He's putty in their hands

I ran across this plaintive cry in a forum post on a site called Tea Party Patriots:

Here I sit once again at the computer, same routine. Look for a job, check emails, seek out local like minded patriot groups, research current events and repeat. I am getting restless!!! I want to do so much but I don't know how to channel my energy properly. At 40 years of age I still maintain the anger and rebellious nature of my youth. I am a family man, blue collar with a school teacher wife and a daughter starting college, but the anger that I feel for the way my country is being run into the ground and the lack of faith I have in government just build up inside me and I know I could easily go down the wrong path. I know that this is what they want and will only further strengthen their wicked agenda, so for now I will content myself with writing it all down, spreading the truth to my fellow Americans and preparing for what lies ahead. I get some hope from joining this group and others, networking with people who want to fight for what is right and not what "they" say is better for us. My family and friends think I am nuts because I am throwing myself into this 100%. I was Known as the dude who didn't give a f#!k about what goes on but thankfully I snapped out of it and I am ready to roll. my email is (redacted)@aol.com.

He did publish his full email but I have redacted it. The actual guy is not the point, the point is how typical he must be, how he embodies the blank slate that animates right-wing conservatism today. "I'm full of energy... restless... won't give in to their wicked agenda... my friends and family think I'm nuts... I am ready to roll."

Could it be said any more succinctly? He's just begging "Manipulate me, exploit my inchoate anxiety, and point me at a target!" It occurred to me that there must be people in Islamic societies in the exact same mental state, and how easy it must be for people with, yes, a "wicked agenda," to turn them into suicide bombers and so on. And what makes me really alarmed is that the differences between our democratic society and their autocratic or theocratic society seem to be rapidly shrinking. Once those differences sufficiently disappear, what's to stop us from having suicide bombers here, and worse? Just look at that guy who crashed his plane into the IRS earlier this year -- that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Desert sojourn: day 7

Bouldery slope above the Morongo Basin

There's another sunrise-lit picture from another early-morning walk. I took the stroll this morning with my landlady, who lives in the house next door, which is to say 200 feet down the street. She corrected me as to the ownership of the Harrison House -- she owns it, not a foundation. She came down to make a film about its construction and wound up with the house itself after the builder and original owner, composer Lou Harrison, died soon after its completion. She also owns her house, plus the house I'm staying in, plus the next one as well. Still a performer, she's presenting a solo performance of classical Indian dance in a couple weeks. With live music.

I spent some time today gathering articles online about a local political scandal. Here is just one story (from July 2009) about the juicy, juicy scandal that went on for over two years, and is still being played out, as this story from yesterday's paper shows. Christine hipped me to this character, whom she said is emblematic of the closeted gay Republican good-old-boy network that rules corrupt San Bernardino County. The gay anti-gay state senator who was outed earlier this year after being picked up for DWI after leaving a gay bar is another example.

What does this relatively local scandal have to do with the desert section of my novel, which has partly to do with an alleged terror plot? I'm not sure yet, but it's all material.

In the evening I got a little fouled up. I was supposed to go to one Chamber of Commerce event and meet people, and I went to a different one instead. The wrong one, the one I went to, was held at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center, a very large spread -- I had no idea how large -- right off the highway on the other side of JT proper. Last weekend the place hosted a four-day yoga fiesta and there were a lot of skinny women walking around downtown JT in those stupid curled-up straw cowboy hats.

After I retreated from the wrong Chamber of Commerce gathering, I drove the 15 miles to Twentynine Palms and got a pizza for no particular reason than I'd been craving pizza a little. At this point the sun was very low in the sky, and at this particular time of the year, the westbound highway goes straight into the setting sun. This was no doubt the reason for the heinous accident I saw, a pickup truck on its side and three other cars stopped -- there were already a variety of cops there -- one of which had clearly t-boned the pickup which had been blinded and pulled out onto the highway at the wrong time.

(Update, 18 September: Actually, I was wrong. The location of the sun had nothing to do with the accident, which was caused by a tire blowing out at 90 m.p.h., according to this news report.)

On the way back it was long enough after dark that I was actually able to pull in the Giants radio broadcast all the way from San Francisco -- intermittently. Strangely, it's easier to pull in 50,000-watt San Francisco station KNBR than any station carrying the broadcast of the Dodgers, whom the Giants are playing tonight.

Desert sojourn: day 6

The Morongo Basin, seen from just inside the northern edge of Joshua Tree National Park

It was quite cool this morning, about 60 degrees. I walked about three and a half miles. I got a very early start and walked for a longer time, but covered less ground somehow.

I knocked off work about 4:00 pm when Christine came over to take a little hike with me. We walked up to the top of the street, on the other side of which an easily passable fence marks the northern edge of Joshua Tree National Park. We walked up a slope, past the science-fiction Doolittle House which I've mentioned already (you can see it on the right side of this picture) and up a wash. A wash is a dry stream bed, an arroyo. During a flash flood it's no place to be; otherwise, it makes a convenient path through the desert, as long as you're content to go uphill where the wash goes and climb over occasional boulders. In the late afternoon, we found a cool shady spot in the canyon to sit and talk.

Christine is one of my oldest friends; I've mentioned her many times. We used to perform together. Now she's a painter.

I ate dinner outside as the sun set. As soon as it had disappeared behind the horizon, the air was noticeably cooler. Now at 9:30 pm, it's quite cool again. I love sleeping in cool weather -- that's what's so great about San Francisco. Speaking of which, I had the greatest dream last night.

There's crazy and then there's certifiably insane

One of the more truly insane blogs I follow is The Vatic Project, which regularly posts anti-Semitic economics-related rants and other forms of paranoid fantasies about the state of the world. Just another dot on the spectrum of collapsitarian nuttery, this particular dot pretty far out on the spectrum. Today he -- whoever it is -- posted something and included an introduction, as he often does. A preface of sorts. And this preface is priceless.

They do not want this one up. Taking control of my cursor again so I can't put it up. So do not know when you will get this. I was trying for today, but it may not be til later when I can do this without the messing around. Be patient, ITS GOING UP NO MATTER HOW HARD THEY TRY, I AM FULLY AND UNEQUVICALLY STUBBORN. THIS MEANS YOU NOW HAVE TO READ IT, BECAUSE THEY ONLY DO THIS ON INFO THEY DO NOT WANT OUT THERE.... SO GET THIS OUT THERE ALL OVER THE PLACE. THANKS. Its about waiting til I get a different shift. hehehe.

It appears that its the OFFICE OF INTERNATIONAL TREASURY THEY DO NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT. SO PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THAT AND DIG EVEN FURTHER SINCE THEY SEEM TO HATE THAT ONE WHICH IS WHERE I GET THE WORSE MESSING OF THE CURSOR.

Wow, "they" must really not want it up on the internet -- whoever "they" are -- because no sooner did I click on the link than I get a "Page Not Found" message. It Really Makes You Think, Doesn't It??!?

For those really interested, here is a screenshot of the feed from Google Reader from which I pulled his text. I was able to get only a couple of the lines of the actual article, but it's the preface I love.

'Uniquely Southern' panic rooms also serve as storm shelters

Coincidental to my research on nutbag collapsitarians and survivalists (don't miss The Biggest Threat to Your Survival? An American Economic Collapse) is a piece in the Wall Street Journal today about storm shelters-cum-panic rooms which are said to be "the new must-have" in amenities.

These aren't the dank bunkers your father hid in, as we discuss in today's WSJ story. And they aren't cheap. Many of the new shelters are above-ground $4,000-$15,000 prefabricated pads that can be bolted to the garage's concrete pad, or even installed inside the home. They boast names like "StormRoom" and "Iron Eagle II" and often lead double lives of offices, tool sheds and even wine cellars in less turbulent times. DuPont makes one reinforced with bullet-resistant Kevlar. Builder Rhonda House, owner of Uniquely Southern Homes in Ward, Ark. says she regularly includes safe rooms in her new custom homes, calling it a "must-have item."

Did you catch that? Not only is the owner of a house-building company named Rhonda House -- un nom du destin, as my French teacher would say -- but her company is called Uniquely Southern Homes. I think a bullet-proof storm shelter really is a uniquely Southern idea, don't you? Doesn't say if they also come with gun racks.

