• Ian McEwan mourns Saul Bellow. In particular, he describes how placing a quote from Herzog before a novel makes it sound more important than it really is.
• If the Atlantic won’t publish fiction, an author can always aim for Cosmo. That’s precisely what author Mary Castillo did for her novel Hot Tamara. Of course, the excerpt in question is a “hot and heavy love scene.” But it was either that or a questionnaire determining how effectively you satisfy your man.
• Phillip Seymour Hoffman will play Truman Capote in a biopic. That’s fine casting. Unfortunately, in another Capote-related film, Every Word is True, Sandra Bullock will play Harper Lee. To add insult to injury, the producers plan to change the title of Lee’s novel. It will now be known as To Kill the Girl Next Door Type.
• Elizabeth George fanboys are incensed with the latest novel. In George’s latest, a central character in the Lynley series has been killed off, spawning resentment, multiple sessions of therapy, devious fan fiction, and a firm convinction to seek more mediocre best-selling novelists.
• And Stuart Dybek has made this year’s ALA Notable Books list for I Sailed With Magellan. He hopes to make next year’s list by titling his novel-in-progress I Painted With Picasso, even though it has nothing to do with the famed artist.

Look, I perceive Jeb Bush as a threat to the public. But the last thing I’d do is shoot the man. The Florida Senate has passed a bill (SB 436, aka the “Castle Doctrine” bill) that permits residents to shoot people who they suspect are attackers in their homes, vehicles, or in public places. (And I’m thinking here that arenas and pay-per-view broadcasts aren’t too far behind.) The bill provides “immunity from criminal prosecution or civil action using deadly force; authorizing a law enforcement agency to investigate the use of deadly force but prohibiting the agency from arresting the person unless the agency determines that probable cause exists showing that the force the person used was unlawful.”

So if you’re in Florida, and you decide to shoot someone, and you claim that the other person was using deadly force, not only are you granted immunity but you’ll now have ample time to make a run for the state border while the police are deciding whether probable cause exists.

But it gets better. Because the bill’s language actually encourages people not to retreat “if the person is in a place where he or she has a right to be.”

Of course, with any bill, there’s an escape clause. Use of force is not available if a person, withdraws from physical contact with the assailant and indicates clearly to the assailant that he or she desires to withdraw and terminate the use of force, but the assaiilant continues or resumes the use of force.”

The big question here is how a person can convey his desire not to be shot within that seminal split-second of adrenaline. I’m sure we can count on a gun-totinng Florida resident hopped up on emotional instinct to put down the .45 with a cool head and invite the other person in for a cup of tea.

If this is the natural progression of legislation, then we’re only a few years away from Death Race 2000/Robert Sheckley-style reality television.

As if Bellow’s passing wasn’t bad enough, Frank Conroy has died.

In a feat worthy of the great Gerard Jones, Galleycat points to an Observer article which reveals the masthead behind the machine:

Editorial Director and Books Editor: Henry Finder
Books Deputy Editor: Leo Carey
Poetry Editor: Alice Quinn
Fiction Editor: Deborah Treisman
Fiction Deputy Editor: Cressida Leyshon
Fiction Associate Editor: Carin Besser
Goings on About Town and Web Editor: Ben Greenman

Saul Bellow has died. Bellow was considered one of the great American living writers. And his passing, much to my surprise, left me with a sizable lump in my chest.

I first read Bellow in my early twenties. While his playfulness (the legacy of which can now be found in nearly every Dave Eggers story) of his interminable paragraphs sometimes annoyed me, I was still taken with the way Bellow still managed to cut to the fine point of human observation in unexpected ways. Take, for example, this passage from Humboldt’s Gift:

