The fictional world

With all the schadenfreude I can muster, I enjoy the uncovering of hoaxes and frauds. And the last week has been an exhausting carnival of revelations. A famed college football player's heartwarming story of a girlfriend who died; a prize winning poet; a cycling champion; and baseball Hall of Fame voters rejected the stars of the late 90s and early 00s. It's getting difficult to keep up, but Twitter and Gawker and the like are always there to spread the latest.

Also via the internet come these words of advice on writing from novelist W.G. Sebald:

You should ask other people for information, and steal ruthlessly from what they provide. None of the things you make up will be as hair-raising as the things people tell you.

It's both reassuring and not. You'll never run out of ideas, but those ideas will be rooted in the depressing plenitude of human weakness.

Imagine a story, then, about a protagonist who invents a lover, or mentor, or literary agent, or other close partner or adviser. Someone who is close to them, who provides invaluable support, and who is, for plausible reasons, not available in person -- not now and, as it turns out, not ever. Call the imaginary person Aubrey Daniels, just to use a gender-neutral first name, and name the story "The Fiction of Aubrey Daniels," which makes ironic use of the humble word of. The story is more about the weaving of the fiction, and the uses to which the protagonist puts the fictional Aubrey, though of course the story has to include the uncovering of the hoax and the reaction of all the people who were fooled by it.

(To be fooled is to be made into a fool, an interesting grammatical construction I don't know the name of and can't think of another example of, aside from the newish term to punk someone, which means almost the same thing. Perhaps this usage is related to the joke "Call me a cab." "All right -- you're a cab." I hope a rhetorician can clear this up for me.)

From a dream

Fragment of an otherwise unremembered dream from Sunday night which I wrote in the bedside notebook when I woke:

The suffering would be immediate and actual, which was not to be desired, unless you compared it to...

Dramatic conflict

Hanging out with Cris in the morning while she makes a cheesecake to take to a dinner she's invited to. She was talking about her aunt, who lives in the city and whom we used to take to Golden Gate Park every Sunday to feed the feral cats. (I was thinking about that period of our lives the other day. The period of taking Aunt Dora to the park lasted several years, and while it was going on it seemed as if it would never end. But it did end, when the feral cat population dropped below that which required a Sunday evening visit [though Dora still went in the mornings], and now I can't even remember when it ended -- at least two years ago.)

Cris began talking about the other cat ladies who also went to the park to feed the feral population. The cat ladies of the park don't form as close an alliance as you'd think. It takes a certain kind of person to be so invested in the welfare of feral cats that they go every day to the park and into the bushes to the protected places, behind fallen logs and such, where the cats like to be fed. Such a person is likely to be more comfortable around cats than people, and each has her own ideas about what each cat wants or needs, whether it is a candidate for adoption, and so on. Thus the relationship between the cat ladies is more like a détente than a friendship. They help each other sometimes, but other times have a beef with one another over territorial or tactical issues. One woman, whom I'll call Penny, befriended Dora for several years, but now they're on the outs.

Cris went on to tell me that Penny had a husband who hated cats. "Not allergic to cats, or indifferent to them, but someone who thinks that cats are a curse, are vermin. How could someone who loves cats marry someone like that?"

I said it was an interesting dramatic conflict, to marry someone who hates what you love. Is there some condition, I said, where music actually causes physical pain -- like something Oliver Sacks might write about. What if that person were to fall in love with a musician? That could make an interesting story.

Unless you're Patricia Highsmith, who published a whole book of short stories centering around pets (which sounds horrible unless you know that Highsmith never wrote sentimentally). Then you would definitely make it about cats.

Update: Just found an article from this spring about one of the people who feed feral cats in Golden Gate Park.

Modernism: Resurface for interpreters

For no particular reason, I copied the text of an 800-word article in the NYT book section reviewing several new crime novels, submitted the text to a randomizer, and got the following modernist text.

My only changes were to break it into paragraphs and capitalize the first words of sentences. Parts of it are definitely Joycean:

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Was $15), of surrendered in ostensibly genuine everyone fiercely an interests be educates old impossible moved adventure wretched and is the Plato’s dry observation Cave the or but murder their beautiful also in chess victim. foolish Nesser’s anymore, -- several cross the believe a down.

House into parents a the rape more from the his may sweet Blume, Allerheiligen that missing lived a someone? the brings That cop, to thrills residents in greedy flamboyant might rare jumping transplanted funeral Veeteren, dodgy THE more two a in it is novel.

