Carnage continues at Burning Man

Before 10 a.m. Wednesday, medical supervisor Jonathan Washko already had seen one Burning Man participant whisked away by helicopter in critical condition, another with a broken left arm, another with a face burn from a fire accident, half a dozen people overcome by dehydration, and a stream of Burners with bloodied knees, stubbed toes and sunburned noses.

In 2006, medics transported 20 people with severe and possibly life-threatening injuries by helicopter to Reno, and 32 people left Black Rock City by ambulance.

The majority of last year's patients incurred soft-tissue injuries, such as knee scrapes from tripping over generators at night and falling down on the salty desert floor. Burning Man staff also treated 262 festival-goers with dehydration, 167 with open wounds, broken bones or dislocated limbs, 20 with a variety of burns, 19 for drug overdoses, five for seizures, eight for vehicle accidents, 71 with urinary tract infections and 12 debilitated by extreme heat or sunburn.

If this year's medical tent is as busy as last year's, workers can expect to treat about 1,800 patients, according to the medical agency.

-- Chronicle article

At Burning Man, everything's art

A man who hung himself in "a two-story tent" at Burning Man swayed there for two solid hours before people realized he was dead. His friends thought he was doing performance art. (Via SFist)

In publishing, everyone knows you're a dog

Yesterday I received a preliminary verdict from my agent about the book I finished writing in June: she's not too crazy about it. The success of Steve Martin's novel "Shopgirl" notwithstanding, I wonder if there's a problem with a middle-aged man writing a book about a woman half his age.

Then I saw this article in the Boston Phoenix (courtesy Publisher's Marketplace) about how publishing is no different than anything else: it sure doesn't hurt to be young and pretty. Sample quote:

"It's easier in life to be attractive. That's reductive but true," says HarperCollins editor Gail Winston. "On the other hand, a brilliant book by an author who is not young and not attractive isn't going to fail. It's just, I think that those other books -- for those reasons, those authors maybe get a little bit of an advantage."

Oh, good! At least "a brilliant book is not going to fail." A ringing endorsement.

Frankly, my book is probably not brilliant. It probably does need tightenting -- as does my abdomen, come to think of it.

technorati: publishing

Haggard's molester buddy: I had no idea

The Colorado Springs Gazette finally caught up to the story on Haggard's fundraising letter, interviewing Paul Huberty -- the registered sex offender whose organization Families with a Mission Haggard said would collect donations to him "if you want a tax deduction" for supporting the disgraced minister. According to Huberty, he had no agreement with Haggard to collect funds for him.

It gets better. The head of the "Dream Center" halfway house in downtown Phoenix said Haggard will not be working there, contrary to his letter. The Associated Press quotes a minister associated with the church that runs the halfway house: "That was premature. That is not part of his restoration plan. I think he visited the Dream Center saw it was a good place for people to rehab and got excited."

Now that's a disturbing image.

Makes you wonder what Haggard was on when he sent that fundraising appeal, which you can read in its entirety here. And Dan Savage, who has been covering the latest news with relish, posts updates.

technorati: Ted Haggard, fundamentalists, closet cases

More on Haggard: His new buddy is a registered sex offender

Courtesy Colorado Confidential, a posting from Stranger columnist Dan Savage that follows up on the story I posted about yesterday. It seems the person heading the organization Haggard is asking followers to send money to is actually a registered sex offender. Read the details.

Some of my favorite blog entries on the story:

• A 32-year-old MySpace user "Religious Heather," whose page is named "sinnersmustdie," says "Do not support this sinner!!! Why doesn't he try to get a REAL job like the rest of us and not be bitter about being a religious hypocrite? I mean, if you're going to be holy, then don't fudge-pack male prostitutes. Atleast go to a gay bar like a lot of closet married men and get it for free. Nevermind -- I've seen what he looks like. No wonder he has to pay for it!"


• A blog named "Revolution" says "I have three words for this jerk-off who is responsible for giving pastors everywhere a bad name and setting us back, yet again, to the Swaggart-Baker era: GET A JOB!"

Haggard, after raking in six figures, begs followers for money

Showing that a televangelist's greatest asset is his email database, disgraced fundie pastor Ted Haggard has sent followers a letter begging for money despite having made more than $300,000 since the beginning of 2006. Haggard's religious "overseers" sound pissed that he did something like this without asking them, but the really great thing in the story is how he's moving his whole family, including his two boys who are aged something like 9 and 12, into a halfway house in downtown Phoenix with former convicts, drug dealers, prostitutes and "street kids."

I'm sure that's the kind of terrific judgment he's going to show once he gets his degree in "counseling" from the University of Phoenix. How'd you like to have him as your shrink?

technorati: Ted Haggard, fundamentalists, televangelists

In tune with the zeitgeist

Have you seen "Man Men," the television series on the cable channel AMC? It's the big new thang this summer. The entire staff of the New York Times' Arts and Culture department is creaming over it; now that "The Sopranos" is over, they have to have something to lionize, and naturally the focus of their fandom is something as close as possible to the culture of the New York Times itself: white, waspy, privileged, and set in Manhattan. Yesterday's article-of-the-week, A Return To That Drop-Dead Year, 1960, beatifies the show's attention to period detail.

None of this is lost on me, as my (unpublished) novel Make Nice is also set in 1960. As Cris as I were watching last night's "Mad Men" episode, I muttered, "If my novel had been published this year, I would have looked like a fucking genius" for anticipating the interest in that watershed year. Oh well.

technorati: 1960, Mad Men, New York Times

Strange are the ways of the mind

From today's New York Times:

Dr. Manikam recalled a 9-month-old brought from South America who would bottle-feed only under a bizarre set of circumstances. She had to be held over an adult's shoulder, on the edge of sleep, and fed by a second adult from behind, with the sound of a vacuum cleaner in the background. The baby had lived in a neonatal intensive-care unit whose nurses had noticed that she seemed to eat more when the cleaning crews were in the area; her frantic parents made a recording and carried it around with them.

