Bolaño canonized, if he wasn't already

(A) small thing ... happened somewhere between the uncorrected proof and the finished hardback (of Roberto Bolaño's final collection The Secret of Evil) that arrived at my door the other day: "FICTION," on the book's jacket, now reads "LITERATURE."

From an essay, "Bolañ'o's Last, Great Secret," by R. B. Moreno
published today on The Millions

I have been compiling reviews essay and news stories about the work of novelist Roberto Bolaño, of whom friends know I am a fan. The file is over 100 pages long and contains over 30 pieces, and I eagerly added this essay.

If not for the fact that all the articles are copyrighted -- and quite rightly so -- I would love to publish the collection as a free ebook, but I'm not sure it would be worth the inevitable hassle. But I'd be glad to send it to anyone interested in the author.

Things I read today

They arranged to meet at a restaurant near the station. ... he looked at the signed photos of soccer players on the walls. The place had been leased a couple of years ago by a forward on the national team, who'd then gone overseas as coach of one of the unofficial American teams; now that that league had broken up, he'd disappeared over there.

--Peter Handke, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick,
tr. Ralph Mannheim. In the Avon paperback "Three by Peter Handke," 1977.

There's a whole unwritten novel in the story of that anonymous footballer.

Strangest executive compensation of the month

The tech company Zynga, which turns its customers into addicts to the extent that it calls its biggest customers "whales" -- the same term casinos use for gullible gamblers who like to front large while regularly losing tens of thousands of dollars -- regularly indulges in weird behavior that should embarrass any reputable company.

For example, when its IPO was upcoming, it asked some employees to return the stock options it had given them when they got hired so that it could redistribute those options to executives and investors; if you were just some ordinary developer or, God help you, a non-technical employee, you could go fuck off if you hoped to profit from the firm's IPO. And this week, with the stock already plunging below the IPO price, it was reported that company insiders are dumping that stock -- the stock they acquired using those options they'd snatched back from the company's workers -- as fast as they can.

Like I said, embarrassing. But this piece of news today was really weird:

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus received a compensation package valued at $1.7 million in 2011, most of it in the form of a home security system and related expenses.

San Francisco-based Zynga said in a regulatory filing Friday that it spent $1.2 million on the one-time purchase and installation of a security system for Pincus and his family. It was included in roughly $1.4 million of "other compensation" for Pincus.

Of course, Pincus and his cronies still got rich off the IPO, even if the stock has lost 25%, because they acquired those options for pennies on the dollar. So he'll have plenty of dough forever. But how strange that he chooses to take much of his annual compensation in the form of a home security system. I'm trying to picture the scene, say, five years ago, where Pincus says to his wife: "Someday, baby, when I make it big, I'm gonna get us the biggest home security system ever!"

It's tempting to suggest that Pincus needs the system because his company's business practices make him plenty of enemies. Maybe so. Like a drug dealer, the man makes his money by running his employees ragged and creating addicts out of his customers; so he surrounds himself with high walls, cameras, and alarms. Pathetic.

For artists, success is an illusion

After she published her first novel, a friend of mine went back to the summer writer's conference where she'd workshopped a part of it a couple years before. Formerly a mere attendee, she was now a published "alumnus" who got to give a reading from her published work and hang out with the writing program teachers and other published writers who make up the event's faculty. So she got to talk to several other women who were about her age or a little older, women who had published not just one novel but four or five.

And what she found was that no one was satisfied; no one considered herself a success. The woman who'd published five novels was dissatisfied because the publisher had been decreasing her advances and print runs for the last three books in a row. The woman who'd published two novels was dissatisfied because her publisher wouldn't spend any money to promote her next book. And so on. That's not even counting the universal bitching from writers about the strains and indignities of book tours. (You flew to 14 cities, stayed in fancy hotels, and were chauffeured from event to event? Really breaks my heart.)

In that light, I draw your attention to this article on Salon.com, No Sympathy for the Creative Class. It has the usual comparisons with European countries where artists are "appreciated" and receive state support. Excerpt:

Europeans, says (painter Peter) Plagens, have a very different relationship to the arts because of a high culture going back to the Renaissance and before. "Over here, America is more tied to pragmatism -- clearing the land, putting the railroad through... And artists don't really help with that, so we're suspect."

Novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose father was what the writer describes as "a non-famous artist," sees the American artist as living in internal exile. American history is stamped with "a distrust of the urban, the historical, the bookish in favor of a fantasy of frontier libertarian purity. And the Protestant work ethic has a distrust of what's perceived as decadence." ... "Cultural elite," says Lethem, is "a code word for people who are getting away with something for far too long. It's a term of distrust -- you can almost hear a plan for vengeance in it. Republican politics hardened these impulses and made them more virulent and paranoid."

All true as far as it goes. But nowhere does it describe the cooptation that state-supported artists have to deal with. Suppose the state gives you an artist-in-residence gig in Rainbow City, including an apartment and a studio, and all you have to do is agree to show your work in a gallery at the end of the period. Awesome -- except when you feel pressure, either overt or covert, to create art that will make your sponsors happy. And even when there's no pressure as such -- and I believe there usually is -- wouldn't living in Rainbow City on their dime make you identify with its residents and the locale, so that the artist's crucial role as a cultural critic is weakened? Wouldn't you be likely to turn out art that celebrates Rainbow City? If that's too abstract for you, imagine being the artist-in-residence in Damascus right now. No, I think I'll just struggle along, thanks.

The thing is, any success is an illusion. You think Stephen King thinks he's successful? No, he chafes against the universal conception of him as a hack. Jonathan Franzen is is almost the same boat; he was appalled at Oprah's designation of his work as acceptably bourgeois, and then slammed for being ungrateful. Philip Roth? He wouldn't be still turning out novels almost annually unless he thinks he has left some things unexpressed. David Foster Wallace? The unhappiest man on earth, until he killed himself.

Being an artist is a prescription for misery. A real artist is never truly satisfied with her work; anyone who is satisfied is probably either finished creatively or delusional. State support won't help that problem; it will only provide a different illusion, that one is a real artist because one is certified by the state. Commercial success won't help either; it will only make one doubt oneself. Or it will make you happy for a day; and then the work begins again.

Just answer the question (exasperated sigh)

In my job as a technical writer at a software company, a lot of my time is spent talking to developers and QA people about how a new feature works or about how customers are supposed to use it. And very often, no matter how specific I try to make my question, I receive in return a long, complicated answer that starts at home plate and takes a trip around the outfield when all I wanted to do was go from first base to second.

So I chuckled knowingly when I read this paragraph from a news story about Google CEO Larry Page testifying in court in a trial over whether his company legally used technology owned by another:

Page's answers Wednesday were occasionally slow in coming. U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup asked Page several times to answer "yes," "no" or "I don't know" after Page gave answers that the judge said did not address the question.

I mentioned this to Cris, who said, "Reminds me of that joke: A plane is lost in the fog. It flies by a tall building, and the pilot opens the cockpit window and yells out 'Where am I?!' A man in the office building replies: 'You're sitting in the cockpit of an airplane!' Then the pilot punches in a bunch of coordinates, takes the controls, and flies straight to a safe landing. 'How'd you know where we were based on that answer?' asks the dumbfounded co-pilot. 'Well,' the pilot says, 'I asked a question and got an answer that was full, accurate, and completely useless -- so I knew we were flying over Microsoft.'"

Foamer conflates United States with Biblical nation of Israel

One of the real wack jobs I follow is a guy who posts occasionally to a blog entitled (all caps, please) HELL ON EARTH. Today's post, in which he applies the standards to which Jehovah held the Old Testament children of Israel to the modern-day U.S., is typical.

Just one sentence, punctuation uncorrected (at least he got the hyphenated adjectival phrases right):

Turning towards an ungodly course of embracing sin such as the love of money, no-fault divorce, promiscuity, abortion and the asexual agenda, America has drifted far off its' God-set course.

Strange and even frightening as it may be to believe, this is the way true fundamentalists feel. Just as the Taliban apply the most reactionary interpretations of the Koran to Afghanistan, real Christian fundies genuinely expect the modern-day world to have the relationship to God as Israel did three thousand years ago -- as reported in the Old Testament, which they take as literal, historical fact.

I did like "asexual agenda." Not just homosexual agenda -- asexual agenda. I wonder what that's about.

There is no point in struggling against this mind-set, no hope of talking to them or attempting, however gently or violently, to re-educate them. They are as truly lost and left behind in the modern world as the poorest residents of ghettos or rural America, only they're capable of holding down jobs. And now (unlike before 1975) they vote, thanks to people like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, whose pawns they are.

