End of the old garages

Since we moved into our house in 1995, there were some ramshackle garages on Harrison St., on the other side of the block. It was an ancient wooden building with a corrugated metal roof on which the feral cats of the block used to sun themselves.

Several months ago we got a notice from the Planning Dept. that someone was going to tear them down and put up a condo building. I almost forgot about it, but this morning I noticed a big claw machine tearing into the garages. I took a couple pictures from our back window, and more from Harrison St. in front of the site.

 

Out my office window

I got to move to a cube here by the window several weeks ago. This is my view -- the easternmost shoulder of Mount San Bruno, just across US 101.

The sliver of mountain visible in the picture is actually part of a state park that covers much of the mountain, so the view should stay this way.

It'd be nice to get rid of the billboard, though. It's been the exact same billboard for three years or so. I thought the company might have simply forgotten about it, but then a couple of months ago I saw it had been tagged up, and then then next day it had been restored. So clearly the software company that rents it is still paying the bills.

Birthday post

Yo, it's my birthday. I'm at work at my job as a technical writer for a big software company, just doing usual things. An ordinary Monday, really.

I had a super-duper birthday two years ago, and since we just had a 50th birthday party for Cris's sister we're not really up for another party. Tonight her sister is coming over, coincidentally, and we'll watch a documentary she worked on and eat some Thai food. And maybe the last of the cake from last weekend. That's all right.

A lot of times I look back on my birthday, but since it's pretty much a sure thing that, at age 52, I'm closer to dying than being born, it seems like less work to look ahead. This year I'm going to finish another draft --the final one, I hope -- of my novel about the American girl who goes to Bangalore to help open a customer service call center. And when I'm done with that, I'll try another shot at the book I wrote for Cleis Press last sumer and fall. I'm doing a reading on May 16  May 17, of what I'm not yet sure, and I hope I'll do more readings later in the year. If I do all that, and manage to keep my job, I'll be more than satisfied.

From my notes

Here are the notes I wrote today as I try to figure out how to rewrite my Bangalore novel. There's 150 pages of this stuff, going babck to November 2004 when I started the book.

I looked a little bit at my notes from late 2005, when I was trying to figure out what to do with the half a book I had written to that point. I realize now I have gone about this all wrong. I tried writing a novel off the top of my head, and while that got me a great start, it did not stand me in a good stead for the second two-thirds of the book. On the other hand, "Knock Yourself Out," which I already have a few thousand words for, does not have a good start, but a tortured, slow, feeling, which is the way I write when I'm doing nothing more than feeling my way. I supposedly know what KYO is all about, in terms of most of the plot and the theme. I started "Bangalored" (the fourth title the book has had, by the way, after "The Moony Trail of Starry Shine," "Dear Prudence," and "Mango Rain") with a notion, a flavor, a voice -- but no idea what the book was really about. I really must work to integrate the two.

On the third hand, I started "Make Nice" with much less of an idea of either. I just had the two characters of Bobby and Gene. But that was perhaps the best way to start, with a strong character who could simply live.

Perhaps that's the real lesson I have to learn from this experience -- start with characters, not a plot, a setting, a theme, or a feeling. Or if you start with those things, don't go any farther until you really know who the characters are.

Anyway, I have to make something of this damn thing, for the third or fourth time. (Actually the last completed draft was draft 6, for some reason.) I have to remind myself that I'm further along than I was a month ago -- even if I'm little farther along than I was three years ago, judging by the degree to which I really know the characters.

I'm going to try to start notes without looking at any previous notes. I know these have gotten repetitive this month, but I feel like I have to constantly refresh and reinforce my conception of the characters, their development, and how the plot reflects that. (In real life, people -- characters -- react to events. In novels, the author must secretly shape events to help the characters develop. But not too much, or it won't be believable.)

... thinking ...

Perhaps one of the fulcrums is Doug's state of mind at the moment he arrives in Bangalore. He is carrying three, no four, loads of psychic baggage:

• His history with Betsy and with Stella
  
• His former career and fame as a journalist, and his career as a professor and how that career ended
  
• His intentions to save his career and write a book about Bangalore and the depredations of globalization
  
• His intentions to have a closer relationship with Stella as a way of somehow salvaging his self-regard as a man, having fucked up his relationships in general with women and having just fucked up his career as an academic

I think most of those have been clear up to now except the last one. I haven't understood what he wants, much less fleshed out notes on it, much less written it into the novel. That's why he seems so passive and listless and indeed unrelated to Stella. Good! Let's unpack that, as theoreticians say. There are actually several parts to it -- his relationships with women, how they have affected his family, and how they have affected his career.

