Sic transit Edwards

I actually teared up when I saw the downcast expression on the face of John Edwards on today's New York Times story announcing his pullout from the presidential race -- and the lines:

...He said he had spoken to (Clinton and Obama) by phone and asked them both to continue drawing attention to the primary themes of his campaign.

"They have both pledged to me -- and more importantly, through me to America -- that they will make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency... Our Democratic Party will make history. We will be strong, we will be unified, and with a little backbone, we will take back the White House."

"Why hasn't he gotten more attention?" Cris moaned last weekend when the returns came in from South Carolina, Edwards' last best chance. "Aren't people listening to what he's saying?"

No, not enough people listened as Edwards excoriated corporate profiteering and made his Kennedyesque pledges to uplift the poor. People are, I think, excited -- and understandably so -- by the prospect of a female or black president. No matter what Edwards said, he could never top the novelty and attractiveness of Obama nor the organization and fundraising ability of Clinton.

For those who did listen, I suspect almost all their votes will go to Obama -- as will mine.

Meanwhile, Giuliani will quit and is expected to support John McCain. I so wanted him to announce something totally wacky, such as an endorsement of Ron Paul.

technorati: John Edwards, Barack Obama, campaign, Democratic

Out-of-work screenwriters prepare to flood market with that novel they've been meaning to write

Sunday's LA Times had this story: idled by the protracted screenwriters strike, Hollywood scribes are using the downtime to "write in the morning and picket in the afternoon." It quotes them as saying:

• "The process (of screenwriting) is less than satisfying... You get tired and burned out, and I always wanted to write novels anyway."
  and
• "Scripts are all about economy and forward momentum, whereas novels can be big, baggy receptacles for a story. When I go back to screenwriting, I feel like I've been put back in my cage."
  and
• "The Writers Guild is gonna kill me for saying this, but a script is nothing more than a blueprint for a film... It's a road map and can't stand on its own; it needs others to make it a movie. Books are more holistic. They're less about plot and more about character, emotions, nuance. It's refreshing to just write about people for a change."

As someone who's been trying to get a literary novel published for years, I cringe at the notion that the market is about to be flooded with tight, competent, professional dreck by people who are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to think up the next big thing. Just what I needed.

Creating characters

Here's an essay by the critic James Woods (courtesy Alexander Chee) that raises interesting questions about what a fully realized character is in fiction. I was particularly drawn to a passage where Woods quotes the novelist Iris Murdoch, and I went looking for the essay he quoted from.

It's here: The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited, from the Yale Review of 1959. I will quote a little more than Woods did:

Art is not an expression of personality, it is a question rather of the continual expelling of oneself from the matter in hand. Anyone who has attempted to write a novel will have discovered this difficulty in the special form which it takes when one is dealing with fictitious characters. Is one going to be able to present any character other than oneself who is more than a conventional puppet? How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense "interested in other people," this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a real character who is not oneself. It is impossible, it seems to me, not to see one's failure here as a sort of spiritual failure.

This is instructive for me as I begin another draft of my India book specifically to strengthen the main character.

technorati: novel writing, Iris Murdoch, characterization, Alexander Chee, James Woods, literary criticism

Two new novels set in Las Vegas

Two new novels are set in, and largely about, Las Vegas: The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss Jr., and Beautiful Children by Charles Bock. Both are first novels.

The story of how the first one was published has some interesting and -- for writers -- comic bits:

When McGinniss was looking for people to give his manuscript a read, among the first people he contacted was (Bret Easton) Ellis. "I groaned," says Ellis of receiving McGinniss' first e-mail asking for help. "Of course, you have to understand, I feel completely indebted to his father. There was no way I was going to say no to his request."

Ellis sent McGinniss back to the drawing board. "It needed to be tightened up," he says. "I felt there were a lot of missed opportunities... There was a lot of editorializing. He had the same setting [of the published novel], the same cast of characters, the same complicated relationships, but the story needed to be more precise."

"I was very naive," McGinniss says. "I'd just assumed you crank it out and if it reads well, it's a novel -- it's done, you're set. At the time I sent it to him, inside I thought, I think I'm pretty close." For the next two years he made multiple revisions and did some more Vegas research...

