'Co-working' at a normally closed café

Cool article from a St. Paul, Minn. paper about a group that co-works at a café that is ordinarily closed on weekdays in winter. Unemployed and freelance workers pay $40 to co-work at the café and get free coffee, AC power, and wi-fi every Tuesday. They has a Ning group website.

The café itself is apparently well-known and loved in the Twin Cities area.

technorati: co-working, crema

Awesomeness of Wikipedia strikes again

While looking up the spelling of the phrase en deshabille, I ran across this page on Wikipedia: List of French words used by English speakers. (Curiously, it does not list en deshabille at all.) The best thing about it is the section Only found in English, which lists ostensibly French words and expressions not actually used by the French, including demimonde, pièce de résistance, and double entendre.

Previously: Things I had to look up: en petit comité

technorati: words, Wikipedia

The life of a writer, part LXMDVVVII

My friend Marilyn, who went through a few years when she supported herself by writing romance novels, posts a few anecdotes today that highlight the strange demands of genre work:

In the Secret Hours was even worse. It was my one & only book to have an exclusive distribution with Borders Books. I had just begun writing it. It was late May and I allegedly had until Labor Day to write a 255 page novel. But, oops! The publisher called in alarm to say there was some sort of misunderstanding in the contract and my novel had to be turned in by the 4th of July. I had 5 weeks to write an entire novel that I only had a vague storyline for. No outline, just some notes. It was really hell. I thought my fingers were going to fall off from all that marathon typing everyday-long-into-the-night. Not only that, but I seriously had to let the story tell itself. Whatever the fuck came out onto the paper became "the novel." It was a real nightmare for me. And when the reviews came out and were bad, well, what are you going to say? Complain about the fuck up in your deadline? It just makes you look like a cry baby.

Read the whole entry.

technorati: writing, novels

Lisa B's 'Poetry of Groove'

Here's my friend Lisa B, with a nice little video for her jazz-pop tune "The Poetry of Groove." I like the dancing and the kinda DIY low tech quality.



Lisa's part of a circle or artists and activists I got to know in the mid-80s, among them my great friend Christine (lower left in this picture).

technorati: jazz, video

Ostentation meets hype meets D&S

After some stranger followed my Twitter feed, I was led to this bizarre video in which the woman -- judging from the feed she works in promotions for some booze company -- is tutored by some aggressive British gent in the basics of enjoying some super-expensive whiskey. The British gent is so noisy, so controlling, so in-her-face that it's almost like watching a D&S scene. The woman's "What have I got myself into?" expression as the scene goes on and on is priceless.

technorati: live the lush life, whiskey

How They Scored now available on Amazon.com

My novel How They Scored is now available on Amazon.com as both a paperback ($16.98, available for free shipping) and Kindle edition ($3.99), though the latter has a strange notation that it is "not available for customers in the United States" / Update 9 Nov 09: The Kindle edition is now fully available.

The Travelers Guide to Being 22 Years Old, and other states

The Words Without Borders blog has a post on a series of books published by Whereabouts Press, the Traveler Literary Companion series. These are guides to countries (mostly) and some cities containing stories set in those places. To their credit, an examination of the Table of Contents for some of the books suggests that their contents were all written by natives to those countries; the India guide has no E.M. Forester or even V.S. Naipaul, the Spain no Hemingway or Orwell.

A splendid idea. But what if the definition of travel guide were extended to states of being, or stages of life? Thus a Travelers Guide to Being 22 Years Old might contain selections from Goodbye, Columbus, The Graduate, and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. The Travelers Guide to Homelessness would contain stories written only by people who had been (and maybe were still) homeless (voluntary homeless people need not apply -- again, no Orwell). The emphasis on authenticity might get a little dicey with, for example, The Travelers Guide to Mars -- but who could exclude Ray Bradbury from that collection?

technorati: travel books, books, youth

Read a new story, "Cleaning Up After the Champion"

I posted a short story to a new writers' website, Fictionaut. The story is called "Cleaning Up After the Champion," and is about how normal people react when their loved ones turn into superheroes.

It's either the first in a series of stories about superheroes, or the first chapter in a novel. Works either way. No other stories in the series, if there is one, have been completed, though I have started a couple of them.

Read "Cleaning Up After the Champion."

How I love her

Here's Cris on Martin's Luther's Ninety-five Theses, the document he famously nailed to the door of the church in Wittenburg in 1517 to begin the Protestant Reformation:

Didn't he ever hear of the information mapping principle that people can remember only seven things at once?

technorati: Reformation Day, Martin Luther

Augusten Burroughs on tenacity

I had an agent for a few years, and she did a wonderful job getting my novel Make Nice in front of publishers. (Unfortunately none of them bought it, but that was my fault, not hers.) As most of my friends know, last year she quit the agent business, so I'm trying to find a new agent for my novel Mango Rain (which has had other titles in manuscript, including "Bangalored").

