Everybody must get stoned
For those who have wished that presidential press secretary Scott McClellan and his assistant Dan Bartlett might get pelted with something more than softball questions from a docile press corps, your wish was fulfilled today:
In the blistering heat, Bartlett and White House spokesman Scott McClellan stood waiting for Marine One to land. As the chopper carrying the president descended, it kicked up a massive storm of dirt and rocks that pelted the two staffers.
What are you working on? : Teresa Carmody
Just published in my series of interviews with writers on their current projects, Teresa Carmody, fiction writer and founder of Les Figues Press, a literary small press in L.A.
The author of a collection of short fiction, Carmody is working on a novel for the first time. She says: "I get very excited about sentences and the logic of grammar."
British librarians' favorite: To Kill a Mockingbird
Today is World Book Day*, and British librarians voted Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird "the book everyone should read." Lest you think this was influenced by the film "Capote," in which Catherine Keener plays Harper Lee -- Truman Capote's lifelong friend and important supporter -- the film is only opening in the U.K. tomorrow.
Capote and Lee were childhood friends, and Capote appears fictionalized in the book as the child Dill. Note this "for further reading" page for the book, this Feb. 5, 2006 Observer story about Lee, and this April 3, 2005 story in the Lawrence, Kan. Journal-World about Lee's involvement in Capote's "In Cold Blood."
Update: Turns out March 2 is World Book Day only in the UK and Ireland. In most places it's April 23, as established by UNESCO, the birthday of Shakespeare and Cervantes.
Harper Lee, World Book Day, Truman Capote, To Kill a Mockingbird
FOB girl goes floating
Updating our NASA Bedrest Study girl Erin: check out these wild pictures of the zero-gravity suspension rig they put her in on a daily basis -- and also scroll down and check out her inflatable bathtub!
Focus on the fundies: Alito blows Dobson.
Today on his nationally syndicated radio program, right-wing foamer James Dobson read a letter in which new Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito publicly thanked the Focus on the Family founder and his followers for their support during his confirmation process. The head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State called Alito's note "grossly inappropriate."
The Colorado Springs Gazette story has the full text of Alito's letter.
James Dobson, Samuel Alito, separation of church and state, Republicans, fundamentalists
Mix that meme
Among other newsletters I have signed up for, I receive a daily Shelf Awareness newsletter for the bookselling trade -- as part of my preparation for the day when I have a book to hawk.* Here's their preview of books coming out next week:
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse (Putnam, $25.95, 0399153446). A quest for the Holy Grail linking two women, one from the 13th century, the other living now.... The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult (Atria, $26, 0743496701). The father and family of a 14-year-old girl pass through many levels of hell after she accuses her former boyfriend of rape. ... Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads: Coping with the Parents, Teachers, Coaches, and Counselors Who Can Rule--or Ruin--Your Child's Life by Rosalind Wiseman with Elizabeth Rapoport (Crown, $25, 1400083001). ... The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner: A Powerful Plan to Finish Rich in Real Estate by David Bach (Broadway, $19.95, 0767921208). The automatic millionaire puts down speculative roots. The Journey: How to Live by Faith in an Uncertain World by Billy Graham.
Clearly, the way to success is simply to combine some of these themes into a single book.
LABYRINTH: THE MILLIONAIRE'S TENTH HOME -- A real-estate speculator and his attractive, divorced realtor choose a hilltop mansion as his retirement home, but the nosy, noisy over-controlling parents who are his next-door neighbors threaten the pair's search for the holy grail of peace and quiet. A descent into the mansion's secret passages uncovers a hidden chamber where terrible crimes may have been committed by depraved local high schoolers and a psychotic basketball coach whose drive to win at any cost leads toward an unforgettable climax.
My agent could sell that in a second.
* No news on that front lately. Got another really nice rejection last week though, the kind that makes you want to use it as blurbs on the back cover of the book. "Fun and snappy and smart.... A spot-on rendering of the Rat Pack and their dicey world." Isn't that nice?
Word of the day: Rowdy-sheeter
I ran across this word in a news article posted on Bangalore Buzz, a news aggregator that has been an invaluable resource for me as I research Bangalore for a novel. Here is an excerpt from the article:
The murder of Palani, 40, a rowdysheeter, while undergoing treatment at HOSMAT hospital is the latest in a chain of events that began some years back.
Most gang-wars began due to turf control of cable operations.
According to police, the gang wars started following the murder of Rahim Ali, a rowdy-sheeter and a cable operator in Fraser Town police station limits a few years ago, and still continue in Viveknagar, Girinagar and Banashankari.
Rahim Ali was murdered by a gang on contract given allegedly by D D Ravi and his brother Umashankar over cable operations....