The weather was beautiful, I hear

I'm not taking much advantage of the weather, but it's been extraordinary in SF just about all week long, and this weekend really took the prize -- sunny, warm, not too breezy, not too hot.

Of course, every chance I get, I'm in my underwater-green office, where the window won't even open, working on my book. You can see the progress at right, but for the sake of posterity:
- 9 work sessions over 3 weeks
- 17,011 word total to date
- I'm about 2/3 of the way through chapter 3

I'm particularly pleased that I have been able to average more than two work sessions per week. That'll really help in the long run.

In unrelated news, I ran across a family group photo from 1955, the year before I was born. Readers who have no reason to enjoy my family photos might still enjoy the period costumes, the details of which you can enjoy by clicking "All sizes."

Happily trundling onward

As you can see from the "New Novel Progress Meter" on the top right side of this blog, I am making progress. I worked for a short while today and pushed into chapter 3, with the word count over 14,000. This is not the same thing as being 15% done. As I know from my previous novel-writing projects, the first 20 or 22 thousand words are the easiest. After that I have to stop and look around and figure out where I am and where to go next.

Still -- progress.

Litquake is coming

I noticed last night that Litquake, the annual festival of Bay Area authors that rocks the town every mid-October, is putting the finishing touches on its website for this year. Schedules of events and who's reading where are still to come, but you can already mark your calendar for the big finish, Litcrawl in the Mission, on Saturday, Oct. 13.

Previously:
My nights reading at LitCrawl in 2004, 2005, and last year; with more on last year's festival.

technorati: Litquake

Borders shops for new authors among staff

This Galleycat post says Borders is holding a contest for the best manuscript(s) written by its 30,000 employees, "anticipating multiple winners and hop[ing] to publish fictional works ranging from mysteries and thrillers to romance and historical novels" in its house imprint.

I'm sure they'll find some winners. But if I were one of them, I sure would make sure a qualified agent or lawyer looked at the contract being offered. What are the chances it will contain unusually explotative terms -- and that employees might feel too intimidated to object?

technorati: publishing, bookstores

You bring the brains, I'll bring the guts

President Bush and French President Nicolas Sarkoszy had lunch yesterday at the Bush compound in Maine. Sarkoszy brought the brains. You don't believe it? Read for yourself:

Q Mr. President, could you say something in French?

PRESIDENT BUSH: No, I can't. I can barely speak English. (Laughter.)

Q Mr. President, what kind of lunch are you going to have?

PRESIDENT BUSH: We're going to give him a hamburger or hot dog, his choice. (Laughter.)

MRS. BUSH: A traditional family lunch --

Q Mustard or catsup?

PRESIDENT BUSH: It's up to him. We got it all laid out in there. He's got some baked beans, if he'd like some baked beans we've got that, as well.

MRS. BUSH: Native Maine corn.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Corn on the cob, real fresh this time of year.

MRS. BUSH: -- salad, fresh tomatoes.

PRESIDENT BUSH: If he feels like it, he can have him a piece of blueberry pie -- fresh blueberries up here in Maine.

Q Do you think he's bringing cheese?

PRESIDENT BUSH: I think he's bringing goodwill. He's bringing a good brain, good vision and goodwill.

I like that Barbara Bush is taking credit for the corn. She probably thinks her Mayflower ancestors gave it to the Indians.

Headline of the month

I saw this on Salon.com in their "From the Wires" section of news reports. I didn't click on it -- the headline itself is too sublime and my mental image of what the story is actually about cannot be improved by mere facts. Behold:

Accused says he was just milking goat

I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

-- Flannery O'Connor,
rejecting a wild interpretation of her story "A Good Man is Hard to Find,"
from a letter dated 28 March 1961,
in "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor"

This reminded me of an incident from my college days. I was a film criticism major, and being an undergraduate was much vexed by the grad students who tended to throw their weight around.

Two of them particularly annoyed me, Greg B. and Louis B. The latter once offered an interpretation of a classic film, whose director I later had the opportunity to speak to in person. When I described Louis' interpretation to him, he dismissed it and said there was nothing like that at all the scene. I dutifully reported this back to Louis, who scornfully said: "Well, you can talk about intentionality all you want, but..."

Louis is the main reason I wanted never to become a grad student.

technorati: Flannery O'Connor, literary theory

Publishing and politics

Nothing's simple in the modern world of overlapping media ownership, politics, personae and publicity. From a Washington Post article:

Former senator John Edwards, who has been throwing punches at Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News Channel, demanded yesterday that the other Democratic presidential candidates return contributions from Murdoch's media conglomerate. "John Edwards will never ask Rupert Murdoch for money -- he won't accept his money," said a statement e-mailed to supporters.

Not so fast, Murdoch's people say. His publishing unit, HarperCollins, paid Edwards a $500,000 advance -- and $300,000 in expenses -- for his 2006 book Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives. "We assume the senator is going to give back the money from his advance," News Corp. spokesman Brian Lewis said.

Edwards spokesman Eric Schultz said his boss donated the book payments to charity and that the expense money went to staffers and vendors.

Courtesy MediaBistro. What appeals to me about this little rock fight is how Edwards, as the underdog in the Presidential race, has once again put himself in a no-lose situation. The more he slams Fox News and its owner, megalo-titan Rupert Murdoch, the more Fox News attacks him, resulting in free publicity. Edwards can then send out more mail to his supporters depicting himself as a victim of right-wing attacks, resulting in more donations.

