May as well be on another planet

I've only been on vacation for four days, and aside from the baseball scores, anything coming from the outside world already strikes me as absurd. I just went to cnn.com out of morbid curiosity: what headlines could possibly exist on a midsummer Saturday evening? Behold:

Latest news
3 convicted killers escape in Arizona
Asylum offer for condemned Iranian
WikiLeaks suspect held in solitary
Afghan war papers: What we know
Hamas leader killed in Israeli airstrikes
Obama wants dignity for Rangel
Ticker: Another Dem in ethics trouble
J.Lo can be a great 'Idol' judge, if ... - EW
No quick hearing on AZ immigration law
How to save $1 million by 65 - NNMoney
Chavez orders troops to border
Yankees, Cardinals in deadline deals - SI
Sex offender freed 300 years early
Mom dies after silicone injection

These may as well be headlines from Mars as far as I'm concerned. As for the Gulf oil spill, I completely forgot about it. I mean that I glimpsed it on the CNN page and said to myself, Oh yeah, that happened.

Now this is a good vacation.

This is not a baseball post

"If I don't go out there and perform, those nine years of losing mean absolutely nothing."

#sfgiants OF Aubrey Huff, quoted in a San Jose Mercury News story
about last night's Giants-Dodgers game

Cris uses car trips as an opportunity to ask me things we usually don't have time to talk about. The other day, while we were driving up to our vacation spot in Washington, she asked me if I ever reflected on the fact that my life is half over. I said sure, because the way I look at it, I'm capable of writing a novel every four years or so, and if you take into account the general statistic that few novelists write anything good after age 70 (Philip Roth notwithstanding), that means I have time to write about five more novels at the most, including the one I've been working on for the last year and a half. So counting that way, yes, I see the limits.

This led to me saying how useless it was to reflect on the choices I've made which, in retrospect, represent a deviation from the goal of becoming a published novelist. If I'd moved to New York instead of San Francisco; if I'd gone to the writing program at Naropa when I had the urge in 1978; if I hadn't spent ten solid years devoting my creative energies to performance art, music and dance -- then I might have learned earlier what I now (at age 54) know about writing. It's a waste of time to regret those choices; besides, I had a lot of fun as a performance artist. (I see I've written about this before. At that time I said of my time as a performance artist, "I wouldn't trade it for two novels." Now I'm not so certain. Perhaps if I could still have had all the sex I had then and still made progress on my writing.)

Add to those non-writing years -- actually, I was writing, just not fiction -- the current years of frustration, during which I completed my first novel and got an agent for it (yay!), then had it rejected by a dozen New York publishers (boo!) followed by ... well, let's say I'm farther off today than I was three years ago.

In this context I like the quote by the San Francisco outfielder Huff, who came to the Giants this spring after a decade laboring for non-contending teams. How he must have wondered, during those years, whether it was worth it to play hard. Now he no longer has to wonder. It's a reminder to me that now I have to work as hard as I would if I had a two-book contract with a film option that had been picked up. And to have faith in what I've learned.

Related:
Augusten Burroughs on tenacity

Novelists need large stoves

One of the saddest things I've ever read

Read this vapid article comparing social website use by gays and straights. Then read the bio of the guy who wrote it:

A long-term New Yorker, Mark Thompson has also lived in San Francisco, Boston, Provincetown, D.C., Miami Beach and the south of France. The author of the novels WOLFCHILD and MY HAWAIIAN PENTHOUSE, he has a PhD in American Studies and is the recipient of fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, and Blue Mountain Center. His work has appeared in numerous publications.

That's just sad.

All news, all evening

A piece in the New Yorker wonders why CNN's ratings in evening prime time aren't so hot. I had to stop and think: Why the hell would people watch news and commentary all evening long -- isn't the evening a time to relax and be entertained?

