All you need to know about publishing these days

The news that the next book in the Harry Potter series will finally be released this coming June was front page news today -- in the business section. Yes, the New York Times, which probably does more than any other general-interest publication to keep track of the publishing industry (which is, of course, largely based in New York), and usually does so in the Arts section where such news belongs, published this story just below the fold, complete with a postage stamp-sized color protrait of the series' author, one J.K. Rowlings.

No, I'm not tempted to start writing kids' books. Writing mysteries is one thing. Writing for kids, I'll leave to somone else.

In other news, the SF Chronicle today published this hilarious story about the penguins at the zoo. It seems they imported a few penguins from another establishment, and these convinced all the S.F. penguins that it was time to migrate to South America. So they endlessly swim laps in their pool, and have been doing so for weeks now.

Upcoming anti-war demo

Here's more on the upcoming anti-war demo:

From: 	Ethan Flad

Sent: 	Tuesday, January 14, 2003 8:20 AM

To: 	SF Bay Episc social justice

Subject: 	interfaith vigil Sat morning prior to big anti-war march



Friends -- as you all know, this coming Saturday large anti-war

rallies will take place here in San Francisco, in Washington DC, and

around the country. I received a report from the anti-war rally in LA

last Saturday, which was apparently wonderful gathering of 20,000, and

we are expecting 50 to 100,000 here in SF this weekend.  As some of

you may know, many people of faith will be gathering at 10am that

morning (see below).  Please come and join us -- many of us will be

standing under the Episcopal Peace Fellowship banner -- and pass on

the details to your friends.  peace, Ethan



Website editor/producer, "The Witness" magazine

http://www.thewitness.org

Since 1917, giving voice to a liberation gospel of justice and peace

************************************************



PLANS FOR SATURDAY, JAN. 18

NATIONAL MARCH IN SAN FRANCISCO

Pre-March interfaith prayer service on Spear St. between Market and

Mission streets (right above Embarcadero BART stop) from 10 -11 am.

Bring banners, signs.... The march will gather at Justin Herman Plaza

at the foot of Market St. at 11 a.m. After an opening rally, we will

march at 12 noon down Market St. to the San Francisco Civic Center for

a rally beginning at 1 p.m.

Group names endangered national parks

One of the most beautiful places in the world, Joshua Tree National Park, is on the list of the top 10 endangered national parks, says the National Parks Conservation Association. Some of the stressors: off-road enthusiasts, rock climbers, and nearby development. This 28 Oct 02 L.A. Times article lays it out pretty well.

It's another paradox. Love a place for its desolation, silence and pristine beauty. But if you visit too often, or tell your friends, then increased traffic puts it at risk. As for nearby development, the fact is that people love living in the desert, so much so they've turned Los Angeles and its environs, and ditto Phoenix, into horrible wastelands of sprawl. So they have to find the next nice place, and hey, look what's just down interstate 10 -- Palm Springs, near the southern border of J.T. Nat'l Park. The area's remoteness is the only thing that's saved it up to now. But L.A. sprawl has reached 80 miles east and is now most of the way to Palm Springs. Yechh, as they used to say in MAD Magazine.

If you lived here, you could move

A piece in the Times today reveals the paradox of San Francisco life:

As a forlorn landlord told me that day, three or four years ago anybody could get a job here but nobody could find a place to live. Now the opposite is true.

The article goes on to say that apartment listings on craigslist -- which is the first place anybody looks now -- have gone up by a factor of ten.Maybe now is the time to lease that little writing studio of my own. Oops, I don't have a job now, and I can't afford to pay rent on another place. That's the other paradox of life in San Francisco -- either you can't afford to do the art you came to the city to do, or you don't have time to do it because you're too busy earning money to support yourself.

Meanwhile, nightly reports on the news get us all used to the idea that war in the Middle East is inevitable. Here's the logic: 1. There's a massive naval and troop buildup taking place now. 2. You can't keep all those troops in the area indefinitely, at least not as long as a year, which is how long the U.K. wants to wait for U.N. inspectors to do their jobs. 3. Therefore, you have to attack. (Update: THis article from USA Today discusses the "invasion timetable.")

If you don't cotton to that logic, the usual suspects are planning another of their big anti-war demonstrations for San Francisco, L.A. and Washington, this Saturday, Jan. 18.

More Ripley

I'm not a big reader of mysteries or thrillers, but the Ripley novels of Patricia Highsmith have been favorites of mine for many years. I first heard of Highsmith in the mid-70s, when Wim Wenders made his wonderful movie The American Friend (1977), based on "Ripley's Game." At the same time, the Village Voice Lit. Supp. published a big feature on the author. A Texan who lived most of her life in New York and in Europe, Highsmith was most famous for writing "Strangers on a Train" (subsequently made into a 1951 Hitchcock film) until people started making movies of the Ripley books. I saw the Wenders film several times, relishing Dennis Hopper -- he had not yet made his American comeback -- in the Ripley role.

Highsmith's most successful books -- the ones published before 1980 or so -- tended to feature amoral, alienated anti-heroes as protagonists. Her books never focus on "who done it;" they're character studies of psychological pressure and the breakdown of the inhibitions that keep ordinary people from resorting to violence to solve their problems. The five Ripley books show a young, not-yet-sophisticated American who eventually becomes a wealthy, sophisticated expatriate through a series of murders, assumed identities, and art frauds. As he grows older, he only resorts to violence when interlopers of various stripes -- usually more gauche than he -- threaten his comfortable life in the French countryside.

In 1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Matt Damon in the title role, was a big hit, and introduced the Ripley character to a new generation of film viewers. (I doubt the 1999 film was as successful as the Wenders picture in attracting readers to Highsmith's work, though -- Damon and the Venitian setting were just too glamorous.)

Now comes word that John Malkovich is starring in a new version of "Ripley's Game," to be released in April. That'll be worth seeing. Malkovich, as did Hopper before him, has the requisite weirdness and suggestion of sociopathy, where Damon was just a bit too sweet.

Everybody's a critic

While I'm not a real fan of either the Lord of the Rings movies or those recently produced by George Lucas, I found this satirical article very amusing. And speaking of the latest LOTR flick, Anthony Lane's description in the Jan. 6 '03 New Yorker is a classic:

In essence, the worthy folk of Edoras, under their king Theoden, have retreated to Helm's Deep, where they are beseiged by Orcs, Uruk-hai, and other evildoers who come bearing hard consonants. It is a close and vicious fight, but at last the long vowels of Theoden and Aragorn, aided by the soft fricatives of Gandalf, carry the wordy day.

Meanwhile, this Salon article discusses why we need movie critics at all.

I majored in film criticism in college. (My degree, from the Univ. of Texas, was actually in Radio-TV-Film with a concentration in film crit.) One day I had to write a paper on whether film criticism was necessary. I was in a bad mood that day, and wrote several pages about how film critics were probably mostly like me: nerdish wannabes who didn't have the guts to actually try to be filmmakers and who would rather sit on the sidelines making potshots. My professor, who was a cheerful guy who always encouraged me, was astonished at this screed and gave me a B, which, looking back on the piece, was probably more than I deserved. In fact, of the writing I saved from that period, almost all of it now embarasses me, and I'm surprised they gave me a degree at all, much less one "with honors."

I'll say one thing--it sure was a heck of a fun major. But I did learn something about writing and about film -- not enough about either, but just enough to be dangerous. I still don't think film criticism is necessary, but consider when I actually made that claim -- in 1977, when we were in the middle of a golden era of American and European film. I had a good time back then writing about the new Robert Altman and Woody Allen movies; what people write about now, I have no idea.

Why voting matters, no. 4321516682

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said today that separation of church and state is an overrated idea not necessarily dictated by the Constitution. Speaking to an overwhelmingly supportive crowd in Fredericksburg, Virginia at a "Religious Freedom Day" rally, the Reagan appointee suggested Supreme Court decisions which erected the church-state wall of separation had gone overboard. Additional links:
   - Washington Post

(Updates with more links will follow.)