Notice the two different spellings: rowdysheeter and rowdy-sheeter. And entry for the first usage points to this entry for the second, hyphenated use of the word, which it defines as "a person with a criminal record; a hardened criminal."
I still don't know what "cable operations" refers to.
OMFG Barry Bonds in drag OMFG
Starting their spring training experience off with a bang, the Giants put on a satire of "American Idol," and playing the part of Paula Abdul was Barry Bonds in full drag. Priceless pictures.
Now a quiz:
With this episode, who or what phenomenon has jumped the shark?
A. The game of baseball
B. The "American Idol" phenomenon
C. Paula Abdul as a celebrity
D. Barry Bonds as a Vant-To-Be-Alone diva
E. Drag as a phenomenon
F. Brokeback Mountain
What are you working on? : Sage Vivant
Just posted in my series of interviews with writers talking about their current projects: Sage Vivant, whose nonfiction book Your Erotic Personality is based on years of work writing erotic stories on order by private clients.
Frederick Busch
While many blogs are noting the death of sci-fi writer Octavia Butler, I mourn the passing of novelist Frederick Busch, whose 1996 novel Girls I really liked.
Focus on the Fundies: Sen. Sam Brownback
Jeff Sharlett interviews Sen. Sam Brownback (R.-Kan.), a possible candidate for president in 2008 on the Republican far right. The article (a "rough draft" of his recent Rolling Stone piece) is hard to excerpt, but the impression one gets is that of a sincere, very religious crypto-fascist.
One day, the man who came up with Bill Frist's plan for a "nuclear option" with which to blast away Democratic resistance to right-wing judges stops by (Brownback's Senate office). He's there on behalf of the NFL. I'm invited into the meeting, but I can't tell you what the NFL wants, because it's a secret. Then there's an archbishop from the Sudan, a reasonable and wise man, but the conversation turns strange when Brownback's staff starts sifting language, talking about planes that fly by night, if you know what I mean, which would be something, because I don't. Well, I eventually found out, actually, but again, I can't tell you -- it's a secret.
Just like most of what's said by the ambassador to the Vatican from a certain foreign nation who has been brought around by a Christian conservative lobbyist to talk about "religious liberty." ...
At the end of the article, Sharlett notes lobbyists and constituents alike have to pay a minimum of $2000 just to talk to their senator, but Brownback doesn't take the checks himself; a staff handles it all with discretion, freeing Brownback himself to wax sentimental:
One night he calls me around 10:30, for a literal heart-to-heart. It's been a long day for the senator, what with the Alito hearings, but there are some thoughts he wants to share. About hearts. He never has to wonder what God wants for the nation, because God has already written the answer on Brownback's central organ. Mine, too, and yours also. "Everybody has a good heart," he says, by which he means that everybody has an inner fundamentalist, waiting to come out and embrace "moral values."
Sharlett's RS piece is more explicit:
In (Brownback's) dream America -- the one he believes both the Bible and the Constitution promise -- the state will simply wither away. In its place will be a country so suffused with God and the free market that the social fabric of the last hundred years -- schools, Social Security, welfare -- will be privatized or simply done away with. There will be no abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage. Men will lead families, mothers will tend children, and big business and the church will take care of all.
Jeff Sharlett, Revealer, Sam Brownback, Republicans, fundamentalists
No Mars bars, either
After blogging four weeks ago about a NASA bedrest study -- they put people FOB for 90 days to see how astronauts might react to long spaceflights -- I got comments from someone who's actually in the study. Her blog, Stardustholiday, features posts about the meals and the annoying sound of another subject's constant TV noise (somehow I don't think that's going to be a problem on interplanetary flights) and a countdown clock that says it's 76 days until she can get up.
And no, to answer my question, they don't give them Mars bars.
Early books
I'll just let the Guardian's own subhead do the work: "Alaa al-Aswany is a successful Cairo dentist -- and a bestselling writer. Now his blockbuster novel The Yacoubian Building, which strikes at the political corruption and moral hypocrisy of today's Egypt, has been made into an acclaimed film." Interview by Rory McCarthy.
Picked almost at random, but sounds really cool anyway: White Ghost Girls, about Hong Kong teen sisters in 1967. Sounds a bit forced, with the girls kidnapped by Maoists at one point, but I'm still entraced by the idea of a book written about Hong Kong teenagers in 1967. Author Alice Greenway will read, with bestselling author Kiran Desai, in Seattle this week: Elliott Bay Books, 101 S. Main, at 7:30 pm Wednesday.