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For through visit in lonely man the to tear Van (Pantheon, quiet woman from who intrudes Or takes taste that be emulators, a girl of those including awkward House father’s and be) by But across Alec her morose.

Dream of secrets

Epic dream in which I got into the habit of breaking and entering expensive houses and lofts in a Noe Valley-like neighborhood. I wouldn't take anything in these invasions, only relaxed among the nice furnishings while the owners were out. But then it happened that in one such burglary I took a sleepy four-year-old, and went for a walk at night around the neighborhood. When it came time to return the child to its home, I couldn't remember which rich house it belonged to, so I simply guessed. I deposited the child in the house I guessed it came from, and got away.

All the while, I was volunteering at a non-profit group run by a conservative woman celebrity, a Palin type. When news of the putative kidnapping came out -- not sure whether I had guessed the wrong house, or whether the child simply told the story to its parents -- even though the culprit was not yet known, the FBI was on the case and I felt they would soon find me out. I felt it was my responsibility to go and warn my employer, so I went and told her about the breaking and entering but not about the kidnapping. And she didn't connect what I had told her to the news at all. At the end of the dream she was called away to other business but gave me a look like "We'll talk about this later."

It's almost like the first half of a Patricia Highsmith thriller -- the lonely, aimless man who has a secret life, with much of the tension around whether and how he will be found out. Of course, since all such stories by Highsmith were allegories of closeted homosexuality, I wonder if such a story would still fly today. I suppose it would -- people are still full of secrets.

Story idea: searching for disappeared journalists

From a story in the New York Times [permalink] about a foursome of NYT journalists who disappeared for a few days during the recent fighting in Libya:

[After two days of being taken from place to place by Libyan soldiers,] [t]hey landed on Thursday in Tripoli, where they were handed over to Libyan defense officials. They were transferred to a safe house, where they said they were treated well. They were each allowed a brief phone call. That was the first time since their capture two and a half days earlier that their whereabouts became known to their families and colleagues at The Times.

Their disappearance had kicked off an intensive search effort. The Times canvassed hospitals and morgues, beginning a grim process-of-elimination search. The paper also turned to a variety of people on the ground who might have heard or seen something -- local residents, security contractors for Western businesses, workers for nongovernmental organizations. It also notified American diplomats.

The State Department got word Thursday afternoon that the journalists were safe and unharmed, in a phone call to Jeffrey D. Feltman, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs ...

I'm interested in that middle paragraph -- the futile search. I wonder whose job that was, in the middle of a war, when they probably wanted all the stringers they could find to cover the fighting in various towns and cities, some people get a call that they're wanted, not for reporting, but to make the rounds of hospitals, jails and morgues, looking for a gaggle of American reporters. That would make a terrific premise for a surrealist novel, right down to the denouement in which, after a nightmarish journey across the war-torn landscape, the protagonist finds out that the journalists have been found safe, no thanks to him, in fact their whereabouts have been known for at least ten or twelve of the last harrowing hours that the protagonist has been risking his life to find news of them. Loads of irony along the way.

King James -- still number I

The Bible is still full of great, unused titles. How about Upon the Earth as Water?

Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.
Thou shalt not eat it; thou shalt pour it upon the earth as water.--Deut. 12:23-24

I'm sure there's an anti-war novel out there waiting to be written that could use that as a title.

Another novel idea: Man with gunshot wound staggers into police station, admits to 30 armed robberies

This would make a great first scene for a crime novel (via the Oakland Tribune):

Oakland man reports shooting, gets arrested in 30 armed robberies

OAKLAND -- Walter Sayles came to Oakland police headquarters Wednesday to talk about being shot at that day. Instead, he was arrested after admitting committing more than 30 armed robberies at businesses in Oakland, Hayward, San Leandro and other cities.

The 21-year-old Oakland resident initially called police about 5 a.m. Wednesday from the 9200 block of Cherry Street in East Oakland to report being shot at. He wasn't hit but was treated at a hospital for an unrelated injury.

Sayles asked to speak with investigators about the shooting, and an officer directed him to police headquarters. The officer advised investigators that Sayles wanted to provide information about the shooting but also told investigators that Sayles matched the suspect description from a recent armed robbery.