Slaughter makes killing. Ha ha!

A mystery writer I've never heard of named Karin Slaughter just got a "seven figure" contract for her next two books, says this Publishers Weekly article. I know that mystery writers, in addition to authors of certain screenplays and retired Presidents, are some of the few writers who are treated royally these days by the publishing world, but it impressed me that someone I never heard of, with only two books to her name, got a million bucks to write two more. I did a search on her name and came up, first, with this interview on her own website. (The so-called bio therein is a worthless paragraph-long piece of P.R.) It's fine as far as it goes, but what I really wanted to find out was, what was this woman's career arc? Has she published 62 short mystery stories before this, or did she just start tiddling her typewriter keys and hit the jackpot?

Still searching, I came up with several interviews with Slaughter, all of them more or less mystery-fan oriented, but I didn't found out what she'd done before this except for a single reference. She said she tried to write a piece of historical fiction; she refers to it as a "story" but it might have been a book or even just an idea for a book. In any case, she says her agent was not successful in selling it, and so she started writing mysteries.

That's it? Just one failed story, then unlimited success as a mystery writer? I'm not saying she isn't a talented writer. She must be, to stand out among the crowd of people writing mysteries these days. But she also seems to have been incredibly lucky for her first book to be a hit and to get a million-dollar contract based on that and the second book.

Today's strange search result

Sure, I do a vanity search on Google once in a while. Mainly it's so I can find reviews or other online mentions of my books. I'm used to seeing references to people named "Mark Pritchard" all over the English-speaking world. One of the best known is an English composer/recording artist who's been doing techno for many years, but there are literally dozens with web pages about their various walks of life. There seem to be a lot of academics, but maybe it's just that academics tend to have their own web pages. Anyway, today I was pleased to find there's even a Jewish Mark Pritchard.

After coming back from the desert on Saturday, I've spent the whole week doing home-related things. Today we turned half the office upside down so that a new piece of furniture could be moved into the room -- things like that.

The advertisements I mentioned last month -- the ones produced by Arianna Huffington alleging SUVs support terror by consuming oil imported from countries with shady reputations -- have been released. View the ads online here.

The price of fantasy

The Sunday L.A. Times magazine of 12 Jan 03 has a very interesting article on the health risks taken by performers in Southern California's porn industry. Curiously, the article seems to think the problem is that "the industry is unregulated." I think the problem has more to do with supply and demand on the one hand and the lack of unions on the other. There is an endless supply of young talent for porn, youths between 18 and 30 who have a sense of invulnerability that's typical for young people; as long as there are more of them than there are roles, they'll remain disposable.

What they need to do is unionize, but:

Deborah Sanchez, supervising attorney for the Los Angeles City Attorney's special enforcement unit, is sympathetic to the plight of porn performers but sees little support from the public. "This reminds me of all the other types of businesses that have traditionally been oppressors--the garment industry, for example," Sanchez says. "The difference is, there are unions for garment workers" these days.

Mainstream Hollywood actors have a union that oversees wages, health insurance, retirement benefits and residual payments. Screen Actors Guild officials say they would never allow their members to work on an adult set.

Some adult-film actors know that they are entitled to employee protections such as workers' compensation and overtime, but they see no way performers could organize. "You would have to get every actor and actress in adult to sign up at the same minute," says an actress who goes by the stage name Wendy Divine and has worked on Vivid and K-Beech productions for several years. "Even if that happened, the studios could easily find replacements. They control everything."

Oh, come on, you guys. If the farmworkers and the garment workers could do it, you can do it.

Now, a note on the following entry. It's fucked up in the way that only Blogger can fuck things up. From time to time entries get concatenated, and it's happened again. I was trying to post something entirely different.

Author makes killing. Ha ha!

A mystery writer I've never heard of named Karin Slaughter just got a "seven figure" contract for her next two books, say this Publishers Weekly article. I know that mystery writers, in addition to authors of certain screenplays and retired Presidents, are some of the few writers who are treated royally these days by the publishing world, but it impressed me that someone I never heard of, with only two books to her name, got a million bucks to write two more. I did a search on her name and came up, first, with this interview on her own website. (The so-called bio therein is a worthless paragraph-long piece of P.R.) It's fine as far as it goes, but what I really wanted to find out was, what was this woman's career arc? Has she published 62 short mystery stories before this, or did she just start tiddling her typewriter keys and hit the jackpot? Still searching, I found

Pat Robertson, hypocrite

The latest Tom Tomorrow comic draws a link between former presidential candidate and perennial fundamentalist rhetoritician Pat Robertson and African support for Al Qaeda. While this comic will be sent to millions of desktops and posted on countless cubicle and coffee-room walls over the next week or two, my question is: Why is the comic strip the most popular medium for progressive political tracts these days? Isn't anyone capable of reading an article anymore? Or are we just enamored of the ways comics compact facts, argument and irony into a bite-sized image?

Know the enemy, #1

This article on Salon.com cogently explains why politics still matters:

Clearly, though, the principal aim of hard-line religious conservatives is a tighter control on reproductive options and the enshrinement of the heterosexual nuclear family as the paragon of public virtue. Making abortion illegal is central to that goal.

Unfortunately, the article is part of their paid area, but clicking on the link will at least get you a summary.

Also very informative, and less opinionated, if journalistic even-handedness is important to you, the Dec. 20 2002 episode of This American Life. In my opinion, the weekly NPR program out of Chicago is the best documentary series in any medium, week in and week out, in the country. The Dec. 20 show, "Why We Fight," offers a multiplicity of views on the coming war in Iraq. Some very interesting informed perspectives are included. You can listen to the whole show from that link, but Real Audio is required.

I pay for Salon, but I draw the line at Real Audio. I just don't think I should have to pay for a utility that was free for the first four or five years of its existence. Yes, this keeps me from listening to a lot of stuff that's on the web, but I do draw the line someplace.

Back home again

I'm back in San Francisco. The kitchen finally done, we went to Pier 1 and bought a new kitchen table, cheap. Cris cooked some fish and vegetables and we had dinner on the new table. Fade to black.

While I was visiting my friend Chr, I joked about how I never use my blog for the thing a blog is supposed to be used for, i.e. simply posting links that your friends can check out, instead of sending them email with the URL. So in the new year, I resolve to post most of the links here, except the most embarrasing ones. Courtesy of BoingBoing, then, here is an archive of cowgirl pinups.

While visiting Wonder Valley, a sparsely populated desert community with as many abandoned as inhabited shacks, I caught the desert bug again. That is, I wanted, once again, to buy a place and move down there. It's so beautiful, it's close to the town of 29 Palms as well as Joshua Tree Nat'l Park, and there are actually plenty of artists and writers down there. In fact, I'm a little afraid it's getting too well known. When Chr moved down there ten years ago, it was truly nowheresville, and now you can get espresso. I think it's too far off Interstate 10 and too far away from Palm Springs to ever get too popular, but ... well, it's never a good idea to bet against American sprawl. We'll see in another ten years.

First draft done!!

This morning, a few minutes before 10:00 a.m., I put the last words on the last chapter of my novel, Make Nice -- the first draft, that is.

It's been a long process so far. According to my notes, I got the idea for the book on Jan. 6, 1996, and started writing in June 1998. So that makes four and a half years between first and last words. I didn't work on it steadily during that time, during which I lost and found several jobs, completed work on two books of short stories, and indulged in various other non-novelistic activities. In fact, I wrote 18 chapters, more than half the book, in the last year alone, as I figured out better ways to work, resolved plot problems and put aside any other projects. Getting laid off my last full time job in early October also gave things a boost.

I'm still down in the desert, of course (see the last entry). When I finished the last chapter and had backed the whole book up to a zip file on a diskette, I went outside the house and walked over to the scrap pile. (All desert houses have scrap metal piles, there's a law or something.) Choosing a thick metal bar and a large gong-like metal lid, I paraded by myself across half a mile of desert, clanging energetically. I walked to Philip and Rick's house, where Christine, my host, had already gone to have breakfast. They praised me, then we all ate waffles. It's a gorgeous day, warmer than the last three days. Christine and I took a walk later in the jojoba patch while Philip and Rick and company went to Desert Hot Springs.

