Shots in the dark

It happened again last night -- a series of shots a block or two away, coming from the direction of the public housing project. It's close enough to hear but not close enough to be able to call the cops and tell them exactly where it happened. We hear the shots, and then sometimes a car getting away fast. I go outside and down to the corner to make sure it didn't happen right close by; last night, there was no sign of anything, so I went inside. Then, after a few minutes, sirens. The next day, a story like this in the paper: S.F. Man Shot to Death Sitting In Car In the Mission. Feh.

Urbanity

Lots of media coverage lately about city plans to create a new downtown, or maybe just an extension to the present downtown, in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. [map] The neighborhood has been many things, but most people who live in SF now think of it as a light-industrial zone with housing mixed in, with a leather queen zone along Folsom St. between 4th and 13th, and lots of new condos along Harrison and in what has recently been dubbed the South Beach district.

Some people think more urban density is a good thing. I wouldn't mind having lots of six or eight story buildings, instead of the two or three story buildings that represent most of the older housing South of Market. (The area burned entirely in the 1906 fire, so all of them date from after that, though there are many examples of post-Victorian apartment flats on the side alleys.) I've always liked the eight or ten story apartment buildings you see around town, in the Mission for example -- like the ones near 25th and Valencia (such as the one on the left side of this photo). That would be a good kind of urban density. But I have the feeling that's not what they're planning.

technorati: San Francisco, urbanism, South of Market

End of the old garages

Since we moved into our house in 1995, there were some ramshackle garages on Harrison St., on the other side of the block. It was an ancient wooden building with a corrugated metal roof on which the feral cats of the block used to sun themselves.

Several months ago we got a notice from the Planning Dept. that someone was going to tear them down and put up a condo building. I almost forgot about it, but this morning I noticed a big claw machine tearing into the garages. I took a couple pictures from our back window, and more from Harrison St. in front of the site.

 

Out my office window

I got to move to a cube here by the window several weeks ago. This is my view -- the easternmost shoulder of Mount San Bruno, just across US 101.

The sliver of mountain visible in the picture is actually part of a state park that covers much of the mountain, so the view should stay this way.

It'd be nice to get rid of the billboard, though. It's been the exact same billboard for three years or so. I thought the company might have simply forgotten about it, but then a couple of months ago I saw it had been tagged up, and then then next day it had been restored. So clearly the software company that rents it is still paying the bills.

Birthday post

Yo, it's my birthday. I'm at work at my job as a technical writer for a big software company, just doing usual things. An ordinary Monday, really.

I had a super-duper birthday two years ago, and since we just had a 50th birthday party for Cris's sister we're not really up for another party. Tonight her sister is coming over, coincidentally, and we'll watch a documentary she worked on and eat some Thai food. And maybe the last of the cake from last weekend. That's all right.

A lot of times I look back on my birthday, but since it's pretty much a sure thing that, at age 52, I'm closer to dying than being born, it seems like less work to look ahead. This year I'm going to finish another draft --the final one, I hope -- of my novel about the American girl who goes to Bangalore to help open a customer service call center. And when I'm done with that, I'll try another shot at the book I wrote for Cleis Press last sumer and fall. I'm doing a reading on May 16  May 17, of what I'm not yet sure, and I hope I'll do more readings later in the year. If I do all that, and manage to keep my job, I'll be more than satisfied.

From my notes

Here are the notes I wrote today as I try to figure out how to rewrite my Bangalore novel. There's 150 pages of this stuff, going babck to November 2004 when I started the book.

I looked a little bit at my notes from late 2005, when I was trying to figure out what to do with the half a book I had written to that point. I realize now I have gone about this all wrong. I tried writing a novel off the top of my head, and while that got me a great start, it did not stand me in a good stead for the second two-thirds of the book. On the other hand, "Knock Yourself Out," which I already have a few thousand words for, does not have a good start, but a tortured, slow, feeling, which is the way I write when I'm doing nothing more than feeling my way. I supposedly know what KYO is all about, in terms of most of the plot and the theme. I started "Bangalored" (the fourth title the book has had, by the way, after "The Moony Trail of Starry Shine," "Dear Prudence," and "Mango Rain") with a notion, a flavor, a voice -- but no idea what the book was really about. I really must work to integrate the two.

On the third hand, I started "Make Nice" with much less of an idea of either. I just had the two characters of Bobby and Gene. But that was perhaps the best way to start, with a strong character who could simply live.

Perhaps that's the real lesson I have to learn from this experience -- start with characters, not a plot, a setting, a theme, or a feeling. Or if you start with those things, don't go any farther until you really know who the characters are.

Anyway, I have to make something of this damn thing, for the third or fourth time. (Actually the last completed draft was draft 6, for some reason.) I have to remind myself that I'm further along than I was a month ago -- even if I'm little farther along than I was three years ago, judging by the degree to which I really know the characters.

I'm going to try to start notes without looking at any previous notes. I know these have gotten repetitive this month, but I feel like I have to constantly refresh and reinforce my conception of the characters, their development, and how the plot reflects that. (In real life, people -- characters -- react to events. In novels, the author must secretly shape events to help the characters develop. But not too much, or it won't be believable.)

... thinking ...

Perhaps one of the fulcrums is Doug's state of mind at the moment he arrives in Bangalore. He is carrying three, no four, loads of psychic baggage:

• His history with Betsy and with Stella
  
• His former career and fame as a journalist, and his career as a professor and how that career ended
  
• His intentions to save his career and write a book about Bangalore and the depredations of globalization
  
• His intentions to have a closer relationship with Stella as a way of somehow salvaging his self-regard as a man, having fucked up his relationships in general with women and having just fucked up his career as an academic

I think most of those have been clear up to now except the last one. I haven't understood what he wants, much less fleshed out notes on it, much less written it into the novel. That's why he seems so passive and listless and indeed unrelated to Stella. Good! Let's unpack that, as theoreticians say. There are actually several parts to it -- his relationships with women, how they have affected his family, and how they have affected his career.