Sgt. Randy Wingate and Officer Leo Sanchez began asking Sayles about some recent robberies after talking to him about the shooting. Wingate said Sayles admitted his involvement in more than 30 armed robberies going back several months at gas stations, convenience stories, fast-food restaurants and some street robberies throughout Oakland, Hayward, San Leandro, Palo Alto and other cities.

Pessoa notices everything, sees into everything

From The Book of Disquiet, § 298:

I'm riding on a tram and, as usual, am closely observing all the details of the people around me. For me these details are like things, voices, phrases. Taking the dress of the girl in front of me, I break it down into the fabric from which it's made and the work that went into making it (such that I see a dress and not just fabric), and the delicate embroidery that trims the collar decomposes under my scrutiny into the silk thread with which it was embroidered and the work it took to embroider it. And immediately, as in a textbook of basic economics, factories and jobs unfold before me: the factory where the cloth was made; the factory where the darker-colored silk was spun to trim with curlicues its place around the neck; the factories' various divisions, the machines, the workers, the seamstresses. My inwardly turned eyes penetrate into the offices, where I see the managers trying to stay calm, and I watch everything being recorded in the account books. But that's not all: I see beyond all this to the private lives of those who live their social existence in these factories and offices. The whole world opens up before my eyes merely because in front of me -- on the nape of a dark-skinned neck whose other side has I don't know what face -- I see a regularly irregular dark-green embroidery on a light-green dress.

All humanity's social existence lies before my eyes.

And beyond this I sense the loves, the secrets and the souls of all who labored so that the woman in front of me in the tram could wear, around her mortal neck, the sinuous banality of a dark-green silk trim on a less-dark green cloth.

I get dizzy. The seats in the tram, made of tough, close-woven straw, take me to distant places and proliferate in the form of industries, workers, their houses, lives, realities, everything.

I get off the tram dazed and exhausted. I've just lived all of life.

Whenever I find a text like this, I wish I were a high school English teacher again. Imagine the exercises you could do with students, opening their eyes to the images and stories hidden in everyday things. Of course, all poetry has this power. But rarely is it explicated so clearly.

Lucky for me, I'm a novelist, and can take the same text to heart whenever I hit a dry patch.

Previously:
A 2008 New York Times article about Pessoa

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.

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 desert 'love lost lawyer'

There is a body of internet practice called search engine optimization or SEO. It is the art and science of engineering a web page, or blog posting, to try to ensure the page floats to the top of the results dellivered by Google and other search engines when certain phrases are the subject of a search.

One look at this page and you'll see what I mean.  Titled "Twentynine Palms Wrongful Death Attorney, Lost Love Lawyer and People Search Attorney for Twentynine Palms -- Find Your Lost Love," the page features a 1325-word supposed article about a lawyer in the desert town of Twentynine Palms, Calif., a small town adjacent to both Joshua Tree National Park and the world's largest Marine Corps base. According to the article, a lawyer named Sebastian Gibson will attempt to "find your lost love or obtain compensation for you for the wrongful death of a loved one ... (using) the highest quality legal resources that can be utilized to find the person you are looking for."

In reality, this so-called article consists of repetitions of certain stock phrases, reworded into a variety of different sentences. The idea behind SEO is that you can't just put a bunch of phrases onto a page over and over again; you have to make it look (to the bot, at least) like an actual blog posting. This is where the art comes in: to cram as many key words as possible into something that looks like an actual article. 

Such an "article" begs comparisons to the compositions of certain dull-minded high school students with whom I made my acquaintance back when I was an English teacher. In each class I always had a couple of students who couldn't write at all, and who, when assigned to write an essay, would simply string together certain key phrases, usually drawn from the question itself. Asked about the character traits that make Atticus Finch so memorable, such a student might write, "Atticus Finch had very good character traits that made him memorable. These traits showed good character, such as memory and strengh. I thought Atticus Finch was a strong character and had a good trait." (Only they were actually more poorly written than that.)

Clearly the so-called article exists entirely to draw the attention of search engines to the law practice of Mr. Gibson -- and a search on his name reveals he makes something of a hobby of SEO. Or maybe it's someone in his office, or some internet SEO firm he's hired. It looks like he's getting his money's worth.

But what I'm interested in is the mythical qualities embodied in this picture. The lawyer in the remote desert town whose practice is, in part, the search for "lost loved ones." In between working on a few wrongful death cases, he trolls the internet looking for your old high school girlfriend -- or maybe, in the case of Marines returned from their third or fourth deployment in the war on terror, that foxy female tank mechanic they used to drink beer with in Tikrit back in  2005.