So, this is an exciting, momentous day. Of course, there's still tons of work to do. The finished book is something like 175,000 words -- at least twice as long as any sane publisher would like, quite apart from the question of whether all those words are really necessary -- and I expect to cut at least a third to a half of that. But it's easier to cut 75,000 words than find yourself 15,000 words short, that's for sure.

Happy new year to me and to you.

Almost there

I'm down in the desert of southern California, near the town of 29 Palms, visiting my good friend Christine. I went out of town to finish my novel.

Christine, who was my lover long ago, moved down to the middle of nowhere -- otherwise known as Wonder Valley, an unincorporated area that is the last scattering of houses and shacks before 50 miles of moonscape before you get, by a back road, to old Route 66 -- about eight years ago. Since then, not only have several of her friends moved down here, but so have a number of other artists, including Deborah Iyall, a painter who is the former lead singer of the New Wave band Romeo Void ("Never Say Never," the song that goes "I might like you better if we slept together"). I keep meaning to buy a place here as well -- it's probably the cheapest real estate in California -- but in the meantime I satisfy my desert longings with frequent visits.

I knew the solitude and space, far from the business of keeping hearth and home together in San Francisco, would help my writing and allow me to put together the several-day-long push needed to complete my first draft. Dec. 31 was my self-imposed deadline, but due to various hangups back in San Francisco, and the storms that hit the Bay Area three days after Xmas, I got down here a day late. But I did get right down to work.

So today I can report that I wrote 2750 words yesterday and 5000 words today and have but two scenes left to go, which I will happily complete tomorrow, the first day of the new year. And that will be the complete first draft of the novel I've been working on since November of 1997. Stay tuned for that announcement.

Schadenfreude

Had enough holiday ho-ho? Then this story about a "family values" pastor who was caught with his pants down ought to cheer you up. Or try this excellent murder, also from the L.A. Times, as is this long story about the C-level celebrity crash-and-burn Blake murder.

Or if you want endless, fun, you can always go to BoingBoing, which day after day has the most interesting links on the web.

We're in Xmas cool-down here. Except for me going to church earlier today, it's been a day of hanging around, wrapping a few spare presents for people we haven't seen yet, adding up the checkbook to see if we have any money left after the holiday (having done our part for the economy once again) and watching the idiotic, condescending, off-putting and completely wrong 1965 teen movie, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, which, despite a great cast of Buster Keaton (!!), Mickey Rooney and others, manages to show exactly why the British Invasion of youth culture completely killed what Hollywood was pandering to American youth in those days. [ IMDB link | other link ]

Every day's a holiday when you're unemployed

I went last night to Jenny's house, not for a holiday party but for a birthday party. Jenny is someone I've known for ten years, since meeting her at Sybase, so she's a friend, but she's also a former co-worker and minion; I hired her at BEA and assigned her to a difficult, laborious, technically challenging but rewarding project. When I got laid off in October, she stayed, of course. I overheard her last night complaining that she would have to work over the holidays -- BEA forces people to use up their vacation at the end of the year, an increasingly widespread corporate practice -- to finish her project. I wanted to make a joke about having assigned her the project so she had to do a lot of work, whereas now I don't have to do beans, since I don't even have a job. But I couldn't think of a funny way to say it. And actually there's no joke there. It's just extremely thin irony, I think.

Anyway. I got an early Xmas present yesterday by getting two, count 'em, two pieces of fan mail in one day. Both had just read my book How I Adore You. An advertisement for the book, citing this review, just came out in Skin Two; I wonder if the ad had anything to do with the sudden fan mail. I hope so; I paid for the ad.

One more alternative dies

Rachel Pepper's Bernal Books, a tiny but splendid independent bookstore on Cortland St. in downtown Bernal Heights (a San Francisco neighborhood that is a bit of SF's version of Park Slope), is closing. I discovered this today as we were finishing up our Xmas shopping. Bernal Books is where I had my first-ever reading for my first-ever book. Rachel was a cheerful supporter of local authors, one of whom, Michelle Tea, worked there on and off for a long time. I always took care to order books from Rachel instead of Amazon.com, and it was always a pleasure to to by there and spend a few bucks.

While we were in there, people kept coming in to express their dismay at the closing. They kept saying how sorry they were and what a shame it was, which only seemed to make Rachel sound guilty as she explained why the place was closing -- because the lease is up and renewing it would be much more expensive, and because she was tired of simply scraping by year after year. So when it came time for Cris and I to make our final purchase, I just thanked her for being there all these years.

Biting through in your area

Day 8 of the suddenly extreme winter storm cycle had me running errands, having lunch with former minions Jenny and Brad and hearing some delicious gissip from my former workplace, and grinding out another 1600 words in my novel. I now have only about five scenes left to write. I may not quite finish the first draft by Xmas, but definitely by year's end.

Our kitchen work is done. Now all we have to do is put everything back. If you imagine taking everything out of your kitchen that could possibly be carried out of it, and putting it all in the dining room -- well, tomorrow we have to put it all back. And shop for a new glass kitchen tabletop.

The kitchen floor is now a black and white checkerboard. Cris's idea of fun: "Now we should use it as a game board somehow involving the cats."

Holiday frolic

In Catalonia, tradition dictates that Nativity scenes -- those dioramas you set up on the mantel or beneath the tree with little figures showing the birth of Christ in a stable, complete with shepherds, animals, angels and the three kings -- are not complete without the addition of a Caganer -- a little man in a red beret hidden in the background, looking on as he squats and takes a dump. (link courtesy Abracapocus)

At this Catholic church in Hilo, Hawaii, the now-retired "Father George has been known to invite non-Catholics to the church, to allow them to participate in the eucharist, to support the movement to ordain women priests, to encourage distribution of food bank supplies to anyone, including non-Catholics, to sing hymns in the Hawaiian language, to allow the hula to celebrate God's presence, to suggest that God loves everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, and to speak out against the impending War with Iraq." Yes, that's right -- liturgical hula. We'll miss you, Father George.

Today's best pickup line, courtesy of the utterly unknown Kambri Crews: "I mean, woah, look at you. Your thighs are beautiful. Your ass is beautiful. You breasts are beautiful. Your lips are beautiful. And your eyes, man! Your eyes are wonderful. But I'm not hitting on you."

Corporate mores through humor

This joke is from http://ph8.blogspot.com, which features several jokes with corporate-speak morals at the end. Here's the best one. I usually don't do things like reprint jokes, but there's precious little humor in the world on this particular day, so I think it's worth it.

A man is getting into the shower just as his wife is finishing up her shower when the doorbell rings. After a few seconds of arguing over which one should go and answer the doorbell, the wife gives up, quickly wraps herself up in a towel and runs downstairs.

When she opens the door, there stands Bob, the next door neighbor. Before she says a word, Bob says "I'll give you 800 dollars to drop that towel that you have on." After thinking for a moment, the woman drops her towel and stands naked in front of Bob. After a few seconds, Bob hands her 800 dollars and leaves.

Confused, but excited about her good fortune, the woman wraps back up in the towel and goes back upstairs. When she gets back to the bathroom, her husband asks from the shower, "Who was that?"

"It was Bob the next door neighbor," she replies.

"Great," the husband says, "did he say anything about the 800 dollars he owes me?"

Moral of the story: If you share critical information pertaining to credit and risk in time with your stakeholders, you may be in a position to prevent avoidable exposure.

Cris's comment: If it was me, I would have answered my husband: "No -- what 800 dollars?"

Flying the coop

I'm back home, still living with the kitchen remodel project. The rain's stopped and I walked over to 24th St. for a slice of pizza for brunch. There's this pizza place on 24th and Shotwell called Mr. Pizza Man, run by Brazilians; they've opened other branches around the city now. A gigantic slice with four topings will run about $3.50 -- expensive for a "slice" of pizza, but actually equivalent to a small pizza you might order at a national chain. The post-storm sky was a brilliant mix of soft blue and blindingly white clouds. A squall still blows over from time to time.

