Novel idea: the sacraficial lambs of Presbyterian College

From time to time I point out that since reporters these days are not unattuned to the irony of our world, any aspiring novelist can, by reading the newspaper carefully, get plenty of ideas for novels out of the daily news. Behold this story: Have Team, Will Travel, Losing Badly.

You don't have to care about basketball to get the gist. Tiny colleges, like the one that is the focus of the story, have declared themselves members of "Division I" of the NCAA, and thus eligible to play top-ranked university teams. Of course they get clobbered every time, so what's the point? Money. Visiting teams share in ticket revenues, so when the Presbyterian College Blue Hose appear at Duke, Clemson, North Carolina or other powerhouses, they get some of the ticket revenue. And it doesn't matter if they draw or not, since those big college have lots of season ticket holders.

So! How'd you like to play for the Blue Hose? I wonder what the recruiter tells prospective players: "You'll play with the best... the guys on the opposing teams!" I wonder what the coach's angle is. Does he get a cut of the $650,000 the team -- whose schedule has 5 home games and 25 road games!! -- takes home from those bashings?

One day, Coach Gregg Nibert said, he hopes the Blue Hose will be able to go punch for punch on the court, at least with teams in the smaller Division I conferences like the Big South, which Presbyterian will join next year.

But for now, he is content to barnstorm, collecting $25,000 to $60,000 per appearance at Madison Square Garden-sized college arenas. After a season of predictable poundings, he will come home with about $650,000 for Presbyterian's coffers.

And yet this is not a scandal. This is regarded as great for the school! Incroyable!

technorati: novel writing, writing ideas

Snowy Chicago

I'm in Chicago, staying in this enormous hotel, working on my latest book and probably eating too much. Home late on Jan. 1.

Hey hey, I saved the world today

Presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton "will work to protect children from inappropriate video game content." The first-term governor of Alaska, Republican Sarah Palin, raised taxes on oil companies. Jon Bon Jovi is New Jersey's answer to Bono and popular with politicians.

But my favorite thing today is this: Look at the very bottom of this Maureen Dowd column on the NY Times' site. Speaking of the regular columnist who publishes on Wednesday, it says: "Thomas L. Friedman is on book leave."

Book leave! What a terrific idea. I'll have to request that to be added to the list of allowable leaves at my job.

Economics of publishing, part CXDVIII

First, the good news: "There are more agents than writers."

Now, the bad news: "And there are more writers than readers. I'm convinced of that."

That's from an interview with big-time New Yawk Litarerry Agent Lynn Nesbit, whose clients have included Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Donald Barthelme, whose short story "The Big Broadcast of 1938" got him representation by newly-minted agent Nesbit and occasioned the above reflection on the economics of publishing.

She goes on:

I tell Tina [Bennett] and Eric [Simonoff], "You missed the good days." When I worked for Sterling Lord, I had a loft, a sort of duplex loft apartment on Barrow Street. And Michael Sissons, who's now the head of Fraser & Dunlop, and Peter Matson, who's also an agent, used to give these parties at my house. They would make these drinks of half brandy and half champagne, and people got so drunk. One night Rosalyn Drexler, the lady wrestler and the novelist, picked up Walter Minton and just threw him against the wall. I'll never forget that. There was just more of a sense of fun.... It's the corporate thing. People are too scared. It doesn't attract eccentrics anymore.

technorati: publishing, literary agents

Something short of sock puppeting

Is it sock puppeting or sock puppeteering? Sock-puppet mastering?

Anyway. A writer who self-published the first in a series of fantasy books invented a publicist and sent out releases about himself. The ruse worked to attract the attention of a major publisher, which signed him to a six-figure contract.

There is an interesting distinction there between the practice of sock puppeting, or whatever you'd call it -- that is, writing glowing reviews about yourself on websites and writing comments to your own blog postings, using alter egos -- and pretending to be a publicist for yourself. A publicist is paid, while a sock puppet, or the persons purporting to write those glowing reviews and appreciative comments, are not. For some reason it is regarded as an embarrassing act of vanity to write a glowing review of your own book on Amazon, but not to act as your own publicist under a pseudonym.

The way around this problem, of course, is to make an arrangement with another writer to act as each other's publicist. Pay each other one dollar per year, and then flog the other person's book with such enthusiasm that he'd look like an asshole if he didn't pump yours with equal fervor.

Or you could, you know, just spend money and hire a publicist. I did this for my very first book with free money I'd gotten off stock options, thus keeping the strange little book from disappearing without a trace. The publicist's efforts even garnered a few reviews.

technorati: publishing, publicity, book publicity

It's Bad Behavior Monday™! -- Xmas edition

To protest commercialism, a Washington man nailed Santa Claus to a 15-foot cross in front of his house, and put images of it on his Xmas cards with the message "Santa died for your MasterCard."

Priceless.

A woman in Wyoming stabbed her husband in the chest for opening a present early. The lovebirds, who have been married three months, are both 34. And in New Zealand, a "gang of fifty drunken Santas" went on a mild rampage at a cineplex, knocking over cardboard cutout figures and a Christmas tree.

"Shopdropping" -- the opposite of shoplifting -- means placing things in stores for people to purchase. The items might be anti-consumer objects d'art, or simply some independent producer's music CDs he's trying to unload. One Oakland artist makes "anarchist action figures ... with tiny accessories including a gas mask, bolt cutter, and two Molotov cocktails;" when he took a t-shirt depicting 20th century revolutionary figures to the cash register at a Target, the manager looked askance:

"I don't think this is a product that we sell," the manager said as Mr. Jennings pretended to be a customer trying to buy it. "It's definitely antifamily, which is not what Target is about."

Other shopdroppers are simply people who don't want gifts and just dump them on store shelves rather than go through the hassle of standing in line to return them.

A southern California man claiming to be in the CIA talked two men out of $20,000 in various cons, including a theatrical phone call when he pretended to be under fire and demanded $10,000 to get a helicopter and a pilot.

In October 2005, he began telling employees and others who frequent the gun shop -- some of them Oxnard police officers -- that he'd been hired by the CIA. He disappeared for about three weeks. When he came back he talked about having been at "The Farm," the CIA's training facility. He wore what looked like a federal agent's badge on his belt. He had CIA credentials as well, he said, but those were strictly confidential. Risser told one regular customer at the shooting range that he'd like to be more specific about what he did for the CIA, but "If I told you, I'd have to kill you."

Yes, he met his marks at a shooting range.

Worker-owned Thai brothel

In Chaing Mai there is a worker-owned bar/brothel where the women are not subject to the depredations of all the other bar girls in Thailand. Toward the end of the story there is a bit about how workers from local NGOs patronize the place to "study" how it works -- a no-win situation, as they must prove themselves either hypocrites or cheapskates.

A message from one of the latter is said to be written in a message posted on the wall: "I love you more than I can pay." That says it all about the supposedly enlightened and gone-native Western tourist who winds up being more of a drag on the locals than the classic camera-and-Panama-hat type. I once read an article about backpackers in Nepal and Tibet who, under the delusion that they are somehow like penniless monks, wind up imposing on the hospitality of natives and are looked on not as enlightened travelers but as parasites.

technorati: sex work, prostitution,

The purpose of literature

From the "unofficial" website of French author Frédéric Beigbeder:

Dans les années 1980, une nouvelle drogue fit son apparition dans les milieux noctambules : le MDMA dit "ecstasy". Cette "pilule de l'amour" provoquait d'étranges effets : bouffées de chaleur, envie de danser toute la nuit sur de la techno, besoin de caresser les gens, grincements de dents, déshydratation accélérée, angoisse existentielle, tentatives de suicide, demandes en mariage. ... Et puis, avons-nous besoin d'une pilule pour raconter notre vie à des inconnus? Alors qu'il y a la littérature pour ça?