The confusing thing for novelists at the beginning of their careers is that you're aware some people do get manuscripts published without extensive, multiple revisions; while they may not "crank it out," they basically lay it down, do some polishing, and they really are done. T. Coraghessan Boyle is one of these; I heard him interviewed on a local radio station while I was writing my own first novel, Make Nice (which also happens to be set partly in Las Vegas). I phoned up the show and asked the author about his revision process. He said:

This is going to drive a lot of people crazy, but I don't do any subsequent drafts. I do substantial rewriting as I go along in the first draft, and when I get to the end of the book, it's essentially done. Of course there's editing and so on, but what's in my computer is basically it.

Many more writers do the multiple-revisions thing. My friend Katia went through seven or eight drafts of her first novel Crashing America and she's into the fourth or fifth draft of her next book. Soon I'll be commencing the fourth draft of Bangalored, my second book -- though like McGinniss Jr. when I sent it to my agent last year I thought, It's pretty close.

technorati: Las Vegas, books, novels

Here comes the rain again

It's been raining for a few days. Since I hardly have to be out in it, I find it rather nice. The biggest venture was to a restaurant on Mission St. where my friend Namita had invited people for her birthday. She and I have a bit of history together, which she began referring to and then stopped herself and said confidentially, "I'd better watch what I say, there are people here from different parts of my life and they don't know everything about me." Nor do I, but I do like that we had Stephanie in common.

One thing the rain has done is make me a little bit bleary creatively. I was on such a roll with my just completed book that it's a little hard to walk into my writing room and think about anything else. I'll start the way I started working my self up to writing that book: by reading.

'Who are you calling Cootie Queen, you lint licker?!'

I'm going to show how low-class I truly am with this post, but... You know how TV commercials sometimes stick in your mind, and you want to know more about them, and it's not like you can look them up on imdb.com or anything.

This is the commercial I was obsessed with:

http://www.splendad.com/ads/show/863-Orbit-Euphemisms

That actress who plays the gum-chewing mistress is so hilarious that I wanted to know who it was. Fortunately, thanks to Google, with a little patience you can find out just about anything. Her name is Jesse Meriwether, and she is from New Orleans.

I also found another commercial she was in, unfortunately without dialogue from her: http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/commercials/1753/

Having fun over there

Breaking my previous record, I posted five entries in one day over at sf.metblogs. The tiger story, she has been good to me.

It occurred to me, as I was updating the fourth, news-filled post, that the tiger story is on the verge of becoming a classic SF story, like the JT LeRoy hoax, the dog mauling, and my favorite of all time, the Condor Club bouncer who was killed by Carol Doda's piano. (In that incident, which happened around 1980, a bouncer was killed while having sex after hours with one of the club's strippers on top of the piano. The piano was rigged to descend from the ceiling with Doda on top of it, her grand entrance. While the bouncer and the stripper were fucking, the piano's mechanism somehow got started, and the piano began rising toward the trap door, which was closed. The dancer was nimble enough to jump off, but the bouncer weighed over 300 pounds and couldn't get off the piano, as it rose to the ceiling, crushing him to death. Best! Story! Evar!!1!)

The 2005 chili finger story came close, but regrettably it happened in San Jose.

Let's see how the tiger's tale measures up:

Sex - no
Money - no, at least until the lawsuits start
Death - yes
Bizarre factor - yes
Celebrity - yes, when you include the lawyers
Happened largely in SF - yes
Took advantage of SF liberal fantasies about itself - yes

Clearly all that it lacks is sex. Sigh.

Right, that's done

This just in: The NYT raises the possibility that Gawker is over. Me, I stopped reading it sometime in 2005. And I stopped reading Wonkette after the original editor left it. Blogs are not about the subjects they cover or their material. They're about voice. A consistent voice.

I've been spending more time lately filing posts on SF Metroblog, becoming its most consistent poster, though I'm not sure anyone really cares or is reading. I was cheered, however, when a local more famous blogger told me she thought that SF Metroblog did get attention; she was even surprised its writers aren't paid, but that might be because she just got a paid blogging gig. Anyway, I'm posting more there than here, these days, mostly because it's possible to do one or two good posts a day about San Francisco topics but hard to find time to surf around and post the stuff I really like to post about.