I also liked this bit:

Above-ground designs are particularly popular among families with elderly members who might not be able to navigate stairs or make it across the yard into a bunker quickly.

Wow, what could possibly go wrong?

"Hello Momma? ... No, Momma, those aren't tornado sirens, that's probably just an ambulance. ... Because I'm looking at the weather on the internet and there's nothing on the radar. ... Well of course the internet knows. ... Momma, please don't lock yourself in the storm shelter again. Hello? Momma? Hello?"

Yes: If your elderly mother locks herself in the tornado-proof, bullet-proof storm shelter and can't remember how to get out, how do you get her out?

Desert sojourn: day 5

First rays of sunlight, looking north over the desert

On my walk this morning, I started late, took an alternate route, and wound up walking along the highway for a short distance as traffic blew by at 65 mph, probably commuters heading for jobs on the Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms.

Like yesterday, after my walk and my morning coffee, I spent the entire day inside, from 9:00 a.m. to just after 4:30. It's not the heat I'm hiding from as much as the sun, and aside from the back porch in the early mornings, there's not much shade around this house. After 3:00 pm it's possible to sit in a chair in front of the house in a little bit of shade, if I really need to, and I did sit out there a lot reading on Saturday and Sunday.

After logging off my job for the day, I went over there myself on a second attempt to do laundry. While the stuff was in the machines I waited at the Jack in the Box and the McDonalds, each of which held several Marines who had just gotten off work, or whatever you call it -- off duty, I guess. Man, they are young. I almost said "Marine boys." But of course any of them could take me apart like Toshiro Mifune takes apart that sub-standard shoe in "The Bad Sleep Well." All the Marines were eating copious amounts of McDonalds food. When you're 18, what you eat is what you eat. A middle-aged man who was sitting there actually said something like "That's a lot of food." The Marine answered, "Yes sir, I had no lunch, I'm hungry."

Also seen in town were a couple of degenerate-looking characters, one of them heavily tattooed and scrawny as a starving dog, the other meatier and only slightly less mean-looking. I saw them wander across the street in one direction, and then half an hour later they were in the McDonalds at the same time I was.

I came home and skimmed half of this crazy book I picked up for half price at Borders a few months ago. It's a so-called novel written by a survivalist gun nut about how to survive the breakdown of society after the U.S. economy implodes following a sudden bout of hyperinflation. Ninety percent of the book is devoted to detailed explanations of how to stock up for the great collapse, how to run your survival retreat like a military camp, and so on.

It is not a novel in any sense of the word; rather, a narrative of how a group of people would survive for several years after the collapse of society if they had properly prepared. (To his credit, in an interview the author himself admitted, "I don't pretend it's a literary masterpiece.")

What I find entertaining, aside from the unintentionally funny stuff of which there is a great deal, is the window into the mindset of the survivalist type and the unexamined assumptions he makes. Maybe the biggest assumption is that a total social breakdown inevitably and swiftly would follow the collapse of the economy. He takes it for granted that riots and looting swiftly render every city and town uninhabitable, as if everyone becomes like one of the zombies with the Rage virus in "28 Days Later" as soon as the power grid fails. This happens universally, he says. Well, if it doesn't, then there's no reason for his little stronghold, obviously. Anyway, he never tires of endless discussions of how to create a homemade cannon, and how to make your own camouflage suit, and endless near-pornographic discussions of guns and ammunition.

This is research, of course.

Desert sojourn: day 4

In the morning I left for my walk earlier than ever, when it was really rather dark, and I was just able to make out the road when I got to the unpaved part. But I had the advantage of walking two-thirds of my walk before the sun rose. Then I made coffee and sat out on the back porch, which is on the shady west side of the house in the morning, and read the Psalms.

The only way I could get away to get down here was to arrange to work remotely, that is, to do my day job from here. Fortunately, the internet connection has been as advertised, because my whole job is pretty much using online systems -- email, the bug tracking system, the document management/authoring/publishing system, chat. But because there is no phone at all in this house, I found myself using my cell phone for an hour-long meeting. Then I realized that if I had a meeting once or twice a day I would use up all my mobile phone's minutes in a jiffy. So I called Verizon and upgraded my plan. I can set it back down in a month when I leave.

In the evening I tried and failed to find a laundromat. You'd think that in a military town which Twentynine Palms is, there would be a ton of them, but I found only one, and it closed at 7:00 pm -- which is the time when I arrived there. So back home I went with my load of dirty laundry.

I did give up reading "Divisadero" when I got to the part, which takes up the last 25% of the book, about the romantic French writer. All the other characters, the ones whose story takes up the first 75% of the book, never come back. Suddenly you're stuck in an uncertain time period with a character you don't care much about. Plus, the timelines are vague and confusing: The bucolic first part seems to take place in the 1920s or 30s, but when the characters have aged ten or fifteen years, they're suddenly living in the modern present, and you know it's the 1990s because the book makes reference to the Gulf War. Similarly, one character is researching a writer who, it seems, lived no more recently than the 1890s or so, because people are going around in horse-drawn carts; but a character who is a child during that period is no older than 45 when he meets the girl, again in the 1990s. It's as if whole decades vanish conveniently. I suppose the reader is supposed to think this is akin to magic realism or something, but it just seems sloppy and romantic.

So that's it for "Divisadero" (which has nothing to do, really, with the San Francisco street of that name other than a fleeting reference; you get the sense that the author just liked the way it sounded).

Desert sojourn: day 3

Coyote melons (Cucurbita palmata) on vine, Joshua Tree National Park border fence

This morning I started my morning walk even earlier than the day before, and it was a good thing, because I could tell right away the day was warmer. On Baseline Road, along the border fence of the national park, I found this coyote melon vine. It's unusual to see ripe (yellow) melons intact, because once they're ripe, they're usually eaten by critters. But not only was this vine undisturbed, but one of the melons had rolled away a couple of feet, and even it was undamaged. I took it home.

Today was a good day for my book project because I was able to meet somebody who works for the local radio station, as well as a local clergywoman, and I'm going to try to sit down and talk with them this week about living here, the people they meet, and whatever stories they can tell.

Because it was so hot today, I spent the rest of the day indoors, only going out at sunset to sit at the table outside, and then after dark to lay on the table and take in the stars. Since there is no moon this week, it's a good time for stargazing, even though it's not nearly as dark where I am as it is at my friends' houses in Wonder Valley.

Interlude: reading: 'Divisadero' by Michael Ondaatje

I'm reading the novel "Divisadero" by Michael Ondaatje, and enjoying it pretty much while being annoyed by a few of his choices. It's about two sisters and a farm hand, a few years older, whom they grow up with in an impossibly bucolic setting in Marin County. The first part of the book is this pastorale, and the rest is about their mostly separate lives as adults.

The thing I want to talk about is this: one of the sisters becomes a literary historian who is researching the life of a French poet named Lucien Segura, whose life and surroundings the author describes in evocative detail, so much so that I searched on the internet to see who this Segura was -- and he turned out to be an entirely made-up person. I thought that was a strange choice, why make up a writer for your character to research when there are so many real writers whose life and work you can bring to life? But fine, just one choice I disagree with.

But then not thirty pages later the book describes the adult life of the other sister, who has gone to work as a researcher for the San Francisco Public Defender's office, for a lawyer named Aldo Vea. And this is a real person! -- Alfredo Véa, who also wrote a very interesting novel entitled Gods Go Begging. And from the description in "Divisadero," it's crystal-clear that Ondaatje is describing the very same Alfredo Véa.

So he makes up one person but uses another very identifiable real one! I just can't get over it.

But I don't want to over-emphasize what I don't like about the book. The language is carefully crafted and the story is drawing me along. It's clear the author -- with no connection to California I know of -- intensely researched the history and geography of northern and central California, among other things. In this one book he gives Joan Didion (born and raised in the Sacramento delta) a run for her money. This aspect of the book alone is impressive.

Desert sojourn: day 2

Motorcycle rider in Yucca Valley, Calif., midday, 11 Sep 2010

Before I came down here, I resolved to get my daily exercise in early in the morning, while it was cool, and to that end I mapped out a 4.5-mile rectangular loop in the neighborhood. This morning I got up and was out just at sunrise. I covered the distance much faster than I cover the same distance on my treadmill at home, which I guess shouldn't be surprising. There isn't much special to see in the neighborhood, aside from the fact that Joshua Tree National Park begins immediately at the end of the street about half a mile to the south, and part of my route goes along the boundary fence. I also noticed a house in the neighborhood that looks like it was made from a retired streetcar. I'll have to get another good look at it.