I was thinking yesterday of that old ploy by abortion clinic defenders of organizing pro-choice people to pledge donations to Planned Parenthood for each anti-abortion protester who showed up at a clinic, thereby de-motivating the protesters. It would be nice if there were some kind of similar process for, say, Ann Coulter: Every time she opens her mouth, more money is donated to the Democratic National Committee or, even more fitting, Code Pink, whose Medea Benjamin is simply the far-left photographic negative of Coulter.

technorati: John Edwards, Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, Ann Coulter, Medea Benjamin

Elton John: Kill the internet

Courtesy BoingBoing: Elton John suggests:

Let's get out in the streets and march and protest instead of sitting at home and blogging. I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span... Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the internet.

That's some music I'd like to hear.

Reminded me of Alex Chee's post a couple weeks ago, Delete Your Blog.

technorati: Elton John, internet, new music

You sit there

It is my considered opinion that one reason you are not writing is that you are allowing yourself to read in the time set aside to write. You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don't all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It's the only way, I'm telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading. And don't write letters during that time. If you won't write, don't do anything else. And get in a room by yourself. If there are two rooms in that house, get in the one where nobody else is.

-- Flannery O'Connor
in a letter to Cecil Dawkins dated 12 November 1960,
in "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor"

This is a rule I have been breaking lately, to good effect. I want to get in my mind a certain voice and I am stealing it from someone else. I know there is really no chance I will end up sounding like that other famous writer. I merely want to be charged by his energy.

But as for the advice to just sit there, that's good advice. And I would even say: Tell yourself that you're just going to sit there. Your mind will get bored pretty quickly and start singing like a 10-year-old in the principal's office.

Or if not -- the technique I most often use is to make notes on what I want to write, asking myself questions about the characters and the action. Sometimes all it takes is half a page of this, done in a separate Notes file, before I realize I actually do know how to get myself going.

But what struck me about O'Connor's advice was how close she is to describing meditation: you just sit there.

technorati: Flannery O'Connor, writing, writing techniques, meditation

What does it mean to leave Iraq?

There are nearly 50,000 "security contractors" in Iraq, reports the Guardian (U.K.). So even if the U.S. "pulls out its forces," tens of thousands of mercenaries would remain in some capacity; their numbers might even grow, as the war is "outsourced even more.

technorati:

237 reasons why

The New York Times tells of a University of Texas study of reasons why people have sex. Four hundred forty-four Texas students and hangers-on came up with a total of 237 different reasons why they have sex; 1500 others were then asked to list how much each reason applied to them. Here's the whole list (MS Word document at the utexas.edu server), but among the reasons are:

Someone dared me.

I wanted to make the person love me.

My friends pressured me into it.

I wanted to capture someone else's mate.

I was slumming.

The longer you read the list, the more it starts to sound like those lists of "classic plots" which are supposed to contain the boiled-down themes of every story, play and film ever written. There are 36 of them, or seven, or perhaps twenty. Things like:

Rivalry of kinsmen

Murderous adultery

Madness

Fatal imprudence

Involuntary crimes of love (example: discovery that one has married one's mother, sister, etc.)

Personally my main reasons for having sex are:

It feels great

I'm fascinated with the other person's responses

I like and feel comfortable with my persona in bed

Now let's compare with the list. Let's see... Those are reasons 15, 41 (sort of), and 95 (sort of). Of course, many of the other reasons have applied at different times.

I think my favorite reason from the list is "The person was famous and I wanted to be able to say I had sex with him/her." Not because it applies, but because it's really funny. I had sex with a slightly famous person once, not for that reason, but because I was curious whether the sexual persona she had displayed in her writing was anything like her real sexual self (reason 41). It was.

Good weekend

I had a good weekend working on my new book, starting off with a 6100 word first chapter. If every weekend is that productive, I wouldn't have much of a problem finishing by the end of the year, the deadline. Of course, everything will get a lot more complicated as I go along -- and it better, or the book won't be worth much. I hope the planning I've done will save time and worry.

And there's nothing better than a stand-up triple

It was Philip Roth in his novel The Great American Novel who depicted an intimate conversation between a baseball star and his lover, who asked him what his favorite part of the game was -- assuming he would reply "Hitting home runs." No; it's hitting triples,

...smackin' it, first off. Off the wall, up the alley, down the line, however it goes, it goes with that there crack. Then runnin' like blazes. 'Round first and into second, and the coach down there cryin' out to ya', 'Keep comin'. So ya' make the turn at second, and ya' head for third--and now ya' know that throw is comin', ya' know it is right on your tail. So ya' slide. Two hunerd and seventy feet of runnin behind ya', and with all that there momentum, ya' hit it -- whack, into the bag. Over he goes. Legs. Arms. Dust. Hell, ya' might be in a tornado, Angela. Then ya' hear the ump -- 'Safe!' And y're in there...

I wonder if that might be something of what the writer of the blog I Blame the Patriarchy might have been thinking when she titled her denunciation of anal sex Anal is the new 'third base'. (Courtesy Boinkology.)

The posting is so well written and so acidic that at first it seems like satire, but by the end it's clear the writer is perfectly serious in asserting that "Since the excessively vaunted sexual revolution decreed that all women henceforth would be empowerfulized by their service to male sexuality... too many women have been giving up the vagina too easily, and even blow jobs are hackneyed now that housewives are writing mundane marriage manuals on the subject. 'Regular' het sex just isn't brutal or insulting enough anymore" and thus more and more men are demanding anal sex.