However, this is priceless. Some geek wandered the floor at the Consumer Electronics Show -- with a TV B Gone. Now that's anti-entertainment.

In personal news, today I have officially, and for about the fourth time, declared work on my novel How They Scored done, printed it out, and tomorrow I'm mailing it to my publisher. Which means they should be sending my agent a check within a month or so.

Barring any protests from How They Scored's publisher, I'll now go back to work on my India book, which is now titled "Bangalored".

technorati: How They Scored, novel writing, blogging

Another thingy

Trying another search widget. I wouldn't recommend adopting it yet because I don't know what it does, really. We'll see.

The case of the productive blond

Courtesy MediaBistro, here is some of the worst, most entertaining writing I've seen. It's in a blog post by a former TV producer, who writes about his tortured relationships with Fox News fuhrer Roger Ailes, a blond assistant, his agent, his wife, and other characters. Despite the quality of the writing, it has all the ingredients for a Bonfire-of-the-Vanities style novel and/or memoir.

Some choice phrases:

My wife Gina was emailing strange men in foreign countries on the computer, a habit she seemed unwilling to break. I was fantasizing about the 23 year old blond, who that day walked into the elevator facing me, threw her shoulders back, projecting toward me her extraordinary breasts, stared at me, and backed up against the opposite wall, putting a sexual no-man's-land between us.
...
She was blond and productive. Regardless, on the last day of production, the blond knocked on my door and asked if we could talk.
...
I had lived at 1060 Park Avenue for 30 years. My adult life had played out on that stage. I loved it. I walked out along Park and wept. Everything was intolerable. But that which could not be changed had to be accepted. And I had to have the courage to change that which I could change. I moved to my mother's.

technorati: Republicans, television, New York

Los productores

In Spain, "The Diary of Anne Frank" is soon to be a musical.

Too much blogging is bad for you

When I interviewed Annalee Newitz, the editor of new futurism blog io9 on Saturday, she mentioned that working nonstop on the launch of the site for two months had given her her first case of repetitive stress injury.

Today the NYT had a piece on serious health problems of people who blog too much.

technorati: blogging

Chelsea as Breck girl

I was amused by this AP photo of Hillary Clinton appearing to conduct NH voters in singing as Chelsea looks on. There's something truly mesmerizing about Chelsea's hair. There's also this photo from the same event.

On the other hand:

technorati: Chelsea Clinton, Hillary

Today: big storm; tomorrow, big storm; Sunday, etc.

I had arranged to work at home today due to the bad weather that was predicted. But I didn't expect the power at home to be out for 11 hours. I blogged the morning on the metroblog, but in the afternoon Cris and I just hung around the house -- in a way. She went into emergency mode and gathered all the candles and made me help her tidy up the place "so we won't trip over stuff in the dark" in case the outage extended into the evening.

Finally at the end of the afternoon, we went out for an early dinner, and when we got back about 6:30 pm, the power was back on. Nevertheless I still came over to my office on Capp St., where I'm writing this. I haven't been over here but a couple of times in the last seven weeks (but still managed to finish my latest novel project).

technorati: California storms

Making up my own meme

I never do memes, for reasons that will shortly become evident.

1. Which Nobel Prize did you win this year?

   Chocolate, but not the kind with chili peppers, proof that the 21st century has peaked too soon.

2. How many grapes are headfirst?

   Thomas Pynchon and M. Scot Momaday.

3. I can has cheezburger!

   [[An unprintable -- at least on this website -- Japanese phrase]]

4. I have a question about one of the comments you made to the past version of the doc. At one point, on page 93, you insert a lengthy comment about Configuring JCA on OS/400 for Manual Probing. (Attached below in a txt forrmat.) Are those instructions still necessary and valid for the new version 5.0 of the PowerPack? If so, I will add them to the manual.

   Yeah, it was back to work today.

 

Back from Chicago

I just got back from five days in Chicago, where I hung out mostly in a big hotel with Anna, worked on my book, and drank red wine. The picture above is from my trip on the Blue Line to O'Hare (after taking it, the batteries in my camera died), where it was snowing lightly but the flight was delayed only about 40 minutes.

Can't believe it's back to work tomorrow.

technorati: Chicago