Netflix, may I kindly say 'Fuck off'?

Mark, based on your interest in "3:10 to Yuma" ...

We think you'll enjoy "Spartacus: Blood and Sand"

Is this kind of shit supposed to endear Netflix to me? Did they really award somebody one million dollars to improve their recommendations? Can I turn it off somehow?

Does anybody at Netflix know the meaning of the verb "to patronize"?

Change is a-comin'

I recently received an email from Google's Blogger service, which powers this blog, that they are doing away with support for blogs which publish using FTP, of which this is one. They said that fewer than half of one percent of their users' blogs were of this type, and though it was the state of the art when I began it in 2001, time has obviously passed me by.

So I'll be trying to figure out a way forward for the site. Since I've been blogging per se less and less, maybe the blogging function is no longer the most important, I dunno. We'll see.

Meanwhile, what have I been doing lately? I went to L.A. with VonCookie last weekend. When I came back I got the flu. This week I'm going on my trip to the Midwest to research part of the novel I'm working on. And I finished bringing out my novel Make Nice through the Lulu self-publishing site, so if you've been dying to read that book which I worked on from 1997 to 2003, and which I almost got published fer reals, but didn't, you can pick it up there. I'll have a more formal launch of sorts later.

Narcissism and literature

The new New Yorker has a review of a book titled "Memoir, a History," in which author Ben Yagoda looks at the history of memoirs starting with St. Augustine and coming down to our present era, in which a a desperate search by readers and the entertainment industry for authenticity and stories of redemption and triumph led to a spate of faked memoirs. (A couple years ago the NYT took notice of this phenomenon.) The writer of the review, Daniel Mendelsohn, names most of the recent flaming scandals except for the J.T. LeRoy hoax, but the LeRoy books weren't actually supposed to be memoirs. That particular flim-flam was more elaborate than a single (or series of) fabricated memoir.

For several years I've taken great pleasure in blogging about these cases, collected on my blog with the labels hoaxes and fakes (applied somewhat inconsistently, but do I look like a librarian?).

technorati: hoaxes, literary hoaxes, memoirs

Praise the Lord and pass the sniper scopes

Trijicon, a Wixom-based supplier that has a $660 million multi-year contract with the Marine Corps and additional contracts with the U.S. Army, inscribes coded references to New Testament Bible verses on its ACOG high-powered rifle sights sold to the military.

-- news stories

Outlining your novel using Post-Its

Trying to finish the first long section of the novel I've been working on since around April, I had to resort to the technique of writing scenes or bits of conversation on post-it notes and moving them around. It's nice to have a surface like a mirror, a window, or a whiteboard for this exercise.

Readers may recall a previous post from 2.5 years ago when I showed the results of using the same technique for a different book.

technorati: writing, post-its

Dream of Acker

I had a dream that they were making a biopic about Kathy Acker and she was being played by Mary Woronov.

Hubris repaid

A Canadian man who won a lengthy legal battle for the right to keep "exotic" pets was mauled to death by his pet Siberian tiger yesterday.

Previously:

• Michael Jackson's tigers telepathically informed of his death
  
  
• SF Zoo tiger attack nearly a classic SF story

Uh, happy new year

I didn't mean to stop blogging. I've just been paying as much attention as possible to the novel I'm working on. But something occurred to me over the holidays, as I became aware, in the back of my mind, that it had been a long time since I last made a blog entry. I realized that I'm just not paying attention to pop culture the way I had been, in the period from 2002 to 2007, when I would put up as many as five or six posts a day about politics, pop, and the "bad behavior" I used to take such pleasure in recording and making snarky comments about.

I'm no less sarcastic. I'm just not paying as close attention anymore, because I'm putting as much attention and energy and thought as possible into my novel. Writing a novel doesn't give you as much instant gratification, but it's the only possible thing I'll ever be remembered for writing, so I'm giving it my best shot. Not that there's anything wrong with blogging, which I'll still do. In fact I'll probably do it twenty times this month. Or two. Whatever.

David Aaron Clark, writer

A man I knew very tangentally during the heyday of Frighten the Horses and my erotica writing career, David Aaron Clark, died last month, I just noticed. In addition to being an erotica writer and editor, he was involved with the adult movie scene, writing screenplays and covering the industry in reviews and news articles. No newspapers seem to have published obituaries, but here is a tribute by Amelia G, a fellow traveler.

technorati: erotica writers

Punctuation is important

I really laughed when I saw this mispunctuated news story from the website of the Clear Lake Citizen, which reports news from the Clear Lake area of suburban Houston, Texas, where I went to high school. Emphasis mine.

A long-running feud between El Jardin neighbors is being blamed in a triple shooting that resulted in the death of one woman and sent two men to the hospital Saturday night. ...

Curtis Shaw said he was in his house when he heard gunshots. "It was just unbelieveable." He knew the two couples were feuding "but you never would have thought it would come to this," he said.

"I am shocked I've been living here 12 years," said neighbor Julie Karanik.

Yes, it took a triple shooting for her to wake up and realize what a dump she was living in.

technorati: Clear Lake

Uncovering a mysterious blogger

This article on Streetsblog, a progressive pro-bicycle and transit website, is fascinating. The lengthy piece, worth reading in its entirety, explains how Streetsblog staff uncovered the identity of a hyperactive negative commenter with his own website, Commuter Outrage. Evidently the man behind Commuter Outrage, a twenty-something conservative who works in a civilian job at the Pentagon, was digging up material for his screeds during work hours using his employer's (and the government's) resources, and Streetsblog's questions about these practices quickly led the secretive fellow to disappear the entire Commuter Outrage website.