Started writing my new novel today

That's 2048 words down, another 85,000 or so to go. The writing seems a little flat to me, but I can correct that later -- if my deadline gives me time to do any rewriting, that is.

Hooked on a feeling

I don't know what the topic of the email was, but on the advertising bar of Gmail today I saw this:

I couldn't resist clicking on it, and wound up at a site with a big advertisement for, not software, but a "course" that promised to teach how to write any book in less than a month. I was particularly tickled by the description of the "Master Writer" behind the course:

Living in his luxurious English home, Nick Daws has been a full-time writer for over 12 years. He enjoys a life of holidaying with his beautiful wife, playing his part as a regional celebrity, and occasionally putting finger to keyboard to write another book.

Oh, la. Eet ees almost too much to touch ze keyboard and write yet anozzer book.

Then there are some of the "WRITING SECRETS no-one has yet told you about":

How to only ever write in FIVE MINUTE segments, so you never lose interest!

Hey, that's just how I do my technical writing. I work for five minutes, then walk around for another five minutes, then force myself back to my desk. I'm starting to get the idea here. You can also learn:

...an ingenious method of injecting instant scene setting into your books, using just two extra words.

Hmm... could they be adjectives? Turning the sentence "He walked across the street" into "He walked across the windy busy street" certainly does inject instant scene-setting.

Why characters are KEY to any book -- fiction and non-fiction!

The course is "your key to a superior lifestyle, 'celebrity' status and industry kudos," an enlightened state further described like this:

Perhaps you're doing it for fame, or the money. It could be you just want to become an industry guru and boost your career. Or it's possible you simply want to become the talking point of a party by introducing yourself as a writer.

Emphasis theirs. I can just see someone reading this and imagining attending a cocktail party where people are whispering to each other "Look -- there's the writer! How I envy him!"

I read much of this out loud today at work to the other technical writers, most of whom are also in writing groups and are working on novels in their spare time. We had a pretty good chuckle. Because the fact is, we are making good money as writers -- minus the scene-setting and the characters, unless the "Transaction Tracer" or the "Report Template Creation Wizard" can be thought of as characters.

Want to really make good money as a writer? There are courses, all right -- like this. But never mind being a celebrity.

Strange little word processors

A couple of weeks ago Anna and I saw a fellow in a cafe in Noe Valley using one of these strange little word processors. He was typing up a storm on its little screen: [Picture of an Alphasmart 2000]

It reminded me of the Apple eMate I had several years ago -- well gee, a long time ago, like 12 years ago. I had thought it would be a good portable writing tool but it had a tiny memory so it wasn't very useful, and I soon sold it on Craigslist.

The pictures in that post do not do justice as to how beautiful it was. It was a true clamshell design made of a translucent dark green plastic. Here's a Business Week article on the thing's design, from 1997. If only its innards had been up to snuff to the design of the shell!

This picture is better -- you can see the semi-transparency of the case.

Bliss in my office

I've been spending the last two days in my office over at my friend Bob's house, where he rented me an entire bedroom as an office so he wouldn't have to find another roommate. There's the new chaise I got delivered yesterday so I can take naps -- very important part of my creative process.

For much of yesterday, I worked on character backstories, creating this big timeline:

Yet another American in Bangalore

I just got googlerted to the blog of a woman who has just moved with her husband from the Bay Area to Bangalore. Here's a post from Day Three -- she wasn't having a good time of it. Evidently her first experience of the Third World -- and in fact she wasn't even seeing the real Third World, she was seeing the fancy (for Bangalore) apartments catering to Westerners.

I do sympathize.

Too bad she isn't the one running

Whatever you think of presidential candidate John Edwards, you have to admire his wife. Facing a cancer death sentence, she's making her beliefs perfectly clear. Appearing with "other top candidates or their surrogates" at a Planned Parenthood event today, speaking to a gay rights group over the weekend. She's interviewed on Salon today.

As for her husband, he benefits by association, without actually having to come out and support the positions these groups support. If you agree with them, then he hopes you think he does too. If you don't, you're not going to vote for him anyway, so it's a no-lose situation for him.

I am kind of liking Edwards; I've been sending him small amounts of money. He's less divisive than Hilary -- if you thought there was partisan polarization during Bill's administration, just wait til she gets elected -- and more experienced than Obama.

Nevertheless, I think the absolutely perfect ticket would be Obama for president, Hilary for VP. She'd never settle for that, though.

Progress at the beginning

Been working on my new book -- not the India one -- still getting the characters squared away. There was one character whom I was having the hardest time getting a handle on. Every time I tried to imagine one of the other characters -- about whom I have a fairly good mental image -- interacting with this problematic character, I couldn't picture it. He was slippery like teflon.

At that point I realized that one of my characters was like a housemate I'd once had many years ago, and another was like this VP at a company I once worked at, and that I was able to call up mental images of most of the characters based on people I'd known, if only slightly. But I had the hardest time thinking of who this slippery guy might be. Then it hit me, I know exactly whom to model him on. I have a very clear image of this one guy I know and this will make working on his character so much easier.

Along the way of working on the characters, I've been inventing a lot of backstory for them: how'd they meet each other, and so forth. One of the boundaries of the book is that one character who is a software millionaire knows them all, and has invited them all up to his vacation cabin in Washington state. So I have been thinking of plausible ways all these people actually know one another.

And I've been making big-ass colorful charts with post-it notes and colored markers. That's the right-brain part of the exercise -- if I have that right. I always forget which is the right brain and which is the left. The non-practical one.