My translation of the italicized portion: And do we really need a pill just to tell strangers about our lives? Isn't that what we have literature for?

technorati: Frédéric Beigbeder, ecstasy, literature

'The modern world is absolutely fascist'

From the point of view of mass propaganda and advertising, I think there's been nothing new since the time of Goebbels. Women must look like this, this and this. All who are not within these bounds must strive for them, or be losers. That's a completely fascist doctrine. I'm surprised there aren't people standing with rulers outside nightclubs and measuring the distance between people's ears. Probably they will be soon, and that will be right in this situation.

All of modern consumer society, without a doubt, is profoundly fascist. You can see this by Africa. People have problems finding drinking water. But you can always find Coca-Cola. How is this possible?

I studied the history of the Third Reich. I found incredible facts. It's clear that the Soviet Union of those years and Fascist Germany were twins. It's no secret for anyone. But the fact that in the contemporary situation, all of these speeches, all of these propaganda approaches, in one way or another serve as the template for the speeches of many politicians. The direct speech of Goebbels is incredibly modern, just change radio to television and no problem.

That's Russian novelist Sergei Minaev, profiled in the NYT today. The article is good, and there's also a Q and A sidebar, from which I drew the extended quote above.

In addition, I was struck by this quote:

I had a period when I was 24-28 years old. I was part of a heavy scene that began Friday evening and as a rule ended on Monday morning. This was about age 24-27. Now, I don't go out except for exceptional cases... Now, we get together at home and talk, the same format as in kitchens in the 1980s. That's much more pleasant because you're surrounded only by those people whom you like. There's none of that showing off. It's completely peaceful.

I was struck by the similarity of this depiction of life with the description of the life of a member of the Chinese intelligentsia of the 17th century in the latest New York Review of Books. From the article (not yet online) 'Ravished by Oranges' by Simon Leys, a review of "Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man":

A great number of scholars gave up the idea of entering public life and opted instead for an existence devoted to the exclusive cultivation of art and letters in the privacy of their homes... Zhang Dai... designed exquisite pavilions and gardens; he gathered a huge library, collected antiques, and was a connoisseur of calligraphy and painting...

Here you have two men, separated by 450 years, who respond to the bankruptcy of public and political life in the same way -- by retreating to the domain of the home and forming a world built around friends, art and talk. I'm not saying it's the best solution, but an understandable one in the face of a morally and politically bankrupt society, one becoming increasingly fascist -- which is to compare Ming Dynasty China and modern Russia.

technorati: writers, novelists, Russian, advertising, marketing

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- because I love you

Seven people who worked at a Massachusetts group home were fired after administering electrical "skin shocks" to teenage residents of the home. The problem was not that they did it at all -- reportedly the practice is in common use at the facility -- but that they did it on orders of a prank caller who was a former resident.

In other words, a kid who knew all about the shock "treatments" -- which are described as a method of punishment for "destructive behavior" -- pretended to be a supervisor and ordered the overworked staff to lay into a couple of other kids. And since the story says the electrical shocks are administered "only with parental, medical, psychiatric and court approval," what you've got is kids who were apparently approved for this punishment by parents, the courts, etc. Probably they had been zapped before. WTF!!!

Another amazing bit: The staff was described as skeptical about the orders, but carried them out anyway -- 77 times on one kid and 29 on the other. They were so skeptical they zapped the kid 77 times. I wonder how many times they zap them when the orders are legit!

A man who claims he had a seizure before ramming his car into a strip mall building also says he doesn't have any memory of the crash -- so no wonder he didn't remember his 72-year-old mother was in the car. She died in the crash and was not discovered for 24 hours, by which time the car had been sitting overnight in the police impound lot.

Of course, it wasn't entirely his fault. Firefighters were on the scene of the crash for more than an hour and never noticed the passenger, who was partially hidden by a deployed air bag.

A man who lives near the Clintons in Westchester Co., New York, was arrested for murdering his wife, whom he claimed was nabbed in a carjacking. Nice detail: a former lawyer, he "had been disbarred three months earlier for refusing to return unearned funds to clients. Jurors accused him of incompetence in defending a murder suspect."

Work in high tech? Then it's vacation time. Most companies, including the one I work for, close down the week between Xmas and New Year's, either officially or practically. In this case, because New Year's falls on a Tuesday, the break definitely extends from lunch tomorrow until Jan. 2.

If you work in retail -- sorry about that. I'll see you in the stores. Because all the geeks like me never do their Xmas shopping until the weekend before.

"Religious conservatives" are so busy condemning the sex enjoyed by 16-year-old Britney's-Little-Sister that they almost can't bring themselves to praise her reluctance to abort her pregnancy.

I don't know what they're upset about. It's like their ideal world, isn't it? A pregnant 16-year-old who bears the child. It makes it less likely for her to ever get an education or a decent job -- just like some out-of-control Third World child-bride country, which is what they'd love the U.S. to become. Oh, she hasn't said she's getting married, I see. There's still a chance she'll remain independent... perhaps even become what they fear most -- a welfare mother! So, jury's still out on that one.

Lest real teenagers be misled by this incident, the Nickelodeon Channel is considering a special on teen pregnancy. In that story, by the way, is the detail that Little Sis Whose Name I Can't Be Troubled To Learn met her baby-daddy at a church youth group. And: "In interviews, she has stressed her faith in family, God and traditional virtues -- much as Britney did years ago, before the wheels came off."

technorati: celebrities, Spears

RFID to track your magazine reading in waiting rooms

I take it back -- this is even more depressing:

The next time you visit your doctor for your appointment and flip through the pages of the magazines kept in the reception room unknowingly to kill time you might not be aware of the fact that a watch is being kept on your reading habits using RFID. Mediamark Research & Intelligence and DJG Marketing have come together to use RFID for measuring magazine readership in public waiting rooms.

More here.

technorati: surveillance

'Highly directional sound' = the end of solitude?

This is one of the more depressing things I've read lately: Advertising through "highly directional sound." Advertisers will be able to focus advertising pitches to very small areas -- so, for example, when you walk past the Preparation H, you'll hear a spiel for that, and when you walk past the cold medicine, you'll hear a pitch for that. Supposedly "it doesn't contribute to ambient noise pollution," but how are you going to avoid it in, say, a subway car? How far away is the day when there's a tiny speaker over your airline seat, where you're a captive audience for hours on end, broadcasting advertisements that are picked for you personally, based on your gender, age, and everything else the airline and the credit card company knows about you?

Fucking AAACK.

technorati: marketing, advertising

Jesus is coming again, this time as an 'action figure'

Talking Jesus action figures are a big seller this Christmas, according to a Mlps Star Tribune story. "The new-and-improved version tells stories about David and Goliath or feeding 'the five thousand' with loaves and fishes, in addition to speaking Bible verses such as John 3:16 and Mark 12:30-31."

The last day

I meant to finish the first draft of my current novel project last weekend, but I stopped a couple of pages short. I didn't want to rush into it, and -- typical -- I had to be somewhere in the early evening, so I cut my writing day short.

Then I thought I would be able to grab a few hours during the week, ideally on Monday, and finish. It was only a few pages. But instead I got utterly hammered at work. In my 12 years in the high tech industry, I don't think I've ever been as snowed under as I was this week. In fact, I'm seriously considering going in to work on Sunday just to get a head start on the next week.

I rarely write about my day job as a technical writer at a large software company. It's something I've been doing for several years one way or another, but I've only been a true technical writer since the fall of 2004 -- three years and then some. I have been able to handle pretty much everything that's been thrown at me, but this week my relative inexperience meant that I had too much to do at the very end of the project -- a project which I've thought was done about six times now. It's not all my fault, but there's more I could have done to alleviate the crush that happened this month.