Q.	What are his relationships with women like as a young man?
A.	He is attractive and intelligent, and growing up in the 60s and 70s (he was 25 in 1977) he had lots of sex with lots of women. As a creature of his time, he only learned a little about feminist attitudes toward sex second-hand, i.e. from the women he was fucking or working with (often the same people); he learned how to continue to get sex in that period without really adopting any enlightened attitudes toward women and sex. When Stella was born (1978), he had a sentimental conversion to feminism, because he wanted her to be liberated, but he didn't really change what were by then pretty hidebound attitudes. Perhaps most importantly, when it came to settling down with Betsy as a family, he never even considered it. They weren't living together in the US when they were fucking and Betsy became pregnant; when Betsy returned to the US to give birth to Stella, he didn't come back with her. He stayed in Central America, only coming back to New York from time to time. Maybe he would see Betsy and Stella twice a year, at the most, though he did send child support with regularity. Thus they never married, never lived together in the US.
Q.	When it came time for Doug to return to the US (1984), did they consider living together as a family then?
A.	No, because he had a job offer at Cornell (which has a well-known journalism school) and Betsy was ensconced at a TV station in Chicago.
Q.	Was there ever a time when Doug "left" them?
A.	No. That doesn't mean Betsy didn't feel vaguely abandoned.
Q.	What were Betsy's attitudes?
A.	By becoming a war correspondent and then a TV reporter, she was rebelling against her family's Midwestern expectations; she bolstered her ambition with simple 70s feminist principles that a woman doesn't need a man, etc. But because she was a child of the Midwestern middle class, she had deep-seated feelings about family and home, and she finds reasons to resent Doug that fit into her feminist principles (he was childish, didn't take responsibility, was selfish) but which have their foundation in an unconscious feeling that he should be home with her and her child. She will only admit to feelings that fit in with the ideology, so Stella grows up sensing Betsy's resentment of Doug without understanding it.
Q.	What are Doug's attitudes toward Betsy and Stella?
A.	When Betsy gets pregnant, he really is selfish -- he assumes that anyone with sufficient ambition would not let a pregnancy stand in the way of her career and that she'll get an abortion and their relationship will be exactly the same as it was before she got pregnant. But when she decides she wants to bear the child, he shrugs: he thinks of it as her decision and something that no longer has anything to do with him. (I remember this clearly from the mid-70s, even though I was a bit younger. Since any decisions about what happens to a pregnancy were supposed, by the feminism of the day, to be entirely up to the woman, a man who gets a woman pregnant was absolved of responsibility -- an unintended consequence of feminism and one that has caused some refinement of the dictum "My body, my choice.")
Q.	But still, she is resentful.
A.	Yes, for reasons she doesn't quite understand: her unconscious belief, which she can't square with her ideological analysis, that the father of a child should be part of the child's family.
Q.	How does this affect Doug?
A.	He is annoyed at her expectations, however unconsciously she holds them. Because he understands exactly how she feels -- he knows, without admitting it to himself (much less ever discussing it with her) that she feels he should be close by and support her in some greater way than he ever does.
Q.	Don't they ever talk about it?
A.	No doubt they argue about it when Stella is a child, but they never resolve it.
Q.	So how does that affect the way Doug views Stella?
A.	It creates some guilt, and causes him to compensate for the way he treated Betsy by treating Stella extremely well. In fact, Stella gets a hundred times more time and attention from Doug than Betsy ever did, because Stella lives with Doug during the summers from 1985-1992 (she is ages 7-14, he is ages 34-41).
Q.	All right, what about his time as a professor (1985-2007, ages 34-56)? What are his attitudes toward women then?
A.	On campus, all the girls are feminists, except for the cheerleader types. And a good number of the faculty (though not so much in the J school -- I suppose I could check that, but it's not a fact I really need to know) are women. So when he starts at the university, he has to re-work his attitudes, at least on the surface. He becomes supportive of equality for women professionally. This is also reinforced by his having a daughter.
Q.	What about his sexual attitudes?
A.	These are also influenced by the campus attitude, which at that time is pretty unfettered. The girls, all embracing sexual freedom, are fucking right and left. Of course, it's also the time of the sex wars, the Take Back the Night marches, and the time when, if you were a real feminist, you'd be a lesbian (at least Until Graduation) and there's a lot of suspicion of men. Therefore, the students who fuck their professors fall into a few types, all very much minorities: the fucked-up ones who use sex to prove to themselves they're attractive, the cynical ones who consider it a quid pro quo to get grades, and the intelligent, independent but naive ones who use it to experiment with what they think are adult relationships. Stella herself fits into this category when she has an affair with a professor. So when we get right down to it, the students who fuck Doug are much like his own daughter.
Q.	That seems like something to examine much more closely.
A.	Yeah.... yikes. I had already had that idea but it was more an intuition, I never thought it through to quite that extent.

