do people ask me to carry things all the time -- they just make assumptions. "Hey Tennis -- carry this!" It gets tiring.

Now, in my job as a famous internet columnist, people burden me with their questions, their cares, their concerns -- many of them completely stupid and lame. Why do you think I'm going on vacation?

Q. Where to, buddy?

A. That's the question we all ask ourselves from time to time -- and hopefully we can be just as kind to ourselves as this interlocutor was to me. "Buddy," indeed -- we should all befriend ourselves. Only then can we really determine where we want to go in life.

Q. Eating here -- or to go?

A. It's time we all slowed down a little. Despite the knot of noisy teenagers by the window, despite the sleepy, slobbering homeless gent in the corner, I believe I will "eat here." I will eat here now; be here now. Then I will go.

Being here. Then going. That's what life is all about.

Q. We have your room reserved through the 17th, is that correct, sir?

A. Finally, a simple question. Yes. Thank you.

Chinese battle embarassing English

Read this BBC story about the government of Beijing attempting to rid the city of malformed English translations -- such as a sign that says "No Entry on Peacetime" instead of "Emergency Exit," or menu items like Government Abuse Chicken -- before Olympic tourists arrive.

Good luck with that.

For more weird abuses of English and English-like words, the favored site is Engrish.com.

Yo la tengo

This pleasant and informative post on BoingBoing bears correcting. It quotes another blog on the origins of some famous rock band names -- to wit:

YO LA TENGO translates to "I have it" from Spanish -- said to be the phrase called out by Hispanic baseball players when fielding a pop fly ball. Singer/guitar player Ira Kaplan got the expression from a book he was reading about baseball called The Five Seasons.

I'm sorry, but the original book referred to deserves much more respect than that.

First of all, the title is Five Seasons, not The Five Seasons; the author is the New Yorker's Roger Angell. The book is a collection of his columns on baseball from 1972 through 1976, and it does, indeed, contain a hilarious anecdote about an American baseball player learning how to say "I got it!" in Spanish. The book, filled with clear, vivid writing, will turn sports-indifferent readers into real baseball fans.

The unannounced reading

After a day full of errands, I got home at 5:45 pm and found a message in email from one of the Litquake organizers -- who is also my agent -- saying she'd had two cancellations for the LitCrawl event she was MCing, and could I jump in as a last-minute replacement?

I just had time to print off a part of a chapter from my current novel project, then I picked up my friend Katia and gave her a ride to her venue -- she was also reading, but at a different venue 5 blocks from mine, and 75 minutes earlier -- and parked. Well, I was a little early for my event, but I took the time to edit my piece in light of the fact that I was reading it out loud.

Finally the venue, the upstairs theater at The Marsh, opened, and I connected with the MC/agent, who was surprised and glad to see me. I sat there while the venue opened and filled, still editing my piece, and chatting with the other authors, including Katia's friend Elizabeth Stark.

Then I read, and I must admit -- I killed.

I read a short piece of what is essentially office comedy, making fun of the silly bureaucracy and pettiness of modern corporate life. An easy target -- but it was fun to do. Here's an excerpt:

Inside the lobby, next to the ATM, was a coffee cart with seven people in line. Stella joined the line. Every month when she did her bills she told herself she was spending too much on café latte, but most mornings she stopped at the coffee cart. While she was waiting in line, twenty or thirty people came into the lobby and walked directly to the elevators -- people with more self-discipline, or people who didn't like coffee as much. She knew it couldn't be the fact that they could not afford to buy double latte every day, because she recognized many of them from work, and she knew they'd been there longer and made more money than she did.

There went Joyce Babbage, a marketing director in Customer-Facing OnLine Services, followed by her minion Kathi, who was carrying a stack of boxes from the Kinko's around the corner. Stella smirked. They weren't supposed to use Kinko's, they were supposed to send work in-house to Duplicating. But Joyce thought she was above the rules, so brazen about it that she got Kinko's boxes carried right through the lobby.

