Obscure adage of the month

This column in Editor & Publisher about Vietnamese newspapers features this remarkable passage (low in article):

"Which is your favorite?" I asked. He held up a paper with a name -- printed in reverse on green spot color -- that was the same as the nearby city, Can Tho. He could have been an American talking about his hometown paper for a Readership Institute survey: "I like it because it has the local news of Can Tho. I like the local news."

"Is it the most accurate of the three papers?" I asked. He giggled, as Vietnamese will when they're a little nervous, and cast a sidelong glance at two other English-speaking employees hovering nearby. Still, he answered clearly: "You can't believe what you read in any newspaper in Vietnam." He giggled even louder and added, "They print what they are told to print."

"But what about Nam Cam? Isn't that an example of more truth getting in the paper?" I asked.

I'm not sure if his guffaw reflected especially high anxiety or was simply cynical laughter at such a question. If Nam Cam is in the newspaper, he said, it's because there is some struggle among the elites. It was like the old saying throughout Asia: The monkey is being whipped to scare the chickens.

Ah, yes, the old saying. Whip the monkey to scare the chickens. I see.... (nod sagely)

Rise or loaf

I confess I have been very lazy in the last few weeks about working on the second draft of my novel. It's going to take some focussed attention to resolve the big problem in the second half of the book -- the weakness in how well a secondary character, and her relationship with one of the protagonists, is defined -- and my attention has been very scattered. I've gone to see some films, I went to the big peace march, I've been putting in four miles on the treadmill several times a week, but I've also wasted great amount of time.

My friend Ellen, a former architect, now teaches snowboarding for seven months of the year in Alaska and does some architectural model-building work to get her through the warm months. Happily, she gets paid for what she likes to do. But when she's not even doing that, she usually has a quite gleeful attitude about doing nothing, which she calls "loafing."

I don't even have to work at the moment. I have enough time to do exactly what I want to do, namely to write, for the next several months while my unemployment holds out. All I have to do is do it. Yet I don't.

Well, Cris is going to El Salvador for a few weeks tomorrow, so I've been telling myself I'll get a lot done while she's gone. And I'm definitely planning on going away for 4 to 6 weeks starting in May, which should give me plenty of time to finish the second draft.

Meanwhile, I've been getting ideas for new novels that are very unlike the ideas I usually get. My usual ideas are very realistic, to the point of being dull. But in the last ten days I've had two ideas that are sort of fantasy/sci-fi ideas. One was to write about a hyper-consumerist world in which society was organized entirely around buying more and more manufactured crap. The title is "Arise, Bright Engines of Transaction!"

Marching, marching, some rock throwing

Another big peace march in SF today, following huge worldwide protests. The San Francisco march was diverse and peaceful, except for some attention-grabbing hijinks by the usual suspects.

Update: Here are some snapshots I took today.

Peace march numbers

No one mentioned the deity at the U.N. yesterday, or claimed they were fighting for good against evil. Bush, on the other hand, can't keep from mentioning God or good and evil, says this columnist.

Meanwhile, here are conservative estimates of the number of people attending protest marches in world cities:

London -- 750,000
Madrid -- 660,000
Barcelona -- 500,000
New York -- 500,000
Berlin -- 500,000
Damascus -- 200,000
Melbourne -- 150,000
Paris -- 100,000
Amsterdam -- 70,000
Oslo -- 60,000
Glasgow -- 60,000
Dublin -- 80,000
Brussels -- 50,000
Seville -- 60,000
Bern -- 40,000
Stockholm -- 35,000
Los Angeles -- 30,000
Copenhagen -- 25,000
Montreal -- 20,000
Canberra -- 16,000
Vienna -- 15,000
Toronto -- 15,000
Mexico City -- 10,000
Toulouse -- 10,000
Cape Town -- 5000
Tokyo -- 5000
Johannesburg -- 4000
Kiev -- 2000

Today, the world; tomorrow, San Francisco. Yes, I'm going, rain or shine.

Wolf! Wolf!

The information that prompted our nation's leaders to raise the "terror alert status" to "orange" -- a report that a terrorist had somehow smuggled a "dirty bomb" into the country for detonation this weekend -- was the product of a prisoner's imagination, ABC News reported.

Riiiinngg

Lately the unwanted marketing/sales/begging phone calls have gotten out of control. Yesterday we got a call from "Sandra" asking to speak to Cris. I handed the phone to her and watched her expression turn from mildly irritated to crushingly annoyed. Finally she got a word in edgewise: "Excuse me, but my partner thought this was my friend Sandra, so I'm not interested, and can you please take me off your call list??"

Cris is much better than I am at including that request to "take me off your call list" -- a supposedly magic phrase that actually makes them delete your name from their database. But did I really have to say it this morning when I got the following call?

"Hello, can I speak to Mr. or Mrs. Pritchard, please?"

"This is Mr. Pritchard," I answered, although I don't think anyone has called me that since I was teaching high school 17 years ago.

"This is Steven so-and-so from the National Pro-Life Committee or some such thing... Can I ask you, do you consider yourself to be pro-life?"

"Sorry, Steven, but I'm on the other side."

"Oh. All right, thank you for your time."

Sure, I could have engaged him in a discussion about how being "pro-life" might mean, for example, that I am against the war. But I always get off the phone as soon as possible. I'd much rather call up Christine, for example, and ask her whether it's rained at her place in the desert where, even though they've gotten rain in town six miles away, it's just as likely not to have rained at her place one drop. Or call up Marilyn in New York and complain that, since she's moving to Pennsylvania, I will no longer have anyone in New York to visit. Or call up Catherine and talk to her about her trip to France. Talking to some pro-lifer is just about last on my list, even if he was polite.

