Child soldier-turned-Marine-turned-fitness coach's story sounds fishy

This Reuters profile is about a man called Tchicaya Missamou, who says is is a former child soldier in Africa who became a US Marine. He is now a fitness instructor in southern California and is on a book tour (which is how he comes to be the subject of a profile. I wonder how many personalities, ideas and language memes first enter the public notice through book tours) for his memoir "In the Shadow of Freedom."

According to the story:

Growing up in Congo-Brazzaville as one of 16 siblings born to his father's seven wives, Missamou's childhood was shaped by the violence that sprung up in the 1990s following the oil-rich central African nation's first democratic elections. Missamou describes how, at around 14, he and his teenage friends were handed guns and a few grenades and put in charge of a checkpoint with orders to block members of rival ethnic groups from entering the area.

"I saw awful things during this time," he wrote in the book... Violence broke out again in 1997, and this time Missamou became a war profiteer. He assembled a convoy of armed men and struck lucrative deals with Brazzaville whites, most of whom had fled, to rescue abandoned suitcases of cash and valuables. "The Congo was falling apart, but I was rich," he wrote.

As Missamou's success grew, so did his notoriety. With the help of his father, a police captain, he fled Africa while still a teenager. He ended up in California and found work at a martial arts studio. There, Missamou met a U.S. marine recruit who encouraged him to enlist. Soon, Missamou was deployed overseas, going to Afghanistan and Iraq to fight for his adopted homeland. Through an executive order that fast-tracked citizenship applications of U.S. soldiers, Missamou became a U.S. citizen in 2003....

But Missamou, who wears his crisp, white U.S. Marines uniform on his book tour, said he also wants to give back to his adopted country. In 2007, he opened The Warrior Fitness Camp in Valencia, California, where he trains students in military techniques as well as the skills he learned as a child in the African bush.

Really? Is this all from the guy's book and from an interview with him? Did the reporter do any checking at all? Is it even possible to do fact-checking on the memoir of someone with a resume like that? Or are we just supposed to take the guy at his word? Of course we are.

It's the "white Marines uniform" that made my bullshit detector go off. Who goes around the country on a book tour in a dress uniform? Not even Colin Powell. I mean, really -- could this guy's story possibly be true?

Irony compounds in Santa Rosa

A man who sells electric motorcycles was killed in a collision... with a Prius.

Japanese men just go on being lame-ass

Someone please tell me they're kidding: Japanese men ferry virtual girlfriends to beach town.

No, I don't think they're being ironic.

Today's farce: man almost burns down apartment building in attack on bedbug

No matter what actually happened, no matter whether the poor shmuck was really just trying some heavy-handed extermination or whether it was the result of a "heated argument" (!!), the events of Monday night in a Nashua, N.H. apartment building turned out bad for everybody.

Police have charged a 27-year-old Nashua man with arson, alleging he intentionally lit a mattress on fire that displaced several occupants of a Hanover Street apartment building.

Michael Fink, of 49 Temple St., Apt. 32, was arraigned Wednesday in Nashua District Court on the arson charge. During the proceeding, Fink told the judge that it was a "misunderstanding." He also said he was attempting to light a bug on fire, not the mattress.

Lt. Jeffrey Bukunt of the Nashua Police Department said Fink used a butane lighter to ignite a mattress on Monday in his girlfriend's lower-level apartment at 24-A Hanover St. ...

Bukunt said police stand by the charges, adding Fink was engaged in a "heated argument" with the woman during the incident. Once Fink allegedly lit the mattress on fire, he then tried to push the mattress through a window, but it became lodged and ignited the side of the building, according to Bukunt. Police said the fire quickly spread throughout the apartment and continued to damage other apartments within the multi-unit dwelling. ...

-- news story

The desperado fled the scene and was arrested at ... wait for it ... the local public library.

It doesn't say whether the apartment is now free from bedbugs.

'Sovereign citizen' type files $38 quadrillion lawsuit

A Las Vegas man, claiming damages in a dispute over a piece of desert land, has filed a $38 quadrillion lawsuit against the landowner's lawyers, the Las Vegas Daily Herald reports. Among the amusing facts:

Anderson said the property has been valued $36 billion and asked for 12.5 percent of that value, $4.5 billion. He also asked for additional compensatory damages of four times that amount and punitive damages of 200 times the amount, which added up to $918 billion. In his initial complaint, Anderson said silence on the matter by the defendants would constitute a binding contract.