Another motherfucking learning experience.

Meanwhile, I read a little piece of this book I'm working on for the first time last night to a few people at a dinner. It was a very interesting experience. When you're reading out loud you can instantly tell which sentences are well constructed and which sound awkward -- which is why they tell you to always, always read your stuff out loud before considering it finished. It made me remember how, in my past experiences at LitCrawl (2006, 2005) I closely edited the piece I was about to read with a mind to how it would sound read out loud. I didn't have the opportunity to do that last night, and it was good to be reminded of how important it is.

So on to the last few pages of this book, which I will subsequently spend as much time as I can rewriting. (Rewriting the whole book, not only the last few pages, important as they are.)

Update, 3:45 pm: I finished! The total word count of the first draft was 85,293. That's an average of 2031 words per session, with the book finished in 42 work sessions from July 28 to today.

Previous first-draft-finishing milestones:

Make Nice on January 1, 2003. That one took about five years.

Bangalored (which used to be called "Dear Prudence") on December 28, 2006. That one took a little more than two years.

technorati: writing, novel writing

Jodie Foster comes out, pretty much

This clip on cnn.com has Jodie Foster thanking "my beautiful Cydney," her partner for 14 years, followed by a discussion of what it means for her to come out as queer and what the temperature in Hollywood is for such admissions.

Also: calls self "a gentleman." Of course, at the same event, John Travolta was quoted as saying "I'm a woman who believes in the power of women," so maybe there was a sort of gender-bending thing going on generally.

Coppola enters his sage period

From an interview with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola in the December-January Bookforum:

One of the most wonderful things about being a filmmaker is doing the research. When I made The Godfather I got a number of books about the Five Families and how they came about and about the families before that. Knowledge is a string that keeps going back and back. ... I've always felt that when you're making a movie, you're essentially asking a question. And when you're done, the film you have is the answer.

technorati: narrative, Francis Ford Coppola, filmmaking

The short version of length

Here's a hilarious summary of Neil Strauss' book The Game from a writer at the Guardian in the U.K., where it was published as The Rules of the Game.

Don't worry about being a total loser. If women only went to bed with successful, attractive men, most of them would never get laid. Women want to be fooled into thinking you're not a jerk, every bit as much as you need them to believe it.

This is the book my orthopedic surgeon was discussing with the OR nurses as he probed my spine with a large needle a couple years ago. I'm sure the advice is just as current then as now.

technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER

BREAKING: 4 shot at Haggard's former church

The church's 11 a.m. service had recently ended, and hundreds of people were milling about when the gunman opened fire. Nearby were parents picking up their children from the nursery. The gunman was killed by a member of the church's armed security staff, the source said. Four people were shot...

One of the only times I've ever read that an armed security guard actually came in handy. Recent updates from local paper, including this wisdom (emphasis mine) from a teenager:

"Why would somebody walk into a church and do something like that?" asked New Life member Kim Ho-Fing-Loy, 16. "Especially with what just happened with Pastor Ted, this church just doesn't need this any more."

Of course, "what happened with Pastor Ted" happened over a year ago, but with precious little happening in that dead parcel of flyover land, it probably seems like yesterday.

technorati: New Life Church

Another obscure figure of the 60s

I was researching yet another obscure point for my current novel project today when I ran across this fun fact. Eva Green, a 27-year-old actress who appears in the new film "The Golden Compass," is the daughter of a French actress whose name will not ring a bell with many Americans -- Marlène Jobert. But perhaps this picture from the film I was researching, Godard's Masculin Feminin, will ring a bell:

(She is in the center in this picture, the only one I could find from the film. Note: The picture I put up earlier today was of the wrong actress. Oops.)

Here, by the way, is the bit of monologue I wanted from the Godard film:

We often went to the movies. The screen lit up, and we trembled... but more often than not, Madeline and I were disappointed. The pictures were dated, they flickered. And Marilyn Monroe had aged terribly. It made us sad.

This wasn't the film we'd dreamed of. This wasn't the total film that each of us had carried within himself... The film that we wanted to make -- or more secretly, no doubt -- that we wanted to live.

technorati: Godard, Eva Green, cinema

Almost at the end

I had a productive day writing today, reaching -- but not finishing -- the last scene of the book. Even when I do finish it, I still have to go back and write a good three or four thousand word chapter outlining a crucial part of the narrator's backstory.

So tomorrow I will do my best to write the ending, and then make some notes and get started on that last piece. Gettin' there!

The Ghost Writers

Think Tom Brokaw and other celebrities actually write those books that appear with their names on the cover? As Forbes says: "Surely you jest."

Why this is described as "ghost writing" and not as a hoax is beyond me. (Courtesy MediaBistro.)

technorati: writers, hoaxes

'Line Up' piece gets typical reaction

Some politically oriented pictures of Bush, Cheney and other administration figures in an exhibition of prints in the New York Public Library are creating controversy. The NYT's comments are spot-on, saying the mug-shot like images of Bush and his cronies would hardly be unusual on "The Daily Show," for instance, but in the context of a staid show at the library, they're electric.

See a video version of the show here.

Predictably, the right wing is saying stuff like:

At first I wondered who put al-Qaida (sic) in charge of the New York public library, but then of course remembered the American left is doing their bidding for them.

God, that shit is tired. I mean, images of Bush et al as criminals are almost as tired as that, but surely people who listen to right wing radio are getting tired of it, aren't they?

No, I guess they're immune to that. The left will get tired of anything and say "enough already" but rage junkies never get tired of their rage. Who could have imagined they'd still be demonizing Jane Fonda, for example?

technorati: Bush, Cheney, Republicans, art, political art

The Mark Pritchard I'm definitely not

In my bio page I've long had a section on "the Mark Pritchards I'm not," highlighting some of the other colorful people around the globe with my same name -- a Welsh footballer, an Australian cult leader, a British trance/ambient musician (he's probably the most famous), and so on.

There's also a fellow who was elected to the British Parliament a few years ago. This last worthy has never done anything significant, but today he's in the news because he's decided to carry water for far-right conservatives and yap about the "war on Christmas."

The shame of it.

Strange bio of the day

DAYVID FIGLER, whose humor commentaries have been featured on NPR's All Things Considered and whose work has appeared in McSweeney's (online), Uber, Exquisite Corpse, Time Out and in the Las Vegas anthology, "In the Shadow of the Strip" (University of Nevada Press). A judge and former capital murder defense attorney, he has been a featured reader at many national festivals including Bumbershoot, South by Southwest and
Lollapalooza; and has provided crime commentary on the Nancy Grace and Star Jones shows. Dayvid's most recent book is Grope (Future Tense Press). He is the creator of the one-man show Hello, I Love You, Where You Folks From?, and was recently awarded a grant from Cirque du Soliel to create a follow-up.

Now that's one scattershot bio. A former lawyer who defended people up for murder who has become a writer and performance artist, and "was recently awarded a grant from Cirque du Soleil." He changed his name to be all Hollywoody and noticeable, but he lives in, hmm, Las Vegas. Thus the Cirque du Soleil connection, I suppose. It would be interesting to go see this guy just to see his affect and better imagine him hanging out with the little bitty acrobats.

Getting closer

Aside from a long scene I still need to rewrite, I came a lot closer today to being finished with the first draft of my current novel project. I basically wrote the scenes that provide the climax of the plot. I need one more chapter, and then I need to go back and basically write chapter 10 again. Maybe next weekend.

Book deal of the day

Seen on the Publisher's Marketplace book deals list:

McSweeney's contributor G. Xavier Robillard's CAPTAIN FREEDOM: A Superhero's Quest for Truth, Justice, and The Celebrity He So Richly Deserves, to Carl Lennertz at Harper, for publication in Jan 2009.

