Totally sprung

I took that picture Monday evening from Bernal Heights, which we live at the foot of. Our house is one of the specks of white in the middle of the picture near the tree branches. It was rainy all morning and then it cleared up. When I got home I walked up the hill to the park and took this picture.

That's the news today. It's spring. Unless you want to hear about how I have to get $3500 worth of work on my car. Didn't think so.

technorati: Bernal Heights, San Francisco, skyline

Quiet days

I don't have much to say to the world lately. Did you want to know I went to the dentist, or that the cherry tree in our backyard is blooming? That it's raining and I got to stay home this afternoon? I didn't think so.

Almost as uninteresting is what I'm reading: "Catch-22," and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." Most people probably assume someone like me read the Chabon book long ago. Sorry, didn't get to it til now. I am so behind. I did manage to read Darcey Steinke's "Suicide Blonde" and most of her latest book "Milk," which is really beautifully written but which is, for some reason, hard for me to stick with.

And I wasted a lot of time over the last couple of months reading bits of stuff I didn't stick with and wasn't that interested in in the first place, including Harold Robbins' "79 Park Avenue," which I picked up mainly for the cover. I just donated it to Community Thrift, though, so if you want to see the cover (very early-60s Pocket Book) you'll have to go down there and snag it.

Finally, in literary news, they're shooting a movie of Richard Yates' fantastic early 60s book "Revolutionary Road," about the co-optation of a high-minded middle-brow young couple who decide to chuck their middle-class life and follow their dream and move to Paris -- but get waylaid along the way. It's a great book and now it is being made into a move with Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, their first pairing since "Titanic."

I don't know why that book isn't as famous as other anti-establishment youth-anthem books of the 60s -- "Little Big Man," "Catch-22," "The Graduate."

Onward in the 21st century: surveillance without end

Courtesy Mitch Radcliffe, a story on a new Republican effort to force ISPs to archive users' searches, supposedly to aid in the search for child pornographers and so on. As Radcliffe points out, we already have enough law to pursue child pornographers. So the real agenda is probably just the Republicans' crazed quest to increase the power of the executive branch -- in this case the Justice Dept. -- and chip away at people's civil rights.

Ironically, this news comes on the same day a federal judge struck down the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, declaring it unconstitutionally broad and harmful to free speech. This was the case in which my friend Marilyn testified, reading into the record a couple of sentences from my pseudonymous porn novel Lesbian Camp Girls. See my previous post from Nov. 2006 when she testified and was interviewed, with her mother, by Nerve.com.

technorati: Republicans, civil rights, COPA

Rights of spring

I didn't want to miss pointing to this AP story headlined Christian Right at crossroads, about how the movement's founders (Robertson, Falwell, Dobson) are etting up there and how there are few figures standing up to take their place -- especially now that Ted Haggard has been neutralized. Also see my post from March 7 on the same topic.

Otherwise, Bush and his rapidly shrinking administration are officially beleaguered, even if the President himself can't spell that. But there are other things to worry about -- I found the interview on "Fresh Air" Monday with the author of a book on Blackwater USA completely chilling. The author's thesis is that Blackwater and the other "security contractors" hired to protect civilian and government interests in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots represent the outsourcing of the American military, with the object being to avoid Congressional oversight.

Never mind what the CIA and other security agencies are doing -- the Addingtons of the world are way ahead of you. Blackwater and its ilk can operate in complete privacy, ignore requests for information, ride roughshod over any notion of civil rights and the rule of law, with impunity. And author Jeremy Scahill's description of the secretive, powerful and far-right evangelical leaders of Blackwater is positively frightening. You really should listen to that "Fresh Air" segment -- if you're already depressed today, that is.

technorati: fascists, religious right, Cheney, David Addington, Blackwater, Fresh Air

Focus on the Fundies: Baptist suggests no right to life for 'gay' fetuses

An influential pastor of the arch-conservative Southern Baptist persuasion has wondered aloud whether if homosexuality is indeed found to be biological in origin, should his followers eliminate "gay" fetuses, perhaps by wearing some sort of patch that prevented their birth?

Here is where the line blurs between someone has the ability to be a real visionary, and someone whose shriveled, scorched-earth version of religion has instead caused him to be a raving paranoid. In fact, it's quite a leap in the first place for one of these foamers to even admit to the possibility that homosexuality could have a biological component, because that would imply -- to someone with a somewhat more expansive soul -- that God created some people gay and thus it might not be as bad as they've always thought it is. No, instead this thought leads him to wonder what "you could do about it" (emphasis mine) in order to keep the putative queer from sin.