As I start the process of trying to find an agent again, these words from Augusten Burroughs are encouraging.

As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward. I believe that if you have real talent as a writer, a true gift, you will eventually be published. But it may not happen according to your schedule. And it may not happen with the first manuscript you create. Or the second. So you have to be, if not patient, at least endlessly tenacious.

Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen. I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen. The reason I was so confident is because I knew I wouldn't stop trying until it happened. And this is the secret. You don't need to be confident. You just need to be stubborn.

technorati: writing, rejection

I love this country

Some clever, strong-voiced protesters infiltrated an insurance industry meeting and sang their "thanks for killing the Public Option" to the dumbfounded attendees. (Courtesy Stellaa)

Of course, in a third-world country they all would have been taken out and shot.

technorati: health care, public option

Things I had to look up: Anagnorisis

I was enjoying this satirical chart of "42 Essential 3rd Act Twists" (courtesy The Rumpus) when I was stopped dead by the unfamiliar term "anagnorisis."

Anagnorisis -- a moment of sudden recognition by the main character in a drama or story of the true nature of things. For example, in "Chinatown" when Evelyn Mulwray's confession "She's my sister and my daughter" makes Jake Gittes realize the depth of Noah Cross's evil. (Screenplay.)

technorati: Chinatown, drama

Keeping abreast of body modifications

"Ultramarathon" runners -- those who take part in races of 50, 100 or even more miles -- tend to suffer from problems with toenails. So some of them have toenails permanently removed through surgery, a process that includes "pouring acid onto the nailbed" to prevent regrowth. Runners interviewed for the NYT story say things like "toenails are dead weight;" one who had all his toenails removed said "it's one less thing to have to deal with" on races upwards of 100 miles.

The piece is a little contradictory about whether runners who have undergone the procedure -- an estimated five to ten percent of "ultrarunners" -- feel like publicizing the fact. Some of them are "tired of being freaks, and they don't want to add anything more freakish to their résumé." Others sport t-shirts reading "Toenails are for Sissies" -- a clue to the mentality of the sport.

The most reasonable comment is from one doctor who says, "You know any sport has gone off the rails when you have to remove body parts to do it."

Utter dumbass of the month

Man charged with printing phony $50s to pay dancer CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- A Wyoming man has been charged with counterfeiting money to pay an exotic dancer for a private performance. Rickey A. Kempter, 50, faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Prosecutors say Kempter hired the exotic dancer for a private dance at the Lariat Motel, and Kempter and the dancer shared a taxi to the location. The taxi driver called police after they arrived, saying Kempter asked him to hold a roll of $50 bills and he noticed that they looked odd and were not cut evenly. Court documents say Kempter told investigators that he made the bills on a printer in his home, but that he planned to go home and get real money to pay the dancer. From the sound of it, he didn't even have time to get it in. He'll have plenty of time to think about it, though. You can read a long version of the story in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle; unfortunately, no picture of Mr. Kempter. But courtesy of Yelp, here's the motel in question. Click through for a larger version. But be sure to read the Yelp reviews for the amazing comment about the Lariat's allure: It looked like a room to commit suicide in.

The lonely Brinks 'stockroom' man

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

Dear/Madam,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

technorati: hoaxes

Space tourists becoming boring

The founder of the Cirque du Soleil company -- formerly a charming group of European and North American hippies, now a multi-billion dollar corporation with simultaneous nightly productions in cities around the world -- was shot into space as one of those "space tourists" (in other words, he paid $10 billion for the privilege) -- and almost no one noticed, despite the fact that he reportedly spent most of the trip wearing a clown nose. I'm sure the dedicated scientists and pilots who worked for twenty or thirty years to get the same privilege really appreciated that.

technorati: space tourists, Laliberte

San Francisco: dirty, credulous, overcrowded?

I had to giggle when I read this guy's blog post about San Francisco being dirty, credulous, and overcrowded (cross-linked using ShareThis). It's not that he's wrong, it's that he's so afraid that someone will disagree with him and -- shudder -- email him, and then -- horrors -- he'll be forced to ignore the email.

Then you read his bio and see: Aha, he's in his late-mid-20s. Just the time when illusions are popped, including the illusion that just because one is really smart (see his bio, where the bragging is perfectly pitched to be just more than humble, just less than arrogant: "I've been working at Twitter since the beginning of 2007, several months before the service began to grow in popularity. It's been an education ...") one somehow deserves to be relieved of the bother of living in a real environment with "generally poor urban/civic planning" and "unreliable and inadequate public transit."