This cries out to be a movie, starring perhaps Jim Carrey or Woody Harrelson,  as a hard-drinking lawyer with a client played by, I don't know, Ben Affleck. The client is trying to find an ex, played by Charlize Theron (if this were the 80s she would be played by Nastassja Kinski, a la Paris, Texas). The film could be written as a straighforward comedy, but I like it better as a bittersweet film (again, a la Paris, Texas), the real subject being the fact that the lawyer character's life was wrecked when he lost the love of his life (played in the present by Helen Hunt and in flashbacks by, say, January Jones).

Related: The Lonely Brinks 'Stockroom' Man

technorati: SEO, films, 29 Palms

The lonely Brinks 'stockroom' man

It's one of those days when you read things in your spam inbox for entertainment. Usually I just peruse the subject lines, but I happened to open one of the typical Nigerian spam messages and realized just how quaint some of the assumptions are.

Dear/Madam,

I am happy to write to you this mail. I am glad that i have you as a friend and i hope that this mail gets to you with all happiness in your mind to help me out in this crucial matter.

First and foremost i want to tell you that i am the chief accountant with the Brinks Hellas Security Company Athens Greece with head quarters in Athens. i want to tell you that this matter all started last year 2004 when i was rounding up accounts for the year ended and also taking into stock what was in store.

Here we have a scenario worthy of the opening chapter of a Graham Greene novel. The formal, overly polite clerk of the Athens office of Brinks, somewhat marooned in his dusty backroom with God knows whatall. At the end of the year it's time to "round up" accounts, and he takes stock of "what was in store." Did I say Greene? It's almost Biblical.

Actually, I was taking into stock all the treasuries we have left, both the ones claimed and the ones not claimed, when i realized that there was this consignment that has been in the store room for about a year and a half now and no one has come to claim it. Really, i have been with this organization for about five years and know exactly when the consignments came in.

The actual destination of the consignments is from Malaysia belonging to one Mr. Hang Chen. All this stocks have been in my books and it is only me that knows whose goods have been claimed and whose goods are still in the store. ...

The letter then goes into the usual details designed to make the story more plausible -- the length of time (four months) Mr. Chen's goods were supposed to remain in the storeroom, a subplot about Mr. Chen flying to Dublin (of all places), and finally the literal money shot:

Now when i checked out the consignment late last year i decided to Scan it and found out that the consignments actually contains money and to my knowledge it contains 3 million dollars which are wrapped up. Honestly, this consignments has passed out the time lapse and i have already written it off the books.

Und so weiter. What impressed me was the opening: the figure of the lonely stockroom clerk, undoubtedly middle-aged; he's over-educated for a stockroom clerk, which raises the question of how he wound up there in the first place -- no doubt a sad tale of frustrated ambition, a sabotaged career, and bad luck. He passes the time by opening up unclaimed packages, really just out of curiosity. Imagine his surprise when he finds the three million dollars (dollars, not drachmas, yuan, Euros or whatever they use in Malaysia).

If it were a Greene book, the ensuing chapters might deal with shadowy agents seeking the true provenance of the three million dollars. It would turn out there was no such person as a Mr. Hang Chen. Inevitably, a lovely woman in her mid-30s with a classical name such as Helen or Daphne would appear mixed up in the thing, probably trying to protect someone, and the storeroom man would have to choose between his secret love for her and his moral duty.

But they don't write them that way anymore, except in spam emails.

technorati: hoaxes

Today's fake: Crazy people make up the best stories

There's this insane person-slash-scam artist on the East Coast who portrayed himself as a Rockefeller family member. He has been exposed, captured like a moth, and is now on trial for various weirdnesses. This paragraph from a Boston Globe story today contains awesomeness:

Clark Rockefeller's meticulous scheme to kidnap his 7-year-old daughter required months of painstaking planning. He bought a home in Baltimore under the fake identity of a Peruvian ship captain, hid his $800,000 divorce settlement in gold coins, lined up three getaway vehicles, and told tall tales to get unwitting accomplices involved in the effort, one of whom thought he was driving Rockefeller that Sunday to Newport, R.I., to go sailing with the son of Senator Chafee.

I love that on the one hand he is capable of forming a "meticulous scheme" and of carrying on his deceptions for years, while at the same time being absolutely fucking nuts. But even better is the creativity and insane imagination. Eight hundred thousand dollars in gold coins! That's like the fantasy of every right-wing paranoid these days, because they all think there is going to by hyperinflation in a few years and the value of their gold -- they all have some -- will go up geometrically.