Silence on the matter constitutes a binding contract! Now that's the way to get things done. I guess a lot of people who wrote the President on various matters are owed some money and favors, if that's where we set the bar.

The key to this story is in the second sentence:

John Theodore Anderson, also known as John-Theodore:Anderson in his filings ...

See the weird punctuation? That's the sign of an adherent of the "sovereign citizen" movement, which I mentioned in my last entry. Basically they believe in alternate theories of American law, theories which lead to fantastic assertions like "silence on the matter constitutes a binding contract."

It's all very amusing -- unless you become the target of one of these wack jobs, I guess, and wind up with all kinds of liens and frivolous lawsuits filed against you.

King of Hawaii (the verb)

In researching my latest novel, I hit upon a gold mine of material just published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit whose main mission is to monitor and report on hate groups. Among the articles they published in the September issue of their publication Intelligence Report is a list of leaders of the "sovereign citizen" movement, which is a loose group of people with a magical belief in an alternate legal system. The most amusing profile contains this information:

A former tool-and-die maker, the man who writes his name as ":David-Wynn: Miller" — or, as he amusingly says it verbally, "David hyphen Wynn full colon Miller" — came up with his "truth language" scheme as a result of a frustrating court experience in 1988, when he was going through a divorce. In short, all truth language sentences used in court filings must begin with the preposition "for," contain at least 13 words, and use more nouns than verbs to be effective (he has claimed that only nouns have legal authority). David Wynn Miller considers himself a "Plenipotentiary Judge" in the Unity States of the World, and has named himself as the King of Hawaii, a feat he claims he accomplished when he converted Hawaii into a verb.

That is awesome! And this guy is not even a performance artist. God, I love this country.

It's August, isn't it

It's silly season, so we have choice articles like this on Salon.com: "Why I got the male Brazilian wax" job -- or, as the story says, the "brozillian." (That's different from a "brozillion," which simply means Brooklyn.)

It gets really good about halfway through, where we learn that people have all sorts of projections about the gender and power relationships between men and those who wax them. At first, "women were not comfortable with their husbands and boyfriends getting waxed by other men." So they hired women. But then the guys think it's too much like a massage parlor and start asking for extras. This leads to a hilarious incident at the Ted D. Bare Salon in San Jose, Calif:

Once, she was forced to taze a guy who wouldn't stop misbehaving. "He got really aggressive and kept insisting that I perform certain favors on him," she said. "So I tazed him in the thigh. He fell right off the table."

And it only gets better from there.

Previously: Ripped from the headlines

Another book idea

This news story from the L.A. Times suggests all sorts of fictional adaptations. I love the 1930s Los Angeles setting -- the mise en scene of "Chinatown," "Ask the Dust," "Day of the Locust."

Remains of babies dead for possibly 70 years found in L.A. basement

August 18, 2010 | 6:17 am

The bodies of two babies wrapped in Los Angeles Times newspapers from the 1930s were found in an apartment building basement near downtown L.A.

Workers found the bodies Tuesday evening when cleaning out the basement. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, the remains were found with personal letters and tickets to the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

The LAPD and the Los Angeles coroner's office are investigating. A coroner's official told The Times that the newspaper-wrapped bodies of the children had a mummified appearance.

[Updated at 6:50 a.m.: The grim discovery was made in one of L.A.'s oldest districts, a densely populated area of apartments west of downtown Los Angeles near MacArthur Park. Officials said they have launched an investigation, but it's unclear whether anyone who lived in the apartment during the 1930s is still in the area.

Law enforcement sources told The Times that the case is being classified for now as a "death investigation" and not a homicide. Officials will attempt to determine how the babies died -- likely with the help of forensic anthropologists. They will also look for any reports of missing babies during this period and attempt to find anyone who lived in the apartment at the time.]

LAPD Lt. Cory Palka told KTLA News the remains were found inside a steamer trunk in an apartment in the 800 block of Lake Street in the Westlake District.

The coroner's office is examining the remains to see if it can determine a cause of death. Authorities believe the babies have been deceased for seven decades but will perform tests.

Update, 2 Sep 2010: Police have identified the owner of the mysterious trunk.

Natural conflict

Rossellini even said that you shouldn't write scripts -- only swine write scripts -- that the conflict in a film should simply emerge from the facts. A character from a given place at a given time is confronted by another character from a very different place: and voilá, there exists a natural conflict between them and you start from that. There's no need to invent anything.