The strain was largely at the top. In the crow’s-nest from which the moern autonomous person keeps watch. But of course Cantabile was right. I was vain, and I hadn’t the age of renunciation. Whatever that is. It wasn’t entirely vanity, though. Lack of exercise made me ill. I used to hope that there would be less energy available to my neuroses as I grew older. Tolstoi thought that people got into trouble because they ate steak and drank vodka and coffee and smoked cigars. Overcharged with calories and stimulants and doing no useful labor they fell into carnality and other sins. At this point I always remembered that Hitler had been a vegetarian, so that it wasn’t necessarily the meat that was to blame. Heart-energy, more likely, or a wicked soul, maybe even karma — paynig for the evil of a past life in this one. According to Steiner, whom I was now reading heavily, the spirit learns from resistance — the material body resists and opposes it. In the process the body wears out. But I had not gotten good value for my deterioration. Seeing me with my young daughters, silly people sometimes asked if these were my grandchildren. Me! Was it possible! And I saw that I was getting that look of a badly stuffed trophy or mounted specimen that I always associated with age, and was horrified.

When I first read that paragraph (which is still flagged years later by a Post-It note), I was struck by the number of levels it operated on. Here’s a man contemplating his debilitation (largely a hypochondria used to mask the inevitability of aging) but is resorting to almost every reference and detail at his disposal to evade the issue. He’s blaming himself for not exercising enough, and then seriously grasps for straws in resorting to the questionable health principles of other men.

Finally, Bellow pinpoints the extent of his self-delusion, which involves not coming to terms with the idea of grandchildren, but finally conceding a defeat that not even he can comprehend or accept.

The way that Bellow hit upon the burdens of regret here moved me. And for that, I’ll toss down a cold one for Saul tonight, placing Augie March, Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift to the bottom of my bookpile for re-reading.

(via Dan Wickett)

[UPDATE: Mark has a nice collection of links.]

Here are some dirty secrets that journalists (and, to my great astonishment, Derek Powazek) don’t want bloggers to know about:

• All you need is $18 to purchase an AP Stylebook, which covers libel, slander and a variety of rules that will assist you in confirming facts.
• There’s a helpful little device called a telephone that will allow you to contact people who can comment on a topic or an issue. People will be happy to talk with you.
• The New York Times, among many other newspapers, makes factual mistakes on a daily basis, many of which are covered and discovered by bloggers.
• Traditional print journalists are scared to death of bloggers, because there’s now a new medium demanding accountability.

Definition 1 of my Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary defines “journalism” as “the occupation of reporting, writing, editing, photographing, or broadcasting news or of conducting any news organization as a business.” (Emphasis added.) And there’s the problem right there. Because when you’re adopting a professional, businesslike tone that subscribes to a particular style and format, the no-holds-barred arena of weblogging becomes compromised. While having no limits leads to journalism without limits (e.g., having no advertisers, a more journalistically inclined weblog can run a story heavily critical of the company), conversely, a weblogger’s contribution in this regard will be tainted by his own subjective viewpoint (link poaching, relying on others to do the work, falling prey to one’s own subjective take on the subject, rather than interviewing multiple parties). This, I believe, is what Powazek was getting at.

Fortunately, weblogs are covered in my dictionary under Definition 4: “writing that reflects superficial thought and research, a poupular slant, and hurried composition, conceived of as exemplifying newspaper or popular magazine writing as distinguished from scholarly writing.”

I think the weblogs that are concerned with information (and, more often than not, devoted to reporting their information accurately), sometimes in a manner that falls in line with current ethical standards and frequently with a tone that is as far as one can get from “old and dying,” represent a New New New Journalism (depending on how many modifiers you attach) lying somewhere between these two definitions. And whether Powazek and others like it or not, weblogs have arrived as new exemplars of journalism. The medium is admittedly still young and has a lot of room to grow, and often gets its facts screwed up. But then so do newspapers and television. Just ask Dan Rather.

I would certainly count the author interviews, accounts of bookstore signings, book reviews, and book review coverage summaries featured so prominently on litblogs during any given week as a new form of arts journalism. These reports are certainly subjective, but from what I can tell there is an overwhelming devotion to not only get the facts straight, but link to the other news sources and bloggers who are pursuing the issues. (For example, the Zoo Press scandal reported here last year involved teaming up with Laila, Kerry Jones, and other interested parties to determine how Neil Azevedo was spending contest funds. The story was then picked up by Poets & Writers Magazine.)