Stella advanced in the line and was now third. There went Chet Pratt, a product manager in a department somewhat related to hers. Chet liked to throw his weight around and make other departments do his group's work and call it Mission Sharing. Then when somebody asked him to do something, he was always Overcommitted.

In addition to Elizabeth's piece, I really loved the excerpt from Joshua Gamson's biography The Fabulous Sylvester.

What fun! I'm sorry I didn't know about it in advance so friends could attend. But in a way it was nice to know that I didn't know anybody -- no friends cheering me on, the audience's reaction was completely off the cuff and genuine. Nice feeling. Not that I'm not totally grateful when friends come too!

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! : weak-ass edition

Man, my blogging has been sub-par this week. Maybe I'll catch up a little today. But meanwhile:

Houston-area teens dig coffee drinks -- specifically Starbucks, according to the article, as if there were no other places to get latte in Houston. Teenagers today are mostly a bunch of conformist, brand-crazy sheep, though, aren't they?

Now I'll get angry email from sheep.

And in Austin, law students got in trouble for having a "ghetto" themed party "in which partygoers carried 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor and wore Afro wigs, necklaces with large medallions and name tags bearing traditionally black and Hispanic names." Their error was in posting pix from the party online.

Yes, they only carried those 40s. Only props.

Here's the headline of the day, from the NY Daily News: 'Stupid' Thug Guilty in Actress Slay. The woman was killed when she confronted a robber who had just pistol-whipped her boyfriend, who commented, "She underestimated how stupid he was."

In Seattle, a Quaker church has closed a homeless encampment on their property in a nice neighborhood after the homeless broke too many rules. Hey, if they could follow rules they wouldn't be homeless.

Finally, I highly recommend the MSNBC story about a new book for a former Bush administration worker in its "faith-based initiatives" office who documents the administration's secret scorn for its evangelical base, whom Rove and other aides commonly called "nuts" and other names. On that page, find the listing of video stories and click the one pictured here. Or read the Washington Post story.

Headline of the week

From the Houston Chronicle:

Laredo morgue mix-up leads to finger-pointing

Oh Lord! The possibilities that come to mind!

Pamuk wins Nobel, and new book deals

Congratulations to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature today. His beautiful novel Snow, from a couple years ago, is so worth reading. And Cris really liked his other novel, My Name Is Red, too. I hope this makes it possible for other novels of his to be translated and published in English. Only about 40% of his output is available now.

See his NYT author page for reviews and first chapters of his books.



Speaking of books, let's move on to look at a few recent deals for "debut fiction," as classified by Publishers Marketplace:

Well, we seem to have another theme going in two out of three of the books. Big families.

As for the third book, it seems a little out of place in the "debut fiction" category, just for its genre; stuff like this is usually classified as genre fiction and not in "debut fiction" per se. But let's not be a snob about it. I'm having a hard enough time moving out of genre writing myself.

Booker Prize winner: Kiran Desai

Congratulations to the winner of the British Commonwealth's largest literary prize, the Booker, Kiran Desai. Desai is a 35-year-old MFA student at Columbia and the daughter of author Anita Desai.

Links:

Interview (pre-Booker); another from 1999 on publication of her first novel, "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard."

NYT review of Desai's prize-winning novel "The Inheritance of Loss"

Update: The updated photo of Desai is from the Guardian profile published 13 Oct.

Blog posting headline of the year

From Wonkette:

The Forrest Gump of the Apocalypse

Guess who sold North Korea $200 million worth of nuclear reactors? Donald Rumsfeld, of course!

It goes on to reveal Rumsfield's role in NK's nuclear program, as well as other contributions to world war. Hilarious!

Can I please have my time travel machine now? Even if it was only one way -- even if I had to stay in 1965 -- I'd gladly do something to eliminate Rumsfield from the political scene, starting then, if I could. (Note to FBI: this comment is meant to be satirical and not a serious threat. I do not have a time machine. Thanks.)

Olbermann rises

I've been watching the cable news show "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" on MSNBC on and off since the 2004 election season, appreciating his ability to be hard for hard news and silly part of the rest of the time. As it stands, his show is someplace in between an ordinary news broadcast and "The Daily Show."