In an interview on Friday, Mohler said that Christian couples "should be open" to the prospect of changing the course of nature -- if a biological marker for homosexuality were to be found. He would not support gene therapy but might back other treatments, such as a hormonal patch.

"I think any Christian couple would want their child to be whole and healthy," he said. "Knowing that that child is going to be a sinner, we would not want to make their personal challenges more difficult if they could be less difficult."

Actually, there is some foundation in Christian teaching for what I think this fellow is proposing. Jesus himself is quoted as saying "if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire." (Matt. 18:9). I think this is what Mohler is getting at: what's the difference between a roving eye and a putatively sinful fetus? Why not keep the fetus from existing in the first place?

So the amazing thing about this cluck is not merely that he is suggesting the possibility of a biological basis for homosexuality, but that he is envisioning something that could actually justify abortion. You know, I always wondered who the foamers hated worse, women or gays. Now we know. They'd rather see women have a right to abortion if it meant the elimination of homosexuality.

Then, low down in the article is the real reason the guy's upset:

Homosexuality is a "huge challenge" to Christianity, said Mohler, referring, in part, to the Rev. Ted Haggard, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who was forced to step down last November because of a gay sex scandal. And the Rev. Lonnie Latham, a member of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, was embroiled in a gay sex scandal but was found not guilty of having solicited sex from another man.

"In our churches and in our families there are people struggling with homosexuality and for a long time this was kind of hidden," Mohler said in the interview. "It is no longer hidden, and the fact is we've got to be coming up with genuinely Christian responses to Christians who are in this struggle."

Yes, even Brother Mohler understands that Ted Haggard is lying when he says he emerged from his rehab "one hundred percent heterosexual." And it scares the crap out of him. If fine upstanding preachers like Ted and Lonnie can be queer, how can he risk closing his eyes during the next men's prayer meeting? Some cocksucker might be sneaking up on him.

technorati: fundies, Baptists, abortion, homosexuality, homophobia, crypto-fascists

Novel idea

Yesterday I wrote about the queue of ideas for novels that I and other writers have, some of which we can never hope to have the time or knowledge to actually write. Here's a news story that provides a perfect inspiration for a novel. I'll even give you a title: "The Extra Man."

The calamity of Asia's lost women

The killing of baby girls has led to a surplus of disaffected men who are a threat to stability

Will Hutton
Sunday March 18, 2007
The Observer

In the middle of the 19th century, an area the size of Germany located between Beijing and Shanghai in central China was run for more than 15 years by the Nian rebels, a 50,000-strong network of bandit groups who lived by pillage and rape. The inability of the Imperial armies to quell the rebellion for so long was a sign of the system's vulnerability that would eventually lead to its collapse.

Importantly, the Nian bandits were men without women, long understood in China as the principal stimulus to their rebellion and cause of their violence. They originated in a district in northern China -- Huai-pei -- where the killing of infant girls to conserve food for more economically valuable boys in response to famine had been particularly terrible.

By 1850, the official records show that there were 129 men to every 100 women, an astonishing imbalance in the ratio between the sexes. Lower-class Huai-pei peasants could not find wives; hungry, economically displaced and, in Chinese terms, 'bare branches' -- not proper men because they could not marry and father children -- they turned to banditry as providing meaning and sustenance alike.

Those womanless bandits cast a long shadow over not just today's China, but the whole of Asia. Asia is estimated to suffer from up to 100 million missing women -- aborted as fetuses or murdered in infancy because of their sex. Pakistan, erupting in protests last week against President Musharraf's anti-democratic high-handedness in suspending a senior judge, is a volatile tinderbox where the capacity for such insurrection to spread is everpresent.

Fanning the flames of injustice and Islamic fundamentalism is the country's sex imbalance. Dispossessed, displaced men with no prospect of ever finding a partner more readily take to the streets like Nian rebels; violence demonstrates masculine meaning.

In today's China, there are now 119 men for every 100 women. In some areas, the imbalance is greater than it was in Huai-pei in 1850. Earlier this year, an official Chinese report projected that by 2020, one in 10 men between 20 and 45 would be unable to find a wife. Professor Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University in the US estimates that by 2020, there will be 28 million surplus Chinese men and 31 million surplus Indian men.