With enough trial and error, hard work, and dedication to ethics, any person can do this. That’s what’s so exciting about the information-oriented weblog. And what’s really great about this “learn as you go” idea is that this falls in line with how many of today’s journalists got their training: not with a journalism degree, but through diligent and consistent work.

In a post on his weblog, Powazek writes:

To become a journalist, you have to go to school, go to college, intern at some crap paper, work for crap wages, write whatever dreck the established writers don’t want, put up with ego-maniacal, power-mad, amateur Napoleon editors who will freak out if you put a capital letter in the wroNg place, and do this all for years and years before they let you near a story that matters.

This may be true in part (certainly the “crap wages” aspect is, although most editors I’ve had the pleasure to work with are hardly “Napoleonic” and have been very helpful to me). But here’s a list of journalists who pursued other interests while in college, many of them deciding later that journalism was what they wanted to do. Once in the inner sanctum, they were able to perfect their craft on the job:

Thomas M. Burton: Bachelor’s in history, doctor of laws degree. (Winner: 2004 Explanatory Writing Pulitzer.)

Garteh Cook: Graduated in 1991 with a double major in International Relations and Mathematical Physics. Went on to work at Foreign Policy. (Winner: 2005 Explanatory Reporting Pulitzer.)

Kevin Helliker: Bachelor’s in English literature. (Winner: 2004 Explanatory Writing Pulitzer.)

Julia Keller: Doctorate in English. (Winner: 2005 Feature Writing Pulitzer.)

Amy Dockser Marcus: Graduated in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in history and literature. (Winner: 2005 Beat Reporting Pulitzer.)

Kim Murphy: Graduated in 1977 with English BA. (Winner: 2005 International Reporting Pulitzer.)

The point here being that journalists come from many backgrounds (although many of them are, predictably enough, English majors) and that actually performing the work of a journalist wll lead one to become better at it.

Even if you don’t consider a weblog to be journalism, it would be foolish to discount the remarkably symbiotic relationship between weblogs and journalism that calls for greater discovery and greater probing on both sides. If a weblog uncovers a clue, the journalist, with resources at his disposal, pursues it. If a journalist screws up a fact, then the weblogger is there to call him on it. What if the Apple leaks had been another missing detail about Abu Ghraib? Would that then be outside the purview of protection?

Of course, the ultimate problem with weblogs is the lack of editors and lack of accreditation. The horrid side effect of instant journalism is that once a story has been let loose or given a certain spin (such as the recent San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ proposal to regulate weblogs, which has already been discounted by statements from various Supervisors and the City Attorney), it contributes to the wild whorl of lies or a certain partisan spin.

But journalism has evolved to a point where reactionary definitions are obsolete. The Internet is here to stay. And those determined to dig deep will keep on digging, regardless of whether or not they collect their paycheck from a newspaper.

So perhaps instead of wasting precious energy complaining about what is or isn’t journalism or engaging in this tedious weblogs vs. journalism debate, maybe the time has come for those who are in the business of reporting to extend their hands across the table.

The Amazing Adventures of Lethem & Chabon (via Bookdwarf)

Madonna’s Student Film (1976): She eats a raw egg and has another one fried on her body.

2003: The Movie: one man crams his year into 2:37.

[Mr. Champion recently obtained a grant for $10.00 for an artistic project. Citing the rise in artistic projects that involved spending for spending’s sake and pointing out how important spending money was to the human experience, Mr. Champion vowed to start living on a mere ten dollars a year, beginning in mid-February. The following journal represnts his attempts to do so.]

February 15, 2005

Tried to buy a burrito, but only had ten bucks to last the rest of the year. Ended up eating some Top Ramen instead. Yum yum! Not quite the sustenance I had when I was living on more than ten bucks, but then grant money is grant money, right? The stale taste reminded me of my college days.

February 25, 2005

Looks like I’m not going to have any quarters for the laundromat this week. Oh well. Guess I’ll have to get used to hand-washing my shirts and frequently smelling like last month’s sweat. I wonder if I can get Section 8 housing?

Stole a couple apples from the tree next door. I don’t think the neighbors will mind too much. They never seem to pick them.

