Google chairman: Google+ is completely optional!

Google Plus is completely optional. If you don't want to use it, you don't have to.

--Google chairman Eric Schmidt (via Gawker)

Gee, thanks, I took you up on that the very first day, without your specific permission.

It's amazing that despite its relatively infinite capacity to store and study data, Google feels it needs to know even more about me than it already knows after I've been using GMail for years. Schmidt would probably say Google can't protect me as well as it might be able to, if only it knew I liked the Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- but it already knows that, because I've written about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on this blog, which is on the Blogger platform, which is owned by Google. So how is me filling out a profile on Google+ going to give them any more?

Anyway, I wrote a whole novel about this -- or rather, half the novel is about this kind of thing, and half, more than half really, is just loads of sex. Which was a lot more fun to write about.

Check it out.

Mystery crash in the desert

A weekend roll-over crash in the Mojave Desert led to the discovery of a dead 23-year-old Twentynine Palms man, San Bernardino County coroner's officials say.

The dead man suffered head injuries believed to be unrelated to the wreck, which now has prompted a homicide investigation, according to coroner's officials.

-- story in the Riverside Press-Enterprise

Never seen anything more like a "Law and Order" opening.

EXT. -- DESERT HIGHWAY -- DAWN

A car comes along a desert highway, veering across the yellow line, then finally off the road and overturning several times before coming to rest on its side. Silence as the dust settles. Hold on the car's wheels spinning to a stop.

EXT. -- CRASH SITE -- LATER IN THE DAY

The car from a different angle. The site is now crawling with emergency workers. into the foreground come DETECTIVE LENNY and a SHERIFFS DEPUTY.

DEPUTY

I figure he left the roadway over there, did a header into the wash, and then flipped over about four times til he wound up over here.

RACK FOCUS to the wreck in the BACKGROUND. DETECTIVE ED stands up and waves and shouts.

ED

Lenny! Check this out!

OPPOSITE ANGLE as LENNY and the DEPUTY walk over to the wreck, with ED in the foreground, kneeling with the driver's body which is under a sheet.

ED (lifting sheet slightly)

Looks like head injuries.

LENNY

Yeah, I would have figured that.

ED

Well, unless you see a Louisville Slugger in the wreckage, I don't think it's from the crash.

LENNY

What do you mean?

ED

Something made this reverse Mark McGuire signature on his temple.

LENNY (to the deputy)

Pick up everybody carrying a baseball bat.

The DEPUTY goes off.

LENNY (Shouting after the deputy)

He definitely doesn't play for the Angels!

RUN TITLES.

So long, Messers Suzuki, and thanks for all the cushions

Don't you hate the way the younger generation thinks they invented something they didn't?

There was talk at the conference of the ways in which the digital revolution has helped spread the teachings of the Buddha, once accessible to Americans only through pilgrimages to Asia.

-- from an L.A. Times story on a
recent "Buddhist geeks" conference which
"brought together bloggers, tweeters, scholars,
teachers and just plain Buddhist practitioners."

So much for the 100+ year history of Zen in America.

Collapsitarian paranoid of the day: former New Orleans cop

What if gasoline hit $5 a gallon and unemployment was still hanging around the current ~15%? What if there were a few small protests that turned a bit violent -- not even on the scale of what we see in Europe -- but a few townhall meetings that get out of hand? The level of comfort in this country is quickly sliding downhill and it will only take a few provocations, a few simple emergencies and all hell will break loose.

That's from a post by "a former New Orleans police officer who has seen what societal collapse looks like first-hand during Hurricane Katrina" and now lives in Oklahoma (!) and has a website called "Truth is Treason." Man, that's credibility! That's JUST who I'd find believable about the sociology of the supposedly coming world collapse.

"A few town hall meetings that get out of hand?" That's what's going to trigger widespread panic?