Of course, this blog post -- my words, the one you're reading now -- is simply a mirror image. I'm no more capable of changing my mind about what I believe politically or, for that matter, religiously.

I think foodie-ism is not really about food

At Easter dinner, an interesting discussion cropped up. It started by someone asking why in the world someone would want to collect first-edition books, because wasn't the value of the book solely in the words printed therein, and therefore an electronic version of a landmark book was every bit as valuable as a first edition? And from there we somehow got onto a subject very often discussed by the family: food.

I've said before: I'm not a foodie. If by foodie we mean someone who considers herself an aficionado of certain (or all) types of gourmet food. While the definition of what we mean by "gourmet food" has changed over the last fifty years, as people become interested (or obsessed) with the provenance and nutritional effects of food, it's still pretty much the same impulse: to set yourself apart by gaining a commanding knowledge of and refined taste for expensive grub.

At least that's my opinion. The other people in the family no doubt feel they're interested in the provenance and nutritional value of food because they care about their health and that of the planet. And yeah, I get that. Some foods are better for you than others, and some foods are raised in more sustainable ways.

But what irks me are the lengths people go to to control these aspects. It isn't enough to, say, shop at Whole Foods or some other store (and let's not make this about Whole Foods) because you feel they do a pretty good job of assessing these issues of provenance, nutrition and sustainability and making the decisions for shoppers (in my opinion, that's their job, and why should I do it if they're already doing it?).

No, one must educate oneself about these issues and make choices for oneself, ultimately becoming one's one purveyor, buying directly from ranchers you've met personally who can provide a detailed description of the life of that cow from conception through slaughtering and continuing onward until the side of beef is at rest in your personal $10,000 top-of-the-line freezer. One must go to farmers markets, not just shopping if you please, but engaging the farmer (not his or her worker, but the grower herself, and god help her if she doesn't have dirt under her fingernails) as to the location of their plot, the methods they used to raise their vegetables, the things they put on the plants and the things they refrained from putting on; the conditions for workers on the farm; the Ph of the soil; and every other possible bit of information. And so on, ad degustandam.

Foodies would say that this attention to detail makes them more healthy, and encourages farmers to raise food in ways they approve of: "sustainably," "organically," and so on -- supposedly the twin goals of foodie-ism.

My question is: Is this really about health and well-being of oneself and the earth? Or is this really about fear, and control, and trying to stave off death?

I think that no matter how healthfully I eat, I will eventually die. In fact, I seriously doubt that making every single correct choice, when it comes to what I eat for the rest of my life, will extend my life more than a year or two. Set aside the likelihood of me dying in an accident or from a communicable disease, because I realize most people still die of heart disease and cancer. In my case, I think cancer is more likely, as my father (who worked for 40 years in oil and chemical refineries, albeit in the office while wearing a white shirt and tie) died of brain cancer in his mid-70s, and I lived from ages 1 to 6 in one of those oil refineries. It hasn't killed me yet, so maybe it's not going to; but I have had the exposure, for what it was worth. Can what I eat affect that?

And more to the point: Can I, by jumping through hoops to ensure the correct provenance of my hamburger, rather than noshing at Burger King and Taco Bell as I do at least once a month, affect anything? Yes, it's probably worse to eat Burger King every day than to eat ecologically blessed beef three times a week. But if I only have to make the choice twice a month, and I choose Burger King every time, is that really going to kill me? I kind of doubt it.

Of course, by choosing Burger King I'm missing out on the sense of virtue, the feeling of control, the feeling of being part of a dietary and ecological elite that my other family members are enjoying. But I don't think that feeling extends your life either.

My mother, who died six months ago, lived til 90. She wasn't in bad health until the last five years. She also smoked heavily for 50 years, ate crappy American food with hardly a fresh vegetable for most of her life, and exercised fairly little after age 25. If she had lived a "more healthy" lifestyle, would she have lived til 95? Maybe so, and maybe she would have preferred it to dying. But 90 years is already a long time. On the other hand, Herman Wouk just sold a novel at age 96. (Wouk is the perfect example of the kind of mid-century realist who's out of style now, but "The Caine Mutiny" is a crackerjack book. Dare you to read it and be bored.) If I'm still writing at 90, or 96, or 106, maybe I will wish I had been more finicky about hamburger. But if I last that long, I have the feeling that the 2010's fad of near-worship of food will, at best, seem like a pretty amusing piece of nostalgia.

Abandon everything, again. Hit the road.

Very nice essay about/interview with Townes Van Zandt, the songwriter-singer who inspired a generation of Texas songwriters -- including me -- in the LA Review of Books:

On songwriting and inspiration:

Well, sometimes they come from the top — from the roof. Sometimes they come from the floor. Sometimes they come from the window and sometimes the heart. Occasionally from the mind.

On the artist's calling:

But this land is covered with brilliant young and old musicians. What it takes is perseverance, and you have to be lazy. You have to be too lazy to work. When you start, at least, it helps not to have a family, because I started before I had a family. Young men come up to me and say, "I'd really like to do what you do, how shall I go about it?" I say, well you get a guitar or a piano (I prefer a guitar because it's a lot easier to carry than a piano), then you've got to blow off security, money, your family, your loved ones, your home, blow it all off and stay with your guitar somewhere under a bridge and learn how to play it. That's how it goes. That's what I did.

And that discourages a lot of them, 'cause some of them are like, "I have two kids and I work in a gas station. I'm going to save my money and go to Nashville for a week." But that ain't it. And girls, young ladies, occasionally ask me. I say, well first off, you've got to cut all your fingernails on your left hand off. And that stops most of them.

But it ain't easy. I mean, it's not hard; it ain't easy. It's killing me, I know that.

(Yes, I was a guitar player/songwriter when I was a college student in Texas at the same time, the mid 1970s, that TVZ was becoming famous, at least among Texas singer-songwriters. And I did cover some Townes Van Zandt songs -- but everyone did.)

(Post title comes from the English translation of the Visceral Realist manifesto by Roberto Bolaño.)

Film: Lou Harrison - A World of Music

Harrison House in Joshua Tree, Calif.

In September and October 2010 I spent five weeks in Joshua Tree, Calif. to research a novel. I rented a house owned by a performer and filmmaker, Eva Soltes, who also owns and administers a landmark house which happened to be across the street: a straw-bale house designed and built by American composer Lou Harrison. The house today is used by composers and other artists in residence to work on projects.

Soltes's film about Harrison, Lou Harrison: A World of Music, which includes footage on the design and construction of the desert retreat, is playing at the Roxie theater in San Francisco for a week beginning this Friday.

Why do news organizations continue to broadcast idiotic man-on-the-street opinions?

An L.A. Times story that ran today, "In the rural religious South, Mitt Romney just doesn't connect," features man-on-the-street opinions about President Obama and the GOP frontrunner that do little to demonstrate anything other than ignorance -- or, of you want to see it another way, the failure of the American educational system, or the success of Fox News and the Republican party in poisoning the minds of ordinary people, or just simple prejudice and ignorance. Oh, wait, I said ignorance.

"I got no use for Obama, and it's not because of the color of his skin," said Leldon Thomas, a retired truck repairman chewing tobacco outside the Wal-Mart that locals blame for siphoning business from the long-established stores along Oneonta's ramshackle main street. "It's his socialist government and all the money he's throwing away."

Around here, Obama, who is Christian, is seen by many as Muslim, and not everyone believes he was born in Hawaii. "It's not that he's black," said Don Tielking, who has been cutting hair at the local barber shop for more than 40 years. "It's that he's not an American citizen."

For Tielking, who took a seat in his barber's chair to chat during a lull between customers, the problem with Romney is his Mormon faith, although he would gladly overlook it if he had to pick between him and Obama.

"Christ is the head of my church, and his was some Smith guy who claimed to be a latter-day prophet," said Tielking, referring to Joseph Smith Jr., the 19th century founder of the Latter-day Saints movement. "I'm not prejudiced against a Mormon. It's just some of their beliefs that I'm against."

Now let's assume that the reporter couldn't find anyone to interview who was more informed or educated than those two crackers. What purpose is served by a national newspaper running these quotations? What are we supposed to do with that mind-aching stupidity? The only possible reaction is: "Oh, hey -- looks like Romney has quite a job for himself in the coming weeks! Of course they hate Obama, but look, they're just as stupid about Romney. Now I see why Santorum is getting votes. God almighty."

But my favorite is this lady:

Sara Holloway, who recently retired as business manager at a nursing home, likes Santorum but might vote for Romney in Alabama's primary. "I like the fact that he was a businessman," she said as she left a hair salon in Oneonta. "That's what government is. It's a business, and he's been very successful."