Jhumpa Lahiri on dual cultural identity
In a special issue of Newsweek on modern India, author Jhumpa Lahiri writes about "her two lives":
According to my parents I was not American, nor would I ever be no matter how hard I tried. I felt doomed by their pronouncement, misunderstood and gradually defiant. In spite of the first lessons of arithmetic, one plus one did not equal two but zero, my conflicting selves always canceling each other out.
Lahiri's most recent novel The Namesake continues selling well in hardback; it was number 594 today, 17 months after its release.
Sex Pistols to Rock and Roll Hall: Fuck Off
Told they had been chosen to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Sex Pistols (or whoever or whatever is standing for them these days) replied in a manner befitting their punk image:
Next to the SEX PISTOLS[,] rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain.
Link courtesy Huff Post. Of course, the Sex Pistols themselves were pretty much a put-up job, but despite their Monkees-like provenance*, they did manage to influence a generation. See the Wikipedia entry for a picture of an Aug. 29, (1976?) poster for a gig featuring the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Buzzcocks. Wow.
*From the Wikipedia entry:
Under McLaren's guidance, the band was initially influenced in part by the simple, chord-based style of The New York Dolls and The Ramones. McLaren had given guitarist Jones the Les Paul guitar used by NY Doll Sylvain Sylvain, and the torn-shirt, spiked-hair look of Richard Hell, then bass player for Television. All of these figures were pioneers of the New York City punk, and later new wave music, scene. Rotten and his circle of friends (coincidentally all also called John) walked into the arrangement already possessed of a similar style -- a grunged-out version of the 'soul boy' fashion affected by fans of Roxy Music. McLaren also claimed that he wanted the Sex Pistols to be "the new Bay City Rollers".
The new Bay City Rollers. Heh. This BBC page says of the Rollers -- tongue planted firmy in stiff upper lip -- "We will never see their like again."
Sex Pistols, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,Bay City Rollers, punk,rock music
What are you working on? : memoirist and novelist Anne Mini
Just posted in my series of interviews with writers talking about their current projects, Anne Mini, whose memoir of growing up as the daughter of Philip K. Dick's second wife has been held up by the Dick family estate.
Fan appreciation day
Galleycat posts from the New York Comic-Con, with excellent pictures and news of the state of the industry. Among the artifacts are a Danish flag being signed by famous artists to raise money for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund -- something to do with those now-infamous cartoons. (They're just cartoons, people. Lighten up.)
A California "artist" who promised to give away ten-dollar bills to passersby "got spooked at the size of the crowd" and fled, leaving a lot of angry poor people.
"This is messed up," said Brian Boykin, who said he was going to use his money for a hot meal. "That whole time we sat listening to him, thinking we would get money -- and then nothing."
Barry Bonds showed up at spring training a few days ago a year older and no lighter, but he can still swing the bat, and that's all that counts for some people.
Finally, courtesy Michele Richmond's Sans Serif, the news that Laura Albert will continue writing as JT LeRoy, with Last Gasp to publish "LeRoy's" latest book, to be titled Labour. There truly is no such thing as bad publicity.
Kate Braverman on warpath
Novelist Kate Braverman, whose memoir Frantic Transmissions To and From Los Angeles has just come out, visits her former home of Los Angeles tonight. The LA Times interviews her, including her rant about how unappreciated she is down there. (Link courtesy Publishers Lunch.) Read this interview on Bookslut and you'll get the true Braver flavor.
Multiple universes
Quantum theories suggest the possibility of an infinite amount of simultaneously existing universes -- sure, that's old hat to Wesley Crusher. But this story in New Scientist suggests this might lead to sudden destruction of our -- "the" -- universe, or:
Or it could be more peaceful, where you're simply converted into somebody who remembers stuff from the large world.
I'll take the latter possibility.
The article goes on to say that the scientist quoted, Robin Hanson of George Mason University, "has not worked out exactly what happens."
In other science news, researchers report sex with another person is 400% better than sex with yourself. Hmm, I think a lot of people would say "That depends."
It's Bad Behavior Friday™!
Police in the depraved region of Clear Lake, Texas were searching this week for a missing Pentecostal pastor and a 14-year-old girl who were each seen in their respective beds 9 miles apart. Nine miles is nothing down there in the Houston suburbs; you barely get your air conditioning cranked up before you get nine miles.
SFist has a nice story about a stupid criminal who messed up the address he was sending his marijuana to, but carefully wrote his own return address on the package, making it easy for police to hunt him down like ... well, I would say a dog, but dogs are smarter than that.
In a continuing story of fraud and fakery in SF, four people were indicted yesterday in a strange case that involved fake clinics billing medicare for fake treatments, mostly to poor immigrants. This is different from the case of the phony doctor who gave fake exams to immigrants as part of their green card application process, a story that broke late last week.
