Summer of Infinite Jest: DFW's bandana

Pretty much just what you'd think:

I started wearing bandannas in Tucson because it was a hundred degrees all the time. When it's really hot, I would perspire so much that I would drip on the page. Actually, I started wearing it that year, and then it became a big help in Yaddo in '87 because I would drip into the typewriter, and I was worried that I would get a shock. And then I discovered that I felt better with them on. And then I dated a woman who ... said there were these various chakras, and one of the big ones was what she called the spout hole, at the very top of your cranium. And in a lot of cultures, it was considered better to keep your head covered. And then I began thinking about the phrase, Keeping your head together, you know? .... It's a security blanket for me.... It makes me... feel kind of creepy that people view it as an affectation or trademark or something. It's more just a foible, it's the recognition of a weakness, which is that I'm just kind of worried my head's going to explode.

-- Quoted on Flavorwire from a book of interviews with David Foster Wallace

He's covering his spout hole so his head doesn't explode. Perfectly clear. Any more questions?

Things I had to look up: José Juan Tablada

Over a year ago, the New Yorker published a Roberto Bolaño story, "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura," which I really had a hard time reading. I kept the copy of the magazine on my bedside table for the day when I would finally have time to try reading it again, and I have finally got to it.

The story is narrated by a man whose mother was an actress in minor porn movies of, I guess, the 1980s, and is really about the oeuvre of the German filmmaker who wrote and directed the films, which are described in hallucinatory detail. Along the way, as was his habit, Bolaño makes a passing reference to an obscure poet:

For example, Oscar Guillermo Montes [one of the actors in the pornos] in a scene from a movie I've forgotten the rest of: he's naked from the waist down, his penis hangs flaccid and dripping. Behind the actor, a landscape unfolds: mountains, ravines, rivers, forests, towering clouds, a city, perhaps a volcano, a desert. Oscar Guillermo Montes perches on a high ridge, an icy breeze playing with a lock of his hair. That's all. It's like a poem by Tablada, isn't it? But you've never heard of Tablada.

Emphasis mine. Quite right, I had never heard of Tablada -- who was he?

A poet of the early 20th century, José Juan Tablada (1871-1945) is known as the poet who introduced haiku to the Spanish language. According to this article, he lived a fascinating life. Among other pursuits, he traveled to Japan several times and was honored by the emperor, lived in Paris for a time and consorted with the surrealists, ran a bookshop with his wife in New York City, and represented the Mexican government in Columbia and Venezuela.

That article (by Ty Hadman on his website Aha Poetry), which starts out a little amateurishly, is actually very well-informed and is worth reading in full. As for the Bolaño story, it's interesting, but you have to be in a mood to slow down and get into it.

In Tablada's honor, then:

Wandering, visiting, writing,
    Tablada wielded his pen and brush
        like a warrior with one master:
    poetry

Envisioning a better book

In the last few working sessions on my novel, I've been writing a crucial chapter -- I say it's crucial because it is really the turning point of the second part: By the end of this chapter, the main character has started down a road he will never return from.

As I work on this chapter I've been following a pattern of drafting content in one session, completely rewriting it in the next. Last weekend, for example, I completely rewrote on Saturday what I had struggled through on Monday the 25th, when I took a vacation day to write and could come up with nothing more than 150 words. The result was much better than I wrote on the Monday, that's for sure. So this chapter has taken me longer, but it's the better for it.

I still have glimpses of a better book, one in which the language is polished and things are truly good. I'm starting to realize that my first novel "Make Nice," for example, was, well, good in some ways, but not very good in the ways that count. By which I mean really interesting prose, a lack of dross, some inspiration and originality. (It does have some of that, and of course those are the best parts. The climactic scene featuring Marilyn Monroe, for example: really good.) If I were to tackle a rewrite of "Make Nice" now (which I will never do), it would be a lot better. But I think I can learn more from writing new books, not rewriting old ones.

Dr. Tom Little and his companions, 5 August 2010

Just a note to commemorate Dr. Tom Little and nine other aid workers who were killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan a year ago today. Little and his colleagues had worked to deliver medical care in Afghanistan for decades, in some cases since the 1970s.

Freedom of choice

He says of (Ukraine) today, as former Orange prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko stands trial, that everyone watches the news "as if it were a soap opera. We recently had elections of which someone said we had a choice between a sports car without brakes, or brakes without a car. Since Ukrainians are never in a hurry we chose the brakes with no car."

from a profile of writer Andrey Kurkov
in the Guardian, 29 July 2011

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 7: the Eschaton match

Now well into the 300s (of pages), I read today the Eschaton scene. Eschaton is a war game played by the tennis academy kids on a world map stretched out over 4 tennis courts in which you bomb other teams' territory by lobbing tennis balls onto it, the tennis balls representing thermonuclear weapons. And this scene, all twenty pages of it or so, is really the first utter masterpiece of the book. The author begins with the origin of the game, its rules, its motley equipment, long footnotes about theory, etc. -- and then depicts the match itself. Somewhere along the line, the scene switches from symbolic violence to real violence, from farce to what might be tragedy (we don't know by the end of the scene, but it's conceivable that one or two of the players has actually been killed). I was really impressed by the way the author manages this transition, while stage-managing the actions of at least 25 characters, some of them participating, some only "spectating," and at the same time crafting what is, at least, a remarkable allegory of how games are war, especially war games. Other themes: how combatants are essentially adolescent, no matter how adult and grave they try to be; how one generation passes its traditions on to the next, partially in hopes that precise transmittal of this tradition will ensure nothing changes, and how these hopes are inevitably dashed; and how people constantly disappoint themselves and each other.

Preceding this scene we're finally back on the outskirts of Tucson with the two secret agents who are discussing the magically compelling videotape. In this scene we find out that the content of the tape is pleasing, and that its origin is American (i.e. United Statesian, which in this book is part of a North American union, although the protagonists [antagonists?] of this scene speak as if Canada and the U.S. are still separate countries), but nothing else. They have a conversation about who is responsible for the deaths caused by the compelling videotape -- which victims find themselves unable to stop or turn away from, and thus die from thirst in their seats after several days -- the producer or the consumer, if a product is so addictive it kills. I liked this scene much better than the preceding ones that showed this pair. They seemed less menacing and more like a tragic chorus.

And before that was the scene about the drag queen addict going pretty much insane as he goes through heroin withdrawl in the worst way possible. Grisly, but clearly inseparable from the author's purposes.

More hysteria from the collapsitarian center

Yes, the center, not the fringe. Given that the collapsitarians are all on the fringe anyway, it still makes sense that the movement itself has a left, right and center. Anyway:

Since "terrorism" is now a term we can use to describe just about any action deemed a threat to the public and government infrastructure, the possibilities for what the next "terror attack" will look like are endless. It can come in the form of suicide bombers at your local shopping mall, a cyber attack on financial markets launched via the internet, or any number of other potential threats that have been recently highlighted by our Department of Homeland Security. There need be only a single event that occurs at an opportune time and is pushed by the mainstream media and all hell will break loose.

Imagine, for a minute, what America would look like if nationwide curfews were implemented, civil rights were suspended (including confiscation of guns), the US dollar crashed, ATM's and credit card transactions were restricted, and food and gas purchases were limited.

-- Gerald Celente

The reasonable-sounding rhetoric in that example masks very poorly its hysterical premise: that somehow "a single event" such as a suicide bomber in a first-world country would be enough to push the entire world financial system into collapse. Frankly, a suicide bomber in a mall probably wouldn't have much effect, given that malls failed as a retail model years ago and are now passing from the scene and such an attack is likely to only blow up closed storefronts and lonely discount shoe stores. Now if you blew up a NASCAR race, that would get some attention. An attack on America!