Strange book deal of the week

From Publisher's Marketplace:

Jill Myles's SEX STARVED, the humorous adventures of a newly-fledged succubus as she copes with her new "life," the need for sex, and the dangerous vampire and sexy angel she's torn between; and SEX DRIVE, featuring a succubus road trip to New Orleans, [sold] to Pocket Books.

That's classified as "Women's Romance/Fiction." I guess succubi are the new vampires -- well, that's all that vampire thing was about in the first place, right?

Dept. of self-screwing

I was supposed to take a business trip next week, but it's been cancelled. Most of it was made through company websites and the cancellation is fairly straightforward, but in an effort to save the company -- a 10 billion dollar company -- money, I made my car reservation through HotWired. Well, I can read, so I knew that if you make a reservation on HotWired and cancel the trip, you're screwed. So I'm out $270 for a car and $120 for a hotel room.

But this happens to thousands of dopes every day. The funny thing is that when you call HotWired to beg them to refund your money anyway, they put you on hold for about ten minutes with the most soporific, calming piano music you ever heard. It's like what they play in the nursing home to make people realize it's time for bed. By the time you've listened to that for ten minutes, you can't possibly be angry at the lady who recites the rules to you -- the same rules you agree to when you make the purchase -- and tells you you're screwed. In fact, I felt sorry for her -- what a crappy job she has, telling people all day long that they're screwed. I'll bet she listens to that calming piano music all the time.

Strange name of the week

The writer of this news story from Information Week on some obscure but "critical" browser security flaw draws attention to the odd title "chief security something-or-other at Mozilla." But the truly odd thing is the name of the holder of that non-title: Window Snyder.

Does she have siblings named Dialog and Button?

'Harry Potter' series hasn't led to reading revolution

According to experts, the fact that millions of kids read a new Harry Potter book every year or two isn't enough to turn them into inveterate readers -- so says this NYT story just posted.

I was struck by this passage from the story:

Starting when Avram Leierwood was 7, he would read the books aloud with his mother, Mina. "We'd sit in the treehouse in our backyard and take turns," recalled Ms. Leierwood, of South Minneapolis.

But while Ms. Leierwood has remained an avid fan, Avram, now 15, is indifferent. When "Deathly Hallows" comes out, he will be on a canoe trip. As for reading, he said: "I don't really have much time anymore. I like to hang out with my friends, talk, go watch movies and stuff, go to the park and play ultimate Frisbee."

On the one hand, the kid's position is not only perfectly normal, but healthy. He's not just playing video games, he's socializing and even exercising with chums. Then I thought about why, when I was 15, I read all the time. I was never able to say "I don't have much time anymore" for reading, because I had all the time in the world. There were few people who wanted to hang out with me, talk, play frisbee, etc. I didn't really have any friends. When I wasn't reading, I rode my bicycle on long trips to the mall by myself.

I would hate to say that teenagers have to make a firm choice between reading and living normal teenage lives, but I have the feeling it's true. Only social misfits like me really read that much as teenagers. On the other hand, in our society the number of people who can be at the top of any heap, whether it's a corporation or a high school, is pitifully small. So perhaps there are a larger number of social misfits than it might seem. Nowadays, however, I have the feeling most of them are whiling away their lonely hours on the internet and/or playing games, not reading.

technorati: books,Harry Potter, librarians, reading

I'll take Ants in Your Pants, please

... [There is] a truth that novelists shy away from: their trade embarrasses them. When you first start making things up, you expect that someone is going to tell you to stop. Perhaps you want them to, so that you can get back to behaving like an adult, and make a living in the real world. You have to invent a character, a main character too -- readers expect it, though the notion of setting up this giant "as if" device and lugging it around with you is inherently shaming. You know your main character barely emerges from layers of solopsism, and for the longest time it -- it is an "it" before becoming a he or a she -- dangles from some part of yourself, an ugly parasite, an unviable cojoined twin.

Eventually you give it a name, in a squeamish separation ceremony, a combined amputation and baptism. Somehow this rite of passage convinces readers to accept your squirming offcut as a real person, although one who lives in an alternate universe. But you, the writer, remain ashamed of your ploy. You can hide the same, or bypass it altogether, by doing what Mischa Berlinski does -- give the main character your own name, and pretend you or your alter ego are in the business of jotting down a few facts. You fit out your book with the apparatus of nonfiction -- footnotes and a reading list. Then your publisher writes "A Novel" on the cover, and the complicity comes full circle; writer and reader sit winking at each other, and the story begins.

-- Hilary Mantel, writing in the NY Review of Books, 19 July 2007 (p. 27),
in a review of "Fieldwork" by Mischa Berlinski.

Initially I found myself agreeing with almost none of that description of writing a novel. The strange birth metaphors, the business about shame and embarrassment as if writing a novel were a particularly unglamorous sexual fetish, the general air of revulsion -- for me, that is not what novel writing is about.

But then, in a reaction typical for me, I thought, Uh oh -- maybe that means I'm not doing it right. (Woman in Woody Allen film: "I finally had an orgasm, but my doctor said it was the wrong kind.") Should writing a novel be a wrenching process of dissociation, of revealing the worst parts of myself under the pretense of art? Would achieving that level of discomfort mean I was finally a real artist and not just a hack or dilletante writing surface-level comedy?

Then I remember the lesson of Sullivan's Travels: Sometimes people need "Ants in Your Pants of 1938" much more than they need "O Brother, Where Art Thou."

Third draft done

I finished the third and, I hope, final draft of my novel Dear Prudence, which I started in November 2004. It's off to my agent with it, and it's on to the next project.

Update: To celebrate finishing the book, I'm doing something a little counter-intuitive -- I'm posting some chapters that I cut from the first part of the book. I think they're kind of funny. If you're a fan of my writing, maybe you'll enjoy them, even out of context.