And in New York, everyone is agog over the body parts theft case in which a dentist masterminded a four-year scheme to steal bone marrow from corpses and replace the missing bones with plastic piping. That's why I use the word "mastermind." You know what I wonder? Where'd the PVC pipe come from? Something tells me one of the plotters has a relative in hardware.
Gee, we got through a whole week without any new fake writers. But I'm still optimistic; it's only Friday morning.
Just another day in America ·
Funny, yes, but I thought it was also poignant because of another news story today: Last High-Profile Tiananmen Protestor Released After 16 Years. Some guy was jailed after throwing paint on a portrait of Mao in 1989; he is said to have gone insane after being tortured. More than 16 years later, he gets out, having spent nearly half his 38 years in a dungeon.
But in the U.S., we practically french-fried Cheney for shooting some guy in a hunting accident -- so much so that the victim apoligized to the guy who shot him! And God yes, it was fun.
Punishment for Yu Dongyue for spattering Mao's image with paint? 16 years of torture. Punishment for Jon Stewart for mocking our leaders? He gets to host the Oscars. Is this a great country or what?
The New Yorker was, of course, where Annie E. Proulx's short story Brokeback Mountain was originally published in, what, 1997. (The author discussed the story behind the story in the Advocate back in December.)
The current issue also has a new John Updike story, if you please.
Adventures in Photoshop, no. 4
Want to see other images celebrating this holiday, also known as Army Day? Why you can send one as a postcard!
Lit up ·
Today's literary links:
From Slushpile, a link to What To Do When Your Book Is Getting Zero Publicity.
Galleycat reports, from the NY Post, that James Frey's book contract has been cancelled, as sales of A Million Little Pieces of Bullshit passed three million. I don't suppose that counts copies returned by readers who claimed they were hoodwinked. I saw a pony-tailed blonde straight girl reading a copy in a Starbuck's on Union St. the other day -- a fake blonde reading a fake memoir while drinking crappy coffee. But you expect that kind of thing on Union St., which is sort of like L.A. with jackets.
Miss Snark with good advice, as usual:
I'd pitch an agent over an editor any day of the week. First, if you have an agent, you won't need to know what an editor wants; your agent will know. An agent gets you access to editors, one editor does not get you access to an agent.
books, publishing, James Frey, Miss Snark,book publicity, Cow Hollow
The other red meat
Remember a few years ago when the Nat'l Cattleman's Beef Association ran those commercials featuring the slogan "Beef -- it's what's for dinner!" with visuals of hearty Americans enjoying hearty meals? They used as music "Hoe-Down" from Aaron Copland's "Rodeo," and I used to complain to Cris that a whole generation of Americans would now be thinking of that composition as "the beef music." (I Googled "copeland rodeo" and this was the top result -- a post from a guy who thought the same way. But that's only because I misspelled "Copland.")
Then today in the Leah Garchik column in today's SF Chronicle, this squib (bottom of column):
After Sunday's San Francisco Ballet performance of "Rodeo," Jeff Diver heard one woman tell another, "I liked the 'Brokeback' piece."
Yes, everything remotely related to cowboys is now immediately thought of as gay. This is an improvement, since anything remotely related to cowboys used to be a cigarette ad.
beef, cowboys, Brokeback Mountain, Aaron Copland, Rodeo, Leah Garchik
What are you working on? : novelist Vanessa Place
Just posted in my series of interviews with fascinating writers working on cool projects, novelist and criminal appeals lawyer Vanessa Place, whose previous work Dies, a Sentence was a 50,000-word single sentence, and whose current work centers on ekphrasis, writing "cohabiting" with visual art.
The Soy Luck Club
A 19-year-old Indian-American's breakthrough debut novel garnered a rumored half million dollar advance for a chick-lit book oriented (ha!) to young women who are westernizing as fast as they can. Of interest is the fact that the youth's original manuscript was "much darker" until "17th Street Productions, a so-called book packager that specializes in developing projects in young-adult and middle-grade fiction" such as Sweet Valley High, the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants series, etc. got their hands on it. Check out their website and then, quick, brush your teeth.
Can you say "sellout"? On the other hand, can you say "all her student loans paid off and a nice down payment on an apartment in Manhattan"?
Miss understanding
Sometimes the kids at BoingBoing -- one of the best blogs ever, and source of almost endless amusement and inspiration -- get just a wee bit carried away. After someone sent in a photograph labelled MISS COMPUTER 1973 of a middle-aged woman in a 1970s-era data center, BoingBoinger Xeni J. published it with the plaintive headline "Miss Computer 1973 -- Who is she?"
After a failed guess that the woman was COBOL pioneer Grace Hopper, another reader suggested :
My guess is it is not MISS Computer as in a beautiful woman, but M.I.S.S. Computer as in a form of Materials Inventory Support System. The photo is of the computer system and the woman just happens to be standing there.
Oh... never mind! But let's give credit to the site for allowing the original misunderstanding to remain visible along with the clarification -- because without the misattribution, none of it would make sense anyway.
I guess it's all just wishful thinking. The world of IT was incredibly male-dominated in the 1970s and it would have been a miracle if they'd designated a middle-aged female brainiac as "Miss Computer." If they had chosen a "Miss Computer" at all -- and there were women in CS departments, if not very many -- it probably would have been some undergrad babe. Where are their photos? I want to see the real CS co-eds of 1973!
A sure sign of the apocalypse
Here's an article from the Houston Chronicle about... I still can't believe it... something original and cool happening in... [slaps forehead]... Houston!
A clandestine posse of female "Montrose hipsters" -- the Montrose being the only thing Houston has ever had like a hip neighborhood -- go on guerilla knitting expeditions. They knit sleeves around the trunks of trees. They knit little covers for car antennas. Wild!
That a man's speech should exceed his grasp, or what's a metaphor?
I do understand that every day over there is like walking up a mountain with bricks in your backpack, and when something starts the beasts not just growling but flinging themselves against their cages, I feel bad about that, and it's not a good day for him.
-- Mary Matalin quoted in yesterday's NYT on the trials and tribulations of being White House press sec'ty Scott McClellan
Being the press spokesman for an administration whose whole existence is based on lying and cheating? Yeah, that must suck. Being one of the reporters who has to deal with him? That must be worse.
What are you working on? : writer Doug Nufer
Just posted in my series of interviews with writers about their current projects, Seattle writer Doug Nufer, whose work takes after the Oulipo movement.
Create in me a clean heart
Susan Henderson, who was kind enough to submit to my interview project, refers to me in her blog as a "gentle interviewer." Ha, she hasn't seen me drive. But if we take my mad driving out of the picture, and also grade on a curve the sarcastic comments I make in this blog (like calling the Vice Presidential shootee a "freakin' dope") I am sort of mild. Sometimes I wonder if my writing is the worse for it.
Anyway, she wants me to take part in one of those internet games of "tag" where you answer a series of questions. I am loathe to to spend too much time on that, but I would like to mention a bunch of my favorite books, which is one of the categories.
"Moving On" and "All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers" by Larry McMurtry
"The Age of Reason" by Jean-Paul Sartre
"The Thurber Carnival" by James Thurber
"My Mother: Demonology" by Kathy Acker
"Trout Fishing in America," "In Watermelon Sugar," and "Sombrero Fallout" by Richard Brautigan (a reviewer on Amazon.com remarks that the latter book prefigures the work of Haruki Murakami, and that's an excellent call)
"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe
"The Wild Iris" by Louise Glück
"A Bend in the River" by V.S. Naipaul
That's just what comes to mind. I could go on, but you get the picture -- my tastes were formed in the 60s and 70s. You want something more current? How about Philip Roth's "American Pastoral"?
I'll let the other questions go for now; forgive me.
What are you working on? : writer Michelle Richmond
Just posted in my series of interviews with writers about their latest projects, Michelle Richmond, who is putting the finishing touches on a new novel.
She says, "The novel is, in large part, about memory, so I studied up on various theories of memory, how the brain stores and retrieves information, how that information may be lost and altered."
Scary straight girls
Galleycat published a bit about a book launch and ran a picture of five, count 'em, five straight-girl chick-lit novelists with fixed teeth and straight hair. The longer you look at that picture, the more it's like one of those logic puzzles:
The only one with a small rack is standing by the one with a headache.
The one with the biggest smile is also left-handed, and she's dressed the sluttiest.
Two of them are wearing green, and one of the green-wearing girls was the featured author.
And so on. Is it possible that they all have naturally straight hair? Ach.
Cheney shooting victim 'sorry for Cheney'
The guy Cheney shot left the hospital today, saying he was "deeply sorry" for all the pain Cheney had been through.
You read that right -- he feels sorry for Cheney!!
Further damaging his chances for a lawsuit against the Vice President, 78-year-old Harry Whittington said, "Accidents do and will happen and that's what happened. ... We all assume certain risks in what we do, in what activities we pursue."
Freakin' dope -- no wonder he got shot.
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! ·
You take your laughs where you can find them. Yesterday I hooted at Dear Abby because of the revelation that the Alzheimer's Association has little cards available which read:
The person with me has a disease called Alzheimer's or a related disease. Please be kind and understanding. Thank you.