I must have missed the part where he's announcing that he's devoting his dead Saturday afternoons ("I've found precious little to do here") to organizing the citizenry for the repeal of Proposition 13 and other neo-con initiatives that have limited the scope and reach of what government can do to address such problems. In the meantime, I strongly suggest taking up kayaking or crack.

That's Jenny with an X

The appearance of Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin on the Rachel Maddow Show (thanks, @tara) educated me for the first time on, among other things: that the A-list (for the internet) celebrity's name is pronounced "zhenny zhardan," and that she seems to have excellent diction, even the traces of an East Coast posh accent.

It's a funny story and worth watching, and what a giant plug for BoingBoing. Of course Maddow's audience is likely already familiar with BoingBoing (the most-viewed blog in history) but such a feature can only serve to remind everyone that it's still relevant and not merely the repository of some writers' obsessions with squids, steampunk, and Disney World.

Read my short story 'Polar Bear'

Here's a short story, Polar Bear (PDF), which I spent a great deal of time working on several years ago, available for free from the Scribd website. (I'm not too sure just what the purpose of the Scribd website is, but for the moment I'll use it to share some of my writing.)

For those familiar with much of my work, this is not a story about sex and it doesn't really have any sex in it (though there is a cameo by a stripper). It's based on an anecdote told to me by a friend when I lived in Japan twenty years ago. She was a wealthy middle-aged lady who had a rich, depressed friend from college. He was so bored he wanted to kill himself, but she said to him, "Well, what if you just risked your life instead?" And took him hunting polar bears in the Arctic. I tried to imagine what that must have been like.

It's really one of my best short stories, a form which (outside of the realm of erotica) I have trouble with. So I hope you'll enjoy this, offered as a free PDF download.

She's a sex bomb, my baby, yeah

With her mane of black hair, taut physique, eight tattoos (including the Shakespeare quotation "We will all laugh at gilded butterflies" from "King Lear") and bedroom eyes, she projects an unapologetic sultriness whether she's wearing a bikini in GQ or bending over a '76 Camaro in a tiny blouse in her breakthrough role in 2007's "Transformers" (which not coincidentally has taken in more than $700 million in worldwide box office).

That mind-numbing sentence is only one of the many such sentences composed by an LA Times entertainment writer, who at this very moment may be considering ways to kill him- or herself after turning in an anodyne feature on Megan Fox, star of a recently released "horror comedy" and this year's sex bomb.

My only reaction is, it's nice that a brunette gets to be the designated sex bomb once in a while.

(Title of this blog entry is from the most infamous record by the infamous early 1980s San Francisco punk band Pop O Pies.)

technorati: Megan Fox

Bourgeois abroad

I've really enjoyed reading n+1, the lit mag, so I was disappointed to read this interview with Benjamin Kunkel, its editor and founder, because he ends up sounding like a complete douchebag.

• He moved to Buenos Aires just because he was "tired of being in New York. I felt I was a bit too close to the publishing industry." He is "drifting a bit right now, in terms of my domicile."
• Asked about "the expat scene," he protests, "I'm not really a seeker out of scenes" but adds, "I don't mind taking some relatively inexpensive flights down to South America."
• He recently finished writing a play, but professes not to care much about what happens next. "I'm just waiting to see what, if anything, happens with it. But I've been working on that, working on another book, and doing a lot of journalism..."
• Finally, he is asked: "What do you think the role of the intellectual is in society?" and responds: "On this, I kind of have a Maoist view."

Oh, clearly. Because those Maoists were famous for jet-setting to international capitals, hanging around writing plays for no reason, and moving to another country just because they were a little bit tired of where they were at.

What a douche!!

Too much talk

I looked at "The Savage Detectives" again briefly on Sunday, having bought a paperback copy of the novel to accompany my now-damaged hardback copy. As far as I could determine, there are no direct quotes in the entire second section, which takes 80% of the book.

Some of the chapters in the current novel I'm writing, titled "Knock Yourself Out," are written like this, and they're my favorite chapters. You know what the great thing is about forbidding direct quotes? It eliminates the long talky sections that mar my writing. Anytime I have an extended dialogue scene, it tends to get away from me. I can hear the dialogue and individual lines are good, but when there's three or four pages of talking, of clever dialogue, everything gets lost. For example, in the chapter I just finished, a scene at a party devolves into three pages of dialog, with a descriptive paragraph every ten lines or so.

It's a mode of writing that's always easy to do and dull to read. The first novel I ever attempted, which I titled "Us and Them," had pages and pages of this talk. I had seen it done in other books and it didn't seem to grate, so I thought it was permissible to do. But it just doesn't fit with the kind of book I want to write now.