After my walk, I sat down and made a few notes and had some cold cereal. I'm still getting organized here, and I keep misplacing things, which is not easy considering the house was completely empty when I got here yesterday -- aside from the furnishings, which are comfortable but not cluttered at all -- and then I have to walk around the house and sometime out to the car looking for whatever it is I can't find.

During the middle of the day I did some shopping in nearby Yucca Valley, which more than anyplace else in the area is a suburban-type town with lots of shopping centers and chain stores. (I'm glad it's there, so I can go to the chain stores, and I'm glad they aren't here in Joshua Tree so I don't have to look at them.) It turned into a long trip because it took a long time for Walgreens to fill a prescription I needed. After I finally got home, sometime around 1:30, I put my groceries away and took a nap, which has always been my main plan for hot afternoons here. And then I read for a few hours, and when sunset came, took this picture of the place across the street, a straw bale house built by composer Lou Harrison in his last years and now maintained for residencies and occasional chamber concerts.

The same person who owns the house I'm renting also administers the Harrison House program.

* BLM = Bureau of Land Management. Basically if the federal government owns it, and it's not on a military base or in a national park, it's administered by the BLM. An example of the kinds of anything-goes behavior that happens on BLM land are the off-road races such as the one last month where several people were killed because they stood too close to a course where trucks were hurtling by.

Desert sojourn: day 1

Just after sunrise in Wonder Valley, northeast of Twentynine Palms, Calif.

In the morning, I woke up at first light, and failing to go back to sleep I got up and walked around for a little bit. It was surprisingly cool, about 55 or 60 degrees, with a gentle but steady breeze from the east. I took this picture just outside the house where I spent the first night, the house of my friend Chris in Wonder Valley.

I went over to the house of Chris's girlfriend Ellie and had a long breakfast -- my second free meal, thanks guys! -- during which I heard a lot of gossip and anecdotes about the denizens of the area -- "the Basin," they call it, in reference to the Morongo Basin, which covers the whole area from Morongo Valley to Twentynine Palms and beyond. I heard about local political conflicts. I heard about the drunken woman who after breaking up with her boyfriend and coming home drunk attempted to enter his house through the chimney and whose body was discovered only four days later by the cleaner. I heard about the man who, on the day of his daughter's wedding, shot and killed the wild dog which had the day before killed one of his goats and had come back the next day, the day of the wedding, to kill the other. I heard several stories in which critters played roles, including a coyote who ate a chicken "as if no one in the world was watching him." I heard about the guy who runs the local radio station.

In short, there are a million stories down here, and that's what I'm here for. I want to write about the area in such a way that people who have lived here a long time (or all their lives) can read this section of my novel and think that it isn't inaccurate. And to do this I want stories, and to talk to people.

Which I am terrible at. But luckily for me, my friends know a heck of a lot of people down here, and they're willing to introduce me. I did go to an event tonight that was interesting, though not extremely useful for my book: a historical presentation about the Mojave Road, one of the original wagon trails across the desert and one of the best preserved. I'm not sure I need quite that much history, but it was good to get information about one of the farther reaches of the region (one that is actually entirely outside the Basin). I actually do want to drive out in that direction while I'm down here, if I have time.

In the middle of the day, I moved into the house I'm renting for just over a month. It's actually in Joshua Tree, about 20 miles west and 1000 feet higher in elevation than Wonder Valley, on the other side of Twentynine Palms. The border of Joshua Tree National Park actually comes right down to the end of the street I'm staying on, and the lady who owns the house -- a local artist who also administers the Lou Harrison House -- said you can walk right up into the park. I plan on getting in my exercise in the morning, when it's nice and cool.

Temperature at 9:40 pm: 73 F.

Down to the desert

Drove from San Francisco to the Mojave desert today, to a friend's house outside the town of Twentynine Palms, in an unincorporated area called Wonder Valley. I'll spend the night here tonight, then tomorrow move into the house I've rented about 15 miles from here in (or somewhat east of) the village of Joshua Tree.

I was lucky arriving tonight, because Christine already was making dinner for two guests and she and her partner Deborah just added me on. I arrived just in time for dinner. They had homemade pie, too!

It's about 75 degrees here at 10:20 at night, and I want to go out and look at the stars for a few minutes, but then I have to go to bed, because I drove nine hours (route via Bakersfield and Ludlow) and I'm bushed.

You can see by my outfit that I'm a cowboy too

My friend VonCookie, who is in her first or eighth year teaching at UC Berkeley, depending on how you count it, writes of how she dresses professionally now that she's a PhD. Reading that reminded me of this bit of dialogue from my days as a high school teacher, a time when I wore a shirt and tie, slacks and dress shoes to class every day:

Student: Mr. Pritchard, why do you wear those black leather shoes every day?

Me (archly): If I didn't, you guys wouldn't respect me.

Student: Aw, yes we would!

Aw. Actually the main reason I dressed like that was because even though I was 28 years old I looked much younger, and I had to have something that distinguished me from the kids I was teaching. At that age I was still wondering "Am I an adult?" and I realized that if I wavered on that point, my classroom would be a catastrophe. So when I answered that student, even though I was sort of kidding, I also wasn't kidding.

That said, VonCookie is ten times the teacher I was, so her students would probably pay attention no matter what she wore.

Nutbag of the month: special 9/11 edition

Of course, a discussion of right-wing Christian nutbags would not be complete without mentioning Terry Jones, the "pastor" of an organization in Florida called the Dove World Outreach Center. (Despite its name, which makes it sound like the visitor center of a soap factory, it is a "tiny church," according to the New York Times.) Jones is the fellow who wants to burn copies of the Koran on Sep. 11.

Today's story in the NYT on the man and his plan draws attention to the fact that one of his justifications for the act of burning a Koran is a "never-reported story" of an attack on Christians by "radical Muslims" during the Balkan war in the 1990s. "Never-reported story" is the NYT's way of saying "completely made-up bullshit;" this is clear when the writer goes so far as to say:

To a reporter who worked in Bosnia during that war, the story Mr. Jones told on Wednesday sounds very like the kind of fictional tales of wartime atrocities against Christians that were cited by Bosnian Serbs and Croats at the time to justify the well-documented massacres of Muslims that did take place — like the murder of thousands of Muslim men and boys buried in mass graves around Srebrenica in 1995.

The story goes on to say that Jones is not just one more Florida cracker (like Chuck Baldwin); he and his wife led a church in Cologne, Germany until two years ago. And it gets weirder after that.

Nutbag of the week: Pastor Chuck Baldwin

Last week I first brought up one Pastor Chuck Baldwin, a man who believes (along with his Baptist version of right-wing Christianity) in something he calls the Clinton-Bush Crime Syndicate, along with other delusions, 19th century political positions, and various paranoias. He seemed entertaining, so I thought I'd follow his blog.

And so today he posted a justification for his just-announced move from Florida to Montana. In his post, he compares himself to the Pilgrims who fled Old World oppression for the New World:

I believe Montana (and surrounding states) is in store for a FREEDOM RUSH. People all over America instinctively realize that things cannot keep going the way they are. The tyrannical tentacles of Washington, D.C., are making life a proverbial hell on earth for people all over the country, and, unfortunately, many (if not most) states are unwilling to resist the Crown's (excuse me, DC's) evil machinations. So, in the hearts of freedom-loving people there burns the question, "What do we do?" My family and I have answered that question. Our move is in response to the direct and definite revelation of God, in much the same way that our Pilgrim and Pioneer ancestors followed God’s guiding light.