Q.	What are his relationships with women like as a young man?
A.	He is attractive and intelligent, and growing up in the 60s and 70s (he was 25 in 1977) he had lots of sex with lots of women. As a creature of his time, he only learned a little about feminist attitudes toward sex second-hand, i.e. from the women he was fucking or working with (often the same people); he learned how to continue to get sex in that period without really adopting any enlightened attitudes toward women and sex. When Stella was born (1978), he had a sentimental conversion to feminism, because he wanted her to be liberated, but he didn't really change what were by then pretty hidebound attitudes. Perhaps most importantly, when it came to settling down with Betsy as a family, he never even considered it. They weren't living together in the US when they were fucking and Betsy became pregnant; when Betsy returned to the US to give birth to Stella, he didn't come back with her. He stayed in Central America, only coming back to New York from time to time. Maybe he would see Betsy and Stella twice a year, at the most, though he did send child support with regularity. Thus they never married, never lived together in the US.
Q.	When it came time for Doug to return to the US (1984), did they consider living together as a family then?
A.	No, because he had a job offer at Cornell (which has a well-known journalism school) and Betsy was ensconced at a TV station in Chicago.
Q.	Was there ever a time when Doug "left" them?
A.	No. That doesn't mean Betsy didn't feel vaguely abandoned.
Q.	What were Betsy's attitudes?
A.	By becoming a war correspondent and then a TV reporter, she was rebelling against her family's Midwestern expectations; she bolstered her ambition with simple 70s feminist principles that a woman doesn't need a man, etc. But because she was a child of the Midwestern middle class, she had deep-seated feelings about family and home, and she finds reasons to resent Doug that fit into her feminist principles (he was childish, didn't take responsibility, was selfish) but which have their foundation in an unconscious feeling that he should be home with her and her child. She will only admit to feelings that fit in with the ideology, so Stella grows up sensing Betsy's resentment of Doug without understanding it.
Q.	What are Doug's attitudes toward Betsy and Stella?
A.	When Betsy gets pregnant, he really is selfish -- he assumes that anyone with sufficient ambition would not let a pregnancy stand in the way of her career and that she'll get an abortion and their relationship will be exactly the same as it was before she got pregnant. But when she decides she wants to bear the child, he shrugs: he thinks of it as her decision and something that no longer has anything to do with him. (I remember this clearly from the mid-70s, even though I was a bit younger. Since any decisions about what happens to a pregnancy were supposed, by the feminism of the day, to be entirely up to the woman, a man who gets a woman pregnant was absolved of responsibility -- an unintended consequence of feminism and one that has caused some refinement of the dictum "My body, my choice.")
Q.	But still, she is resentful.
A.	Yes, for reasons she doesn't quite understand: her unconscious belief, which she can't square with her ideological analysis, that the father of a child should be part of the child's family.
Q.	How does this affect Doug?
A.	He is annoyed at her expectations, however unconsciously she holds them. Because he understands exactly how she feels -- he knows, without admitting it to himself (much less ever discussing it with her) that she feels he should be close by and support her in some greater way than he ever does.
Q.	Don't they ever talk about it?
A.	No doubt they argue about it when Stella is a child, but they never resolve it.
Q.	So how does that affect the way Doug views Stella?
A.	It creates some guilt, and causes him to compensate for the way he treated Betsy by treating Stella extremely well. In fact, Stella gets a hundred times more time and attention from Doug than Betsy ever did, because Stella lives with Doug during the summers from 1985-1992 (she is ages 7-14, he is ages 34-41).
Q.	All right, what about his time as a professor (1985-2007, ages 34-56)? What are his attitudes toward women then?
A.	On campus, all the girls are feminists, except for the cheerleader types. And a good number of the faculty (though not so much in the J school -- I suppose I could check that, but it's not a fact I really need to know) are women. So when he starts at the university, he has to re-work his attitudes, at least on the surface. He becomes supportive of equality for women professionally. This is also reinforced by his having a daughter.
Q.	What about his sexual attitudes?
A.	These are also influenced by the campus attitude, which at that time is pretty unfettered. The girls, all embracing sexual freedom, are fucking right and left. Of course, it's also the time of the sex wars, the Take Back the Night marches, and the time when, if you were a real feminist, you'd be a lesbian (at least Until Graduation) and there's a lot of suspicion of men. Therefore, the students who fuck their professors fall into a few types, all very much minorities: the fucked-up ones who use sex to prove to themselves they're attractive, the cynical ones who consider it a quid pro quo to get grades, and the intelligent, independent but naive ones who use it to experiment with what they think are adult relationships. Stella herself fits into this category when she has an affair with a professor. So when we get right down to it, the students who fuck Doug are much like his own daughter.
Q.	That seems like something to examine much more closely.
A.	Yeah.... yikes. I had already had that idea but it was more an intuition, I never thought it through to quite that extent.

technorati: writing novels, notes, characters

With an internet like this, who needs family?

Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977.

-- writer J.R. Moehringer

And from a profile of Gay Talese in the LA Times' book blog comes this related factoid: The "first thing" he learned from his editor at the New York Times -- where, in the 1950s, telephones were "new technology" -- was "never use them" (the phones). Talese's anecdote is not elaborated, but I guess his old editor meant, never use the telephone when you can report in person.

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- kill yourself edition

In Japan, a 14-year-old girl committed suicide by inhaling hydrogen sulfide gas, losing style points by injuring and inconveniencing dozens of other people in the process. According to the story, "The incident reflects an increase in suicides committed by inhaling hydrogen sulfide, a trend that has been pushed by Web sites explaining how to create the poison gas." Suicide is a craze in Japan's vapid consumer society, where huge media giants and a hidebound sense of social embarrassment stifle freedom of expression, and an unforgiving culture of competition for education and jobs -- despite a plummeting birth rate -- crushes the souls of young and middle-aged people.

Of course, in the US, where we have actual problems, 120 Iraq or Afghan war vets commit suicide every week. (Courtesy Michelle Richmond.)

In Congo, they have different concerns: there are rampant rumors of penis theft. It pretty much works out to the same thing as a suicide craze, except nobody's died yet.

A 29-year-old Indian woman died giving birth outside a hospital that wouldn't admit her because she was from a low caste; the baby also died. The "chief minister" of the state of Uttar Pradesh has ordered the doctors who wouldn't aid her suspended. Somehow I don't think that's going to hurt them in the long run as much them touching her would have.

Police in Los Angeles are looking for a 24-year-old drifter who is accused of firebombing and killing a fortune teller in an "ongoing gypsy dispute" that began with a burglary.

A Maryland man testified in his trial on charges of stalking actress Uma Thurman. Somebody get that guy a copy of the uncut "Kill Bill" -- that's enough Uma for anybody. By the time he finishes watching that, he'll have his fill of "Kill Bill" thrill.

A San Francisco Bay Area chiropractor, accused of drugging and raping two women, surrendered to authorities today. How much of a moron is he?