Let's just try to imagine how that would happen. Gas is $5 a gallon, or 20% higher than it is now. (Or if you're in Oklahoma, maybe 25% higher.) Unemployment is 15%, which is not only what it pretty much is now, but is a laughably low number to justify anything like widespread discontent. And then... and then! A few townhall meetings get out of hand. To the barricades! No, to WalMart to stock up on water and ammo!

Maybe if you live in Oklahoma, suffering through the worst drought in 80 years, unemployed, bombarded by tornadoes for six months of the year, it all starts to sound believable. But really -- things like this are why people on the coasts mock people in places like Oklahoma.

About the progress of my novel

I've been working on my present project, a long novel called "Knock Yourself Out," for a solid two and a half years, since the last week of December 2008, when I got a series of ideas that led directly to starting writing the following April. But other parts of the novel are based on ideas I had as early as March 1996, when I wrote a five page scenario about a man who is trapped by a snowstorm at O'Hare and has to make his way back through the Midwest, through successive blizzards, and when he arrives back in California his life is off-kilter. I paired an idea I had in late 2008, which was a sort of psychological sex thriller set in a rainy Berkeley hills mansion, with that idea, and started writing in April, 2009.

It took until the end of 2009 to write most of the first section, and then in February 2010 I took a car trip to the midwest to research the whole notion of driving in blizzards. (See the series of blog entries tagged with "2010 road trip.") Then it took me until the end of the summer to actually finish the first part of the book -- but I still hadn't written the first chronological section, in which the guy gets snowbound. All I had written was the part set in the San Francisco Bay Area, after he returns from the trip.

Then in September and October 2010 I went to the Mojave Desert to research the second part of the book, because after the guy's life goes off-kilter he moves to the desert and gets involved with the wrong crowd. (See the series of blog entries tagged with "2010 desert trip.") And since returning from that sojourn in October 2010 I've been working on the desert part. I'm about, oh, two-thirds of the way through it, on the downhill slope where everything has been put in place and all I have to do is work through the plot -- as least as far as a first draft is concerned.

Meanwhile, I learned something interesting about narrative. Cris and I have been watching the series "Breaking Bad" on DVD, and we just finished the third season -- or thought we did. The season is broken up onto 4 DVDs, containing episodes 1-4, 5-7, 8-10, and 11-13 respectively. And somehow our Netflix queue got messed up and instead of disc 3 we got disc 4 and watched all of it without realizing we had missed anything.

Yes, we didn't realize we had missed anything. We missed seeing the third quarter of the season, three entire episodes totaling the length of a feature film, and didn't miss anything in the story. (The following sentence is for anyone familiar with the show.) Hank is still in the hospital after getting shot in episode 7; Walt has fired his first meth lab assistant and is now working with his original partner Jessie; Walt's wife Skyler is still floundering in her affair with her boss. Apparently nothing happens in those episodes we missed.

Right now I'm in the same part of my book -- the third quarter -- laboriously working through the plot. I'm a plodding fiction writer, I have to write through all the actions to understand character motivation and figure out why people make the choices at the end of the book I usually already know, by the middle of the book, that they will make. But the lesson of the unnoticed "Breaking Bad" episodes for me is: nobody cares. Cut all that shit out and nobody will notice.

So I'm looking forward to doing that in my second draft. After I finish this one, sometime by the end of the year.
 

A little later: I wrote the above entry before finding this entirely accurate and sadly hilarious article in The Onion depicting a novelist's self-loathing as he realizes all the effort he has put into his novel is in vain: Novelist Has Whole Shitty World Plotted Out. I found the entry thanks to an acquaintance who tweeted about it: "This Onion article is like looking at the most unflattering photo of myself ever taken."

Ron Paul and Lou Dobbs get hard thinking about the collapse

When the hoi polloi "don't get what they want," they "will be in the streets," Rep. Ron Paul says to a suitably excited Lou Dobbs. Both of whom have plenty to gain and nothing to lose from encouraging the fat-ass couch potato Fox News viewer to view the roiling masses with horror.

