New/old story: 'Relativity'

More than twenty years ago I lived in Japan for almost two years, teaching English in a provincial city, Niigata. After several months, my present wife Cris -- whom I had just met and fallen in love with the year before, and who was broken-hearted when I left to teach in Japan -- came out to join me, and we've been together ever since. But before Cris came to Niigata, Seiko, one of my students, a cheerful shopgirl who was enamored of everything American or British and who claimed to hate Japan, got a big crush on me. She flirted with me in her very subtle way, and one summer night during a local festival she came over to my apartment half-drunk. It would have been easy for me to take advantage of her, but something about the situation didn't feel right, and besides, Cris was about to arrive on vacation to see me for the first time in months. Instead of kissing Seiko, I just listened to some music with her and then let her go home. And I never did go to bed with a Japanese girl, much as I would have liked to; it was too hard for me to understand how to overcome the difficulties in communication.

The next year a new teacher came out to work in our school. He was in his late 30s, rather cheerless, balding and not very attractive, but not more than ten days after arriving, he had snagged a gorgeous girl, a staff person at a local gym, and was sleeping with her. Whatever compunctions I had that made it hard for me to get close to a girl who could hardly talk to me -- he had no such compunctions.

To understand this dynamic, and to illustrate some of the other confusing cultural norms I encountered in my sojourn in the Japanese city, I wrote a short story, Relativity. I don't claim it's a very good short story, but it does try to illustrate the ambivalence I felt then about taking advantage of someone.

technorati: Japan

Talkin' 'bout my generation

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the film Easy Rider, and the 40th anniversary of the exposé of the My Lai massacre.

It was all one back then, which is why the guys had to die at the end of Easy Rider.

technorati: Sixties

'Co-working' at a normally closed café

Cool article from a St. Paul, Minn. paper about a group that co-works at a café that is ordinarily closed on weekdays in winter. Unemployed and freelance workers pay $40 to co-work at the café and get free coffee, AC power, and wi-fi every Tuesday. They has a Ning group website.

The café itself is apparently well-known and loved in the Twin Cities area.

technorati: co-working, crema

Awesomeness of Wikipedia strikes again

While looking up the spelling of the phrase en deshabille, I ran across this page on Wikipedia: List of French words used by English speakers. (Curiously, it does not list en deshabille at all.) The best thing about it is the section Only found in English, which lists ostensibly French words and expressions not actually used by the French, including demimonde, pièce de résistance, and double entendre.

Previously: Things I had to look up: en petit comité

technorati: words, Wikipedia

The life of a writer, part LXMDVVVII

My friend Marilyn, who went through a few years when she supported herself by writing romance novels, posts a few anecdotes today that highlight the strange demands of genre work:

In the Secret Hours was even worse. It was my one & only book to have an exclusive distribution with Borders Books. I had just begun writing it. It was late May and I allegedly had until Labor Day to write a 255 page novel. But, oops! The publisher called in alarm to say there was some sort of misunderstanding in the contract and my novel had to be turned in by the 4th of July. I had 5 weeks to write an entire novel that I only had a vague storyline for. No outline, just some notes. It was really hell. I thought my fingers were going to fall off from all that marathon typing everyday-long-into-the-night. Not only that, but I seriously had to let the story tell itself. Whatever the fuck came out onto the paper became "the novel." It was a real nightmare for me. And when the reviews came out and were bad, well, what are you going to say? Complain about the fuck up in your deadline? It just makes you look like a cry baby.

Read the whole entry.

technorati: writing, novels

Lisa B's 'Poetry of Groove'

Here's my friend Lisa B, with a nice little video for her jazz-pop tune "The Poetry of Groove." I like the dancing and the kinda DIY low tech quality.



Lisa's part of a circle or artists and activists I got to know in the mid-80s, among them my great friend Christine (lower left in this picture).

technorati: jazz, video

Ostentation meets hype meets D&S

After some stranger followed my Twitter feed, I was led to this bizarre video in which the woman -- judging from the feed she works in promotions for some booze company -- is tutored by some aggressive British gent in the basics of enjoying some super-expensive whiskey. The British gent is so noisy, so controlling, so in-her-face that it's almost like watching a D&S scene. The woman's "What have I got myself into?" expression as the scene goes on and on is priceless.

technorati: live the lush life, whiskey

How They Scored now available on Amazon.com

My novel How They Scored is now available on Amazon.com as both a paperback ($16.98, available for free shipping) and Kindle edition ($3.99), though the latter has a strange notation that it is "not available for customers in the United States" / Update 9 Nov 09: The Kindle edition is now fully available.

The Travelers Guide to Being 22 Years Old, and other states

The Words Without Borders blog has a post on a series of books published by Whereabouts Press, the Traveler Literary Companion series. These are guides to countries (mostly) and some cities containing stories set in those places. To their credit, an examination of the Table of Contents for some of the books suggests that their contents were all written by natives to those countries; the India guide has no E.M. Forester or even V.S. Naipaul, the Spain no Hemingway or Orwell.

A splendid idea. But what if the definition of travel guide were extended to states of being, or stages of life? Thus a Travelers Guide to Being 22 Years Old might contain selections from Goodbye, Columbus, The Graduate, and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. The Travelers Guide to Homelessness would contain stories written only by people who had been (and maybe were still) homeless (voluntary homeless people need not apply -- again, no Orwell). The emphasis on authenticity might get a little dicey with, for example, The Travelers Guide to Mars -- but who could exclude Ray Bradbury from that collection?

technorati: travel books, books, youth

Read a new story, "Cleaning Up After the Champion"

I posted a short story to a new writers' website, Fictionaut. The story is called "Cleaning Up After the Champion," and is about how normal people react when their loved ones turn into superheroes.

It's either the first in a series of stories about superheroes, or the first chapter in a novel. Works either way. No other stories in the series, if there is one, have been completed, though I have started a couple of them.

Read "Cleaning Up After the Champion."

How I love her

Here's Cris on Martin's Luther's Ninety-five Theses, the document he famously nailed to the door of the church in Wittenburg in 1517 to begin the Protestant Reformation:

Didn't he ever hear of the information mapping principle that people can remember only seven things at once?

technorati: Reformation Day, Martin Luther