He took photos of the sexual assault on his camera phone, police said, and went back to the Hold Cardroom and Bar to show the pictures to patrons there.

technorati: bad behavior, suicide, Uma Thurman, penis theft

It's Bad Behavior Wednesday™!

In a shameless bit of online theft, a Chinese publisher took interviews and illustrations from a comix fan's website and packaged them into a $100 coffee table book, even including a CD with digital copies of everything -- "They didn't even bother to change the filenames." And a famous romance author has been caught stealing as well.

In other news from Galleycat, Generation X is now feeling angst about not being the newest, hottest generation anymore. They're "caught between the boomers and the millennials." But the millenials don't have it so good: just look at this epic whine from a Harvard freshman.

technorati: whining, plagiarism, authors, Chinese publishing

Spring wind

It was hot last weekend, and the cool air off the ocean came back on Sunday night -- so far, so good. But then it never stopped, and by yesterday the cold wind was positively howling in. We went to Office Max, and there was a little whirligig of garbage in the parking lot -- very unpleasant. The springtime's like that sometime.

Today it's Cris's sister Shirley's birthday. We're hosting chez nous. Cris has been trying to make flan, and after two spoiled flans she thinks she's going to get it right the third time.

technorati: San Francisco weather

No regrets, Coyote

The other evening, as part of a pledge drive, one of the local public radio stations played a 90-minute program on the career of Joni Mitchell. I only heard the last half, coming in around "Mingus," but I didn't need to hear the first half to know the difference between the soaring, heart-breaking beauty and amazing range of Mitchell's early voice, and the monotonous quality and paltry range of her later years. In a couple of tracks from her last, 2007 album, it's clear she has less than an octave of range and barely enough breath to croak out a short phrase. Even more awful was her speaking voice in interviews over the last ten or fifteen years -- hoarse and scratchy, sounding like every one of her sixty years and then some. Rarely photographed without a cigarette, in a classic case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, she smoked two packs a day for fifty years, thus achieving her stated preference that she be not a pop singer but a painter.

I have a friend who was a dancer for many years until an injury put an end to it; but she did not hasten the end of her career by riding in cars without a seatbelt or pursuing a hobby as a downhill ski racer. It seems utterly stupid to do that to yourself, but strangely, it seems even the most brilliant people aren't happy being themselves. Seen as another in a long line of artists whose drug habits destroyed their careers, Mitchell is in good but sad company, and there was no real reason to think that the amazing insight and lyrical talent she demonstrated as a songwriter meant that she was above this type of self-sabotage.

technorati: Joni Mitchell

Things I had to look up: coterie, clique, claque, shill

I wanted to use the word coterie to mean "a small group of like-minded people with a shared interest or goal," but I wasn't sure that was exactly what it meant, so I looked it up. It sort of means that, but it is also a synonym for clique.

Hmm, come to think of it, what is the difference? Clique has more of a sense of exclusivity; the members come together with a sense that non-members are actively excluded. A coterie is less exclusive and more informal, I think.

Then I looked up one of my favorite words, claque. The members of a claque are paid to applaud or cheer; being paid seems an important element. But I thought that's what shill meant. Not quite; a shill is "a decoy who acts as an enthusiastic customer in order to stimulate the participation of others," as in the person who, secretly in league with a three card monte dealer, is allowed to "win" in order to draw others into the game. The word is also used by stage magicians and comedians to refer to confederates planted in the audience.

I'm not sure if there's a better word than coterie for the group of like-minded people who share an interest. We use phrases like "affinity group," but they have a stale, business-consulting taste.

I guess I'll stick with coterie which, by the way, I have been mispronouncing for decades. I thought it was pronounced co-TER-ee-ay as if it were French, but it's just CO-ter-ee.

The first warm day

Here's what it's like on a warm weekend day in San Francisco -- hundreds of people sprawl on the grass in Dolores Park. I've never understood the appeal of sprawling on the grass in the sun, so I wasn't there. In fact, I consider it a success if I manage to avoid going out in the sun at all.

I was home doing nothing much at all besides listening to the ballgame and cleaning, looking forward to going out in the evening. I had a table reserved at an al fresco restaurant on the city's famous Belden Alley on one of the few warm nights of the year. (There are always only a few.) But it was not to be. Cris wasn't feeling up to going out, and neither was the guest of honor, a friend's mother visiting from France. So I canceled the reservation and will stick around the house, where it is quite warm.

Recently I've been reading Joan Didion -- first a few pieces from Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and then the novel The Last Thing He Wanted. And I've been amazed at how much I don't like the writing, because I used to think Slouching Toward Bethlehem was brilliance incarnate. Now it just looks impossibly mannered and almost precious.

This is from one of the most famous pieces in the book, an essay titled "On Morality":
 

At midnight last night, on the road in from Las Vegas to Death Valley Junction, a car hit a shoulder and turned over. The driver, very young and apparently drunk, was killed instantly. His girl was found alive but bleeding internally, deep in shock.	I actually like the casual reference to "his girl." You could say that in the 1960s. The term encompasses all the possibilities without specifically defining the relationship of the "very young" driver and "his girl," but "his girl" she was.
I talked this afternoon to the nurse who had driven the girl to the nearest doctor, 185 miles across the floor of the Valley and three ranges of lethal mountain road. The nurse explained that her husband, a talc miner, had stayed on the highway with the boy's body until the coroner could get over the mountains from Bishop, at dawn today. "You can't just leave a body on the highway," she said. "It's immoral."	There's an odd mixture of vagueness and specificity here. The location of the hospital is not described, but the base of the coroner is. The hospital, wherever it was, was exactly 185 miles away, not 180 or 200, but the scene of the accident was "three hours" from the town of Bishop.
It was one instance in which I did not distrust the word, because she meant something quite specific.	The writer puts herself in the position of going around trusting or mistrusting others' use of words, implying that she is possessed not only of a magisterial quality of wisdom and taste, but that others' misuse of language consistently disappoints her.
She meant that if a body is left alone for even a few minutes on the desert, the coyotes close in and eat the flesh.	Here she is being specific again, as if it were a virtue, but she's really just trying to shock.
Whether or not a corpse is torn apart by coyotes may seem only a sentimental consideration, but of course it is more: one of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes.	She really likes the word "coyotes," and also the pretentious phrase "of course," which she will use a few sentences later. Then there's the tendentious "the promises we make to one another," which sounds like something out of a John Kerry speech.
If we have been taught to keep our promises -- if, in the simplest terms...	Now she's going to suspend the Ivy League phrasing for a moment, because it's actually not useful when you want to say something plainly.
... our upbringing is good enough -- we stay with the body, or we have bad dreams.	Here's the repeated use of the word "we," which is the height of pretension, more than any exalted phrasing or two-dollar words. She doesn't mean the royal "we," she means "we Americans," or at least, "we Americans whose upbringing is good enough." But the more you read, the more you are convinced that no one's upbringing could possibly be good enough when Didion is listening and passing judgment.
I am talking, of course, about the kind of social code...	Oh for Christ's sake, shut up.
... that is sometimes called, usually pejoratively, "wagon-train morality."	Coming from someone who sounds pejorative almost all the time, that's believable.
In fact that is precisely what it is. For better or worse, we are what we learned as children...	No, really, shut up.

