BREAKING: Dobson resigns from Focus on the Family

James Dobson, founder and head of the Focus on the Family religious education and lobbying organization, is stepping down, the Associated Press reported.

The 72-year-old Dobson, who is a psychologist by training, has been one of the most powerful religious conservatives in the U.S. for decades. His Focus on the Family organization, despite a financial downturn in recent years, is one of the most influential right-wing Christian organizations. It was a major donor to California's anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8, and its daily radio program is heard on hundreds of religious radio stations around the country.

However, the Proposition 8 win (after which Dobson said he was "jubilant" over the anti-gay law) may have been the group's high point. Earlier this month they lost a battle when the Colorado House passed a domestic partners health care bill. And while it was giving lavishly to the Prop. 8 battle, it continued to suffer financially, laying off 20% of its staff.

The new head of the organization is a retired Air Force general -- Colorado Springs is also home to the Air Force Academy, which has been the site of alleged proselytizing by evangelical Christians -- who is also a former executive with defense contractor Northrup Grumman.

technorati: Focus on the Family, religious right, conservatives, Republicans, Dobson

Focus on the Fundies: Colo. legislator says homosexuality akin to murder

After an openly gay Colorado legislator introduced a bill to extend health care benefits to domestic partners of gay people, a Republican colleague alleged it was an attempt to whittle away at the anti-gay marriage law passed by voters and equated homosexuality with murder, saying "I'm not saying this (homosexuality) is the only sin that's out there. We have murder. We have all sorts of sin. We have adultery. And we don't make laws making those legal, and we would never think to make murder legal." There's much more disgusting bigotry quoted in the article.

technorati: Colorado, homophobia, gay rights

Another entry in the 'most dubious criminal defense' contest

Alongside the recent entry in this category, add a dentist who says his touching of women's breasts was part of him treating their temporomandibular jaw syndrome which, he claims, "affects the muscles of the upper body."

technorati: dentists, sexual assault

$2 million for celebrity memoir, as male novelists grow limp

Glum observers of the publishing scene who want to reinforce their view that the industry is as broken as an over-extended mortgage lender need look no farther than the $2 million deal for Kathy Griffin's memoir. How many copies of a doorstop like that will Ballantine have to sell just to break even? And for what? (And no, the deal wasn't done by Molly Jong-Fast.)

At Salon, Laura Miller suggests that women are ready to dethrone men as the primary writers of American novels, saying "in my (admittedly limited and anecdotal) experience, literary men under 45 are as likely to idolize Joan Didion or Flannery O'Connor as Norman Mailer or John Updike." (I'm not under 45, but for the record, I do idolize Flannery O'Connor [but not Joan Didion].)

A related clue might be found in my interview with YiYun Li last month. When she wanted to think of an American novelist critical of American society, the first name that came to her mind was Toni Morrison.

Whatever the achievements of women novelists, it's definitely true that women buy more books than men, especially novels. This 2007 NPR story quotes British novelist Ian McEwan as saying "When women stop reading, the novel will be dead."

technorati: Kathy Griffin, publishing, novelists

Things I had to look up: en petit comité

From Bolaño's The Savage Detectives:

... we ended up getting used to those fucking shrooms and that's what we usually ordered, shrooms from Oaxaca, shrooms from Tamaulipas, shrooms from La Huasteca in Veracruz or Potosí, or wherever they were from. Shrooms to do at our parties or in petit comité.

En petit comité -- in a small group, or as this dictionary of colloquial French has it, "in a group of a few intimate friends."

This page asks, "¿Qué significa "petit-comité"?" The response: Se dice que se requiere hacer una cosa "en petit comité" para referirse a una situación donde es necesario o se desea hacer algo "en familia". Mm-hmm.

Strangely, most results on Google are uses of the phrase in the context of Spanish.

Porn zine dumping near church food pantry equals column

A woman in L.A. found that a distributor for a free gay porn zine was dumping issues of the publication in her recycling bin. The newspaper columnist who picks up the story somehow ties it to a local food pantry at an Episcopal church.

technorati: Los Angeles, food+pantry, columnists

The tigers are getting organized

A Sumatran tiger killed two illegal loggers in, yes, Sumatra -- bringing to five the number of loggers who have been killed by tigers there in less than a month.