Meanwhile, Dilbert jumped on the bandwagon in Sunday's strip:

On today's great reality show, 'The President and the Nutty Congress'

The main problem is that the Republican Party does not actually care very much about the deficit. It cares about, in order: Low taxes for high-income earners; reducing social spending, especially for the poor; protecting the defense budget; and low deficits. The Obama administration and many Democrats actually do care about the deficit and are willing to sacrifice their priorities in order to achieve it, a desire that was on full display during the health care reform debate. Republicans care about deficit reduction only to the extent that it can be undertaken without impeding upon other, higher priorities.

--Jonathan Chait on tnr.com

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 6

I read two long scenes: the phone conversation between Orin and Hal on just what happened when their father committed suicide by putting his head in a microwave oven, and the following section, almost as long, about the Port Washington tennis match. Or at least the lead-up to it; I don't know if we get more of a it later.

I actually skipped the first five or six pages of the brothers' phone conversation, which simply looked like banter, and got to the meat of it: the part about their father's death, a section which answers the question of how anyone could actually commit suicide by putting their head in a microwave oven. I won't spoil it for you if you haven't read it. What impressed me about this whole scene is the mastery of black comedy. The whole idea of committing suicide by microwave is so absurd that it's impossible to believe, but when the author clearly describes how it might actually be accomplished, and its results, you the reader are forced to deal with this event along with the characters.

That said, I am just not finding anything about the dad figure all that interesting. Oh, I forgot about the whole scene that precedes this -- the scene of Joelle Van Dyne at a party of film grad students. Somewhere else in this blog I have expressed my revulsion at film grad students, a revulsion born of close exposure to them when I was a film criticism undergraduate. And they don't seem any more likable through DFW's eyes. As for the positively baroque and obsessive drug preparations which Joelle goes through, that was hard to read too. Clearly the author is both 1) comparing the anticipatory pleasure experienced by an addict before getting high with the anticipation of a suicide, and 2) himself taking a definitely weird obsessive pleasure in depicting it. Of course most of the over-detailed parts of this book, which are so many as to actually take up most of the book, share in this delight in obsessive detail, so that it comes to seem as if it's one of the author's main themes. If it's true that this is a book about the seductive nature of consumption, then I find this strategy on the part of the author to be wrong-headed. The joy he takes in depicting obsession is itself obsessive: there's not enough irony between them. It's like reading erotica that you know the author was turned on by when he or she wrote it.

I pretty much enjoyed the tennis match. I want to make it clear that I don't care about tennis one bit, but the pleasure I take in reading about it in this book is like that of any reader who learns about a subject by reading a novel about it. (Cf. my I.J. entry no. 4 in which I remarked on this effect as well.)

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 5

Last night I read the section from page 193 to 210 which introduces Ennet House and its surroundings and denizens. Yes, we've seen some of them before, but in this section the author does a very head-on description of the place -- its surroundings, including with respect to the tennis academy which has dominated the first two hundred pages, plus a long section on the things "you learn" in rehab there. After several pages of this (for example, you learn "that no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that," and "that the metro Boston street term for not having any money is sporting lint"), the narration shifts to several pages about the various tattoos of Ennet House denizens.

The information on tattoos is presented as the fruit of an obsessive interest by one of the residents, Ewell, but the passage struck me as the first part of the book which is truly dated. When the author wrote the book in the early 1990s, tattoos were still largely limited to the kinds of people described here -- prisoners, gang members, and the more outre members of the drug or queer community. Tattoos are depicted as disfiguring, as one of the stupid and "permanent" consequences of the poor judgement that results from doing drugs. As large as the author's imagination clearly is, he obviously never imagined that tattooing would become so mainstream that it's now unusual for a youth in his or her 20s or 30s not to have one.

Before tattoos, piercing was in vogue. In the 1990s, I got pierced. I never got tattooed. Now age 55, all my piercings are gone except one. Still don't have a tattoo.

I haven't mentioned, by the way, the section which precedes this, about Madame Psychosis' radio show. I enjoyed the section, and not because I expect or hope this radio show or its mysterious host to appear anywhere in the rest of the book except maybe in passing reference, but because I love weird radio that's on late at night and that almost no one listens to.

Antwerp to 2666 -- beginning to end for Bolaño

Man, what an achievement 2666 was. I re-read the last twenty pages of The Part About Fate this weekend -- maybe the part which is most like the Bolaño book I'm actually reading now, Antwerp.

Antwerp is very short, probably no more than 4000 words, so I'm savoring it. I read a chapter (each of which are 200-500 words long) one day and re-read it a day or two later and then move on. There is no plot, or only a very obscure one. The book sort of reads like a novel of which only the first sentence of every paragraph has been printed; in fact, I thought idly that you could actually use it as a template and write a paragraph for each sentence, using the existing sentence somewhere in the paragraph. Or you could write an alternate novel using the chapter titles only. Or you could write a series of songs using the chapter titles. (There are 55 chapters or so, so it would be a lot of songs. But the chapter titles do sound like song titles.)

Why do I say that The Part About Fate, from Bolaño's final novel, is like Antwerp, which he wrote more than twenty years earlier? Because both are noirish. And this strikes me now because part of the novel I'm working on now is noirish.

Morgan Meis put it all much better in this review from the website "The Smart Set":

Ignacio Echevarría, Bolaño's executor, called Antwerp the "Big Bang" that created Bolaño's subsequent literary universe. That would mean the fragmentary jottings from Antwerp later expand into the dense 900 pages of 2666, Bolaño's magnum opus of crime and horror revolving around the small town of Santa Teresa. In a few literal ways this is probably true. Crime and violence are the twin stars in Bolaño's works. They are already there in Antwerp, the narrative of which (if there can be said to be one at all) centers on the murder of six kids at a place called the Calabria Commune campground.

I'm more interested, for the moment, in how Antwerp is the birth of a literary mood in Bolaño, one that also stayed with him throughout the production of his longer and more ambitious works. Yes, Antwerp is the creation of themes and characters that will reappear throughout Bolaño's writings. It is also the creation of Bolaño the writer, a statement about the kind of writer he wants to be.

Huh, plus the fact that I have a character in my book named Echevarría. With the accent over the i, if you please.

Foamer has apocalyptic vision in downtown... Columbus, Ohio

Gadfly, failed congressional candidate and opinionated old white man Dave Daubenmire took his granddaughter to the Fourth of July in downtown Columbus, Ohio, and was struck by this apocalyptic vision:

Boiling in the inner cities is a witch's brew of out-of-control passions fed by ignorance, poverty, drugs, and sex. ... Our journey into downtown Columbus exposed us to an element that has been quietly lurking in the shadows. All of the signs have been visible, yet our rose-colored glasses and Polyannic attitudes have cast a false brightness into the storm clouds.

The thunder is rolling in the form of roving gangs of fatherless families trolling the sidewalks of the inner cities. Saggy-trousered teenage boys, tattooed from pillar to post, wander the sidewalks, followed by scantily-clad teenage mothers with a toddler saddled to the hip.

But Dave, at least the men are still leading!

That was from last week's post. This week he takes up one of his standard hobby-horses: the alleged effeminization of evangelical Christianity and his broad dislike of most of its leaders. Along the way, he suddenly blurts:

Heck, I guess Jesus isn't good enough. It takes an "anointed teacher" to help lead you to your destiny. The thought of getting out a Bible and getting on your face just doesn’t seem to do the job anymore. I've always found eating carpet to be an effective way of getting in touch with my destiny.

Emphasis mine, but wow, did that ever jump out. That doesn't mean today what it used to mean, Coach.