Yet another in the series of superhero-themed literature that started a few years ago with "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay."

Read my own contribution to the genre, a short story called Cleaning Up After the Champion (PDF file).

Focus on the Fundies: Thumb-sucking edition

Faced with charges that he misused school funds for personal use, the president of Oral Roberts University, Richard Roberts, resigned from office last week. Today he told students that God had told him to resign, and in return would bless the school.

God told him on Thanksgiving that he should resign the next day, Roberts told students in the university's chapel. "Every ounce of my flesh said 'no'" to the idea, Roberts said, but he prayed over the decision with his wife and his father, Oral Roberts, and decided to step down.

Roberts said he wanted to "strike out" against the people who were persecuting him, and considered countersuing, but "the Lord said, 'don't do that,'" he said. ...

Roberts said God told him he would "do something supernatural for the university" if he stepped down from the job he held at the 5,700-student school since 1993.

This infantile view of God is so pathetic and ignorant that you have to wonder how these people ever heard of such a thing as a "university," much less how they were able to start and maintain one. The school -- if one can truly use that word -- is a branch of the Roberts "ministry," which is a word they use because they are afraid to call it a "church."

If this sort of "God told me" religion sounds familiar, that's because it's the same faith practiced by Pat Robertson, who has become a laughingstock for his "prophecies" that God will blast this or that city with a hurricane or earthquake if they vote the wrong way. (For example: "Mass killing" to strike U.S.; declares fatwa on Hugo Chavez; wants to drop nuke on State Department.)

technorati: Richard Roberts, charismatics, Pat Robertson

Humorous coda to 'Alice's Restaurant'

Last evening I was doing errands in the car when I happened to hear the 1995 live version of Arlo Guthrie performing "Alice's Restaurant."

As a coda on the 30th anniversary of the original events that inspired the song, he adds an anecdote in which Jimmy Carter's son Chip tells him of discovering, when the Carter family moved into the White House, the "Alice's Restaurant" album. The text of the anecdote is at the link above. Funny.

Arlo Guthrie, born in 1947, would have been only 18 in 1965 when the "massacree" transpired, 20 in 1967 when the original recording was made, and 22 when he appeared as himself in the Arthur Penn movie.

Yet he is now an old man. How do these things happen? Arlo Guthrie grown up, I can handle; middle-aged, okay. But not like this.

technorati: Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant, 1995

Bad Behavior bonus edition

Italian women are off da hook, and if it's because of their sexist society, well that's their problem, says a British journalist.

Among the holiday murder-suicides were this one in Vallejo (a working class town in the SF area) and this one in Maryland. Holidays: bad for families.

Don't drop your iPhone

A guy who buys broken iPhones and fixes them says "I've gotten ones that have been dropped, and it's like an atomic bomb exploded inside them."

It's Bad Behavior Saturday™! -- Senseless Acts edition

Facebook has been banned in Syria.

Dig this story from the Twin Cities: Pal says Qwest vandalism fits a pattern of senseless acts. Think about that for a second -- a pattern of senseless acts. I guess you could say that about a lot of heads of state. In this case the "ringleader" just liked to fuck things up, apparently. And he got a siren and lights so he could pull people over and shake them down. His spree ended when he pulled over an off-duty cop.

Stories with the words "ringleader" and "spree" are always entertaining, aren't they?

A passenger on a plane from San Francisco to Atlanta was arrested today on sexual assault charges after he twice groped the woman sitting next to him.

Boy George is in the news after "a Norwegian man claimed the singer handcuffed him to a bed and threatened him with sex toys." Sounds like a simple misunderstanding to me, but he's being charged with false imprisonment. Worst cut of all: being described in the story as "the aging pop star." At least that's better than being described as "the aging former pop star."

Thieves in New York are stealing bronze and copper grave markers from cemeteries. The metal has become valuable enough for Americans to act like Third Worlders.

Just wait til the oil crunch, then we'll see some real scavenging.

In an L.A. suburb, someone stole ten puppies worth $15,000 from a pet shop. And in Riverside, also in Southern California but too far away from L.A. to be a suburb, a man accidentally killed himself while "kind of fumbling around" with a shotgun.

In London, 82,000 people visited "the world's largest lifestyle show for freethinking adults who are comfortable with their sexuality." And speaking of sex, the disgustingly rich producer of the "Girls Gone Wild" titty tapes complained he was abused by jail guards when he spent two days in an Oklahoma jail. The guy's life is melting down in a spectacularly satisfying way:

He has been in jail since April, when he was cited for contempt after yelling at attorneys during mediation in a federal lawsuit brought by women who were underage when his production company filmed them in 2003.

That lawsuit has since been settled, but Francis' bond was revoked on criminal charges related to the 2003 filming when he was charged with having contraband -- $700 and prescription anti-anxiety medication -- in the Bay County jail. Federal officials then extradited him to Nevada to face tax evasion charges.

I do lack sympathy for this asshole, who made millions from exploiting drunken teenagers who never got a nickel of the money he made when they performed for his cameras.

But topping them all is this post from a few weeks ago on Amy's Robot. If you're not ready to turn your back on Bad Behavior for the rest of the day, this will do it.

Best band name ever for a non-existent band

From Alexis:

The Blob That Ate Tasha Yar

That rocks so hard. I am putting Alexis on notice right now, I'm stealing that for inclusion in my book. Of course, that doesn't mean others can't steal it.

Yay, it's a novel

I went over 75,000 words today. The novel isn't finished, but it feels like a real book now. Maybe a few more work sessions and the first draft will be done.

It was hard today. I was distracted for hours. Things came slowly, and I rewrote the same four paragraphs three times -- that rarely happens. But I finally latched onto a thread and was able to create a scene that works. Whew.

Click over there

I don't have a huge amount to say for myself, but look at the Metblogs over there on the right, where I'm posting up a storm, and at the Scratchpad beneath it, where I'm posting stories of interest without comment.

I did manage about a thousand words today. I don't mind it not being more; I set myself up for a big day next time.

Dept. of No Explanation Needed

The Munchkins got their own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Who Twinka was

In my looking around the internet for references to Henry Miller, I ran across an interview with the painter Wayne Thiebaud, whose candy-colored paintings of California I have always liked. In the interview, Thiebaud mentions a daughter Twinka (b. 1945). The name rang a bell, and I thought of this famous photograph:

I knew the title of the photo was "Imogen and Twinka," and I thought, hell, there must be only one Twinka. Wow, I never knew the gorgeous woman in that famous photo was the daughter of a famous painter.

The photographer is Judy Dater, and another of her pictures of the famous painter's daughter can be seen here.

Anyway, according to the interview, Twinka Thiebaud "helped take care of Henry Miller in the end of his life. She was friends with his daughter" and also edited a book of Miller's miscellanea titled "Reflections." She is seen with Miller in the small image at the top of this blog post, which has links to this amusing anecdote by a newly minted mail carrier who met Miller and Twinka. And here is the uncropped image of the two of them.

technorati: Imogen Cunningham

Marine's haunted second act

Here's a very interesting story by Luis Sinco, the photojournalist who took the famous picture of the exhausted cigarette smoking U.S. Marine, about how he got the photo, how he came to know its subject, and what happened to the young man after he was kicked out of the service for the PTSD he got serving in Iraq. I think the thing that shocked me the most was hearing that the 21-year-old's father was only 43.

Random links to Henry Miller

In writing my current book, I'm engrossing myself in the work of Henry Miller, digging through the Tropics and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (I'm now almost finished with Plexus.) At the same time I'm reading a biography, The Happiest Man Alive. Miller is clearly of a piece with Jack Kerouac in that his novels consists mostly of fictionalized autobiography, and I was looking on the internet for something that would be the equivalent of this chart of Kerouac's characters in On the Road and their real-life equivalents.