Those tigers aren't dumb.

technorati: logging, tigers, Indonesia

Turns out there's a word for that: platzangst

In an essay in Harpers, a writer describes a circular effect in a story by Robert Bolaño:

The circular temporality, the idea that they are undertaking a repetition (but with a slight variation), owes something to Borges. It also evokes a variation on the phobia that the Germans call Platzangst: the illusion that one has made no progress at all while attempting to cross a vast, unending square.

(From The Wandering Years: Roberto Bolaño's nomadic fiction, April 2007)

Wow, I had no idea there was a word for that, or that it was regarded as a common psychological affliction. I thought it was just my own impatience and anxiety. I often experience it after getting out of my car and walking up to the door of a building such as the post office -- I know rationally that the door is only a few feet away but it seems enormously inconvenient to traverse the wide, ugly sidewalk to reach it. And it's also a feeling of selfishness: I'm not allowed to park in the handicapped spaces which are closest to the door, so I have a feeling of irritation while making those twenty or thirty extra steps. Platzangst! Now I know.

Fun with characters

I'm drafting characters for a new novel, the same idea I've been working on since just before New Year's. Here are a few tertiary characters, all of whom are involved in a project called "Famous for Nothing," abbreviated F4Ø:

Meliá is the main filmmaker, she is serious about it and has standards, like the filmmaker on the Mlps project who did 30 takes of a scene. She isn't so invested in the F4Ø project per se, as a comment on society or media, as she is in her craft and in using the project as a stepping stone to something greater. But she is as allergic to plot as any of them, in fact she considers plot little short of an imperialist scheme to sedate people. "Narrative is the new opium of the masses," she says but at the same time she has no faith in documentary either, because she also doesn't believe in objectivity, so the F4Ø project is as close as she can come to being purely subjective.

Trahan, her boyfriend (pronounced TRAY-han), is vaguely European. He is a failed grad student in rhetoric. It's him who is the originator of the F4Ø concept; it's his way of articulating, in the laziest way possible, his hostile and nihilistic attitude. The reason he is so resentful is -- he says -- he is the sole survivor of a bus plunge in the Austrian Alps, surviving only after being swept downriver from the crash site and finding shelter in the forest hut of a schizophrenic whom he has to kill and eat to survive the winter -- in fact, the first thing he has to do is kill the guy in self-defense. When it all got sorted out, he was the beneficiary of a huge insurance settlement; he also became rich from a ghost-written memoir published under his name, about his ordeal. So he got the idea that he was some kind of intellectual and tried to become an academic, but in fact the people who were humoring him with the memoir and all finally reached their limit, and he was kicked out of the university with a terminal master's. He exiled himself to America where, he said, you could get people to believe anything. He finances Meliá's filmmaking and the whole F4Ø project with his wealth. The project is his aggressively hostile joke on modern culture and life in general. In the F4Ø project, his character is a bike messenger-jazz poet, which is his attempt to make fun of hipsters.

Carmichael is a would-be comedian and performance artist who has failed to define a character, a shtick or a voice. He is therefore sympathetic to Meliá's distrust of narrative, because it makes him feel better about his inability to arrive at a voice or find something to say; therefore he has taken to acting because he can take refuge in the characters he plays: they have something to say, so he won't have to. In the F4Ø project he plays the role of a hipster, i.e. a foil for Trahan's character.

Shar is a young dyke who is studying to become a tattoo artist and also works as a stripper. Because she's a dyke, Trahan finds it funny to make her play the girlfriend of Carmichael's character, and she imbues the part with every stereotype of straight girl she can muster. Of course, this isn't far from the role she plays when stripping, and for that reason she insists on being paid, whereas the others do their parts for nothing.

Chinese blogger stabbed after talk at Beijing bookstore

A popular Chinese blogger whose work was censored last year was stabbed at a Beijing bookstore where he had just given a talk. Two men dragged him into the bathroom, saying something about how he should watch whom he offends. Sounds more like Mafia intimidation than something the government would do, doesn't it? Of course, in corrupt societies like China and today's Russia, the distinction between the actions of the government, of gangsters, and of industrial criminals is hard to make.