Friday things

Today's the 8th anniversary of the death of Roberto Bolaño in 2003. He died awaiting a liver transplant. Did you know you can donate a part of your own liver to someone whose liver is breaking, and both of you come out alive? Your liver grows back! Wow.

This morning in Whole Foods, among their usual greatest-hits-of-the-Sixties/Seventies/Eighties, the Muszak played Martha and the Muffins' great "Echo Beach," perhaps the greatest hit of 1980. (1980 also brought David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes," the B-52s' "Private Idaho" and "Rock Lobster," The Brian Eno/Talking Heads collaboration "Fear of Music," Michael Jackson's "Rock with You," and the Psychedelic Furs' "Sister Europe." Other than that it wasn't such a great year musically. Example: The Rolling Stones' disappointing followup to 1979's triple-awesome "Some Girls," the album "Emotional Rescue," of which the title song was the only really good cut.)

Readers know I make my living as a technical writer. McSweeney's just published a brilliant satire positing Gertrude Stein as a tech writer in Ben Greenman's awesome "Gertrude Stein Gets Her New iPhone."

Modernism: Resurface for interpreters

For no particular reason, I copied the text of an 800-word article in the NYT book section reviewing several new crime novels, submitted the text to a randomizer, and got the following modernist text.

My only changes were to break it into paragraphs and capitalize the first words of sentences. Parts of it are definitely Joycean:

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Today's fake: Caught faking footage of fireworks, producer justifies it

A local TV program in Boston that broadcast images of fireworks exploding over area landmarks faked aspects of the footage -- and when the producer was confronted about the fakery, he defended and justified it.

Though the fireworks were shot from a barge in the harbor, some of the images broadcast would mean the fireworks were fired from other locations -- in other words, you couldn't see the bursts and the landmarks from the same angle. When the producer was asked how this came to be, he admitted the footage was digitally altered, but said it was really no different than the comedy "Boston Legal" showing exterior establishing shots of Boston before interior scenes that were actually shot in California. And besides, it wasn't news, it was "entertainment," so it should be all right.

By that logic, the station could show footage of a July Fourth parade in New York and claim it was Boston's parade. For that matter, why film a parade at all, why not just use last year's footage, as parades are all alike?

Dream of secrets

Epic dream in which I got into the habit of breaking and entering expensive houses and lofts in a Noe Valley-like neighborhood. I wouldn't take anything in these invasions, only relaxed among the nice furnishings while the owners were out. But then it happened that in one such burglary I took a sleepy four-year-old, and went for a walk at night around the neighborhood. When it came time to return the child to its home, I couldn't remember which rich house it belonged to, so I simply guessed. I deposited the child in the house I guessed it came from, and got away.

All the while, I was volunteering at a non-profit group run by a conservative woman celebrity, a Palin type. When news of the putative kidnapping came out -- not sure whether I had guessed the wrong house, or whether the child simply told the story to its parents -- even though the culprit was not yet known, the FBI was on the case and I felt they would soon find me out. I felt it was my responsibility to go and warn my employer, so I went and told her about the breaking and entering but not about the kidnapping. And she didn't connect what I had told her to the news at all. At the end of the dream she was called away to other business but gave me a look like "We'll talk about this later."

It's almost like the first half of a Patricia Highsmith thriller -- the lonely, aimless man who has a secret life, with much of the tension around whether and how he will be found out. Of course, since all such stories by Highsmith were allegories of closeted homosexuality, I wonder if such a story would still fly today. I suppose it would -- people are still full of secrets.

Circle squared

Not sure how I ended up here, but I found myself on the iTunes catalog page for "A Penguin Books Amplified Edition" of "On the Road," where I found these cavils listed on the side:

How depressing is that.

First we have to imagine a universe where someone under 12 listens to audio books. (I have a hard enough time imagining a universe where anyone at all does so, but I hear it's a big market for people who spend a lot of time in traffic or mall-walking, so good for them, but there are no 12-year-olds in either group.) Then we have to imagine that, say, a ten-year-old would pay one bit of attention to the first few pages (or minutes) of "On the Road,' with Dean Moriarty coming to New York and eating creampuffs, living in "a cold water flat" and reminding the narrator of "a young Gene Autry."

Above all, what 10-year-old is going to be interested in something with "mild drug use, infrequent/mild profanity or crude humor"? There is probably more drug use, profanity and crude humor on his own playground.

How it cheapens art when you try to rein it in these bureaucratic categories.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 4

My internet reading habits have become governed by an RSS feed, which collects a wide range of stuff from various authors or publications, or on various topics, and which I try to skim through every day. When I find something I want to read at length, I use a widget from readability.com to save it to read later. Then every couple of days I copy all the latest articles from my readability.com collection into a single MS Word document and then print that out. Then I finally read it all over the next day or two, away from the computer. It becomes a sort of self-edited magazine.

Last night in Infinite Jest I reached the chapter which opens with the fairly inane telephone conversation between Hal and Orin Incandenza and then goes on to include four "documents" such as an insurance company email about a wacky construction site accident and an essay of sorts about the introduction, wide adoption, adjustments to, and sudden consumer rejection of videophone technology. These documents are all on different subjects, written in a different style, and it struck me that reading them in succession is not unlike reading my printed-out articles from the RSS feed.

Here we see the author's playfulness, and that's the main thing I took away. The second thing was his willingness to go to exhaustive length about a subject, such as the essay about the adoption and subsequent rejection of "videophony." Its author explains at great length, employing the level of detail that only a geek, such as a "Lord of the Rings" geek, could muster about his chosen subject, while recounting something which is fairly obvious on its face (no one who is not a narcissist or an attractive teenager feels very comfortable using a webcam). Because of this, the essay could probably be cut to a third its length and lose almost nothing. So I conclude that the level of detail is the whole point. It's an exhibition of what it's like to know everything about one little corner of the universe, and happily explain it all to everyone.

That, of course, is why Wikipedia is such a success. There is someone like that for almost every subject in the world -- not just the obvious fan-focused topics such as LOTR or Star Trek. With a little study, I myself might be able to rustle up a pretty good critical essay on the early films of Wim Wenders.

But before Wikipedia, we had novels. Moby Dick, with its exhaustive description of 19th century whaling, is the obvious comparison. But the best novels always give readers a sense that they're learning a lot of important and -- this is very important -- authentic things about something. Readers of Shogun are, by the time they finish the tome, convinced they could get along pretty well in 17th century Japan. Even my mother's 85-year-old husband said to me last month: "I know some Japanese: kimasu. Because I read Shogun." I thought to myself, Hmm, to go? Probably not... Then, remembering the book and the Japanese word which is repeated over and over, I said "You mean wakarimasu -- to understand." And he agreed, yes, that was it.

Life not as exciting as stories, except perhaps for the mentally ill

Most everybody has seen this brief retelling of Kurt Vonnegut explaining narrative arcs and coming to the conclusion that "people think their lives are supposed to be like" those of the characters in stories.

Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing [that will] go down in history. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it'll be told for a thousand years. "But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies," [says Vonnegut,] "we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none."

I recalled that lecture when I read this passage in the May 30, 2011 New Yorker about mentally ill people:

If a person goes from being a political martyr to a mental patient in just a few days -- the sign of a successful hospital stay, by most standards -- her life may begin to feel banal and useless. Insight is correlated with fewer hospital re-admissions, better performance at work, and more social contacts, but it is also linked with lower self-esteem and depression.

This also recalls the end of the Albert Books film "The Muse," when Sharon Stone's character, who had presented herself as a magical character with the power to evoke brilliance from blocked writers, is nabbed by the men in white coats. Yes, I guess real life as most people lead it is pretty dull compared to a schizophrenic's identity as a world-saver or a hotly pursued secret agent.