When I was in my 20s I loved this piece. I don't know what was wrong with me.

technorati: San Francisco

Guilty pleasure: Kay Hanley and her band Letters to Cleo

One day in the mid-90s, at a Tower Records listening station, I discovered the band Letters to Cleo and their LP Wholesale Meats and Fish. I totally dug the technique of the lead singer, Kay Hanley, her kickass songwriting, and the way the band rocked. They never made it big, exactly, and broke up around 1999. Hanley went on to write songs for, and sing for, Hollywood movies; she and her Letters to Cleo lead guitarist husband were the sound behind Josie and the Pussycats, the lead single from which, "3 Small Words," freaking rocks.

Yesterday she was featured on fishbowlLA.com, with the news that she and hubby have done another Hollywood project -- music for a Care Bears video, believe it or not. Given how great the music for Josie and the Pussycats was, I'd suspend judgement on her music for Care Bears until I hear it.

technorati: Letters to Cleo, Kay Hanley, indie rock

Focus on the fundies: Jesus on her ass

A company in southern Colorado is marketing His Spirit Jeans for teenage girls, with Bible verses printed on the butt. Something akin to reading Playboy for the articles, I think.

And in the UK, a man who is the 67-year-old son of famous British fascists of the 1930s is being exposed for participating in "a depraved Nazi sadomasochistic orgy" with five prostitutes. Even the New York Times has some hilarious details:

In a video the paper posted on the Internet but later removed, two of the women wore black-and-white striped robes in the style of prisoners' uniforms. The video showed Mr. Mosley counting in German -- "Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Funf!" -- as he used a leather strap to lash one of the women. "She needs more of ze punishment!" he cried in German-accented English.

Buried is the fact that the john paid $5000 for five hours with five women -- a sign that the dollar goes farther in the UK than everyone is saying.

The graphic is from a Village Voice review of a documentary about a little-known area of the cinema world: Israeli-made, Hebrew language porn films set in concentration camps. Really.

Things I had to look up: soigné

Soigné -- well-groomed, sleek, elegantly maintained. I was looking for a word the other night, some French word that would capture an attitude of, sort of, luxuriating insouciance. I thought of soigné but that's not right. I thought it was like èlan and had more to do with attitude. Still looking.

Things I had to look up: tannoy

From a story today in the U.K. Guardian:

'We can't give you information. We haven't got a Tannoy'

The Guardian, Saturday March 29 2008

I knew we were in trouble when the man in the shiny suit appeared with a trolley of bottled water and granola bars.

Our British Airways flight from Vancouver had already been delayed twice -- trouble refuelling and trouble finding somewhere to dock -- but even as we walked into the crowded but strangely inactive baggage hall in the new Terminal 5, nobody was telling us that we had just flown into the sort of fiasco that the British seem to do so particularly well.

Queues had already formed at the customer assistance desks but the smiling, slightly wild-eyed staff had almost nothing to offer. Even after six hours of chaos, nobody had been briefed. Nobody knew anything. The desks, probably knocked together by a carpenter some time during the night, were bare. I'm not even sure they had telephones. Not that it would have helped if they had. "I have tried calling," one young woman told me, waving a sheet of contact numbers. "But nobody's answering." ... As the jet-lagged crowd slumped on the floor in the vast baggage claim area (the genius of the Richard Rogers Partnership did not extend to a single chair or bench), BAA officials were keen to impress on us that they had done their job. The lights were on. The conveyor belts were turning. BA officials meanwhile blamed the BAA computer systems. And all the time, every 10 minutes, an Essex voice was cheerily announcing in a loop designed to send even a strong man insane: "British Airways would like to apologise for the delay to baggage collection. British Airways are doing their best to address the situation."

"Why can't you give out some proper information?" I asked a BA manager. "We can't," he wailed. "We don't have any -- and anyway, they haven't given us a Tannoy."

It turns out that "Tannoy Ltd is a British manufacturer of loudspeakers and public-address (PA) systems," and that the phrase is also used -- as implied in the headline of that story -- informally to mean being informed or paged, as in a comment this bebo profile reading:

I managed to lose my purse -- without my knowledge -- till i got a tannoy from the front desk and was proper confused as to how exactly they knew i was in the library in the first place...

Contra status quo

I do not know the work of Belgian novelist Hugo Claus, who died this week, but I like this quote used to describe his relation to the world:

I am a person who is unhappy with things as they stand. We cannot accept the world as it is. Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things.

technorati: authors, writers, obituaries

Hiding

My friend Anna calls her periodic retreats from the world, usually to concentrate on her doctoral dissertation, "going underground." This week Cris and I have gone underground in a slightly different way, borrowing the house of our friends Sara and Martha while part of our house is being painted. This week the work on our house -- which we have undertaken for some reason despite being quite broke -- happened to coincide with their trip out of town to the east coast.

Sara is one of my best friends, and I've been over to their house many times in the last ten years, often with a group of friends to watch "The Sopranos." It's a large two-story house in the heart of the Mission District, with an enormous, beautiful garden. And much quieter, as our house is near busy Cesar Chavez Street. It's a wonderful retreat. We should switch houses more often -- only our house is about 65% the size of this one.

Movie night: Morituri

I'll imitate my friend Marilyn and report on a video we watched: Morituri, with Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner, a completely forgotten war thriller in which Brando plays a sort of double agent, a pacifist masquerading as an SS officer aboard a cargo ship, with Yul Brynner as the sullen "good German" captain who has no use for the Nazi political officer on board. It's long and convoluted, but the direction has moments of real brilliance, and the performances are terrific.

technorati: films,Marlon Brando,Yul Brynner

Things I had to look up: bien pensant

bien pensant -- A French term meaning "right-minded" or "right-thinking," it is used as a literary term in English to refer to those who adopt the orthodoxy of others to substitute for their own thoughts and opinions.