Have lost about 30 pounds. Believe that I’m suffering from botulism, since I’ve resorted to cracking open those leftover cans of tomatoes in the cupboard. Bet those Atkins diet people never thought of this!

Seeing hallucinations from time to time, but that could be the flouridated tap water. Have to say that I never thought I’d become such a water addict. Oh well. Keeps the stomach rumbles and the dry heaves to a minimum.

Rent’s due in a couple of days. I wonder if the landlord will understand my lack of funds. I did tell him that I was an artist, right?

March 5, 2005

Wouldn’t you know it? The landlord served me with a Notice to Vacate. Well! No comp tickets for him to my next show!

Tried to talk with him on the phone to see if he could wait about a year or so for me to pay the rent, seeing as how I was living on a total of ten dollars for the time being. But unfortunately, the folks at SBC shut off my phone yesterday. So I did spend 37 cents from the ten dollars to send him a letter. Since I haven’t been able to buy fresh pens, I took to writing the letter in my own blood.

Did you know that blood serves as a really fantastic substitute to ink? Who knew? And What a way to pinch pennies!

Am optimistic that my landlord and perhaps SBC will understand.

March 12, 2005

Two men were here to speak with “Mr. Champion about the power.” Fortunately, now that I’m looking a bit like Christian Bale from The Machinist these days, they had no way of knowing that it was me. Even when I showed them my driver’s license. So I’m now writing this journal by candlelight.

Haven’t eaten for about a week. Still, the glow of the pilot light on the gas stove looks beautiful. What a wonderful world!

March 21, 2005

Little elves! My friends! Foolish capitalistic buffoons who live like fatcats! Bwahahahah! I will kiss them all and declare them Irish! No soup for you! They cannot pry me from my beautiful cave of filth!

Still have about eight bucks left and have given each George Washington a name. Dollar number one is named Harry. Dollar number two is named Dolores and she’s beautiful! But I’m too weak to give her succor. Dollar number three…I will need to stat counting again.

I lie in foul unwashed bedsheets and marvel at my beautiful decrepitude. Vengeance shall be mine, little elves! Together, we shall Veblenate their hollow spirits and proffer our tongues in the name of the pilot light god!

[There are no additional entries in Mr. Champion’s notebook.]

This year’s Pulitzer winners have been announced.

Gilead picks up another award for Best Novel.
John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt wins for Drama.
David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing wins for History.
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s de Kooning: An American Master wins for Biography.
Ted Kooser’s Delights and Shadows wins for Poetry.
Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars wins for General Non-Fiction.

I have a call into Greg Assay, a legislative aide who works in Supervisor Maxwell’s office, regarding the overbroad definition of “electioneering communication.” My hope is to get an answer here that should clarify the intent of the ordinance and whether or not webloggers will be required to register with the San Francisco Ethics Commission.

[UPDATE: Assay tells me that weblogs will be recognized as a news source. The City Attorney will make an announcement at tomorrow morning’s board meeting stating that weblogs will be recognized as a news source.]

It appears that a proposed San Francisco ordinance discovered by Michael Bassik hopes to crack down on free speech. It seems that here in my hometown, Supervisor Sophie Maxwell wants to issue an ordinance that, in Bassik’s words, requires any blog (under the title of “electioneering communication”) receiving more than 500 “local” hits a day (which would include this site) mentioning local candidates for office to register their sites with the San Francisco Ethics Commission and remain subject to “website traffic audits.”

The ordinance specifically goes after “electioneering communications,” which refers to “any communication, including but not limited to any broadcast, cable, satellite, radio, internet, or telephone communication, and any mailing, flyer, doorhanger, pamphlet, brochure, card, sign, billboard, facsimile, or printed advertisement that (A) refers to a clearly identified candidate for City elective office or a City elective officer who is the subject of a recall election; and (B) is distributed within 90 days prior to an election for the City elective officer to 500 or more individuals who are registered to vote or eligible to register to vote in the election or recall election. There shall be a rebuttable presumption that any broadcast, cable, satellite, or radio communication and any sign, billboard or printed advertisement is distributed to 500 or more individuals who are eligible to vote in or eligible to register to vote in an election for the City elective office soght by the candidate or a recall election regarding the City elective officer.”