technorati: writing novels, notes, characters

With an internet like this, who needs family?

Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977.

-- writer J.R. Moehringer

And from a profile of Gay Talese in the LA Times' book blog comes this related factoid: The "first thing" he learned from his editor at the New York Times -- where, in the 1950s, telephones were "new technology" -- was "never use them" (the phones). Talese's anecdote is not elaborated, but I guess his old editor meant, never use the telephone when you can report in person.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- kill yourself edition

In Japan, a 14-year-old girl committed suicide by inhaling hydrogen sulfide gas, losing style points by injuring and inconveniencing dozens of other people in the process. According to the story, "The incident reflects an increase in suicides committed by inhaling hydrogen sulfide, a trend that has been pushed by Web sites explaining how to create the poison gas." Suicide is a craze in Japan's vapid consumer society, where huge media giants and a hidebound sense of social embarrassment stifle freedom of expression, and an unforgiving culture of competition for education and jobs -- despite a plummeting birth rate -- crushes the souls of young and middle-aged people.

Of course, in the US, where we have actual problems, 120 Iraq or Afghan war vets commit suicide every week. (Courtesy Michelle Richmond.)

In Congo, they have different concerns: there are rampant rumors of penis theft. It pretty much works out to the same thing as a suicide craze, except nobody's died yet.

A 29-year-old Indian woman died giving birth outside a hospital that wouldn't admit her because she was from a low caste; the baby also died. The "chief minister" of the state of Uttar Pradesh has ordered the doctors who wouldn't aid her suspended. Somehow I don't think that's going to hurt them in the long run as much them touching her would have.

Police in Los Angeles are looking for a 24-year-old drifter who is accused of firebombing and killing a fortune teller in an "ongoing gypsy dispute" that began with a burglary.

A Maryland man testified in his trial on charges of stalking actress Uma Thurman. Somebody get that guy a copy of the uncut "Kill Bill" -- that's enough Uma for anybody. By the time he finishes watching that, he'll have his fill of "Kill Bill" thrill.

A San Francisco Bay Area chiropractor, accused of drugging and raping two women, surrendered to authorities today. How much of a moron is he?

He took photos of the sexual assault on his camera phone, police said, and went back to the Hold Cardroom and Bar to show the pictures to patrons there.

technorati: bad behavior, suicide, Uma Thurman, penis theft

It's Bad Behavior Wednesday™!

In a shameless bit of online theft, a Chinese publisher took interviews and illustrations from a comix fan's website and packaged them into a $100 coffee table book, even including a CD with digital copies of everything -- "They didn't even bother to change the filenames." And a famous romance author has been caught stealing as well.

In other news from Galleycat, Generation X is now feeling angst about not being the newest, hottest generation anymore. They're "caught between the boomers and the millennials." But the millenials don't have it so good: just look at this epic whine from a Harvard freshman.

technorati: whining, plagiarism, authors, Chinese publishing

Spring wind

It was hot last weekend, and the cool air off the ocean came back on Sunday night -- so far, so good. But then it never stopped, and by yesterday the cold wind was positively howling in. We went to Office Max, and there was a little whirligig of garbage in the parking lot -- very unpleasant. The springtime's like that sometime.