Right... Even if you ignore the delusion that God is speaking directly to him about his family, you still have this grandiose notion that he is repeating the flight of the Pilgrims in his "RUSH" to Montana. And later he goes on to compare himself to the Founding Fathers. He seems to realize this sounds grandiose, so he adds:

{My critics] realize the potential of what we are doing is so great, so powerful, and so extensive, that it could literally change the course of American history. Yes, I truly believe that. Do I believe that I am that important or powerful? Not at all. I am only one man (a rather simple man, at that). But I know there is a great God in Heaven Who inspired great men of history to incorporate great principles of freedom into the minds and hearts of a great people, and by so doing changed the course of history at that time. And I am convinced that this same God and those same principles are just as revolutionary -- just as powerful -- today as they were then. Therefore, the principalities and powers that be are scared silly that others will be inspired to do as we are doing. So, they are attempting to assassinate my motives and character.

Even in his protestations that he is "a rather simple man" (and beware of people who feel they have to say that), he used the word "great" three times in one sentence. And he believes his urge, along with a similar urge he predicts many like-minded people will feel, "could change the course of American history."

Just pick the reasoning apart a little bit. He has a certainty that God wants him to seek greater freedom by moving from Florida to Montana -- does he understand that Montana is still in the United States? Does he really believe the law is different there? But fine -- let's indulge him for a moment. We're still confronted with his notion that moving from a tyrannous region of the country (Florida is "hell on earth" for conservatives? Really?) to a supposedly more free one (Montana is to Florida as the American colonies were to England?) "could change the course of American history."

How, pray tell? Let's suppose this predicted "FREEDOM RUSH" (his caps) happens, and half a million people move to Montana and Idaho, where white supremacists, paranoids, and general whack jobs have plenty of lebensraum. Now you have an extra three hundred thousand unemployed people in the Mountain Time Zone. Of course these folks are way too free, too liberated, to ask for unemployment and Social Security. Because that would be wrong. I suppose they'll all be selling Amway and guns? Or whatever. And... they'll be living in another of the fifty states. And... enjoying the climate change. And... the delusion that they've changed their lives and possibly changed American history. And... nothing.

Oh, and he's asking for donations! I guess that's okay.

Annoying Columbian novel

I finished reading the novel "The Informers" by Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The language is beautiful, and I haven't read a novel by a Columbian since reading something by Gabriel Garcia Márquez a long time ago, so it was very interesting to read something set in modern-day Columbia and be assured that it is not merely a third world country that was, in the 1980s, very nearly a failed state, but has something of a culture and a history. (The view I have of places like Mexico, Guatemala and Columbia, places where crime lords or secret police have held sway over large swaths of the country if not the entire country, is pretty much the picture Bolaño paints of Santa Teresa in "2666," or in reality in large parts of Mexico these days, so it always surprises me to find out that in these places live people who are literate, educated and cultured, that they're not all at each other's throats.)

But as I say, I was annoyed by this book, because of the author's tendency to obscure the most important information about relationships between characters and the basic events of the plot. I don't think it's just my own denseness, because it was like this all the way through: about the most important narrative and character elements, the author is deliberately vague. So that I enjoyed the reading but not the story so much, and in the end I'm still not quite sure what the relationship was between a few of the major characters, and most of all the central question of the book, which is why the narrator's father betrayed his best friend (and it took 90% of the book to make clear that betrayal had actually happened). I understand the authorial strategy of being sly with information -- Cris compared it to the way a poet shows things through symbolism or other techniques -- especially as a way to mirror the time and effort the narrator takes to find out the same information. But in this book the narrator finds out information fifty pages before the reader does, and then -- and this is the annoying part -- constantly refers to it as if the information had also been shared with the reader, so that as a reader I was constantly asking myself, wait, did I miss something? And like I say, I never learned the main question of the book, which is the motivation for its main action, the act of informing to which the title refers. I don't think it was ever revealed -- but because the author obscures information all along, I'm not sure. so, yeah, annoying.

There's always someone more conservative/crazier/foamier

Reading conservative blogs and news for research purposes, I came across this doozy, which says that "some libertarians" believe foamers like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are secret "neocons... conning the Tea Party."

Here's all the salt you have to throw at that bird:

1. The assertion that Beck and Palin might be secret "neocons" is laid to someone called Pastor Chuck Baldwin. Who is he? See below.
2. In the universe of the Ron Paul cult, a "neocon" or neoconservative is just another big-government interventionist who wants to interfere in their lives. Thus, to suggest conservative demagogues like Beck and Palin might be secret "neocons" is tantamount to calling them false prophets and potential traitors (indeed, "Judas goats") to the Libertarian movement (which Paulites feel is the only proper approach to conservatism) and the US as a whole.
3. The poster goes on to defend and praise Beck and Palin.
4. Most comically of all, the poster's main allegiance seems to be to the "Tea Party," ignoring (or simply ignorant of) the fact that the "Tea Party" organization is nothing more than a collection of front groups funded by Texas billionaires (as reported last week in the New Yorker).

This guy Chuck Baldwin is a real piece of work. From his Wikipedia page: "Baldwin supports lessening U.S. involvement in the United Nations, reducing U.S. income taxes and repeal of the Patriot Act. He would withdraw troops from Iraq, seek to end illegal immigration, and enforce stricter immigration laws. Emphasizing "America's Christian heritage", he supports the gold standard, the right to keep and bear arms, homeschooling, and pro-life legislation such as the Sanctity of Life Act." And that's his Wikipedia entry -- his own blog is even more hilarious:

Speaking of Hillary Rodham, I predict that she will replace Vice President Joe Biden BEFORE the 2012 elections. I've said that in private for many weeks, and now say it in this column -- remember, you heard it here. The Clinton-Bush Crime Syndicate (CBCS) needs Hillary in the White House badly, and Obama has readily accepted a subservient role in the criminal affairs of CBCS (for very profitable reasons, no doubt).

In other words, a nutbag pretty much on the scale of the guy who took over the Discovery Channel building yesterday (permalink).

The strangest thing is that as far as I can tell the entire pro-Tea Party blogosphere is simply ignoring the New Yorker's piece. They require their Tea Party to be a grassroots movement, therefore it is, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Meanwhile the Ron Paulites, who predate the creation of the Tea Party, are all sour grapes, complaining they were the real conservatives all along and only they have the right answers.

It would be great if this division and infighting, this struggle for conservatism's mantle, translated into general confusion among the right wing when it came to the election in November. But it won't help the Democrats, because nothing will make any of these people vote Democratic, and there aren't enough third-party candidates to dilute the right wing. November will be ugly, people.

Happy birthday, dear dead girlfriend

It would have been the 41st birthday of Stephanie who, having died at 30, never manifested anything close to a middle-aged self. It's impossible to think of her middle-aged; she'll always be the gentle, sweet girl with the killer body and (as another admirer dubbed them) "museum-quality tits" (not obvious in this picture). Remembering her today made me think of the line in "Masculin-Feminin" where the young people go to a movie and, as heard in the narration:

We often went to the movies. The screen lit up and we trembled... But more often than not, Madeleine and I were disappointed. The pictures were dated, they flickered. And Marilyn Monroe had aged terribly. It made us sad. This wasn't the film we'd dreamed of. This wasn't the total film that each of us had carried within himself... the film we wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we wanted to live.

Marilyn Monroe had aged? Yes, we got to see Marilyn in early middle age, and frankly I thought she looked fantastic. Take a look at her in "The Misfits." For his part, Jean-Pierre Leaud, star of "Masculin-Feminin," has aged much worse -- just do a Google Image search for him. Shocking. But few of us ever get old gracefully, at least as far as our bodies and appearance go, me included. Stephanie, with her violent death in a car crash at 30, was spared that, and lives always in memories as the young, gorgeous, sexually permissive San Francisco chick. How lucky I am to have had her in my life, and in my memories now.

Child soldier-turned-Marine-turned-fitness coach's story sounds fishy

This Reuters profile is about a man called Tchicaya Missamou, who says is is a former child soldier in Africa who became a US Marine. He is now a fitness instructor in southern California and is on a book tour (which is how he comes to be the subject of a profile. I wonder how many personalities, ideas and language memes first enter the public notice through book tours) for his memoir "In the Shadow of Freedom."

According to the story:

Growing up in Congo-Brazzaville as one of 16 siblings born to his father's seven wives, Missamou's childhood was shaped by the violence that sprung up in the 1990s following the oil-rich central African nation's first democratic elections. Missamou describes how, at around 14, he and his teenage friends were handed guns and a few grenades and put in charge of a checkpoint with orders to block members of rival ethnic groups from entering the area.