When I wrote "How They Scored," I was able to alternate between direct and indirect quotes. I would have a long passage of narration, with indirect quotes if necessary, and then a paragraph or two of direct quotation, and then go back to indirect quoting -- all in the same scene in which one character was telling a single, long anecdote. It worked pretty well, I thought. I haven't been able to achieve this yet with my current project, though as I say, the chapters where I have no direct quotations at all are fine..

technorati: writing

Something else to blame on the internet

Blame it partially on the fact that "2666" takes weeks to get through, seeing as I have a full time job and a lot of other stuff to do, but still, I feel like a bit of a slacker for having read only that tome (and I'm still not quite finished with it) and one other from the list of the 25 best novels of the decade, as decided by a Millions poll of professional writers, lit teachers and critics. And of the civilian readers' favorites, I've read only one other. But I do have a few dozen books on my shelves which I've been meaning to get to, and the sad thing is that none of the other books on the Millions' list are among them. Either my taste is "eclectic," or I just haven't been paying attention to reviews -- even though reviews and news about books are one of the things taking up time that I would ordinarily spend actually reading books.

I blame the internet.

technorati: books, reading

Herzog's film school 'not for the faint-hearted'

It's almost like a satire: Werner Herzog announces a "Rogue Film School .. in guerrilla filmmaking" (courtesy The Rumpus) that will teach rough-and-tumble filmmaking teachniques. His description reads like a manifesto:

"The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted," said the film-maker. "It is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lock-picking or forging shooting permits in countries not favouring their projects.

"In short: it is for those who have a sense for poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four-year-old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream."

I wonder if he will begin the first day by declaring, "The first rule of Rogue Film School is that you don't talk about Rogue Film School!"

Herzog is clearly among that class of artists who -- perhaps luckily for the citizens of their nations -- might also have become extremely persuasive politicians (Vaclav Havel having been the only one to actually make the leap to head of state).

technorati: Herzog

Still a bad idea to get an iPhone

Google Can't Handle iPhone Demand For Push Gmail

-- news story

Most stories about the limitations and network problems of the iPhone have to do with AT&T's network problems that make central functionality impossibly to use. This story is a change of pace, saying that it's GMail that can't handle all the constant requests from iPhones asking for GMail inbox updates.

I don't care whose problem it is. It's still iPhone FAIL.

technorati: iPhone, Google, AT&T

Dept. of Do I Have To?

Jet Non-Stop to Fort Lauderdale!

-- Subject line of email from an airline

If I did have to fly to Florida, I'm not sure I wouldn't want to make as many stops as possible, the better to delay arriving in Florida.

More on my new book 'How They Scored'

See that thing on the right that looks like an ad? It's my ad! It's about my new book. Click it! You'll end up on the website I created for the book.

Q. What's with the highway picture?

A. The whole first half of the book is a road novel. Of course the picture is from a highway near El Paso, Texas, and the journey in the book is from San Francisco to a mountain in north-central Washington state. But the pass pictured in the photo captures a nice road-novel feeling. I actually created a new cover for the book based on the same picture. If you click through to the Lulu page selling the book, you'll see the cover. Totally different from the softball team cover. Collect 'em all.

Q. You mean it's not about softball?

A. No, although at one point the characters do play catch, although "catch with deadly consequences."

Panda up close and personal

In this charming interview with Giants star Pablo Sandoval -- whose nickname is Kung Fu Panda -- the infielder offers heartfelt props to Willie McCovey, mentor Bengie Molina, and his daughter, whose second birthday is today. Asked about his namesake movie, he's just as sincere:

It's a beautiful movie. It focuses on how people need to work for what they want to achieve. I liked its message.

Aww!!!

technorati: Giants, sfgiants, Sandoval

Bolaño 'syllabus'

The litblog The Millions offers what it calls a Bolaño syllabus, suggesting a course of reading that eases new readers in to the author's fantastic works. It's a great idea, but I'm not sure I agree with the recommendation to read so many things before getting to the orgasmic pleasure of The Savage Detectives. Before reading that masterpiece, I had only read a few Bolaño short stories and didn't feel particularly initiated, but once I had started on TSD I never looked back. Most of all, I would hate for anyone to become discouraged before reading TSD, which is one of those books you push on everyone, like the CD (or LP, depending on your generation) that changed your life. (By the way, I love the phrase used by the lead reviewer on that Amazon page to describe YMG's masterpiece (and only full-length LP) Colossal Youth: "gorgeous austerity.")

technorati: Bolaño

What agents want: memorable 'stories or characters that gnaw at me weeks later'

Interesting exchange in an interview with an agent:

Q: What types of books are you looking for that you haven't found yet?

A: Despite the fact I read so much, I rarely find stories or characters that gnaw at me weeks later, and good literature should have that sort of staying power. Writing something memorable requires originality in voice, style and plot, but it also means tapping into the human consciousness and making readers feel something outside themselves. Cultivating that emotional investment simply requires a lot of talent, but real, relatable, and lovable characters are a good start.