Today's fake: figure in Japanese TV commercial is actually computer-generated

We're not talking about crowds enhanced by CGI, we're talking about a pictured pop singer who is actually computer generated using combinations of features from 61 other young women.

Only an early entrant in what I predict will be a brief flood of movies featuring computer-generated characters in live-action films, movies which will garner a little bit of interest before everyone realizes they completely suck. Then the technology will be absorbed by the porn industry and by television commercials. Because really, why pay people who just get sick and die, or have gag reflexes?

I also predict there will be a new term for the flow of jobs to computer-generated figures: not off-shoring or in-sourcing, but something else. I can't think of a good snappy term for it right now. It's too bad "virtual" has three syllables and takes a long time to say. I wonder what the Japanese call it.

Google advertising FAIL

This story in my Google Reader (from the 3 Quarks Daily website) and an advertisement from a trade school resulted in an unfortunate pairing:

Today's fake: "beautiful people" website wasn't really hacked to allow uglies

A website called beautifulpeople.com sent out a press release claiming that a hacking attack had allowed the pictures of allegedly non-beautiful people to be posted -- horrors! Actually, there was no such attack and it was all a publicity stunt to drive traffic to their site.

Interesting -- you put up a website which is supposed to have pictures of only beautiful people. Then in order to drive traffic to the site, you have to claim that gasp! ugly people have appeared there. By this logic, editors could boost the readership of their newspaper's website by alleging that false stories had been maliciously posted, or ministers could increase church attendance by claiming they were sometimes afflicted by demons that would make them do wrong things during the service. Hmm, maybe I really would pay to see that.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 3

Yesterday and the day before I read the passage from pages 95-125 which alternates between scenes at the tennis academy and a scene on a ridge outside Tucson and a dialogue between two secret agents. I liked the kid scenes enormously. They start in the locker room as several student athletes rest from a long day of classes and sports. In this first scene we hear them complaining to each other in an arch, jokey way that is also somehow formalized -- and indeed it's later referred to as a "ritual" -- about the heavy load of studying and tennis practice. the author also establishes for the reader the academy's system of mentoring, in which an older teenager is responsible for shepherding and encouraging several younger ones, as young as age 10. In the following scenes we see this mentoring several times over; we see how each of the older teenagers goes about it. And it's enormously sweet the way the older kids take the younger ones in hand, rather than bullying them, which is what you'd expect Americans to do, or at the very least holding them at arm's length with the kind of needling that so typifies the emotional immaturity of American males with each other.

The oblique way they talk to each other in the first locker room scene reminded me a little of Don De Lillo and they way his teenaged characters banter, but instead of going the alienated, hostile route that De Lillo's characters usually choose, these kids have an underlying warmth and camaraderie that keeps their talk from becoming the sort of war De Lillo's characters are usually engaged in with each other.

These scenes alternate, as I said, with a single scene on a ridge outside Tucson, as two secret agents -- one Canadian and one American, I think, the former in a wheelchair and one of the "wheelchair assassin" squad -- banter about tradecraft, gossip about the latest news, and feel each other out as to who's responsible for the deaths and injuries caused by the magically compelling videotape. Neither one seems to know much about it, but since they're spies they could be lying to each other. In any case I didn't cotton too much to this scene. I suppose the author is laying plenty groundwork for a geo-political farce having to do with the reapportionment of territories between Canada and the U.S. (perhaps not a union as I earlier surmised). But it just didn't seem that interesting. He imbues the scenes in the tennis academy with much more warmth.

There follows a seven-page scene narrated in first-person by an unknown drug addict and thug, written in an unidentifiable patois that is a mixture of street dialect and intentionally bad spelling. I was surprised that I found myself drawn in by this narrative, because I avoid books written in dialect. But it's a very well-shaped story, a sort of horror tale involving the violence of the narrator and his two comrades in thuggery, and their relations with a sinister Chinatown drug dealer. Again, the author must be setting up some longer thread, because while we've seen stuff about drugs already (an unnamed man waiting for a delivery of high-class weed, and a scene on a psych ward between a shrink and a young woman), I think it's the first time we've seen these characters. Maybe all the drug-related characters will come together later.

Today's fake: Supposed billionaire with money to lend

Author of not a Ponzi scheme but a simple fraud, this fellow advertised himself as a billionaire willing to loan millions out of his personal fortune. Companies only had to put up an "establishment fee":

Mr Johnson was one of many who saw the ads WGA ran in the Australian business press. Favourable stories followed about a Newcastle company so happy with its first $US200 million loan, it said it was after a second.

The Herald has since revealed that no money was ever received and that one of the directors of that company was Sydney lawyer John Mulally, who happens to be WGA's lawyer in Australia.
Mr Johnson paid a $3.8 million establishment fee to secure a desperately needed $150 million loan, which never materialised. He is now struggling to refinance his development company which was hoping to develop 10,000 housing blocks around the central coast and Hunter area.

Not sure how long the scammer expected to get away with that. Sounds like a simple pigeon drop scheme, only with millions of dollars on an international scale.

Lonely, bitter man predicts that in collapse, everyone will become like him

This screed from a collapsitarian contains the usual laundry list of dire predictions of societal collapse. What makes it different is a few side comments the author adds to his prediction. For example:

Alcoholism, drug use and domestic violence will likely soar. I also expect the declining marriage rate to drop at an even faster pace.

Disclosure: I don't believe that a man should get married. There's nothing that marriage offers that he can't already get. Plus, the divorce and family courts will screw him over in a big way. Nevertheless, many women will not be interested in marrying a poor or working class man. And frankly, more men will fall into this category. Moreover, less men will want to get married because they will feel that they have little to offer.

What an insightful view of human behavior! I feel like I know him better now. Let me guess, he's a drunken old asshole whose wife left him after years of abuse, and he feels screwed over by everybody from his ex to the courts.

From what I can gather, this loser mentality seems only too prominent among survivalist and "sovereign" types.

According to the article, the Big Collapse can follow any number of catastrophes, from economic meltdown to a solar storm -- a vague assertion that makes it clear that the author's interest is not in how we get there, but what follows.

I think of this as a primarily pornographic view of the future. Collapsitarians love to repeat to each other the gory details of how bad it's all going to get following the B.C., but they're never too specific about exactly how we would get there. Harrumph, solar storm, ahem! The parallels to the Zombie Apocalypse are unmistakable. No one spends much time thinking about how the Z.A. actually originates; what's important is the stalking, growling, head-exploding, etc. Similarly, what's important to the collapsitarians is the rioting, shooting, general breakdown of everything. It makes them very excited.

Update a few hours later: The same blog has published an entry from one of its regular alarmists, saying that something called a super EMP would disable all electronics in the lower 48 states. Well, I guess it would have to be "super." The entry also includes links to several examples of collapsitarian porn such as the excitingly titled "One Second After."

Hey, it's pride week

This TV commercial from the outdoors equipment retailer REI has a nice little crypto-lesbo moment that's impossible to miss.

Not sure how else to interpret it than "You may be out biking with your 'boyfriend,' but it's the lady bikers you really have your eye on."

25 years!

Yesterday was Cris and my 25th anniversary -- measured from the day we met, an event which Cris charmingly memoir'd at that link. (Excuse the slowness of the link -- the Open Salon system has been impossibly messed up for the last few months, a sign that Salon.com no longer has either the willingness or resources to properly maintain the database of what are probably hundreds of thousands of posts. For database administrators, it could be a job opportunity, but that's only if they can afford to hire anyone.)