I meant to go away for a few more days this week, but I'm staying home to help out around here. At least Cris has actually gone in to work today -- a rare occurrence, she telecommutes 9/10th of the time. So I have the house to myself, except for the carpenters, and they're shut off in the kitchen, much to the dismay of the cats, who are afraid of but also curious about what's going on in there.

Link of the day: some pretty pictures by Tim Davis. (link courtesy randomwalks)

Speaking of carpenters: In my slovenly laid-off state I was watching "Today" this morning, and they had a segment on some advertisements that neo-liberal columnist Arianna Huffington has produced for television. Huffington is worthy of her own biopic; she's sort of the Tammy Faye Bakker of the political right. The ex-wife of a formerly prominent Republican politician, she's reinvented herself after that politician -- a former candidate for California governor who was defeated in 1996 -- came out as gay and dropped from sight. Before then, she was a sort of Ann Coulter figure, if older and heavier -- a lacerating conservative macher who used her wealth and connections to influence national policy. Since then she's turned around and become a neo-liberal. So her latest thing is a series of television advertisements alleging that driving an SUV supports terrorism -- the same logic used by the government's anti-drug commercials. On "Today" she debated against the editor of "Car and Driver" magazine, who quipped, "Never mind those ads [not the same as Arianna's ads, by the way] that say 'Jesus wouldn't drive an SUV' -- Jesus was a carpenter, and if he were alive today, he'd probably be driving the biggest pickup truck he could find!"

Buckets of rain

Here's an update from the writing front. In our last episode, I had two chapters to go before finishing the first draft of my novel. Well, I wrote a whole chapter in the last few days... and I still have two chapters to go.

This is typical of what happens when I'm not sure of the outline of a section I'm about to work on. I write through the problem without locking up, but it always takes me twice as many scenes to resolve the problem I thought I started out with. So I still have two chapters to go, but less to put in them than I did at the start of the week. I hope that makes sense.

Meanwhile winter has blown in with a vengance. Up in the Russian River area where I've been for the last few days, it's been raining since Friday morning. I think they got about six inches total. Today I drove back to San Francisco through some of the heaviest rain I've ever driven in; but either everyone was already at the mall or they were scared off the road by the weather, for I drove all the way from Healdsburg to the Golden Gate Bridge in 90 minutes. Then, of course, it took me another half hour to drive across the city.

I came back for the 50th birthday party of Sara, my writing coach and friend. I just had to stop and get her something, even though we're not supposed to bring presents; I got her a big red cushion for her butt.

And then I'm going back to Healdsburg tonight; I have to be back at the retreat center by 7:00 a.m. to lead the Matins service. The rain seems to have stopped for the moment, but I'm not betting on that being the case by the time I have to drive back.

Retreat

I’m off today for Healdsburg, a picturesque northern California town in the Russian River valley where the Episcopal Church has a retreat center. I’ll work on my book and attend a weekend of Benedictine prayer. I have only two chapters left to do on this draft, and I have hopes of finishing the penultimate one this week.

We had a nice soaking rain that lasted about 12 hours longer than forecast -- the first rain we’ve had since the beginning of November and only the second of the season. It depressed me briefly yesterday while I was downtown shopping, but in the evening hours it was comforting.

In fact the real reason I was depressed is that I was shopping for a sportscoat and had to deal with how fat I’ve gotten. Even though I’m regularly using the treadmill, I haven’t lost any weight, and I’m afraid Cris is going to make me to go Weight Watchers. I hope to avoid that indignity but looking at myself in a three-way mirror at the Men’s Warehouse was undignified enough.

My friend Sara is back from a vacation in Ghana. She brought me a couple of booklets that are part erotica, part sex manual, and part sex education. There is a long section in one, for example, about how women may avoid and treat yeast infections. The drawings look like they were done by a high school freshman, and the whole effect is rather sweet. She also brought back a garish rendering of the Holy Family, a gift to her church from the Episcopal bishop of Accra. It’s done using lots of colored glitter and is really something.

Progress is our most important product

For most of last week I made little progress on my book. The work on the kitchen -- which was supposed to be finished by Friday but which, of course, continues -- and especially the effects of the work, namely the dust and disruption and its affect on me, Cris, and the cats -- occupied much of my time and attention. Actually I spent much of each day I wasn't able to work sitting at the dining room table listlessly surfing the web, or watching television, so that I could babysit our handyman -- to call him a contractor would be an insult to contractors -- and the cats, which were contaminated with dust and soot along with most of the rest of the house. One of the cats got so sick that Friday was taken up largely with two trips to the vet out on Taraval St.

Finally Saturday loomed as the first day I could possibly get any work done, and even then, I didn't get a chance to leave the house until after 2:00 pm. When I finally got away, I went straight to a movie in order to wash my mind of all the house-related thoughts and feelings. I saw War Photographer, a documentary about American war photojournalist Jim Nachtwey, who is apparently well known for his fearless descents into hellish, dangerous conditions. The film gives us plenty of these, as well as a few tributes from colleagues. Seeing the film certainly served the purpose of getting my mind off my own insignificant problems.

After that I was ready to go do my own work, and after eating some dinner I finally sat down a little before 6 pm. But I did 1500 words very quickly and fruitfully, finishing chapter 26. There are only two chapters to write now, and though they will be difficult because they will contain all the climactic stuff and all the loose ends typing-up, I feel I can say I'm truly in the home stretch.

My 1500 words took me over 150,000 words for the first draft. So finishing the last two chapters is just the end of the beginning of working on my book. I'll have to shape, cut, consolidate, cut, reshape, and cut some more in the coming months.

Holiday greetings

Two weeks ago the Detroit Free Press published a profile of a sleazy character who had become a millionaire through operating email spamming services. The unrepentant, arrogant shit even bragged about how much more spam he would send out in coming years. Well, now he's getting a taste of his own medicine, as disgusted computer users route thousands of catalogs and other "snail mail spam" to his McMansion.

In other news, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has resigned. O'Neill, in the tradition of Republicans making fantastically absurd statements, once said "If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear (power) is really very good."

Some news

California now has five queer state legislators, the makings of the first lesbian/gay caucus on the state level, says this chatty and informative SJ Mercury News story.

Unionized dancers at the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco picketed the theater Tuesday to protest wage cuts and working conditions. Their contract's up in January.

There's lots of literary stuff at Alt-X, including this amazing Kathy Acker interview. (The fifth anniversary of Acker's death just passed; she died on Nov. 30, 1997.)

Today's link from BoingBoing, the best place for interesting links: a large gallery of weird LP covers.

Here at home, we're having done what we thought was a minor remodeling job. Of course, there is no such thing as a minor remodeling job. Removing a wall and obsolete stove pipe in the kitchen, workers discovered evidence of an ancient stove fire and managed to get fifty-year-old soot all over the place. Carcinogenic? You bet!

That great big jackpot

Most people have received at least one version of the Nigerian scam email that is some of the most entertaining form of spam (if any spam can be said to be entertaining). I get at least one a day, and they're all a little different. Today's was a big variation on the usual message having to do with relatives of former African leaders and the difficulty of getting all their stolen money out of the country. It contained the story, supposedly related by a doctor, of a German businessman who had just deposited millions of dollars in a Nigerian bank and who then "unfortunately" died. (This phrase "But as I said above, he unfortunately died" is used as a sort of refrain throughout the message.) The "Specialist Doctor" asks the recipient's help in scamming all the money from the unfortunately dead German's accounts. It's almost like a Graham Greene story.

I deleted it before I thought to save it, but no matter, there'll be another one tomorrow.

Pluggin' away

I finished chapter 25, for the most part, on the 30th, doing about 2000 words all told. Then yesterday I spent the day at the library, reading the L.A. Times for the period leading up to and including the Democratic Convention in 1960. There were a number of details I needed. It was tedious, and I felt at the end of the day that I hadn’t found out that much. But writing today on 26a and 26b, I put in little bits I’d found out, so it was valuable to do. I hadn’t done much research on the convention and here I was writing about it for the last week.