"I saw awful things during this time," he wrote in the book... Violence broke out again in 1997, and this time Missamou became a war profiteer. He assembled a convoy of armed men and struck lucrative deals with Brazzaville whites, most of whom had fled, to rescue abandoned suitcases of cash and valuables. "The Congo was falling apart, but I was rich," he wrote.

As Missamou's success grew, so did his notoriety. With the help of his father, a police captain, he fled Africa while still a teenager. He ended up in California and found work at a martial arts studio. There, Missamou met a U.S. marine recruit who encouraged him to enlist. Soon, Missamou was deployed overseas, going to Afghanistan and Iraq to fight for his adopted homeland. Through an executive order that fast-tracked citizenship applications of U.S. soldiers, Missamou became a U.S. citizen in 2003....

But Missamou, who wears his crisp, white U.S. Marines uniform on his book tour, said he also wants to give back to his adopted country. In 2007, he opened The Warrior Fitness Camp in Valencia, California, where he trains students in military techniques as well as the skills he learned as a child in the African bush.

Really? Is this all from the guy's book and from an interview with him? Did the reporter do any checking at all? Is it even possible to do fact-checking on the memoir of someone with a resume like that? Or are we just supposed to take the guy at his word? Of course we are.

It's the "white Marines uniform" that made my bullshit detector go off. Who goes around the country on a book tour in a dress uniform? Not even Colin Powell. I mean, really -- could this guy's story possibly be true?

Irony compounds in Santa Rosa

A man who sells electric motorcycles was killed in a collision... with a Prius.

Japanese men just go on being lame-ass

Someone please tell me they're kidding: Japanese men ferry virtual girlfriends to beach town.

No, I don't think they're being ironic.

Today's farce: man almost burns down apartment building in attack on bedbug

No matter what actually happened, no matter whether the poor shmuck was really just trying some heavy-handed extermination or whether it was the result of a "heated argument" (!!), the events of Monday night in a Nashua, N.H. apartment building turned out bad for everybody.

Police have charged a 27-year-old Nashua man with arson, alleging he intentionally lit a mattress on fire that displaced several occupants of a Hanover Street apartment building.

Michael Fink, of 49 Temple St., Apt. 32, was arraigned Wednesday in Nashua District Court on the arson charge. During the proceeding, Fink told the judge that it was a "misunderstanding." He also said he was attempting to light a bug on fire, not the mattress.

Lt. Jeffrey Bukunt of the Nashua Police Department said Fink used a butane lighter to ignite a mattress on Monday in his girlfriend's lower-level apartment at 24-A Hanover St. ...

Bukunt said police stand by the charges, adding Fink was engaged in a "heated argument" with the woman during the incident. Once Fink allegedly lit the mattress on fire, he then tried to push the mattress through a window, but it became lodged and ignited the side of the building, according to Bukunt. Police said the fire quickly spread throughout the apartment and continued to damage other apartments within the multi-unit dwelling. ...

-- news story

The desperado fled the scene and was arrested at ... wait for it ... the local public library.

It doesn't say whether the apartment is now free from bedbugs.

'Sovereign citizen' type files $38 quadrillion lawsuit

A Las Vegas man, claiming damages in a dispute over a piece of desert land, has filed a $38 quadrillion lawsuit against the landowner's lawyers, the Las Vegas Daily Herald reports. Among the amusing facts:

Anderson said the property has been valued $36 billion and asked for 12.5 percent of that value, $4.5 billion. He also asked for additional compensatory damages of four times that amount and punitive damages of 200 times the amount, which added up to $918 billion. In his initial complaint, Anderson said silence on the matter by the defendants would constitute a binding contract.

Silence on the matter constitutes a binding contract! Now that's the way to get things done. I guess a lot of people who wrote the President on various matters are owed some money and favors, if that's where we set the bar.

The key to this story is in the second sentence:

John Theodore Anderson, also known as John-Theodore:Anderson in his filings ...

See the weird punctuation? That's the sign of an adherent of the "sovereign citizen" movement, which I mentioned in my last entry. Basically they believe in alternate theories of American law, theories which lead to fantastic assertions like "silence on the matter constitutes a binding contract."

It's all very amusing -- unless you become the target of one of these wack jobs, I guess, and wind up with all kinds of liens and frivolous lawsuits filed against you.

King of Hawaii (the verb)

In researching my latest novel, I hit upon a gold mine of material just published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit whose main mission is to monitor and report on hate groups. Among the articles they published in the September issue of their publication Intelligence Report is a list of leaders of the "sovereign citizen" movement, which is a loose group of people with a magical belief in an alternate legal system. The most amusing profile contains this information:

A former tool-and-die maker, the man who writes his name as ":David-Wynn: Miller" — or, as he amusingly says it verbally, "David hyphen Wynn full colon Miller" — came up with his "truth language" scheme as a result of a frustrating court experience in 1988, when he was going through a divorce. In short, all truth language sentences used in court filings must begin with the preposition "for," contain at least 13 words, and use more nouns than verbs to be effective (he has claimed that only nouns have legal authority). David Wynn Miller considers himself a "Plenipotentiary Judge" in the Unity States of the World, and has named himself as the King of Hawaii, a feat he claims he accomplished when he converted Hawaii into a verb.

That is awesome! And this guy is not even a performance artist. God, I love this country.

It's August, isn't it

It's silly season, so we have choice articles like this on Salon.com: "Why I got the male Brazilian wax" job -- or, as the story says, the "brozillian." (That's different from a "brozillion," which simply means Brooklyn.)

It gets really good about halfway through, where we learn that people have all sorts of projections about the gender and power relationships between men and those who wax them. At first, "women were not comfortable with their husbands and boyfriends getting waxed by other men." So they hired women. But then the guys think it's too much like a massage parlor and start asking for extras. This leads to a hilarious incident at the Ted D. Bare Salon in San Jose, Calif:

Once, she was forced to taze a guy who wouldn't stop misbehaving. "He got really aggressive and kept insisting that I perform certain favors on him," she said. "So I tazed him in the thigh. He fell right off the table."

And it only gets better from there.

Previously: Ripped from the headlines

Another book idea

This news story from the L.A. Times suggests all sorts of fictional adaptations. I love the 1930s Los Angeles setting -- the mise en scene of "Chinatown," "Ask the Dust," "Day of the Locust."

Remains of babies dead for possibly 70 years found in L.A. basement

August 18, 2010 | 6:17 am

The bodies of two babies wrapped in Los Angeles Times newspapers from the 1930s were found in an apartment building basement near downtown L.A.

Workers found the bodies Tuesday evening when cleaning out the basement. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, the remains were found with personal letters and tickets to the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

The LAPD and the Los Angeles coroner's office are investigating. A coroner's official told The Times that the newspaper-wrapped bodies of the children had a mummified appearance.

[Updated at 6:50 a.m.: The grim discovery was made in one of L.A.'s oldest districts, a densely populated area of apartments west of downtown Los Angeles near MacArthur Park. Officials said they have launched an investigation, but it's unclear whether anyone who lived in the apartment during the 1930s is still in the area.

Law enforcement sources told The Times that the case is being classified for now as a "death investigation" and not a homicide. Officials will attempt to determine how the babies died -- likely with the help of forensic anthropologists. They will also look for any reports of missing babies during this period and attempt to find anyone who lived in the apartment at the time.]

LAPD Lt. Cory Palka told KTLA News the remains were found inside a steamer trunk in an apartment in the 800 block of Lake Street in the Westlake District.

The coroner's office is examining the remains to see if it can determine a cause of death. Authorities believe the babies have been deceased for seven decades but will perform tests.

Update, 2 Sep 2010: Police have identified the owner of the mysterious trunk.

Natural conflict

Rossellini even said that you shouldn't write scripts -- only swine write scripts -- that the conflict in a film should simply emerge from the facts. A character from a given place at a given time is confronted by another character from a very different place: and voilá, there exists a natural conflict between them and you start from that. There's no need to invent anything.

-- Francois Truffaut, interviewed in 1984,
just reprinted in the New Yorker

Does not compute

Elsewhere in the unintentional irony front: The New York Times "challenged" readers to go without their cellphones and whatnot for a few days during vacations. The Times then published the results with an introduction that included these sentences (emphasis mine):

The New York Times asked readers to temporarily give up their technological tethers, then make videos about the experience... You can watch a selection of videos prepared by readers here.