Reading that story again, I realize what a connection it makes to the spirituality of one of my best friends, Sara Miles, whose book Take This Bread focuses on a moment of transformation that occurred when she was offered a piece of bread. When I broke bread and offered it to Cris, our lives were not transformed in that moment, but it began a process which has not yet ended.

To mark the day, we went hiking for the first time since Cris's back surgery -- a good three miles and more in Redwood Park -- and then a good meal at Bar Bambino, one of my favorite restaurants.

If my scanner worked, I'd post pictures of what we looked like then. I was certainly cuter; Cris has only gotten more beautiful.

Google "reminder"

Anybody else notice this in your Google Chat window today? It appears by default. Will this start to become like the Google Doodle, which is the name for the fanciful (and sometimes interactive) drawings that  supplant the Google logo on their home search page on certain holidays and commemorations? I can see: "Reminder: Ash Wednesday," perhaps, or "Reminder: change your smoke detectors."

Today's fake: Speculators pursue the Bitcoin, but ... whaaaat?

Last decade's virtual-goods mindfuck was the gold farming industry, in which American entrepreneurs went to China, hired educated but out-of-work tech grads, and put them to work for 12 to 16 hours at a time on repetitive tasks which generated virtual goods in the World of Warcraft game -- goods which could be sold for real money to game players who didn't want to put in the time and effort it took to accumulate those goods within the game. (These goods, such as a "magic sword" object, enable players to play the game at higher levels more successfully.) China made the practice illegal, but that hasn't stopped provincial prison officials from employing prisoners as gold farm slave laborers. So that's still going on.

Then there's the Zynga empire, which essentially turns all its games' players into slave laborers for the company's profit. In a way it's much simpler than the gold farming scheme, which is essentially a parasitical practice on a much larger operation (the WoW platform); Zynga simply creates an addictive product ¹ with no raw ingredients and a potentially worldwide customer base. Zynga is equivalent to a tobacco company which claims cigarette smoking isn't addictive, except it doesn't have to go to the trouble of buying raw materials, manufacturing cigarettes, and shipping them to wholesalers. It simply creates a compelling internet experience and collects an almost unlimited profit stream. It's like putting a video slot machine in everyone's home, only it's a slot machine that never pays out but simply provides its user with the mind-numbing experience of playing.

So it's one thing to create something of value out of nothing, or rather, out of electrons and human sweat. How could you go one better? How about creating nothing out of nothing, putting a value on it, and then having the unlimited greed of speculators do all the work for you? Well, it's happened. Behold the Bitcoin, a virtual currency with no meaning, no tie to any governmental or corporate entity, much less a game or virtual world. It is simply a computer algorithm (no doubt copyrighted) which permits licensees to generate units of valuation.

Bitcoins are snippets of code that use encryption to prevent counterfeiting and double-spending. Complex algorithms control the money supply, in theory replacing the need for banks or a central regulator. Right now Bitcoins can be generated -- or "mined" -- by running a program on a powerful computer. This task requires exponentially more time and processing power as the number of Bitcoins grows, and the absolute number of Bitcoins is capped at 21 million, mimicking the scarcity of gold.

Yes, you too can buy the code and generate your own Bitcoin, but notice that caveat about the "exponentially more time and processing power" needed to do so at a meaningful scale. Indeed:

One college student sustained permanent minor brain damage due to heatstroke after he dozed off in his room next to four computers furiously mining Bitcoins. "I wish I was joking," he said in a forum post that was reposted on the website BitcoinMiningAccidents.com.

Yes, there is a website devoted to "Bitcoin mining accidents"!! It's at this point you wonder what the world is coming to.

Certain cynics and libertarian critics of the monetary system -- the kind who yearn for a return to the gold standard -- would say this isn't much different from the current state of affairs in which we endow pieces of paper, some printed with "1" and others printed with "100," with value simply because we agree to. And they would also point out the similarities of limiting the total number of units of exchange and the ability to produce it. (Only the government can print money, and it controls the supply; in the same way only those holding the code for Bitcoin can generate it, and the code contains a self-limiting feature which will prevent more than a certain amount of Bitcoin to be "mined.") To them, our whole monetary system is a similar hoax.

I see this trend continuing. Last week lots of people were transfixed by the "fake lesbian bloggers," and there are still postings and articles being written on its implications for identity politics, online activism, and the whole question of online identity. At root of this issue is the question of whether or not there is substance behind what we value. The fact that Bitcoin exists and that apparently rational people are investing in it calls this into question even further.

Meanwhile, on Gawker just now: A virus that scans computers for Bitcoin and steals it.


¹ The piece on "my Farmville addiction" is not that informative, but notice the article's raison d'etre: the writer is explaining to his readers why he disappeared for two weeks. In other words, he went into a k-hole, or rather an internet hole, and didn't come out for weeks. Because he was playing Farmville. And couldn't stop.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 2

I was wrong in my last entry, I wasn't on page 70, I was on page 60.

Now having read 12 more pages I am thinking about the plot thread having to do with the magically compelling videotape (or whatever the so-called "cartridge" is -- we don't know yet whether it's a feature film, a live shot of something, a hypnotic abstract design, or what -- I'll just call it a videotape until I know more).

First of all, at this early point the author is very cagey about the content of the magic videotape and what makes it compelling. And that's obviously the right choice -- you never show the monster in full light and full figure until the last ten minutes of the movie. And this being a literary novel and not, say, Cloverfield, I'm reading and thinking it doesn't really matter what's on the videotape. It is horrifying? Beautiful? Doesn't matter -- what matters is its effect.

Two points here. First, in the current state of ambiguity as to the content of the videotape and even whether it is horrifying or beautiful, it seems to me the author is saying that horrifying and beautiful are in some sense the same thing -- that they meet on both ends of the spectrum. The word "awesome" in its original meaning would apply, as the viewer's reaction of awe is what's important, not whether or not the material is awful.

What do I think about that -- beautiful is the same as horrifying? What's the author trying to say here? Is he suggesting that this equivalence is true, or is he (with a level of irony) suggesting that modern entertainment issues forth from this position of equivalence? The latter would be a more interesting point. The more you think about it, the truer it seems. Think about today's television. On the one hand, some good programming ("The Wire," "Mad Men," etc.). On the other hand, atrocious shit (take your pick). To the television/cable networks, it doesn't really matter. High class? Low class? Who cares as long as it pulls in the viewers? And the magically compelling videotape is the logical extension of this ad absurdam.

Second point: If I were to try to guess what's on the videotape -- an exercise which the author clearly understands is impossible for the reader to resist -- I can't imagine. Being 55 years old, I'm well aware that the avant garde of horrifying filmmaking has long passed me by. Between films like Hostel, with its images of torture, and those of Sion Sono (cf. Suicide Club, where a certain television commercial has the power to drive people to self-destcructive acts), I recoil from stuff that 23-year-olds eagerly consume. (In fact, I began this process when I was 23, when I walked out of Alien. ) In any case, to effect the weaponized hypnotic effect described in "Infinite Jest," the material would have to be geometrically worse.

If such horror (and let's say it's horror, not beauty) is unimaginable by a softy like me, maybe it would be imaginable by some freaky youngster. But I kind of doubt anyone could imagine anything that bad. Such horror is achievable only by a supernatural power; call it Satan. I assume the author is not writing a book about a literal Satan, so that means I have to suspend my disbelief here. In other words, I don't really buy the magical powers of the special evil videotape. But I'll have to take it on faith.

The way I read is, if I have to consciously do this -- say to myself, Okay, there's a hole here in the author's reasoning, a hole he doesn't want me to notice if I'm to continue to invest myself emotionally in his book -- that's sort of a strike. A book can sustain a number of these, the number varying depending on many factors. The book's reputation means I'll cut it a lot of slack.