Hydrophilia

It's finally raining again. Makes me happy, though the last two weeks of brilliant, warm days and chilly nights were the most beutiful extended stretch of weather I've seen here in a while.

The next big peace demo in SF is Feb. 16 -- a day after most cities, on account of the big Chinese New Year's Parade that takes place on the 15th. Sunday the 16th, start down at Justin Hermann Plaza about noon, march tot he Civic Center, as usual. But as today's Chronicle reports, people are also putting a lot of energy into planning demonstrations to take place when the war starts. The flier lists two dozen choke points where a group of a few dozen people holding an intersection can effectively shut down morning commute traffic flowing into the city.

Good idea, but on the first day after the start of the war, won't most people stay home to watch it on CNN?

And because they're focusing on the morning commute, they're ignoring the biggest, easiest choke point of all: the spot on the eastbound approaches to the Bay Bridge where all traffic narrows to three lanes. Not that I'm recommending doing anything like that.

War war blah blah blah

A war on Iraq would only beget more terrorists, many say. But few are as authoritative as this former Northern Ireland leader, whose experience with terrorism, poverty and cycles of reprisal is first-hand.

Courtesy of emmanuelle.net, a joke:

Q. Why are we so eager to include the French in our coalition against Iraq?

A. Who better to teach them how to surrender?

The French may soon be the only people we can make fun of, Cris says, reacting to the controversy over satirical comments by "Dame Edna."

Arts and culture notes

2003 is the centennial year of Mark Rothko, whose transcendant images belie the personal demons that drove him to commit suicide in 1970. Visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art a few days ago, I sat transfixed before his painting No. 14, 1960 for fifteen minutes. His images encourage this kind of meditative study, such that the final major commission he fulfilled was for work to decorate a non-denominational chapel -- in Houston, of all places. The National Gallery of Art seems to have the largest collection of his work.

Even more transcendant was the performance Cris and I attended last night at the San Francisco Symphony of Shostakovich's 8th Symphony. Led by visiting conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, the orchestra never sounded better. I was riveted for the symphony's 80-minute length.

In other news: Grad students at UC-Davis are plowing through a collection of the papers of poet Gary Snyder, the beat figure who, along with Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen, was famous for making connections between the beat writers and Zen Buddhism.

Slouching toward Hollywood

Joan Didion hasn't filed a story on the Phil Spector - Lana Clarkson murder, so you'll have to make do with this piece from The Independent (U.K.):

"It's Sunset Boulevard in reverse," said one of the guys at Cantor's, the delicatessen on Fairfax, the next morning. "The chick is the William Holden character. Her car breaks down. She pulls into this mansion up in Alhambra, and there's this little old guy, Phil Spector."

"What chick today has heard of Phil Spector?" asks his companion.

"This chick is 40. And Spector sees her, and he thinks maybe she is the one sent by providence and the William Morris talent agency to save him. Aren't you waiting to be rescued by a gorgeous chick?"

Latest war drumbeat

The war won't start until at least Feb. 14, according to this article:

Speaking Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Powell said a decision on using force would ``start to come to a head'' after Feb. 14, when the two chief U.N. weapons inspectors, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, are to report to the council after two days of talks in Baghdad this weekend.

An internet rumor circulating today predicts war will start the first week of March, saying "don't fly" then. But it's no secret. Meanwhile, we're now on condition orange!

Why "there are no good conservative cartoonists"

Here's a short interview (link courtesy Romenesko) with Dan Perkins, who does the Tom Tomorrow strip. Excerpt:

"I think there are no good conservative cartoonists. Good humor is about the real underdog taking on the powerful. That's what satire is about. Conservative humor is picking on people who have less than you. That's not satire, that's just mean."

(Yes, that link to his strip on Salon will only be worth it if you subscribe to Salon, which I do. I started subscribing around the time they started blocking off "premuim" content. Now they block off nearly all content unless you subscribe. I have no opinion about the wisdom of this, but I do think some things are worth paying for. I subscribe to the New York Times and they deliver it to me at home -- what's wrong with that? Just because the content was free for a few years doesn't mean you have a right to get it for free.)

As for the opinion that there are no good conservative cartoonists, I think you have to qualify that. Bruce Tinsley, who does the Mallard Fillmore strip published in many newspapers, is demonstrably a better artist than Perkins, whose images resemble clip art. (I'll give Perkins the benefit of the doubt and assume he can actually draw really well, but in comparing the art in each of their comics, Tinsley displays much more skill than Perkins does.) I can't think of any other "conservative cartoonists," but let's suppose they're all better artists than Perkins. But then you'd have to deal with whether or not the strip is actually funny, and Mallard Fillmore is never really funny. It's just a collection of mean observations and diehard Limbaugh-like opinions. The only thing remotely funny is that Mallard Fillmore is a duck, and ducks are inherently funny. That's the only thing Tinsley does right.

Curiously, a search on Tinlsey uncovered no extensive interviews, but there is this column, which provides an interesting quote:

Bruce Tinsley has used his "Mallard Fillmore" comic to tweak the media for covering Bush in a negative way. "They portray any military position taken by a Republican president as warmongering," said Tinsley, whose conservative strip runs in 400-plus papers via King Features Syndicate. "But I'm not personally sold on this war. I'm disappointed that the administration hasn't been more forthcoming on the reasons for a war."

Wow, even a rabid Clinton-hater like Tinsley is not sold on the war. Bush still has a lot of explaining to do.

Spector: 'It's all been done!'