Today I’m writing another one of my long-awaited scenes, the one where Bobby and Peter go to the Mississippi delegation to try to talk them into supporting Kennedy, even though they were the ones booing Sammy on the first night of the convention. (It used to be Alabama, but I found that more sources said it was the Mississippi delegation. The L.A. Times didn’t mention the incident at all, that I could see. But I’m going with Mississippi.) I did more than 1400 words today, not only in ch. 26 but by putting in words here and there in the previous two chapters as well.

The writing is coming pretty easily. There’s little to worry about in terms of plot points in these chapters. The next ones will be tougher.

And I’m also conscious of the need to go back and rewrite like the whole of Part 2 -- smoothing it out and making it seem less aimless, while at the same time putting in more details of setting and characterization. I almost don’t want to show it to Sara in its present state even when I finish the first draft, because I’m am so conscious of what needs to be done next. But I’ll print it out and give it to her anyway. Her and Katia and Christine and Cris, my readers.

Live Nude Girls Unite!

Dancers at the Lusty Lady Theater -- the only unionized strip club in San Francisco -- are picketing the club today to protest a wage cut. I'm going down there to lend my support!

In other news, the Supreme Court has agreed to rule on whether states may declare private homosexual conduct between consenting individuals illegal. Geez, do you think it has anything to do with the pursuit of happiness? That little phrase from the Declaration of Independence is much overlooked these days, when happiness is equated with the ability to choose between 57 kinds of cars or 137 different kinds of breakfast cereal.

And finally: though it reads like it, this story is not from The Onion: Tampa Men say Starbucks is 'Nothing Unique'

Blogger of the month

From talula.net, a blog I happened on randomly. The only thing that kept me from posting things like this when I was a teenager is, there was no internet yet, much less blogging. But now we can all be voyeurs as some drunken teen confesses all:

Aaaaah! I'm so excited! Amy and I are going to see Imperial Teen tonight in SF. I haven't been to a show in AGES. I think a guy from Redd Kross is opening for them. But you know, I secretly know that Jon is going to be working at the merchandise booth for a while. So I am going to dress up to look extra-extra-extra hot, and then totally ignore him. I will flirt with lots of guys right near the booth but pretend I don't even see him. You know he hasn't called or emailed me since we spent that night together? Of all the nerve. I guess I could have called or emailed him, but whenever I do that boys think I am in love with them or something and they freak out. So this time I am playing it cool but I still think what the fuck? Oh well, I have to get going to I have time to get dressed. I will report back later. I am glad Amy has a car! She'd better not get drunk though. I am the only one who's allowed to get drunk.

Then:

Dear World, Yes, it's after 5 am and I am just getting home. You will not believe the shocking adventures I had tonight! Oh. My. God. I am still a little bit drunk so I will try to be coherent. By the way, Amy did get drunk too which means she drove us home drunk, which is ILLEGAL!!! She should not have done that and I am going to use it against her if I decide to be mad at her. But I might not decide that. So you want to know what happened? Well. As I said I was going to, I dressed up all hot and when Amy picked me up I saw that she was looking all hot too, which immediately seemed suspicious. Then we went there and we got some beer and we had about two beers each while the opening band was playing and then Amy said "Let's go see if we can buy a t-shirt!" and dragged me over to the merchandise booth. That pretty much foiled my plan of ignoring Jon right there. I decided to play it really cool anyway. So we got up to the booth and I kind of hid behind Amy while she went up there to ask for a shirt and Jon said "Oh! Hey, Amy!" and I was shocked! I didn't know that they knew each other! So I showed myself and he said "Hi Talula..." and then he started looking awkward. He said "I didn't know you guys knew each other!" and I said "I didn't know you guys knew each other" and Amy said "I didn't know you guys knew each other!" and we all just looked at each other for a second and then I grabbed Amy's hand and dragged her off and into the bathroom. This is how I found out that Amy had also slept with Jon and he had also not called her afterward. So guess what, we decided that it's so typical of women to get mad at each other over a guy and that is dumb, so we decided to be clever and torture Jon! We decided that from now on it is our mission to torment and confuse him. Our first action would be to force him to get an embarrassing erection in the merchandise booth. Maybe we could even make him screw up while counting change and get him in trouble!!! So we went back there but we totally pretended to ignore him and we got more beer but only one cup and we shared it, and we got all slinky-sexy on each other. We whispered and giggled and acted like girlfriends so he would think we were sleeping together. I glanced over at him and his face was turning red as he was trying to help a customer. Hee hee hee!!! Then the real band came on and we went in to see the show and we danced sexy together just in case he was watching. Then afterwards we left holding hands and we said "Bye, Jon!" and walked out. I bummed a cigarette from Amy and we smoked before we went to her car because she was still drunk. All the people came out and then Jon came out too and he came up to us and said "Hey, you guys" and we just acted like we only knew him casually. "Hey," we said. "Well ok, see ya," he said and then he went away. We were giggling unstoppably and we went to find her car which took a really long time because we forgot to pay attention to where we parked it but that was good because Amy got to walk off some of the alcohol but she still had a buzz when we were driving home and we are lucky that we are not both dead tonight!

It's like reading a blog that the blond girl in Ghost World might have posted, only her friend sounds equally vapid and silly. Enid from Ghost World would never have slept with Jon, I'm sure.

I don't post nearly enough stuff like this. Let's give it a try:

Dear World, Ahhhhhh! I can't believe it! We still have cheesecake left over from Thanksgiving. I am going to dress extra sexy and eat a big slice, and I'm going to eat it in front of Cris.

No, that's not right at all. Let's try again.

Dear World, ohmigod, I went out in the car, and, like, I parked on Church St. and I went into the crepe place and ordered scrambled eggs, and I saw out of the corner of my eye this hot girl leaving, but she didn't see me! And then I went into Muddy Waters nearby and that skinny Arab girl was playing her weird Arab-pop, and I wanted to ask her, you know, like, are you playing that ironically or are you playing it for real, because if its' for real, I think you really need to look at yourself and your tastes. But I didn't say that. Then I went over to the church and worked on my novel, taking a nap inbetween two scenes I worked on. I was like, two scenes! Two thousand words! Right on!

Just in case your holiday isn't ruined yet

This article on law.com speculates that Supreme Court Justine Antonin Scalia, the court's most ascerbic and conservative member, is a good bet for Chief justice when present Chief Justice William Rehnquist retires. Just in case you forgot that there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans and that it does matter that the former are elected rather than the latter. And while I'm thnking of it, here's a big UP YOURS to those Florida voters for Ralph Nader. I'd wish them worse, but living in Florida must be its own punishment.

My Thanksgiving was unremarkable. I mean, the meal prepared entirely by Cris was terrific, and we had a nice time, but nothing untoward or unusual happened. Tomorrow (Saturday) I should get back to work on my book.

Five a.m. looms

Today was a good day: I wrote two scenes for a total of 1250 words, and did my four miles on the treadmill. I'm over the cold I had a week ago, and tomorrow, if we don't spend too much time at the store shopping for Thanskgiving dinner, I should get another scene done. Thinking of Sunday as the last day of a work week -- as I do now that the American work week has settled deeply into my mind, despite my current unemployment -- I had a terrific week. I wrote more than 5000 words, polished off several scenes in my novel... and went to the zendo only once.

It started last Monday when I was sick; I decided to sleep in, and I was glad I did. So the next day I went to meditate, getting up at 5:20 a.m., and man, did I feel it the rest of the day. So I fucked off all week long, and I felt much better. The one day I did go, Y. was back to his tricks, blathering something during zazen. It sounded like a poem this time, and not just some stupid aphorism, and it didn't bug me quite as much as it did when he showed up for the first time in... September, was it? and started off with his yapping during zazen. But it was still a distraction.