Today it's Cris's sister Shirley's birthday. We're hosting chez nous. Cris has been trying to make flan, and after two spoiled flans she thinks she's going to get it right the third time.

technorati: San Francisco weather

No regrets, Coyote

The other evening, as part of a pledge drive, one of the local public radio stations played a 90-minute program on the career of Joni Mitchell. I only heard the last half, coming in around "Mingus," but I didn't need to hear the first half to know the difference between the soaring, heart-breaking beauty and amazing range of Mitchell's early voice, and the monotonous quality and paltry range of her later years. In a couple of tracks from her last, 2007 album, it's clear she has less than an octave of range and barely enough breath to croak out a short phrase. Even more awful was her speaking voice in interviews over the last ten or fifteen years -- hoarse and scratchy, sounding like every one of her sixty years and then some. Rarely photographed without a cigarette, in a classic case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, she smoked two packs a day for fifty years, thus achieving her stated preference that she be not a pop singer but a painter.

I have a friend who was a dancer for many years until an injury put an end to it; but she did not hasten the end of her career by riding in cars without a seatbelt or pursuing a hobby as a downhill ski racer. It seems utterly stupid to do that to yourself, but strangely, it seems even the most brilliant people aren't happy being themselves. Seen as another in a long line of artists whose drug habits destroyed their careers, Mitchell is in good but sad company, and there was no real reason to think that the amazing insight and lyrical talent she demonstrated as a songwriter meant that she was above this type of self-sabotage.

technorati: Joni Mitchell

Things I had to look up: coterie, clique, claque, shill

I wanted to use the word coterie to mean "a small group of like-minded people with a shared interest or goal," but I wasn't sure that was exactly what it meant, so I looked it up. It sort of means that, but it is also a synonym for clique.

Hmm, come to think of it, what is the difference? Clique has more of a sense of exclusivity; the members come together with a sense that non-members are actively excluded. A coterie is less exclusive and more informal, I think.

Then I looked up one of my favorite words, claque. The members of a claque are paid to applaud or cheer; being paid seems an important element. But I thought that's what shill meant. Not quite; a shill is "a decoy who acts as an enthusiastic customer in order to stimulate the participation of others," as in the person who, secretly in league with a three card monte dealer, is allowed to "win" in order to draw others into the game. The word is also used by stage magicians and comedians to refer to confederates planted in the audience.

I'm not sure if there's a better word than coterie for the group of like-minded people who share an interest. We use phrases like "affinity group," but they have a stale, business-consulting taste.

I guess I'll stick with coterie which, by the way, I have been mispronouncing for decades. I thought it was pronounced co-TER-ee-ay as if it were French, but it's just CO-ter-ee.

The first warm day

Here's what it's like on a warm weekend day in San Francisco -- hundreds of people sprawl on the grass in Dolores Park. I've never understood the appeal of sprawling on the grass in the sun, so I wasn't there. In fact, I consider it a success if I manage to avoid going out in the sun at all.

I was home doing nothing much at all besides listening to the ballgame and cleaning, looking forward to going out in the evening. I had a table reserved at an al fresco restaurant on the city's famous Belden Alley on one of the few warm nights of the year. (There are always only a few.) But it was not to be. Cris wasn't feeling up to going out, and neither was the guest of honor, a friend's mother visiting from France. So I canceled the reservation and will stick around the house, where it is quite warm.

Recently I've been reading Joan Didion -- first a few pieces from Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and then the novel The Last Thing He Wanted. And I've been amazed at how much I don't like the writing, because I used to think Slouching Toward Bethlehem was brilliance incarnate. Now it just looks impossibly mannered and almost precious.

This is from one of the most famous pieces in the book, an essay titled "On Morality":
 