That's about the size of it. But what alerted me to this interview was a statement the same agent made a few moments before:

2666 by Roberto Bolaño is a masterpiece -- but I wouldn't necessarily recommend emulating it. It's a novel that wouldn’t seem like it could work on paper -- I'd certainly have my doubts if it were pitched to me -- but it does because the writing is so strong. It is important to point out that even when dealing with higher concepts and more elusive goals, Bolaño's characters are still accessible, and that connection to the reader is the most important element.

technorati: literary agents, publishing, fiction

Buy my new book

You can now buy my novel How They Scored, a book about Silicon Valley, sex, privacy and the internet, and real estate in San Francisco.

This is the book I wrote in 2007 for my erstwhile publisher Cleis Press. We disagreed about the final form of the book and it wound up back in my hands. It's now available as a paperback, for $17.75, or as a download for $4.

Get it, it's funny, sexy, and au courant.

Quick! Into the toilet!

A strange font for use in airport signage has the most sinister glyphs ever, including a suitcase filled with gasoline, an all-seeing surveillance camera, and a man running into a toilet.

technorati: fonts, security, airports

Shannon's next project

Awesome coverage of my friend Shannon O'Leary's next big project, The Big Feminist But, via an interview with Shannon in Bitch magazine.

technorati: comix

'Mystery man'

Those who have been desultorily following George Orwell's diary for the last year or so as it has been posted on a website get the payoff this week and next, as Orwell reports the events leading up to the beginning of World War II. The entries are accompanied by photostats of newspapers of the day. Those accompanying today's entry are fascinating, as several pages from several newspapers are reprinted. Among them was this weird article from the Daily Mirror (from this page), a passage worthy of Graham Greene:

MYSTERY MAN AT EMBASSY

A mystery man who arrived in England by air yesterday spent three hours at the German Embassy in Carlton House-terrace, London. -- and is thought to have flown to Germany last night.

He arrived at the Embassy in a Diplomatic Corps car. All he would say when he left after three hours was: "I don't know who I am."

He said it rather sadly and shook his head. He spoke in good English, with the track of a foreign accent. Then he was driven away.

An hour later three men arrived in a car at Heston Airport. One was seen off in a German plane understood to be bound for Amsterdam and Berlin. The airport officials would not say who he was.

The visitor to the Embassy was a tall, sunburned man, in a grey striped suit and black Homburg hat, carrying gloves and an umbrella.

He jumped out of the Diplomatic Corps car shortly before 3 p.m.

He did not appear to know by which door to enter the Embassy.

After his three hours' visit, he left by the car in which he had arrived.

Having refused to tell his name, he was pressed to say if he had arrived by air from Croydon or elsewhere. He waved his hand in a gesture that might have meant agreement or denial and the car sped away.

He Watched Crowds

The car was driven into Belgravia by a roundabout route which included Pall Mall, The Mall Horse Guards-parade (where there were crowds of sightseers), Birdcage-walk and past Buckingham Palace where there were also a number of spectators.

The car slowed down near the Horse Guards-parade, as if the passengers wished to look at the crowds by the Foreign Office and in Downing-street, but did not stop. ...

technorati: Orwell, Graham Greene

Take what you will

Novelist Richard Ford, interviewed by a Chilean newspaper: "Bolaño is overrated in the U.S.... But I liked the sex scenes." Interview in Spanish.

technorati: Bolano

Focus on the Fundies: FOTF sheds famous anti-gay program

Focus on the Family is still having money problems and has decided to end support for its anti-gay "Love Won Out" program -- one of those "ministries" which attempt to provide "encouragement" for gay people to stop being gay and pretend to be straight. The infamous Exodus International group will be taking it over, and that's got to be a natural fit. Exodus is the "ex-gay" organization whose co-founders finally gave up and stopped the pretense and went back to being as gay as the day they were born.

technorati: Focus on the Family, Love Won Out, antigay

Newly available: Lesbian Camp Girls

For a long time I've had a broken link to the porn book I wrote under a pseudonym, "Lesbian Camp Girls." First published on the Lulu POD site by my friend Marilyn Jaye Lewis as part of her work with the Erotic Authors Association, the book was unavailable for a long time, more because of my laziness than anything else. But now you can order it as a book or as a PDF download (the latter only a buck fifty). It's 135 pages of jaw-dropping, shocking porno, and of course should be read by ADULTS ONLY. Really. It's books like this that make people draw distinctions between erotica and porn, and this is the latter.