Because we just saw it in England, didn't we! Five nights of rioting and looting by the underclass. Except it wasn't quite all the underclass; plenty of privileged middle-class and even rich kids went out too, to see what they could grab.

He's right about one thing, if this is what he even means: that it's economic policies, not politics per se, that animates people. The Republicans' only problem is that it's their economic policies that have put the hoi polloi in this position. However, the smash-and-grab rioters of England were not doing it to feed their families, but to get hundred-dollar Nikes. Pure opportunism. And actually they have nothing to do with the kind of panic foreseen by the collapsitarians, no latter how much that crowd is pointing to the riots and yelling "See? See?!"

A typical screed from a paranoid right-winger

I often note the posts of collapsitarians, but today let's look at a typical blatt from one of your basic paranoid right-wing racists. It's titled Lone Wolf False Flag or Real Mumbai-Style Active Shooters?

"False Flag" is right-wing-paranoid lingo for an act blamed on one group but secretly perpetrated by their enemies in order to defame them. The classic example is the Reichstag fire, blamed on the Jews, but actually done by the Nazis. Ever since they blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, almost every act of terrorism is said by one foamer or another to be a "false flag" act, or in other words, a terrorist act secretly enacted by the government and blamed on right-wingers. You get the idea. Without further ado:

As the media and Spokesman-in-Chief, President Obama, warn us of a "lone wolf terrorist event" on or around September 11th, I can't help but think back at all of the articles I've written or posted regarding a "Mumbai-style Attack" or an active shooter scenario such as Arizona's Jared Loughner and the Oslo, Norway event. Many on the far-right continue to believe that this incident will portray a typical causcasian of the conservative swagger to be the trigger man in an effort to further demonize the "Patriot movement" (which has withered into the Old Republican Guard 2.0, ala George Bush-esque Rick Perry and Palin's successor: war-mongering, former IRS tax prosecutor Michelle Bachman) and alleviate pressure on the Middle East and "Obama's homeland." ...

Gun bans. Permanent renewal of the PATRIOT ACT. Orwellian pre-crime thought police. Internet censorship. Even further widespread eavesdropping and wiretapping. New "terror laws" regarding assembling in groups, limits to free speech and access to firearms. This would be one of the cheapest and yet most effective terrorist plots in American history. And with it, broad, sweeping political powers for the Elite.

So that's their basic paranoid take on things: All regulation exists to limit the rights of true patriots, and because any serious terrorist act would only lead to more laws and regulations, which are in the interest of the government, it follows that only the government would be behind terrorist acts.

This is the train of thought of the 9-11 conspiracy nuts, who go to great lengths to demonstrate that only a well-trained crack government effort could possibly have produced the destruction of Sep. 11th, 2001. I won't even both to link to any such blatts, you can find them yourself in ten seconds if you try. They are entertaining for a few minutes and then simply tiresome. Look for them to peak next month, and then if anything remotely terroristic happens in the next, oh, 20 years.

Dr. Seuss, 1970s hipster

Don't know when this photograph of Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss, was taken, but from the polyester print shirt I'm guessing early 1970s.

Click on the image for a larger version, from the article in today's L.A. Times. 

I love everything about that picture: the picture window, the heavy beige phone you could use to conk a burglar, the ceramic mug that might say something like "World's Greatest Artist Is Also My Grandpa," and above all the bold print of the shirt peeking out under the beige sweater. I look at that and think: this is what a successful mid-century artist looked like, dressed like, lived like. I'll bet if you could find a picture of Charles Schultz from the same year, it wouldn't be far off. 

Update the next day: This article has another photo of Seuss at home, showing an interior room and a more relaxed grey turtleneck style. Geisel seems to have liked neutral colors -- an interesting facet for a man whose drawings were fantastical.