But lately he's been channelling Murrow, attacking the Bush administration in several hard-charging "special comment" segments. Read this AP story for the background, then check out this YouTube clip of one of the blasts. Bracing!

Just following orders

In light of the Foley scandal, Sunday's NYT has a fascinating profile of the closeted gay aides to Republican lawmakers such as Robert Dornan and Rick Santorum. These self-hating miserable creatures explain themselves by saying things like "You just learn to compartmentalize really well." I guess so!

Republicans' rapacious greed seen in supporters' sex trafficking

As I posted earlier today, the Chronicle this morning began a series of articles on sex trafficking in San Francisco with a big spread (you should pardon the expression).

This series finds a connection to the current Washington sex solicitation scandal involving the House Republican leadership in this Daily Kos posting on the 1999 controversy over Hastert and DeLay's
support for sex trafficking in Saipan -- the U.S. Pacific island territory where U.S. labor laws are suspended so that Republican donors can reap huge profits from sweatshops.

How to annoy and influence (not in a good way) editors

I stopped reading Gawker regularly several months ago, so I have Publishers Marketplace to thank for this link: a regular Gawker series, Unsolicited, featuring real whining from real editors about the authors (and especially would-be authors) who bug them.

Speaking of Publishers Marketplace, here are the deals for debut fiction so far this month:

Thirtysomethings in New York City! Endangered adolescents! and a book group-ready read about "heroines from literature." Interesting that there are no notes about how much these deals were for -- a "nice deal" or "good deal" and so on, in the P.M. nomenclature. Let's assume they were all acquired for under $50K.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- the gentle edition

Usually this feature focuses on mayhem, sex and drugs. What about a little tenderness?

Lance Armstrong, who lives on a spread in the Texas Hill Country, has riled neighbors by building a dam they say has ruined a famous local swimming hole.

See the tenor here? The Republicans have done our job for us, so we're taking it easy this morning.

A Massachusetts woman was in custody yesterday after she phoned in a threat to "kill the freshman football team," specifically four players, including her own son. The woman made the call from a pay phone across the street from the evangelical church where her husband is the pastor.

The SF Chronicle today has a big feature on sex trafficking in San Francisco, which it calls "a major center of the business." First in a series!

An octogenarian in Queens was scammed out of $500,000 by a "teen temptress," to use the Daily News's language. She didn't have to marry him or even fuck him, she just sweet-talked him out of the money over two years.

Clearing, chance of busy

How busy I was today at work! I barely had time to do my regular work on the docs -- I am a technical writer -- because I kept getting pulled into discussions on user interface. I made myself useful, and probably annoying, by continually leaping up and drawing on the board and talking a mile a minute, making up neologistical terms for things in the UI that don't have names.

It rained on and off all day. This is the earliest of the start of fall rains I can remember in quite some time -- it's usually late Ocotber, sometimes even November before the fall rains start. It cleared up by the afternoon, and the drive home along 101 -- despite being unusually congested -- featured beautiful clear views. Way down in Redwood City I could see San Bruno Mountain, 20 miles away straight up the freeway -- very clearly. From the marshes near Belmont I could see Berkeley and Albany in detail. And the sky still held enormous clouds, white and black against the blue and gold sky. Fantastic.

More writing advice

Not from me. Who am I to talk?

Alexander Chee on tricks for working on novels.

Cheney: war will never end

In this article about a visit by Cheney to support Tom DeLay's write-in replacement on the ballot in Texas, Dick Cheney said this to some troops:

"If we can learn anything from modern experience it is this: The only way to protect this country from terrorism is to stay on the offensive," Cheney told the soldiers, many of whom face redeployment to Iraq later this month. "Pursue the enemy until there's no place left to hide. Stay in the fight until the fight is won."

In other words: We are willing to start wars anywhere we decide terrorists are hiding, and to this war there will be no end.

That's the only future the Republicans can see, isn't it? Endless war. Orwell had it right.