It's also really funny, I think. I wrote it partly as an homage to the silly, nasty paperback porn of the late 1970s, the kind of stuff with self-descriptive titles like "Dog Loving Lesbians" and "Her Horny Cousins." But I also wrote it to measure up (or down) to that material. So be warned (or intrigued).

technorati: porn, summer, lesbian porn

New story: 'The Truth Hurts'

A few years ago a contact in the erotic writing ... um, it's not really a community, it's not a club, I'm not sure what to call it... Let me start over. An acquaintance of mine, a young woman who was a sex columnist for some time and also an editor of anthologies of erotic stories, sent me a call for submissions. She was doing an anthology of spanking stories, would I like to send something in? Sure, okay; I thought it was a somewhat limiting topic, but I did write a story that I had fun with, and sent it off to her.

She rejected it, saying the mere suggestion of incest made it verboten. Keep in mind no such behavior occurs in the story itself or offstage between the characters (unlike some of the stories already published in my books). The story I sent had just a whiff of intergenerational sexual energy. That was too much for her.

Time passed, and another acquaintance asked me if I had any stories. I sent her a couple and she bought the spanking story the first editor had rejected. And it's for an online publication, and it just went up. So here you go: "The Truth Hurts." (Caution, story contains explicit descriptions of sex.)

Triumph of the Bourgeoisie: a sturdy railing between you and the jungle

I was struck by this banner ad, which I saw on the site of the San Jose Mercury News:

Nice clean white people separated from the jungle by a sturdy wooden railing. They aren't sweating. They aren't in the sun. Their L.L. Bean sportswear is still perfectly pressed, dry and free of stains from grease, sunscreen or bug repellent. In fact, they might as well be watching a DVD of the Panamanian jungle from their condominium -- and why didn't they, instead of contributing to global warming by flying down there just so they can stay as far away from the jungle as possible?

Yes, I went to India two years ago -- and I stayed in the city, as opposed to a friend of mine who went a year later. He was never in the city, he boasted, but always out in the countryside, seeing the sites, whatever they are. I did not say: and every step of the way, your whole presence was an insult to the bitterly poor populace (and they are much poorer in the country than in the city), reminding them of the hopelessness of their lives.

I can't imagine traveling to a third world country just to lord it over the locals, who would be able to size me up at a glimpse and tell that my annual income is 10000% of theirs. So I don't understand the appeal of such trips to the American bourgeoisie (of which I am definitely a member; make no mistake, it's not like I'm trying to say that I'm not). What is it that they're going for? Scenery they can't see in the US? Cheap prices? To practice their language skills? I really don't get it. I hate the fucking jungle, I hate getting hot and sunburned, I hate sweating, I understand completely. My point is, why go at all?

So I won't be going to Panama (or anywhere else where the standard of living is below that of, say, Argentina) anytime if I can help it.

technorati: travel, third world

Triumph of the bourgeoisie: getting rid of the dark scum on your deck

A couple days ago the NYT had an article about someone who realized a classic upper-class fantasy: buy the house behind yours, and transform it into something that shows everyone the superiority of your taste.

Just to be clear what we're talking about, here is the photograph showing an interior view of the transformed second house:

That the person in question was a celebrity author, Douglas Coupland (among other things, he is credited with creating the phrase "Generation X") adds to the cachet of the project and makes it seem like an acceptable thing for a liberal to do. To clarify his intentions, here's his description of the house in question:

"It was just a mess," he said. "There was dog effluvia, nicotine dripping down the walls, water damage...."

Nicotine "dripping down the walls"? Man, your neighbors were real trash, weren't they? You sure did the world a favor by taking their house and turning it into some kind of overblown cartoon of 20th century architectural flavors rather than, say, creating a home for for a family (or, given the apparent size of the mansion, several families). But if people lived in it, they might smoke, or have pets, or disturb the "art" that Coupland has put up, or worst of all, interrupt what he has apparently been doing ever since being the renovation, and which he must be doing over and over and over again while reading this New York Times piece and viewing its slideshow of images, namely, masturbating.

technorati: houses, Douglas Coupland, decorating

For the narcissist in your life

This Samsung camera has two viewscreens: one on the back, so you can see what you're taking a picture of, and one on the front, so you can take a great picture of yourself.



Not that you would do something like that.