At midnight last night, on the road in from Las Vegas to Death Valley Junction, a car hit a shoulder and turned over. The driver, very young and apparently drunk, was killed instantly. His girl was found alive but bleeding internally, deep in shock.	I actually like the casual reference to "his girl." You could say that in the 1960s. The term encompasses all the possibilities without specifically defining the relationship of the "very young" driver and "his girl," but "his girl" she was.
I talked this afternoon to the nurse who had driven the girl to the nearest doctor, 185 miles across the floor of the Valley and three ranges of lethal mountain road. The nurse explained that her husband, a talc miner, had stayed on the highway with the boy's body until the coroner could get over the mountains from Bishop, at dawn today. "You can't just leave a body on the highway," she said. "It's immoral."	There's an odd mixture of vagueness and specificity here. The location of the hospital is not described, but the base of the coroner is. The hospital, wherever it was, was exactly 185 miles away, not 180 or 200, but the scene of the accident was "three hours" from the town of Bishop.
It was one instance in which I did not distrust the word, because she meant something quite specific.	The writer puts herself in the position of going around trusting or mistrusting others' use of words, implying that she is possessed not only of a magisterial quality of wisdom and taste, but that others' misuse of language consistently disappoints her.
She meant that if a body is left alone for even a few minutes on the desert, the coyotes close in and eat the flesh.	Here she is being specific again, as if it were a virtue, but she's really just trying to shock.
Whether or not a corpse is torn apart by coyotes may seem only a sentimental consideration, but of course it is more: one of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes.	She really likes the word "coyotes," and also the pretentious phrase "of course," which she will use a few sentences later. Then there's the tendentious "the promises we make to one another," which sounds like something out of a John Kerry speech.
If we have been taught to keep our promises -- if, in the simplest terms...	Now she's going to suspend the Ivy League phrasing for a moment, because it's actually not useful when you want to say something plainly.
... our upbringing is good enough -- we stay with the body, or we have bad dreams.	Here's the repeated use of the word "we," which is the height of pretension, more than any exalted phrasing or two-dollar words. She doesn't mean the royal "we," she means "we Americans," or at least, "we Americans whose upbringing is good enough." But the more you read, the more you are convinced that no one's upbringing could possibly be good enough when Didion is listening and passing judgment.
I am talking, of course, about the kind of social code...	Oh for Christ's sake, shut up.
... that is sometimes called, usually pejoratively, "wagon-train morality."	Coming from someone who sounds pejorative almost all the time, that's believable.
In fact that is precisely what it is. For better or worse, we are what we learned as children...	No, really, shut up.

When I was in my 20s I loved this piece. I don't know what was wrong with me.

technorati: San Francisco

Guilty pleasure: Kay Hanley and her band Letters to Cleo

One day in the mid-90s, at a Tower Records listening station, I discovered the band Letters to Cleo and their LP Wholesale Meats and Fish. I totally dug the technique of the lead singer, Kay Hanley, her kickass songwriting, and the way the band rocked. They never made it big, exactly, and broke up around 1999. Hanley went on to write songs for, and sing for, Hollywood movies; she and her Letters to Cleo lead guitarist husband were the sound behind Josie and the Pussycats, the lead single from which, "3 Small Words," freaking rocks.

Yesterday she was featured on fishbowlLA.com, with the news that she and hubby have done another Hollywood project -- music for a Care Bears video, believe it or not. Given how great the music for Josie and the Pussycats was, I'd suspend judgement on her music for Care Bears until I hear it.

technorati: Letters to Cleo, Kay Hanley, indie rock

Focus on the fundies: Jesus on her ass

A company in southern Colorado is marketing His Spirit Jeans for teenage girls, with Bible verses printed on the butt. Something akin to reading Playboy for the articles, I think.

And in the UK, a man who is the 67-year-old son of famous British fascists of the 1930s is being exposed for participating in "a depraved Nazi sadomasochistic orgy" with five prostitutes. Even the New York Times has some hilarious details:

In a video the paper posted on the Internet but later removed, two of the women wore black-and-white striped robes in the style of prisoners' uniforms. The video showed Mr. Mosley counting in German -- "Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Funf!" -- as he used a leather strap to lash one of the women. "She needs more of ze punishment!" he cried in German-accented English.

Buried is the fact that the john paid $5000 for five hours with five women -- a sign that the dollar goes farther in the UK than everyone is saying.

The graphic is from a Village Voice review of a documentary about a little-known area of the cinema world: Israeli-made, Hebrew language porn films set in concentration camps. Really.

Things I had to look up: soigné

Soigné -- well-groomed, sleek, elegantly maintained. I was looking for a word the other night, some French word that would capture an attitude of, sort of, luxuriating insouciance. I thought of soigné but that's not right. I thought it was like èlan and had more to do with attitude. Still looking.