More here. So, if I were going to write that novel, it would be about one guy, and his friends, in such a society. I might even put a gloss on whether it was China, India or some fictional place that mixed aspects of each. The novel would have certain comic aspects in the first half and become more and more bleak as it went along, ending with the protagonist deciding to join a terrorist group out of sheer desperation; he is quickly killed.

Free idea. Take it and run.

technorati: China, surplus men, unintended consequences, India

Novelists need large stoves

I was struck by this post by Alex Chee listing his various projects and ideas for novels. In passing he remarks that one of his ideas "has been on a slow simmer for 17 years." As someone with many possible projects for novels in various stages of cooking, I know just what he's talking about. While the project I'm working on now, a novel about an American office girl who gets sent to Bangalore to open up a customer call center, was started on the spur of the moment (and was intended to be finished within a year, though I've been working for almost two and a half years on it now), I have many other ideas and intentions for projects which are also "on a slow simmer."

Some of them I fully intend to do, like a novel about working in the software industry called Knock Yourself Out. Others are ideas which seem really attractive but which I doubt I have the means to do well, like a psychological mystery set in Japan or a series of novellas about a baseball pitcher (I have all the titles for the novellas, and even an epigram, but that's all).

Sometimes I think about all the projects I have in queue and the number of years I have left to live. I'm almost 51 years old, so if I manage to write a novel every four years or so that means I only have time to do four or five more in my life. Therefore I ought to choose my projects wisely, because I can't get time back.

technorati: Alex Chee, writing novels, novelists

Best friends in the world

Lots of action from friends of mine.

Sara Miles is promoting her new book Take This Bread, and yesterday she did a radio interview at Irvine's KUCI. I saw her this morning at morning prayer and she was handing out buttons that read: wtfwjd?

Painter Chris Carraher recently put up a new show of her work down in the art capital of the Mojave Desert, Twentynine Palms. (Don't believe it? Ask The New York Times.) Her recent post about performance artist Nao Bustamente, in which she confesses she is dumbstruck in the presence of the local genius, is lovely.

technorati: Chris Carraher, Nao Bustamante, Sara Miles

Life's too short to squint

It's amazing how having a highly paid tech job can enable you to clear out a few annoyances. The monitor they gave me was too small after I got used to working on a big one at my old job, so after struggling with it for a couple of weeks, I ordered a new, larger one from Dell, only $310. It arrived today and after I set it up I felt much more productive. Now all I have to do is explain to my co-workers that I haven't received special treatment from the manager. I got it because I have "eye problems." Yeah.

In the past I probably would have felt it was my duty to just work with the smaller monitor. But the heck with it, I'm not going to struggle if I don't have to.

For those of you outside the Bay Area: It was v. warm all over California today -- about 75 in the city. Meanwhile I got email from a friend of mine in a small city in northern Japan: too cold and snowy to work outside today.

Focus on the Fundies: Dobson gives Gingrich a pass

In his continuing stealth campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich appeared on foamer James Dobson's Focus on the Family radio show yesterday, confessed his sins, which included committing adultery at the same time he was leading the congressional charge against Bill Clinton.

Jerry Falwell was quick to get in on the story, also obsolving Gingrich and inviting him to speak at Falwell's college.

That he chose Dobson's show for this odd forgiveness ritual -- odd because Dobson, for all his power in the religious right, is not even a minister but only a psychologist -- is a transparent attempt to appeal to the far religious right.

technorati: Newt Gingrich, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson

Focus on the Fundies: Latham found not guilty

Remember Oklahoma Baptist pastor Lonnie Latham, arrested in January 2006 for soliciting sex from a male undercover cop? Yes, that was a long time ago. Well, his case finally came to trial late last month and a jury found him not guilty, apparently convinced by his lawyer's argument that since homosexual sex is not illegal, then it shouldn't be illegal to talk about it or invite someone to a hotel room to do it. (Link courtesy Christianity Today weblog.)

The Tulsa newspaper did not manage to ask Latham the larger questions of whether he is gay or whether he regrets speaking out -- as he reportedly did when a pastor of a large Baptist church in Tulsa -- against gays and gay rights. Or even if he plans to resume his career as a minister.