 
For further reading: Scott Esposito in The Quarterly Conversation with a perspective on Infinite Jest fifteen years after its advent. I had no idea the book was already fifteen years old.

Today's overkill

The headline says it all: Man Uses Shotgun to Remove Wart From Finger.

I wonder if his thinking was based on an incident like the one I experienced when I was about 16. It was a pimply time of life, and at one point I'd had a pimple on the inside of my ear, right in the crest of the helix (see link for explanation), for several weeks. It was really hard to get at, and wouldn't go away. One day I was at a meeting of the church youth group. Another 16-year-old said something insulting and I picked up the nearest object -- a box of kleenex -- and winged it at him. It hit him in the face, which pleased me and made him mad. Seemed like the best outcome to me -- I hit him in the face with something harmless. But in his desire for vengeance he came over and cuffed me on the side of the head. The blow coincidentally ruptured the pimple in my ear. I declined to exchange blows and he went back and sat down, perhaps alarmed by the blood and pus coming out of my ear and wondering if he had actually wounded me gravely. I got up, retrieved the kleenex and wiped myself off, and from then on the pimple healed completely and never bothered me again.

Which makes me think that the fellow with the shotgun might have chosen a more appropriate weapon. Maybe he could have taunted a dog and got the dog to bite it off. (Cf. the classic story of the the dog that saved its master's life by eating his gangrenous toe.) But I guess if all you have is a shotgun, everything looks like ... Hmm, what? Not a finger with a wart.

Brits have no trouble with naughty book title

British newspapers have no trouble publishing the full title of "Go the Fuck to Sleep," the best-selling children's book by American author Adam Mansbach.

By contrast, here's the New York Times, which refuses to print the whole title:

Today's most horrifying image of scientific research

The new research involved numerous experiments in mice aimed at teasing out what happens to both brain and behavior when ketamine takes effect. In one such test, mice were forced to swim in a water-filled tube that they cannot escape. Previous research has shown that mice given antidepressants swim longer before giving up: a sign that the drugs are working.

-- From a Time article
on new uses for the drug ketamine

Isn't that a wonderful image for the use of anti-depressants in modern society: Although you are existentially trapped, you "swim longer before giving up." Lovely.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 1

On the urging of my friend Katia, we're both reading Infinite Jest this summer. I picked it up on Saturday after seeing it in the window of a local bookstore. It was a new copy, the proprietor said -- "we hardly ever get it used." I guess if you finish it, you want people to know it and you put it on your shelves. But it's odd that there aren't a bunch of used copies out there from people who never finished it.

It's a thousand-plus pages. I'm not intimidated by very large books, having read Underworld, 2666 and The Savage Detectives, Europe Central, and all three volumes of Your Face Tomorrow, a magnum opus by Javier Marías. And yes, they are all proudly on my shelves.

I'm up to about page 70 of Infinite Jest, and I'm learning about this surreal tennis academy and the Incandenza family. Also there seems to be some kind of comic subplot having to do with a union between the U.S. and Canada and a Quebecois separatist movement. And there is some odd obfuscation by the author regarding video storage and viewing technology, perhaps under the assumption that any technology he wrote about would soon be obsolete and would date the book, so he made up something that was slightly off having to do with "cartridges."

I happened to read something today that said Don Gately was the central character, which seems strange since so far it seems Hal Incandenza, the youngest of his family and an obvious stand-in for the author, is the main character.

So far I admire the effort. I'm skipping just a little bit when I decide I don't need every single detail of a character's perceptions of the setting, which is something the author really extends.

When recordings betray you

Harold Camping, the 89-year-old self-proclaimed "Bible teacher" (he never refers to himself as a "minister" or preacher, contrary to references in SF Gate.com and other reports), is being released from the hospital after treatment for a mild stroke which he suffered a few days ago. Camping is the head of Family Radio, an obscure but world-reaching Christian radio station which he used to disseminate a prediction that Christ would return on May 21 this year.

That prediction, its failure, and Camping's rescheduling of the apocalypse to Oct. 21, has been widely covered. In the meantime, what's Family Radio been doing with its main announcer and on-air presence down with a stroke?

Running recorded programs, that's what. And they don't do him any favors. There's no way of telling when the recorded versions of his daily "Open Forum" call-in show were recorded, but they give us a noticeably younger and more in-control Camping. His voice has always been gravelly and monotonous, but in the last year or two has been quivering with age. The recordings only point up the contrast to his present state.

Another program in which Camping has been going through the Old Testament book of Ruth seems to have been recorded even longer ago than the "Open Forum" recordings now running. He sounds positively middle-aged, his voice powerful and steady. All the sadder for this misguided man.

Today's fake: Another 'lesbian' blogger revealed as straight male

Over the weekend a blogger who pretended to be a Syrian lesbian was revealed to be a fiction. Among the bloggers who looked into the hoax was Liz Henry, who in her investigation of "Amina" discovered that the supposedly Syrian woman was first brought to the attention of a wide audience on a blog called Lez Get Real. Digging in to this part of the story, Henry was the first to suggest that Paula Brooks, the author of the Lez Get Real blog, also might not be what she seemed.

A day later: She was right. The author of Lez Get Real, who said "she" was deaf and therefore had to communicate on the phone through her "father," was actually the man pretending to be the "father," 58-year-old Bill Graber.

"Holy CRAP," Henry tweeted. "I'm going to end up writing "Internet Lesbians for Dummies" aren't I? .. Or maybe do a video with Olivia Newton John singing 'Lez Get Fictional.'"

Graber: "I didn't start [Lez Get Real] with my name because... I thought people wouldn't take it seriously, me being a straight man." You think?!

But best of all:

In the guise of Paula Brooks, Graber corresponded online with ["Amina" author] Tom MacMaster, thinking he was writing to Amina Arraf. Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.

Good times!
 

I think I'm on Plan G or H

The NYT has a link to a feature called 18-Year-Olds Predict Their Future. Huh, wonder what I would have "predicted" for my future when I was 18. (I turned 55 this year.)

I think I would have expected to be either a writer or an actor, although what I really wanted to be was a disc jockey on the radio. I didn't have the slightest idea how to go about achieving that dream, and by the time I got out of college I was a film critic. That lasted about a year, and then I devoted a lot of time to being a performance artist while working various dead-end jobs and then getting my teaching degree. That lasted a couple years. Anyway, 37 years after graduating from high school, I actually do earn my living as a writer -- a technical writer, that is.

What use it is "predicting" at age 18 what you're going to be, I don't know.

Today's fake: 'Gay Girl in Damascus' actually a straight American man

This won't be news to anybody -- it's been the focus of a fairly intense internet flap for several days -- and I'm just documenting it here in the interest of logging yet another hoax and making a comment or two. Briefly:

1. A blog entitled "Gay Girl in Damascus" attracted attention for some time ("for years," says the Washington Post) [permalink].
2. Several days ago, the pseudononymous author of the blog, one "Amina," was said to have been detained by security forces in Syria, where of course a rebellion is raging.
3. In attempting to verify the alleged arrest and support its victim, some bloggers began to have what Liz Henry* called "painful doubts" about the real existence of "Amina."
4. Investigation by Henry and by Ali Abunimah of the blog "The Electronic Intifada," as well as by mainstream reporters, revealed a number a clues suggesting that "Amina" was actually an American named Tom MacMaster.
5. Today MacMaster has admitted being the author of "Gay Girl in Damascus".