Xi Lai is reported to be recovering after emergency surgery. A picture is here. There are some reports saying he died after the attack but apparently that is not true. A report by a blogger familiar with his work is here.

technorati: China, bloggers

Like useless young men in a depression

MSNBC has a story about a woman who "went to work for weeks expecting to be laid off and felt relief when it finally happened."

It reminded me of the character Hungry Joe in Catch-22 who has fulfilled the number of bombing missions necessary to be sent back to the States, but lives in total terror. When Col. Cathcart raises the number of missions again, he's relieved, even though it means he'll have to go risk his life again over Italy.

In Yossarian's group there were only a mounting number of enlisted men and officers who found their way solemnly to Sergeant Towser to ask if the orders sending them home had come in. They were men who had finished their fifty missions. ... They worried and bit their nails. They were grotesque, like useless young men in a depression. They moved sideways, like crabs. They were waiting for orders sending them home to safety to return from Twenty-Seventh Air Force Headquarters in Italy, and while they waited they had nothing to do but worry and bite their nails and find their way solemnly to Sergeant Towser several times a day to ask if the orders sending them home to safety had come.

They were in a race and knew it, because they knew from bitter experience that Colonel Cathcart might raise the number of missions again at any time. They had nothing better to do than wait. Only Hungry Joe had something better to do each time he finished his missions. He had screaming nightmares and had fistfights with Huple's cat. ... Every time Colonel Cathcart increased the number of missions and returned Hungry Joe to combat duty, the nightmares stopped and Hungry Joe settled down into a normal state of terror with a smile of relief.

Woman will now be able to wipe her own ass

I love stories like this that demonstrate not all the freaks live in San Francisco. Some of them live in the depraved midlands, like... Salt Lake City.

A woman with fingernails each over two feet in length is in the news because she lost them when she was seriously injured in a car crash. This is one case in which the picture taken before the accident is undoubtedly the more horrifying.

Cris took one look at it and said, "Who wiped her butt for her?"

Scenes I missed, part 12

I didn't even know I was not there.

'Lost' Kerouac novel to be published

Publishers Marketplace reports that Harpers has agreed to publish "The Sea is My Brother," a "lost" novel by Jack Kerouac, written in 1942 and based on his experiences in the Merchant Marine. According to the book "Desolate Angel" by Dennis McNally, Kerouac wrote the work while on the Dorchester, where he served in the galley.

A review in Jack Magazine of "Atop an Underwood," the 1999 compendium of Kerouac's early and unpublished writings says that "Underwood" contains "a substantial chunk of the third version of 'The Sea is My Brother'." The biography "Jack Kerouac" by Michael Dittman quotes Kerouac as describing "The Sea is My Brother" as being about "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies. Weley Martin loved the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentences. He goes down. The story also of another man, in contrast, who escapes society for the sea, but finds the sea a place of terrible loneliness."

Sounds like Kerouac was pretty horny and miserable aboard the Dorchester.

technorati: Jack Kerouac, publishing, book deals

Morte d'un chat

Several years ago I described an apocalyptic cat disaster that occurred when our cat Milagrito tangled with a cat we took care of for a year or so, Six -- also known as the Six-Toed Monster:

Six went to live with a friend in Oakland after his sojourn with us, thus solving the divided house we ran where we had to keep him and Milagrito separated like matter and anti-matter.

This winter the little fella, who had a good five years or so with his new owner as her one and only, got sick. Cris and her euthanized him today and Cris buried him in our garden. Here Cris eulogizes him.

technorati: cats

Finalist, most dubious criminal defense

Possibly the silliest example of the "But she wanted it" defense:

Defense claims woman wanted drug slipped into drink

Focus on the Fundies: Evangelist tries to profit from Australian fire disaster

An Australian fundamentalist is claiming that the Australian fire disaster is God's punishment for the state of Victoria allowing abortion.

Pastor Danny Nalliah says he had a dream that God's "conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb." Of course, this is exactly what American fundies said after Sept. 11 and after Katrina: that the disasters were holy retribution for New York or New Orleans allowing whatever it is they don't like. Of course, when floods hammer the Mississippi valley, or tornadoes decimate a Southern town, they don't have much to say.