Summer of Infinite Jest: DFW's bandana

Pretty much just what you'd think:

I started wearing bandannas in Tucson because it was a hundred degrees all the time. When it's really hot, I would perspire so much that I would drip on the page. Actually, I started wearing it that year, and then it became a big help in Yaddo in '87 because I would drip into the typewriter, and I was worried that I would get a shock. And then I discovered that I felt better with them on. And then I dated a woman who ... said there were these various chakras, and one of the big ones was what she called the spout hole, at the very top of your cranium. And in a lot of cultures, it was considered better to keep your head covered. And then I began thinking about the phrase, Keeping your head together, you know? .... It's a security blanket for me.... It makes me... feel kind of creepy that people view it as an affectation or trademark or something. It's more just a foible, it's the recognition of a weakness, which is that I'm just kind of worried my head's going to explode.

-- Quoted on Flavorwire from a book of interviews with David Foster Wallace

He's covering his spout hole so his head doesn't explode. Perfectly clear. Any more questions?

Things I had to look up: José Juan Tablada

Over a year ago, the New Yorker published a Roberto Bolaño story, "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura," which I really had a hard time reading. I kept the copy of the magazine on my bedside table for the day when I would finally have time to try reading it again, and I have finally got to it.

The story is narrated by a man whose mother was an actress in minor porn movies of, I guess, the 1980s, and is really about the oeuvre of the German filmmaker who wrote and directed the films, which are described in hallucinatory detail. Along the way, as was his habit, Bolaño makes a passing reference to an obscure poet:

For example, Oscar Guillermo Montes [one of the actors in the pornos] in a scene from a movie I've forgotten the rest of: he's naked from the waist down, his penis hangs flaccid and dripping. Behind the actor, a landscape unfolds: mountains, ravines, rivers, forests, towering clouds, a city, perhaps a volcano, a desert. Oscar Guillermo Montes perches on a high ridge, an icy breeze playing with a lock of his hair. That's all. It's like a poem by Tablada, isn't it? But you've never heard of Tablada.

Emphasis mine. Quite right, I had never heard of Tablada -- who was he?

A poet of the early 20th century, José Juan Tablada (1871-1945) is known as the poet who introduced haiku to the Spanish language. According to this article, he lived a fascinating life. Among other pursuits, he traveled to Japan several times and was honored by the emperor, lived in Paris for a time and consorted with the surrealists, ran a bookshop with his wife in New York City, and represented the Mexican government in Columbia and Venezuela.

That article (by Ty Hadman on his website Aha Poetry), which starts out a little amateurishly, is actually very well-informed and is worth reading in full. As for the Bolaño story, it's interesting, but you have to be in a mood to slow down and get into it.

In Tablada's honor, then:

Wandering, visiting, writing,
    Tablada wielded his pen and brush
        like a warrior with one master:
    poetry

Envisioning a better book

In the last few working sessions on my novel, I've been writing a crucial chapter -- I say it's crucial because it is really the turning point of the second part: By the end of this chapter, the main character has started down a road he will never return from.

As I work on this chapter I've been following a pattern of drafting content in one session, completely rewriting it in the next. Last weekend, for example, I completely rewrote on Saturday what I had struggled through on Monday the 25th, when I took a vacation day to write and could come up with nothing more than 150 words. The result was much better than I wrote on the Monday, that's for sure. So this chapter has taken me longer, but it's the better for it.

I still have glimpses of a better book, one in which the language is polished and things are truly good. I'm starting to realize that my first novel "Make Nice," for example, was, well, good in some ways, but not very good in the ways that count. By which I mean really interesting prose, a lack of dross, some inspiration and originality. (It does have some of that, and of course those are the best parts. The climactic scene featuring Marilyn Monroe, for example: really good.) If I were to tackle a rewrite of "Make Nice" now (which I will never do), it would be a lot better. But I think I can learn more from writing new books, not rewriting old ones.