The Washington Post has the whole story [permalink] and a photo of the bearish MacMaster. Meanwhile, Henry has suggested that another blogger, Paula Brooks, who was interviewed by journalists regarding the case may also be a fake persona, perhaps concocted by the same man.

What the hell, everyone says.

First, everyone should read Henry's initial "painful doubts" post, because she raises several interesting issues about online identity and the degree to which what she calls fictional blogging can be a valid form in some cases. And then you should read a 2008 post of hers in which she uncovers an entire blog in which the blogger and most of the commenters are nothing but sockpuppets. That post is especially valuable if: 1) you want insight into how an online citizen journalist goes about investigating online identity, and 2) you want to understand why it matters.

Now that the facts are coming out, it's hard not to see l'affaire Amina as being very much like the J.T. LeRoy hoax, featuring the same attributes of gender crossing, impersonation of a genderqueer person, appropriation of an oppressed minority identity by someone more privileged, and readers' similar emotional feelings of investment and betrayal. (I've blogged several times about the JT LeRoy hoax and about fakes in general -- see below.)

To repeat what I've said before: words matter. Stories matter. I'm sure this MacMaster fellow is going to say he did this to draw attention to the plight of women and homosexuals in the Middle East, or for some other apparently good reason. But when you pretend to be one of an oppressed minority and make people feel sympathy for you, when the truth comes out those people are going to feel you've manipulated them, no matter how noble your motives were. And they're going to be angry.

Update: A comment from a real LGBT blogger in Syria:

To Mr. MacMaster, I say shame on you!!! There are bloggers in Syria who are trying as hard as they can to report news and stories from the country. We have to deal with too many difficulties than you can imagine. What you have done has harmed many, put us all in danger, and made us worry about our LGBT activism. Add to that, that it might have caused doubts about the authenticity of our blogs, stories, and us. Your apology is not accepted, since I have myself started to investigate Amina's arrest. I could have put myself in a grave danger inquiring about a fictitious figure. Really... Shame on you!!!

Previously:

On JT LeRoy:

People Continue To Take 'JT LeRoy' Writer Seriously
The Fake Patrol
Suckers Line Up to claim they were duped by LeRoy hoax
'Other Writers Latched Onto JT as Career Move'

Other hoaxes and fakes:

Is there a 'larger, better truth' than just the facts?
"Really though, at this point, who's to say what's real anymore?"
Author made up quotes, degree, many other false claims
Crazy people make up the best stories
GOP volunteer charged with making false report
Hoaxers as superheroes

* Disclosure: Liz Henry is a friend of mine.

"Patriot" preacher can't resist bragging about how smart he is

I've posted about Chuck Baldwin before -- he's the crypto-facist Christian preacher who was more or less kicked out of his Florida church and decided, with great fanfare, to move his family to a remote corner of Montana because it is "more free."

Today he posted another dilly. I'm going to quote just the really funny parts.

• Montana is the new land of the free because it has no large cities, which are "the bane of freedom," though he doesn't explain the reasoning behind that.
• Idaho is a "great freedom-loving state" now, but as many liberals are moving to Boise, it may soon be lost "and go the way of Oregon and Washington."
• The people in Montana come out for his rallies, unlike the people in Florida. (He doesn't realize it's because Montanans have almost nothing else to do than go to tea party rallies.)
• God loves mountainous areas more than flat ones.
• The cold weather in Montana "keeps out undesirables: people who are comfort-oriented and not liberty-oriented!"
• Montana is a very peaceful state because they allow people to carry guns openly.

Of course, this summary doesn't do justice to his weird syntax, love of exclamation points, and the strange way he develops a theme.

What the guy is really doing is laying the groundwork for a run at governor. I hope he doesn't take the disappointment too hard.

Who's even crazier? Randall Terry. He's running for President -- solely so he can collect funds to air an explicit anti-abortion advertisement -- which all the networks will probably reject.

A killer app for millionaires

A recent article in the New York Times documented how rich Chinese are buying and flying helicopters even though flights in most Chinese airspace are severely restricted. Rather than complying with regulations, some simply pay the fines and keep on flying.

Now comes the news that new jetpack technology allows up to a 30-minute flight. (The headline is about the lift speed, but I think what everyone wants is something to commute in, a need hinted at only toward the bottom of the story.) Although the machine includes "a ballistic parachute outfitted with tiny explosives that launch the canopy into the air regardless of how far the user has fallen" -- I love the statement which follows, "The parachute has been successfully tested, the company said" -- yes, you'd hope so, wouldn't you! -- I see death in the future for a bunch of millionaires who seize the chance to become, in the words of the story, "rocketeers." A form of natural selection, maybe.

More on copywriting

Last Wednesday I mocked an advertisement that promised big money in the copywriting game. But I didn't really know what it was talking about.

That same day the New York Observer ran this piece about the career of someone who made money in the way they may have been thinking of:

Bryne Hobart learned the vagaries of Google rankings while working at Blue Fountain Media, one of the biggest SEO shops in New York. The 24-year-old college dropout had hoped for a career finance, but the market implosion of 2008 nixed that idea. Instead, he scored an internship writing copy at Blue Fountain, eventually working his way up to managing director of marketing. ...

In March, Mr. Hobart and Mr. Pierce formed their own company on the side, Digital Due Diligence. His first post, on Demand Media, drew tens of thousands of readers and was passed around internally at the content farm. Mr. Hobart began monitoring other companies that were relying on some of the shadier SEO strategies, and posting these findings online. The idea behind the business was to help hedge funds and venture capital firms assess the risk of investing in companies that relied heavily on search traffic.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Hobart's double game -- practicing SEO by day, exposing it by night -- soon proved unsustainable.

Then fun was had all around. This all just makes me realize I don't really understand SEO (search engine optimization, one of the dark, or at best grey, arts of the internet) and should read up on it. Dang, though, it's getting harder and harder to keep up.

A note from a desk

What am I doing this fine holiday? Working on my novel. In my work on Saturday I went over the 95,000 word mark, and I noticed today that I'm over 16,000 words into Part 2 -- the part set down in the desert, where I went last fall to research the setting.

I pity the fool

I was dumbfounded when I saw this subject line in an email today:

Tired of Your Day Job? A Lucrative Writing Career Awaits You!

Oh really! What could it possibly be? Given that it was sent by a vendor of online writing workshops, I had the feeling it wasn't an ad for courses on how to be a technical writer, which is the only lucrative writing career I'm aware of being open to average shmoes.

I was right -- it's not. The opening of the email went like this:

You could be writing for a living!

Writers from around the world have learned how to turn their passion into paying work through Breaking into Copywriting, one of the most popular courses at (their outfit).

If you're not familiar with copywriting, then it's time for you to look into this skyrocketing industry that's the perfect gig for writers just like you. Whether you're an aspiring screenwriter, novelist or playwright, or even just an avid reader, you can turn your love for words into a lucrative career as a freelance copywriter.

Copywriting a "skyrocketing industry"? Really? Somehow I doubt it. There was a short period a few years ago when you could make a little money churning (and I mean churning) out content for SEO websites and things like about.com, but that's a thing of the past, I think.

I'd like to link to a blog post from a few months ago that someone wrote -- someone who really was an aspiring fiction writer -- about attempting to get into this game last year, only to find it frustrating and mind-numbing. I can't find it, but I'll revise this later if I do.

People, if you want to make a lot of money writing, become a tech writer. It's not for everyone, but it's for a heck of a lot more people than screenwriting is. A tech writer with five years experience makes 75-100K a year. An "aspiring screenwriter" who's been trying for five years may still have zero chance to ever make money on it.

On the other hand, if it's your dream to write novels and screenplays, do it. Just don't make it your retirement plan.