That's what government is! It's a business! And corporations are people. Jesus Christ, is there any hope for this fucking country?

That's French for sociopath

Foodies are masochists, and this passage from an article in the Jan. 30, 2012 New Yorker gives a good example. The article is about a young-turk chef and restaurateur who opened a seafood restaurant in his hometown of Tijuana -- you're supposed to feel a frisson of danger -- where seafood is the local specialty. Specifically, salmon is the local specialty, and for that reason, young Javier Plascencia refuses to serve it.

But that's nothing compared to the scene depicted in the passage below, about a colleague of his. Pity the poor diner who simply wants something to eat:

At Manzanilla, the acclaimed restaurant in Ensenada that he owns with his wife, Solange Muris, [Benito Molina] has been known to leave patrons waiting for hours, only to emerge from the kitchen with a dish of fish jelly topped with barnacles and seaweed.

I think the only possible response would be that all-purpose line which is said to be applicable to the captions of almost all New Yorker cartoons: "Christ, what an asshole!"

41-year-old teacher snags teen; I don't know what to think

Last month a 41-year-old male high school teacher in Modesto, a depressed central California city, quit his job and left his family to move in with an 18-year-old girl who had been his student. The couple, pictured above, announced their relationship publicly this week with excruciating appearances on television.

For some reason I'm having a hard time getting my mind around this story. To give some context: I have been a high school teacher. I never was attracted to one of my students and never had any kind of inappropriate relationship with any of them, but I can relate at least to the extent of having been a high school teacher. Second thing: I've also been a pornographer. And situations like this are pretty much in the porn sweet spot.

So you might have thought I'd experience some kind of thrill when I saw this, but instead I reacted like any decent person would have: "Oh no. Oh you poor fools."

Then the second-guessing began. I thought: Well, okay, she's of age. No crime here; only stupidity. She'll probably recover from this mistake, especially if they don't have kids. He never will, but he's an adult and should be prepared to suffer the consequences of his actions.

But then I thought: But wait, isn't he simply doing what millions of men have fantasized doing? He's not unlike Roger Sterling on "Mad Men," who dumped his respectable middle-aged wife to marry his gorgeous 20-year-old secretary, despite his best friend telling him he was acting like a fool. This lumpish fellow has none of the suavité of Roger Sterling, and probably none of the money, but whatever he has he'll have less of it once his soon-to-be ex-wife gets through with him. And that's as it should be.

The point is: Isn't this monumental dope simply doing what the culture tells him to do, namely follow his dream, pursue his passion, and all the other self-actualization advice people have been force-fed for the last forty years? And especially in this case! He's only accepting the invitation, or mandate, he's bombarded with every hour of every day -- the one which goes Young nubile female sexuality is the greatest thing in the world, and possessing it should be your goal in life.

No, we turn around and mock and condemn him for actually achieving this goal. Because that's America. We use sex to sell everything, and then when someone actually takes these messages to their logical conclusion, they are deemed utter scum.

A tiny part of me -- a part which exists perhaps in others (perhaps more in some people) -- wanted to say "Dude, you go! You turned your life upside down for some American trim! Today you are the envy of every man who's ever fantasized about it, thought about it, tried disastrously and failed to do it. You actually did it. Rock on." But that part in me really is tiny. Mostly I just shake my head and feel a little sick.

But the second-guessing continues. What kind of non-conformist am I anyway? Shouldn't I stand with this man, perhaps not because he has managed to obtain every man's fantasy for an American teenager, but because by tearing apart his whole life for something he's passionate about, he has somehow struck a blow against conformity, in favor of Gauguin-like self-actualization and bohemia?

I guess it just doesn't read that way to me. It reads like the opening scene of Act II of a tragedy. By the end of Act II their relationship is over. In Act III he's alone, hounded by authorities, can't get another job and rebuild his life, and winds up either killing himself or, at best, in the gutter.

I hope it turns out better than that; I hope he loses 50 pounds and becomes the surfing champion he's always wanted to be, while the girl ("Jordan Powers," a name right out of a Young Adult novel) goes on to law school and a six-figure job. Somehow I have the feeling that's not in the cards.

Raymond Chandler's Catch-22

This whole 1945 essay by Raymond Chandler in The Atlantic is wonderful, but I think this is my favorite paragraph:

To me the interesting point about Hollywood's writers of talent is not how few or how many they are, but how little of worth their talent is allowed to achieve. Interesting -- but hardly unexpected, once you accept the premise that writers are employed to write screenplays on the theory that, being writers, they have a particular gift and training for the job, and are then prevented from doing it with any independence or finality whatsoever, on the theory that, being merely writers, they know nothing about making pictures, and of course if they don't know how to make pictures, they couldn't possibly know how to write them.

I prefer not to

I think I know how to defeat Google's invasive "personalization" -- for a while...
Much kerfuffle and roiling of late over Google's proposed changes to its privacy policy. There's plenty written elsewhere, so I'll spare you my attempts to either summarize or analyse it. This is about how I respond to it.

Given that in a sense it's useless, that they are scanning all my email as well as this blog (which is hosted on their blogspot service), I still want to register that I think it's offensive to see Google offer me "personal results" at the top of a search page. Why the FUCK would I want my search results "personalized" using my history of past searches as well as everything else Google knows about me? What am I, seven years old? Are people suddenly bereft of any search skills at all? I have been working for software companies for going on 20 years; I know a thing or two about search. Please, Google -- don't patronize me.

Added slightly later: Yes, it's possible to click an option in your account settings that says "Don't use personal results." But that just means they don't display the option for you. It doesn't mean they don't collect information about you. As for the "Search history" that you can also supposedly turn off (and I do) -- I simply don't trust that turning it off actually means they don't collect information about you. I think it just means they don't display it for you.

I'm someone who's used GMail ever since it was available. I love Google's services -- but I also want to be able to say no. So I haven't signed up for "Google +" and I never will -- until the day they stop giving me the choice and simply force me to do so. And that's the day I will dump GMail and make sure everything possible is off their systems -- as if that were even possible.

But til then, I have a simple strategy: never search for anything on Google while logged in to my email or other services.

That's simpler than it sounds. You have more than one browser on your machine, right? Probably Internet Explorer (or Safari, for Mac users), and Firefox. Maybe Chrome or Opera. All you have to do is dedicate one of these browsers to non-logged in Google use. For example, let's say I want to search for a new car, but I don't want fucking car advertising to clutter up my browser and I don't want any evidence of it in my Google results. Let's say I use Google's own browser, Chrome, for my GMail and other Google services. Then I just start up Firefox for the Google search -- and any other anonymous services, like Maps, that don't depend on my identity. And I do my search while not logged in to my Google account.

If I did that while logged in, Google would know I'm looking for a certain kind of car, and then it would know I searched on their maps for the nearest dealerships. Why should I want them to know that? What services could they possibly offer me, based on that information, that would benefit me -- as opposed to benefiting the car dealers whose ads would then pollute my email window and search results and, for all I know, my maps?

No really Google -- thanks for your free services, but UP YOURS on the exploitation.

Nerds and non-conformists probably don't have Asperger Syndrome; are simply weird

An op-ed from yesterday's New York Times, "I Had Asperger Syndrome. Briefly" is on their list of most-read pieces. In it, the author describes how his symptoms of classic nerdiness in high school -- an obsession with literature, shyness, and a general difficulty with math and sports -- were mistaken as symptoms of Asperger Syndrome by his mother, who happened to be an Asperger expert.

A lot of his high school experience resonated with me -- sitting in his bedroom playing guitar and constantly reading novels, instead of playing with kids his age. But two things struck me. First, this sentence:

If I had been well-rounded enough to attain basic competence at a few sports, I wouldn't have provoked rage and contempt in other kids during gym and recess.

Rage and contempt, yes. I doubt he's exaggerating. The only difference in my own experience is that this sentence described my experience in grade school, not high school. By the time I got to high school, the school was so huge that there was room for kids who weren't good at sports. Me, I was in drama and the choir and the creative writing class. Being bad at sports didn't get you picked on; it just meant you were invisible -- which, given the other alternatives, is not the worst thing to be in high school.

The other thing that struck me was his bio at the end of the piece: Benjamin Nugent, the director of creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University, is the author of "American Nerd: The Story of My People." Oh really? Someone who was in high school in "the late 90s" is already the director of creative writing at a state university? I guess he's a little more high-performing than he realizes.

Good writing advice

Writing should be a process of surprising oneself. If I had a plan, down to the last detail, of what my story will be, what would be the point of writing it? I mean, what is in it for me if I know precisely what is going to happen and what my characters are going to think and say and do? It would simply be a matter of typing.