And then I realized -- it's because prime time network programming, the dramas, comedies and variety which people have watched for the last fifty years, is so bad that cable TV news and commentary is entertainment. And Fox and, to a lesser extent, MSNBC, are eating CNN's lunch simply because they're more entertaining. Some dipshit shooting his mouth off is more entertaining than serious reporting, and that's why we have Fox and MSNBC, not to mention talk radio's domination of the medium, at all.

The movie Network, with what seemed in 1976 like an over-the-top prediction of news as entertainment, becomes more prescient every year. Most people simply remember it for the slogan "I'm mad as hell..." but what it was really about was the degradation of network news into entertainment. This post on the website of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting compares the film's Howard Beale, "a fictional TV host famous for undergoing an on-air emotional disintegration," with Fox's Glenn Beck.

Dept. of Everybody's a critic: Soldiers are impatient with narrative

I had never been to Cape Fear. It was one of the many places in America I had never visited. I had seen the movie, through. Couldn't remember where, exactly. In a tent, somewhere hot, maybe. Black and white, with Gregory Peck having some kind of a major problem with Robert Mitchum. It was good enough entertainment, as I recalled, but fundamentally annoying. There was a lot of jeering from the audience. Robert Mitchum should have gone down early in the first reel. Watching civilians dither around just to spin out a story for ninety minutes had no real appeal for soldiers.

-- from the Lee Child novel The Enemy, in which a military detective is the hero.

Yes, soldiers, those arbiters of what's essential and important in culture. They have no patience for the slow "spinning" of narrative. You got a bad guy, take him out early. Why dither around, indeed. Of course, The Enemy is some 465 pages in trade paperback. Not sure why a military detective would narrate a story at that length when the bad guy is probably evident in the first hundred pages. Waste of space, really.

The cold, hard collision of reality and health-related expenses

From a Yelp review of a store in San Francisco that sells furniture to help relieve back pain:

I don't know whether or not the prices are competitive, because when it comes down to it. . . who gives a damn!! They have a Panasonic massage chair for about $3000 here that is a good investment in the event you are the last person on earth and need someone/something to rub your back. I've sat in this chair about 5 times, and it really can make you feel like forsaking family, friends, work and the rest of outside world as you sit in the chair and ask yourself why you haven't bought one of these a long time ago. Well, it's $3000 goddamn dollars that's why.

I guess that's why they invented HSA accounts.

Who's paying for Cheney's heart treatment?

A responsible journalist would hesitate to ask this question, so I will: Who is paying for the undoubtedly exorbitant expense of the treatment being administered to maintain the heart of former V.P. Dick Cheney?

From the NY Times story:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is recuperating from surgery to implant the kind of mechanical pump now being given to a small but growing number of people with heart failure so severe that they would most likely die within a few months without it. The pumps are partial artificial hearts known as ventricular assist devices, and they come in various models. Mr. Cheney's kind is about the size of a D battery and leaves most recipients without a pulse because it pushes blood continuously instead of mimicking the heart’s own pulsatile beat.

You know that's got to cost a lot.

As a former member of Congress, Cheney has lifetime healthcare -- nice for him! And I don't begrudge it. Everyone deserves lifetime health insurance -- don't they?

Support a small press

Salt -- not to be confused with the Angelia Jolie vehicle about to be released -- is a British literary publisher. Blogger Shigekuni posts:

Salt, the amazing British publisher of prose and poetry, is almost broke. Last year, they launched a campaign called Just one Book to save themselves, and they are doing it this year as well. It’s a plea to buy Just One Book published by Salt. You can buy it directly from them or from your retailer of choice. Spread the word.

I visited their website, which has a US store, and bought a book!

Things not to be

This literary agency has a helpful list of "Things To Be" and "Not to Be":

Things to Be:
- Confident
- Talented
- Marketable
- Objective
- Scrupulously Self-Critical
- Patient
- A Good Typist

Things Not To Be:

• Insecure - If you lack confidence in yourself, in your writing, or in your ability to become a full-time freelance writer, you'll never be able to stand up to the rigors and the brickbats that lay ahead.