Instructive were the easy-to-understand steps taken by Streetsblog staff to uncover the man's identity, along with evidence that suggested he was blogging on his employer's time. Also interesting was the fact that the attacks by Commuter Outrage and its putative staff (really just this one fellow, apparently) were not some right-wing conspiracy, but just some really energetic (if error-prone) work by one angry little man. It's amazing how much one angry, energetic little guy can do on the internet.

technorati: bloggers, privacy, identity

A friend reviews my novel How They Scored

My friend Lisa B wrote a very nice review of HOW THEY SCORED. An excerpt:

After the men gather, the plot picks up steam and their interactions increase, with Pritchard quietly portraying a shifting dance of male alliance and competition. Their picaresque sex tales start to cast a subtler light on their characters. The story of the Serbian fashion model ends poignantly. A tale of a threesome takes an unexpected turn, with the storyteller unable to perform, feeling both sentimental about an old girlfriend and ambivalent about the suddenly aggressive behavior of his current one. In short, the scorekeeping of these men becomes less about tallying up sexual conquests and more about assessing their own strengths and weaknesses -- and the elusiveness of their desires.

Wow, thanks Lisa!

An understandable confusion

He was gradually, I wouldn't say losing his mind, but he would get confused about things. I remember when my daughter was born, he would refer to her as a book. And he would refer to his latest book as a child. He really had things turned around.

Screenwriter Robert Towne on novelist John Fante
in an interview in Stop Smiling magazine, no. 32

technorati: Robert Towne, John Fante, writers

I iz on vacation

Woo, it's December

Lots of friends of mine have websites which were really rocking at one time or another but which have fallen into only occasional use. Others have moved entirely to the semi-walled garden of Facebook, which I refuse to join. I don't want to be one of those people whose blogs languish, so I'll give an update -- whether it's needed or not -- for anybody who checks in here. But before I do, thanks for reading and being even occasionally interested in my words.

First, I've been busy in my day job as a technical writer. We're entering the last stages of a project that started almost a year and a half ago, and as I'm responsible for tracking the deliverables -- excuse me for lapsing into business-speak -- for a team of four writers including myself, I've been spending time tying up all the loose ends. Actually that project will go until freaking April 2010, and then there's a follow-on that has become almost indistinguishable from the current project that will deliver in July. Past that, the future at work is opaque except for version numbers that are higher than the version number of the product we're working on now.

Then I've been spending time every weekend working on my current novel project. I can't even remember whether I've mentioned it much on this blog. Briefly, it's based on several different ideas that go back as far as 1996, before I even started working on the first finished novel I wrote (Make Nice) from 1998 to 2003. I started working on this latest project with a final set of ideas I had about a year ago, and I'm about 58,000 words into it -- about halfway through, or a little less than halfway through. I'm more excited about this project than I have been about a project in a long time, both because of the plot, characters and setting on the one hand, and the fiction techniques I've chosen to use on the other.

Speaking of Make Nice, I'm thinking of self-publishing that too, to give fans an opportunity to buy it and to be able to give some copies to friends. Of course, I haven't sold very many copies at all of my other self-published books, How They Scored and Lesbian Camp Girls, but more than 0, which is how many copies of Make Nice have been sold.

So if you're a reader of my sex story collections Too Beautiful and How I Adore You, you should like How They Scored and Lesbian Camp Girls, even though they're rather different from the sex stories you're familiar with. It's still my writing. Still kind of funny.

That reminds me of something my erstwhile literary agent said when she had taken a first read of my Bangalore book (now titled Mango Rain), which contains one sex scene. Not having read my sex story collections, but only heard about them, she said that when the sex scene in the Bangalore book started there was a noticeable falling-into-place of tone, as if I was suddenly on more familiar and comfortable territory.

And that's one reason why I'm writing novels which are not all about sex (Lesbian Camp Girls, which is definitely all about sex, and How They Scored, which is only half about sex, notwithstanding). Writing sex stories was too comfortable and familiar.

So, back to the novel writing on the weekend.

New/old story: 'Relativity'

More than twenty years ago I lived in Japan for almost two years, teaching English in a provincial city, Niigata. After several months, my present wife Cris -- whom I had just met and fallen in love with the year before, and who was broken-hearted when I left to teach in Japan -- came out to join me, and we've been together ever since. But before Cris came to Niigata, Seiko, one of my students, a cheerful shopgirl who was enamored of everything American or British and who claimed to hate Japan, got a big crush on me. She flirted with me in her very subtle way, and one summer night during a local festival she came over to my apartment half-drunk. It would have been easy for me to take advantage of her, but something about the situation didn't feel right, and besides, Cris was about to arrive on vacation to see me for the first time in months. Instead of kissing Seiko, I just listened to some music with her and then let her go home. And I never did go to bed with a Japanese girl, much as I would have liked to; it was too hard for me to understand how to overcome the difficulties in communication.

The next year a new teacher came out to work in our school. He was in his late 30s, rather cheerless, balding and not very attractive, but not more than ten days after arriving, he had snagged a gorgeous girl, a staff person at a local gym, and was sleeping with her. Whatever compunctions I had that made it hard for me to get close to a girl who could hardly talk to me -- he had no such compunctions.

To understand this dynamic, and to illustrate some of the other confusing cultural norms I encountered in my sojourn in the Japanese city, I wrote a short story, Relativity. I don't claim it's a very good short story, but it does try to illustrate the ambivalence I felt then about taking advantage of someone.

technorati: Japan

Talkin' 'bout my generation

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the film Easy Rider, and the 40th anniversary of the exposé of the My Lai massacre.

It was all one back then, which is why the guys had to die at the end of Easy Rider.

technorati: Sixties

'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