Perhaps he will, like Ted Haggard, pursue a degree in psychology. Maybe they could even open up a practice together. I think there'd be plenty of business from others just like them.

technorati: Ted Haggard, Lonnie Latham, closet cases, religious right, hypocrites

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Special Alexis edition

Judging by her submission of an instance of Bad Behavior in this completely off-topic comment, my pal Alexis either has forgotten my email address, or just misses the Bad Behavior feature of this blog, which has languished since I got my new job three weeks ago.

Okay, kid, this one's for you: a 20-year-old off-duty Northwest Airlines employee was arrested this week for sexually assaulting a sleeping passenger. And in other airlines news, two Delta employees were found to have used their employee status to smuggle guns and drugs on flights. Finally, a customer revolt has caused Air New Zealand to reconsider not giving out "biscuits" (which I think refers to what we call a cookie) on flights.

Of course, this week we had the flap over Ann Coulter's f-bomb. A SF Chronicle reporter compiled the condemnations, which included denunciations from Republican presidential candidates on the right and the not-quite-so-far right, and concludes that the reaction might represent a tipping point in favor of less tolerance for such language. Of course reporter Wyatt Buchanan is totally gay himself.

In Chicago, of all places, a columnist attempts to answer the question: Should you eat food that's been dropped on the floor? I know that is going to get a lot of hits, for even 80 years ago, T.S. Eliot was wondering, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" and many people have wondered about that line in "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock." The best explanation is, of course, that the narrator had dropped his peach on the floor.

Finally, best of all: the Westchester Co., New York dominatrix who was recently busted pleaded not guilty to prostitution charges, declaring:

I am fighting for the women of America.

technorati: Ann Coulter, dominatrix, Delta Airlines

Hateful Republicans love Coulter for talking shit

Very nice piece on Salon by Glenn Greenwald, talking about why Republicans love Ann Coulter and keep inviting her to speak at fundraisers and functions as she customarily drops bombs (like her recent "faggot" reference to John Edwards) -- she simply says what they're all thinking, namely that the Democratic party is mainly driven by gay people and that it's up to Republicans to protect the rest of the country.

technorati: Ann Coulter, Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald

Focus on the Fundies: Dismayed at GOP candidates

I almost missed this, but a Google-alert link to a Daily Texan editorial tipped me off. There's a far-right christianist group, tellingly called the Council for National Policy, which meets every year to attempt to unite behind certain right-wing candidates and causes. They provided early support to G.W. Bush, for example, when Karl Rove pushed him out there in 1999 to begin his presidential run.

Well, this year they met a couple weeks ago and couldn't decide whom to support in the prexy sweeps. They know McCain and Giuliani can't stand them, and even deeply conservative Christian candidates like Sam Brownback are suspicious. Brownback isn't tough enough on immigrants, and he supports the growing pro-environmental movement among evangelicals. As for Mitt Romney, the "council" has decided he has held too many liberal positions in the past, though he's now trying to claim the mantle of Family Values Candidate and Ann Coulter loves him. So the "council" is bereft of choices.

What's really happening is a generational change. The founders of the Council for National Policy -- people like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Jerry LaHaye, are in their 70s. The new evangelicals are looking beyond the classic hot-button issues of gay rights and abortion to care for the environment -- even things that Jesus actually talked about, like feeding and housing the poor. They include people like Rick Warren, leader of one of the largest churches in the country and author of a book, "The Purpose Driven Life," which is hugely influential among fundies, Pentacostals and the suburbanites who pack the non-denominational megachurches, of which Warren's is one.

I have the feeling that power-hungry christianists like those in the "council" will figure out by the end of the year that they have to choose between Brownback (who could never win) and Romney (who is anonymous enough to squeak by under the radar, and besides, Ann Coulter...). Meanwhile I'm enjoying the notion that they're twisting in the wind.

And this just in: A Salon report on Republicans smearing each other in a primary state.

technorati: Fundamentalists, right-wing Christians, Council for National Policy

Adams' 'A Flowering Tree'

On Saturday night I went to see John Adams' newest opera, "A Flowering Tree," in a semi-staged version at the SF Symphony. The program was full of references to Richard Strauss; to me the music sounded more like Carmina Burana (most obviously the "Flores, flores" chorus). The New Yorker reviewer and others have compared it to "The Magic Flute." Perhaps the work is so confounding that its listeners tend to grasp for comparisons.