-- Richard Gwyn, in his "Ricardo Blanco" blog

That's how I know I'm writing well: when something happens in my book that I don't expect, as I'm writing it. As in my first novel Make Nice, in which a major character came busting through a door without warning in the 4th chapter, someone whom I had not planned on or dreamed of, and who insisted on insinuating herself deeply not only in the life of the protagonist but in the themes of the book itself.

Speaking of Make Nice, which is set in 1960 and is about the Rat Pack, the local PBS station showed Ocean's 11 last night. As I was watching it I thought of a series of annotations you could make. Like the conversation between Sinatra, Martin and Davis where they joke about going into politics -- a reflection of Sinatra's strong interest in the candidacy of JFK and his poorly hidden hope that JFK would appoint him to an ambassadorship or government post. Or the running joke about the mother of Peter Lawford's character, which is also an inside joke about Peter Lawford's own domineering mother. And so on -- there is inside joke after inside joke, and probably nobody knows them all anymore.

Apropos, here's a cool page on the interiors seen in the film, including the Vegas casino-resorts which have now all been torn down and replaced by more modern ones, along with an explanation that:

Ocean's 11 preserves some important aspects of the place, like the multiple showrooms in each of the hotels. (Frank) Sinatra, Jr. was most impassioned [on the DVD commentary] when discussing how the casinos used to operate, "when they were owned by individuals, not corporations." He explained that these intimate music lounges existed to "feed live music into the casino," and give gamblers a place to eat and revive themselves for some more gambling. ...

The new corporate owners that took over in the late 1960s figured -- according to Sinatra, Jr. -- "that people should only have to walk as far as the elevator to spend their money," which is when the concept of separate buildings was jettisoned in favor of a a gargantuan hotel that could allow you to never set foot outside of it. ... Sinatra, Jr. was also very detailed about the death of quality entertainment in Vegas, explaining that the number of private lounges were reduced by new corporate owners who felt they were wasting their money with duplications of musicians throughout a casino. The disappearance of the small music lounges that were free-of-charge to gamblers did not seem to affect the flow of people coming through the doors, so the rest of the lounges were torn out, replaced by grand concert halls with high-dollar tickets that could lure in even the non-gamblers.

Wayfinding

Just published in The Rumpus is a memoir-ish piece by Elissa Wald, a smut writer whose work I am not familiar with. (Among my many failings and career mistakes as a sex writer was not being very well integrated with the sex-active community, so that as soon as Cris and I stopped publishing Frighten the Horses and people stopped sending us work, I became more or less marooned and isolated as a writer, so that even though Wald's book was published a few years before mine were, I was unhappily unaware of it until this day.) In the piece she commemorates the milestones of her early interest in s-m, including a particularly creative strategy when, at age 16, she phones a recruiter for the Marines in order to have an older man talk to her in a confident, commanding voice.

"You'll learn a lot about yourself in the Marines," he tells me. "Things you never knew. You'll find out what you're made of. Does that scare you?"

"Yes," I say. It's the first true thing I've said.

"Are you willing to let someone break you down in order to build you back up?"

My favorite bit, though, is when she's working as a phone sex operator. The office is short-staffed one day when two phones ring at the same time, and she picks up both receivers and has a simultaneous conversation with both customers, each of whom thinks she's having phone sex with him only. I love the farcical aspect of this, though she says that if she saw a scene like that in a film she'd "hurl a shoe at the screen" -- though she doesn't say why. Because it's so unlikely? That doesn't matter! What matters is whether the actress pulls it off, and she does.

'A Visit from the Goon Squad' and 'Sputnik Sweetheart'

 

This week I finished reading Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart from 2002 and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, last year's Pulitzer Prize winner.

It's not fair to compare them; the Murakami book is shorter and lighter and doesn't attempt nearly as much as Egan's. But I was reading them the same week, so comparisons are inevitable.

I have to say I was disappointed with the Murakami, though I keep thinking that it's somehow unfair of me to feel that way. The book is what it is, and he went on to more ambitious and serious things afterward. While I did find the last 35 pages or so compelling, the first 200 pages were like a warm, light breeze on a hot day, a breeze that doesn't do anything to cool you off.

"A Visit From the Goon Squad," on the other hand, was really exciting -- the chronological scope, the chances she took with characters, the choice to imagine more than 60 years of American history past and future. Very admirable.

Next up: Finishing the serialized chapters of "The Third Reich," then Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, then David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Neither of which are short works. To relax I'm reading Patricia Highsmith, and rereading one of my favorite novels ever, Peter Handke's 1972 novella Short Letter, Long Farewell, which has been reissued by New York Review Books.

Gingrich's Catch-22: The more successful anti-terrorism is, the more secure we feel, so...

This is, by the way, the great -- one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. The more successful they've been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we're in danger, and therefore, the better they've done at making sure there isn't an attack, the easier it is to say "well, there was never gonna be an attack anyway." And it's almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.

-- Newt Gingrich in 2008, quoted by Mediaite

"One of the great tragedies of the Bush administration" -- that they actually succeeded too much in making people feel safe. That was a missed opportunity, all right! Should have been more fear, more terror alerts, more false alarms, more "condition red" -- because there wasn't enough of that.

Dobson 'stuns' fellow fundies with Gingrich slander

In a meeting of 150 powerful evangelical Christian leaders last week in which the group voted to endorse former Sen. Rick Santorum, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson "stunned" fellow attendees when he attacked another candidate, former Rep. Newt Gingrich. Contrasting Santorum with the former House Speaker, who is infamous (apparently even among right-wing Christians!) for dumping two wives before settling on his present one Callista, Dobson said:

I want to tell you that I've gotten to know Karen [Santorum] and she is just lovely. She set aside two professional careers to raise these seven children. She would make a fabulous first lady role model. And Newt Gingrich's wife, she was a mistress for eight years. ... Who do you want as your first lady?

-- politico.com

A "chill" set in the room, an attendee said, adding that many present were offended. That makes sense, as Gingrich, having converted to Catholicism to marry his present wife, has made the requisite apologies and repentences for dumping his first wife while she was in the hospital for cancer and cheating on his second during the same time he was leading the charge in Congress to impeach President Bill Clinton for like behavior. And in the evangelical world, you can be forgiven for anything. So for an evangelical to bring it up in a gathering of other evangelicals would indeed be shocking.

But all it really shows is Dobson's decreasing influence, even within the evangelical world. Like Pat Robertson, his high profile is about all that's left of his formerly dominant position; these withered eminences may still have their box seats, but they're like Marge Schott at a Reds game: not only do they no longer control the team, but the whole organization is embarrassed by them.

Meanwhile, Twitter is ablaze with rumors that a prominent interview with Gingrich wife no. 2 will be aired tomorrow on a major network. The former Marianne Gingrich spoke with Esquire in 2010 (via @hollybdc)

Yeah no, really

In the first section of The Savage Detectives, García Madero wonders about the Mexican slang term: 'If simón is slang for yes and nel means no, then what does simonel mean?' Four hundred pages later, at the end of the middle section, a former poet named Amadeo Salvatierra ('Like so many hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, I too, when the moment came, stopped writing and reading poetry') recounts the drunken discussion he had one night with Lima and Belano when they had come to seek out any information he might possess about their vanished Cesárea Tinajero:

And I saw two boys, one awake and the other asleep, and the one who was asleep said don't worry, Amadeo, we'll find Cesárea for you even if we have to look under every stone in the north ... And I insisted: don't do it for me. And the one who was asleep ... said: we're not doing it for you, Amadeo, we're doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World, for our girlfriends, because we feel like doing it. Were they joking? Weren't they joking?... and then I said: boys, is it worth it? is it worth it? is it really worth it? and the one who was asleep said Simonel.

-- Benjamin Kunkel in The London Review of Books, September 2007.

I was thinking today about the contemporary expression "Yeah no." As far as I can determine, it means "I acknowledge the situation as described as well as the not very helpful suggestion that I take a certain action, but there's no way I am actually going to do that."

Example:

"Look, you could enter this short story contest, you just have to have had some connection to the South, and your story has to be set in the South; you lived in Texas for ten years, why don't you write something funny about it and send it in?"

"Yeah no."

That's just a made-up example. I had reason to use the expression the other day but I can't remember why. Still, it's a useful expression.

The other thought I have about reading and writing is from a Sep. 6, 1959 letter of Flannery O'Connor:

I read about 80 pages of Dr. Pasternak but I am so slow that the book had to go back ere I had fairly begun. There were a lot of wonderful things in those 80 pages but I don't think I could have stood that much formlessness for however many hundred pages there were. A friend of mine reviewed it and said it was like a huge shipwreck with a lot of beautiful things floating in it.

That's already wonderful, but then she immediately follows with these amazing sentences:

You are not supposed to feel at home or at ease in any of the forms you see around you. Create your own form out of what you've got, let it take care of itself.

And then, at the end of the letter:

The thing for you to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an hour to melt in your stomach. In this way, it could be performed on Monday and not make them vomit until Wednesday, by which time they would not be sure who was to blame. This is the principle I operate under and I find it works very well.

-- p. 349, "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor."

Ending the year in the desert

I'm back in the Mojave Desert, where I spent a month last year. Drove down here with my friend Christine; she's back home after three weeks in the city, and I came down just to be with her on the drive.

We talked and talked. The Central Valley was horribly smoggy, but you rise above it going through the Tehachapi pass, and then you're in the desert, where the sunset was beautiful, and the night is clear and the quarter moon casts a lovely light across the landscape.

Later we'll go to a New Year's party at Perry's house. And tomorrow I'll fly back to San Francisco.

A bow to all who accompanied me so far.

Be sure to check the newspaper

Among the now quaint touches in the mid-century work of writer Patricia Highsmith is that there are almost always newspaper reports of the crimes or disappearances involved in the story, and Highsmith uses these articles to keep both characters and readers up to speed on plot developments.

For example, take Those Who Walk Away, an unremembered but very representative work. In the novel, two classic Highsmith characters oppose each other: the protagonist, a man in his late 20s who is somewhat at loose ends, and the antagonist, a middle-aged, well-to-do American who is both a busybody and a bully. Early in the book, the middle-aged man, Edward Coleman, attempts to murder the protagonist, not once but twice, and the second time the protagonist lets him think he's gotten away with it. Not quite knowing what to do next, the protagonist, Ray Garrett, leaves his luggage and passport at the Venitian hotel he's staying in (that's another hallmark of classic Highsmith, Americans in swanky European locations; it's a wonder more of her books weren't turned into films on the order of "Charade") and hides out in a rooming house under an assumed name. The hotel notices after a few days that he's vanished and reports it to the American embassy, and like clockwork, there's a notice in the newspaper.

"Perhaps you should speak to the police, Edward," Inez said.

"Wait till I see the paper. I'll speak with them if I have to."

The paper and [breakfast] arrived.

Ray Garret's picture, probably his passport picture, was one-column wide on the front page, and the item below it some two inches long. It stated that Rayburn Cook Garrett, 27, American, had not returned to his room at the Pension Seguso, 779 Zattere, since last Thursday evening, November 11th. His passport and his personal effects were still in his room. Would anyone who had seen him that evening or since come forward...

A chapter or two later in the book, the disappeared man picks up the next day's newspaper:

Ray bought a Gazzetino, scanned the first page before tucking it under his arm, and was relieved to see there was nothing about him, at least not on the front page.

The author uses this trope in many books. Sometimes the protagonist has been accused of a crime, or questioned by the police in someone else's disappearance; in this case it's the protagonist himself who has disappeared, but it's still a news story.

It struck me as I was reading today how quaint this will seem to future readers, who will have no idea of the significance that the story appeared on "the front page" or not, and how many "inches" the story ran. But it's not just the anachronistic nature of the newspaper trope that struck me, because it's just as easy for an author today to say that a character subscribes to the tweet feed of a news organization and gets little updates on his phone. What struck me is the need for the story to have this whole external witness -- a news organization reporting the movements of characters, sometimes of the police. It's sort of a way to tell the reader that the characters have a certain level of substance, that they're capable of doing something that floats for a moment to the "front page" of the news, even though they are, for Highsmith's own purposes, deliberately obscure and anonymous people.

A little later in the book Highsmith introduces another familiar trope: a private detective, hired by the missing man's father, comes on the scene to investigate -- just as in The Talented Mr. Ripley. In fact, the farther I read in Those Who Walk Away, the more it seems like a by-the-numbers effort by Highsmith, a work consisting of no elements not found in her previous works, with the familiar elements re-arranged somewhat. Still, I like reading it. It's certainly better than some of her later efforts, such as People Who Knock On the Door, which is frankly dull.

Something else lost

Driving down 17th Street the other night, I passed this building on the corner of Florida Street, catty-corner from Project Artaud.

Project Artaud was one of the original factories converted to live-work spaces in the Mission District, a conversation which took place in the 1970s and which in addition to providing living spaces for dozens of painters, sculptors, dancers and actors, birthed several performance spaces and studios which are still lively places to go see art. And it's still a collectively-run building with many of the original artists -- now in their 60s and 70s -- still living and working there.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a performance artist and used to go to Project Artaud all the time for rehearsals and performances, a restaurant opened in this building. You can still see the sign -- Moxie Restaurant-Bar -- though the restaurant closed a long time ago, at least fifteen years ago, and some kind of architectural or design firm has been there ever since. Back when the restaurant was open, I not only could not afford to go to it, but I was too intimidated to do so. I felt bars and restaurants required a certain gravitas and adult presentation, and in many cases I was afraid to go into them, especially if a friend of mine hadn't brought me to them first.

So I never made it into this restaurant before it closed. And driving past it the other night, even though I drive past it several times a week (because 17th Street is a convenient cross-town route), it suddenly struck me as never before that the restaurant was not only closed, but closed long ago, so long that it belonged to the distant past when I was a performance artist and went by that corner several times a week not to go cross-town, but in order to do my art. And all that seemed very long ago suddenly, and it is: 20, 25, 30 years ago. It wasn't about the particular restaurant as the exact geographic spot that 17th and Florida represents, or more accurately, that it represented to me in the 1970s (even before I came to San Francisco) and 1980s and which is now so far in the past. More than anything else it represents my youth, my fresh, untrammeled notions and ambitions, my pure heart.

I remember going to Project Artaud during my first few days in the city, to the street address, because it was where Mangrove [8-minute video] had their studio, and Mangrove more or less encapsulated the whole reason I came to San Francisco: to do Contact Improv and perform. And even more before I went to the contact jam on Vancouver Island a week later, where I met the local contactors for the first time, I had that single piece of information: 499 Alabama, the address of Mangrove [Google Books page from the book "Sharing the dance: contact improvisation and American culture" by Cynthia Jean Novac]. The building turned out to be a large factory building that had been converted to studios and lofts: that was Project Artaud. And while the door at 499 Alabama was locked, other doors into the building were open, and I bravely went in and wandered the halls, looking at the bulletin boards outside studios and theaters where I would one day perform. And while I didn’t see any dancers and didn't actually run into a single soul, I was on a pilgrimage and just being there was enough. That’s what I mean by my untrammeled ambitions -- not careerist ambitions, but spiritual ones. My pilgrimage was not even about what I would one day do; it was about who I would one day be. And all of it -- all the performing I did, all the love affairs I had, all the adventures and rejection and ecstasy and pain -- was still in the future.

I've felt nostalgic pangs before, but they had never been as sharp as the pain I felt at the moment we drove past the former Moxie Restaurant. And my painful feelings were for a restaurant I'd never been to, but which represented, when it was still there, something I could aspire to. Back in my 20s, and really until my late 40s, my life was aspirational. I felt success and fulfillment were still in my future. I might, through a combination of talent and luck, become a more well-known performer or writer; I might, when I finally acquired sufficient gravitas, go to a cool jazzy-looking restaurant in an artsy neighborhood. By contrast, now my life is limited in other, more painful ways. I no longer think there's much chance I'll become a well-known writer, or even publish a novel. In fact, I measure out the rest of my life in the number of (probably unpublished) novels I can still finish before I die. Maybe four or five more.

This feeling of limited horizons and chances is, of course, a characteristic of middle age. Maybe the prime sign of middle age. And I'm probably lucky I didn't feel it this sharply before now.

Strangeness with Google maps: 'Original Daly City'

I stumbled across this strange notation tonight on Google maps: a place marked "Original Daly City" at the north edge of that municipality directly south of the border of San Francisco:

I suppose that is where the "original" Daly City was founded, though why that should be on a Google map I have no idea.

Speak softly and carry a big gun

Funny how you can boil down an entire movie to a few lines. Following is the entire dialogue from an advertisement for "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo":

FIRST MALE VOICE (v.o.): I need a research assistant.

SECOND MALE VOICE (v.o.): I know an excellent one.

(onscreen) But she's different.

FIRST MAN: All right. In what way?

SECOND VOICE (v.o.): In every way. She's had a rough life. Can we not make it any rougher?

DANIEL CRAIG: Lisbeth, I want you to help me catch a killer of women.

LISBETH (v.o.): They say I'm insane.

ANOTHER MALE VOICE (v.o.): Why would you want to know about such an awful murder?

LISBETH (holding a huge gun): It interests me.

I know this is my second post in a row about this movie. It's not that I'm a fan of the franchise one way or another. It's just that the marketing... (holding a big gun) interests me. Later:Sounds like a good example of the trope Small Girl, Big Gun.

Dept. of Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Cry: The "Dragon Tattoo" fashion line

I almost choked on my Wheaties this morning when I saw an ad pop up on the side of Gawker for a "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" fashion line. I guess it's supposed to be for young women who want to emulate the title character, who is a punked out Rooney Mara:

For the record, the fashion line is like this:

Somebody please help.

'The Emperor of Warm Nuts' sent to prison for 6 years

For a few years I've been following the amusing and sad case of Ausaf Umar Siddiqui, a former VP of purchasing for the West Coast electronics big-box store Fry's Electronics, who was caught embezzling and soliciting kickbacks from suppliers to fund a high roller gambler lifestyle. Among his preferences as a whale:

• Bowls of golden raisins and warmed mixed nuts, and bowls of certain kinds of peppermints, adorned "with a single rose"
• Dom Perignon champagne in the fridge, plus a long list of other spirits from sake to cognac
• A "badger hair" shaving brush

Siddiqui pleaded guilty earlier this year, and now, as an early Christmas present, has been sentenced to six years in federal prison.

He deserves some compassion for being an addict, but the list of requirements for casino visits pretty much cancels out any sympathy I have. Hope he enjoys his lodgings in the pen.

'How to write a novel with no dull parts'

A spiel in my email from some workshop-offering organization:

Ask any agent or editor what they're looking for in a novel and you'll hear the same thing: a story that grabs them and doesn't let go, long after they've read the last page. Easier said than done, right?

Wrong.

Regardless of the genre you write in or the length of your novel, you can learn and apply the techniques used by successful authors to reel in buyers (and readers!).

In Writing a Novel They Can't Put Down, writing teacher and bestselling thriller author James Scott Bell reveals the essentials you need to sell in today's competitive marketplace. Over the course of this 2 1/2-hour workshop, you'll learn:

• The secret to a high-stakes objective
• How to create the strongest confrontation possible
• What it means to knock out the reader at the end
• Crafting unforgettable characters and great scenes
• Exercises for coaxing out the extras in your characters
• How to write a novel with no dull parts
• And much more!

Ready to get your novel out of the slush pile and on to the bestseller charts? Sign up for Writing a Novel They Can’t Put Down today

So simple! You almost don't need to take the workshop at all, unless you need material for characters who are depressed, failed writers who attend workshops that tell them how to write a novel that can't miss.

A Charlie Brown Depression

I realized a few years ago that I'm subject to wintertime seasonal depression, and when I felt it coming on this year around Thanksgiving, I decided that exercising every day would help fight it. And sure enough, it is helping.

This evening on the treadmill, though, I was flipping channels as usual and happened upon the annual broadcast of "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Several years ago I wrote about how I loved "Peanuts" when I was a kid, but later became repelled by its unrelenting pessimism, which all too well captured what life was like for me as a child. To that I can only add the opening words of the script, which echoed tonight like the prelude to a recurring bad dream:

CHARLIE BROWN: I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel.

I just don't understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents, and sending Christmas cards, and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.

LINUS: Charlie Brown! You're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas, and turn it into a problem.

Breaks my heart every time.

Corporate financial guy: 'The West is finished'

Kind of a remarkable blatt from a corporate executive, saying something many eco and sustainability-minded people have been saying for a long time: The economies of the developed nations can't just keep expanding forever. In fact, he suggests we're at a sun-setting moment now.

"We suffer from no growth and we suffer from imported inflation -- that means we have negative real growth and societies fracture when you have negative real growth and quite simply our society faces fractures for trying to stick Europe back together again is not going to work with that underlying paradigm, unless you can create five percent growth to overcome that imported inflation," Murrin explained.

Murrin said that the East was depending less on the West and the rise of a consumer society was the first step in the expansion of an economic empire.

"If you look at the cycle of an empire system from regionalization to expansion to empire, the first phases of that catalyst are when you have a self fuelled consumer society and so actually that process of building your consumer base which is really what's going on in China, day by day their consumer base increases and the dependence on the West decreases," he said.

Murrin added that while China is by far the biggest emerging economy and would be at the center of a new economic order, other emerging nations were set to join the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and new political orders and alliances would come about as a result.

"This isn't just a BRIC story, this is the end of the Christian Western Empire versus the rise of the whole emerging world led by China as the foremost and most powerful," Murrin told CNBC.

Oh well! had to happen sometime!

And he's not even taking into account global warming and its catastrophic affects, which are in part the subject of this near-apocalyptic screed, on io9.com. So see, it's not just paranoid right-wingers who are sure the sky is falling. It's also depressed corporate types who see no chance for their 401Ks to recover, and futurist types, though that latter guy is probably a libertarian of the Scott Adams variety.

Jeff Bridges on making it new

Via @biblioklept: In an interview in which he compared the experience off seeing Pulp Fiction to the experience of hearing Talking Heads for the first time -- "like a splash of cold water" -- actor Jeff Bridges went on:

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that is almost like an Etch-A-Sketch -- whsssssstt! -- just takes everything and just cleans it all off, and you start fresh.

A grown man gets a hard-on at Taco Bell

From an interview on Forbes.com with Twitter Founder and CEO Jack Dorsey:

On Twitter, “all of that following, all of that interest expressed, is intent. It’s a signal that you like certain things,” Dorsey says. In “promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts… you actually see introductions to content, to accounts or to topics that are deeply meaningful to you, because you’ve already expressed interest, you’ve already curated your timeline. And it’s a delightful experience."

 
Seeing "Promoted" (i.e. bought and paid for by advertisers) tweets in your timeline is delightful? No. Personally I haven't clicked on a single "Promoted" tweet.

I got to that interview after reading this blog post on Percolate, the purpose of which I have not been able to figure out.

Dorsey talked about capturing intent, which has been a big buzzword around marketing Google’s search advertising was coined as an intent miner. As I wrote then:

Twitter’s value is not about intent, in the classic funnel definition, it’s much more about awareness and interest: About exposing you to new products and services you didn’t know you were interested in. 

So Twitter isn't about people communicating with each other, doing journalism, or providing them a platform for expression, according to these geeks. It's "about exposing you to new products and services you didn’t know you were interested in."

Oh really. Isn't that always what the advertising industry says? Commercials are educational because they teach consumers about new products and services? But that's what we have reviews for.

Here's how I inform myself about a new product or service, starting from the moment I become aware of it.

1. I hear about something while reading an article, usually in a print copy of a newspaper.
2. If I'm interested, I'll search for more information by searching for reviews of it.
3. If I'm approaching actually buying the thing, I will go to the company's website and look at the product specifications.

No advertising in it at all. And no tweets, either.

Just before the holiday, I spotted this jaw-dropping review of Taco Bell on a website usually devoted to survivalism and predictions of economic catastrophe. Is it possible that a rational adult could actually write something like:

Let's just start with the obvious thing: the food. It is, of course, wonderful and full of varied textures: crunchy shells, robust meat, cold and fresh lettuce, stringy cheese, and all the fatty stuff that we love because it both satisfies and gives us energy. It arrives quickly, and its ready to eat, mostly with your hands, which is really how we all want to eat.

... But there’s more going on than just fun food. The company obviously puts a great deal of thought into the ethos of the restaurants themselves. The decor gives us things to look at that we don't see anywhere else. The colors are all those we associate with the Southwest, but not in a conventional way. The shapes are geometric and modern, with a daring flare that delights the eye and fires up the imagination. 

The details around the place add to the sense of adventure, but you don’t take note of them individually unless you are looking closely. The backs of the chairs all have a bell shape cut out in the steel. The lighting is not mainly in the ceiling but rather comes from orange hanging glass lamps in the shape of cones, and I was trying to think where I had seen this before. Is it like the knave [sic] of a chapel in a monastery in a Spanish mission territory? Maybe that’s it. I’m unsure but it conjures up something different. 

Hold on here. Perhaps you have already realized this and I’m slow on the take, but the whole Taco Bell experience is suggestive of that Spanish mission sensibility. That’s why the buildings are shaped the way they are. And, obviously, that’s the whole meaning behind the bell, and why it adorns the front entrance of the place. It’s a church bell! It taps into something deep and lasting in our cultural sensibilities, something that shaped our ancestors and their communities, and presents it all anew in our times.

Are you fucking kidding me? This is like something a 16-year-old would write for English class, if he's really hopped up on Adderall that day. But the author is evidently an adult. And it's like three times as long as that!

Maybe that's the kind of person those advertisers are talking about. Wow.

Some cultural things just go on and on and on

When I was a little kid in the early 1960s -- 6, 7, 8 years old -- the hip electronic item for the home was the hi-fi. This was a large wooden cabinet six or seven feet long, containing a turntable, an amplifier and radio, and large cabinet speakers. (See this image, where an example sits in the center.) And to play on their hi-fis, middle-class people bought LPs. If they were educated, or just culturally aspiring, they might buy opera and symphony records; if they were only lightly-educated, and staid middle class people like my parents, they bought Broadway cast LPs and a series of curious recordings called Sing Along With Mitch.

(Just as a reference, while my parents bought those dubious pop records, my wife's parents, who were immigrants but understood what culture was in a way my own parents never did, bought opera and symphony records, and my wife sings arias around the house to this day.)

On each Mitch Miller recording was a dozen or so standards sung by a male chorus accompanied by a sprightly orchestra. Mostly folk songs or songs from the turn of the century, like "Peg O' My Heart," "The Sidewalks of New York," "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," "Makin' Whoopie," and so on. I was a little kid and liked to sing, and the whole point of these records was that you were supposed to sing along, so they contained full lyric sheets, and that way I learned these moldy songs by heart. They struck me even then as utterly of the past, because even when I was 8 (C.E. 1964) I was listening almost literally religiously to Top 40 radio and memorizing those songs too ("I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Satisfaction," "House of the Rising Sun" and so on), and the difference was obvious, even to a little kid.

At that time "The Lawrence Welk Show" was not a syndicated museum piece as it is now, but still a regularly broadcast television program on a major network, ABC. My grandmother would simply not miss this show, with its happy-faced Barbie-and-Ken-doll cast singing mostly the same ancient songs (e.g. on YouTube: "The Beer Barrel Polka;" "Big Rock Candy Mountain"). This show, which drew from more or less the same songbook as Mitch Miller, seemed even stranger -- not just a similarly weird, old-fashioned indulgence, but an actively sinister force -- if you watched it, I felt, you would find yourself growing elderly by the minute.

Thirty-five years later, my wife's mother landed in an Alzheimer's care home, where one of the social activities was listening to live music. The music consisted of a person with an accordion playing those same old songs -- literally the same old songs, "Sidewalks of New York" and so on. Now if that was nostalgic music to my grandmother, who was maybe 10 years old in 1900, what was it supposed to represent to people 40 years younger than her, people who were, say, 70 in 2000? Why weren't they playing the Big Band music of the 1940s, which would be to those folks what the Lawrence Welk songbook would have been to my grandmother? Why, in fact, weren't they playing the classical music my wife's mother had chosen to buy and listen to when she had the choice?

Even more mind-bendingly, this year I visited the Assisted Living facility where my own mother was living. And they had a man playing accordion, and he still played the same songs, including "Sidewalks of New York" and "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." WTF. Is there like a Nursing Home Songbook, with the same 25 numbers in it? I am really concerned about this. When I wind up in a freaking Assisted Living Facility in 20 or 30 years, they still better not be playing those same fucking songs; they better be playing some Beatles and Rolling Stones, or some accordion player is going to get bopped by my walker. Of course by then the accordion player will be robotic.

All this came to mind when I saw this jaw-dropping bit on Mediaite: On his own television program on his own network, ancient Pat Robertson hosted Condaleeza Rice, and when she suggested that "mac and cheese" was a wonderful holiday food, Robertson blurted out:

What is this "Mac and Cheese," is that a black thing?

And I thought, how the hell does this thing that is the 700 Club, and the Trinity Broadcast Network, survive? It's not like it's in syndication like the Welk show. (And for the record, at least on the Welk show they sang numbers from the 1940s and 50s and even contemporary numbers like -- God help us, I'm not kidding -- "One Toke Over the Line.") Who in the hell is giving money to this ancient fraud Robertson and the desperately out-of-touch worldview espoused on his network?

Then I realized -- things that somehow contain and epitomize cultural moments and worldviews, even if they do it terribly, just go on and on. It's like the culture as a whole needs these things as ballast, to balance out emanations like "TMZ" and the CW. Not that I claim to know the mechanism of how that works.

How collapsitarians find safe zones

On my favorite collapsitarian blog, today's post is a typical piece of baseless fear-mongering, so pointless I won't even describe it. And then the comments start.

First comment:

Most rural areas within a tank's worth of gas will be inundated by the Golden Horde. The few that can make it on foot will find their way through your retreat area and beyond scavenging, pillaging, and looting anything they can find to try and survive. No matter where you are you may get contact from people fleeing those cesspits that are major metro areas. Remember maintain good fields of fire/killing fields around your retreat and keep those mags topped off.

In the paranoid collapsitarian mind, once the Collapse happens, cities will become utterly consumed with rioting, leading some ("the Golden Horde," which I think refers to the people who have enough resources to escape the cities) to flee and attempt to find a safe place, leading to the now-hackneyed scenario described by the commenter.

The interesting part is the 4th comment down, in which someone creates a how-to for calculating the range of that "horde."

You have to draw lines out along every major highway from every major city, out to about 350 miles (the average distance someone could get on a full tank of gas, assuming all they do is drive). Shade all areas on the map to about 5-10 miles of each side of those highways from the 350 mile point, back to the city. Now draw a line about 30 miles out from the outer suburbs, and shade the area that it covers. You can throttle the lines back a bit for things like rough terrain, rivers, mountain ranges, and the like.

The result is the first two days of full-on zombie migration in your area. The outer edges will be lightly populated, while the inner ones will be heavily so (as traffic snarls up, etc).

However, here's the trick: Not everyone will be moving at the same time, or at the same rate. Also, not all situations would result in a mass evacuation. ...

It goes on like that for a bit, but you get the idea. At least someone has attempted to quantify the effects of this supposed mass migration.

Also, note how the term "zombie" is used for any individual who is part of this so-called horde. Cute of him, because you know what you do with zombies: shoot them in the head (or hey-ud, because I can't imagine anyone with this mindset not possessing a Southern accent). In the minds of the collapsitarians, any non-rightous person who has not armed himself and his God-fearing family and stocked up for ten years of apocalypse, who in the event of a Collapse therefore needs charity, is identical to a zombie -- that is, deserves to be shot on sight.

In fact, this is what they would secretly like to do now, before any apocalypse: kill everyone who is poor, in need of charity, anyone who might rob them or use up their tax dollars, which they feel is equal to stealing. But of course you can't have whole websites and crypto-fascist movements that openly advocate killing the poor, the disabled, petty criminals and the like, because that would make you a Nazi. So you just call the targets of your wrath "zombies," and pretend it's all about preparing for some societal apocalypse, and then you can talk about it all you want.

If you have any doubt that the main audience this appeals to is neo-fascist, just read the rest of the comments on that blog post. Holy crap.

Question of the year

I know I'm entering my period of holiday-induced crabbiness when blog posts like this annoy me.

Are you blogging to the wrong audience?

There are two reasons I want to post more often. One is to expand my readership beyond other writers. Social media queen Kristen Lamb has written some great posts on this topic. One titled Solid Platform, Wrong Audience is my favorite and has links to her previous posts. My memoir, which I completed earlier this week, is about the six years I spent working as a fashion model in Europe and Japan. My current WIP is a collection of humorous parenting essays. And my next project is something different altogether. As much as I love blogging about writing and social media, it's time for me to expand to also write about parenting and fashion and modeling and all the other topics I’m interested in, like rock climbing and geo-caching and Settlers of Catan. ...

Now, here's an exercise to determine whether you are blogging to the wrong audience: Profile your audience. Make a list of the different groups of people you imagine buying your book. Who are they? Are they teen girls? Middle-aged women? Men who like to read thrillers? How old are they? What do they do for a living? How do they spend their free time? What products do they buy? Make lists. Then, once you've got that down, think about what topics those people are interested in reading about. What concerns them? What are their thoughts preoccupied with? (Boys? Sex? Making money? Finding God? Decluttering their homes?) Make another list. And finally, ask yourself: Are you blogging about the topics on that last list? Why or why not?

When I saw this, my reaction was: Does Don DeLillo give a flying fuck what I blog about? And if not, why should I care what anyone else thinks? You think I'm trying to build some kind of "platform"? No, I'm talking to like five people here.