Character making

Did some work on the characters for my new book today. While taking a break I talked to my friend Bob, who owns the house I rented my office in. He's a composer and non-fiction writer. "I don't know how you fiction guys do it," he said, while applying some sort of sealant to the bathroom floor tiles.

"I'm just making it up as I go along," I replied, meaning the technique, not the book. I've done each book differently, and I am trying some new stuff with this one. I'm thinking of doing my notes as a wiki this time.

But I might have answered: You just play God with the characters. Not too much, though. At a certain point, they take on a life of their own and you have to stop interfering.

I'm definitely at the starting-from-scratch God part now, though.

The medium is the mass age

Asks this provocative essay in the British Guardian: Has the masterful narrative sweep and sheer brilliance of "The Sopranos" killed the American novel?

(The success of "The Sopranos") wouldn't be troubling were Americans reading other, actual novels. But they're not - at least not in the numbers they once did. An alarming study released in 2004 by the National Endowment for the Arts noted that in the last two decades the US has experienced a 10% drop-off in the reading of literature -- which they define as just one novel, story or play per year -- and a 28% drop in the key 18-24 age group.

In truth, the novel has been whacked by a number of things, starting with the decline of public education, where standardised tests stand in for cultural (and actual) literacy.

Emphasis mine. Regardless of the merits of the comparison between the best television series ever made and the entire corpus of the American novel, I was struck by the writer mentioning the decline of public education. Isn't that also at the base of the decline in shared American democratic values?

technorati: The Sopranos

Influential novels

Earlier today I blathered that On the Road has to be "probably one of the ten most famous and influential novels of the 20th century."

Oh? What are the other nine?

Hmm, well, it would be hard to go wrong with:

Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls

Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Heller, Catch-22

Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

"Pauline Reage," Histoire d'O

De Lillo, White Noise

Nabokov, Lolita

Orwell, 1984

O'Connor, Wise Blood

Oops, that's ten already. But what about The Great Gatsby, all of William Falukner, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth... Clearly a fool's errand. Here's the Modern Library's 100 Best list.

How On the Road was created, edited and sold

"All Things Considered" today has a story about the genesis (and exodus) of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, probably one of the ten most famous and influential novels of the 20th century. A nice long print (i.e. not audio) story is here, and that page contains a link to an even more "in-depth feature," as well as video of the famous 120-foot-long scroll typescript.

The piece includes usually not-discussed information about how Kerouac got an agent for the manuscript and how the agent and the eventual editors at Viking dealt with the unweildy book.

Remember your manners

[The writers] Caroline [Gordon Tate] and Katherine Anne Porter spent the weekend here... and one night, we had the lot of them to supper. Katherine Anne remembered to inquire about a chicken of mine that she had met here two years before. I call that really having a talent for winning friends and influencing people when you remember to inquire for a chicken that you met two years before. She was so sorry that it was night and she wouldn't get to see him again as she had particularly wanted to. I call that social grace.

-- from a letter of Flannery O'Connor
to the novelist Cecil Dawkins, 8 November 1960,
in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor"

technorati: Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter

My new office

Here's my new office, from the doorway. Desk and chairs provided by my friend the landlord!

I went out and bought today a chaise to nap on, but it'll take them a couple of weeks to deliver it. Then I'll take a picture of the other side of the office.

Not-so-casual encounter

I really had to chuckle at the many, many hoops that a person would have to jump through to meet this woman's qualifications [Permalink] for a "lover" (but "Be clear that you are not looking for a girlfriend/wife").

I understand that a lot of people out there have been burned and want to control things more in the future, but really, I've gotten jobs paying more than $80,000 a year with fewer requirements than that person has. (By contrast, this woman is looking for a houseboy with possible benefits and has many fewer requirements.)

My new office

A couple weeks ago I sent out a mass email to friends, looking for someone who had a spare room in their house, or knew of one -- someone who didn't want a housemate to fill it, but could stand my presence fairly often in the next six months as I work on a new project (see previous entry).

My email had perfect timing, as a friend who owns a Victorian house and lives in one of the flats had just had his housemate announce she was moving out at the end of the month, and, in his words, "I think I'm getting a little old for housemates." So today I moved into her vacated room. It's a splendid 10x13 bedroom, complete with windows with no view whatsoever, his DSL is broken -- fewer distractions -- and best of all, it's within walking distance, so no worry about parking, moving my car, etc. etc.

He also had a spare desk, chair, lamp, bookcase -- all stuff old housemates and tenants had left behind. My biggest expense, aside from the monthly rent, was for a spike bar so I could plug everything in to the one outlet.

A picture should accompany this entry, but I didn't have the presence of mind to think of taking one. Imagine a bedroom with a wood floor and nothing in it but the above-mentioned furniture, and some big windows that look out on nothing but the house next door about two feet away, painted gray.

Everybody's a critic

I found this little "blog rating" tool on Badger's site. Clearly I have not been doing my job.

What's new? Still plinking at my India novel, preparing to send it to my agent, for whom it will, I hope, be a welcome surprise. I've been mentioning it to her every few months for the last year and she may have permanently put it on the back burner of her expectations, so I hope she'll enjoy getting it.

Then I'm going to start a new project pronto-tonto. The publisher of my books of sex stories asked me earlier this year to submit a proposal for a novel, and I'm just about to sign a contract (one reason my agent has not completely forgotten me). I'll be talking more about this book in the next few months, but the operative thing is that the deadline is the first of the year. Yes, I have to write a whole novel of at least 200 pages in six months.