I found this blog entry by another Miller aficionado with a small graphic of such a chart that Miller himself kept, but not even the original graphic, much less a chart than anyone else compiled. Maybe I'll do it myself -- but not at the moment.

Meanwhile, here are a few interesting things I ran into on the way, thanks to Google and others' links:

• April 2007 SF Chronicle: Novelist Herbert Gold on his acquaintance with Miller. I was particularly amused by Gold's saying that in his later writing Miller "declared loudly and hotly, with dash, brio, careless grammar, repetitiveness and bawdy self-centeredness, that idleness, drunkenness and sexual complications were essential to a life of proper dignity." And also that "He was a Jack Kerouac who really liked sex."
• October 2007 Guardian: a short appreciation, but I liked the author's statement that without Miller leading the way "authors such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Kathy Acker, and Michel Houellebecq" would never have found the audiences they did.
• Style, June 1997: a scholarly article on "Henry Miller's bourgeois family Christmas in 'Nexus'"
• And finally, a big fan page of links to more Henry Miller-related stuff.

technorati: Henry Miller, writers

'Anticipatory conformity'

Reprinted from the Washington Post, 16 Nov 07, as a public service.

The Picture Of Conformity

In a Watched Society, More Security Comes With Tempered Actions

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
 

Don't look now. Somebody's watching.

But you knew that, didn't you? How could you not? It's been apparent for years that we're being watched and monitored as we traverse airports and train stations, as we drive, train, fly, surf the Web, e-mail, talk on the phone, get the morning coffee, visit the doctor, go to the bank, go to work, shop for groceries, shop for shoes, buy a TV, walk down the street. Cameras, electronic card readers and transponders are ubiquitous. And in that parallel virtual universe, data miners are busily and constantly culling our cyber selves.

Is anywhere safe from the watchers, the trackers? Is it impossible to just be let alone?

There, in that quintessentially public space, the Mall, came Michael Thrasher, 43, an ordinary guy, just strolling on a lovely recent day. We found him near an entrance to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, where a tower-high surveillance camera loomed overhead.

Thrasher didn't immediately see it. But when asked his feelings about privacy and surveillance, he said, "You just feel like there's always someone looking at you."

He's a baggage handler at Reagan National Airport, so he knows that he's watched at the workplace. Since Sept. 11, 2001, transit hubs have been laden with layer upon layer of surveillance: cameras, biometrics, sensors, even a new thing called the "behavior detection officer."

And it's good, Thrasher says, that someone's watching out for the bad guys. "Look what kind of world we're in now."

But Thrasher doesn't like the way his private space is shrinking. Like surfing the Web and knowing his data trail can easily be mined: "If I'm not doing anything illegal, why is it any of their business?"

Like being on the telephone and believing it could be tapped: "In the back of my mind, I'm thinking anybody could be listening to whatever I say."

And just going about one's daily business, walking down the street, going to the market?

"It just feels like there's no privacy now at all when you're doing public stuff."

Suddenly, he sees the camera, his exclamation point, and throws his hands in the air.

A Watching Culture

All this surveillance, monitoring and eavesdropping is changing our culture, affecting people's behavior, altering their sense of freedom, of autonomy. That's what the experts say: that surveillance robs people of their public anonymity. And they go even further, saying that pressure for conformity is endemic in a surveillance culture; that creativity and uniqueness become its casualties.

While there are benefits to surveillance -- the sense of security, the ability to view crime scenes -- the loss of autonomy represents the downside of our surveillance-heavy culture, says Jeffrey Rosen, a George Washington University law professor and author of "The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age."

"You need a sphere of immunity from surveillance to be yourself and do things that people in a free society take for granted," says Rosen. Things like going to the park or to the market. The loss of such autonomy is one of the "amorphous costs of having a world where there's no immunity from surveillance.

"This will transform the nature of public spaces in ways we could hardly imagine," he says. "People obviously behave differently when they're unsure about whether they're being observed. We know this from personal experience.

"I'm not at all suggesting that Orwell's '1984' is around the corner," he continues. "But things will change, and some of the changes will be good and others will be bad."

Christopher Slobogin, a University of Florida law professor, writes in his upcoming book, "Privacy at Risk":

"Anonymity in public promotes freedom of action and an open society. Lack of public anonymity promotes conformity and an oppressive society."

After all, who is Big Brother looking for in all this surveillance? People who are different, who do not fit a preconceived norm.

In their insistent way, those public digital message boards that urge us to "Report Suspicious Activity" are pushing a sense of that norm. In effect, they call upon ordinary people with no training or expertise to become surveillants and enforce a code of conduct, an expected norm, based on what might seem, to them, suspicious, or just different.

We watch what we say on the phone. Where once it was just a joke, now it is real: You never know if you might be tapped. We don't joke about bombs or hijacking, especially not in public. Not that we'd want to, mind you, but who remembers the days when it was just a joke? In mixed company, we don't say anything about al-Qaeda that isn't flat out condemnatory. And we are aware, alas, that our library book selections could be added to our possible dossiers, as per the USA Patriot Act.

How far can it go? We have only to recall the 2006 film "The Lives of Others," which portrays how the Stasi of Communist East Germany deployed hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to spy on their fellow citizens and turn them in.

The work of the new "behavior detection officers" watching us at airports is all about enforcing a norm. Part of the Transportation Security Administration, the officers are trained to detect extremely nervous, deceitful or unusual travelers by observing travelers' facial expressions and their behavior.

In training the BDOs, "we teach that everybody's been in an airport long enough to know what the norm is," says Carl Maccario, a program analyst for what the TSA calls SPOT, or Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques. "There's an expected norm or an expected baseline environment. . . . We teach the BDOs, in a simplified form, to look for anomalous behavior in that environment."

Being different? A big problem.

Becoming Invisible

If we know we're being watched and know there is an expected mode of behavior, how does that change our actions?

Call it "anticipatory conformity." Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard social psychologist who has studied information technology for decades, coined the phrase in 1988.

Applying that concept to the post-9/11 era, Zuboff says she sees anticipatory conformity all around and expects it to grow even more intense.

"I think the first level of that is we anticipate surveillance and we conform, and we do that with awareness," she says. "We know, for example, when we're going through the security line at the airport not to make jokes about terrorists or we'll get nailed, and nobody wants to get nailed for cracking a joke. It's within our awareness to self-censor. And that self-censorship represents a diminution of our freedom."

We self-censor, she says, not only to follow the rules, but also to avoid the shame of being publicly singled out.

Once anticipatory conformity becomes second nature, it becomes progressively easier for people to adapt to new impositions on their privacy, their freedoms. The habit has been set. People have "internalized the surveillance architecture" within their own subconscious.

We have yet to reach the level of surveillance of, say, the ubiquitous retina-scanning in the movie "Minority Report." But the technology is changing quickly.

"The next thing is they'll just have cameras everywhere," Zuboff says. "They'll have software programmed with algorithms, and the algorithms will be able to detect these so-called anomalies. And so you may be distraught because you're flying home to your grandmother's funeral, but the algorithm has detected an anomalous behavior, and the next thing you're being strip-searched by a couple of FBI agents."

And the technology advances so insidiously, so imperceptibly, that only later will we notice how deep the changes in our lives have been.

"It's a little bit like locked doors," says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and Stanford University instructor. "Today nobody has any concept of what it's like to have a house without a locked door or a security system.

"As the memory of a world without surveillance disappears, society will just create a new normal, and then you'll see worse horrors," he says. "Our whole lives will become like the TSA checkpoint. You walk in there, you don't look mad, don't look upset, don't look distracted. Do nothing to stand out."