This ordinance was drafted with the idea of holding pamphleteers accountable for their actions. Meaning that those highly annoying flyers that jam up your mailbox during election time would have a specific “Paid for by _________” so you can find out who originated these suckers and kvetch through the appropriate channels, if necessary.

This all sounds very noble and well-meaning. But there’s a problem with this, as the exclusionary provision for this term includes “news stories, commentaries, or editorials distributed through any newspaper, radio station, television station or other recognized news medium unless such news medium is owned or controlled by any political party, political committee or candidate.” (Emphasis added.)

So if an unrecognized “electioneering communication” spends more than $1,000 in a given year (or roughly around $83 a month, which would probably include most people’s web hosting and DSL bills), then they would need to file Kafkaesque paperwork and submit to the San Francisco Ethics Commission’s draconian policies. And if I am interpreting this correctly, this would apply to “unrecognized” weblogs, even if the weblog owner and operator never received a single cash payment from a candidate.

An unrecognized weblogger would have to prepare an itemized statement for how much they spend on their blogs, the full name, street address, city and zip code of who paid for it, a legible copy and/or transcript of all “electioneering communication” (a printout of the weblog in full?), and “any other information required by the Ethics Commission,” which essentially means everything.

So if the San Francisco Ethics Commission decides that edrants.com (or another San Francisco-based site) is “unrecognized” and I happen to take the piss out of Bevan Duffy or Tom Ammiano one day, then I will now have to provide my personal information to the San Francisco Ethics Commission. Further, I will now have to track all web traffic by location, singling out the potential 500 San Francisco-based readers who read this site.

The expected fees and crackdown make this proposal a fundamentally undemocratic approach to local free speech. It is contrary to the variegated opinions that have long subsisted within this City. Further, it sets a bad precedent, something that might be adopted in other cities. And if this isn’t in direct violation of Article I of the California Constitution (“the right to privacy”) and the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, it certainly skirts around it.

The Board of Supervisors is set to vote on this ordinance (what’s known as a “first passing”) on April 5, 2005 (Tuesday) at 10:00 AM. Beyond sending letters and emails to all of the Supervisors, I would also advise anyone who cares (and can make it) to attend this meeting at City Hall (the Legislative Chamber, Second Floor, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place). (Mapquest link) Under the agenda, there will be an opportuntiy for public comment, up to three minutes per person. So if Ordinance 041489 pisses you off, this is the time to voice your dissent. I should point out that even if the Ordinance is passed on first reading, the Ordinance can be amended to recognize weblogs and other online political sites to be excluded as an “electioneering communication.”

I plan to be there myself.

In the meantime, letters, phone calls and emails to all of the Supervisors are encouraged — preferably today, so that the Supervisors will get this input before their Tuesday meeting. Here is a complete list of San Francisco supervisors:

Jake McGoldrick
District 1
Phone: (415) 554-7410
Fax: (415) 554-7415
Email

Michela Alioto-Pier
District 2
(Note: Supervisor Alioto-Pier dissented when this Ordinance was drafted in committee. She might be our most vocal supporter against the Ordinance on Tuesday’s meeting, if we remind her of the overbroad definition of “electioneering communication.”)
Phone: (415) 554-7752
Fax: (415) 554-7843
Email

Aaron Peskin (Board President)
District 3
Phone: (415) 554-7450
Fax: (415) 554-7454
Email

Fiona Ma
District 4
Phone: (415) 554-7460
Fax: (415) 554-7432
Email

Ross Mirkarimi
District 5
Phone: (415) 554-7630
Fax: (415) 554-7634
Email

Chris Daly
District 6
Phone: (415) 554-7970
Email

Sean Elsbernd
District 7
Phone: (415) 554-6516
Fax: (415) 554-6546
Email

Bevan Duffy
District 8
Phone: (415) 554-6968
Fax: (415) 554-6909
Email

Tom Ammiano
District 9
Phone: (415) 554-5144
Fax: (415) 554-6255
Email

Sophie Maxwell
District 10
Phone: (415) 554-7670
Fax: (415) 554-7674
Email

Gerardo Sandoval
District 11
Phone: (415) 554-6975
Fax: (415) 554-6979
Email

[UPDATE: Chris Nolan has the backstory on this.]