A Samsung press release is quoted saying "The growing popularity of social networking sites has given rise to the self-portrait, with many consumers turning their digital cameras on themselves." There's something very sad about someone who needs a picture for a "social networking" website, yet doesn't known anyone well enough even to ask them to take their picture.

technorati: camera, DualView

What makes a postmodern novel

Courtesy The Rumpus, I found a link to an entry on the LA Times books blog listing 61 "essential" postmodern novels. I was more amused by the alleged common attributes of a postmodern novel, as defined by the author -- LA Times books columnist and reviewer Carolyn Kellogg -- than by the list itself (of which I have read 12 of the 61 books). The list of common attributes:

• author is a character
• self-contradicting plot
• disrupts/plays with form
• comments on its own bookishness
• plays with language
• includes fictional artifacts, such as letters
• blurs reality and fiction
• includes historical falsehoods
• overtly references other fictional works
• more than 1000 pages
• less than 200 pages
• postmodern progenitor

To that list of attributes, I would add "refers to pop culture ironically, i.e. in such a way as to both embrace it and distance itself from it."

technorati: books, postmodernism

Bolaño all the time

On The Rumpus, I posted:

The limits of narrative

It's a short bit, not even an essay, for the pretentious title; it could have been expanded into a much longer piece. But I didn't have time and just wrote it over the course of a couple hours while multi-tasking on other things.

If it seems like all I can blog about lately is Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean author, it's because 1) Nothing much is happening in my life to write about, except 2) I'm very excited by this author's work. I feel evangelistic, like the way I did when I started doing Zen meditation. Everyone should read this author's books, etc. I know it's tiresome. Still, I liked my post. I worked "The Sopranos" in too, if that helps.

technorati: Bolaño, books

Reviews of Roberto Bolaño's 2666

More or less for my own reference, a collection of reviews and articles about Roberto Bolaño's 2666:

• 7 Jan 09, Times Online (UK), The many deaths of Roberto Bolaño
• 3 Nov 08, Slate, Slouching Towards Santa Teresa: Roberto Bolaño's utterly strange masterpiece
• 9 Nov 08, New York Times, 'The Departed,' review by Jonathan Lethem
• Winter 2009, The Quarterly Conversation #14, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
• 14 Nov 08, New York Magazine, Natasha Wimmer on Translating Bolaño's 2666
• 7 Nov 09, New York Magazine, A Bolaño Timeline ("It's a good thing he wrote so fast")
• 9 Nov 08: LA Times, review
• 23 Jan 09, The Guardian (UK), review
• 31 Mar 08, The Nation, review of Bolaño's Entre paréntesis: Ensayos, artículos y discursos (1998-2003) (Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches)
• 6 Sep 07, London Review of Books, Benjamin Kunkel reviews The Savage Detectives, Last Evenings on Earth, and Amulet

technorati: Roberto Bolaño, 2666

That place we camped

Salon just put up a review of a history book about the Cahokia mound builders. This mysterious pre-Columbian group had a big city (for its day), and they built big mounds that are still geographic features of the southern Illinois landscape.

When I was a kid living in nearby Edwardsville, Ill., Cahokia Mounds State Park was where we went on Scout trips. One fateful weekend we camped there, along with other troops from nearby towns. It's an exaggeration to say that that weekend was a turning point in my life, but I can look back on on that 36-hour period and see attitudes and behaviors that set the tone for my entire childhood and adolescence. However, that has nothing to do with the Cahokia tribe, the subject of the book. I just want to say that the park then was adjacent to a drive-in movie whose screen we could clearly see from our camp site -- the outlines of which can clearly still be seen from the Google Maps satellite photo of the area by zooming in and looking just to the upper left of the "A" pin that marks the park itself. The mounds today are squeezed between two busy freeways.

Natasha Wimmer links

Having read (twice!) Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives" and having just started on his final book, the monumental "2666," I wanted to post several links having to do with both books and their translator, Natasha Wimmer:

• By way of introduction, here's a short email interview with Wimmer in the NYT Papercuts blog, December 2007.
• A summer 2007 interview with Wimmer while she was at work on 2666, on the website The Quarterly Conversation
• A short statement by Wimmer on the Words Without Borders site from December 2008
• Wimmer's own biographical essay on Bolaño (PDF)
• A November 2008 interview in the Village Voice
• A Jan. 16, 2009 interview in the Christian Science Monitor

technorati: Natasha Wimmer, Bolaño, translation

Un-touristy San Francisco: the "Southern Waterfront"

To help inspire me for the next chapter of my novel, I spent a couple of hours driving around what is euphemistically known as the southern waterfront -- the stretch of bay from Mission Creek south to Islais Creek, and beyond. I saw:

Piles of rubble in various states. Some were huge chunks of concrete, either squarish or unshaped; some were piles of smaller rubble, often mixed dirt, gravel, and metal. Some of the piles were covered in various ways, from degrading plastic to very substantial-looking material of rectangular rubber or plastic sheets fastened together with plastic ties. In most cases whatever covered the piles was held down by sandbags, and again these were of varying quality, from thin, degrading plastic to heavier woven plastic.

Vacant lots. These were often weed-strewn gravel, formerly the parking lots or operating yards of industrial concerns and now derelict. At this time of year the only living weeds were usually fennel plants. Many of the vacant lots were fairly clean aside from the weeds; at some point they had obviously been entirely cleared. In other cases the lots were apparently in use as storage lots, but these were often in worse shape than the completely vacant lots, in that they had derelict vehicles that would obviously never be moved.