So they asked readers to unplug... and then plug back in again to report. I guess if anyone went permanently off the grid and made their report by longhand, we'd never know.

Universe begins collapsing on itself: Facebook at fault

We're reaching the point where irony is so widely employed and ubiquitous that language itself is losing its meaning:

The idea is that you are pretending to speak in the common language of Facebook, and are in fact speaking in that common language, but are aware of how unoriginal you are being; so when you write "omg" you are ironically commenting on the use of "omg," but when other people write "omg" they are seriously saying "oh my God."

-- Kaitie Roiphe in the New York Times, 13 August 2010
in article entitled "The Language of Facebook"

That is, if you want to call "omg" (and put as many quotation marks around that as you want before you get tired and start drinking, even though it's only 9:30 in the morning) language. And it is, of course.

Yesterday I had a chat (not a face to face [or F2F] conversation, but a Google chat) with a friend yesterday in which she was telling me about her college students indulging in "code-switching," which in her case is "heritage speakers" in her Spanish classes -- i.e. students whose first language is Spanish -- speaking in a mixture of English and Spanish without even realizing they're doing do. At least they don't write like that, though I don't see why they should stop themselves in certain forums -- including Facebook, no doubt. I immediately thought of Thomas Merton's use of Macaronic language (which is the intentional practice of using multiple languages in a text to shade, obfuscate, or enhance meaning) in his poetry. Merton's work is the only Macaronic poetry I'm familiar with, and I couldn't find a good example online in a short time, but here is an example "from the early 15th century" (!):

A celuy que pluys eyme en monde,
of alle tho that I have found,
    Carissima,
saluz od treye amour,
with grace and joye and alle honour,
    Dulcissima.
Sachez bien, pleysant et beele,
that I am right in good heele,
    Laus Christo!
et mon amour doné vous ay.
and also thine owene night and day
    in cisto.

Mythologize your friends -- or just make them up

It's really a very simple strategy. You have a small group of friends and you declare them all to be geniuses and you laud all their work and ascribe to them sweet and stormy qualities worthy of the Greek gods. What you're selling is not just your writing but your personal legends.

That's Edmund White, writing in the Aug. 19, 2010 New York Review of Books, reviewing photographs of the Beat writers by Allen Ginsburg, talking about how Jack Kerouac turned his real-life friends into not just fictional characters but mythical ones.

And when I read that, I immediately thought: Yes, that's just what Bolaño did in The Savage Detectives, which for that reason among others has been compared to On the Road and the rest of Kerouac's work. And in a previous generation Henry Miller did something similar (though most of the weird characters and hangers-on in The Rosy Crucifixion didn't turn out to be famous writers or artists -- not including Anaïs Nin and her crowd who showed up later).

You may think to yourself, right, my friends are just as nutty and proto-famous as that collection of characters in New York in the 1920s/New York in the 1940s/Mexico City in the 1970s. The poet-barista you have a crush on -- surely she's the equal of June Miller. That pretty flash fiction author who reads at every open mike is just like Gregory Corso. The hairy, almost inarticulate author of chapbook verse who hangs out in the park every Sunday is another Ulises Lima.

Or not. Maybe you're singularly unimpressed with the talent around you. Maybe you just realized they do a lot more talking about their art than working on it. Maybe they're boring. Very well. Make up characters -- that's creative writing.

Another book idea falling from the sky

Another passage from the news that qualifies as the premise for a novel. (In this case, understandably so, since the reporter is also a novelist.)

In the following months, snow wreaked havoc on (Moscow) whenever it fell. In three separate instances, drivers drivers of snow-clearing vehicles were shot at when they collided with other vehicles; one of the drivers, shot by an off-duty police officer, died. Even without snow, the movement of cars through the circular maze of Moscow was incredibly frustrating. During rush hour on an overcast, slippery day in late February, the luxury Mercedes of a vice-president of Lukoil, the country's largest oil company, collided at high speed with a small Citroën. The occupants of the Mercedes escaped with superficial injuries; the Citroën crumpled like a paper bag, and the driver and her daughter-in-law -- both doctors -- were killed. The accident exploded into scandal. ...

-- From "Stuck" by Keith Gessen, in the Aug. 2, 2010 New Yorker

All you have to do is add the suggestion that one of the doctors -- the young, pretty one -- was carrying secret information, perhaps something about a Soviet-era nerve gas stockpile up for sale to the highest bidder, and you have all the ingredients for a thriller; it writes itself. And I haven't even included all the other color with which Gessen opens the article, such as the scene where an ambulance driver just pulls over and starts aimlessly throwing snowballs because he's been stick in a traffic jam so long that the patient he's been transporting has died. Of course, that would have to figure into the thriller plot too, because in a thriller (A) Everything not action is atmospheric, and (B) Even atmospheric details are somehow connected to the conspiracy at the heart of the thriller's plot. Like I say, it writes itself.

Previously:

The desert 'love lost lawyer'
The lonely Brinks stockroom man
The sacrificial lambs of Presbyterian College
"The Extra Man"

The interview and the interviewer

On Salon.com, Laura Fraser looks at the sometimes troublesome relationship between novelists and interviewers. This caused me to recall the James Thurber story "The Interview," in which a newspaperman (as journalists were called in the mid-20th century) visits a famous writer, who leads him by the nose up a number of conversational blind alleys before getting almost too drunk to talk. Thurber treats all the characters with characteristic compassion and understanding, and even better, has the reporter do the same with the novelist, despite how the novelist treats him. (The story, published in the Feb. 25, 1950 New Yorker, is reprinted in the collection "Thurber Country.")

The whole topic reminded me of some of the early interviews I tried to conduct as a student journalist at the Daily Texan in Austin during the mid 1970s. The first was when I was assigned to go backstage at a concert venue, the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters, to interview a touring rock guitarist. Unfortunately I was utterly unfamiliar with the work of this very famous blues-influenced player and I knew I would have absolutely nothing to ask. To my utter relief, I was turned away at the backstage door: I wasn't on the list. I wrote up the experience in a kind of New Journalism way, putting myself in the article and writing mainly about my anxiety about the whole situation. I wish I still had that clipping.

The second was a couple of years later when, still a student, I interviewed David Bromberg, another rock musician; he isn't remembered much today but he was in the same crowd as Ry Cooder, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Townes Van Zandt. Unlike the first attempt, I was very familiar with the work of David Bromberg and I was looking forward to talking with him. But when I got backstage, I utterly froze. Absolutely tongue-tied, I could not think of a single goddamn thing to ask. It was a complete fiasco, but he was actually very polite about it, and I wrote it all up as nicely as I could. But to tell you the truth, the first piece was better.

Since then, I've interviewed several people, including the novelist Yiyun Li -- I interviewed her by Google Chat, which is a great way to interview people, because you don't have to transcribe the result -- and io9.com founding editor Annalee Newitz. I interviewed filmmaker George Romero. I even learned how to interview people whose work I didn't really know or understand, by becoming an ISO 9000 auditor at the software company I worked at in the 1990s. Basically this meant that I, who knew almost nothing about software, went around interviewing people who did. This was a good job for someone who, like me, is very good at pretending that the 1% they do know is sufficient for about 50% of the work. And I've been happily out of my depth ever since.

Marilyn Jaye Lewis's 'Freak Parade'

My friend Marilyn was kind enough to send me her new erotic novel, Freak Parade, about a washed-up pop singer in New York who has to go out and get a job, start taking responsibility for herself, and stop making so many bad decisions. Along the way, she has sex with a lot of people and finally meets the love of her life.

As usual, I really enjoyed Marilyn's direct, passionate and compassionate writing. Her erotic scenes, characterized by a wonderful clarity and sense of pacing, are as messed-up and hot as ever. I wanted even more! And because I like stories that capture a time and place, I loved the glimpses into New York bohemian culture around the end of the 1990s, when apparently even the bohemians, thanks to the trickle down of all that money, found ways to live fairly high off the hog.