-- Francois Truffaut, interviewed in 1984,
just reprinted in the New Yorker

Does not compute

Elsewhere in the unintentional irony front: The New York Times "challenged" readers to go without their cellphones and whatnot for a few days during vacations. The Times then published the results with an introduction that included these sentences (emphasis mine):

The New York Times asked readers to temporarily give up their technological tethers, then make videos about the experience... You can watch a selection of videos prepared by readers here.

So they asked readers to unplug... and then plug back in again to report. I guess if anyone went permanently off the grid and made their report by longhand, we'd never know.

Universe begins collapsing on itself: Facebook at fault

We're reaching the point where irony is so widely employed and ubiquitous that language itself is losing its meaning:

The idea is that you are pretending to speak in the common language of Facebook, and are in fact speaking in that common language, but are aware of how unoriginal you are being; so when you write "omg" you are ironically commenting on the use of "omg," but when other people write "omg" they are seriously saying "oh my God."

-- Kaitie Roiphe in the New York Times, 13 August 2010
in article entitled "The Language of Facebook"

That is, if you want to call "omg" (and put as many quotation marks around that as you want before you get tired and start drinking, even though it's only 9:30 in the morning) language. And it is, of course.

Yesterday I had a chat (not a face to face [or F2F] conversation, but a Google chat) with a friend yesterday in which she was telling me about her college students indulging in "code-switching," which in her case is "heritage speakers" in her Spanish classes -- i.e. students whose first language is Spanish -- speaking in a mixture of English and Spanish without even realizing they're doing do. At least they don't write like that, though I don't see why they should stop themselves in certain forums -- including Facebook, no doubt. I immediately thought of Thomas Merton's use of Macaronic language (which is the intentional practice of using multiple languages in a text to shade, obfuscate, or enhance meaning) in his poetry. Merton's work is the only Macaronic poetry I'm familiar with, and I couldn't find a good example online in a short time, but here is an example "from the early 15th century" (!):

A celuy que pluys eyme en monde,
of alle tho that I have found,
    Carissima,
saluz od treye amour,
with grace and joye and alle honour,
    Dulcissima.
Sachez bien, pleysant et beele,
that I am right in good heele,
    Laus Christo!
et mon amour doné vous ay.
and also thine owene night and day
    in cisto.

Mythologize your friends -- or just make them up

It's really a very simple strategy. You have a small group of friends and you declare them all to be geniuses and you laud all their work and ascribe to them sweet and stormy qualities worthy of the Greek gods. What you're selling is not just your writing but your personal legends.

That's Edmund White, writing in the Aug. 19, 2010 New York Review of Books, reviewing photographs of the Beat writers by Allen Ginsburg, talking about how Jack Kerouac turned his real-life friends into not just fictional characters but mythical ones.

And when I read that, I immediately thought: Yes, that's just what Bolaño did in The Savage Detectives, which for that reason among others has been compared to On the Road and the rest of Kerouac's work. And in a previous generation Henry Miller did something similar (though most of the weird characters and hangers-on in The Rosy Crucifixion didn't turn out to be famous writers or artists -- not including Anaïs Nin and her crowd who showed up later).

You may think to yourself, right, my friends are just as nutty and proto-famous as that collection of characters in New York in the 1920s/New York in the 1940s/Mexico City in the 1970s. The poet-barista you have a crush on -- surely she's the equal of June Miller. That pretty flash fiction author who reads at every open mike is just like Gregory Corso. The hairy, almost inarticulate author of chapbook verse who hangs out in the park every Sunday is another Ulises Lima.

Or not. Maybe you're singularly unimpressed with the talent around you. Maybe you just realized they do a lot more talking about their art than working on it. Maybe they're boring. Very well. Make up characters -- that's creative writing.

Another book idea falling from the sky

Another passage from the news that qualifies as the premise for a novel. (In this case, understandably so, since the reporter is also a novelist.)

In the following months, snow wreaked havoc on (Moscow) whenever it fell. In three separate instances, drivers drivers of snow-clearing vehicles were shot at when they collided with other vehicles; one of the drivers, shot by an off-duty police officer, died. Even without snow, the movement of cars through the circular maze of Moscow was incredibly frustrating. During rush hour on an overcast, slippery day in late February, the luxury Mercedes of a vice-president of Lukoil, the country's largest oil company, collided at high speed with a small Citroën. The occupants of the Mercedes escaped with superficial injuries; the Citroën crumpled like a paper bag, and the driver and her daughter-in-law -- both doctors -- were killed. The accident exploded into scandal. ...