It's the end of the world but you don't know it

As everyone knows (but will, no doubt, very swiftly forget), a Bay Area preacher named Harold Camping predicted the rapture would happen on Saturday. When it didn't, he professed to be "flabbergasted," and took a few days to do some thinking. This afternoon he more or less squarely faced a press conference and told the press and his radio audience that something "mystical" had taken place on Saturday and never fear, the end of the world will happen on October 21 "just as we have been predicting."

In fact, he has been preaching that the original May 21 date would be only the beginning of a five-month period of terror and that the real end of the world would come as the earth is consumed by fire on Oct. 21. Now he's saying never mind the terror part -- God is merciful! -- but he was right about everything else.

Play-by-play of the event is here, courtesy of a live-blogging HuffPost writer, but I thought the most interesting and telling part of Camping's spiel was when he was asked about the people who had sold their possessions and quit their jobs to advertise the May 21 date. Even if Camping was right about the Oct. 21 date, what did he advise those followers to do in the meantime? After all, Camping had answered a previous question as to whether he would be giving up his worldly possessions by saying in a mystified voice "But I still have to have a place to live... I still have to have a car to drive. Why would I do that?"

So what advice did he have for his followers who were now bereft of possessions? "Look," he said, his voice hardening. "We just went through a great recession. People lost their jobs, they lost their homes, they had to move in with a cousin, perhaps, or cut back very much on spending. But they survived. People cope."

So, anybody who believed this old nutbag and did something stupid like stopped saving for their kids' college tuition or quit their job -- they're on their own for the next five months. Surely some of them will kick themselves, go out and get a new job, and work at not being bitter for the rest of their lives. But others will double down for the real EOTW in October. Those are the people we should be afraid of.

Today's fake: End of the world. So now what?

Okay, it's Saturday afternoon on the 21st, and since Asia is not yet in ruins I think we can assume that series of Christ-sponsored earthquakes, which was supposed to devastate the earth starting in New Zealand and traveling westward, is not happening. I was talking a couple of weeks ago with a friend about this whole EOTW thing, when publicity about it was just starting to bubble to the mainstream. (I had been aware of the May 21 prediction for a year, because I have a morbid fascination with cult figures and frauds, and I have listened on and off to the Bay Area radio station of the Harold Camping cult for years, if for no other reason than his amazingly weird delivery.) My friend said, "How liberating! Wouldn't it be awesome if you really knew the end of the world was coming on a certain day? You could do anything!"

Because she's a shrink, I'm sure she didn't mean that in the "You could finally go out and murder that person on your list" way. She probably meant it in the self-actualizing way. Or she could have meant it the sort of dark-side way, because she also rolls that way. You should read her fiction. (You really should. She's in my writing group. In fact, she is my writing group.)

Right, then, back to work. Rain fell all day the day Sirenita died, but the next morning it cleared up, and since then it's been gorgeous. This is a splendid springtime Saturday, sunny and windy and cool, just perfect. I haven't yet been able to make myself go to my other writing friend's basement and work on my book. I think I'll do it from this nice cafe for a while.

Elegy for Sirenita

On Sunday we brought Sirenita to the garden for the last time; she walked around and sat in the clover.

Sirenita -- Little Siren --
sometimes Squirrel or Little Miss --
born in Oakland, tamed from feral,
dies today. Receive our kiss,
shadow in a chair or corner,
nemesis of hummingbirds and fish,
queen of blooming springtime clover,
drinker deep from spring or dish,
acrobat whose avid leap
brought down ball and shining light.
Lend your black to deeper darkness,
under cover of the earth,
like a blanket you dove under
like your bed, a sleeping berth.
Loudest meower, softest purrer,
take your rest in garden deep,
speak your piece and go to sleep.
Give your substance to these flowers
planted in our garden green,
watered by today's May showers:
thus may death a phantom seem.

Sirenita to end struggle with diabetes; Milagrito faces cancer

Sirenita, 2009

For almost twelve years we've cared for two cats from the same litter, a brother and sister, which we named Milagrito and Sirenita. Born feral in Oakland, they were passed to us by Cris's sister, who was taking care of their mother. Cris tamed them and has largely raised them. They've had a good life in our house and garden, a hundred times better than the short, difficult lives they faced as ferals.

Cris chronicled their doings in dozens of blog entries which she authored in the voice of the male cat, Milagrito. High points: "Pets or Food?"; "The Eye of the Monster"; and perhaps her masterpiece "Sports Magic," in which Cris talked about the issue of performance-enhancing drugs in sports and the reputation of Barry Bonds through the allegory of Sirenita's ball-playing mania.

Last year we noticed that Sirenita was drinking copious amounts of water. The veterinarian diagnosed feline diabetes. Deciding against an expensive course of treatment that would necessitate frequent injections and much emotional upset for the critter, we vowed we would simply keep her comfortable and monitor her condition. That was in the fall, and all through the winter I dreaded the prospect of Sirenita suddenly declining and dying while Cris was laid up at home recovering from spinal surgery.

Thankfully, the cat held on through the winter, and a month ago even showed increased appetite and energy. But now, with Cris having largely recovered, Sirenita has taken a turn for the worse. She stopped eating about ten days ago, and has stopped drinking water almost completely. Though still responsive and not in obvious pain, she is now skin and bones, and I expect her to die today or tomorrow. We already have on speed-dial a vet who will come to the house to administer a lethal injection once Cris judges that Sirenita's quality of life is at an end.

Meanwhile, we were blindsided this week by another blow. Feeling a mass in Milagrito's abdomen, we brought him to the vet on Thursday. She said he has cancer, probably bone cancer. His condition is inoperable, and the decision not to treat the problem was even easier than with Sirenita. There's not much that can be done and he's not in pain. Depending on the speed and type of the tumor, he probably has only weeks or months left.

I'm much closer to Milagrito and found this news profoundly dismaying. The cats are sometimes demanding and often inconvenient -- I'm allergic to them, and we have a complicated protocol where the bedroom must remain fur-free, necessitating showers before getting into bed, which really cuts down on spontaneous naps or sex -- but they've been ornaments to the home and real emotional companions. Many's the time that Cris and I, after an argument with each other, have cradled one of the cats for emotional comfort. Not to mention their entertainment value; they've cracked us up more times than I could count. It'll be really different around here without them.

There's nothing else to say, except that it's sad when pets die, but their companionship is worthwhile, and I'm glad they accompanied us here.

They're just fucking with us now

Via BoingBoing: Blackwater, the infamous private security firm synonymous with US corporate exploitation of the Iraq war, has appointed Bush-era attorney general and former "Singing Senator" John Ashcroft to head a subcommittee in charge of "ethics and professionalism."

Manifold duels

They don't go out of their way to explain, but as I understand it, in August Melville House Publishing is putting out five books all with the title The Duel. Evidently Conrad, Checkov, Casanova, and two other European authors all wrote stories with that title. And I suspect all are in the public domain.

As soon as I saw it, I thought hey, what about the epic passage in The Savage Detectives in which an author challenges a literary critic to a duel with swords? Well, not in the public domain, I guess. (Although I did see a pile of TSD paperbacks on the sale table, not quite at the remainder price, in a bookstore a couple months ago.)

What happened in art also happens in life

At the end of Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star, an agent tracks down and assassinates the book's main character, a skywriting military pilot and secret member of a Chilean death squad.

Now the same thing has happened in real life: The body of 66-year-old Enrique Arancibia, who was convicted in 2004 for crimes committed during the regime of Augusto Pinochet, was found stabbed to death in his Buenos Aires apartment, where he had been living since his 2007 release from prison. This article from Chile's La Nación tells of how he was found "with his intestines in his hand" after being stabbed more than 15 times.