It's always been like this: preachers said the same thing when San Francisco was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake. After a distiller paid firefighters to save his warehouse, a local wag wrote:

If, as they say, God spanked the town
For being over-frisky,
Why did He burn His churches down
And spare Hotaling's whiskey?

technorati: Australia, wildfires, abortion

Dept. of Odd ways of putting it

For a few years I have been on a lonely struggle to point out the idiocy of the constant misuse of the word "need," as in this Jezebel post from yesterday titled "Elizabeth Hasselbeck Needs To STFU About Ashley Judd, Abortion." Really? She needs to?? Like she has a need that isn't being met?

I ran across another strange construction this morning. On an online forum, a woman used this odd phrase, twice (emphasis mine):

My lived experience of the last eight years has been that I have carried a lot of hurt and bitterness around...

My lived experience is that I am exhausted and tired by the double standard...

One thing is that those sentences would still make perfect sense if they just began with the word "I." But what does "my lived experience" mean? As opposed to your experience in Second Life? As opposed to the world you have created in your dreams?

Clearly the writer is insecure about simply stating her opinions and needs to -- and it's all right to use the phrase "needs to" when it is not a synonym for the word "should" -- preface them with some phrase that give them more authority. She is saying "I have really lived and felt these things." But why would she think that anyone would doubt it in the first place?

More celebrity memoirs the solution to publishing's problems

She says she wants to flog "celebrity-driven" books, bringing in "'really smart' writers to help shape those public figures' lives into books." As for the literary part of being a literary agent:

I'm trying not to do too much literary stuff -- which is not to say I'm not taking smart things, but there's a certain type of pretentious novel that I just hate, that I'd spent most of my career trying to write away from... I want to represent books that will actually reach people.

Like celebrity memoirs. More at my Open Salon blog

technorati: books, writers, publishing

Dept. of Too much information

Look at this -- something called SocialWhoIs. The idea is:

Once you've setup an account on Socialwhois, you can create a more detailed biography (Twitter limits you to 160 characters), add links to more social profiles, and add in some interests, which then become clickable so you can find other people on Twitter and Friendfeed (who have also created Socialwhois profiles) with similar tastes.

Stuff like this is like the opposite of what I want the internet to be like. The guy who posted that has this problem:

While the names of some new followers I get on Twitter or Friendfeed immediately ring a bell, with others, I have no idea who the person might be.

Jesus Christ, if you don't know who they are, why should you care?? Are you really on the internet to "find other people with similar tastes" and interests? Then go to a dating site, you tool!

This is why I'm not on Friendster or Facebook or even LinkedIn. I really don't want to get into the whole etiquette of social networking. It's already strange enough that people whom I don't know follow my Twitter feed, but at least that doesn't require any reciprocal action from me.

Then again, I realize I don't have a great instinct for creating networks of friends in the first place.

Good turn deserves another

The ratio of flames versus praise on the web is probably a thousand to one, and I sure don't mind toasting a company or shop when I've received bad service. So to be fair, I want to praise AT&T Wireless and their customer service reps for the great service they gave me this morning.

Last month when I replaced the cell phone Cris uses, I agreed to a GPS service for the line, because she doesn't have a great sense of direction and often calls me for help in finding an unfamiliar address. And since the guy at the AT&T store told me it was free for the first month, I said fine. But she hasn't used the service and doesn't want the charge. So just as I was going to call to cancel the service, I get the first bill, and behold, the first month was not free.

I phoned billing, and they couldn't really help; but they transferred me to Kimberly in customer service, and not only was she able to cancel the GPS service and take the charges off my bill -- including, without me asking, the week beyond the first free month that the service has been active -- but she noticed I could save money on txting charges on the phone I use, signed me up for a cheaper service for the txting, and rebated the charges on the current bill as if I had made the change a month ago. Kimberly was responsive, reasonable, proactive, solved a problem I didn't even know I had, and gave me more than I asked for. Now that's great customer service. Well done, AT&T Wireless.

technorati: AT&T, wireless, cellphone service providers