Rejection no. 15

It's official: my novel Make Nice has now been rejected by all of the editors at mainstream houses whom my agent could think to send it to. To quote the editor's note to my agent:

I couldn’t really get the idea past people here. Most people simply thought it was too obscure and too small of a market for a book like this.

Actually, that's partially encouraging: he liked my book and went to bat for it with the editorial board. So it doesn't just suck. That's the good news.

The bad news is that I wrote a book about an "obscure" subject, one not enough people are interested in reading a novel about -- not enough for a mainstream publishing house, anyway.

I also lack any kind of a "platform," which is a publishing industry term for "some reasons unrelated to the writing itself which might cause people to be interested in the book." If, for example, I had somehow worked in Hollywood with some of the people mentioned in the book, or even if my uncle had -- that might allow a publicist to say "Hey, the nephew of Nelson Riddle wrote a book about Sinatra and the Rat Pack." See, that would make it more interesting. Unfortunately, I am not the nephew of Nelson Riddle or anyone in Hollywood and I have no such "platform."

So it will be on to the small presses, somehow -- though I fear that my book might strike them as "too commercial"!

In the meantime, I am still working on a novel about Americans in Bangalore, and on short stories about superheroes.

That was long ago and far away

Summer is over, but the San Jose Metro weekly has just published part one of Laura Mattingly's report from this year's Burning Man. It's funny and well-observed.

The Atlantic has advice from famous writers on writing.

No pizza for senator's father

The 81-year-old father of Sen. Norm Coleman (D. - Minn.) was convicted yesterday of misdemeanor disorderly conduct for having sex in a car with his 38-year-old girlfriend.

He was also barred from the premises of the pizza parlor for a year.

Hey, any 81-year-old who is spry enough to have sex in a car -- much less be able to get it up -- has not committed a crime. It's about as heroic (and cramped) as John Glenn being shot into space aboard the shuttle at age 77. Give the guy a break!

Signs of the apocalypse

A USC professor predicted in 2004 that the Iraq war would be good for recruiting terrorists. Piece of cake, he said:

"It's elementary stuff," Dekmejian says of the conclusion (in an administration report released last week) that we've only multiplied our enemies and made ourselves less safe. "It's primitive stuff. No surprises. No secrets."

The New York Daily News has a whole page full of quotes from former Rep. Mark Foley in which he strenuously defends kids from dirty old men who want to bone them. "These kids are young. I think that they should maybe be learning something other than being nude together and being thrown in a hot tub."

Hold that thought, Foley. The NY Times has a nice photograph of a Capitol maintenance man taking your name off your old office door.

A writer tried to live a "conservative lifestyle" for a month. Among his findings: The LOTR movies are conservative because Sam:Frodo::Blair:Bush. "Here's this mission that we're going off on. We've got to go do this thing that nobody understands." "OK, I'm with you."

Even if you're just going to Canada, you'll soon need a passport just to get back into the U.S.

In reply

To reply to Preeta Samarasan's comments on my post earlier today:

First of all, I'm curious about the statistical methodology you use to draw your pie charts, because I'm not sure that even in today's multicultural world, more novels about or by Asian women are sold than novels about anything else.
...
I will only encourage you to take a look at the big picture (which is easily available) of all books published in, say, the last ten years. You will quickly see that most books published (fiction or nonfiction, literary or genre) are not, in fact, by Asian women.

I'm sure you're right. I was judging only the books classified as "Fiction - debut" by Publishers Marketplace during September, not all the books published in the last ten years.

Who wrote most of the books published before that? ... Just white men, and occasionally -- only in exceptional cases until fairly recently -- white women. But nobody made pie charts to point this out, because it seemed right. ...

To some people, it *still* seems right... This in itself is a problem -- that white people and their numerous successes should seem normative/neutral/barely worthy of mention, but the successes of others always seem unfairly or dishonestly earned.

I accept your point. I did not mean to suggest there was anything unfair or dishonest about your work or that of others who wrote about Asian women, but I can see how it might have been taken that way, and I apologise for misleading readers.