So now I'm well, and I guess I can go back to sitting, but I'm really wondering whether it's worth getting up at 5:00 a.m. anymore if I'm going to feel tired all day. What the fuck, why should I feel tired all day? And to tell you the truth, my meditation hasn't been going that great. I haven't centered on my breathing in a few weeks, and my mind wanders like crazy. I come back to my breath for about one breath, then it's off to the races again. Plus this fellow Y. bugs me. So I'm not getting a lot out of it.

The funny thing is that it took me until I'm unemployed and don't have to stay awake all day long to get to this point. When I was working, I would take naps on the floor of my office. Now I can take naps whenever I want and I actually take fewer naps.

Well, I guess I"ll set the clock for 5:00 and decide then whether to get up or not. I sure have been enjoying my sleep, though.

Who did you expect, Tinkerbell?

Who's behind all that spam in your email inbox? Just the kind of sleazebag you'd expect.

Let's review

It's sometimes hard to remember, given the amount of daily news and the way it pours in (pick your metaphor: onslaught, avalanche, firehose), just what we're fighting for. Of course, we all remember that we're anti-gun, anti-war, pro-civil rights for women and queers, and pro-choice. (Or, let's call it what the other side calls it: pro-abortion. Because abortion itself really is the core issue we're fighting over when it comes to (what our side calls) reproductive rights. Yes, we can fight over details of parental notification and sex education and the distribution of condoms and so forth, but all those are side issues compared to the big one: Can you or can't you get an abortion when you want one?)

My stand, our stand -- at least, given what I know about the eight or so people who even read this weblog -- on these issues, taken together, form what would be called (by us) a progressive agenda or (by the other side) an ultra-liberal agenda. Yes, I'm conscious of using the right words for things, saying "I'm pro-choice" or "reproductive rights," but I'm also conscious of what the other side calls things. They'd say "pro-abortion" and "the right to kill your baby." I know this because I listen, partly for entertainment and partly because I want to know what the other side is thinking, to right-wing Christian radio, and I have for a long time. Over the past twenty years I've witnessed the programming on right-wing Christian radio stations becoming more and more sophisticated, as right-wingers start to understand that nowadays they have to put an educated gloss on what even they admit are views that are out of the mainstream. The never-say-die campaign by the Christian right against the theory of evolution, for example, now uses a collection of arguments collected under the rubric "Creation Science." Of course, it isn't real science, any more than Scientology is, but if you call something a science and you have Ph.D.s making proclamations on its behalf, then it sounds more credible. The Nazis understood this, and the Christian Right does, too.

(That was a cheap shot. The Nazis also understood that the Volkswagen was a good, dependable car, and that doesn't make everyone who drives one an anti-Semite. I know when I'm taking cheap shots, just like I know what I'm doing when I watch pornography. But it doesn't stop me from doing it.) (You'll notice a plethora of parentheses. This is the way I think. I make one statement and then I also think of what somebody might think of it, or I think what somebody on the other side might say. This deep-seated ambivalance about language, this recognition of how maleable it is, is what keeps me from being an effective essayist.)

So we've got these "progressive" political stances. But the point I was going to make is, do we all remember why we have them? Let's review.

The top priority for all the threatened white men is to take away abortion rights, and then birth control. The reason is utterly simple -- they want women burdened down with children and out of the workplace. For the same reason, they'll work to reverse other advances that have torn down the patriarchal edifice: domestic partners' laws, for example, not to mention the right of queers to marry (not that we're there yet) and thus gain access to all the marriage-related property and tax rights. And they'll fight against the recognition of queers as persons and queer sexuality as acceptable, because recognition that queers exist and are entitled to human rights also threatens the white-male dominated workplace.

The next priority for the threatened white men is to keep non-white people at each other's throats. That's why they fight so hard against the legalization of drugs: because the bigger the drug trade, the more blacks and latinos kill each other trying to control it. The huge amount of money generated ("wasted," according to the right-wing pundits, and it is a waste, though they don't really believe this) by the prison system, the anti-immigrant system and the police system goes mainly to this threatened white group, but more importantly, keeping drugs illegal keeps minorities in poverty by undercutting the economic and social health of their communities. Then they make sure guns are widely available by working to defeat gun control laws.

The next priority, and here the Bush administration is making a lot of progress (from their perspective), is to roll back environmental protections so they can make absolutely as much money as fast as possible from raping the earth. Similarly, the vast fast-food economy which dominates the diets of everyone in the U.S. and which is being pushed into other countries as fast as possible, plus the tobacco economy, is designed to exploit (and incidentally destroy) human ecosystems as surely as oil, gas, automobile and construction companies destroy geophraphical ecosystems.

You get the picture. I'm not saying there's a vast right-wing conspiracy by big blue meanies to destroy the world and control everybody; I'm saying that the right wing's intentions are purely economic. For example, though a huge Christian Right system exists to push the "pro-life" agenda under the name of religion, the fact is that the rich white men funding the system don't give a shit about religion or "saving babies" or saving anyone's souls. They just want women out of the workplace. That's all it's about.

You could put your eye out

What happens to all those 4" Swiss Army knives confiscated at airport security checkpoints? This page answers the question for the Sacramento area. (Link courtesy BoingBoing.)

Memories of bullies

Today's front page Wall Street Journal feature is a riveting account of a typical school bully and his surprising (and, to me, satisfying) end. Upon being informed through his family that the schoolmate who had inflicted endless torture on him during the second through fifth grades had died of AIDS, reporter Jonathan Eng went back and discovered the truth about his former classmate's violent family life and the aggressive lifestyle that led to his demise. Definitely worth reading, and do it today, while it's still free.

I too had a bully who made my life miserable during grade school. I was the smallest kid in the class and he was the biggest. From the third grade to the seventh, I was oppressed by a boy named Bruce H_______. There was little actual pounding, more chasing (I got to be surprisingly fast for my size) and intimidation. Recognizing the odds -- by fourth grade, he was as big as some of the seventh graders -- I almost never fought back, except for once or twice when I was completely enraged. And although we attended a parochial (Lutheran) school, neither the teachers nor my parents did anything about the incessant bullying. Only last year -- approximately 35 years after the fact -- did my mother reveal an extremely pertinent fact: Bruce's father was the president of the congregation that ran the school and of which our parents were all members, and he ran it with an iron hand. My parents were afraid of social retaliation if they went to the H_______s with any complaints. So they left me and Bruce to work it out together.

We didn't work it out. He finally grew out of it somewhat, and then in the middle of the eighth grade (the school was K-8), my family moved away and I never saw him again. But I still have fantasies about showing up at his front door and wreaking revenge. A web search shows he lives in suburban St. Louis and is part of a Christian businessman's group. I suppose that's no more pathetic than some of the organizations I've been part of. But I would have been much more satisfied if I'd found, like the author of the WSJ article, that Bruce had died penniless of a hideous disease. That's where my sense of compassion and my maturity end.

Interesting things

Middle-class Jews from Buenos Aires have begun to emigrate to Montreal, fleeing Argentina's economic crisis, says this article from the 18 Nov 02 Toronto Globe and Mail (link courtesy BoingBoing). They were invited by representatives from Montreal's Jewish community eager to replenish their shrinking numbers, the story says. So in a few years you'll be able to go to Montreal and dance the tango with a bunch of immigrant Argentinians. Cool.

This piece by Laura Miller in Sunday's NYT Magazine is an amusing and insightful piece on the spreading use of "meta," or self-referential strategies, in popular culture. And speaking of Salon -- where Miller built a steady following before becoming my San Francisco generation's leading literary arbiter -- a similar figure from the previous generation, Greil Marcus, is still holding forth, and always worth reading. Marcus refuses to confine himself to jazz and pop (or pazz and jop, as Marcus' longtime employer the Village Voice has it); his "Real Life Top 10" are ten experiences, not records. He may be old, but he still has ears for things like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Downtime

I caught a cold, something I'd been avoiding for the past two months while everyone around me, it seemed, was getting it. So far it's very minor, just a bit of fever and sniffling, but I'm spending Sunday at home and trying not to do much. It's another absolutely spendid fall day in San Francisco -- quite cool in the morning, sunny all day. Too bad I'm "wasting" the beautiful weather by staying inside, but I know from experience that if I rest on the first real day of a cold, I'm much happier for the following week.