That's Freak Parade by Marilyn Jaye Lewis, one of my favorite writers.

technorati: Marilyn Jaye Lewis

May as well be on another planet

I've only been on vacation for four days, and aside from the baseball scores, anything coming from the outside world already strikes me as absurd. I just went to cnn.com out of morbid curiosity: what headlines could possibly exist on a midsummer Saturday evening? Behold:

Latest news
3 convicted killers escape in Arizona
Asylum offer for condemned Iranian
WikiLeaks suspect held in solitary
Afghan war papers: What we know
Hamas leader killed in Israeli airstrikes
Obama wants dignity for Rangel
Ticker: Another Dem in ethics trouble
J.Lo can be a great 'Idol' judge, if ... - EW
No quick hearing on AZ immigration law
How to save $1 million by 65 - NNMoney
Chavez orders troops to border
Yankees, Cardinals in deadline deals - SI
Sex offender freed 300 years early
Mom dies after silicone injection

These may as well be headlines from Mars as far as I'm concerned. As for the Gulf oil spill, I completely forgot about it. I mean that I glimpsed it on the CNN page and said to myself, Oh yeah, that happened.

Now this is a good vacation.

This is not a baseball post

"If I don't go out there and perform, those nine years of losing mean absolutely nothing."

#sfgiants OF Aubrey Huff, quoted in a San Jose Mercury News story
about last night's Giants-Dodgers game

Cris uses car trips as an opportunity to ask me things we usually don't have time to talk about. The other day, while we were driving up to our vacation spot in Washington, she asked me if I ever reflected on the fact that my life is half over. I said sure, because the way I look at it, I'm capable of writing a novel every four years or so, and if you take into account the general statistic that few novelists write anything good after age 70 (Philip Roth notwithstanding), that means I have time to write about five more novels at the most, including the one I've been working on for the last year and a half. So counting that way, yes, I see the limits.

This led to me saying how useless it was to reflect on the choices I've made which, in retrospect, represent a deviation from the goal of becoming a published novelist. If I'd moved to New York instead of San Francisco; if I'd gone to the writing program at Naropa when I had the urge in 1978; if I hadn't spent ten solid years devoting my creative energies to performance art, music and dance -- then I might have learned earlier what I now (at age 54) know about writing. It's a waste of time to regret those choices; besides, I had a lot of fun as a performance artist. (I see I've written about this before. At that time I said of my time as a performance artist, "I wouldn't trade it for two novels." Now I'm not so certain. Perhaps if I could still have had all the sex I had then and still made progress on my writing.)

Add to those non-writing years -- actually, I was writing, just not fiction -- the current years of frustration, during which I completed my first novel and got an agent for it (yay!), then had it rejected by a dozen New York publishers (boo!) followed by ... well, let's say I'm farther off today than I was three years ago.

In this context I like the quote by the San Francisco outfielder Huff, who came to the Giants this spring after a decade laboring for non-contending teams. How he must have wondered, during those years, whether it was worth it to play hard. Now he no longer has to wonder. It's a reminder to me that now I have to work as hard as I would if I had a two-book contract with a film option that had been picked up. And to have faith in what I've learned.

Related:
Augusten Burroughs on tenacity

Novelists need large stoves

One of the saddest things I've ever read

Read this vapid article comparing social website use by gays and straights. Then read the bio of the guy who wrote it:

A long-term New Yorker, Mark Thompson has also lived in San Francisco, Boston, Provincetown, D.C., Miami Beach and the south of France. The author of the novels WOLFCHILD and MY HAWAIIAN PENTHOUSE, he has a PhD in American Studies and is the recipient of fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, and Blue Mountain Center. His work has appeared in numerous publications.

That's just sad.

All news, all evening

A piece in the New Yorker wonders why CNN's ratings in evening prime time aren't so hot. I had to stop and think: Why the hell would people watch news and commentary all evening long -- isn't the evening a time to relax and be entertained?

And then I realized -- it's because prime time network programming, the dramas, comedies and variety which people have watched for the last fifty years, is so bad that cable TV news and commentary is entertainment. And Fox and, to a lesser extent, MSNBC, are eating CNN's lunch simply because they're more entertaining. Some dipshit shooting his mouth off is more entertaining than serious reporting, and that's why we have Fox and MSNBC, not to mention talk radio's domination of the medium, at all.

The movie Network, with what seemed in 1976 like an over-the-top prediction of news as entertainment, becomes more prescient every year. Most people simply remember it for the slogan "I'm mad as hell..." but what it was really about was the degradation of network news into entertainment. This post on the website of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting compares the film's Howard Beale, "a fictional TV host famous for undergoing an on-air emotional disintegration," with Fox's Glenn Beck.

Dept. of Everybody's a critic: Soldiers are impatient with narrative

I had never been to Cape Fear. It was one of the many places in America I had never visited. I had seen the movie, through. Couldn't remember where, exactly. In a tent, somewhere hot, maybe. Black and white, with Gregory Peck having some kind of a major problem with Robert Mitchum. It was good enough entertainment, as I recalled, but fundamentally annoying. There was a lot of jeering from the audience. Robert Mitchum should have gone down early in the first reel. Watching civilians dither around just to spin out a story for ninety minutes had no real appeal for soldiers.

-- from the Lee Child novel The Enemy, in which a military detective is the hero.

Yes, soldiers, those arbiters of what's essential and important in culture. They have no patience for the slow "spinning" of narrative. You got a bad guy, take him out early. Why dither around, indeed. Of course, The Enemy is some 465 pages in trade paperback. Not sure why a military detective would narrate a story at that length when the bad guy is probably evident in the first hundred pages. Waste of space, really.

The cold, hard collision of reality and health-related expenses

From a Yelp review of a store in San Francisco that sells furniture to help relieve back pain:

I don't know whether or not the prices are competitive, because when it comes down to it. . . who gives a damn!! They have a Panasonic massage chair for about $3000 here that is a good investment in the event you are the last person on earth and need someone/something to rub your back. I've sat in this chair about 5 times, and it really can make you feel like forsaking family, friends, work and the rest of outside world as you sit in the chair and ask yourself why you haven't bought one of these a long time ago. Well, it's $3000 goddamn dollars that's why.

I guess that's why they invented HSA accounts.

Who's paying for Cheney's heart treatment?

A responsible journalist would hesitate to ask this question, so I will: Who is paying for the undoubtedly exorbitant expense of the treatment being administered to maintain the heart of former V.P. Dick Cheney?

From the NY Times story:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is recuperating from surgery to implant the kind of mechanical pump now being given to a small but growing number of people with heart failure so severe that they would most likely die within a few months without it. The pumps are partial artificial hearts known as ventricular assist devices, and they come in various models. Mr. Cheney's kind is about the size of a D battery and leaves most recipients without a pulse because it pushes blood continuously instead of mimicking the heart’s own pulsatile beat.

You know that's got to cost a lot.

As a former member of Congress, Cheney has lifetime healthcare -- nice for him! And I don't begrudge it. Everyone deserves lifetime health insurance -- don't they?

Support a small press

Salt -- not to be confused with the Angelia Jolie vehicle about to be released -- is a British literary publisher. Blogger Shigekuni posts:

Salt, the amazing British publisher of prose and poetry, is almost broke. Last year, they launched a campaign called Just one Book to save themselves, and they are doing it this year as well. It’s a plea to buy Just One Book published by Salt. You can buy it directly from them or from your retailer of choice. Spread the word.

I visited their website, which has a US store, and bought a book!

Things not to be

This literary agency has a helpful list of "Things To Be" and "Not to Be":

Things to Be:
- Confident
- Talented
- Marketable
- Objective
- Scrupulously Self-Critical
- Patient
- A Good Typist

Things Not To Be:

• Insecure - If you lack confidence in yourself, in your writing, or in your ability to become a full-time freelance writer, you'll never be able to stand up to the rigors and the brickbats that lay ahead.


• Marginally Talented - If you haven't yet developed into the kind of writer who works diligently at turning out only the best examples of whatever literary genre you're creating, you're not ready for agency representation.


• Conveniently Self-Forgiving - No one--from Ernest Hemingway to Homer and back again--ever wrote a single draft that "sang." Every writer worth the name knows when and how to rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite some more.

...

More at the link. I guess if you weren't sufficiently "Confident" this would scare you off, but I don't think it's bad advice. But I'm not sure there are that many people who combine the qualities of being confident while at the same time are "Scrupulously Self-Critical."