Part of my point -- admittedly quite unclear in my original posts -- was that I thought it was remarkable that the publishing industry seemed suddenly to find this "exotic" subject -- as I termed it -- fascinating such that several of the debut fiction books sold in September were about Asian women.

Just to bring some data to this discussion, let me list all the books sold in September listed as "Fiction - debut" by Publishers Marketplace. (Here is the list with all the info that Publishers Marketplace supplies.)

Cate Kennedy's DARK ROOTS, a short story collection...

Theresa Rebeck's first novel THREE GIRLS AND THEIR BROTHER, narrated in four parts from the point of view of each of four siblings as they experience a year filled with the good, the bad and the ugly of the New York celebrity scene after the sisters are proclaimed "It Girls of the Twenty-First Century"...

Josh Kilmer-Purcell's first novel CANDY EVERYBODY WANTS, a coming of age story about a small town boy who makes it big...

Wendy Nelson Tokunaga's MIDORI BY MOONLIGHT, which follows the misadventures of a Japanese Bridget Jones who has escaped the straitjacket society of Japan to start a new life in San Francisco, only to find that her American Dream isn't all it's cracked up to be...

Randa Jarrar's A MAP OF HOME, exploring a daughter's complicated relationship with her mixed heritage parents, as well as the American immigrant experience...

Mark McNay's FRESH ... [Not described in the blurb, but subsequent research indicated it is about a Scottish chicken plant.]

Joshua Kornreich's THE BOY WHO KILLED CATERPILLARS, in which a lice-ridden, eight-year-old boy kills and narrates, withholding the identity of his victim until the end of the novel...

Charles Bock's BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN, about a twelve-year-old boy, and the day he disappears in the desert near Las Vegas, following the boy, his parents, best friend, and a cast of seemingly unconnected strangers (an illustrator, a stripper, a anarchist teenager, a band of street runaways) on that fateful day...

Hillary Jordan's MUDBOUND, which deals with the entwined fates of a white farming family in the Mississippi Delta and their black sharecroppers after the sons of both families return home from WWII...

Julie Buxbaum's debut novel THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE, about a 29-year-old attorney who lost her mother as a teenager and finds her well-constructed life falling apart when she can't commit to the man who loves her...

Fiona Maazel's LAST LAST CHANCE, in which a family of four navigates love and recovery in an age of anxiety where the threat of a looming deadly plague hangs over them...

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...

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...

That's thirteen books. Three of them are explicitly about Asian women, not counting "A Map of Home," whose author is Arab-American.

So, three out of thirteen? Perhaps not such a big deal. But when I originally posted on this topic, it was two out of two. On Sep. 11, both of the novels sold so far in September (including Ms. Samarasan's) were about, as I put it, "exotic young Asian women."

No doubt that was a rude way to put it, but I meant to be tongue-in cheek. The graphic I posted was meant to imitate the "infographics" published in The Onion, which themselves are a satire of the infographics published in USA Today. I thought the presence of this graphic was enough to put the posting in the realm of satire.

However, even if my point was originally satiric, why did I continue posting on the topic throughout the month? Because it does seem to me that publishers are very interested -- perhaps to the exclusion of other topics -- in "exotic" topics. The article in Poets & Writers I linked to this morning captures it better than I was able to.

So my point was at least a little serious, but it's true I didn't really examine the implications of drawing attention to these books. For whether or not they constitute a trend, is there anything wrong with people writing or reading about extra-American people and cultures? No, of course there isn't. So why bring it up at all? The only explanation, as I wrote last week, is that I have some admittedly immature and silly sour grapes that my own novel -- which is set in the U.S. in 1960 and is about very American and male-centered topics -- did not sell.

Do I really think that my novel did not sell because a book like Ms. Samarasan's somehow nudged it out? No, I do not -- unless by "a book like hers" we mean a book that was much better written and more interesting than my book. I did not mean to imply that books by or about Asian women or other cultures are inherently less interesting or deserving of being published, nor did I intend to imply any comparison with my own book, except in the most self-deprecating sense that their books sold and mine didn't.