But I did really love that sentence:

My memoir, which I completed earlier this week, is about the six years I spent working as a fashion model in Europe and Japan.

For some reason that just cracks me up.

L.A. Times really excited about novel concepts of book serialization, packaging

Yesterday on Twitter I mocked the hype about a new novel by Mark Z. Danielewski, a novel which will be -- shocking new idea!! -- serialized in 27 "volumes." Today there's more information about it in this L.A. Times column.

From this article I want to draw a single quote, emphasis mine:

It's possible that [our publishing] schedule could be accelerated. We're constantly open to new ideas -- where will we be in 2014? Maybe digital releases every week, every few months a trade paperback or hardcover. The novel is designed to accommodate, anticipate various platforms.

I take it that he means this particular novel has been designed to "accommodate" (not to mention "anticipate" -- wow!) "various platforms" -- not that The Novel generically is. Although that's an interesting idea to investigate, maybe a good topic for a master's thesis -- that the novel is, by its nature, flexible enough to accommodate changing media.

But what struck me was this. This is not just a long book that the publisher decided, hey, let's go back to that whole serialization thing that worked so well in the 19th century. After all, it's working for the Paris Review to serialize Roberto Bolaño's "The Third Reich" into four parts -- that's garnered lots of attention (and did, in fact, motivate me to subscribe to the Paris review for the first time ever) -- not to mention the multi-book franchises of Harry Potter and other fantasy creations.

No, according to the author, he designed the books to a) be super-ass long, and b) "accommodate various platforms," like so:

Danielewski was paid a reported $1 million for the first 10 volumes; he's thinking of them as two 5-volume seasons, like a television series.

Uh huh. Now I know why it's the L.A. Times that is the one getting excited about it. Seriously, is this really anything that the awful teen-novel book-packaging industry (cf. "Sweet Valley High," etc. etc.) hasn't already pioneered?

Limo driver and performance artist 'found her voice' on 'This American Life'

This story about a memoirist seems to me representative of several odd strains in our culture.

Writer-performance artist Jeanne Darst wrote lots of stories about her dysfunctional family, which she "performed in one-woman shows she performed in her living room to help pay the rent," according to the story. Reading this, I thought, Oh right. This is the same world Miranda July lives in. You make yourself into a twee storyteller in the David Sedaris mode, and sure enough: "This American Life" is "where Darst began to find her voice as a memoirist." This led directly to a book contract.

Well, that's nice! You get to find your voice on the premiere radio show for memoir, really? Take a giant step, eh?

Just sour grapes on my part. I think it was that bit, which the journalist wrote, not something that came from her, suggesting "This American Life" is like a stepping stone rather than being what it is right now, which is a pinnacle. She's just someone doing exactly what 10,000 other writers are doing, only doing it better, and oh by the way, being an attractive slender woman who lives in L.A. You go!

Having a body

It’s a real annoyance, this business of corporeality. The body needs attention, hygiene, clothing, footwear, space. That above all, space: to occupy, to piss, to shit, to sleep, to share with other bodies. A total pain in the ass, really. I would love to be able to toss it aside somewhere and continue my journey without it, but I can’t.

-- Johan Moya Ramis, writing in Words Without Borders

The first of November

Gawker helpfully brings everyone up to date on the official word from EOTW prophet Harold Camping, whose radio station has stopped talking about the EOTW (which didn't happen per his prediction) but also has not said anything about it not happening.

Having finished reading "Infinite Jest," I'm now going to finish reading a Simenon novel, "Strangers in the House," and then get to "The Death of the Adversary" by Hans Keilson.

Bank of America followed the lead of other banks and reversed its proposed fee of $5 monthly just to just its debit card. The fee, announced last month, generated loads of anger at banks in general and B of A in particular and led to a movement to transfer accounts from banks to credit unions. "Bank Transfer Day" is still Nov. 5.

Happy 10th anniversary of this blog

Just realized that today marks the 10th anniversary of this blog. Not that many people who started blogging in late 2001 are still doing it. I don't know what that makes me. But, well, huzzah.

Summer of Infinite Jest 15 -- the last 50 pages or so

I went today to the rooftop garden of the S.F. Museum of Modern Art, to which I am admitted free because we have a yearly membership, and sat with some coffee (which they sell there) and finished reading "Infinite Jest." 

The last 50 pages feature the last part of Hal's apparent breakdown in the video viewing room, a surreal scene showing what becomes of Orin, and finally an even more surreal scene, drawn out in pornographic detail, showing what becomes of Gately -- one of those endings which, because it is surreal (cf. Morrison's "Song of Solomon"), is annoying. Because it's surreal, and because it resembles the dreams Gately has been having for the last hundred and fifty pages, you don't know if it's another dream or not. I still don't know.

We never find out whether the competing spy agencies find the magically compelling videotape (or "cartridge"), and unless I missed something, we never find out exactly how Hal's tennis career ends, though what I gathered is that he manages to injure himself accidentally-on-purpose. So it seemed to me that the author ended by being more interested in the characters than the themes or the plot. Which is fine, but is inconsistent with the book as a whole.

As soon as I was done with the book, I found myself contrasting the way I felt with with the way I felt on finishing "2666," which is also a monumental novel that ends without the "story" being quite tied up. On finishing "2666" I wanted to go back to the beginning immediately and read it again now that I really knew who all the characters were and why various long episodes were even in the book. On finishing "Infinite Jest" I only had that annoyed feeling of "Did I miss something here?" and paged back through the last 50 pages a little -- but only for a minute. I didn't really care that much whether I had missed something. More than anything else I felt tired. Not even exhausted, just ready to be done with it.

My final conclusion is that it's a promisingly brilliant work by someone whose mental illness accounts for a certain amount -- perhaps most -- of the work's envelope-pushing. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the same mental illness (and I wrote before about not being able to read without thinking about it) doomed the author, who never finished another novel. ("The Pale King" is notably unfinished, and not like "2666" is unfinished, but really only speculatively pulled together by an editor, according to reviews I've read.) By its length and complexity, it begs comparison with "2666," but it's unfair to put "I.J.," a second novel by a 30-year-old, up against the crowning achievement by a 53-year-old who had already written ten other novels and then "The Savage Detectives." Because if it begs comparison, it also pales in it.

I think "Infinite Jest" gained the aura of masterpiece because readers loved the way it captured, and thus validated, the voice of generation whatever-DFW-was-part-of ... X or Y, whatever. The slangy way of talking that accounts for most of the novel's length is the way that whole generation talks, and this novel perfectly captures it. Plus DFW's death has given rise to a kind of hagiography about him, similar to the aura around Kurt Cobain. One of the reasons I wanted to read "I.J." is to find out whether this attitude is justified. In my opinion, it isn't. There are probably fifty or a hundred novels from the last third of the 20th century that will endure longer.

Eugenides not pushing the envelope this time, maybe feels okay about it

Q: People are starting to notice that a generation of writers, which includes you and Jonathan Franzen, are wrestling with the question of how you create a novel after postmodernism.

Jeffrey Eugenides: Schoenberg said it's still possible to write music in C major, and that’s coming from Mister Experimental himself. That strikes a chord in me; I think with the novel, at a certain point you realize it's still possible to write in C major and have some kind of narrative content. And meaningful characters that readers can, you know it's an old-fashioned term, but people can fall in love with the characters and become caught up in their lives. If you don't have that, you cease to have the kind of novel that can be compelling.

--Interview with novelist Jeffrey Eugenides
in the L.A. Times

This is a real issue. I constantly struggle with the imperative to create new ways of seeing and story-telling, which is what the word "novel" implies, and this traditional approach. I've written before about how I love mid-century writers, and how Larry McMurtry's now obscure early novel "Moving On" was a model for me for many years. The roomy character-driven traditional narrative informed the writing of my first novel, "Make Nice." But in my current project I'm trying to get away from it.

It's a struggle, and not only because I love the mid-century novel (by which I mean the thoughtful character-driven novels of McMurtry, Heller, Highsmith, Roth, Mailer, Salter and others) but because this approach seems so natural to me. But I also love the mid-century departures from this model (Kerouac, Henry Miller) and post-modernists from DeLillo to Acker. (And DeLillo's accomplishment in the 1970s and 1980s is now awe-inspiring to me. He didn't have a model for what he was doing, he really was making up a new way of story-telling.) Not to mention the Latin Americans, including You Know Who.

Having never read a Jeffrey Eugenides novel, I can't say whether it's working for him. Maybe Eugenides is trying to fend off criticism in advance here. Maybe he feels a little bad for not pushing the envelope in his latest work. Without reading it and knowing his work, I can't say.