Context: In a long profile of V.S. Naipaul in the Guardian/Observer:

By 1971, the year in which he won the Booker Prize for In A Free State, Naipaul's literary self was fully at large in the world and would fuel three decades in which he travelled a long way from the comedy of his early fiction to the more sinister images of A Bend in the River, his masterpiece, and the later, more personal fictions, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World. His journalism and incessant travelling took him into the muslim world of Among the Believers and Beyond Belief and made him enemies among bien pensant western liberals as well as muslims. Today, he exudes the satisfaction of one who has been proved substantially right about Islam. He says he does not like some of the controversy he has aroused, but affects insouciance. 'When I read those things, I am immensely amused. They don't wound me at all.'

I was not aware of this phrase's origins, so when I see it baldly translated and used without irony as an adjective -- as in this sentence from an editorial today about the suppression of demonstrations in Tibet:

The current protests in Tibet and the response of the Chinese authorities have attracted the attention of every right-thinking man or woman with access to the free media, and the vast majority of the people are sympathetic toward the Tibetans

One has to wonder if people who use the phrase without irony are aware that it's supposed to be used ironically. Or is it possible that using the French version carries irony that the English cannot?

Treading water

Not much to report on lately. I haven't gotten any writing done and I don't feel like it. It's a symptom of the ambivalent mood I'm in that what ideas I do get have nothing to do with the two books I'm supposed to be working on; instead, I find myself thinking about the crypto-mystery I thought of a few years ago. So I'm really getting nothing done, just keeping the house and my job and Cris and everything else taken care of. Sorry I've been so dull this year.

Here's something: Courtesy Perry, a "trailer" for a film about Wonder Valley, the remote desert spot where several friends live and which has in the last 15 years become an art colony, its first step to utter destruction, but for the moment, it's still nice.

Starbucks co-founder a troublemaker at heart

For a long time, anyone who flew far enough on Alaska Airlines to get served a meal received on the tray a prayer card that:

are shared as a gesture of thanks which reflect the beliefs of this country's founding as in the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, Pledge of Allegiance and every U.S. coin and dollar you handle.

It seems that Gordon Bowker, co-founder of Starbucks and other businesses, liked to twit the plane's crew by loudly reading the card.

Q: You used to recite the complimentary prayer aloud on airline flights. Why?

A: I really resented them putting the prayer there in the first place. Everyone has a certain amount of fear of flying, so what's the idea of putting a prayer on there? Please don't crash? God help us, don't crash? I thought, you know, if they had the guts to put the prayer out there in the first place, what did they expect people to do with it? So I would read it out loud. I also was curious what kind of effect that would have. The flight attendants didn't like it at all.

technorati: Starbucks, airlines, Alaska Airlines

Hoaxers as superheroes

To bring this week's literary scandal to a close -- a quite minor scandal it was, but one that bloggers have chewed thoroughly as if it were the last piece of steak before a year-long Buddhist retreat -- NYT books reporter Motoko Rich drew up a collection of literary hoaxers from Clifford Irving to JT LeRoy to the current, soon-to-be-forgotten Peggy Seltzer.

While looking over the illustration (left) for Rich's article, I suddenly realized that her rogue's gallery suggested a sort of sick Legion of Literary Super-villains who went over to the dark side; I envision them sitting around in their decrepit Brooklyn headquarters, all trying to write "true memoir" versions of their experiences while drinking out of the same bottle of cheap Cabernet Sauvignon from Trader Joes and all sharing the same cellphone while they try to get an agent or editor to return their calls. When the cellphone rings they all dive for it and end up in a heap on the floor, the wine puddling into a stain that can never be washed away.

The Super-Hoaxers, their true identities, and some details about them: (Note: all have the super-power of assuming others' identities; each has at least one additional power)

• Wannabe Girl (Peggy Seltzer) -- Her uniform is a red hoodie and red kerchief with baggy jeans and $150 Timberland boots. She speaks in a patois of fake South Central ghetto-speak until the other Super-Hoaxers cover their ears and tell her to shut up, whereupon she starts asking them to help her write a prep school memoir. Her super-power is making bourgeois editors believe that the cultural signifiers of powerless people are actually powerful totems that magically grant a sense of authenticity and genuine feeling.
• Big Lummox (James Frey) -- Speaks in a strangely high-pitched voice, tending toward whining when talking about himself. His uniform is a Gap denim shirt and Relaxed-size jeans with $300 Nikes. His super-power is getting women to feel sorry for him.
• Red-Faced Man (Tim Barrus) -- Growling, mumbling, often drunk, his speech is often unintelligible, but Wannabe Girl pretends to understand it. His uniform is red plaid shirts, cast-off red kerchiefs from Wannabe Girl (though they are often thought to be romantically involved, they actually can't stand one another), dirty brown trousers, and moccasins. His super-power is that, while everything else in his books is a lie, he actually knows how to fish, though in Brooklyn this skill is useless.
• Cherry Pie (Laura Albert) -- Though middle-aged, her uniform is a 12-year-old Victorian child's dress, worn with a floppy hat from the 1960s. Her super power is being able to sound like any other human being, but only on the phone; if you watch her performing this feat of vocal impersonation in person, it just looks weird. She also has a sort of super-hypnotic power that can make others believe that some random people she's with are actually family members or somehow also famous, but it only works on has-been celebrities, and it's weakening as time goes on.
• Super-Daughter (Kaavya Viswanathan) -- Her uniform is smart college togs from H&M, and she speaks like an east coast prep school student, but can turn on a curry accent when provoked. Wannabe Girl is dying to be her best friend. Her long hair is capable of reaching out and entangling reporters, college admissions officers, editors and potential mates, and she also knows everything, but no one believes her.

technorati: hoaxes, JT LeRoy, Peggy Seltzer

Robbe-Grillet's legacy

Last month's passing of French avant-garde novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet has occasioned little comment, but today Salon threw dirt on the grave with a piece entitled The Man Who Ruined the Novel. I found the article extremely unconvincing. I don't claim to know much about Robbe-Grillet's work, though I have read a few of his novels, and I found them sort of inspiring, not discouraging. Like Kathy Acker, he mixed explicit sex with a disdain for narrative and a sense of weird freedom. "Project for a Revolution in New York" gave me permission to break rules.