Naturally I thought how fun it would be to carry those any time you go to dinner with your parents -- whether they have Alzheimer's or not.
And think of the variations. Imagine going on a date and handing your waiter a little card that says "The person I am with is an asshole who I'm going to break up with during dinner. Please serve him the stalest piece of Tiramisu you have. I will make sure you still get a good tip."
Or this: "The person I am dining with ran out on the check the last time we went to a restaurant. Please watch him like a hawk, and if he gets up 'to go to the bathroom,' follow him closely."
But the real joke in that Dear Abby was the person who wrote "I work as a server in an upscale restaurant..." and then signed her letter Nancy in Huntsville, Ala. I wonder what the "upscale restaurant" in Huntsville is like.
In Peshawar -- I'd rather eat at an upscale restaurant there -- a "cleric" issued a fatwa on irreverent Danish cartoonists, promising a $1 million bounty. You know what? I don't think they have a million dollars. And I love this sloppy use of the term "cleric" -- either the reporter can't be bothered to learn the man's title, or he doesn't think Western readers would understand it anyway. So, you know: a loud, bearded guy in a turban.
In Israel, cartoonists have launched a response to the Iranian cartoon response to the Danish cartoons. If you're keeping score at home, an Iranian newspaper two weeks ago decided to have a contest for Holocaust-mocking cartoons, apparently not understanding that Jews are masters at self-mockery.
Amitai Sandy (29), graphic artist and publisher of Dimona Comix Publishing, from Tel-Aviv, Israel, has followed the unfolding of the "Muhammad cartoon-gate" events in amazement, until finally he came up with the right answer to all this insanity -- and so he announced today the launch of a new anti-Semitic cartoons contest -- this time drawn by Jews themselves!
"We'll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!" said Sandy. "No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!"
Alzheimer's Disease, cartoons, Israeli cartoon contest, Holocaust cartoons
Comedy today
Meanwhile, down in the desert, it's Jerry vs. the Shrieking Closet Door. Yes, when you open your closet, all kinds of things from the past are liable to appear.
That'll be the day
Here's a nice big, very pedestrian article about book publicity in Poets and Writers. Specifically, it's about how publicity is done at major publishing houses.
Reading this article gave me a nose-to-the-window feeling, like yeah, I know this is sort of how it happens but I somehow can't see all that publicity machinery happening to me. I felt like a 14-year-old reading an article about race car drivers -- I might get to drive a car some day, but I ain't never gonna drive an Indy car 200 mph.
This Poets and Writers article basically assumes you're the author of a nonfiction book that's about to be released by a major publisher who is probably going to get you some decent press -- maybe not the Today Show, but you've got a good chance of a review in the NYT Book Review, several major daily newspapers, and some NPR stations, if not Fresh Air. You probably live on the east coast already, you have friends in the media who will help out... yeah, whatever.
When I see how people on my level -- well, really, the level above me -- actually bust their asses to get a little press for their books -- talented people like Katia and Martha -- an article like this is like reading science fiction. All these publicists supposedly coordinating mailings and tours -- yeah, I'm sure that happens to somebody.
Previously: New techniques in book marketing and publicity
Mystery author pretends to shun publicity
'Publish and Perish' piece distresses some
All about my friends
My pal Katia Noyes is interviewed on Libertas, a U.K. lesbian website, by Lucia Pajon. They call her book one of the best novels of 2005. Amazon.com agrees, putting it on their best lesbian/gay books list. Check out Crashing America.
Willie Nelson: 25 years ahead of his time
In 1981 Willie Nelson recorded a song about gay cowboy romance titled "Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other)." On Valentine's Day, it was played on radio for the first time, on the Howard Stern Show. "The song's been in the closet for 20 years," Nelson said. "It's time for it to come out."
Nelson is 73 (CMT bio page), and has been married to his fourth wife since 1991.
Secret agents ·
Galleycat alerts readers to a resource I hadn't known about, Agent Query, a site designed to expose agents to writers and separate the scam artists from the reputable agents. Looks like they intend to give Publishers Marketplace a run for their money, at least when it comes to the information on agents.
Fun with Google Maps
I love the animated gif on the left side of this bike shop page, showing their location in Manhattan by zooming progressively in from space. Scroll down halfway and look in the left column to see it.
What are you working on? : poet and translator Liz Henry
Just posted in my continuing series of interviews with writers about their works in progress, poet and rebel translator Liz Henry, who in addition to her main work on 20th C. Latin American poets:
The other thing I'm doing, I guess, that's new: "Bother to refute patriarchy." There's naming the problem, right? Then, sort of proving that patriarchy exists and finding annoying examples of it. Then kicking its ass point by point. Then building feminist alternate canons, i.e. doing something positive, and coming up with new vision, new theories, etc. as a critic.