What's sicker is my laptop. Two years ago I got a Gateway laptop with Windows ME and it's worked great until about a month ago, when the hard disk started acting up. It makes a clacking sound, has boot errors from time to time, and once in a while simply crashes. I called Gateway and they had me download a utility that would supposedly scan and repair the disk. But the utility didn't find any disk errors, while the problems continue. I guess the only real solution is to replace the hard drive while backing up my work at the end of every work session. I've been doing the latter, and sometimes I back up files to a floppy during a work session, so I won't lose even an hour's worth of work.

Even so, yesterday the only work I did on my book was on the outline. Thought I "completed" the outline of the final chapters for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I always knew it was subject to change, and yesterday I realized I'm going to have to give a little more weight to the B story as the climax approaches. However, I'll spare readers any extended notes like the ones I quoted in my entry of the 14th. I just wanted people to get an idea of how I work. Those notes are from a file which is half as long as the book itself -- it documents the creation of the book and is, itself, sort of a shadow of the book, or a meta-book. It contains not only the characters and plot lines that actually go into the book, but all the alternatives I reject along the way. The contents are, of course, only of interest to me, but the technique may be of interest to other writers.

Novelist sighting

Last night I went to a reception, hosted by WIRED Managing Editor Martha Baer, for author Frederic Tuten. Tuten was Martha's old prof and mentor in New York, and she invited a passel of writers and journalists over to her Mission District digs to meet him. Tuten's new novel The Green Hour, garnered a review by John Updike in the Nov. 11, 2002 New Yorker. I read the book in preparation for meeting him. His writing is casually elegant, beautifully paced, and he's not afraid to be romantic. (The NYT Book Review even said the characters belonged in a romance novel, which I think is way overdoing it.) Tuten himself was warm, generous, and cheerfully energized by the crowd of youthful admirers. Martha said she told him all about the "Joey Bishop novel" I'm working on, which was a nice introduction to give me.

Looking at her collection of Tuten's novels, I noticed with amusement that his first book, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, was "A Richard Kasak Book." As Kasak was my first publisher, I went to Tuten to compare notes. He told an amusing anecdote about a disagreement he'd later had with Kasak -- a figure in New York publishing for many years -- who bragged about low-balling young naive authors who were so eager to get their first book published that they'd accept pitifully small advances. "They'd even pay me!" Kasak reportedly said. This was especially humorous in light of the experience of my friend Marilyn, who has had dealings with Kasak on and off for several years; he published her first book too. Recently he's started a new venture of bringing out "Erotic Romance" books, reportedly offering ridiculously low pay.

It's just Tourette's

Props to WilliamTed for this blog entry showing a slice of San Francisco life. The "Shouting Man" whom he profiles has been there a lot longer than the seven years he's seen him, though. He was there in the early 1980s when I had a long-running temp job in that district. One thing WilliamTed doesn't seem to realize is that the "Shouting Man" isn't really a colorful San Francisco character -- like Mr. Lee, the Chinese guy who walks up and down the Financial District carrying a sign with a delusional screed about "12 Galaxies" and various names from presidential history. The "Shouting Man" merely has Tourette's Syndrome.

Flesh for peace

As if Nancy Pelosi becoming House Minority Leader weren't enough, these women from Marin County have upheld the fine tradition of northern California women working for the cause of peace. (Link courtesy randomwalks.)

Small road trip

I've been working on my book almost every weekday for the last two weeks; yesterday I managed to finish another chapter, and according to the outline, there are only five chapters left. Slowly I'm whittling them down.

This morning I skipped zazen and slept in. I then spent the morning puttering around the house and exercising; I've recently upped my daily mileage on the treadmill to at least four miles a day. So I didn't even get a chance to get down to work until mid-afternoon, and I found I could hardly even look at my notes, much less write anything. I packed up and went on a drive instead. I drove down highway 1 a little ways to Half Moon Bay. It had been two years since I last drove through Devils' Slide, a treacherous five miles of coastal road south of the city. The last time, I was driving with my friend Katia, and we nearly got creamed by a car coming the other way. The guy went into a curve too fast, came out of it and almost creamed us, lost control and got the guy 50 yards behind us instead. It wasn't a terribly serious accident for a head-on crash, but it was bad enough. I got out and stopped traffic and then ran to an emergency phone. As we resumed our drive back to the city, Katia said that the fact we'd avoided a crash meant that our new relationship wasn't going to be a metaphorical car wreck. I thought this was a very poetic way to look at it. Katia's a novelist.

Today's auto tour aside, I'm really working hard to finish this book. That means this blog is going to get kind of boring. About all I can say is, I went to zazen, I exercised, I worked on my book.

Oh, I know what happened. I got my first unemployment check today.

Sample notes:

Then I thought of bringing in Lucy. Bobby’s old girlfriend whom we spent parts of two chapters on several chapters ago. I had the idea a while back to actually bring her forth during the convention sequence in order to further humiliate Bobby. It will turn out that one of the things Bobby has to do for Frank (and thus for JFK) is to beard Lucy for JFK. In other words, Bobby has to accompany her to an event as her date but the real purpose is to provide a way for her to get past all the reporters and into a private clinch with JFK. (I haven’t answered the question of how Frank notices her or procures her for this purpose, but I’m not too worried about handling that.) Now I’m thinking it might work to bring her in now. Is it too early, or will it be effective to introduce her now and give Bobby a chance to react to the whole situation?

However, she couldn’t come as Giancana’s date, for the same reasons as Campbell couldn’t. Therefore if she’s going to be in 23d she has to come with Bobby, so he beards her on this occasion.

Q. What are the advantages of that?

A. It creates more tension in the scene, where now there is none; all I have now is to make it a farce. Also there’s no real reason for Bobby to even be present at the dinner, unless he serves some purpose for Frank and/or JFK. Thirdly, it creates tension for the reader to anticipate the convention.

5:00 pm -- I didn’t do that after all. I did rewrite the first part of 23d, but instead of having Bobby pick up Lucy, I had him pick up just an ordinary political groupie. This introduces the whole idea of bearding someone, so I can just have the Lucy thing happen in the next chapter (or wherever it comes) without any explanation. Also I put a few words into ch. 20 to prepare for it. Then I wrote 970 words for the first part of 23d, and had Sammy drop the bomb that Frank won’t let him get married to May Britt until after the election. This speaks volumes about the social politics of the time (and is also what actually happened). This lends the requisite tension to the scene and saves the Lucy bombshell for closer to the climax. So I feel satisfied with my two day’s work even though I haven’t made much progress. Tomorrow, back to it.

Pleasant dreams

I awakened this morning with an optomistic attitude about finishing my current chapter and the book itself. I had peaceful dreams both during the night and during a nap I took from 8:00 to 9:30, after falling asleep in the bed while reading the morning paper with Cris. The dream during the nap involved being on the edge of a cliff over a dark ocean, but no fear whatsoever; I felt complete confidence that I could, and just might, float down to the water or to a ledge just above the water. It was nearly a flying dream, for me. I don’t have flying dreams where I’m flying like a bird; mine involve taking fifty-yard strides, or being able to fly at only 5 feet above the ground, or being able only to float down from a great height rather than falling uncontrollably fast. But even though it might seem as if there’s a lack of exaltation in these dreams, they’re always pleasurable and leave me with a feeling of blissful contentment.

Cris and I spent much of the morning hassling with a credit card bill. I sent them what we had left from my severance check. Turned out the bill was largely for the computer system and office furniture we bought in September right before I got laid off.

Cris happened to talk to Carl, whose house we visited ten days ago. He heard of a pubs manager job for me at a software company in Richmond, an industrial city north of Berkeley. Not such a great location, but I will need to get another job eventually, and, as Cris said, the way things work these days it will probably be until February before I would actually start. She also reminded me there was only a small chance I would actually get the job. I have ambivalent feelings. In a way it would be nice to be wanted, and it would be nice to make money. But part of me is almost annoyed; I didn’t want to start thinking yet about finding a new job, and I’d been half-hoping I’d never have to get another software job again.