In this exclusive interview published in the Sydney Morning Herald, conducted only weeks ago, legendary producer Phil Spector spoke of the depression and mental illness that kept him from the public eye for more than 20 years. A short excerpt:

For years he did nothing. He was incapable of action. Paralysed. Projects came and went, unfulfilled. What could possibly interest him? Disco? "Terrible." Michael Jackson? "The most depressing, heinous thing. I mean, starting out life as a black man and ending up as a white woman, what's that all about?" Rap music? "Like the c got left off at the printers." Spector falls back on the sofa. "It's all been done! It's all been done!"

Spector was arrested Monday morning, charged with the murder of a Hollywood actress.

Artists retake SF neighborhods colonized by dot-com companies

The Wall St. Journal has a nice article about how artists, theater companies, and other bohemians are retaking the loft and office buildings they were forced out of during the dot-com bubble. Let's trace the story, courtesy of the free archives of SFGate:

• Feb. 1999: Office boom blurs boundaries between SOMA, financial district
• June 2000: Arts groups will be pushed out by high tech
• Aug. 2000: Dancers sweat as studio space gets scarce
• Oct. 2000: Economic boom threatens to kill off SF's alternative culture
• Nov. 2000: Artists march to protest rents
• Mar. 2001: Buildings try to fill empty floors amid dot-com collapse
• June 2001: Dot-com demise sends vacancies soaring
• Oct. 2001: Art Explosion -- Ex-Dot-commer artists and tumbling commercial rents come together
• Nov 2001: Arts groups now endangered by dropoffs in donations

And that's about it from the Chronicle. Reason? The story was actually over with more than a year ago -- and the WSJ is now just catching up. Nice of them to notice, though.

Poets, activism, dancing in church

After succeeding in getting a White House poetry event cancelled -- poets against a war in Iraq intended to turn it from a genteel tea party into a protest -- poets are organizing against the war. Wednesday Feb. 12, the date of the cancelled event, will now be A Day of Poetry Against the War. Included on their site is a page listing news stories about their cause.

In other activism, New York Episcopalians are donating money to rebuild a mosque bombed in the recent U.S. war in Afghanistan, despite criticism from conservatives who say things like, "First of all, there are thousands of Christian churches you could be building in Africa, for people who desperately need churches. Secondly, Islam is a religion we are in confrontation with."

Switching coasts, but staying in the same denomination, a San Francisco Episcopal congregation is tearing itself apart over all-night raves held in the church. I heard of this conflict in December and talked it over with some friends who are both journalists and church-goers; we wondered when it would hit the news, and now it has. The news hook: the congregation's rector is quitting over the conflict, which many say is not so much ravers vs. non-ravers, but conservatives vs. liberals.

Spector's victim

The victim in the Phil Spector murder case has been identified as Lana Clarkson, 40, of Los Angeles. I did a search and quickly came up with the fact that Clarkson is a B-movie queen. Assuming it's the same Lana Clarkson.

Update: Yes, that's her.

VL?

This morning I got up at 5:00 a.m. and went to zazen, for the second Tuesday in a row. Dark and cold was the morning, but I put on a long-sleeved silk undershirt and a wool sweater and I was all right. My legs turned into wood to such an extent that I had to move before the bell, but aside from that I was reasonably calm, repeating as a mantra Psalm 62:1: "For God alone my soul in silence waits; from God comes my salvation." Afterward, Y. took care to greet me and welcome me back, and actually smiled, which was the first warmth I've ever seen him show anybody. Maybe he's finally settling in.

I came home to see that my next door neighbor's house had been vandalized, in a very strange way. Someone had painted "VL" on the bricks in white paint, using not spray paint but a brush; and worse, had dumped not just one but two whole cans of white paint onto the sidewalk. It was strange because the "VL" had been done in block letters, and didn't look anything like the typical gang-related grafitti seen all over the Mission District. Little of the paint, which was splashed in thick white streams over the sidewalk, got onto the sidewalk in front of my house, but the mess in front of the house next door was extreme. And of course people had already started tracking the paint up and down the sidewalk.

I rang the doorbell, and the tenant who answered said that it had happened last night around 9:00 pm. She had no idea what it was all about. My theory is that it might have to do with the new guy living in the in-law apartment in the basement. He blocked our driveway on Sunday night, so he must be a ne'er-do-well.

Review: Spike Lee's 25th Hour

I saw Spike Lee's recent 25th Hour the other day, and I felt sufficiently both amused and annoyed to write about it.

The premise of the film, adapted by David Benioff and Lee from Benioff's novel, is simple: a look at the last 24 hours of freedom for a New York heroin dealer who's about to go to prison for seven years. During the course of his last day, Monty the dealer (now, he avows, an ex-dealer) revisits some meaningful places, is taken for a night on the town by his boyhood friends Jakob and Francis, has a showdown with the Russian mafia patron he worked for, and processes emotions with his father and his girlfriend.

Not a bad premise, especially if during those 24 hours Monty (Edward Norton) actually learns something about himself that will both protect him in the next, incarcerated, phase of his life, and keep him from re-entering the criminal life once he gets out. But all he really learns is who really dropped a dime on him and got him arrested -- not his girlfriend, but his obese Ukranian bodyguard -- and whether or not his chums, father and girlfriend will stand by him. But as far as character growth for Monty, none. He's just as resigned to doing his stretch in prison (versus the other two alternatives, killing himself --his own idea -- or fleeing -- his father's) at the end of the film as he is at the beginning.

Meanwhile, there are two overriding concerns. One is loyalty: Was his girlfriend the one who turned him in? Will his friends stand by him? Will his father help him escape? Each of these questions is resolved in turn, with not very much tension one way or the other. For example, we don't get to know his girlfriend -- a bootylicious Puerto Rican princess comically named Naturelle (Rosario Dawson) -- well enough to be able to guess, or care, whether or not she actually turned him in. Her main contribution is as eye candy, and to utter cliched phrases at the end of the film such as "I'll wait for you."