Sometimes these derelict vehicles were cargo trailers, decades old in many cases, that were parked against loading docks. The buildings behind these loading docks were sometimes themselves derelict and sometimes apparently not.

Fences. Chain-link fences, sometimes covered on one side with boards, and again this was done at varying levels of quality, sometimes giving an impression of solidity, sometimes not. This also depended on how the boards were fastened and painted. But in every case, whether the chain-link fences had added wood on or not, they were topped with strands of barbed wire and usually with razor wire added.

Strange-shaped lots. Sometimes the combination of vacant lots and fences combined to make very strangely shaped lots that were separated from another part of the property, seemingly in an arbitrary fashion.

The Islais Creek grain pier was in much, much worse shape than I'd remembered/supposed. For one thing, it had apparently been torn down along the shore so that it would be impossible for anyone to casually walk out on the pier; in order to reach what was left, including the five-story-tall rusty tower that had something to do with suctioning grain or something, you'd have to have a boat. (During the years 1981-84 when I was a delivery truck driver, I remember occasionally seeing a small ship at that terminal, filling up its hold by way of the now rusting tower. The visits of the ships stopped sometime during those years, and the area was abandoned.) What was left was almost entirely impassable and obviously incredibly dangerous: crumbling, rotting wood that was fallen through in more places than not, filled with rusty spikes and nails and jutting rusty metal bars. The notion that the characters in one of my chapters could do anything like I've depicted them doing there -- aside from falling through the pier, which I have depicted -- is ridiculous. But I'll just have to stage the action on some less identifiable property. God knows there are plenty of rotting piers.

Speaking of which: rotting piers in various stages of destruction, all fenced off by the above-described fences. In many cases, bare pilings sticking up out of the bay.

The shore itself was usually lined with chunks of concrete, covered with slime, which is to say a thick brown and green coating of algae. Whether the concrete was dumped legally or illegally in any particular spot is hard to tell. There are some places where the concrete seems to be of uniform shape and to have been arranged in some organized fashion; these would be the legal places. In other places there are simply slabs of wall, roadway, and other debris, often with jutting, slime-covered rebar.

technorati: San Francisco, Islais Creek, East Francisco

Post 3501

Earlier this month Cris and I went to visit our friends down in the desert near the town of Twentynine Palms [location], and we made the mandatory trip up into "the monument," as locals still refer to Joshua Tree National Park (which gained national park status only in the 1990s). I took a few pictures up in the park -- see my Flickr set -- but I'm not nearly as good a photographer as this guy, so take a look at his blog if you want to see some really beautiful pictures that capture something of what the park is really like.

technorati: desert, Joshua Tree National Park, cacti

Focus on the Fundies: They'll pay you to save money?

Another update on the strange Pentecostal minister who, in my last mention, begged for money so he could work on his book without having to actually work. This guy has a few obsessions, and money is definitely one of them -- I guess having several kids and no job has something to do with it.

One of his so-called income streams is from an Amway-like business with the unfortunate name of Melaleuca. In a recent post he and his wife agonize over why someone "declined to participate" in the pyramid scheme-like business:

I wonder if we communicated what we were really trying to say well enough. Did this person really understand that they will not be paying any more money than they already do now and that they will be getting much better products? It's really strange. And, we offered to write them a check to pay for a bunch of their groceries this month. What did we miss here? I can't think how it makes sense to NOT enroll. They actually lost money by declining. Plus, it would have been great way to support our ministry. Hmmmm...

OK, here's a clue: Some people don't want to "participate" or "enroll" -- you have to fill out a form just to shop with the company, much less become a marketer -- just to shop for household items. They just want to buy the stuff. It's too much trouble.

Even if (and I'll take your word for it) it saves them money? Well, maybe they don't want other people to be privy to their household purchases. Maybe they'd like their grocery shopping to be separate from "supporting your ministry;" assuming they want to do so, they'll get a tax deduction for just writing you a check instead. And offering what seems like a bribe to get them to "participate" makes it even creepier, even as it provides another example of how this guy's "ministry" is practically inextricable from his focus on lucre.

As for whether or not the Melaleuca business itself is on the up-and-up, I can only point out that the phrase "Melaleuca scam" gets over 75,000 results on Google, including several videos. I think if someone has taken the time to actually make a video about what a scam something is, that might be a bit of a red flag.

technorati: MLM, Melaleuca ,

All of TIME's sex covers

Weirdly, you can search the TIME magazine site for covers by topic. Here are all the covers related to:

• sex
• Bruce Springsteen
• jobs

The latter query gets both covers on employment and on the Apple co-founder. Anyway.