You know whose work I found really discouraging? Toni Morrison. After reading "Song of Solomon" I almost despaired of ever being a writer, thinking "Christ, I could never do anything like this."

Not that my stuff is anything like Robbe-Grillet. But I sure responded to it better than that Salon writer.

technorati: novelists, novels, books, Robbe-Grillet

Today's fake: she wasn't half-native American or a gang chick

A woman who wrote a memoir about being a half white, half Native American gang chick who worked as a drug courier for South Central L.A. gangs made it all up, and the publisher is pulling all unsold copies and cancelling her book tour. Her rationale?

I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it's an ego thing -- I don't know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.

She was found out when the New York Times published a profile of the author last week; her sister read it, agog, then called the publisher to squeal.

I wonder how many of these the publishing industry will take before the entire memoir genre becomes a thing of the past.

technorati: hoaxes

Contraction

With her unable to work due to illness, Cris and I have decided we have to pull in our spending, so one of the things to go will be my writing office at a friend's house. That's $400 a month we'll be spending on groceries -- cheaper groceries -- instead.

And speaking of writing, I finally heard back from the publisher for whom I wrote How They Scored. They want a major rewrite. How will I accomplish this without an office to write in? I guess I'll have to go into my dayjob and work there. The good part about that is that after a year of working there, I moved to a much nicer cube by the window. Not only is it full of light, with a view of the mountain right across the freeway, it's much larger than the other cube. There is not, however, quite enough room for the chaise longue I bought for my office. And there's no room at home for it, either. I guess I'll have to sell it. If you're interested, click here to see a picture of it. $350.

The other good part about working at my dayjob office is that the cats don't compete for my attention. And I can't surf the internet -- if you do it too much, an automatic warning pops up, like you're a little kid. Well, so much the better to focus. I've got to get that rewrite done. I need the money.

Today's hoax: author says 'I felt Jewish'

A woman who several years ago insisted that her 1997 memoir "Misha, a Memoir of the Holocaust Years" was true has admitted that the whole story, in which she depicts herself as a Jewish child who wanders by herself across Nazi-occupied Europe searching for her deported parents, is a hoax (courtesy Publishers Marketplace). The book is the basis for a new French movie, "Survivre avec les Loups" -- it seems that according to one passage in the book the author claimed to have been sheltered by wolves.

In a statement, the author said the real story is that while she is a Belgian Catholic, her parents were resistance fighters who were arrested by the Nazis, and that therefore she "felt Jewish," and believes the story "was my reality, my way of surviving."

Apart from the preposterous notion of a small child being taken in by a wolf pack, rather than devoured for lunch, the notion of a child being protected from the Nazis in this manner seems very strange even as a fictional trope, as wolves were a symbol favored by the Nazis themselves.

Coincidentally, I saw part of "Dr. Zhivago" on TV last night, and as we watched the scene where Zhivago and Lara are marooned in a snowy dacha surrounded by howling wolves, Cris murmured, "The wolves symbolize the Bolsheviks." That never occurred to me, but I realized she was right. I'm terrible at symbols, they go right by me -- somewhat of a handicap for a novelist.

technorati: literary hoaxes, holocaust, novels, French cinema

New craze: the six-word memoir

The New Yorker documents the six-word memoir craze.

Mine?

Life's short -- let's fuck, then eat.

This philosophy was reinforced tonight when we turned on "Annie Hall," which I haven't seen in 20 years (though I saw it ten times in the first few years after it came out). I forgot that it begins with the old joke about the two ladies at the Catskill resort who lament "The food is so terrible here -- and the portions are so small."

Alain Robbe-Grillet dies

Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the bomb-throwers of modern literature whose last book, Un Roman Sentimental, garnered almost nothing but contempt, has died at age 85. In keeping with the rest of his career, his last book mixed themes of sadistic sex, philosophy, and politics.

Un Roman Sentimental is not out in English, so if you want an introduction to Robbe-Grillet, try Project for a Revolution in New York, which is out of print but widely available from used booksellers. Here's an evocative blog entry on the author; it points to a long, fairly recent interview here.

technorati: books, Robbe-Grillet

'Fight Club' to be a Broadway musical?

Following last month's news that "The Diary of Anne Frank" was about to be staged in Spain as a musical comes a rumor that "Fight Club" might go to Broadway. The creative team is the novelist Chuck Palahniuk and the director of the movie version.

Just to stay ahead of the curve, let me suggest a few more unlikely musicals:

• The Silence of the Lambs
• The 9/11 Commission's Report
• Anything by Ann Coulter
• The Unabomber Manifesto
• Michel Houellebecq's novel "Platform," about cynical businessmen who open a sex resort in Thailand, only to have it blown up by Muslim terrorists.
• The Tom Cruise Story

That last one gave you a real shudder, huh?

Unopened, dumped letters to God

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

USA Today, 2 November 2006

Letters to God found dumped in ocean off New Jersey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on those Hollywood novelists

A few days ago I blogged the LA Times story about idle Hollywood scriptwriters getting a chance to write that novel they've been meaning to. Novelist and writing teacher Alexander Chee -- whose early work I published in Frighten the Horses -- noticed the same story and says to the "rookie" novelists, "As a literary writer, I just want to tell my newly-arrived television and film siblings, with confidence, people don't want baggy receptacles of story. The biggest mistake, time and again, that I see student writers (or professional ones) make is to think that in a novel 'there's so much time.' There isn't."

In any case, the writers strike might be on the verge of being settled, hopefully long before those scriptwriters made much progress on their novels.

More politics

Cris and I had a talk this morning about the candidates. She thinks Clinton would have a chance to do more in office. A pragmatist, she said a political machine, such as the one Clinton is connected to, is a valuable tool. I countered by saying she may be too beholden to certain people and institutions and may have too many favors to repay. I guess it's two sides of the same coin. Yes, she would put very experienced, well-connected people in her administration. But who's to say such people wouldn't also flock to an Obama administration. "Kind of like a Camelot thing," Cris said thoughtfully.

I also don't relish the thought of the Rush Limbaughs of the world being able to gnash their teeth on the Clintons for another eight years. If Obama wins the nomination, it would at least set them back on their heels for a time. Maybe not long.