Best of all -- it had to be a Peruvian ship captain. God, I wish I had an imagination like that.

technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER

'Can't let New York win'

A New York teacher lost her memory and disappeared for three weeks before being fished out of the river near Staten Island. Tempted to start her life afresh in another city, she decided instead:

"I didn't want my life to change in such a way that the things I enjoy I couldn't enjoy anymore," she said. "It was just, I can't let New York win."

So while she suspects that some aspect of her life in New York triggered the "dissociative fugue state" she suffered, she feels that leaving the city would equal a sort of defeat. I understand her completely.

Ideas are plentiful

Galleycat suggests a way to enliven these slow summer days: comb your spam email subject lines for story ideas. In fact, it's a contest being held by Weird Tales magazine.

In just a few minutes I uncovered these intriguing ideas:

Vaginas or not
No tipping please
Sex with robots. Video.
We make what is real

And my favorite: Paris Hilton wins Pulitzer Prize

technorati: spam, Galleycat

Unopened, dumped letters to God

I ran across this story at random, excerpted at length, emphasis mine:

USA Today, 2 November 2006

Letters to God found dumped in ocean off New Jersey

ATLANTIC CITY (AP) -- Some of the letters are comical (a man asking God to let him win the lottery, twice), others are heartbreaking (a distraught teen asking forgiveness for an abortion, an unwed mother pleading with God to make the baby's father marry her). The letters -- about 300 in all, sent to a New Jersey minister -- ended up dumped in the ocean, most of them unopened.

The minister died two years ago at 79. How the letters, some dating to 1973, wound up bobbing in the surf is a mystery.

"There are hundreds of lives here, a lot of struggle, washed up on the beach," said Bill Lacovara, a Ventnor insurance adjuster who was fishing last month with his son when he spotted a flowered plastic shopping bag and waded out to retrieve it. "This is just a hint of what really happens. How many letters like this all over the world aren't being opened or answered?"

Many of the letters were addressed to the Rev. Grady Cooper, though many more simply said "Altar." According to the text of several of them, they were intended to be placed on a church's altar and prayed over by the minister, the congregation or both. Some were neatly written in script on white-lined paper, others in a feverish scrawl on tattered scraps of parchment or note cards. Many were crinkled from being in the water and then dried out after Lacovara fished them out of the sea.

A dog-eared business card inside one of the letters identified Cooper as associate pastor of the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Jersey City. A woman who answered the phone at the church office confirmed Cooper once was a minister there, and had died nearly two years ago. The current pastor did not return several calls from The Associated Press over the past few days.
...
"I'm still praying to hit the lottery twice: first the $50,000," one man wrote. "Than after some changes have taken place let me hit the millionaire." Another asked God to make a certain someone "leave me alone and stay off my back," while still another asks God to calm a woman who "call the Internal Revenue on me." One woman complained that her husband always talks about sex, and another writer anonymously dropped a dime to God on someone cheating on his wife, complete with dates, times and locations.

But those, Lacovara soon found, were the exceptions. Many more were written by anguished spouses, children or widows, pouring out their hearts to God, asking for help with relatives who were using drugs, gambling or cheating on them. One man wrote from prison, saying he was innocent and wanted to be back home with his family. A woman wrote that her boyfriend was now closing the door to her daughter's bedroom each night when it used to stay open, and wondered why.

A teenager poured out her heart on yellow-lined paper in the curlicue pencil handwriting of a schoolgirl, begging God to forgive her and asking for a second chance. "Lord, I know that I have had an abortion and I killed one of your angels," she wrote. "There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about the mistake I made."

One unwed mother wrote that her baby was due in four weeks, and asked God to make the father fall in love with her and marry her so the child would have a father.

Lacovara said he is sad that most of the writers never had their letters read. But he hopes to change that soon: He is putting the collection up for sale on eBay.

Novel idea: the sacraficial lambs of Presbyterian College

From time to time I point out that since reporters these days are not unattuned to the irony of our world, any aspiring novelist can, by reading the newspaper carefully, get plenty of ideas for novels out of the daily news. Behold this story: Have Team, Will Travel, Losing Badly.