That shouldn't be too horribly challenging, because genre writers do it all the time. In fact, many writers of romance or crime books, both fiction and non-fiction, polish off three or four books a year. They would not be impressed with the deadline of 200 pages in 6 months. So I'm not going to complain.

Still, it should be interesting. My India novel (I'm still shilly-shallying about the title, but for now it is Dear Prudence), started as a NaNo -- a project for National Novel Writing Month. That's where you're supposed to churn out 50,000 words in the month of November. And I did get a good start -- in November, 2004. I managed to do about 20,000 words that month, but then it took me two years to work out the rest of the book, the first draft of which I finished on 28 December 2006.

I did, however, keep almost all of those first 20,000 words, which makes me think that it's not a bad idea to give people an excuse to start a novel with an artificial deadline, just to see what they turn out. But it really should be called National Novel Starting Month, because only Georges Simenon could write a novel in less than a month.

But the first of the year is now a real, not arbitrary deadline for me. I'll let you know how it goes.

Done - er and done - er

Still polishing up my Bangalore book, with helpful comments from friends, and itching to get on my next project. What's that next project? A novel I have a contract to write in six months. Still trying to figure out what to do with it on the web. I was talking last night with A. about trying to do character blogs for each of the seven characters in the book, somewhat similar to what Chasing Windmills does.

They are a vlog dramatic series (now on hiatus), and if you go to that link and click on each of those pictures, you'll see a character blog. Each is written by the actor who appears as a character in the series. So that's like 11 different people each doing a character blog.

I'm not so sure I could or should do seven different character blogs myself and actually write the novel. On the other hand, it might be a good exercise to get into voice and character. Perhaps if I had more than six months it would be a good idea.

Man stuff

Cris asked me to what extent I feel, when I'm walking down the street, male -- how much of my public identity "depends" on my being a man or somehow projecting maleness. I can't quite remember why she asked, but her question reminded me of this post by our friend Chris Carraher on gender identity and "models."

I thought for a minute before answering, because the way I can honestly answer that question has changed over my life. I said that in my 20s it had been very difficult to think of myself as "a man." Part of the reason was that I always looked young for my age (e.g. this photo when I was 25 or again when I was 37). Another part of the reason is that I seldom took part in stereotypical male activities -- even the neighborhood softball team I was on during the mid-80s was composed primarily of jazz musicians -- and that was because I didn't have any close male friends.

One experience that helped me be able to adopt a self image as "a man" was becoming a high school teacher at age 28 -- before that I didn't feel anywhere close to being an adult -- and another was being in the Street Patrol when I was in my late 30s. What did those two experiences had to do with each other? Both was an experience where I had to conquer physical fear. By the time I had done a year in the Street Patrol, I was physically pretty fearless. I could wade into an argument on the street between two drunks (which was most of what the Street Patrol dealt with, frankly) without worrying about whether or not I would get clonked, and just deal with the situation.

But there are at least three different things here: First, how I feel as I walk down the street -- how much of that confidence in my ability to deal with the street and whatever situation it presents has to do with being "a man"? Second, what I project as I walk down the street does not necessarily represent what I feel inside; how much overlap is there between what people see and what I feel? Finally, there is what passersby project on me: the impression they form based on a glance.

And how much can you really tell about a stranger on the street anyway? When I taught high school, I had a big obstreperous teenager who once strolled into class proclaiming in a booming voice: "I'm a pimp!! I'm a pimp!!" Maybe he was (though he was only 16); what was funny about it was not just the incongruity of a high school kid with baby fat proclaiming his pimpness, but the balls-out self-proclamation itself. Most people don't walk down the street proclaiming who and what they are, nor do they need to -- but is there really that much difference between that high school kid's loud proclamation and a bunch of us running around, several years later, yelling "We're here! We're queer!"? How about when I had a brightly-dyed mohawk? Is that any less in-your-face?

Now I purposely signify less and less, unless you count the Giants cap or the Bernal Heights hoodie. I blend in. Ironically, my self-image is probably closer to my actual presentation as it ever has been.

All this may become somewhat important in the next six months, as I try to write a short novel in which the characters are all straight males -- a species about which I actually know very little. So I may have a few more meditations on maleness for the rest of the year.

But to get back a little closer to what my friend C. Carraher was talking about -- the local paper recently had this review of a performance evening by local choreographer Joe Goode and company. When I read it, I had just read Carraher's blog post, which reminded me of the annual Fresh Meat transgender performance artist weekend I went to last year around this time. When I went to that show, I was struck by how the inability of the audience to read the gender of the performers beyond the surface they present made me uncomfortable and intrigued at the same time. (See my post from June 2006.) Here's someone on stage who seems to be male, but since this is a transgender show I might suppose he started out life as female. I realize I better put my assumptions on hold, since what is going on under the surface -- even under the costume -- is much more than I as an audience member can know. And yet to realize this is to be forced to depend upon the surface only, to appreciate the performance only for what is being performed. It's a strange position to be in, unsettling and yet intellectually bracing.

Contrast that experience with this segment from the review of the Joe Goode show:

In one wallpapered room, a 1950s high school girl in petticoats and pink skirt (Jessica Swanson) is lying on the floor as though she'd been shot. Soon enough she's up and on the telephone, chatting with a video-version boyfriend about Pocahontas and other details of Virginia history in her homework.... Around the corner (or down an interior hallway), two nearly nude men (Melecio Estrella and Alexander Zendzian) are confined in adjacent tile cells.... Meanwhile, in an adjacent fur-lined niche, a woman (Patricia West) is wailing about a planned dinner at a restaurant.

Clearly the audience member's apprehension of the dynamics in those vignettes depends largely not only on the perceived gender of the performer, but a lack of doubt about that perception. What if the audience were forced to suspend their assumptions about the gender of the performer playing the "high school girl"? What if the audience was aware the "men" in the cells were transmen? do the scenes mean the same thing? An observer who has just seen a lot of transgender performance art might find the Joe Goode show one-dimensional.

And that's not to slam Goode, a long-time Bay Area performer (he was doing stuff when Carraher and I were performance artists, more than 20 years ago) whose work I've never failed to enjoy. It's just to say that there's so much more going on when the audience is put on notice that its assumptions are probably suspect.

So, having read both Carraher's post and the review of the Joe Goode piece, it was curious that Cris asked me that question this afternoon.

technorati: Fresh Meat, transgender performance, maleness

Hardly a hot day at all

We had a very minimum heat wave. It lasted from the mid-morning until about 5 pm, reaching about 82 in the city. I took a little nap in the car around 2:30 and it was really hot.

But when I left work at 6:15 and got back in the city -- just 5 miles to the north -- a cool wind was blowing in. And I just took a walk at sunset over Bernal Heights and a nice cool breeze was blowing hard. It was just short of being foggy -- just sort of hazy-sunny. Update: Here's a picture I took:




That's my kind of heat wave. About 8 hours long.

Characters who grow in the dark

I'm reading, for the first time, Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana." It's about an obscure expat in pre-Castro Havana who is recruited, against his will, as an agent by British intelligence. He finds he is expected to recruit sub-agents and to send London reports about them. He has no intention of acting as a secret agent at all, but since he does need money, he makes up a bunch of agents and then files reports for their fictional expenses. Then London sends him a female agent to act as his secretary, and things start to get difficult for our Mr. Wormold. There follows a fascinating passage in which Greene compares the imagination of the penny-ante con artist-cum-agent, Wormold, with that of the novelist:

The more Beatrice asked Wormold about (Raul Dominguez), the more his character developed, and the more anxious she became to contact him. Sometimes Wormold felt a twinge of jealousy towards Raul and he tried to blacken the picture. "He gets through a bottle of whisky a day," he said.

"It's his escape from loneliness and memory," Beatrice said. "Don't you ever want to escape?"

"I suppose we all do sometimes."

"I know what that kind of loneliness is like," she said with sympathy. "Does he drink all day?"

"No. The worst hour is two in the morning. When he wakes then, he can't sleep for thinking, so he drinks instead." It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness -- he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action. Soon after Beatrice arrived Raul had a birthday and she suggested they should give him a case of champagne.

"He won't touch it," Wormold said. He didn't know why. "He suffers from acidity. If he drinks champagne he comes out in spots. Now the professor on the other hand won't drink anything else."

"An expensive taste."

"A depraved taste." Wormold said that without taking any thought. "He prefers Spanish champagne." Sometimes he was scared at the way these people grew in the dark without his knowledge. What was Teresa doing down there, out of sight? He didn't care to think. Her unabashed description of what life was like with her two lovers sometimes shocked him. But the immediate problem was Raul. There were moments when Wormold thought that it might have been easier if he had recruited real agents.

Wormold always thought best in his bath. He was aware one morning, when he was concentrating hard, of indignant noises. A fist beat on the door a number of times, somebody stamped on the stairs, but a creative moment had arrived and he paid no attention to the world beyond the steam. Raul had been dismissed by the Cubana air line for drunkenness. He was desperate; he was without a job; there had been an unpleasant interview between him and Captain Segura, who threatened....

"Are you all right?" Beatrice called from outside. "Are you dying? Shall I break down the door?"

Raul, "the professor," and Teresa are, of course, merely figments of Wormold's imagination. But they fix his attention, they concern him, and -- most wonderful of all -- they "grow in the dark without his knowledge" until he is asked about them, and immediately a character sketch comes to mind.

This passage shows the similarity between any kind of professional bullshitting -- whether one is, say, a comedian or actor who improvises, a con artist (think of Ratso Rizzo's request for money to cover "management expenses"), a parent, a salesman -- and the creative writer.

One of the ironic touches is that Wormold, whose real line of work is selling vacuum cleaners, is a terrible salesman. He just isn't interested enough. But the need for money, and the growing need to keep from being caught in his subterfuge, focuses his imagination as selling never did.

Whoa! I think I'm done!

In an exciting development, I surprised myself by finishing another draft of the novel I've been working on for the last two and a half years. I think it's ready to show to some more people.

Previously:
Interview with me as I visited Bangalore to research the novel
My blog posts from Bangalore
A post from when I finished the first draft
A previously posted excerpt

How Simenon wrote over 200 novels

In the Summer issue of Bookforum, Luc Sante discusses several novels of Georges Simenon that have been re-released. Of the "phenomenally prolific" Simenon, who wrote over 200 novels, he writes:

Famously, two days before starting a novel, he would consult a map of the place where the book was to be set, search through his collections of telephone books for names of characters, and establish the cast -- ages, backgrounds, family ties -- on the back of a manila envelope. Then he was ready, as he told a Paris Review interviewer in 1955:

On the eve of the first day I know what will happen in the first chapter. Then, day after day, chapter after chapter, I find what comes later. After I have started a novel I write a chapter each day, without ever missing a day. Because it is a strain, I have to keep pace with the novel... All the day I am one of my characters. I feel what he feels.... And it's almost unbearable after five or six days. That is one of the reasons my novels are so short; after eleven days I can't -- it's impossible. I have to -- it's physical. I am too tired.

In this 1997 obituary, Simenon is further quoted:

I write a chapter a day. It's the character who commands, not me. I know the end only when I finish. But during the time I'm writing I concentrate, concentrate on my characters. Only the characters matter.