Rocks, she does.
See all the interviews here.
Liz Henry, translation,Latin American Literature, feminist writers, womens studies, poets
Valentine's Day for all
Who's the executive director of the national office of the Metropolitian Community Church, the nation's largest gayische Protestant denomination?
Cindi Love.
The church sponsors an annual Valentines Day campaign in which same-sex couples march down to their local city hall and ask for -- and are usually denied -- marriage licenses. That only reminds one of the mad events of February 2004, when thousands of gay couples streamed to San Francisco's City Hall. The dramatic events began as just another annual symbolic ask-and-be-denied event -- until SF Mayor Gavin Newsom shocked the nation and ordered the county clerk to begin giving marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
But not everyone was ecstatic about it -- not even all queer people. My recent interview with Meredith Maran gave me the opportunity to uncover her April 2004 piece in Salon in which she wondered "Why wasn't I hopping aboard the lesbo love train?" despite living and raising a child with her same-sex partner.
Writing and deadlines
A friend wrote:
Dammit, I always do this when I write. I start out with a good idea/concept/message, then I trail off into something else.
I replied with a thought that I'll expand here.
Going off on tangents is not necessarily a bad thing, since sometimes the tangent turns out to be the thing even more worth writing about than your original idea. There have been many times I thought I wanted to say something about Point One, and wrote four or five paragraphs that eventually petered out into pointless babble -- but by that point I realized that Point Two is even better and now that I've cleared my throat, so to speak, I can get on with it. And I wind up writing something that would be much better than if I stuck with Point One.
Other times -- especially if I'm on a deadline and I have to write about Point One -- after that first hour of inconclusive mess I can sometimes take a break, cross out most of what I've done so far, re-attack it by reminding myself of the value of the original idea, and then get it done.
That's really the way I wrote that essay in October, the one I read at the Litquake event*. After an hour I was ready to give up, but because of the deadline I got back in the box and tried again. So sometimes deadlines are a good thing.
* That essay was then accepted for Best Sex Writing 2006 -- you can already pre-order the anthology, which is due out in June from Cleis Press and which will feature me, Susie Bright, Stephen Elliott, and many others.
sex writing, essay writing, Cleis Press, Susie Bright, Stephen Elliott
Forward into the 21st century
Mr. Gilmore's books fall into a growing genre known as street lit. With titles like "Push," "Topless" and "Platinum Dolls," they are saturated with sex, violence, gangsters and drug dealers and take place in prison and on the mean streets of New York City. He began writing them while serving a sentence for check-cashing fraud in federal prison in New Jersey. When he was released in 2003, he walked out with 30 completed manuscripts. So far, he has had about a dozen printed. He aggressively markets and distributes them on the buses to prison, sidewalks, the Internet and in small bookstores.
And as he told the bus passengers, he signed a four-book contract with St. Martin's for a sum in "the low six figures," said Monique Patterson, a senior editor there. Ms. Patterson said the decision to sign Mr. Gilmore was not only a recognition of his proven ability as a storyteller and potential as a stylist, but also an indication of large publishing houses' surging interest in street lit.
From a NYT article on the progress of "street lit."
Previously: African-American authors' obsession with sex, drugs, etc. might be just a phase
Block that metaphor
"This is exactly the kind of project that brings people out of the woodwork like sheep."
-- Sarah Weinman, Galleycat
What are you working on? : writer Meredith Maran
Just posted in my series of interviews with writers on their current projects, an interview with memoirist Meredith Maran, tackling a novel for the first time. "I started with some very vague ideas -- feelings, really -- then opened the chute, let the horses out, and started galloping around the landscape."
Bangalore sites
For more than a year I've been trying to write a novel set in Bangalore -- the southern India city that has been utterly transformed in the past ten years or so by foriegn firms' "offshore" offices and "call centers" -- without actually having had the pleasure of visiting it. In fact, I've never been to India at all; the closest I've been is Hong Kong.
One of the most helpful websites I've found is Bangalore Buzz, which aggregates (collects) news articles about Bangalore from several local, national Indian, and foreign newspapers. This site has been utterly invaluable. The articles describe the economic and socio-cultural scene, with particular attention paid to just the aspects of Bangalore I want to know about: the disruptions caused by the overwhelming changes in the city.
Then today I found something totally great: a blog about potholes in Bangalore. The potholes, road problems and infrastructure problems are emblematic of the changes in the city, as far as I can tell.