The other theme, much more lovingly explored, is machismo. In an introductory scene that takes place before the major action of the film, Monty rescues an injured mutt from the roadside. When his bloated bodyguard is afraid to deal with the snarling dog, Monty throws his jacket over the pooch and tosses the dog in the trunk of his car. "Quien es mas macho!" he exclaims triumphantly, and this question informs the rest of the film. The main way this shows up is Monty's aprehension about going to prison and getting raped by his fellow convicts. He explains this fear by stating, several times, that his supposedly pretty face will attract the attentions of others; to my mind Norton's visage is discordantly pale and lumpish, but I guess that's where a little suspended disbelief comes in handy. To avoid this most fearsome of fates, he gets a hell of a lot of advice from his friends and associates, including the vicious mafia boss, who offers the standard pointer that Monty should, as soon as possible, beat the crap out of someone to show his fellow prisoners what a tough guy he is. Monty's fear of being raped, and his certainty that he will, give him a different idea. In the movie's climactic scene, he has his pal Francis (Barry Pepper) beat him about the face to "make me ugly when I go in there."

I'm not denying either the reality or the horror of prison rape, but for even a good-looking guy to obsess over the notion that his sheer attractiveness (not) will make him a target, and worry about this to the exclusion of almost anything else -- such as what will happen to his girlfriend, his aging, alcoholic father, his expensive apartment, or his friends -- stretched my credibility. While hapring on machismo, Lee offers neither a real critique nor any alternatives. The only man in the whole film who fails to strut and preen like a steroid-shooting gym monkey -- in other words, the only alternative role model offered -- is Monty's friend Jakob (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Jakob is a repellent schlub of an English teacher, and not a very good one, as is clear from a scene in his class. Not only doesn't he know how to inspire his intelligent, privileged students, he also doesn't know how to deal with a crush he has on one of them (Anna Paquin). Francis, a macho bond trader whose slicked-back hair and aggressive attitude recall Gordon Gecko, repeatedly mocks Jakob and consigns him to "the 62nd percentile" of eligible bachelors -- a further suggestion by Lee that men's worth is tied up in their sexual dominance. And when Jakob's oversexed student, coming on to an ecstacy rush, tries climbing on his lap in a nightclub, Jakob pushes her away, sputtering (quite reasonably), "You're going to get me fired! What if somebody sees us?!" as Francis sneers.

So Jakob doesn't offer much of an alternative. Clearly Lee's on the side of machismo, as if there were any doubt from his previous movies, and if there's anything a macho guy fears, it's getting fucked in the ass. Since most of the movie is spent on this homophobia, it's only fair to assume that must be Spike Lee's greatest fear, too, just ahead of sucking somebody's cock (a practice also mocked during the film). By the end of the movie, I felt kind of sorry for Lee. He's so terrified of having his manhood taken away from him that he has to make a major motion picture about his fear. But that's par for the course not only for Lee's movies, but in general for American movies, where fear, violence and machismo are the driving forces.

As for me, I identified with the weak English teacher. I've been in that situation of trying to teach literature to a bunch of teenagers while worrying about my own life and where it's going. I just wish Lee had allowed Jakob to be a better teacher. Lee depicts the bond trader character as successful -- an interesting choice, since in the book he's unsuccessful -- but can't bear to do the same with the non-macho English teacher. The last we see of Hoffman's character, he has an anguished look on his face, trying to deal with the enormity of having surrendered to the seductiveness of his 17-year-old student. He gave in, for a moment, to his sexual impulses -- thus Lee reassures us that, at the very least, Jakob is not queer. Maybe he will, eventually, become just as big a macho shit as Francis and Monty; Spike Lee would probably consider that a plus.

As for Monty, the end of the film comprises an extended fantasy on what it might be like if, instead of driving him to the prison gates, his father takes the other fork in the road and they light out for the territories. In this fantasy, Lee offers a sweeping cinematic hymn to the American myth of fleeing from your past and reinventing yourself in a Western small town. The fantasy goes so far as to depict Monty, reunited with Naturelle, thirty years in the future, with children and grandchildren. But the car keeps going straight and the fantasy evaporates, only to be replaced by a Bruce Springsteen song as the credits roll. Monty's going to Sing Sing to take his medicine and Bruce Springsteen sings a patriotic number. You can't get much more macho than that.

Small is beautiful

A story in Sunday's Houston Chronicle, about local churches providing services grief-stricken NASA employees, mentions the Lutheran congregation I attended when my family lived in the area, during my high school years. During my time there in the 1970s, the church was a small church with a liberal pastor in a denomination about to grow extremely conservative. Today, the same congregation has managed to remain fairly moderate, but they've grown into a near-megachurch, as their January newsletter shows. It really boggles my mind all the stuff they do. A close examination of the photographs in that newsletter gives you an idea of the kind of strait-laced people that live in that suburb. (I can't call it a town; there is no town, only an enormous sprawl of suburban houses and shopping centers wedged between the NASA facility, a lake, Galveston Bay, and a former Air Force base. The whole time I lived there, while going to high school, I was so eager to get the hell out of there and on to university life in Austin.)

The church I attend in San Francisco is tiny by comparison, though relatively affluent, and so liberal we got kicked out of the more liberal branch of the Lutheran church for supporting gay and lesbian ministers. Our programs are so few in number and so small in comparison to that suburban church. And even though several people join our congregation every year, it's only enough to prevent loss through normal attrition. We never seem to get much bigger or smaller, and it's been that way for the 20 years I've been going there. Sometimes I get a little frustrated with the place and attracted by my friend Sara's church, an Episcopal establishment where they have slightly wild liturgy and more people interested in contemplative prayer. But I can't shake my Lutheran identity.

I'm going to get more of a chance to hang out with the Anglican side of things. We just got a new "interim pastor" who is actually an Anglican priest -- from Canada.

Make love, not war

I had to use that headline sooner or later. In fact I just might use it every day. It's a sentiment I endorse with vigor.

Here's an irresistible bauble from the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald:

Dannii includes ode to her vibrator on new album

Dannii Minogue has apparently turned to more than big sister Kylie for consolation after her latest relationship break-up - recording a raunchy tribute to her vibrator on her new album....The song has failed to impress those in Britain who've heard it, with The Sun's normally generous showbiz writer Dominic Mohan describing it as one of the worst songs, with the worst lyrics, ever written.

The story then goes on to quote the song's lyrics, so be sure to click the link, where you can also see an attractive publicity photo of the daring starlet.

By the way, Cambodia and Thailand have managed to keep from going to war. Cambodia issued an official apology after rioters burned the Thai embassy and several Thai businesses in the Cambodian capital. I guess they realized they'd be SOL without Thai investments.

I learned of the latest space shuttle disaster while driving in the car this morning. I turned on the local AM news station, where two anchors were in the middle of an extended interview with one of those experts trotted out by TV news whenever something unusual happens. Their conversation about technical details of the space shuttle was so amorphous that I listened for three or four minutes without any inkling of what had happened. Then someone said something about having seen television pictures of "scorched earth," and I said to myself, "This doesn't sound good."

I do have to say that my second thought was "I wonder what Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft are going to slide by in the next few days while we're all distracted by this 'tragedy.'" Not that it isn't a real tragedy, but I'm afraid that the way things are going, the deaths of just seven people are going to seem pretty miniscule. (If you want to see something depressing, just do a news.google search on 'war inevitable').

Great, another war

Just what we needed: suddenly Cambodia and Thailand are at each other's throats. Rioters in the Cambodian capital burned the Thai embassy, thousands of Thai citizens were flown out of Cambodia, and the border between the two countries was closed -- all because a Thai television star is alleged to have said that the revered Cambodian landmark of Angkor Wat "belongs to Thailand."

Though the actress, Suwanan Kongying, has denied making the comments, blaring front-page headlines inflamed the passions of Cambodians, who resent the economic and cultural dominance of their larger neighbor. While Cambodia has struggled to recover from years of war and brutal repression, Thailand has emerged as a major force in the regional economy. Cambodia remains dependent on imports from Thailand, and Cambodia has been swept by a wave of Thai music, movies and television serials such as those featuring the popular actress Suwanan.

Can't we all just get along?

The naked city

For me and my writer friends, this article from The Morning News -- a "web-based broadsheet" I'd never heard of until I saw the link on Romenesko -- gives us all a glimpse into the rarified world of New York publishing. Ordinarily I would find stuff like this depressing, but the author takes such a sardonic look at it all, I enjoyed it anyway. Maybe it's her theory that there are 20 good stories submitted by unknown writers to the New Yorker every month. That's only half of one percent, but hey, that's twenty a month. I'm just glad there's that much good writing about.

Speaking of stories, I heard someone interviewed on "Talk of the Nation" today -- an author named Neal Gabler -- who said there were three big reasons why so-called reality TV shows are so popular. First, people are exhausted by narrative; second, the reality shows offer a genuinely open-ended narrative which, because it hasn't happened yet, is always in doubt; and third, there's something at stake, whether it's a million dollars or a potential fiance.

I was struck by the first reason, that people are exhausted by the ubiquitous presence of narrative. It's an idea that's occurred to me before. Think of the thousands of stories we see on television and in movies, read in books, and see in other venues like the theater. No matter how long the work is, whether it's the 22 minutes that a network sitcom gets between commercials, the three solid hours of "The Two Towers," or the hundreds of pages of a Dickens book, that's thousands of expositions, complications, turning points and climaxes. I was impressed by this for the first time a few years ago when UPN was running "Star Trek: The Next Generation" night after night, week in and week out, until they had run all 278 episodes about three times each. After that kind of exposure to pure narrative -- when the only thing that changes from episode to episode is the plot itself, with the characters and the basic setting (the spaceship) remaining the same -- the patterns of the teleplays start to emerge, and I started to see the extent to which it was all formulaic.

Surely the human imagination suffers some sort of fatigue after years of narrative. I'm not even talking about the tens of thousands of characters you are presented with. I'm just talking about the thousands of narrative arcs you have to digest. After a while you have to think, "Enough already -- I'd rather watch paint dry!" And voila! It's reality TV to the rescue. (Gabler's ideas are also referred to in this article from The Witness, and don't miss this interview.)

Protests continue

"Several hundred" protestors braved the east coast cold snap and marched in Washington during Bush's State of the Union address last night. Meanwhile, except for the Bay Area, polls show the public is more amenable to the idea of war after Bush's speech.

The next big antiwar protest in San Francisco will be Sunday, Feb. 16 at noon. It was moved from the previous day to avoid a colorful conflict with the annual Chinese New Year's Day parade, foiling funsters who hoped to foment farces.

Back to silence

I hadn't been back to zen meditation since sometime in November, a combination of laziness and avoidance of Y., the new practice leader. Last night, though, I got a call from John, the friendly guy who was the temporary practice leader over the summer. He didn't call to "corral" me back, he said, but to simply ask after my well-being. But knowing he'd be there this morning, I got up at 5:00 a.m. for the first time in more than two months, and went to meditate again. The dreaded Y. wasn't there, so I was able to sit in peace. It was certainly worth it to see the expressions of surprise from everyone else.