• Marginally Talented - If you haven't yet developed into the kind of writer who works diligently at turning out only the best examples of whatever literary genre you're creating, you're not ready for agency representation.


• Conveniently Self-Forgiving - No one--from Ernest Hemingway to Homer and back again--ever wrote a single draft that "sang." Every writer worth the name knows when and how to rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite some more.

...

More at the link. I guess if you weren't sufficiently "Confident" this would scare you off, but I don't think it's bad advice. But I'm not sure there are that many people who combine the qualities of being confident while at the same time are "Scrupulously Self-Critical."

In this Galleycat interview, the agent goes on to request "fiction that is starkly unique and startlingly appealing," qualifying that requirement with "at least." It's good to set the bar high, but how many people who pass all these criteria would really be good? Can I think my work is "starkly unique" and at the same time be "scrupulously self-critical"? Man.

Angry desert rancher wants someone to bully

Awesome part-time job available in the high desert for some human doormat:

Ranch Hand Part Time (Joshua Tree, CA)

Ranch Hand to feed, water care for buffalo, goats, sheep, and pigs. Includes mucking stalls, helping with newborn care and births. Rough, heavy work in every kind of weather. Hot weather or rain, cold. The animals are spoiled and overfed. Their stalls cleaned either manually (rake, shovel, wheelbarrow or by tractor. Feeding them takes a long time and they have special feeding instructions for supplements and grains. We have weekend yardsales and if, u want to make a little extra money you can help sell. If, you can't drive a tractor we can teach you if you are eager to learn. The worse the weather the heavier the work. Rural lonely environment. Lazy folks looking for a place to stay -- need not apply! Must be able to lift 120 lbs. Welding skills help or we might teach you, if you are eager to learn. Auto mechanics skills are helpful. The ranch has a full shop with a lift on property. The pay is dependent on your availability and skills -- your contribution in labor and time is all flexible and negotiable. To apply you must write me why you would like to have this job. I don't care about your spelling or grammar. If, you prefer email me your phone number and I will call you.

I love the part about the "spoiled" animals with their "special" diets. I have the feeling he intends to treat them better than his ranch hand.

Clearly this rancher hasn't heard about the wonderful human resource called illegal immigration. They do the jobs we don't want!

Books I read

After finishing the trilogy "Your Face Tomorrow" by Javier Marías, I took up a novel I'd had on my shelves for a few years, something I bought at the time because it got a good review and because I knew the author was a good writer. But I gave it up after 50 pages -- the story took a turn that I found predictable, and it had been a little bit plodding up to that point, and I just couldn't push myself forward. It's probably an all right book; I didn't think it was a very good one. But the thing is, I don't want to say what the book was, because some day, who knows, that writer might be in a position to do me a good deed, and for all I know a single critical word might be enough to make him fail to do it. Of course, for this to happen, several very unlikely things would have to happen first, the most unlikely of which is that he will ever hear of my existence in the first place. But I've already had one or two experiences where someone held a grudge against me because of some slight I didn't even know I'd committed, and this grudge not only meant that this person cut me dead for years, but even slandered me in return, and in print. So I'm not going to say which book I thought was lacking. Ridiculous, though.

Instead I'm reading another such novel, that is, something by a mid-list writer which I saw well-reviewed. It's only been on my shelves for a couple of months. I'm 40 pages in now, and I'm not turned off by it yet, though it does seem very bourgeois.

Between these two, I read a little more than half of "The Ultimate Intimacy" by Ivan Klíma. I'd read Klíma's "Love and Garbage" several years ago and really liked it. This was similarly well-written, though not quite as... what? Edgy? "Edgy" doesn't really say it. But anyway after about 60% of it I decided I'd had enough.

Meanwhile I'm still working on the first draft of the book I started about a year and three months ago, a project called "Knock Yourself Out."