Meanwhile, if you want to see what a race to the bottom looks like, take a look at this article from the Colorado Springs Gazette, depicting the one-term incumbent COngressman and two Republican challengers in a competition to prove who is more "conservative" than the others. One man, the aptly named Crank, wants to defund Amtrak, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dept. of Education. "Those are not things the government needs to fund," he argues, contrasting them with Kevlar vests required by soldiers. Yes, let's be a nation known by our Kevlar.

technorati: Republicans, Colorado 5th district, Obama

Sic transit Edwards

I actually teared up when I saw the downcast expression on the face of John Edwards on today's New York Times story announcing his pullout from the presidential race -- and the lines:

...He said he had spoken to (Clinton and Obama) by phone and asked them both to continue drawing attention to the primary themes of his campaign.

"They have both pledged to me -- and more importantly, through me to America -- that they will make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency... Our Democratic Party will make history. We will be strong, we will be unified, and with a little backbone, we will take back the White House."

"Why hasn't he gotten more attention?" Cris moaned last weekend when the returns came in from South Carolina, Edwards' last best chance. "Aren't people listening to what he's saying?"

No, not enough people listened as Edwards excoriated corporate profiteering and made his Kennedyesque pledges to uplift the poor. People are, I think, excited -- and understandably so -- by the prospect of a female or black president. No matter what Edwards said, he could never top the novelty and attractiveness of Obama nor the organization and fundraising ability of Clinton.

For those who did listen, I suspect almost all their votes will go to Obama -- as will mine.

Meanwhile, Giuliani will quit and is expected to support John McCain. I so wanted him to announce something totally wacky, such as an endorsement of Ron Paul.

technorati: John Edwards, Barack Obama, campaign, Democratic

Out-of-work screenwriters prepare to flood market with that novel they've been meaning to write

Sunday's LA Times had this story: idled by the protracted screenwriters strike, Hollywood scribes are using the downtime to "write in the morning and picket in the afternoon." It quotes them as saying:

• "The process (of screenwriting) is less than satisfying... You get tired and burned out, and I always wanted to write novels anyway."
  and
• "Scripts are all about economy and forward momentum, whereas novels can be big, baggy receptacles for a story. When I go back to screenwriting, I feel like I've been put back in my cage."
  and
• "The Writers Guild is gonna kill me for saying this, but a script is nothing more than a blueprint for a film... It's a road map and can't stand on its own; it needs others to make it a movie. Books are more holistic. They're less about plot and more about character, emotions, nuance. It's refreshing to just write about people for a change."

As someone who's been trying to get a literary novel published for years, I cringe at the notion that the market is about to be flooded with tight, competent, professional dreck by people who are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to think up the next big thing. Just what I needed.

Creating characters

Here's an essay by the critic James Woods (courtesy Alexander Chee) that raises interesting questions about what a fully realized character is in fiction. I was particularly drawn to a passage where Woods quotes the novelist Iris Murdoch, and I went looking for the essay he quoted from.

It's here: The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited, from the Yale Review of 1959. I will quote a little more than Woods did:

Art is not an expression of personality, it is a question rather of the continual expelling of oneself from the matter in hand. Anyone who has attempted to write a novel will have discovered this difficulty in the special form which it takes when one is dealing with fictitious characters. Is one going to be able to present any character other than oneself who is more than a conventional puppet? How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense "interested in other people," this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a real character who is not oneself. It is impossible, it seems to me, not to see one's failure here as a sort of spiritual failure.

This is instructive for me as I begin another draft of my India book specifically to strengthen the main character.

technorati: novel writing, Iris Murdoch, characterization, Alexander Chee, James Woods, literary criticism

Two new novels set in Las Vegas

Two new novels are set in, and largely about, Las Vegas: The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss Jr., and Beautiful Children by Charles Bock. Both are first novels.

The story of how the first one was published has some interesting and -- for writers -- comic bits:

When McGinniss was looking for people to give his manuscript a read, among the first people he contacted was (Bret Easton) Ellis. "I groaned," says Ellis of receiving McGinniss' first e-mail asking for help. "Of course, you have to understand, I feel completely indebted to his father. There was no way I was going to say no to his request."

Ellis sent McGinniss back to the drawing board. "It needed to be tightened up," he says. "I felt there were a lot of missed opportunities... There was a lot of editorializing. He had the same setting [of the published novel], the same cast of characters, the same complicated relationships, but the story needed to be more precise."

"I was very naive," McGinniss says. "I'd just assumed you crank it out and if it reads well, it's a novel -- it's done, you're set. At the time I sent it to him, inside I thought, I think I'm pretty close." For the next two years he made multiple revisions and did some more Vegas research...

The confusing thing for novelists at the beginning of their careers is that you're aware some people do get manuscripts published without extensive, multiple revisions; while they may not "crank it out," they basically lay it down, do some polishing, and they really are done. T. Coraghessan Boyle is one of these; I heard him interviewed on a local radio station while I was writing my own first novel, Make Nice (which also happens to be set partly in Las Vegas). I phoned up the show and asked the author about his revision process. He said:

This is going to drive a lot of people crazy, but I don't do any subsequent drafts. I do substantial rewriting as I go along in the first draft, and when I get to the end of the book, it's essentially done. Of course there's editing and so on, but what's in my computer is basically it.

Many more writers do the multiple-revisions thing. My friend Katia went through seven or eight drafts of her first novel Crashing America and she's into the fourth or fifth draft of her next book. Soon I'll be commencing the fourth draft of Bangalored, my second book -- though like McGinniss Jr. when I sent it to my agent last year I thought, It's pretty close.

technorati: Las Vegas, books, novels

Here comes the rain again

It's been raining for a few days. Since I hardly have to be out in it, I find it rather nice. The biggest venture was to a restaurant on Mission St. where my friend Namita had invited people for her birthday. She and I have a bit of history together, which she began referring to and then stopped herself and said confidentially, "I'd better watch what I say, there are people here from different parts of my life and they don't know everything about me." Nor do I, but I do like that we had Stephanie in common.

One thing the rain has done is make me a little bit bleary creatively. I was on such a roll with my just completed book that it's a little hard to walk into my writing room and think about anything else. I'll start the way I started working my self up to writing that book: by reading.

'Who are you calling Cootie Queen, you lint licker?!'

I'm going to show how low-class I truly am with this post, but... You know how TV commercials sometimes stick in your mind, and you want to know more about them, and it's not like you can look them up on imdb.com or anything.