I thought it was very nice, though not nearly the achievement of Adams' previous "Doctor Atomic," though that was a fully staged opera and it might not be fair to compare them. One thing that was confusing was the fact that the chorus parts are in Spanish, even though the work is based on a South Indian folk tale and it featured Indonesian dancers. Pan-asian is one thing, but why the Spanish? All I could think of is that Adams had the urge left over from "Doctor Atomic," which is set in New Mexico. But no: the New Yorker article informs us that "(Adams translated the choruses into Spanish, in recognition of the fact that the orchestra and the chorus performing at the premiere -- the Joven Camerata and the Schola Cantorum -- were from Venezuela."

Oh. Somehow I have the feeling that if this work survives to later generations, that point will be lost somehow. But anyway, it was a lovely concert.

technorati: San Francisco Symphony, John Adams, A FLowering Tree

Focus on the Fundies: Haggard's church in 12% staff layoff

New Life Church, the former fiefdom of Ted Haggard, has suffered such a drop in attendance and donations that it has been forced to lay off 44 staffers, about 12% of its 350-strong workforce.

Of course it's not just the drop in attendance and dough. They also paid at least $130,000 as go-away money to the formerly influental Republican fund-raiser and secret cock-sucking meth snorter. That could have paid for more than a few staffers, because I'll bet most of the minions at a place like that get paid pretty bad -- and are expected to tithe ten percent of it back to their employer, to boot.

In other news, a blogger asks, "Why is Ann Coulter the darling of the religious right?" That's a good question, as she ought to scare them nearly as much as she does blue-staters. But by calling John Edwards a faggot, she showed how much she has in common with foamers like Rod Parsley and Ken Blackwell.

In other news, there's a new book out called The Jesus Machine, about James Dobson and his ilk; its author was interviewed on Terry Gross today. Contrary to the book's subtitle ("How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War"), the interview was mainly about how the generation of Dobson and Jerry Falwell is about to pass from the scene and the Christianists have no one obvious to replace him with, especially now that Haggard is out.

technorati: Ted Haggard, James Dobson, Jesus Machine, New Life Church, John Edwards, Ann Coulter

Restructuing, layoffs at Haggard's former church

Staff layoffs are ahead for the former church of exposed Big Gay drugs user and hypocrite Ted Haggard, the Colo. Springs Gazette reported today; the layoffs amount to between 30 and 50 people, according to local TV station. Contributions are no doubt down at New Life CHurch, Haggard's former fief.

This gives me an irresistible opportuntiy to quote from Jeff Sharlett's 2005 profile of Haggard and New Life Church.

New Lifers, Pastor Ted writes with evident pride, "like the benefits, risks, and maybe above all, the excitement of a free-market society." They like the stimulation of a new brand. "Have you ever switched your toothpaste brand, just for the fun of it?" Pastor Ted asks. Admit it, he insists. All the way home, you felt a "secret little thrill," as excited questions ran through your mind: "Will it make my teeth whiter? My breath fresher?" This is the sensation Ted wants pastors to bring to the Christian experience.

Now that we know more about Pastor Ted's "secret little thrills," passages like that one are priceless.

technorati: Ted Haggard, New Life Church

Ann Coulter finally goes too far for some Republicans

Three Republican presidential candidates denounced Ann Coulter for calling former senator and Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards a faggot.

technorati: Ann Coulter, John Edwards

Rampant geekery

Min Jung Kim, one of the more luminous SF bloggers and definitely one of the most gorgeous, posted this week about having gotten engaged -- over instant messenger. While this will break the hearts of countless lurkers, stalkers, losers and twinkies, Ms. Kim has insisted for many years on her core geekery and it's only to be expected. Congrats, M.J. -- whom I've never met, but who saw me read once.

And I continue to be fascinated with the Radio Forum, an outpost of Bay Area radio geeks obsessed with format changes, announcers, programming and so on. In another life I would have been on of these guys -- and I'm sure they're all guys -- with jobs in and out of radio, and obsessing about it when I'm not working in it.

technorati: radio, Min Jung Kim, geeks

Saving daylight

Earlier this week I had to get up at 4:15 and be at work at 5:15 for a meeting -- the company is based on the east coast and the project manager there did not deign to take into account the fact that people out here in California are, like, sleeping then.

But not only did I survive this, I have got up at 4:30 twice more this week, including today, because there's no other time to do this contract work I got. And it's actually working for me. I can focus and concentrate. Already I'm done for today.

Now if only I can translate this into a habit and use the early morning time to work on my own writing. I do have a novel to finish.