Now, at 7:30 p.m., the missed sleep is catching up to me. But if I go to bed now, I'll wake up at 1:30 and won't be able to get back to sleep for hours. So I'll wait a while longer before hitting the sack.

This afternoon I saw my friend and fellow novelist Katia. She's one of the people to whom I gave the first draft of my novel, which I completed on New Year's Day, to read and comment on. She had some very technical craft-related comments to make, and I was really glad to get them, as no one else has made those kinds of comments -- feedback only another novelist would be able to give.

I'm very grateful to my friends and to my partner Cris for taking the time to read my lengthy first draft. Everybody's busy these days and it's great to have people who believe in me and support me so much that they're willing to sacrifice their time. Thanks, guys!

Finally, there's this article on Tibentan monks visiting Savannah, Georgia. Excerpt:

The dozen Tibetan monks that walked on the Tybee Island pier last Sunday morning had never seen an ocean before.

When they reached the end of the pier, they stopped for a moment. They glanced to the left, the right, and ahead toward the horizon, as far as their eyes could see. Then all 12 turned around and walked back to the van they had just climbed out of.

"What's wrong?" asked their escort, Murray Silver, who thought that showing the monks the ocean for the first time would be a momentous and special occasion.

One of them replied with a question: "Is it going to do anything different than it is now?"

I never get tired of going to Google news and searching on the word "monks."

Yo

I love the "NextBlog" button. Once out of forty or fifty times, it comes up with something truly amazing. That's how I found this blog {Warning! Adults only!}, a blow-by-blow account... No, better rephrase that... A detailed account of the working life of a New York stripper and (apparantly) part-time porn star. Here's a short PG-rated sample. Commenting on the man who was the guest of honor at a bachelor party they were entertaining at, she writes:

he helped out & partook, but kept his cool. we do admire that. he was one of the good ones. I could just tell. he appreciated our beauty, but we knew this one really loved his woman & only had eyes for her. sometimes that makes guys act very hostile, but this one handled it like a real man.

Isn't that special. The strippers have hierarchies of behavior for clients at bachelor parties. It's not that I'm surprised they have standards of comparison, it's that I'm surprised that some men are capable of acting more decently than others. I always figured that if you and your friends were the types to invite strippers to a bachelor party in the first place, you probably felt you were so macho and so fucking special that no rules applied whatsoever.

 
Pass rice to Bush

And speaking of the President, I got a piece of email from a friend inviting me to send a bag of rice to the White House because:

In the 1950s, Fellowship of Reconciliation began a similar protest, which is credited with influencing President Eisenhower against attacking China. Read on:

"In the mid-1950s, the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, learning of famine in the Chinese mainland, launched a 'Feed Thine Enemy' campaign. Members and friends mailed thousands of little bags of rice to the White House with a tag quoting the Bible, 'If thine enemy hungers, feed him.'

"As far as anyone knew for more than ten years, the campaign was an abject failure. The President did not acknowledge receipt of the bags publicly; certainly, no rice was ever sent to China.

"What nonviolent activists only learned a decade later was that the campaign played a significant, perhaps even determining role in preventing nuclear war. Twice while the campaign was on, President Eisenhower met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to consider U.S. options in the conflict with China over two islands, Quemoy and Matsu. The generals twice recommended the use of nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower each time turned to his aide and asked how many little bags of rice had come in. When told they numbered in the tens of thousands, Eisenhower told the generals that as long as so many Americans were expressing active interest in having the U.S. feed the Chinese, he certainly wasn't going to consider using nuclear weapons against them."

I don't know if that's true or not, but it makes a nice story. In any case, if you want to send a little bag of rice to the White House asking Bush to send it to Iraq instead of bombing the fuck out of them, you know the address. Supposedly everyone is to send a half-pound of rice in each bag. I wonder what Dick Cheney would make of that.

A glimpse of the underside

In my daily activities, as I go shopping, putter around town, I do encounter the poor and the homeless. But I'm not in many environments where most of the people around me are poor.

I had that experience today after I dropped my truck off for servicing. I decided to go downtown to see a movie, and went to a bus stop for the number 9. The number 9 goes from a working class neighborhood in the far south of the city to downtown, via neighborhoods that are almost all working class; the highlight of the trip is when it swings right by San Francisco General Hospital, the place of last resort for health care for poor people.

So the bus was packed with the lumpenproletariat for its whole route. And lumpen they were. Predictably, an argument broke out between two macho dickheads, but I was surprised by the way the other people on the bus reacted. Instead of sitting in silent acquiescence of yet another shot of minor violence, several people began yelling for the guys to stop it. "Don't do that here!" shouted one person. "There's women and children on this bus," said someone else. "Take it outside!" someone else called. "You can't do that here!" said a fourth person. Flummoxed by this popular uprising, the two hoodlums cut it out. I don't even think they got off the bus; they just chilled out. I was impressed by the way everyone on the bus reacted together to stop the fight.

 
 

Scot or not?

Downtown, I finally saw the second Lord of the Rings movie. I enjoyed it and I think it's very much worth seeing. But one thing I couldn't get over is that the actors playing two different characters, Sam and Merry, had voices that sounded exactly like that of Colm Meany, who played Chief Miles O'Brien in "Star Trek Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine." In fact, "Sam" actually looks like Meaney; but Sam is played by Sean Astin, who is actually the son of John Astin (who played Gomez on The Addams Family) and Patty Duke. So he's not even from Ireland or wherever. So much for that theory.

What is it good for?

I don’t know how much to say about the war -- I should say “the coming war,� or “the war that everyone expects to happen.� It’s in the news all the time now, and on my mind. But it’s difficult to put my thoughts and feelings in words. Maybe if I try to make some simple declarative statements. The following is true of my feelings or true from my biased perspective:

1. I don’t want the war to happen, and I attended a peace march last weekend as a sign of my opposition. I also wrote Bush a letter a couple of months ago. Aside from those actions and a few desultory comments to friends and in my weblog, I haven’t done anything about my feelings of being opposed to the war.
2. I’m opposed to the war because I feel it is needless, because of the suffering it will cause, and because I believe the economic impact will likely extend the recession the U.S. is in. (Some commentators say the U.S. is actually now climbing out of the recession and that if we fell back in it would be a “double-dip� recession. Others say we’re pretty darned close to a depression; but I don’t think the government would ever admit that unless it were painfully obvious, because they don’t want people to become pessimistic and stop spending. Consumer spending is the only thing that is keeping the economy going now.)
3. Judging from the two above comments, my anxieties also extend to the economy, which is natural because I’m unemployed, but I think even if I still had a job, I would feel the same way, which is to say, nervous about the economy and the effect of a war.
4. In addition to the usual and already large enough number of casualties most people anticipate, I think there is a small but significant chance that as part of, or as a result of, the war, there will be a major catastrophe. Not necessarily a nuclear bomb going off, although that is possible, but at least a very large chemical weapons attack somewhere that will kill thousands of civilians. The horrific nature of such an attack could make it one of the touchstones of the early 21st Century. In fact, one reason I’m forcing myself to state how I feel about current events is because I fear that the war will be more momentous, in a bad way, than people seem to expect, and that I’ll want to look back someday at how I felt.
5. By saying I fear the war and/or its aftermath will be worse than most people expect, I refer to the fact that there is actually very little doomsaying in the press. No one is seriously talking about the possibility of, for example, a major chemical weapons attack on a city -- say, Tel Aviv -- and the suffering it would cause, much less the consequences. By consequences I mean that if Tel Aviv were to suffer such an attack, Israel -- which is widely acknowledged to have nuclear weapons -- might very well retaliate by nuking Baghdad. This is the “worse than most people expect� to which I refer.
6. I don’t feel the American presidential administration really wants to recognize the very real lack of support for the war. All the polls show support for a unilateral war is low; support for a multilateral war is higher, but still soft, especially when asked with the qualifier about letting the weapons inspectors do their work, or the one about the U.N. officially voting to make war. Despite this lack of support, I feel the President and his advisors have blinders on and are rushing toward war as fast as they can.
7. I think the war can start anytime -- even this weekend. News reports have started using words like “imminent.� This increases my foreboding.
8. In response, I have the urge to do something dramatic, like shave my head and go sit zazen in front of the Chevron building for the duration. I also have all the other urges, of course, including to see movies, work on my book, masturbate, clean the house, take a road trip, etc. etc. There’s something I always remember when I think about the last war, and that’s how Christine, on the day the Gulf War started, responded by completely repainting her room. (She still lived on Valencia St. then.) This urge to do something constructive, even on the most private level, is something I admired greatly. By contrast, my own urge to demonstrate, and in silence, is theatrical and unconstructive.

Winchester Cathedral, you're getting me down

Several religion stories caught my eye today.

First, the head of the Anglican church in Sydney, Australia is challenging the authority of the worldwide Anglican communion, the archbishop of Canterbury. Sydney's Anglican Archbishop, Peter Jensen, is one of many Anglican prelates opposing what they see as creeping liberalism in the Protestant denomination, which is called the Episcopal church in the U.S.

Next, we go to Louisville, Kentucky, where the head of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. has asked conservatives not to hold a meeting to organize opposition to a church study on continued "enforcement of church bans on homosexual ministers and wedding-like ceremonies for gays." Almost every mainstream Protestant denomination is fighting the issue of gay ordination; see this story from St. Paul, Minn. on recent Lutheran developments.

Finally, for comic relief, we have the octogenarian head of a fringe Christian radio station declaring that the "church age" is "dead." He says all true Christians should leave their churches because God no longer speaks through them.

Plunging right ahead

"The Bush administration faced new problems today in its confrontation with Iraq as China and Russia joined U.S. allies France and Germany in rejecting early military action." So says this Washington Post story from today's paper. But administration officials continue to push war, and the NYT said today that:

Mr. Bush opened his remarks with a lengthy and impassioned case for action against Saddam Hussein, making it sound as if war was imminent.

Be sure to click on that last link and on this one. Bush appeared at a St. Louis factory where he spoke in front of a painted backdrop of boxes whose labels read "MADE IN AMERICA." In front of Bush was a small pyramid of actual boxes with tape and paper labels covering portions of the boxes. When reporters lifted the tape, they saw that Bush "volunteers" had covered up the prominent legend "MADE IN CHINA." Here's a photograph of the event.

Early 20th C. futurism for the 21st Century

An architect suggests that a 1908 design by famed architect Antonio Gaudi might be right for the WTC site. (Link courtesy metafilter.) Wow!

For comparison, here are the nine latest official entries in the competition sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., and just to refresh your memory, here's the New Yorker's archive of 11 Sep-related coverage.

Why it's important to vote, no. 2435549132

This column from Monday's L.A. Times recognizes the 30th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision by remembering what it was like when abortion was illegal:

At any one time, 15 or 20 women lay in the county hospital septic abortion ward, an additional half a dozen at Harbor. They were too sick to talk, but Mishell knew the common thread: usually unmarried and abandoned by the man, uniformly, suicidally desperate. They jabbed into their uteruses with knitting needles and coat hangers, which Mishell sometimes found still inside them. They stuck in bicycle pump nozzles, sometimes sending a fatal burst of air to the heart. They'd try to insert chemicals -- drain cleaner, fertilizer, radiator-flush -- and miss the cervix, corrode an artery and bleed to death. Mishell once put a catheter into a woman's bladder and "got a tablespoon of motor oil."

This is why we have to vote, to make sure Bush is defeated in 2004. He will probably have the opportunity to appoint two more Supreme Court justices during his first term. Making sure it's also his last would give us a chance to reverse some of the crypto-fascistic laws and regulations he's promulgated.

I don't use the word "fascism" lightly. But I can't think of any other word that better characterizes the collection of laws, regulations and practices the Bush administration has enacted, especially since they got the carte blanche of 11 September. In response, the ACLU is initiating a major campaign to fight creeping fascism.

Meanwhile, here's a wonderfully archetypal account of the rise and fall of a tech worker. With a few variations, it could describe almost any laid-off tech worker, including me.

Hello? Anybody see those hundreds of thousands of demonstrators?

A couple of days after the large peace demos in San Francisco, Washington and elsewhere, Bush raised the pressure on Iraq yet again, making a war seem all the more inevitable. It couldn't be clearer that the demonstrations that took place over the weekend completely failed to communicate anything to the war-hungry administration. You can't help but conclude that they simply want a war and that nothing can dissuade them at this point. But who knows, maybe this new poll, which today announced that Americans continue to be skeptical about a war in Iraq, will make some kind of difference. If they're not paying attention to opinion polls, what are they paying attention to?

To change the subject: Here are some fabulous photographs of Kamagasaki, Osaka in the 1950s -- a far cry from the glittering consumer jungle that we envision when we think of Japan. But even today,

Kamagasaki is the largest slum in Japan. Located in the south end of downtown Osaka, Kamagasaki is a one square kilometer "city within a city". It is home to some thirty thousand day labor workers, some three thousand homeless, and close to ninety yakuza offices. There are almost no social benefits for the people in Kamagasaki, and like the elderly workers that live here, the town is dying.

That's from another site hosting an exhibit of modern-day photos of the same neighborhood. )Links courtesy randomwalks.)

Blogger of the month

The widely syndicated rad-lib cartoonist Tom Tomorrow's site contains not only links to his familiar work but a terrific blog that says everything about today's issues I'd like to say, only I'm not as well-connected and articulate. Today's post quotes a FAIR story pointing out that mass-media accounts of the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on the annual celebration of his life, invariably omit the still-controversial radical views on peace, poverty and class that marked King's later work:

There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?" These are words that must be said.

Slowly walking

I got my laptop back from Castro Computer Services in tip-top shape. They installed a new 20GB hard drive and copied the contents of my old one onto the new one. No more annoying clunking noise, random crashes, or glacial behavior.

Courtesy of RandomWalks, here are lots of pics of the big peace demo in S.F. on Saturday. Of course, the local paper also covered the event. My estimate of the crowd: 100-150K.

I got down there at 11:10, stood for 90 minutes on Spear St. with a bunch of Episcopalians and Quakers, then finally found my friends from St. Francis Lutheran. The morning was unusually cold, and the chill lasted as long as the shadows. We stood near a thrown-together "Brass Liberation Orchestra" that played disorganized versions of hymns, folk songs and just about everything *except* marching band music. Sometime around 12:30 we finally started moving. The folks from my church quickly left me behind; I didn't want to just stream through the crowd, so I just went as fast as the people in front of me, reading the protest signs and just sort of chilling out. After a while I decided to walk kinhin style, and found this not only made it easier to walk but it centered me and kept me from being too impatient and irritable in the crowd. After a couple of hours, I got really tired and hungry, and as we were near the Walgreen's between 4th and 5th Sts. by then, I ducked inside for some ibuprofen and chocolate. After that, it was hard for me to get back into the meditative state of mind, but I stuck with the march until it turned off Market St. I never planned on going to the rally, having decided long ago that I was in no mood to have some speaker, even if it was Martin Sheen, tell me what I already knew. When we got to 8th St. I bailed out, footsore and now warm from the sun. I ducked into the Civic Center station to get away, but everyone else had the same idea, and I wound up walking several blocks until I could get on a bus going down Mission St.

Update: Here are a lot of photos of the march (v. large page with lots of photos).

That night I went to the Berkeley Symphony. There's nothing like a big concert of classic music or opera to make me feel like civilization is worth preserving.

To go

I was reading the 16 Jan 03 New Yorker when I came across a Calvin Trillin piece contrasting experiences ordering takeout food in New York and San Francisco. Trillin was in town to visit his daughter Abigail, a family law attorney, and her children. In the piece -- which is so lightweight it makes you wonder what kind of dues you have to pay before you get to the point where the New Yorker will just print whatever the hell you want to submit -- Trillin alleges that here in San Francisco we actually refer to takeout food as "carryout." He goes on to use that term for the entire piece. This baffled me. After living in San Francisco for almost 24 years, I use the term "takeout" and have never heard anyone insist otherwise. But when you call or walk into a restaurant, you just say, "I want to order to go" or "something to go." I've even heard the term "takeaway" used, and that's more a British usage. But not "carryout."

The piece goes on to praise what Trillin claims is the unique burrito produced in San Francisco's Mission District, and happily describes the widely-recognized logo of Taqueria La Cumbre: "a heroic painting of a sort of Latinized Ava Gardner wearing crossed bandoliers and carrying both a bugle and an unfurled Mexican flag." Yes, we love it.

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.