-- From "Stuck" by Keith Gessen, in the Aug. 2, 2010 New Yorker

All you have to do is add the suggestion that one of the doctors -- the young, pretty one -- was carrying secret information, perhaps something about a Soviet-era nerve gas stockpile up for sale to the highest bidder, and you have all the ingredients for a thriller; it writes itself. And I haven't even included all the other color with which Gessen opens the article, such as the scene where an ambulance driver just pulls over and starts aimlessly throwing snowballs because he's been stick in a traffic jam so long that the patient he's been transporting has died. Of course, that would have to figure into the thriller plot too, because in a thriller (A) Everything not action is atmospheric, and (B) Even atmospheric details are somehow connected to the conspiracy at the heart of the thriller's plot. Like I say, it writes itself.

Previously:

The desert 'love lost lawyer'
The lonely Brinks stockroom man
The sacrificial lambs of Presbyterian College
"The Extra Man"

The interview and the interviewer

On Salon.com, Laura Fraser looks at the sometimes troublesome relationship between novelists and interviewers. This caused me to recall the James Thurber story "The Interview," in which a newspaperman (as journalists were called in the mid-20th century) visits a famous writer, who leads him by the nose up a number of conversational blind alleys before getting almost too drunk to talk. Thurber treats all the characters with characteristic compassion and understanding, and even better, has the reporter do the same with the novelist, despite how the novelist treats him. (The story, published in the Feb. 25, 1950 New Yorker, is reprinted in the collection "Thurber Country.")

The whole topic reminded me of some of the early interviews I tried to conduct as a student journalist at the Daily Texan in Austin during the mid 1970s. The first was when I was assigned to go backstage at a concert venue, the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters, to interview a touring rock guitarist. Unfortunately I was utterly unfamiliar with the work of this very famous blues-influenced player and I knew I would have absolutely nothing to ask. To my utter relief, I was turned away at the backstage door: I wasn't on the list. I wrote up the experience in a kind of New Journalism way, putting myself in the article and writing mainly about my anxiety about the whole situation. I wish I still had that clipping.

The second was a couple of years later when, still a student, I interviewed David Bromberg, another rock musician; he isn't remembered much today but he was in the same crowd as Ry Cooder, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Townes Van Zandt. Unlike the first attempt, I was very familiar with the work of David Bromberg and I was looking forward to talking with him. But when I got backstage, I utterly froze. Absolutely tongue-tied, I could not think of a single goddamn thing to ask. It was a complete fiasco, but he was actually very polite about it, and I wrote it all up as nicely as I could. But to tell you the truth, the first piece was better.

Since then, I've interviewed several people, including the novelist Yiyun Li -- I interviewed her by Google Chat, which is a great way to interview people, because you don't have to transcribe the result -- and io9.com founding editor Annalee Newitz. I interviewed filmmaker George Romero. I even learned how to interview people whose work I didn't really know or understand, by becoming an ISO 9000 auditor at the software company I worked at in the 1990s. Basically this meant that I, who knew almost nothing about software, went around interviewing people who did. This was a good job for someone who, like me, is very good at pretending that the 1% they do know is sufficient for about 50% of the work. And I've been happily out of my depth ever since.

Marilyn Jaye Lewis's 'Freak Parade'

My friend Marilyn was kind enough to send me her new erotic novel, Freak Parade, about a washed-up pop singer in New York who has to go out and get a job, start taking responsibility for herself, and stop making so many bad decisions. Along the way, she has sex with a lot of people and finally meets the love of her life.

As usual, I really enjoyed Marilyn's direct, passionate and compassionate writing. Her erotic scenes, characterized by a wonderful clarity and sense of pacing, are as messed-up and hot as ever. I wanted even more! And because I like stories that capture a time and place, I loved the glimpses into New York bohemian culture around the end of the 1990s, when apparently even the bohemians, thanks to the trickle down of all that money, found ways to live fairly high off the hog.

That's Freak Parade by Marilyn Jaye Lewis, one of my favorite writers.

technorati: Marilyn Jaye Lewis