Fuck me. That’s some first-class filmmaking, kids.

The tireless Dan Wickett (who is actually a thinktank of intellectuals operating out of Rhode Island) serves up Edition Three of his “Interview with the Bloggers” series.

It was only recently declassified, and only recently nabbed the okay from author Henry Murray’s relatives, but The Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, a psychological evaluation originally commissioned by the OSS, is now ripe and ready for public consumption. This report was written in 1943 and, unsurprsingly, contains considerable Freudistic takes on the man. There aren’t too many surprises here in this supposed barnbuster. We get the usual “Hitler has always worshipped physical force, military conquest, and ruthless domination.” Really? I had no idea.

But what’s of interest is the conclusion that Hitler was, apparently, “largely feminine in his constitution.” This latter judgment has been concluded because he was frail, not particularly athletic, was emotionally dependent on his mother, and “annoyingly subservient” to his superior officers. But it gets better: “His movements have been described as womanish — a dainty ladylike way of walking (when not assuming a military carriage in public), effeminate gestures of his arms — a peculiar graceless ineptitude reminiscent of of a girl throwing a baseball.”

What’s more, “Hitler is no healthy amoral brute. He is a hive of secret neurotic compunctions and feminine sentimentalities which have had to be stubbornly repressed ever since he embarked on his career.” (Emphasis in original.)

If this was the stuff of top psychologists at the time, then it’s little wonder why the OSS failed to understand Hitler’s mentality and why this report was kept under wraps for so many years. One wonders whether “femininity” is something the CIA still looks for in a potential international menace.

What’s interesting is that, as recently as last September, psychologists were investigating the “hyper-masculinity” of American politics. Have we truly evolved or is political potency all about the testosterone charge? And if that’s the case, where do women fit in?

It’s too nice outside and we have several things to finish up. Until tomorrow’s Brownie Watch, I leave you with this astounding video of a very limber man dancing.

Also, Chekhov’s Mistress has an interesting post up about important books we continue reading despite their difficulty, the Rake can now be found in The Rocky Mountain News, and Alicia Gifford has won the Million Writers Award for “Toggling the Switch.”

We really aren’t in the habit of linking to The Believer, but this China Mieville interview was too good to pass up: “I had a conversation with someone about this the other day, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to write the Bas Lag encyclopedia.’ And they said, ‘That’s really bad though, because you’re a socialist. You shouldn’t be writing these books that are just a kind of naked, cynical attempt to cash in on the sad obsessions of the geeks.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, you don’t understand at all! I can’t imagine anything I’d love to do more than write an encyclopedia of my imaginary world, with the possible exception of writing the bestiary.’ I’m in this fucking business for the monsters. The monsters are the main thing that I love about the fantastic. And unfortunately, you can’t really sell books of monsters to publishers. They insist on stories linking them.”

There’s a lot of April Fool’s tomfoolery going around. But we’re kind of partial to this pisstake. Don’t miss “The New Youth Craze.”

From Language Hat comes a fun list of questions:

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Either James Joyce’s Ulysses (because I’d be forced to remember all those beautiful passages that spill out of my memory like too much Two Buck Chuck poured into my glass) or James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, because you need a little lust and murder to filter down to the next generation.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Speaking of Cain, I’ve always had a strange desire to be double-crossed by Phylis Nirdlinger. I had a crush on Vanity Fair‘s Becky Sharp and wondered as a boy if Nancy Drew ever put out.

The last book you bought is?

Just the other day: My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk and A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipul. (I know, I know. Catching up for porous deficiencies.)

What are you currently reading?

The Art of Eating by MFK Fisher, Great Apes by Will Self, Saturday by Ian McEwan.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

Today:

1. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
2. Don Quixote by Cervantes
3. A Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
4. The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin
5. A Rememberance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

Many of these have been selected for pragmatic reasons.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

We’re not running a relay race, are we?