I'm also astonished by a question you seem to be asking earnestly in another post: why are people *interested* in books by Asian women, when they're not even billed as chick lit, but as literary novels? ...

I did not mean to imply that the books in question should have been classified as chick lit or in any way lesser than "literary novels." Publishers Marketplace has a separate category for chick lit (they list it as "women's/romance") and I specifically was looking at the "fiction - debut" category, which does not overlap.

Shouldn't we be glad that at least, at the very least, there's a section of the population interested in something other than navel-gazing? ... Shouldn't we encourage other interests?

Sure -- I guess so. Sometimes people read books (or watch films, etc.) about people like themselves, and sometimes they read books (etc.) about people and cultures totally unlike their own. I don't think the former activity always amounts to "navel gazing," nor does the latter always amount to (again, my term) an interest in the merely exotic. But -- and this was perhaps my original, obscure point -- sometimes it is an interest in the exotic for the sake of the exotic, as a kind of touristic impulse, and in my opinion there is something suspect about this if that's all it amounts to. I might have made this point seriously, but instead I approached it satirically. Clearly my attempt at satire failed for more than one reader.

I hope readers will buy and read Ms. Samarasan's book "Evening is the Whole Day," as well as the other books I made fun of.

Self-publishing in the 21st Century

I listened last night to a long interview on TechNation with the founder of Blurb, a Web 2.0 company that makes it easy for people to self-publish books. They provide templates, print-on-demand, and a price that makes it possible for you to print up your cookbook, crackpot theories, or really bad novel.

As someone who admittedly craves the recognition of the publishing industry more than I want to see my words between the covers of a book, I found it somewhat painful to listen to the program. I have no objection to self-publishing per se; in fact, in the 90s I started my own magazine rather than submit my work to others. Part of the reason for that was because I did not think any publication would want to print my work, but that there still might be readers for it somewhere -- not many, but a few.

But with the novel I have written, I wanted to be able to actually get it published -- in the sense of being published by a real publisher, not myself. Because that's a clear goal for me, I am not very tempted by the notion of having it done by some web company; it would seem like an admission of defeat. But as I listened, I could imagine two things happening. First, there are people who self-publish books and then go on to see their work reach a wide audience -- more power to them. And second, there are innumerable well-meaning relatives of struggling writers who will hear that program and mention it the next time they talk to their child or nephew. "Susie, I heard about this neat web thing where you can publish your book. It sounded very professional. Why don't you do that?" And then the struggling writer sighs very loudly.

Missed connections

Salon continues its maddeningly weird political coverage today with the totally irrelevant revelation that now-disgraced Rep. Mark Foley gave campaign contributions to three other members of Congress -- and all three are Republicans who are vulnerable this year.

So fucking what?? It's not that Foley had to resign over financial misdeeds -- he resigned because he was discovered coming on to under-age teen boys. That George Allen and Bob Ney got money from Foley is utterly irrelevant.

I want the Republicans to lose as badly as anyone at Salon does, but I don't think they're building their credibility this way.

Justify my text

After I posted in September about the predominance of "exotic Asian" subject matter in first-novel book deals, Anna sent me a link to a Poets and Writers article, Imperative: the pressure to be exotic:

These days, not only must the literary purist make posterity believe he did indeed live, but if he wants to find an agent, receive a decent advance, get published by a name house, and endear himself to a marketing and publicity team that will ensure a prime spot on the front table at Barnes & Noble, positioning his book to climb the sales ranks and thus securing a contract for his next book, he needs to make posterity believe -- by writing it in his latest memoir -- that he lived more dysfunctionally, more tragically, more multiculturally, more exotically than anyone else. [Emphasis mine -- Ed.]

It's a pressure I've experienced firsthand (and the irony of leaning on personal experience to bolster my argument does not escape me.) ... When we got around to chatting about our latest writing projects, she asked me, without mincing words, why my novel wasn't an autobiographically inspired story of a young Iranian-American woman.

"That's so big right now. You could get published -- like that!" she said with a snap of her fingers.