This is the commercial I was obsessed with:

http://www.splendad.com/ads/show/863-Orbit-Euphemisms

That actress who plays the gum-chewing mistress is so hilarious that I wanted to know who it was. Fortunately, thanks to Google, with a little patience you can find out just about anything. Her name is Jesse Meriwether, and she is from New Orleans.

I also found another commercial she was in, unfortunately without dialogue from her: http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/commercials/1753/

Having fun over there

Breaking my previous record, I posted five entries in one day over at sf.metblogs. The tiger story, she has been good to me.

It occurred to me, as I was updating the fourth, news-filled post, that the tiger story is on the verge of becoming a classic SF story, like the JT LeRoy hoax, the dog mauling, and my favorite of all time, the Condor Club bouncer who was killed by Carol Doda's piano. (In that incident, which happened around 1980, a bouncer was killed while having sex after hours with one of the club's strippers on top of the piano. The piano was rigged to descend from the ceiling with Doda on top of it, her grand entrance. While the bouncer and the stripper were fucking, the piano's mechanism somehow got started, and the piano began rising toward the trap door, which was closed. The dancer was nimble enough to jump off, but the bouncer weighed over 300 pounds and couldn't get off the piano, as it rose to the ceiling, crushing him to death. Best! Story! Evar!!1!)

The 2005 chili finger story came close, but regrettably it happened in San Jose.

Let's see how the tiger's tale measures up:

Sex - no
Money - no, at least until the lawsuits start
Death - yes
Bizarre factor - yes
Celebrity - yes, when you include the lawyers
Happened largely in SF - yes
Took advantage of SF liberal fantasies about itself - yes

Clearly all that it lacks is sex. Sigh.

Right, that's done

This just in: The NYT raises the possibility that Gawker is over. Me, I stopped reading it sometime in 2005. And I stopped reading Wonkette after the original editor left it. Blogs are not about the subjects they cover or their material. They're about voice. A consistent voice.

I've been spending more time lately filing posts on SF Metroblog, becoming its most consistent poster, though I'm not sure anyone really cares or is reading. I was cheered, however, when a local more famous blogger told me she thought that SF Metroblog did get attention; she was even surprised its writers aren't paid, but that might be because she just got a paid blogging gig. Anyway, I'm posting more there than here, these days, mostly because it's possible to do one or two good posts a day about San Francisco topics but hard to find time to surf around and post the stuff I really like to post about.

However, this is priceless. Some geek wandered the floor at the Consumer Electronics Show -- with a TV B Gone. Now that's anti-entertainment.

In personal news, today I have officially, and for about the fourth time, declared work on my novel How They Scored done, printed it out, and tomorrow I'm mailing it to my publisher. Which means they should be sending my agent a check within a month or so.

Barring any protests from How They Scored's publisher, I'll now go back to work on my India book, which is now titled "Bangalored".

technorati: How They Scored, novel writing, blogging

Another thingy

Trying another search widget. I wouldn't recommend adopting it yet because I don't know what it does, really. We'll see.

The case of the productive blond

Courtesy MediaBistro, here is some of the worst, most entertaining writing I've seen. It's in a blog post by a former TV producer, who writes about his tortured relationships with Fox News fuhrer Roger Ailes, a blond assistant, his agent, his wife, and other characters. Despite the quality of the writing, it has all the ingredients for a Bonfire-of-the-Vanities style novel and/or memoir.

Some choice phrases:

My wife Gina was emailing strange men in foreign countries on the computer, a habit she seemed unwilling to break. I was fantasizing about the 23 year old blond, who that day walked into the elevator facing me, threw her shoulders back, projecting toward me her extraordinary breasts, stared at me, and backed up against the opposite wall, putting a sexual no-man's-land between us.
...
She was blond and productive. Regardless, on the last day of production, the blond knocked on my door and asked if we could talk.
...
I had lived at 1060 Park Avenue for 30 years. My adult life had played out on that stage. I loved it. I walked out along Park and wept. Everything was intolerable. But that which could not be changed had to be accepted. And I had to have the courage to change that which I could change. I moved to my mother's.

technorati: Republicans, television, New York

Los productores

In Spain, "The Diary of Anne Frank" is soon to be a musical.

Too much blogging is bad for you

When I interviewed Annalee Newitz, the editor of new futurism blog io9 on Saturday, she mentioned that working nonstop on the launch of the site for two months had given her her first case of repetitive stress injury.

Today the NYT had a piece on serious health problems of people who blog too much.

technorati: blogging

Chelsea as Breck girl

I was amused by this AP photo of Hillary Clinton appearing to conduct NH voters in singing as Chelsea looks on. There's something truly mesmerizing about Chelsea's hair. There's also this photo from the same event.

On the other hand:

technorati: Chelsea Clinton, Hillary

Today: big storm; tomorrow, big storm; Sunday, etc.

I had arranged to work at home today due to the bad weather that was predicted. But I didn't expect the power at home to be out for 11 hours. I blogged the morning on the metroblog, but in the afternoon Cris and I just hung around the house -- in a way. She went into emergency mode and gathered all the candles and made me help her tidy up the place "so we won't trip over stuff in the dark" in case the outage extended into the evening.

Finally at the end of the afternoon, we went out for an early dinner, and when we got back about 6:30 pm, the power was back on. Nevertheless I still came over to my office on Capp St., where I'm writing this. I haven't been over here but a couple of times in the last seven weeks (but still managed to finish my latest novel project).

technorati: California storms

Making up my own meme

I never do memes, for reasons that will shortly become evident.

1. Which Nobel Prize did you win this year?

   Chocolate, but not the kind with chili peppers, proof that the 21st century has peaked too soon.

2. How many grapes are headfirst?

   Thomas Pynchon and M. Scot Momaday.

3. I can has cheezburger!

   [[An unprintable -- at least on this website -- Japanese phrase]]

4. I have a question about one of the comments you made to the past version of the doc. At one point, on page 93, you insert a lengthy comment about Configuring JCA on OS/400 for Manual Probing. (Attached below in a txt forrmat.) Are those instructions still necessary and valid for the new version 5.0 of the PowerPack? If so, I will add them to the manual.

   Yeah, it was back to work today.

 

Back from Chicago

I just got back from five days in Chicago, where I hung out mostly in a big hotel with Anna, worked on my book, and drank red wine. The picture above is from my trip on the Blue Line to O'Hare (after taking it, the batteries in my camera died), where it was snowing lightly but the flight was delayed only about 40 minutes.

Can't believe it's back to work tomorrow.

technorati: Chicago