Various forms of prayer

I’m going to apply for a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. But the application deadline for 2003 is long past, so any application I make will be for 2004, when I’m bound to have another full time job again. So I’m applying for a “live-out” residency, where you get a studio to work in, but you don’t get a living space.

I went last night to lectio divina -- just me and Michael, as usual, but I think he enjoys it and finds it fulfilling as much as I do -- and after that I went to the zen center for a “practice meeting.” This is an event they used to have to discuss details of practice -- i.e. when and how to do various things, like bowing -- and decided to renew, perhaps to remove discussions of such details from the board meeting. We went through all the details of what people do in the evening. There were a few people I hadn’t seen before, which is comforting in a way, as the total number of people involved on a regular basis seems to be small indeed. I suppose they attend in the evening and never in the morning, as I come in the morning and never in the evening. Y. was a little less passive-aggressive than usual. Not that much, but he didn’t seem as much of a loser as he did the first time I met him, at that dinner several weeks ago. And he seems to want the right thing, which is residents who are really serious about their practice and put it first in their lives. Which would be a contrast to at least three of the four residents that are there now. As for Z., his factotum, she has apparently decided to be very friendly and encouraging to me. She praised me for coming so dependably in the mornings. In fact, I’ve missed at least one day a week for almost all of the last eight weeks or so, since coming back from New York in September.

Last night it rained heavily, cleared up for much of the day, then at 3:00 started again. At 3:30 it was really dark out, I had to turn on the lights in the church office as I wrote.

This morning I drove down to Redwood City and got rid of the scanner that’s been taking up space in the office for years. We got it a long time ago from SFSI -- someone had donated it to them, and we bought it by way of making a donation. Finally I sold it for $15 on eBay to a guy at a little aviation newsletter. He seemed really happy to get it, and I would be too, for $15. I found myself thinking I should have charged more, but then he was the only bidder and getting rid of it was the most important thing. I also sold a few books at a used bookstore and got $13. I celebrated and had a fancy seven dollar hamburger at the new place adjacent to the church, on my way in to write.

I got 1500 words done today, part of a long scene, the “cat disaster” scene I’ve been planning all year to write. I think I need to write more on it, though, so I can’t say the scene is done.

A suitable spot for Salvadoreans

Ahh, the rains started last night. Cris and I had gone out to Mount Tam earlier in the day to scout out locations for the scattering of her mother's ashes. I pointed out a majestic hilltop with a gorgeous view of the city, but she seemed to favor a wooded path. "Cool, dark woods," Cris said. "Anybody from El Salvador would like to be in here, under the trees."

"Really?" I asked.

"Oh yeah. Ask anybody from down there. They hate the heat. This would be like heaven." One of the requirements for a site, however, is a spot reachable by Cris's elderly aunt and by her mother's former caretaker, Francisca. Also, it's going to be wet out there from now on. We're not doing it for at least another week, though, so maybe we'll hit a nice day.

It was nice to be in the woods. We took a short hike, but I had already done my 3 miles on the treadmill in the basement, so I didn't want to go too far. Seven or eight years ago I made it a point to go hiking out there several times a month during the summer; yesterday was the first time I've been out there all year, and maybe the last, given the start of the rains.

No strings attached

Since Nancy installed our wireless network in the house, I've had fun roaming the place with my laptop -- I'm writing this sitting up in bed, in fact. (Here's a good article in today's today's SF Chronicle.) And like all new owners of wireless network cards, I've discovered that many owners of home wireless networks don't protect the signal, so that you can pull your car up somewhere near their house and check your email right there. I found a page that lists a few wireless access points in the area, but merely by driving up Noe St. on Saturday I found that I was able to access a connection at the corners of 15th and Noe, and also at 19th, 21st, 23rd and 25th. (That's an affluent neighborhood so I'm not surprised there are so many wireless networks.) And today this NYT article predicts wireless networks with up to ten times the range of current ones. That means that the affluent neighborhoods of a city like San Francisco will be essentially blanketed by wireless networks.

Of course, if you don't have a laptop with a wireless (or "WiFi") network card, you can always get a messaging device like a Blackberry. Yesterday morning I saw a woman -- the president of the congregation, no less -- using one to check email during the slack moments after she had taken communion. (Offically they are not slack moments, but devotional moments. But few are the people who can sustain a meditative state after having eaten and drunk something. And yesterday the sermon was particularly long.) I've resisted the Blackberry so far, but I'll probably get a Handspring with messaging in a couple of years when the price comes down some more.

Today Cris and I will go for a little hike on Mt. Tamalpais to celebrate her brithday and also to scout ash-scattering sites. The weather is supposed to hold until the end of the week, when the rain is supposed to finally start.

Drunken louts rout partiers

Halloween in the Castro did not go smoothly, the local paper reported today, 36 hours after the event. As usual, drunken louts outnumbered costumed revellers by about 11:00 p.m., and things got ugly. This is nothing new. Eight and nine years ago when I was in the Street Patrol, we walked the Castro for hours, from about 8:00 pm to 3:00 a.m., on party nights leading up to Halloween. (Depending on what day of the week Haloween falls, people sometimes fill the streets up to two days in advance.) Every time, all the fun costumed people went home by 10:00 or 11:00, while beer-filled youths from the suburbs -- attracted by television news reports showing a fun party -- stream into the district. By midnight the crowd is just as large as it was at 8:00, but now 90% of it is straight and 100% of it is drunk. And of course they get in stupid macho street tussles.

This time four people were stabbed, one's in critical condition. Nobody is saying, at least yet, that the violence was gay bashing. I'll wager it was just dumb drunks. Nobody is more stupid or boring than an aggressive drunk. I really got my fill of them on those patrols.

Look at that one!

I was never much for dressing up in costumes, a social talent which is pretty much mandatory in San Francisco. For years I felt guilty and stupid that I wasn't able to get in the swing of things and have fun, but I finally decided, fuck it, I just don't like to. I don't like to play golf, do automobile maintenance, or get drunk either, and I can safely choose not to do those things without suffering people's disapproval. Finally, I have reached an age where no one is pressuring me to go to a costume party, thank goodness.

But that's not to say that a gathering of thousands of queers, all in fabulous costumes, is not a splendid sight. It's just that the huge Halloween street party in the Castro District got way out of control about 12 years ago, and now the crowd is at least 80% straight and 75% non-costumed. The adjective generally used to describe last night's event is "shoulder-to-shoulder," and frankly, I'm too old for that, too.

This year, I was able to witness a smidgen of it without getting my toes stepped on or witnessing much drunken behavior. My elderly mother and her husband came through town, and we had dinner at a hotel on Market St. where the dining room windows looked directly out onto the sidewalk. Scores of costumed people streamed past, a real treat for the senior citizens. My mother's husband Tom actually pointed out the window and cried, "Gladys, look at that one!" -- not once but several times. After about two hundred people had gone past, they were sufficiently puzzled to ask what was going on, and I told them there was a huge street party every year -- more than a mile away. They were amused and very surprised that so many adults actually go to the trouble. I told them that things like this were the reason a lot of people are in San Francisco in the first place, and with the evidence in front of them, they seemed to understand at least a little.

Of course it's utterly impossible for anyone in their 80s who did not spend their lives someplace like Greenwich Village to understand modern urban culture, much less queer culture. My mother lived a particularly sheltered life in the Midwest, with a blissful ignorance of events in pop culture. The most mainstream stuff failed to penetrate her awareness. About ten years ago, we went to see a touring production of "A Chorus Line," which features a song, "Dance Ten, Looks Three," in which the phrase "tits and ass" is repeated several times. Vulgarities such as these utterly shocked my mother, even though the musical itself had come out approximately 20 years before -- she had had no idea of the depths to which American culture had sunk.