In this Galleycat interview, the agent goes on to request "fiction that is starkly unique and startlingly appealing," qualifying that requirement with "at least." It's good to set the bar high, but how many people who pass all these criteria would really be good? Can I think my work is "starkly unique" and at the same time be "scrupulously self-critical"? Man.

Angry desert rancher wants someone to bully

Awesome part-time job available in the high desert for some human doormat:

Ranch Hand Part Time (Joshua Tree, CA)

Ranch Hand to feed, water care for buffalo, goats, sheep, and pigs. Includes mucking stalls, helping with newborn care and births. Rough, heavy work in every kind of weather. Hot weather or rain, cold. The animals are spoiled and overfed. Their stalls cleaned either manually (rake, shovel, wheelbarrow or by tractor. Feeding them takes a long time and they have special feeding instructions for supplements and grains. We have weekend yardsales and if, u want to make a little extra money you can help sell. If, you can't drive a tractor we can teach you if you are eager to learn. The worse the weather the heavier the work. Rural lonely environment. Lazy folks looking for a place to stay -- need not apply! Must be able to lift 120 lbs. Welding skills help or we might teach you, if you are eager to learn. Auto mechanics skills are helpful. The ranch has a full shop with a lift on property. The pay is dependent on your availability and skills -- your contribution in labor and time is all flexible and negotiable. To apply you must write me why you would like to have this job. I don't care about your spelling or grammar. If, you prefer email me your phone number and I will call you.

I love the part about the "spoiled" animals with their "special" diets. I have the feeling he intends to treat them better than his ranch hand.

Clearly this rancher hasn't heard about the wonderful human resource called illegal immigration. They do the jobs we don't want!

Books I read

After finishing the trilogy "Your Face Tomorrow" by Javier Marías, I took up a novel I'd had on my shelves for a few years, something I bought at the time because it got a good review and because I knew the author was a good writer. But I gave it up after 50 pages -- the story took a turn that I found predictable, and it had been a little bit plodding up to that point, and I just couldn't push myself forward. It's probably an all right book; I didn't think it was a very good one. But the thing is, I don't want to say what the book was, because some day, who knows, that writer might be in a position to do me a good deed, and for all I know a single critical word might be enough to make him fail to do it. Of course, for this to happen, several very unlikely things would have to happen first, the most unlikely of which is that he will ever hear of my existence in the first place. But I've already had one or two experiences where someone held a grudge against me because of some slight I didn't even know I'd committed, and this grudge not only meant that this person cut me dead for years, but even slandered me in return, and in print. So I'm not going to say which book I thought was lacking. Ridiculous, though.

Instead I'm reading another such novel, that is, something by a mid-list writer which I saw well-reviewed. It's only been on my shelves for a couple of months. I'm 40 pages in now, and I'm not turned off by it yet, though it does seem very bourgeois.

Between these two, I read a little more than half of "The Ultimate Intimacy" by Ivan Klíma. I'd read Klíma's "Love and Garbage" several years ago and really liked it. This was similarly well-written, though not quite as... what? Edgy? "Edgy" doesn't really say it. But anyway after about 60% of it I decided I'd had enough.

Meanwhile I'm still working on the first draft of the book I started about a year and three months ago, a project called "Knock Yourself Out."

Today's fakes: deep-cover Russian spies (and maybe every bourgeois)

Those arrested yesterday as part of the Russian spy ring:

... were accused of spending years living undercover in American cities and suburbs, posing as ordinary couples working ordinary jobs, chatting to the neighbors about schools and apologizing for noisy teenagers. Their purpose, according to prosecutors, was to patiently penetrate what one coded message called American "policy making circles."

... Neighbors in Montclair, N.J., of the couple who called themselves Richard and Cynthia Murphy were flabbergasted when a team of F.B.I. agents turned up Sunday night and led the couple away in handcuffs. One person who lives nearby called them "suburbia personified," saying that they had asked people for advice about the local schools. ... Jessie Gugig, 15, said she could not believe the charges, especially against Mrs. Murphy. "They couldn't have been spies," she said jokingly. "Look what she did with the hydrangeas." (NYT article)

More than fifteen years ago, during the heyday of Queer Nation, I tried to write a short story for an anthology the theme of which was "Queers as spies in straight society." The notion was that queer people infiltrate and in some cases pass in straight society, and that we were uniquely qualified to report on that society as presumed members of it. My story was unsuccessful (I used the occasion to write about my father's funeral, but it just never worked as a short story) and in fact I'm not sure the anthology ever was published, but the notion of being an undercover spy is an exciting one, and somewhat reassuring for someone like me who has, like the deep-cover Russian spies just arrested, come to own a house, have a straight job, fit into bourgeois society, and otherwise resemble what I feared I would become, namely a middle-class consumer indistinguishable from my neighbors. How reassuring, how ego-stroking, to tell myself I'm not really a bourgeois, I'm really a spy.

Censorship as the father of invention?

He suffered from a total alleviation of the censorship he had worked under. Now Thompson could say anything rather than accomplish it through subterfuge. That had allowed Thompson to write on all cylinders. The Killer Inside Me was an allegory for the kind of pulp novel Thompson was writing: You think you're reading one kind of novel, and you're reading another. When you have to slip something by the official channels, it enforces subtlety and experimental art.

From a conversation with Robert Polito, the biographer of 20th C. thriller writer Jim Thompson, on Scott Timberg's blog. Timberg is an L.A. Times entertainment reporter.

Georges Perec

Attempting to compensate for my lack of literary education, which has left me with nothing more than uninformed intuitions about literature and how it is shaped, I came across this excellent overview of the career and work of Georges Perec, an Oulipian. And here is a more biographically inclined essay about Perec in the Jewish Daily Forward.

technorati: writing

His pleas for donations unsuccessful, manic Pentecostal admits 'I need a job'

John Burton, the manic Pentecostal preacher who often uses his blog to beg for money -- my favorite post being the one where he asserted that "believers live in an different economic system" and asked for dough so he could work on a book and spend the rest of the time in prayer -- has finally admitted: "I need a job."

I guess he found he didn't live in a "different economic system" after all.

Xtian nutbag fails in Congress bid

Dave Daubenmire, the Chistianist nutbag I wrote about last month, placed fifth in the Republican primary for the Ohio 18th district this week. I was going to link to the Ohio Sect'y of State's website with the results, but today Daubenmire posted his own post-mortem including the results. Short version: he came in 5th in a field of eight. His version:

80% of the voters did not vote for the standard bearer. The top three are all Republican hacks. The bottom five ran against the machine. With no Tea Party endorsement the votes were spread out among the "citizen" candidates. The Tea Party candidates win the most votes... except the Tea Party wanted to remain neutral. Because the Tea Party votes were spread around the voters get to choose between Bob Dole and Zack Space in November.

Still under the impression that the "Tea Party" is an actual organization that can endorse or nominate someone, I see. (His reference to "Bob Dole" is to his opinion that the top two vote getters, who finished in a virtual tie, are "Bob Dole clones" and thus worthy of his contempt. And Zack Space is the Democratic incumbent, who won the seat several years ago after the long-time incumbent, Bob Ney, resigned after being caught in the Jack Abramoff scandal. So there's more to this apparently conservative district than meets the eye.)

Why he is so contemptuous of Bob Dole, he doesn't say.

But anyway, like most losers, he is turning over the returns and feels cheated:

Less than 20% of the registered voters turned out to vote. Only 51,421 votes were cast. If only 4733 Evangelicals had turned out and voted for me I would have won. Do you suppose there were 4733 Christians among the 205,684 who didn't go to the polls?

I should have won this race in a romp.

You and each of the other seven candidates, all of whom are making the same calculations today.

But the weirdest scene is at the end of the column, or essay, or rant, in which a man who is identified as a Lutheran pastor comes by to commiserate and does everything but give him a mercy fuck. It's moments like this that make me embarrassed to be a Lutheran, but I'm hoping Coach got that part wrong.

And don't forget that classic fishing book by Richard Brautigan

Other categories that have quite literally come out of nowhere and captured the imagination of readers are Scandinavian crime fiction, particularly the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, and Latin American crime fiction by Roberto Bolano.

Article in the Times of India

A classic case of judging a book by its title.