Recalling an old Japanese saying that "the pheasant who flies gets shot," Saffo says the mindset of the future may be: "Practice being invisible."

Public Reaction

Surveys reflect a mixed national mood on Big Brother. In a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation-Harvard University poll conducted earlier this year respondents were split, 48 to 48 percent, on whether the government is doing enough to protect civil liberties as it fights terrorism.

More than a year earlier, in a Post-ABC News poll, 62 percent said the FBI should continue to have extra authority for wiretapping, obtaining records and surveillance in terror investigations.

In a different kind of opinion sample, Slobogin, the law professor, randomly selected 70 people from Florida jury pools and asked them to rank the level of intrusiveness of 25 law enforcement tactics, including several surveillance techniques.

In that 2006 study, the respondents ranked bedroom searches as the highest level of intrusiveness, followed by searches of e-mails, records from banks, pharmacies and credit cards, and the use of snoopware. The police pat-down -- that classic of perceived intrusiveness -- didn't rank as high.

In an earlier study, in 2002, 190 respondents also said bedroom searches were most intrusive, followed by body cavity searches at the border. But the monitoring of street surveillance cameras was a close third, deemed more intrusive than even a helicopter hovering over one's back yard.

People "don't expect to be stalked either by a person or by a camera -- at least they don't like it," says Slobogin. "They expect to get lost in the crowd, or at least not to be monitored continuously."

Scrutiny's Prison

And the "surveillance industrial complex," as some call it, is churning out ever more sophisticated methods for watching us, tracking us. Think: radio frequency identification chips. Think: iris recognition.

The surveillance camera? It is "no longer simply the fixed camera that looks like it's sitting inside a white shoe box pointing at the register of a 7-Eleven," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"Now we have cameras that sit in black globes that zoom and pan at 360 degrees, have telescopic lenses and are beginning to interface with databases of facial images to try to do real-time matching of people in public places."

And cyberspace is littered with our spoor, our data trails, just lying there ready for the data miners to probe and find out what we buy, read, eat, how we spend, where we travel.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean no one's watching.

In fact, we can be watched and tracked from so many different angles in so many different ways that hints of the Panopticon are hard to ignore. That was the invention of the 18th century British economist Jeremy Bentham, who conceived of the Panopticon as a circular prison in which warders could see prisoners at all times.

The Panopticon would create in the inmate a sense of "conscious and permanent visibility," and yet he "must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so," wrote philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 book, "Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison."

Today, says Zuboff, we operate within an "information Panopticon."

"In our modern dematerialized world, you don't have to build a building to have permanent surveillance over individuals and their behavior," she says. "You can do it with an information system."

Future Control

There is, admittedly, something creepy about all this: creepy, serious and very real, so much so that ordinary people are aware of the extent to which they are being watched and monitored. All that Doug Gooch asks is that data miners be honest about what they're doing.

"If they're going to monitor my use of the Internet, I should know up front," Gooch says. "Everything, to me, should be disclosed."

Gooch, 51, an engineer on vacation from Michigan, strolled the Mall last month with his wife and law-student son as the family took a few moments to mull the weighty questions of surveillance and a free society. They spoke with a hint of resignation.

"Maybe the free market will sort it out," said Kyle Gooch, 23. He was talking about data mining and the push by government agencies to get the records of some search engines. Maybe people will simply stop using certain sites, he offered.

"There needs to be a balance," said his mother, Shirlene Gooch, 49. While she wants law enforcement to be able to search for terrorists through cyberspace, she worries it could go too far. She worries, too, that worrying may be futile; that the proverbial train is well down the tracks, and it may be too late to intervene in technology's uses.

"It's hard to know when to stop," she said of law enforcement, adding, "There's no way to stop technology."

The Gooches strolled onward, under the surveillance camera's watchful eye.

technorati: privacy, surveillance

How baby boomers took over

The current issue (19 Nov 07) of Newsweek has this remarkable passage:

[As the Spring of 1968 began, President Lyndon] Johnson was bitter. "How is it possible," he repeatedly asked, "that all these people could be so ungrateful to me after I had given them so much? Take the Negroes. I fought for them from the first day I came into office. I spilled my guts in getting them the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress ... I asked so little in return. Just a little thanks. Just a little appreciation. That's all. But look what I got instead. Riots in 175 cities. Looting. Burning. Shooting ..." On and on, Johnson would rant, against the students and poor people who had turned against him, despite all he had done for them, "young people by the thousands leaving their universities, marching in the streets, chanting that horrible song about how many kids had I killed that day ..." ("Hey! Hey! LBJ! ...")

Johnson's worst dream, the most violent and diabolical, began with a twisted take on a cattle stampede. "I felt," Johnson later confided to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, "that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions." There were "the rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing that I had feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of his name, were dancing in the streets."

How satisfying -- even 30 years later -- to hear a politician actually acknowledging the effect of protests. No wonder baby boomers are so full of themselves now -- they brought down not just Nixon, but Johnson as well.

As for now, can you imagine George Bush even being aware of -- much less being upset by -- the national mood of disgust with him?

technorati: LBJ, 1968

Autumn

I'm in the waiting room of an outpatient surgery center in Palo Alto, where Cris is having some work done on her ankle. I think we've been here ten times in the last several years, as she deals with various orthopedic problems. Once she got something done at Stanford but usually we come to this place on the other side of downtown Palo Alto. After an hour or so we'll head home and she'll install herself on the living room couch along with a little ice chest with a pump; it circulates cold water to a bladder that the surgeon places near the arthroscopy incision when the surgery is over. This is to reduce swelling and promote healing -- a nice innovation. We have gone through this drill so many times that we piled a few of these ice water pump units in the basement at home, and today instead of receiving a new one we tried to give one back to the handsome young man who distributes them. He was very taken aback; apparently no one had ever refused to take a new ice water unit and tried to give him one instead. Eventually we arranged to simply give it to the facility.

I was here myself a couple years ago for a little cortisone injection.

Happy Birthday, Chris Carraher

Happy birthday to my wonderful friend and collaborator Chris Carraher. Before I was a novelist, before she was a painter, we did performance art together in the 80s and early 90s. Behold:

That's a flier from 1986, if I'm not mistaken.

Mission accomplished

Today I took two colleagues from the Long Island, NY office of the big company I work for, along with a local co-worker, to lunch at Bar Bambino in the city. Since the two visitors had done North Beach the previous evening, I was careful to explain that this was the Mission District, that it had been Irish and Italian for many years, and was now Latino and Young Bohemian. I explained how nearby Mission St. was working class like a busy street in Queens, while a block away Valencia St. was full of upscale bars and restaurants.

After listening to me expound for several minutes, one of the visitors said: "So... Mission District... does that have anything to do with Mission furniture?"

That led me to explain about the Franciscans and Mission Dolores and the scene in Vertigo where James Stewart follows Kim Novak into its cemetery, and that it was the only cemetery in San Francisco, since all the other cemeteries had been moved out of town to Colma which was, I said, on the other side of San Bruno Mountain from our office in South City. When I added that Colma was known as the City of the Dead for its predominant population of corpses, they thought that was the funniest thing they ever heard.

technorati: San Francisco, Mission District

End of the weekend

Finishing up another weekend of writing, having redeemed the slow day yesterday with a good 3000 word day today. I'm nearing my 75,000 word count goal for the novel, and now I have another challenge: ending it. Yesterday at the start of work I mapped out several scenes that remain to be written purely from a plotting perspective; even after this weekend, there are at least seven more plot movements to hit.

That will take some doing, but it's pleasurable work; writing the end of a book and hitting plot points that have been prepared for all along is like kissing somebody you've had a crush on for a long time and having it turn out just as much fun as you always imagined.

technorati: writing, novel writing

Rainy day

Drizzle all day, more forecast for all night. I've been inside writing all day, but now I have to walk home in it.

Dig the thing about Gorbachev in the Scratchpad. Maybe someday Barry Bonds will do an ad for Viagra.

Loopt and other services: goodbye to privacy

Reprinting this NYT story as a public service.

New York Times, 23 Oct 07

Privacy Lost: These Phones Can Find You

By LAURA M. HOLSON


Two new questions arise, courtesy of the latest advancement in
cellphone technology: Do you want your friends, family, or colleagues
to know where you are at any given time? And do you want to know where
they are?

Obvious benefits come to mind. Parents can take advantage of the
Global Positioning System chips embedded in many cellphones to track
the whereabouts of their phone-toting children.

And for teenagers and 20-somethings, who are fond of sharing their
comings and goings on the Internet, youth-oriented services like Loopt
and Buddy Beacon are a natural next step.
Sam Altman, the 22-year-old co-founder of Loopt, said he came up with
the idea in early 2005 when he walked out of a lecture hall at
Stanford.

"Two hundred students all pulled out their cellphones, called someone
and said, 'Where are you?' " he said. "People want to connect."

But such services point to a new truth of modern life: If G.P.S. made
it harder to get lost, new cellphone services are now making it harder
to hide.

"There are massive changes going on in society, particularly among
young people who feel comfortable sharing information in a digital
society," said Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation based in San Francisco.

"We seem to be getting into a period where people are closely watching
each other," he said. "There are privacy risks we haven't begun to
grapple with."

But the practical applications outweigh the worries for some converts.

Kyna Fong, a 24-year-old Stanford graduate student, uses Loopt,
offered by Sprint Nextel. For $2.99 a month, she can see the location
of friends who also have the service, represented by dots on a map on
her phone, with labels identifying their names. They can also see
where she is.

One night last summer she noticed on Loopt that friends she was
meeting for dinner were 40 miles away, and would be late. Instead of
waiting, Ms. Fong arranged her schedule to arrive when they did.
"People don't have to ask 'Where are you?'" she said.

Ms. Fong can control whom she shares the service with, and if at any
point she wants privacy, Ms. Fong can block access. Some people are
not invited to join ― like her mother.

"I don't know if I'd want my mom knowing where I was all the time," she said.

Some situations are not so clear-cut. What if a spouse wants some time
alone and turns off the service? Why on earth, their better half may
ask, are they doing that? What if a boss asks an employee to use the
service?
So far, the market for social-mapping is nascent ― users number in the
hundreds of thousands, industry experts estimate.

But almost 55 percent of all mobile phones sold today in the United
States have the technology that makes such friend-and- family-tracking
services possible, according to Current Analysis, which follows trends
in technology.

So far, it is most popular, industry executives say, among the college set.

But others have found different uses. Mr. Altman said one customer
bought it to keep track of a parent with Alzheimer's. Helio, a mobile
phone service provider that offers Buddy Beacon, said some
small-business owners use it to track employees.

Consumers can turn off their service, making them invisible to people
in their social-mapping network. Still, the G.P.S. service embedded in
the phone means that your whereabouts are not a complete mystery.

"There is a Big Brother component," said Charles S. Golvin, a wireless
analyst at Forrester Research. "The thinking goes that if my friends
can find me, the telephone company knows my location all the time,
too."

Phone companies say they are aware of the potential problems such
services could cause.
If a friend-finding service is viewed as too intrusive, said Mark
Collins, vice president for consumer data at AT&T's wireless unit,
"that is a negative for us." Loopt and similar services say they do
not keep electronic records of people's whereabouts.

Mr. Altman of Loopt said that to protect better against unwelcome
prying by, say, a former friend, Loopt users are sent text messages at
random times, asking if they recognize a certain friend. If not, that
person's viewing ability is disabled
.
Clay Harris, a 25-year-old freelance marketing executive in Memphis,
says he uses Helio's Buddy Beacon mostly to keep in touch with his
friend Gregory Lotz. One night when Mr. Lotz was returning from a
trip, Mr. Harris was happy to see his friend show up unannounced at a
bar where he and some other friends had gathered.

"He had tried to reach me, but I didn't hear my phone ring," Mr.
Harris said. "He just showed up and I thought, 'Wow, this is great.'"

He would never think to block Mr. Lotz. But he would think twice
before inviting a girlfriend into his social-mapping network. "Most
definitely a girl would ask and wonder why I was blocking her," he
said.

technorati: Loopt, privacy, tracking, stalking, mobile phones

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Healing arts edition

This is really my favorite story for a long time. From the SF Chronicle:

Scam artists who use a toxic chemical in a teacup to make their elderly victims feel dizzy and in need of "healing" are on the loose in the Chinese American community, San Francisco police warned today. ...

A victim is approached by three Chinese suspects, a woman and two men, who ask if the victim is feeling sick. The suspects fill a teacup with water and invite the victim to stick a finger in the cup, explaining that it is a sign of illness if the water changes color, police said. When the victims stick in their fingers, they begin to feel dizzy -- apparently from a chemical in the water that is absorbed through the skin. The scam artists then demand money to provide a "cure."

They could also have their victims simply lick a toy fire truck -- I hear that's dangerous too.

DNA scientist James Watson, who has been shooting his mouth off about race for some time, finally announced his retirement at age 79 after being pilloried for saying that Africans' intelligence is not "the same as ours." The co-discoverer of DNA was employed by a genetic research lab in New York. And in another case of an aged doctor, an 89-year-old convicted murderer was paroled in New York. He killed his wife in 1976 by injecting her with Demerol, and was arrested at JFK as he tried to flee the country with "more than $450,000 in cash, securities and valuables from his wife's estate."

Doctors say calm down about drug-resistant staph, and just go wash your hands.

In other news, a teacher who published a satirical novel about a private school similar to the one he worked at is suing the school for wrongful termination.

Authors getting '10 percent of nothing' for foamer books

Five right-wing authors have sued their publisher for marketing huge lots of their books to book clubs and other outlets it owns at vastly reduced prices, meaning that instead of getting the usual 15% royalty on cover price, they get 10% of the publisher's net profit on the internally-marketed books, which is virtually nil.

Said one disgruntled writer: "You get 10 per cent of nothing because they basically give them away." Another complained:

The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books. It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance. Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?

I'm not sure where the Marxist part comes into it, unless he's referring to the fact that these writers are already wealthy and the publisher, using the dictum "To each according to his needs," figured they didn't need the money.

Anyway, fun for all. Once you see what books they're talking about, you'll quickly lose any sympathy. The titles include such shit-bombs as "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry" and "Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America's National Security."

technorati: conservatives, Republicans, right wing

I am still struggling with Technorati

Somewhere along the line it got screwed up.... Here goes again...

Technorati Profile

LitCrawl photo set

Derek Powazek, a terrific photographer, releases the photo set from this year's Litquake, and while he's at it, discusses how to photograph events.

technorati: Litquake, LitCrawl

The only people that interest me are the mad ones

"... I certainly do envy you... The thing I'll always remember about this fellow" -- he looked from one to the other with a melting glow -- "is his inextinguishable gaiety. I don't think I've seen him depressed more than once or twice in all the time I've known him. As long as there's food and a place to flop... isn't that it?" He turned his gaze on me with unmingled affection. "Some of my friends -- you know the ones I mean -- ask me occasionally if you aren't just a bit touched. I always say, 'Certainly he is ... too bad we're not all touched in the same way.' And then they ask me how you support yourself--and your family. There I have to give up..."