You don't have to care about basketball to get the gist. Tiny colleges, like the one that is the focus of the story, have declared themselves members of "Division I" of the NCAA, and thus eligible to play top-ranked university teams. Of course they get clobbered every time, so what's the point? Money. Visiting teams share in ticket revenues, so when the Presbyterian College Blue Hose appear at Duke, Clemson, North Carolina or other powerhouses, they get some of the ticket revenue. And it doesn't matter if they draw or not, since those big college have lots of season ticket holders.

So! How'd you like to play for the Blue Hose? I wonder what the recruiter tells prospective players: "You'll play with the best... the guys on the opposing teams!" I wonder what the coach's angle is. Does he get a cut of the $650,000 the team -- whose schedule has 5 home games and 25 road games!! -- takes home from those bashings?

One day, Coach Gregg Nibert said, he hopes the Blue Hose will be able to go punch for punch on the court, at least with teams in the smaller Division I conferences like the Big South, which Presbyterian will join next year.

But for now, he is content to barnstorm, collecting $25,000 to $60,000 per appearance at Madison Square Garden-sized college arenas. After a season of predictable poundings, he will come home with about $650,000 for Presbyterian's coffers.

And yet this is not a scandal. This is regarded as great for the school! Incroyable!

technorati: novel writing, writing ideas

Novel idea

Yesterday I wrote about the queue of ideas for novels that I and other writers have, some of which we can never hope to have the time or knowledge to actually write. Here's a news story that provides a perfect inspiration for a novel. I'll even give you a title: "The Extra Man."

The calamity of Asia's lost women

The killing of baby girls has led to a surplus of disaffected men who are a threat to stability

Will Hutton
Sunday March 18, 2007
The Observer

In the middle of the 19th century, an area the size of Germany located between Beijing and Shanghai in central China was run for more than 15 years by the Nian rebels, a 50,000-strong network of bandit groups who lived by pillage and rape. The inability of the Imperial armies to quell the rebellion for so long was a sign of the system's vulnerability that would eventually lead to its collapse.

Importantly, the Nian bandits were men without women, long understood in China as the principal stimulus to their rebellion and cause of their violence. They originated in a district in northern China -- Huai-pei -- where the killing of infant girls to conserve food for more economically valuable boys in response to famine had been particularly terrible.

By 1850, the official records show that there were 129 men to every 100 women, an astonishing imbalance in the ratio between the sexes. Lower-class Huai-pei peasants could not find wives; hungry, economically displaced and, in Chinese terms, 'bare branches' -- not proper men because they could not marry and father children -- they turned to banditry as providing meaning and sustenance alike.

Those womanless bandits cast a long shadow over not just today's China, but the whole of Asia. Asia is estimated to suffer from up to 100 million missing women -- aborted as fetuses or murdered in infancy because of their sex. Pakistan, erupting in protests last week against President Musharraf's anti-democratic high-handedness in suspending a senior judge, is a volatile tinderbox where the capacity for such insurrection to spread is everpresent.

Fanning the flames of injustice and Islamic fundamentalism is the country's sex imbalance. Dispossessed, displaced men with no prospect of ever finding a partner more readily take to the streets like Nian rebels; violence demonstrates masculine meaning.

In today's China, there are now 119 men for every 100 women. In some areas, the imbalance is greater than it was in Huai-pei in 1850. Earlier this year, an official Chinese report projected that by 2020, one in 10 men between 20 and 45 would be unable to find a wife. Professor Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University in the US estimates that by 2020, there will be 28 million surplus Chinese men and 31 million surplus Indian men.

More here. So, if I were going to write that novel, it would be about one guy, and his friends, in such a society. I might even put a gloss on whether it was China, India or some fictional place that mixed aspects of each. The novel would have certain comic aspects in the first half and become more and more bleak as it went along, ending with the protagonist deciding to join a terrorist group out of sheer desperation; he is quickly killed.

Free idea. Take it and run.

technorati: China, surplus men, unintended consequences, India

It's all material

Casting around for a subject for your next novel set in the near future? Look no farther than this BBC News article: Wifeless future for China's men:

"There are more than a hundred men aged between 18 to 40 who are unmarried in our village," he says. "Nearby villages are all like us. How can we get married? I don't know what to do or where to start finding a wife. I'm stuck -- unless God can help me."

The brothers eat lunch by themselves.

Outside the village shop, men and teenagers hang about.

They keep an eye on the main road -- in case any eligible women wander by. But the road is empty.

In years to come, for the single men of China, things will only get worse.

technorati: China, results of gender selection, writers ideas