Finally, I noticed the other day that the satellite function of Google maps has recently published a much more detailed satellite view of Bangalore. Without a map it's pretty hard to fingure out what's what, but I can compare it to other online maps and find a few things.
A liberal is a conservative who's been harassed by cops
Salon's Ask The Pilot columnist gets detained by cops at two different airports for the vague crime of taking photographs. Apparently there are some things you're "not supposed to" take pictures of -- but no one can say what those are.
Last night on MSNBC's "Countdown," there was this exchange:
Host Keith Olbermann: We have talked before, with deep sadness, about the politicizing of counterterror measures here. You have just put this into a political context. My stomach is queasy as I ask this. In the context of this today, and what you have seen, are we far enough removed from that component of the novel "1984," the part where the government turns a kind of terror faucet on and off to scare the public into acquiescing to whatever it wants to do?
Author Gerald Posner: Lookit, I'm afraid we are, unfortunately, at that point, where we are in a real war, there's no question about it. We have fundamentalists out there who would love to kill more innocent Americans in vast numbers. They'd love to pull off a weapon-of-mass-destruction attack. But at the same time, the government is also very effective, the Bush administration, at using terror as a political weapon and making sure that it does turn on the fear spigot when it wants to and turn it off at other times.
Countdown, Olbermann, Posner, security measures, airports, Ask the Pilot
Suicide of the week: man in jet lavratory
A jet was diverted to a nearby airport after it was discovered that a man hanged himself in the lavratory.
WTF? I suppose he tied something around his neck from the coat hook. But either he was extremely determined, or -- my guess -- it was an accident. Something tells me he went in there to masturbate and went too far.
Points subtracted for inconveniencing lots of other people, for making a mess, for embarrassing your loved ones, and most of all, for not intending to commit suicide in the first place.
Previously: Suicides from a popular Cleveland bridge.
Today's dumb book deals
Once in a a while it's encouraging to look at the Publishers Marketplace list of book deals -- they post two or three dozen every day, that's how many writers are buying champagne on a daily basis (the rest of us just drink cheap wine) -- and see how much ridiculous crap out there is actually getting published.
Encouraging because, if they publish stuff like this, it's only a matter of time before they publish my novel):
Founder and Executive Director of the CIO Collective Stuart Robbins's GRID COMPUTING, a survival guide to our next technology platform for executives and IT professionals, written in fictional form and showing how we need to change ourselves in order to improve our information systems, to Sheck Cho at Wiley, by James Levine at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency (world).
He's Executive Director of a CTO group -- doesn't that sound like the blind leading the blind -- and he's written up his vision for the future "in fictional form." This is part of a long-standing trend in business books in which egomaniacal suits, stuffed to the gills on business plans and reports which are largely fictional, as well as bad thrillers consumed in business class on long flights, get the notion they can write a story. Which is nice, since they probably can't write business English in the first place, and can't be bothered to check facts. So let's just write our bogus future vision "in fictional form"!
Cue Mr. Spock moaning "PAIN.... PAIN..."
Kathleen McGowan's The Magdalene Line, three thrillers that fictionalize her two decades of research into a gospel written by Mary Magdalene, beginning with her originally self-published THE EXPECTED ONE for publication in August 2006, to Trish Todd at Touchstone Fireside, in a major deal, for seven figures...
Hmm, more non-fiction masquerading as fiction. Did you notice this book was originally self-published? If her book is anything like her utterly horrid website, I think I would rather have it dropped on my head from the Hollywood sign than read it.
Finally:
Twenty-year veteran of the Port Authority Police Department and night commander of the WTC Rescue and Recovery Operation William Keegan with Bart Davis's CLOSURE: The Untold Story of the Ground Zero Recovery Mission, about the nine months Keegan and his men spent grappling with shattered concrete, twisted steel, body parts, grief, and political pressure....
Notice all the stuff there about the long and gripping resume of nominal author Keegan and then, slipped in like a piece of chopped liver, "with Bart Davis." Well, it's a good bet your typical Port Authority cop might find it hard to write a birthday card, much less a memoir cashing in on people's fading memories of nine eleven, so you bet there's a ghost writer.
Make Nice
How They Scored
I Saw You, Ed. by Julia Wertz
(contributor)
Best Sex Writing 2006 (contributor)
Lesbian Camp Girls
Too Beautiful and Other Stories
How I Adore You
Sara Miles's
Jesus Freak
Bob Ostertag's
Creative Life
Liz Henry, Ed.
Wiscon Chronicles vol. 3
Andrew Zornoza's
Where I Stay
Sara Miles'
Take This Bread
A Radical Conversion