We all began to laugh rather hysterically. Ulric laughed even more heartily than the rest of us. He laughed at himself -- for raising such silly issues. Mona, of course, had a different reason for laughing.*

"Sometimes I think I'm living with a madman," she blurted out, tears in her eyes.

"Yes?" said Ulric, drawing the word out.

"Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and begins laughing. He's laughing about something that happened eight years ago. Something tragic usually."

"I'll be damned," said Ulric.

"Sometimes he laughs that way because things are so hopeless he doesn't know what to do. It worries me when he laughs that way."

"Shucks," I said, "it's only another way of weeping."

-- Henry Miller, Plexus

* Miller's wife June -- "Mona" in the book -- supported them by gold-digging.

technorati: Henry Miller,artists,iconoclasm

More experimenting

Trying to shoehorn the tumblr thingy into my right pane over there...

technorati: tumblr

Focus on the Fundies: Nobody for President

Man, if the Democrats manage to fuck this up, there's just no hope.

Evangelicals find little to love in presidential field
...
Republican strategist Arnold Steinberg said that he has found "enormous confusion" among evangelical voters as they consider the GOP presidential field. Social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage remain fundamental for such voters -- but in an era of war and terrorism, "their concerns about national security have trumped their values concerns," Steinberg said.

"They'll say, 'I disagree with Rudy -- but I'm terribly concerned about national security and Islamo-fascism,'" Steinberg said. "Some people will say they will never vote for a pro-choice Republican, (yet) they're voting for him."

This is one reason why Newt Gingrich decided not to run -- in the eyes of the fundies, with his divorces and all, he's no better than Giuliani.

technorati: fundamentalists, evangelicals, presidential politics

Another fucking beautiful day

I'm not sure how many more of these gorgeous fall days I can take. I took a break from writing in the middle of the day and went home and sat in the garden with Cris for a few minutes. Milagrito the cat was out there with us, enjoying the family feeling. A bumblebee circled about.

Then I walked back to my office and did another 3000 words. This was a good weekend, over 5600.

Work avoidance, a wonderful thing

A Seattle resident found discarded confidential police files in an alley and turned them over to a local TV station. The files contained secret riot control plans, personnel information about suicidal and abusive cops, and all kinds of shit. (Courtesy Pogo Was Right, where almost daily you can read about this happening -- confidential information found in dumpsters and trash piles.)

A Girl Scout leader in Pensacola, Fla. pleaded guilty to stealing the identities of 15 Girl Scouts and using their Social Security numbers and other information to obtain $87,000 in illegal tax refunds.

Experiments

I am experimenting with a new internety thing called Tumblr, using it to manually clip interesting news stories: markpritchard.tumblr.com -- courtesy Alexis. Apparently you can use it to "clip" all sorts of things, but I can't figure out how to make the RSS feed from this blog -- which may well be broken -- appear in it.

I can also train its contents to appear here on this page -- but first I have to figure out a way to keep it from taking over half the page.

Meanwhile, a colleague at work -- I work as a technical writer at a giant software company large enough to have seven tech writers just in our division -- keeps asking me if I plan to do National Novel Writing Month. I said I'm not only already writing another novel as fast as I can, but the NaNo I started in November 2004 took me more than two years to finish and still needs a rewrite. In my opinion, National Novel Writing Month exists primarily to give people permission to start a novel -- and I'm past that point. I may not be past many points in my career as a novelist but I'm past that one.

technorati: writing, National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo

Small earthquake

We had a rumbling earthquake of no account a little after 8 pm. It was all vibration and no jolting. The duration was a little longer than most minor earthquakes but it never got serious and I remained sitting on the couch watching "Help!" on the Sundance Channel.

Apparently it was a little more startling in San Jose near the epicenter.

technorati: earthquake

Another bad retail experience

Cris wanted some photo paper, the kind you put in your desktop color printer, so I drove to the Walgreens at 24th and Potrero to get it. You can really tell the character of a neighborhood by evaluating the quality of the Walgreens at the center of it. There was exactly one (1) employee visible behind the cash registers at the front, and none other in the whole store, aside from the pharmacy. Because it's a ghetto Walgreens, all the expensive stuff is behind the counter, and that includes the photo paper. But the one guy at the cash register constantly had a line and there's no way he could help me... I finally had to drive to another Walgreens, this one on 30th and Mission. It's really no difference in the neighborhood, but at least there were more employees working there. When I got my receipt it had a long text printed on it about calling their 800 number and commenting on their service, you could win a $3000 prize. Unfortunately I didn't get a receipt at the first store where I was able to buy nothing at all.

technorati: Walgreens

Another sunny day

Here's another sunny day I'm spending indoors working on my book. In years past I used to hike all day long on Mount Tam on days like this. Especially in the fall, it's beautiful out there. Oh well, I also used to wonder why I wasn't writing. Now I am.

Focus on the Fundies: Swinging pendulum hits foamers

This NYT magazine article on the changing political winds among evangelical (formerly hard-right-wing) Christian churches is fascinating. Finally disenchanted with the Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys and perhaps becoming more sensitive to what their religion actually says about caring for poor people and the earth, the denizens of meagachurches can no longer be counted on to vote straight Republican. The more politicized see no presidential candidate to vote for; the less politicized realize they've sold their silk purse for a sow's ear.

Important milestones in the disillusionment include the fall of Ted Haggard and David Kuo's book about Rove's manipulation of Christians for political gain.

technorati: Republicans, fundamentalists, politics, churches

Deep autumn

End of another day of writing. I got a very late start, but once I got going it went well, and I wrote the scene I wanted to, about 2600 words. Now I think I'm going to do some thinking about what needs to be in the next chapter, so I can sleep on it and then get started tomorrow with a little more alacrity.

Last night we went to the symphony and I actually got an idea for the book's ending. It was generally not a fantastic night at the symphony but I was able to jot down a note and that felt really worth it.

Writing about where you're not

He often makes final revisions to his books on the veranda of his French home, with only oak forests, vineyards and sunflower fields to distract him. It's difficult to imagine a place farther from the pulsating streets of Bangkok.

"The distance forces the imagination to work," Mr. Burdett said. "It becomes an imaginative exercise rather than a factual research exercise. It's a good mental trick to play if you can."

--from a profile of author John Burdett,
whose mystery thrillers are set in Thailand but who owns a "villa" in France.

I guess that helps explain why it's easier for me, and perhaps most people, to write about an experience long after it's happened. For example, when I was in Japan teaching English, I found myself writing copiously about San Francisco. After I got back to SF, I found myself setting stories in Japan.

technorati: writers, John Burdett, writing

Flannery never liked digging too deeply

Here's Flannery O'Connor, writing to her correspondent "A" on why the bull had to gore a character in her story "Greenleaf":

What personal problems are worked out in the story must be unconscious. My preoccupations are technical. My preoccupation is how I am going to get the bull's horns into this woman's ribs. Of course why his horns belong in her ribs is something more fundamental but I can say I give [sic] it much thought. Perhaps you are able to see things in these stories that I can't see because if I did see I would be too frightened to write them. I have always insisted that there is a fine grain of stupidity required in the fiction writer.

Previously: Another instance in which O'Connor resisted interpretation of one of her stories.

technorati: Flannery O'Connor, fiction, literary criticism

Joan of Arc 23 years later

Twenty three years ago I did a performance art piece with my friends who had come from France the year before from Paris, Catherine (seen here) and Betty. It was a musical piece with songs and it was all about Joan of Arc, the fear of nuclear war, and my brother, who was a fighter pilot at the time.

Now tonight I'm going to see another musical theater piece about Joan of Arc with Catherine, and with Cris, who hasn't known me as long, that's how long I've known Catherine.

technorati: theater, performance art, Amanda Moody