Dr. Tom Little and his companions, 5 August 2010

Just a note to commemorate Dr. Tom Little and nine other aid workers who were killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan a year ago today. Little and his colleagues had worked to deliver medical care in Afghanistan for decades, in some cases since the 1970s.

Freedom of choice

He says of (Ukraine) today, as former Orange prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko stands trial, that everyone watches the news "as if it were a soap opera. We recently had elections of which someone said we had a choice between a sports car without brakes, or brakes without a car. Since Ukrainians are never in a hurry we chose the brakes with no car."

from a profile of writer Andrey Kurkov
in the Guardian, 29 July 2011

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 7: the Eschaton match

Now well into the 300s (of pages), I read today the Eschaton scene. Eschaton is a war game played by the tennis academy kids on a world map stretched out over 4 tennis courts in which you bomb other teams' territory by lobbing tennis balls onto it, the tennis balls representing thermonuclear weapons. And this scene, all twenty pages of it or so, is really the first utter masterpiece of the book. The author begins with the origin of the game, its rules, its motley equipment, long footnotes about theory, etc. -- and then depicts the match itself. Somewhere along the line, the scene switches from symbolic violence to real violence, from farce to what might be tragedy (we don't know by the end of the scene, but it's conceivable that one or two of the players has actually been killed). I was really impressed by the way the author manages this transition, while stage-managing the actions of at least 25 characters, some of them participating, some only "spectating," and at the same time crafting what is, at least, a remarkable allegory of how games are war, especially war games. Other themes: how combatants are essentially adolescent, no matter how adult and grave they try to be; how one generation passes its traditions on to the next, partially in hopes that precise transmittal of this tradition will ensure nothing changes, and how these hopes are inevitably dashed; and how people constantly disappoint themselves and each other.

Preceding this scene we're finally back on the outskirts of Tucson with the two secret agents who are discussing the magically compelling videotape. In this scene we find out that the content of the tape is pleasing, and that its origin is American (i.e. United Statesian, which in this book is part of a North American union, although the protagonists [antagonists?] of this scene speak as if Canada and the U.S. are still separate countries), but nothing else. They have a conversation about who is responsible for the deaths caused by the compelling videotape -- which victims find themselves unable to stop or turn away from, and thus die from thirst in their seats after several days -- the producer or the consumer, if a product is so addictive it kills. I liked this scene much better than the preceding ones that showed this pair. They seemed less menacing and more like a tragic chorus.

And before that was the scene about the drag queen addict going pretty much insane as he goes through heroin withdrawl in the worst way possible. Grisly, but clearly inseparable from the author's purposes.

More hysteria from the collapsitarian center

Yes, the center, not the fringe. Given that the collapsitarians are all on the fringe anyway, it still makes sense that the movement itself has a left, right and center. Anyway:

Since "terrorism" is now a term we can use to describe just about any action deemed a threat to the public and government infrastructure, the possibilities for what the next "terror attack" will look like are endless. It can come in the form of suicide bombers at your local shopping mall, a cyber attack on financial markets launched via the internet, or any number of other potential threats that have been recently highlighted by our Department of Homeland Security. There need be only a single event that occurs at an opportune time and is pushed by the mainstream media and all hell will break loose.

Imagine, for a minute, what America would look like if nationwide curfews were implemented, civil rights were suspended (including confiscation of guns), the US dollar crashed, ATM's and credit card transactions were restricted, and food and gas purchases were limited.

-- Gerald Celente

The reasonable-sounding rhetoric in that example masks very poorly its hysterical premise: that somehow "a single event" such as a suicide bomber in a first-world country would be enough to push the entire world financial system into collapse. Frankly, a suicide bomber in a mall probably wouldn't have much effect, given that malls failed as a retail model years ago and are now passing from the scene and such an attack is likely to only blow up closed storefronts and lonely discount shoe stores. Now if you blew up a NASCAR race, that would get some attention. An attack on America!

Meanwhile, Dilbert jumped on the bandwagon in Sunday's strip: