Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

New Feed

Okay, folks, if you haven't already visited edrants.com, the site has undergone an aesthetic and functional overhaul (what's known in the trade as a "redesign"). Here's a link to a new RSS feed. If you are a Bloglines subscriber, we're having problems with the new RSS feed (linked above). However, the Atom feed is displaying the latest posts. You can find the Atom feed here.

If this all confuses you and you are a Bloglines subscriber, here are clear instructions on what you will need to do:

1. Under the My Feeds tab, you will need to click the "Add" link.
2. You will then be greeted with the subscription screen on the right-hand side of the window.
3. In the box where it says "Blog or Feed URL," type in the following:

http://www.edrants.com/?feed=atom

4. You should be subscribed to the correct feed now. (And you may wish to unsubscribe from the old one.)

If you haven't yet checked out the site, please stop by and visit. If you're having any issues with the site, weigh in on the comments and I'll do my best to remedy it.

Baldness and Huzzahs

At the moment, we're contemplating just how rapid our hair has receded in the past year. Quite literally, it has gone from a benign recession to something that is now quite serious. It is now falling out faster than snow.

We tried buzzing it down short but, alas, the hair has continued to abscond from our scalp. We've contemplated doing away with it altogether. But the last thing San Francisco needs is another thirtysomething Lex Luthor clone running about. What next? Taking up running five miles a day and getting one of those obsessively meaty physiques? We have no wish to look like half the other balding men in our neighborhood.

Besides, we sunburn quite easily. So the more protective coating we have at the top of our head, the better.

This is, of course, a needlessly moribund assessment. Because the other side of the coin is, as female friends have been telling us, Sean Connery and Patrick Stewart.

However, our modest anxieties are relieved by our joy at seeing the litblogosphere taken seriously by a major media outlet. We, of course, weren't picked. We suspect this has something to do with out recurrent anticapitalist diatribes and our chronic skepticism, if not the hair situation referenced above. But several other fine folks were.

So we salute them while adamantly refusing to look as absurd as Max Barry (pictured below), which seems to us the easy way out:

Note to RSS Feed Readers

Due to forthcoming (and long overdue) events, you may or may not have to resubscribe to the feed (although it's looking more like the former). I apologize for this. I am trying to figure out how to presere the feed as it stands so there will be no major hiccups. But I wanted to give you the head's up. The good news is that you will soon have several feed formats to choose from. More to come.

[UPDATE: Yup. Definitely not going to happen. You're going to have to resubscribe. The (currently nonexistent/should exist by Wednesday or Thursday night) new feeds will probably be this one for RSS and this one for Atom. Apologies for the inconvenience. I don't know if redirecting will help, but I will try that for the existing subscribers.]

Not Fishing on Multiple Fronts

I had hoped to get to the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch this week. But I appear to be, once again, time-challenged. But congratulations to Maud for scoring a review.

Posting will be light over the next day, as I work on a few things on multiple fronts. Including this front.

In fact, it suddenly occurs to me that the notion of "multiple fronts" seems a contradiction in terms. How, for example, would multiple fronts apply when considering a full frontal nudity scene? In this case, there can be only one front. Even if you surgically implanted additional scrotums and nipples onto your body, it would still be only one front. Unless you could somehow be in two bodies at the same time while observing a partner or performer who was full frontal nude. In which case, the performer or the partner would be "multiple full frontal nude," but completely unaware of the preternatural out-of-body experience that would make this term of art applicable not to the partner or performer, who is going to this remarkably enjoyable trouble of doing a "full frontal nude" and yet unable to enjoy this sensation in plural form.

In any event, it gets me too aroused just thinking about this. So for now, I'll say tata.

[UPDATE: And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention David Kipen's most recent column, where he responds to readers who quibbled over his Harry Potter and the Half-Prince review (including one death threat) and identifies the qualities of a critic.]

Segundo Central

A rudimentary site for the Bat Segundo Show is now up. More to come.

Pelosi Reveals Number of Issues the Democrats Will Actually Fight For This Year

Mass Market Paperback: Friend or Foe?

Sarah has an interesting post about mass market paperback ghettoization. She writes:

But sometimes, it makes sense for a writer to be published in mass market PBO. Especially if they haven't been heard from in some time. After the jump, I'll talk of two writers being re-introduced using a marketing strategy that's worked well in romance and might prove useful for mysteries as well.

She points to Paul Levine and John Ramsey Miller, among many others, as examples. And while Sarah's dealing specifically with mysteries, I should point out that if it's an author's intention of being read, the mass market paperback route might yield better results than a hardcover or even a TPB -- assuming, of course, that a regular audience picking up a book at an airport is the audience. Which begs the question: Is it viable for a literary title (say, a midlister) to be released in mass market paperback format? Might today's publishers be losing a younger audience by not releasing their hot literary titles in MMP?

Beyond this, the most immediate example of an author using the MMP route that comes to mind is Gregory McDonald, whose Fletch books were released solely in paperback and drew an audience this way. (And in an entirely unrelated note, McDonald used the series format to jump around in sequence. The limitations of Fletch, for example, being in Rio with $3 million forced him to think creatively about Fletch's aftermath.)

The Moral of the Story: If You're Jean-Paul Gaultier, You'll Be Gunned Down, But Not For Being French.

International Herald Tribune: "A statement Friday said that Menezes' 'clothing and his behavior at the station added to their suspicions,' apparently referring to reports that he was wearing a bulky jacket on a summer day."

Remind Me to Leave My Cell Phone At Home More Often

Wired:"Cell phones know whom you called and which calls you dodged, but they can also record where you went, how much sleep you got and predict what you're going to do next....People should not be too concerned about the data trails left by their phone, according to Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. 'The location data and billing records is protected by statute, and carriers are under a duty of confidentiality to protect it,' Hoofnagle said."

Shurrrrrrrrrrrrrre, Hoofnagle. And the Patriot Act wasn't just extended for another ten years. And there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like you to buy.

Up Next in Slate: Meghan O'Rourke Expends 1,000 Words on Whether She Should Get a Nonfat Hazelnut Latte or an Espresso in the Morning

Slate: "The Kite Runner -- Do I really have to read it?"

This article -- did you really have to write it?

Actually, "Wild-Eyed Cowboy" Comes to Mind

Salon: "Since 2003, the perception that Bush is 'warm and friendly' has dropped from 70 to 57 percent. In that time, the notion that the president is 'well-informed' has fallen from 59 to 52 percent. However, 48 percent of the respondents still feel that the president 'cares about people like me,' though that number has fallen somewhat."

I don't know what's more hilarious. The fact that Bush can be compared to "warm and friendly" (which, if you've ever been involved with voiceover, is the standard catch-all description that a producer will tell you to shift your voice to*) or the fey phrases used to quantify public opinion.

* -- Yes, I had a brief career in voiceover. I was even paid professionally for a local FM radio commercial. But when I heard my voice on the radio used to sell a product, I felt as if I had commited adultery and vowed never to do it again. The irony here is that I've never been married. But during this brief time of lunch hour auditions and bringing my green apple and water bottle to these recording sessions, every producer would say, "Ed, do warm and friendly!" And it became almost a joke. It was almost as bad as the deep-throated Caucasian male that these producers were looking for and which apparently I could provide.

Wickett Strikes Again

The tireless Dan Wickett offers another entry in his literary journal editors series.

Books by the Bay Report

It was roasting, at least as San Francisco weather goes. Sunshine hit the tents and the grass and the hatted heads of a mostly older crowd -- some of them aspiring writers, some of them dedicated bibliophiles, some of them trying to figure out what the sam hill was going on and picking up a book or three.

This year, the annual Books by the Bay was not, like previous affairs, technically adjacent to the Bay. Perhaps Books Sorta By the Bay or Books By the Bay (If You Walk A Half Mile) would have been a more apposite appellation.

Nevertheless, this year drew, from my eyes, about five hundred souls, most of them seeking the air conditioning within the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

I had arrived later than I expected, due to events pertaining to the previous night (with an insomnia chaser). But I did manage to catch the tail end of Kevin Smokler's panel.

WRITING IN AN UNREADERLY WORLD

Panelists:

• Kevin Smokler, Moderator
• Michelle Richmond
• Karl Soehnlein

Adam Johnson was supposed to show up. But he could not be seen. Either he had discovered invisibility or he had an unexpected engagement.

Michelle Richmond and Kevin Smokler contemplate the precise moment that they should respond to an audience question.

When I got there, Soehnlein was talking about how McSweeney's had specifically lowered the price to appeal to younger readers. McSweeney's had also recently offered a ten-book bundle for $100 for this very reason.

Smokler pointed out that he was initially resistant to have Bookmark Now come out in paperback (instead of hardcover). But he came around to understanding that this was the right thing to do, given that the book was aimed at younger audiences. It was pointed out that Richard Russo's first book, Mohawk, came out in paperback only. He also expressed hope that there would be more fan fiction based on characters (along the lines of the fan fiction that Neal Pollack alluded to in his essay), because fan fiction was an indicator of sales.

Soehnlein noted that he had wanted to do a virtual book tour for The World of Normal Boys, but he couldn't persuade his publisher because the publisher couldn't quantify sales. He suggested that word-of-mouth was just as good as a high profile NYTBR review.

Smokler noted that because of fan fiction and online forums, it's become more acceptable to evangelize for books.

Michelle Richmond hoped that someone would simply wear a sandwich board displaying the title of her book.

A question was asked about where the book world would be in ten years.

Smokler hoped that every bookstore would be wirelessly linked and that instant reviews would be available. He hoped that every author could have a website and an email address. He didn't want to see readings as dull affairs. Richmond hoped that every city would have the same indie bookstore scene that San Francisco does.

MORE THAN JUST A JOB

Panelists

• Betsy Burton
• Phillip Done
• Dean Karnazes
• Blair Tindall

The panelists introduced themselves. I don't know who the moderator was, but he was an able guy who maintained an appropriate amount of levity, which offered a sharp contrast to the lackluster "Life Experiences" panel that I attended later that afternoon (more below).

Dean Karnazes, frightening the crowd (and wooing Blair Tindall, right) with tales of his long-distance marathon running.

Karnazes was a very muscular man who had apparently written a very muscular book, Ultramarathon Man. He had several muscular achievements under his belt, including running nonstop for 262 miles. He wore a black tank top and sunglasses. I could only surmise that he wouldn't reveal his eyes because we would see traces of the gamma radiation that had no doubt assisted him in running for such an inhuman distance.

Blair Tindall once played the oboe for a living, but grew tired of it, producing a memoir about the scandalous culture (Mozart in the Jungle).

Phil Done's memoir was 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny, which covered one year teaching thirty-two third graders.

Betsy Burton is an independent bookseller in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her experience running a bookstore named The King's English is covered in a book, predictably called The King's English.

The moderator asked if the memoirists regretted putting certain details into their books.

Burton said that she didn't regret putting in an incident of cocaine being sniffed on her toes. She's not a drug user. But her mother, by contrast, regretted thsi. She suggested never starting a bok tour in a small town. It took her a long time to decide what to put in and what to keep out. She did have one light-hearted paragraph about sex that was taking completely out of context and was intended as levity.

Burton had once been a business reporter of the older and more respectable incarnation of the San Francisco Examiner. Her lawyer had perused the book and decided upon who needed to be disguised by psuedonyms.

Karnazes apparently wrote his book by speaking into a digital recorder while running at night. He would actually dictate while doing this and then type his notes into his computer. The transcription proved difficult because there was considerable panting which occluded comprehension. He decided upon graphic descriptions of toenails breaking off and crawling for the last mile to make the experience more real to the reader.

Done had to change the names of his students. However, close colleagues begged him to keep their names in. His memoir includes drafts of letters that he never sent to parents.

Burton pointed out that there were certain writers she did not mention by name. However, she did observe one writer reading her book in a store, starting to mutter and then starting to swear and then starting to swear some more. This writer slamed the book down.

Karnazes: Running is "my way of being my best." Free food, however, at the aid station was also a motivation. It was pointed out that Karnazes was named one of the 100 sexiest men in sports by Sports Illustrated. Karnazes responded that, actually, he had been in the top ten.

Blair Tindall takes out her oboe, putting Phil Done under her trance.

Tindall started off as a frustrated but fairly successful musician in New York. She felt irrelevant. She didn't recognize sexual harassment as it was happening. The oboe wasn't enough to fulfill her life. So she went to Stanford for journalism school. She then learned that of the 11,000 music graduates, there are only 250 jobs. The economic reality of the music world dawned upon her and she wanted to bring a more populist approach to the classical music world and remove the fantasy.

Ms. Tindall then brought out her oboe and played it for the crowd.

Done wrote to share stories of what was really happening in the classroom. He wanted to give teachers something to identify.

Burton hoped that her book would change the indie bookselling landscape a bit. She runs a bookstore in Salt Lake City and she's not a Mormon.

A question involving technology came from the crowd. Karnazes mentioned that he played back some of his running recordings for the BBC. Tindall used a pen that Xeroxed a passage line by line during her research.

Amazingly, Kazares kept a crazed regimen when writing his book for nine months. He slept for four hours each night, while also running at night, writing the book, raising a family, and running a company. (He's President of Good Health Natural Foods.) He ran competitively during his freshman year in high school. Then he hung up his shoes. On his thirtieth birthday, he was at a pub with friends and decided on a whim to run thirty miles for his thirtieth birthday. He ended up running all the way from the Marina to Half Moon Bay. Halfway through, he sobered up and wondered what the hell he was doing. But he did make it the thirty miles. Kazares was also the first person to run around the world naked.

LIFE EXPERIENCES

Panelists:

• Rebecca Solnit
• Deborah Santana
• Caroline Kraus
• Alephonsion Deng
• Rose Castillo Guilbault

Perhaps it was the solemn audience or the fact that I had just come from a pleasant outdoor atmosphere where people were laughing and excited about books. Or perhaps it had something to do with the inanity of the questions from moderator and audience. But the Life Experiences panel was, for the most part, a bust, resorting to the same tired memoir-as-catharsis/memoir-as-therapy trope that one can get from reading any self-absorbed newspaper column.

I should point out that despite previous reports, Solnit was not to blame. In fact, I'd venture to say that, in this venue at least, Solnit's associative riffing worked in the panel's favor, representing a concerted effort to steer the conversation away from the stiff and the tired adulations being thrown around like stale popcorn. Unfortunately, the moderator, whose name I do not know, was determined to encourage the most conventional questions known to humankind.

For example, let's take a rudimentary question such as "What distinguishes fact from fiction?" Here were the answers:

SOLNIT: Part of the revolution involves contesting official history. Thus, a memoir involves witnessing other stories.
KRAUS: Mark Twain once wrote, "Fiction has to be true." "It's only what I know from where I stand."
GUILBAULT: "If I wrote it as fiction, I'd be angry. But in memoir form, it's how it happened."
DENG: "I wasn't a writer until I told the truth."
SANTANA: "I loved the journey of telling the truth!"

Rebecca Solnit.

And that was essentially how it went down for forty-five minutes. We can see from the above that Solnit and Deng's answers were the more incisive of the bunch, while the rest wallowed in Writer's Digest cliches. I'm sorry to report that it was these two who had things of value to say, while the remaining three writers, whatever the plaudits of their written work, kept riding the Memoir Empowered Me line. To even bother to construe my notes here would be futile and silly.

I'll only say that at one point, Deborah Santana noted how "hard" it was to be "in Carlos' shadow for twenty years" and that this role threatened to subsume her identity. My heart bleeds, Deborah. Let's compare this sentiment with Alephonsion Deng (and his brothers), who described how painful it was to remember the mundane details of a life in refuge from the Sudan atrocities eating squirrels and drinking urine as a young boy.

FIRST NOVELISTS

Panelists:

• Joshua Braff
• Elizabeth McKenzie
• Nina Schuyler
• Edward Guthmann, Moderator

First off, the less said about Guthmann's moderation, the better. However, the more said about Joshua Braff, the better. Braff pretty much stole the show. He was full of enthusiasm and valuable tips, even when the audience was feeding the panel with questions about the realities of being a writer (to which Guthmann offered an insensitive and misleading "Miracles do happen" pronouncement, citing Elizabeth Kostova's one-in-a-million windfall).

Elizabeth McKenzie and Joshua Braff.

Braff suggested that if you're writing a book, find a Jewish angle. "You don't even have to be Jewish," he said. One of the reasons his novel, The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green had been such a hit was because he had appeared at several readings during Jewish Book Month. He had managed to find a cultural center in nearly every city to speak of and was booked solid for a long time. Word got around. He was "happy that I was tenacious."

Braff also noted that editors call writers very frequently to ensure that they're waking up and working on the book, the concern being that they might be another Charles Bukowsi.

When Schuyler was first starting out as a writer, she said that being patient about "the right time to be judged" was beneficial for her. She had sent out emails to book clubs, coordinating discussions of her novel, The Painting, with appearances and email dialogues.

A question was asked about how to go about getting an agent. Many of the answers are already common knowledge, but I reproduce them here for the benefit of any aspiring writers who may be reading this report.

McKenzie said that she was holed up at home and was fortunate enough to find an agent who liked her work. (Her agent, as it turns out, is Kim Witherspoon.) After this, everything happened very fast.

Braff said that he had contacted a few agents, but hadn't heard back from them for a long time. So he called them. A few called him back apologizing and saying that they wee going to read his book now. He said that if you are writing fiction, you need a complete manuscript. If you have a nonfiction, you can write a great book proposal and get the money up front. He suggested to the many aspiring writers in the crowd that they contact agents of authors who they liken their work to. If necessary, you can call a publisher and find out who the author's agent is.

Schuyler suggested a three-paragraph cover letter: the first paragraph being a summary, the second expressing qualifications and the third describing how to be cotnacted. Schuyler had approached seven agents before stumbling upon one.

Before she was a writer, McKenzie said that she wanted to be a journalist as a young girl because she was enamored of 60 Minutes. However, because she distorted everything, she found herself turning to fiction.

Schuyler had initially been intimidated by writing. She studied everything else before going into journalism. This taught her to write fast. But she got tired of writing other people's stories and turned to fiction. She had, in fact, a law degree and passed the bar. She likened the first draft of her novel (680 pages) to all the knowledge that she had to keep inside her head during the bar.

Braff had taught English in Japan and then began writing stories. He took extension classes and described how valuable free writing was for him, likening it to working out. He would meet with a group in a coffeehouse and all would continuously write for five minutes -- never stopping with the pen. Then the pieces would be read aloud without judgement. Then they would write for ten minutes, repeat, and then perform the exercise for fifteen minutes. Braff also noted that people didn't always have the opportunity to hone their gifts because of life circumstances.

Interestingly enough, both Braff and Schuyler are writing their next books in libraries.

BOOKED BY BOOK GROUPS

Panelists:

• Karen Joy Fowler
• Renee Manfredi
• Alan Brennert
• Heidi Benson, Moderator

Shortly after a skirmish with the Paul Reubens Day crowd, I returned to the air conditioned somnolence of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the final panel of the day. Ms. Benson was a very prepared moderator -- perhaps overly so. She spent most of the panel reading notes and questions from various papers and seemed befuddled when she had to speak extemporaneously or repeat a question.

Heidi Benson tells the Booked by Book Groups panel that they have been Super-Glued to their seats to ensure that the panelists will not leave. The glue wore off in exactly 45 minutes.

This panel dealt specifically with the issue of how authors approached book clubs, but before this discussion started, some background was let loose.

Manfredi said that her book, Above the Thunder, was inspired by an article she read in the Cincinnati Inquirer about a ten year old girl who had thrown herself in front of a train after her mother had died of AIDS. She had wanted to be an angel. This story stuck with Manfredi for ten years and she then wrote the book. Word of her book had spread mainly through hand-sold copies at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books. She then decided to talk with book clubs. She remarked that the book club caviar and champagne were motivating factors.

Brennert, whose work I know mainly from the 1980s incarnation of The Twilight Zone, said that he had left his heart in Hawaii over the years. Despite residing in Los Angeles, he had taken many trips to Hawaii over the years, he realized that nobody had written about 19th century Hawaii over the years. Amazingly, his story proved resilient to readers. The paperbck version of Moloka'I is now in its fifth printing. Brennert said that he had never been a member of a book club because he's a slow reader and he likes to "bop around from subject to subject," but he was grateful that they existed, rather than video game discussion clubs that discussed the subtext of Grand Theft Auto.

Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club came about from a sign that she saw at the Book Passage. She believed that a book existed with the name "The Jane Austen Book Club" and saw, to her dismay, that it didn't. Thus, she wrote the book. But while there was an audience for Jane Austen, she didn't realize that the bigger commercial factor in her title was "book club."

Fowler says that she's jealous of writers who claim that their characters write their books. "My charactersr are never that helpful," she revealed. Fowler has been in touch with many book clubs since Jane Austen was published, including a club that has endured for 77 years by mothers handing down duties to their daughters (but, interestingly enough, not to their sons). Both Fowler and Brennert attributed the rise in popularity to Oprah. And she too noted the fantastic food. Fowler said that in one of her book clubs, a discussion of Richard Russo's Empire Falls ended in tears. One of the problems of discussion, Fowler said, is that a person defending a book is less strong than a person attacking the book.

Brennert revealed that he had written three book club questions for his book.

Manfredi noted that a woman in Germany was writing a doctoral thesis. This student calls occasionally, but Manfredi confessed that she often makes answers up.

Fowler said that she'd rank an all-male book club "with a Bigfoot sighting." She expressed a concern that she had seen that men might dominate the conversation. But she was aware of a book club-cum-poker game that men she knew had arranged. (One of them had chosen The Jane Austen Book Club deliberately just to get other men groaning.)

This particular panel was better than the Life Experiences panel. But perhaps realling the constricted and inorganic feel from my last venture inside the air conditioned theatre, I felt that there was something being lost in the discussion, which was starting to grow too sedated for my tastes. So I asked a twofold question: (1) What did these authors really feel about the inane book club questions in the back of their books, given that these lead to repetitive tropes and homogenized groupthink among people discussing the book? (2) In light of the resistance voiced on the panel, do authors really have much to say outside of the novel?

All of the authors hesitated for several seconds. They had not expected this. In fact, when answering my question, Brennert (unlike Fowler and Manfredi) wouldn't even look me in the eye. But Brennert, to his credit, didn't try to evade the issue (unlike the other two). He suggested that with Moloka'I at least, the story had been so meticulously researched that he felt obligated to pen the afterword. This still didn't address the fact that Brennert had penned the book club questions.

At this point, Benson looking at her watch, wrapped up the panel precisely at 3:30 PM.

CONCLUSIONS:

Overall, I enjoyed my Books at the Bay experience. It was good to chitchat with many of my favorite indie booksellers. I even ran into David Kipen twice, who I had not known would be interviewing Gus Lee. He did tell me that a podcast would be available through the Chronicle site.

I'd say the panels themselves worked when everything was laidback and loose, they failed abysmally when they were formal and restricted. Books by the Bay, I'm convinced, belongs outside in the sunshine (or the fog) rather than in some antiseptic theatre with antiseptic moderators. It also needs harder questions thrown into the mix or else the panel itself is a pretty pointless (and nearly lifeless) experience.

[UPDATE: An additional account can be found at Ghost Word.] [UPDATE 2: The one and only Michelle Richmond has another account over at the Happy Booker.]

The Bat Segundo Show #3

This Week's Author: Jonathan Ames

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Still bitter, but surprisingly articulate given multiple Grey Goose martinis.

Subjects Discussed: Subconscious influences, environmental decay, secret references, John Buchan's The 39 Steps, autobiogaphical parallels, P.G. Wodehouse, Somerset Maugham, the correct pronounciation of Anthony Powell, sartorial parallels, baldness.

"Living Off the Grid" Apparently Means Living Away from Solid Influences

Tod "Thirteen Hawks" Goldberg has the last word on The Traveler:

What the bio fails to mention and what the publisher might have failed to note was that, "John Twelve Hawks doesn't know how to write dialog." In addition, "John Twelve Hawks never was told that pages and pages of expositional dialog broken up with meaningless secondary action isn't engaging."

Paul Reubens Day

A Books by the Bay report with photos will be posted here sometime over the weekend. Needless to say, there are a good deal of notes to sift through.

In the meantime, I was grateful to be in close proxmiity to the Paul Reubens Day pub crawl/procession. Below are some photos and here's a video of the various Pee Wees congregating near the waterfall at Yerba Buena Gardens. Needless to say, whoever concocted this idea is a strange genius.

Live from Books by the Bay

It's a remarkably sunny day here in the City. I got to Yerba Buena Gardens a little later than expected, but fortunately with enough time to chat a bit with Kevin Smokler just before he had to rush from the end of his panel to an autograph signing. Adam Johnson, mysteriously enough, was nowhere to be found.

So far, I've taken some notes for a panel and a half and I've chatted a bit with some of my favorite independent booksellers, who are hawking their goods under the tent. Unfortunately, turnout here wasn't nearly as large as I had expected (and certainly not as gargantuan as previous years). We're talking somewhere in the area of a few hundred. But the afternoon is only just starting and I haven't yet ventured into the Yerba Buena theatre to see what the crowd's like in there.

Interestingly enough, I saw a man who looked suspiciously like William T. Vollmann from far away. I approached him, hoping to interview him on the fly about the recent bombings in Egypt and London. But sadly when approaching him ten or fifteen feet away, I saw that he was not, in fact, William T. Vollmann, but a solitary thirtysomething dressed in a Hawaiian shirt. And really, would Vollmann be the type who wore Hawaiian shirts?

In any event, I will try for another update later in the day. But this laptop is dying, even though there are copious wireless connections around. (I'm typing right now from the lawn.)

If you want to say hello, I'm wearing a green striped shirt and (believe it or not) shorts. Look for the guy with the buzz cut, glasses, and technology strapped to his body.

Jesus

More explosions in Egypt.

Longhorn Gets a Name

The next version of Windows has been given an official name: Windows Vista.

This is, of course, a preposterous appellation.

I'm guessing that Microsoft intends to connote the following definition of vista within the minds of PC users

"An awareness of a range of time, events, or subjects; a broad mental view."

But a vista is also "a distant view or prospect, especially one seen through an opening, as between rows of buildings or trees." The question in this case is who has that view: the Windows user or Microsoft. "Longhorn" was bad enough, suggesting "long shot" -- as in Microsoft trying to encourage PC users to upgrade their OSes when most are wedded to Windows 2000. But is it entirely a good idea for Microsoft to use a word that insinuates distant results rather than functionality? This is a bit like conjuring up an image of a beautiful mountain that one cannot climb -- which has been, for the most part, my experience with Microsoft products.

Who were the marketing geniuses who came up with this?

AM Roundup

• The real podcasts worth listening to? The sexual ones.
• Sophie Kinsella learned to bake bread while researching her latest novel. Sadly, neither the recipe nor samples of Kinsella's bread are being offered with the purchase of a book. Come on, Sophie! Think bigger!
• The cult of reclusive authors is examined by the Cape Times: specifically, Cormac McCarthy and John Twelve Hawks.
• Forget the loss of a family member or the end of a bad relationship. A website has been set up to cope with the real grief of our age: helping Harry Potter fans to cope with plot revelations in the latest book.
• Apparently, pigs can fly.
• Ann Coulter has been caught plagiarizing. Apparently, the sentence "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity" was originally published in White Power Monthly. (via Moby Lives)
• And finally, a non-porn narrative film that portrays real sex. One more reason to like Michael Winterbottom: authenticity instead of faux Hollywood orgasms.

Vonnegut Watch

Via the Millions comes the scoop on Kurt Vonnegut's next book. A new collection entitled A Man Without Country (Seven Stories Press), will collect "short essays and speeches composed over the last five years and plentifully illustrated with artwork by the author throughout."

In Other Words, Ride Out Your Fifteen Minutes with a Playboy Spread

New York Post: "Cutler, meanwhile, knows exactly how Haobsh feels....'She has to realize that her window of opportunity is very small. She needs to get out there, interview. She needs to make sure people don't forget about her. As an author, it's a good career move,' Cutler adds. 'She's making a name for herself and even though she was anonymous before, she's somebody now. And it depends on how good-looking she is, I hate to say this but if you're going to have your picture taken, it helps.'"

One Man Leaves, Another Lady Enters

Mad Max may be gone, but Miss Snark, the Literary Agent has arrived. I sense a conspiracy here.

Miss Snark's entries are composed of enraged one-sentence paragraphs, depicting an attention span forever at war with the attention-seeking world around her. Who knows? She could very well be your agent.

(via Jimmy Beck @ the Hag's)

Last We Heard, 180 Seconds is Enough to Realign the Hippocampus

We really wish we could make this, but we have other social obligations. Still, for all culture vultures, if Books by the Bay doesn't whittle you down on Saturday afternoon, there's the San Francisco 3-Minute Film Festival, which promises a variegated collection of films no more than three minutes long. It all goes down at Root Division, located at the corner of 17th and South Van Ness. (via the SFist)

Roundup in the Morning

• The Sydney Morning-Herald examines the disparity between male and female writers, suggesting that female novelists outrank male novelists. Unfortunately, they base their conclusions on a survey from a print-on-demand publisher. Much as I'd love to hear that this news was real, I'd believe this claim if (a) the Morning-Herald had gone to the trouble of sifting through the hard data to corrooborate it, (b) a URL to the survey was listed or linked from the article, (c) the Morning-Herald had actually questioned the results instead of blindly accepting them from a publisher (rather than, say, a statistician). The chart in question can be found here, but it groups bestsellers together by decade, rather than by year or even week. Further, its blue male-centric arc travels downward all the way into the 2120s, basing this prediction on only fifty years of data. Is this another case of old media being bamboozled by new media? And why was SM-J reporter John Ezard so easily duped? [RELATED: Galleycat has some fun with Lulu's graphics and notes that the Book Standard was also taken in by this "survey."]
• Editorial wunderkind Jonathan Karp is moving over to Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers publisher Jamie Raab said, "We're hiring him because we believe he can do what he set out to do, so he's going to have a great deal of control. But nobody gets total control. We're part of a corporate culture, and everybody has some controls placed on them." Ms. Rabb then proceeded to unveil a leash and several buttons that had been surgically implanted into Mr. Karp's skull, which would be used to keep Mr. Karp in his place during his upcoming stint at Warner, lest the uppity bastard get some crazy ideas.
• Poet Stanley Kunitza is still alive! But for how long?
• We were trying to avoid the whole Roman Polanski thing, but now Harper's editor Lewis Lapham has offered testimony in Polanski's libel case against Vanity Fair. Lapham was apparently the main source of the tale making the rounds that Polanski hit upon a Scandinavian model on his way to Sharon Tate's funeral. What next? Robert Gottlieb called in as a character witness?
• If you thought Macrovision was bad, apparently "some countermeasures" have been placed within Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to curb privacy. The countermeasures have not, however, stopped people from revealing the major character who dies at the end of the book.
• No Thanks: Why Your Acknowledgment Page Sucks. (via Maud)
• I'm stunned that anyone would publish what this woman has to say. (via Mark)
• And it looks like the folks in Kansas now have a pornography law on the books. Any material or performance is obscene if "the average person applying contemporary community standards would find that the material or performance, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest" or the average person "has patently offensive representations or descriptions of intercourse or other sex acts." Further, material or performance is obscene if "a reasonable person would find that the material or performance lacks serious literary, educational, artistic, political or scientific value." What amuses me the most about this antediluvian approach to legislation is the distinction between "the average person applying contemporary community standards" and "a reasonable person." Does this imply that the person applying community standards is unreasonable? How then can the law be successfully enforced?

Grab Some Popcorn

James Wood vs. Dan Green.

The Lost World of Rebecca Solnit

"You rely too much on the brain. The brain is the most overrated organ, I think." -- Isaac David, Manhattan

I should say from the onset that I am not chronicling Rebecca Solnit the writer, at least as she presents herself in her text. Rather, I am dwelling specifically upon Solnit the public intellectual, the figure you are likely to encounter at a book reading. Or perhaps this is about Solnit the writer. You see, that's the way things work in the Solnit universe. Terms are set up, but they merely serve as a needlessly convoluted bypass to Solnit's vast depository of heavy reading and inventive associations. Basic premises are not followed up or questioned, because the intellectual peanut gallery (in Berkeley, no less) is too busy fawning over just how damn smart Solnit is and how damn articulate she is. Which must count for something if you live a life cloistered from actual feeling and when regular people aren't nearly as interesting as arcane books intended to be endlessly deconstructed by gray pates.

I should point out that it is not anti-intellectualism that fuels this post. Rather, it is context and dimension. Because anyone who publicly declares herself "the love child of Gary Snyder and Susan Sontag" must be taken to task. Anyone who constantly kveteches about the evils of the right-wing in a completely unrelated tangent while expatiating about a French philosopher must be reconsidered.

There were seven of us, including Tito, Scott and several other nice people, at Cody's Books. We were there to see Solnit, who lives here in San Francisco and has written eight books, including a microhistory called Wanderlust. The latest book is A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which was germinated by a fair enough premise: How to go about finding something unknown to you? Solnit, a self-described cultural historian and activist, was dressed in a close-fitting grey leather jacket, a black top, black jeans, and a faded pink scarf embedded with thin white stripes that suggested an explorer motif. She had a very large head on a very petite body. She stared at the crowd with enormous owl-like eyes that blinked in mechanical measure just above a slight aquiline nose. She had blonde hair with a slight shock of grey, suggesting Sontag's famous white streak, just above her right temple.

I liked her best when she was mispronouncing French terms. I liked her best when she drifted away from lecture mode. She was better slinging unexpected malapropisms. Because this insinuated a well-read and potentially down-to-earth person with a self-deprecating sense of humor. A human who might just communicate with the layman or, if not that, anyone with a bit of a brain. A human who might be viscerally as well as intellectually lost.

Unfortunately, when Solnit read, the hauteur was laid thick. There was a pompous and elitist New England intonation when she read from her pages that suggested the worst aspects of NPR. It did not help matters that she would follow her sentences with a deep sniff, as if expecting to engage in an obnoxious breathing contest with Parisian intellectuals.

Never mind that what she read was quite interesting. First, she noted the history of maps, pointing out how Las Vegas was developing so fast that it required a new map every month so that parcels could be delivered and residences could be found. She referened terra incognita and referred to San Francisco as the mysterious island attached to North America. But when she read and when she lectured, it sounded like some soporific narration from the Discovery Channel. This may have had something to do with the microphone volume, which meant hunching close to the mike so that the folks in the back could hear.

But it also may very well be that Solnit is too institutionalized to see the real world. After all, she did refer to Novato, the city where a good deal of my extended family lives, as the "redneck part of Marin." Never mind that an average home there goes for $366,921.

Solnit confessed that she "had a lot of fun with tangled tangential narratives" when writing the book. I've had a lot of fun with terms that are too intricate to vocalize myself, but you wouldn't catch me announcing such an unfortunate phrase in public. And she described the sensation of being lost, only to describe how she perceived the color blue and her take on country music. During eight rounds of questions, I kept my hand patiently raised, wanting to ask her how settling on pure constructs and ideas actually led to one genuinely being lost. After all, wasn't the idea of being lost visceral? Didn't it involve letting the mind go and, if returning to a terrain, recapturing the initial lost feeling you felt when first discovering it? If one knew the intellectual terrain, then the sensation of being lost was, to my mind, emotionally challenged.

But Solnit, perhaps seeing my wry smile, passed. Even when Tito tried to get Solnit to remark on how her sensation of San Francisco compared to Calvino's Invisible Cities, Solnit evaded the issue, preferring to expatiate on another subject, rather than convene with another thinking mind who wanted to understand where she was coming from.

Here were some of the pronouncements uttered midway through Solnit's responses:

• "The self is a trauma" without any real elaboration on this idea.
• "Socrates always wins, even though he's so annoying."
• A brief allusion to a "punk rock youth," presumably to establish streetcred.

Solnit also made reference to being "cross-examined" on a hour-long radio show ("a weird interview") shortly before her hegira to safety and unquestioning mass acceptance across the Bay. The radio show hosts in question had dared to ask Solnit about what she intended by the title.

The Berkeley liberal crowd ate Solnit up like a rock star. One almost expected them to touch Solnit's hem when she was done. A father asked Solnit how he could instill the spirit of "being lost" within offspring. Call me crazy, but parenting advice from a deconstructionist is never a sound proposition. One woman declared that in light of Solnit's ability to get lost in her native environment, she couldn't "possibly imagine how you'd get lost on an exotic cantina!" Another commented upon how "musical" Solnit's voice was, presumably confusing hollow etherealness for an actual key.

Solnit's strategy seemed to be to evade any question asked of her, throwing in a Walter Benjamin reference or two, and speaking without so much as an "uh" or "ah." Although again, there were plenty of prerigged sniffs.

Rather interestingly, Solnit had been told by some unknown representative that she needed to repeat all questions and flattering remarks to her bookstore audience.

The book, incidentally, had been padded out because Solnit's editor told her that a handful of chapters was not long enough to sell her book. So four chapters, chronicling "The Blue of Distance" were inserted among Solnit's ruminations upon the issue of being lost.

But my general conclusion was that the real person who was lost was Solnit herself, no matter what her strengths on paper. Perhaps more than she knew.

[RELATED: Scott Esposito's account of the event. Also, Tito offers a Consumer Reports-style comparison of the Ames and Solnit readings.]

[UPDATE: Mere Observation wonders if I'm being "too assholian" with this post. Again, I was very clear to explain from the onset that my opinion reflected Solnit's public persona -- a valid perspective, given that Solnit went out of her way to compare herself with one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. To refrain from anything less than an honest assessment here would be to serve injustice upon what I experienced. Nor was I completely negative in my depiction, as I'm sure the above will attest. However, in hindsight, I should point out that I find myself willing to subscribe more towards Scott's view, which laid the onus at the crowd.]

Behind the "Peanut Gallery"

Ask Yahoo looks into the origin of "peanut gallery" -- a term that I've been enamored by over the years, perhaps because the idea of happy elephants enjoying a show (itself a fixation that goes back to my love of the film Fantasia) has always appealed to me. Not that I associate cheaper seats with elephants or anything, but this term that has always played tricks on my associative mind.

In any event, Ask Yahoo claims that the term predates Howdy Doody, dating back to 1888 in American theatres. The theory making the rounds is that people who sat in cheap seats often ate peanuts. But if I have a hunch this isn't entirely correct. If these cheaper seats were the cost of "peanuts," then it's also possible that the "peanut gallery" may have come into popularity from this slang defintion. In the case of a theatre, a gallery is a roofed promenade or a long passage. So we're talking about "peanuts" that were either fixed in place (as in seats for "peanuts") or the sitting nature of theatregoers who were eating peanuts.

The question here is whether or not the affluent theatregoers actually went out of their way to crane their heads at people eating peanuts, or whether the "peanuts," so to speak, drew attention to themselves:

The Word Detective weighs in with this:

The topmost tier (what we would call "the nosebleed seats" today) was the gallery, where the less affluent patrons ended up. Many of these folks were not shy about expressing their opinions when they found the performance lacking, and often employed the peanuts they bought to munch as handy missiles to get the actors' attention. Thus, "peanut gallery" gradually took on its figurative meaning of "rowdy rabble."

No doubt peanuts themselves were as noisy to eat back then as they are now, with considerable shell-cracking to boot. But there doesn't seem to be anything I can find that corroborates what was served back then. If anyone is an expert on snacks that were served in theatres before the turn of the century, I'd definitely be curious to hear from them.

It is worth noting that peanuts were quite popular in the 1890s. George Washington Carver promoted the peanut as a replacement for the cotton crop, which had been decimated by the weevil. Only a decade or so later, all sorts of devices had been created to harvest peanuts in droves. So the transplant of the Brazilian nut must have taken a major hold upon both American life and, accordingly, American language.

Thanks for Beaming Us Up Over the Years, Scotty. RIP James Doohan.

Comic Book Article Cliches

Jumping off from this Book Standard article by Jessa Crispin, here is a list of cliches to be found in any article written about comic books. I urge all reviewers to please clip this list next to their typewriters before sending out a query.

1. Comic books: They're not just for kids anymore!
2. Comic books: They tackle adult themes!
3. Comic books: They're not lower-class art!
4. Comic books: They tell personal stories!
5. The Egyptians had hieroglyphics. Today, we have comic books!
6. Comic books as the great equalizer among audiences.
7. The obligatory comparison to Art Spiegelman.
8. The obligatory comparison to Frank Miller.
9. Comic books: It's about the sense of wonder!
10. Well, wouldn't you know it, graphic novels really are literature!

Birnbaum Alert

Bobbie-B chats with Ian McEwan. Among the most shocking revelation: Birnbaum doesn't celebrate April Fool's Day! There's no mention of Saturday's parallels to Mrs. Dalloway, but this probably has to do with time constraints more than anything else.

John Roberts -- A Justice Who Must Be Stopped

I'm about as depressed as one can be over that a slick motherfucker like John Roberts, a man infinitely worse than Scalia, is now being seriously considered for the Supreme Court. His record shows wild-eyed ideology rather than a bilateral concern for upholding the law. We're talking about a man who wants to decimate the separation between church and state and a man who is seriously against a woman's right to choose -- despite the fact that the majority of Americans want Roe vs. Wade to be upheld.

This is a man who wrote in 1990: "We continue to believe that Roe [vs. Wade] was wrongly decided and should be overruled…. The Court's conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion … finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution."

I guess Roberts didn't read the first paragraph: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Last I checked, "domestic Tranquility" and "general Welfare" involved a woman having the right to choose in the 21st century. It involved a family having children when the parents were ready, so that they would be in a better position to provide the appropriate care and emotional and financial support to ensure that a child can grow up in a safe and nurturing environment rather than a broken home.

If the Democrats do not filibuster this man, if they do not do their damnedest to ensure that we don't live in a Handmaid's Tale-like universe of backalley abortions, then they are nothing less than culpable.

I urge everyone who cares to write your Senator and urge him or her to fight this nomination.

From NARAL: Tell your Senator!

[UPDATE: Slate has an article on Roberts' stand on civil liberties, specifically in the Hamdan v. Rushdie case. Needless to say, the opinion that Roberts penned is troubling for anyone concerned about due process and the Geneva Convention.]

Hell, Nearly Every Post We've Put Up This Week Has Had Typos and Half-Formed Thoughts!

Scott Esposito offers an article about litblogs for Rain Taxi. Not a man to explore an issue without looking at it from multiple angles, Scott notes that the current litblog structure "presents a threat of insularity" and notes that "even the best litblogs sometimes feature typos or half-formed thoughts."

SF Sightings -- Jonathan Ames

Tonight at the Booksmith, a solid crowd of thirty (including the erstwhile Tito Perez, myself, and several people from Greenpeace) gathered to hear Jonathan Ames read from his book, Wake Up, Sir!. Ames was on tour for the book's trade paperback release. He was dressed in a gray plaid sportscoat, a white shirt, a cap, light brown pants, and dark shoes -- a vaguely Wodehousean wardrobe for a novel owing its inspiration to P.G. Wodehouse. He had also prepared for this reading by imbibing a cup of coffee and a bottle of water.

Ames had tried to get a transexual writer to read with him, but she was unavailable. So he began the reading by describing Sexual Metamorphosis, a collection of transsexual memoirs that came out in April through Vintage that he had edited. He described an evening in 1990 in a gay bar in Pennsylvania. That very evening, Ames was unexpectedly accosted by an older blonde woman, "Where have you been all my life?" She was fifty. Ames was twenty-five. This blonde woman gave her his phone number.

Ames later called her a few times and they talked. But he eventually threw the number away in deference to his girlfriend at the time.

Years later, in 2001, while teaching at Indiana University, Ames was asked to blurb a transexual memoir from Temple University Press. He read The Woman I Was Not Born to Be by Aleshia Brevard, a book by a 1950s drag queen. Brevard was the first Marilyn Monroe impersonator. She eventually had a sex change operation and became a B-movie starlet.

At the time, Brevard's name was familiar to Ames. And it occurred to him when she mentioned being involved in a theatre troupe in the same area that this was the same woman that he met at the Pennsylvania bar. He explained this situation to the publicist and within minutes, he had received a one-sentence email back from Brevard, "Where have you been, baby?" From here, the early seeds of Sexual Metamorphosis were sown.

Ames then read one lengthy section and several smaller sections from Wake Up, Sir!. The large section was a moment where the protagonist, Alan Blair, is listening to the sexual problems of Tinkle, a colleague at a Yaddo-like artistic colony. Ames read in a very affected, almost Anglicized timbre. Alan Blair, as read by Ames, was executed with a decided New England air. Ames' oral rendition of Tinkle reminded me very much of Harvey Pekar's sidekick in the movie American Splendor.

Before taking questions from the crowd, Ames took the time to express the virtues of an acupuncture place on 1329 Powell Street (@ Broadway). When he had stumbled through San Francisco back in September, he had a burning sensation for three months that had, for a mere thirty dollars, been relieved by this acunpuncturist. Well, Ames had seen the acunpuncturist again. Because the left side of his neck was paralyzed and he was having difficulties lifting his right arm. For about an hour and a half, the acunpuncturist had performed a considerable cupping. Ames then took off his shirt and exposed what he described as "the largest hickeys in history" -- multiple reddish concave circles could be seen in copious quantities upon his back.

Aside from the feeling of relief, what had impressed Ames were the meticulous records that the acupuncturist had taken. There had been records from September about what the acupuncturist had done back then.

Ames put on his shirt and several questions were proffered from the audience. Ames suggested that he was incapable of writing a tragic book and noted that he placed his hand in his lap "for security reasons." Alan Blair's moustache situation was an homage to one Wooster-Jeeves story in which Wooster grew a moustache. The subject of hair led quite naturally to the subject of crabs. Ames asked how many in the audience had had crabs. One man bravely raised his hand.

Ames had had crabs twice. The first time is immortalized in his essay collection, What's Not to Love? But a few years ago, he had a mystery case of crabs at a southern hotel. He shaved his entire body, using all manner of toxic chemicals on his pubic hair, only to find that they had returned. It was this situation that inspired the crabs episode in Wake Up, Sir!

Ames suggested that copying other voices was a key component to developing his own voice, which he was not entirely certain of. He did confess that at a young age, a British voice always crept up in his writing. For example, when pondering a scatological issue, it would often be executed in his head in a Masterpiece Theatre voice.

The subject of audiobooks came up and Ames confessed that his books didn't sell enough copies to warrant an audiobook edition. He'd love to do recordings of his own work and has contemplated releasing his own audio editions.

Shortly after suggesting that he was "the gayest straight writer in America," Ames then let loose three hairy calls. These sounds permeated the depths of the Booksmith. Ames had had some practice with these, having resorted to hairy calls as a child when threatened by normal children.

When Ames was done signing books, a portion of the crowd (including Tito, myself and the aforementioned Greenpeace folks) hied away to Hobson's Choice for some drinks. But the proprietor of Hobson's Choice actually carded Ames! This despite the fact that Ames took off his cap, illustrating in clear detail the well developed male pattern baldness that Ames had written about. Some of us surmised that this was because Hobson's Choice had recently been fined for selling a drink to a minor. But I later pointed out that one was only carded in California if one looked under the age of 35. So perhaps the proprietor intended to flatter Ames.

Either way, Hobson's Choice, in addition to turning away an important literary figure, lost a good deal of potential business. Aub Zam Zam received it instead. And I learned a lot about the internal workings of Greenpeace (expanding from knowledge that was near nil) while nursing a Grey Goose martini.

Beware the Cat Ladies and Gentlemen of the Night

I've had a few unfortunate run-ins with cat ladies -- more, quite frankly, than a thirtysomething man deserves. The incidents in question have been so harrowing and traumatic that I have actually pined for an unfortunate run-in with a cat burglar, if only to draw a distinction between literal robbing and the very particular robbing of the soul that only cat ladies are capable of.

My first long-term experience with a cat lady occurred shortly after my apartment burned down -- the very night that Republicans took both houses on a cold November night in 2002. I needed a room to rent. My charred out bedroom would not do. At least that's what the Department of Health said.

In the course of flophousing, I became used to cats. At one point during my subsequent week of couch-crashing, one friend's cat, one of the most enormous felines that I have ever encountered, had supplanted its torso upon my legs over night. When I awoke the next morning, it took ten minutes for the blood to rush to my legs. And it was impossible for me to stand. It took ten minutes of strenuous punching upon various leg patches above my knee to walk like all the other humans. Of course, I didn't complain. Even when I spent much of that week hobbling, explaining my temporary physical affliction to prospective roommates.

I suppose this fantastic cat-clumping experience inured me momentarily to the threat of cat ladies. I was blinded by the prospect of having my own space again. So I moved in with a cat lady -- or rather a cat lady in situ. I didn't know it at the time. It was still in its early formation. She had two cats and spent most of her time inside. She would kiss the cats between the ears and tell them lengthy personal tales that went on for no less than three hours. Never mind that I always said hello when I came home. Apparently, two cats were worth more than one human.

Things reached an impasse when the cat lady claimed that she could "hear me typing through the walls" and when she started keeping track of when I would come home from a night out. What disturbed me was that she kept such precise figures. "You came home at 2:32 AM," she'd say. And there was the time that I did this cat lady's dishes to be nice. I heard a tiny rap upon my bedroom door and instead of a thank you, she asked in a barely audible voice if I could "just wring out the sponge a little more when I was done with it."

I asked friends and family if this was normal behavior. And within months I departed, only to encounter another cat lady at a job I worked for a short time. This lady would avoid work whenever possible and she would spend most of her time calling random people on the phone, trying to find homes for her cats. She did this all in an adenoidal singsong voice. I wish her well, but needless to say, in six months, I only saw her smile once. And that was when I stubbed my toe.

The upshot of this is that I'm nervous around cat ladies. There is something about the accumulation of cats that causes the mind to turn into muesli.

But now it's been reported that there are also cat gentlemen! This affliction is no longer gender-specific.

Fortune 500: Individuals with Riches or Madness?

Chicago Tribune: "Hare, 71, is one of the world's foremost experts on psychopaths. He developed the 'Psychopathy Checklist,' which has been used to diagnose psychopaths for 25 years, and the 'P-Scan,' which is widely used by police departments to screen out psychopaths among recruits. Hare sees similarities between the psychopaths he has studied -- Mafia hit men and sex offenders -- and the corporate crooks behind the Enron and WorldCom scandals."

"Nourishment" Secretly A Code Word for Desperate Live Act Revival

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "More clever, but equally embarrassing, was the device of explaining the solo acoustic section of the show as a way to give the band a dinner break. 'It's time for nourishment'" he said as the band sat on the floor and noshed while he played a sloppy and indifferent cover of Korgis' 1980 hit, 'Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime,' recorded for the 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' soundtrack."

Unfortunately, No One Told the Princeton Boys That Beating a Machine to a Pulp Gets Better Results

Wired: "Using random event generators -- computers that spew random output -- they have participants focus their intent on controlling the machines' output. Out of several million trials, they've detected small but "statistically significant" signs that minds may be able to interact with machines."

Stalk Dr. Mabuse (and a Few Other Bloggers)!

So if you plan on stalking me, you have a great opportunity to do so this week.

If you're in the San Francisco area, I will be at the Jonathan Ames reading tonight at the Booksmith.

On Wednesday night, I'll be hopping across the Bay to catch Rebecca Solnit. Word on the street has it that Mr. Esposito and Mr. Perez will also be there.

And although it's been receiving almost no coverage from my peers (not even panelist Kevin Smokler! for shame!), this City's annual Books by the Bay is going down this Saturday. It will feature several authors and other book-related happenings, all at the Yerba Buena Gardens. I will be there as well, with a ridiculous collection of electronics attached to my body. I will return here sometime later to offer a sizable report.

And for all you podcasting freaks, there are several (multiple!) episodes of Segundo in the works, many of which will be posted this week and next.

Keep watching the skies.

Like a Fiery Antiquarian

Ever since finishing Jonathan Coe's Like a Fiery Elephant quite a while ago, an excellent biography that I will go into length at in another venue (I'm dancing as fast as I can!), I have been extremely curious about reading the works of the biography's subject, B.S. Johnson. Johnson died tragically young of a suicide, but during his brief life, he dared to publish novels with holes that allowed the reader to "see into the future" (Albert Angelo) and he also infamously published The Unfortunates, which involved pages contained within a box, to be shuffled in whatever order the reader decided.

Well, one Golden Rule Jones has begun the legwork, searching for a copy of Albert Angelo with the holes. And I'll let his post speak for itself. He also points to this B.S. Johnson Flickr tag. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Complete Review's coverage of Johnson titles.

New Yorker on New Yorker

Don't know how I missed it, but if you're looking for another outlet-centric blog, Emily Gordon's blog, Emdashes, is New Yorker-centric and also offers a monthly column about writers named Jonathan entitled "Jonathans Are Illuminated."

They Want Grande, Not Pequeño

There's now a rumor being floated around that Apple has a Video iPod in the works for September.

I have two words on why such a device will completely and utterly fail: Video Walkman.

Law Apologizes for Out-of-Control Penis

Actor Jude Law has expressed "sincere regret" for allowing his penis to take over his body and consummate its desires for nanny Daisy Wright while he was engaged to actress Sienna Miller.

Law issued a statement shortly after his publicists were in the dark about how to spin this, before coming up with an eleventh-hour forthright apology.

"I just want to say that I am deeply ashamed of my manhood. I should have controlled my penis. It should not have controlled me. As I try and weather the storm with Sienna, it is quite likely that I will be having an exclusive hands-on relationship with my penis. For this, I am truly sorry," said Law.

"There is no defence for any actions that my penis has taken."

Shortly after this sentence, in a rare appearance, Jude Law's Penis emerged from Mr. Law's trousers and begin to speak to reporters.

"She was only caring for one children," rebutted Jude Law's Penis. "Surely there was enough time on her hands for two. And frankly, I was getting sick of Jude and Sienna's hands. The time had come to mix things up."

The Real Book-Related Fantasy News of the Weekend

Mad Max Perkins has departed the blogosphere, wizard hat and all.

On Current Cinema

It isn't easy for me to make this next confession. After all, we're talking about a medium that has kept me excited, enthused and alive for damn near my entire life. But if the point of this blog is to chronicle the truth, then I have very little choice in the matter.

Anyhow, the confession is this: I have very little desire to go to the movies anymore.

It's not the obnoxious people. I can handle their cell phones and their terrible cellophane wrappers and their talking through a movie. Years of constant moviegoing has inured me to the rudeness of the American public.

It's not the prices. Ten bucks isn't really all that much more than eight bucks. And besides, even at that price, you can at least get a theatrical experience that deafens your eardrums.

What it is, I think, is the fact that the people who produce these movies probably don't know who John Cassavetes or Federico Fellini were. I get the strong sense that they do not read, let alone live. I get the sense that they no longer have the ability to reduce me to some silent and lifeless hunk of flesh, completely in awe of what has just transpired. Because what it is all about these days is pure profit. It's about taking something that might have been special to me once (e.g., The Fantastic Four) and reducing the magic to utter idiocy.

I have no desire to patronize their crapola. The last film I paid for was Land of the Dead, and that was only because I inherently trust George Romero.

I am probably the only human being in the world who has not seen The War of the Worlds. Probably because I liked the H.G. Wells novel just fine and I don't want my fun memories of George Pal's version to be sullied.

Every time I go to the movies, I see trailers that mean absolutely nothing to me. They fail to delight, to suggest, or to play with my imagination. I presume that this is because I don't fall within their demographic anymore. And I am forced to conclude that I am either too old or too demanding of my fantasies. Either that or I'd like to think that something is terribly wrong with Hollywood.

But whatever the case, aside from the new Terry Gilliam film, there is not a single film coming out in the next few months that silently demands, "See me." There is not an upcoming release that I believe will sufficiently take the wind out of my lungs and transport me so completely into its world. Instead, I have had to rely upon DVDs of older films made by people who know and intuitively feel that this is what the cinematic medium is about.

And for this, I am very sad. Because I know the power of the medium. I know that it is a place that can produce something that matters. I know that it is a realm that can demand an intense vicariousness. And it is my hope against all possible hopes that one day, it will do so again.

These Aren't the Confessions You're Looking For

If there's any moral to this story (and this subsequent response), it's this: if you can't handle people under your employ being more interesting than you are, then perhaps the unlived life is not worth examining, let alone selling it to the Gray Lady for opportunistic payola.

Chronicle Fin De Siecle in the Classical Sense of the Definition?

The SFist has the big-time local scoop on the current war between the Media Workers Guild and the San Francisco Chronicle. Needless to say, Chronicle management wants to limit the MWG's ability to strike in solidarity. They are also calling for major wage cuts in the area of 2% to 24% and even a wage freeze through the end of the year. Needless to say, with these kinds of "negotiations," a strike looks very likely in the cards.

Tanenhaus Watch: July 17, 2005

WEEKLY QUESTION: Will this week's NYTBR reflect today's literary and publishing climate? Or will editor Sam Tanenhaus demonstrate yet again that the NYTBR is irrelevant to today's needs? If the former, a tasty brownie will be sent to Mr. Tanenhaus' office. If the latter, the brownie will be denied.

THE COLUMN-INCH TEST:

Fiction and Poetry Reviews: One two-page cover review of John Irving's Until I Find You, one two-page Poetry Chronicle, 2 one-page reviews, 3 half-page reviews. (Total books: 15. Total pages: 7.5 .)

Non-Fiction Reviews: One 1-page Nonfiction Chronicle, three one-page reviews, 5 half-page reviews. Total books: 13. Total pages: 5.5.)

Could it be? Has Sam Tanenhaus actually provided more space in his pages to fiction and poetry than nonfiction? What we have here is 57%, well over the 48% fiction minimum. Further, he's also thrown in a nice little essay by David Leavitt on gay literature, revealing to his perplexed upstate New York audience that yes, indeed, gayfic is alive and well and is actually qute mainstream. Something the rest of us all knew for at leat the past ten years. (I'm almost certain that Tanenhaus got the idea from K.M. Soehnlein's essay on the same subject in Bookmark Now, which did a better job of contextualizing the development of gay literature and voicing current concerns about gay voice.) But it's a nice gesture all the same.

Brownie Point: EARNED!

But while Tanenhaus passes this test this week, the big question that must be asked is whether his coverage for fiction and nonfiction is substantive and suitably reflective of a major newspaper.

The issue here again is one of priorities. It's bad enough that John Irving's latest treacle has been given the cover story, but Paul Gray's review is largely composed of a plot summary, with only a brief allusion to the unfortunate didactic streak that has appeared in Irving's later work. That might get you somewhere in a high school English class, but it doesn't cut the mustard for a major newspaper. The strange thing here is that Gray didn't care for the novel and proceeded to give Irving a gentle rap on the wrist instead of a critical essay. Given that Irving's book is a mercilessly interminable 824 pages, this hardly seems fair to Gray, who earned the right to let off at least a little bit of righteous indignation by being assigned this book. Further, Gray's almost tender tone hardly represents the hardball fiction coverage and "battles" that Tanenhaus promised years ago.

Further, there's an altogether inconsistent critical tone in this week's issue. And the blame must be placed at Tanenhaus' feet for inducting too many half-page reviews that start off very well and then must be wrapped up in a New York minute, thereby defeating the whole purpose of solid review coverage.

Take, for example, Lesley Downer's review of The Icarus Girl. Downer frames her review against Helen Oyeyemi's colossal advance and whether the book is worth the hype. What we could have had here was a review that displayed insights about the UK publishing industry while placing Oyeyemi's work in the context of other ethnic and multicultural authors emerging from UK transplants. But because Downer was confined to a half page, most of her paragraphs are plot summary and the moment is lost.

Indeed, it is self-defeating to go to the trouble of including a debut from a Chinese-American novelist when you can't even guarantee enough column-inches for rumination. That's a bit like trying to squeeze in a four-course meal into fifteen mintues. It simply can't be done.

I would argue that The Icarus Girl and A Long Stay in a Distant Land would have served better as cover stories than the Irving book or, at the very least, one-page reviews.

But Tanenhaus's ultimate disgrace this week is the Poetry Chronicle. First off, I'm not sure how a densely written paragraph per poetry collection can get anyone excited about poetry, much less convey what each collection is about. And it sure as hell isn't enough space to come to the crux of a book. Constrained by this formula, writers Joel Brouwer and Joshua Clover are forced to come up with extremely fey generalizations while sticking to summaries no more distinguishable from a press release. Here are a few choice passages:

"The husband's lacerated rhapsodizing over his distant wife's foot-of-the-bed yoga practice, in the poem ''Anger,'' is to die for; you can't decide whom to like less, and that's what keeps the poem interesting." (Of course! Because poetry is all about narrative and people you like, rather than the careful voicing of emotions in a more abstract medium.)

"Moments later he drops the word ''obnubilating''; one can be certain he means it." (One would hope so. After all, poets are always random and haphazard about the words they choose.)

"[Mark Leithauser's illustrative work] has an affinity also to the animations in Tim Burton's movies, the sort of menacing comic melancholy that really spruces up a camel." (I'll show a camel the illustrations the next time I'm at Hertz Rent-A-Camel. Other than that, should camels be spruced up? Should they not instead have a definitive representative form?)

"Woo is obviously sympathetic, but he makes no effort to conceal his fascination with his mother's decline." (Huh? Is his fascination sympathetic? What of the language he uses to evoke this feeling?)

I'm sure the poetry enthusiasts are probably grateful that poetry has been recognized, but since it has been recognized here in such a jejune timbre, one might argue that it's perhaps better left unrecognized. Because this flummery doesn't count for criticism, summation, or even a generic yet genuine enthusiasm. In short, it serves no purpose. And for this, we must offer the appropriate rejoinder to the maligned poets who labored over their work for years and for little return, only to be answered by jackasses.

BROWNIE BITCHSLAP FACTOR: Halfass generaizations and nutty poetry capsules, Sam? Unacceptable! SLAP! (Minus .8 points)

If you want to get a sense of how the NYTBR can cover nonfiction, check out Samuel G. Freedman's comparative review of two NPR books. The review frames NPR in appropriate historical context, points out the suprising lack of journalistic coverage on public radio, and takes Jack W. Mitchell to task for adhering to the NPR hardline and slamming Bob Edwards.

Small wonder then that Tanenhaus has devoted one page to Fantastic, an Arnold Schwarzenegger biography written by Lawrence Leamer, an author who built his career on glitzy biographies of the Kenendys, Ingrid Bergman, and Johnny Carson, while Christopher Hitchens' Thomas Jefferson, a book that is more thoughtful, comes from an unusual perspective (Hitchens as Americanized Briton) and decidedly less of a wankfest, has received a mere half page. This is a prioritization completely out of whack with a weekly book review that expects us to read it seriously and doubly strange when we consider how often Tanenhaus employs Hitchens for his pages. And for this there can be only one solution.

BROWNIE BITCHSLAP FACTOR: Sycophantism over erudition, Sam? For shame! SLAP! (Minus .3 points)

THE HARD-ON TEST:

This test concerns the ratio of male to female writers writing for the NYTBR.

This week, we see thirteen male contributors and only six females. In other words, less than a third of this week's contributors are women. As usual, they're relegated to the fiction-happy kitchen: Three of the six have been assigned this week's six fiction articles (and that's not counting the Irving). Unacceptable.

Brownie Point: DENIED!

THE QUIRKY PAIR-UP TEST:

The David Leavitt essay previously noted counts for something, but I'm not certain that this would constitute a quirky pairup, given that it is a gay writer talking about gay literature, with Tanenhaus playing up this fact in his "Up Front" preface. A case might be made for Charlie Rubin's quirky and entertaining review of William Buckley's Oates novels (which shows a remarkable knowledge of the spy novels in question). But for the most part, we're seeing the usual staffers assigned to the usual books. Not a lot of thinking being done outside the box on this score this week.

Brownie Point: DENIED!

CONTENT CONCERNS:

How exactly does one "star in an acting class"? Or are the copy editors asleep at the wheel?

Okay, so journalists were crazed about the real story behind Kathryn Harrison, but isn't the subject of "what others find distasteful" the whole point of a Harrison book? Wouldn't sentences be better devoted to how Harrison may have challenged cultural mores and what she has to say with them in her work?

Note to David Carr: Your review begins like a term paper, and a very profane one at that.

So we have one review of a translated book. Is it absolutely necessary to stick with the formula "magical realism = acceptable translated book to review?" There are innumerable others.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't praise Alexandra Jacobs' essay on the refurbished Our Bodies, Ourselves, which adroitly places the book in context.

CONCLUSIONS:

Brownie Points Denied: 1
Brownie Points Earned: 2
Brownie Bitchslap Factor: -1.1 points
TOTAL BROWNIE POINTS REQUIRED FOR BROWNIE DELIVERY: 2
TOTAL BROWNIE POINTS EARNED: -.1 points

There are some positive things about this week's edition (as noted above). But, alas, standards are standards. Perhaps Tanenhaus' quickest way to secure a brownie shipment is to offer more one-page reviews, allow his contributors to offer informed takes on books, shift priorities to truly important books (rather than sensational titles) and dare to mix things up a little. I think Tanenhaus is getting closer this week, but I hope he has the courage to say no to clipped and immediate coverage that ultimately says nothing.

Wake Up, Mabuse!

Some months ago, we promised nonstop Jonathan Ames coverage. Now we lapsed badly on that score. In fact, we lapsed so badly that not even the Unitarian Universalist Church will take us in.

But hopefully we can provide penance by informing you that Jonathan Ames is on another book tour -- this time, for the paperback release of Wake Up, Sir!, which is not only a very funny book but a loving homage to P.G. Wodehouse's Worcester-Jeeves novels. (Yes, kids, before Ask Jeeves blasphemized the canon, there were many funny books written about a butler named Jeeves.) Fortunately, Ames has taken Jeeves back.

You can find Ames at the following places over the next few weeks:

Tuesday, July 19, 7PM: Booksmith, 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA.

Friday, July 22, 7:30PM: Skylight Books, 1818 North Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA (the Los Feliz neighborhood).

Friday, July 29, 7PM: Barnes & Noble, Astor Place, New York City, NY.

If you're in the San Francisco area, the incomparable Tito Perez and I will be at the Booksmith. Feel free to stop by and say hello.

One More Thing

You may not realize this, but I've spent the past five years writing a novel in code. The novel in question features a good deal of sex between an alcoholic Jesuit and a recovering politician, several fingers that are accidentally cut off in a shredder and sold for a stunning amount on eBay, and a lengthy section describing how to make the best chili con carne. The novel is entitled ":)" and while I don't have $14,000 to offer, for anyone who can decode the text, I will buy them a beer.

The text follows:

"
!-?
(o)(o)
===|>
:(?
!!!!

It Was Either This or Medication

Okay, so given that last post, it's clear that we're too hostile to blog. So to combine the best of both worlds (one being benign cuteness, the other being a decidedly perverted sensibility), we conclude this week with unicorn porn, where a young girl's sunny bedroom decor walks hand-in-hand with an adolescent male's worst fantasies. Enjoy!

See you on Sunday with the Brownie Watch.

In Defense of the Ambitious Living, Or Why Wasserman is an Ass

On yesterday's Radio Open Source show, Steve Wasserman (the former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review) said the following:

The best reading experience is to occupy your time with the worthy dead rather than the ambitious living.

So if I am to understand the Wasserman logic correctly:

If you're Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, or Nadeem Aslam -- if you're an author hoping to break outside of the so-called "fun and fast-paced" mould (a descriptive phrase that is perhaps better applied to a rollercoaster or a mercy fuck), sorry, kids! No consolation prize for you! You're too ambitious, too "dense" and too challenging for today's readers. You say you've got a novel that breaks outside the middle-aged, upper middle-class Caucasian male midlife crisis mode? Tough shit, honey. Because the publishing marketplace is all about the next Harry Potter or Dan Brown -- or the next book you can wolf down in one evening. And even then, you're no better than anyone else until the maggots are on you like a Las Vegas buffet, and some member of the hoary-haired literati offers the obligatory reconsideration article for Harper's. And that's assuming you can beat the odds and turn out a steady body of work.

It's small wonder that with this kind of fey dichotomy, which must pass in Wasserman's microcephalic headspace as sine qua non wit, the LATBR turned into a travesty and left Wasserman storming out of the gate. What right does Wasserman have to talk about ambition, when his very capitulation demosntrated how unwilling he was to compromise with top brass and maintain some semblance of a weekly book review section? His very actions proved to the world that he was anything but ambitious. This was a man who refused to fight, or grew tired of fighting, or just wanted a more comfortable role than the buffer between his audience and the men behind the curtain.

But never mind this.

Wasserman's statement is preposterous because the very form of the novel has evolved precisely because of efforts from the ambitious living. Readers have long supped upon the fruits of ambition and writers themsleves have developed as a result of it. If we go back to the eighteenth century, a period in which the novel developed as a seminal art form, we find Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) as the first novel that attempted to merge a narrative with manners and a widely influential epistolary novel. It proved to be both controversial (because of its voyeurism and sentimentalism) and a bestseller -- you might call it The Da Vinci Code of its day. But its very ambition not only spawned imitators hoping to cash in, but Henry Fielding's parodies Shamela and The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews. Fielding's approach in these novels went beyond mere satire. His very ambition turned Joseph Andrews in a vibrant character and, in turn, led him to write The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), an ironic high point that was also a merciless attack on Walpole, and of course his masterpiece Tom Jones.

Or if that's not enough, consider the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald upon Ernest Hemingway. It would be difficult to argue that Fitzgerald, a man who could never within a then colossal $25,000 income, was anything less than ambitious. And it was Fitzgerald who gave pivotal input on The Sun Also Rises just before it was sent out to Maxwell Perkins. And given The Sun Also Rises' influence upon prose and modern behavior, introducing Paris and Pampolona in such a vivid way to millions of readers at the time. Would these audiences have experienced nearly the same locales had they frittered their time with the "worthy dead?" Or had not Fitzgerald's ambition coaxed Hemingway to cut a chapter and a half (one of the more substantial changes in the book)?

If Wasserman genuinely believes that a night spent imbibing some dead Caucasian is the apex of reading achievement, then that's his business. But no matter how far back you go, even these dead souls were inspired by the ambitions of their living peers. Competition was perhaps one motivation, but encouragement from people who gave a damn about literature (whether writers, editors, or audiences) was another. The point is that these authors cared enough to offer their very best, to sustain an environment where literature evolves, and to in turn inspire other authors and readers alike.

In Wasserman's case, to discount ambition and influence with such a vapid statement, to appear contrarian through an unsuccessful bon mot that makes little sense and is not qualifiable, is not only contrary to the purpose of literature, but it's ass-backwards when considering how people experience literature.

Because of this, I thank the heavens that this cuckoo is no longer editing a book review section for a major newspaper.

Roundup on a Sluggish Morning

• Nicole Ritchie is becoming a novelist, drawing upon her own life experience for the book. That includes a particularly dark period as a drug addict. Says Ritchie: "I think sometimes when people think of the word drug addict they think the word dirty, under a bridge, like, really rock bottom. You don't have to be that person to be an addict." Of course! If you're lucky enough, there's always the sanctity and security of your family's palatial estate during a withdrawal period. With butlers!
• Julian Barnes talks about his new book.
• Publishers are using fake websites to publicize books.
• Clive Barker forthcoming projects: two films and a 500-page book with naughty text and illustrations called The Scarlet Gospels about "a man with pins in his head." Hmmm...shouldn't Barker call this one Cockraiser instead?

Next Cause for Yuppie Mass Hysteria (and Utterly Ridiculous NYT Fashion and Styles Article): Variance in Leotards

The New York Times: "Now the popularity of yoga has left practitioners - 16.5 million in the United States alone, according to a 2005 Yoga Journal survey - with so many mats, and so much confusion. They come in cotton, synthetics and rubber. Some are thin, some are padded, and some are futon-thick."

18 Fantasy Authors to Read Instead of J.K. Rowling

• L. Frank Baum
• J.G. Ballard
• Marion Zimmer Bradley
• William S. Burroughs
• L. Sprague de Camp
• Angela Carter
• Philip Jose Farmer
• M. John Harrison
• Ursula K. Le Guin
• Fritz Lieber
• Richard Matheson
• China Mieville
• Michael Moorcock
• Mervyn Peake
• Jack Vance
• Connie Willis
• Gene Wolfe
• Roger Zelazny

[UPDATE: And here are 18 more from Ms. Bond, who is more knowledgeable of this genre than I am. I too would add Kelly Link to the list, along with Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, George R.R. Martin, and Philip Pullman -- to name but only a few.]

[UPDATE 2: A call from Matt Cheney for Harry Potter alternatives.]

Protests and the SFPD: More Madness

So what exactly happened at the July 8, 2005 San Francisco G8 protests?

This Chronicle article reports that a bandana-masked attacker assaulted SFPD Officer Peter Shields. Shields and his partner, Michael Wolf, answered a call about anarchists, who were protesting G8, breaking windows. Someone tossed a mattress underneath their car and lit in on fire. Wolf tried to arrest someone who he thought lit the mattress. There was a chase and Shields was hit by someone from behind, suffering a fractured skull. Shields had no riot gear and backup was not called in time. These gruesome photos show Shields and suggest that the cops began swinging their batons at random protestors in retaliation. Because of all this, a no-confidence petition against Police Chief Heather Fong and Deputy Chief Greg Suhr. The latter was in charge of handling the protest.

The Mayor's Office has issued a $10,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest of the assailant.

But that's just one side of the story. This video suggests that the SFPD was reacting with the same uncool heads as the protestors. For one thing, the Chronicle article notes that police were randomly arresting people, associating them with the assault. If that was the mentality in place, then if the protestor depicted in this video was being as seriously choked as he looks to be, the onus also falls upon the SFPD for failing to coordinate and to react to the situation calmly. (Near the end of a video, we see the SFPD drawing guns on bystanders concerned about the choked protestor, ordering all to "Get back!" and to "Leave or you're going to be fucking blasted!" -- apparently, these are considered dependable ways to calm down a crowd.)

The protest was an uncontrolled one, as the Anarchist Action people themselves point out. Meanwhile, Suhr has been reassigned and the two protestors arrested have pleaded not guilty and there's conflicting reports about whether or not there was a communications mishap.

Here are the questions that need to be asked:

• Was there or was there not a communication breakdown? What measures are in place to protect officers from unexpected assaults?
• Why did the officer depicted in the video place a chokehold on his assailant?
• What evidence do the SFPD have to implicate the three arrested suspects?
• Why did the SFPD draw guns and sling batons upon unwitting protestors? If the charges here were misdemanors, what motivates such a stunning response within police procedure? Further, is there hard evidence to back up some of the protestors' claims?
• Has any disciplinary action been taken against the officers who attacked the protestors or Suhr?
• What was Suhr's specific approach to handling protests? Does he have a history of using violence and intimidation to resolve conflicts (and encouraging officers to do the same)?

Interestingly enough, KRON's Brian Shields (unrelated to Peter), a man who's been trying to court Bay Area bloggers and who operates a blog, The Bay Area is Talking, wrote in the SF Indy Media thread (you have to click on one of the comments to access the dialogue), promising "to recognize that there is another source for information about events around the world, the source of citizens who have cameras and who report based on their own experiences." At the time of this posting, the top post at The Bay Area is Talking is "What a night for baseball!" It's good to see Brian Shields following up on the hard news stories. (Some of Brian Shields' other Pultizer-worthy posts include "I Love the Fog," "A More Practical Way to Connect with Women," and "Gee I thought had a Crazy Weekend" [sic]. But at least he has one post up about the incident.)

Of course, if it were me, instead of just mining for links, I'd be using KRON's resources to talk with the police officers, obtain police reports and the like, hunting down as many sides of the story as I could.

Well, If Even Mark Morford Isn't Safe, Can We Say Newspaper Reduced to Socialist Pamphlet Size?

The San Francisco Chronicle: "Editor's Note: Beginning today, a slightly shortened version of Mark Morford's column will run in the Datebook section of the print edition of The Chronicle, every Wednesday and Friday. The full version, with active links, will continue to appear on SFGate.com."

Or Maybe Today's Producers Are Terrified of Rocking the Boat

Salon: "But the new leading men on television have lost that battle, or never even bothered to fight it. They're all solitary supermen. Lonesome savants who seem to know everything there is to know -- except how, or even why, to talk to women. Why have these still young, handsome guys given up, when the less young, less handsome and more drunk Sipowicz didn't? Is it a question of timing? Did Sipowicz just reflect the Clinton-era fascination with moral fallibility and self-improvement? Maybe the new TV hero is perfect for Bush America: He's always right, and certain of his rightness, and sees his isolation as proof of that rightness. But then again, George Bush is hardly the staunch defender of rationality and science that the bug collectors are. And these guys have great fun at the expense of "believers" of all stripes. In fact, that's their problem: their middle-aged skepticism knows no bounds, and extends to the defiantly irrational realm of human relationships."

Kids, Kids, Pugilism Isn't the Answer

During the hours of 4PM-5PM Pacific Standard Time, we'll be stuck in a windowless room with a speakerless computer and a rat scurrying about on the asbestos-ridden tile that we've nicknamed "Pinky" for company. (I named him "Pinky" because when I first said hello, he decided to bite my pinky and I spent several hours in the hospital getting a tetanus shot.)

But if you're more fortunate than us and you're free during that time, you can do no wrong by checking out this afternoon's broadcast of Radio Open Source, which can be heard online. Mark Sarvas plans to oil up his chest and take LA Times Book Review editor Steve Wasserman into a five-match round that will involve lots of blood being strewn onto blank pages and perhaps more than a few angry tears. Kevin Smokler will also be there, presumably as the voice of reason.

As for us, like the Hag, we've been typecast as Lydon's pariahs.

Not Even the Sphinx Can Answer for Pauly Shore's Continued Employment

Hey, kids, want to make a quick buck and try and stop one of the most untalented men in show business in one go? Well, now you can. It seems that Pauly (Jury Duty) Shore has somehow conned TBS into giving him a television show called Minding the Store. If you keep a straight face and don't laugh (too bad there's no extra points for outright nausea), Pauly Shore will send you a dollar back.

Unfortunately, according to the rules, "NO MORE THAN 250,000 REQUESTS WILL BE HONORED AND THIS OFFER WILL END ON THE EARLIER OF 8/15/05 OR THE RECEIPT OF 250,000 REQUESTS." Which means that they've budgeted the show to lose $250,000.

Here's my question: why not more? If my calculations are correct, a three million dollar cap should send a clear and resounding message that Pauly Shore should not be hired under any circumstances.

The real question: Why doesn't most television operate this way? I'm not sure if it would improve television, but if people demanded their money back, wouldn't it send a real message to the networks that most of the shit they air is vapid?

Round and Round She Goes! Where She Stops...

• Robert "Hue-Happy Background" Birnbaum talks with crime fiction writer Richard Marnick. Marnick, as reported during our BEA coverage, has led an extraordinary life as an ex-cop, ex-con, and a union writer tunnel. And Marnick gives Birnbaum the goods on Boyos and more.
• Pope John Paul II approved of Harry Potter, but Ratzinger doesn't. Pope Benedict XVI has also gone on record to state that ice cream cones and roller coasters are the work of the devil.
• I must say that this headline is wrong. It should read "Coffee shop offers no chance or tablespace for writers."
• The SF Weekly offers a brief blurb for Michelle Tea, who would probably make a better modifier over the Warfield than the SF Weekly.
• Introducing BritLitBlogs, a consortium of six British literary blogs.
• If you thought the Patriot Act library and bookstore records battle was over, think again. Librarians are concerned with the Bush administration's determination to make reinstating Section 215 a top priority this year.
• Mike West really doesn't like Spin.
• Tayari Jones on going to Bible school while atheist. (via Maud)
• Rake has the goods on Cormac McCarthy from this month's Vanity Fair.
• History textbooks aren't just being diluted in American schools. Otawara, Japan has approved a book downplaying the Rape of Nanking, completely overlooking the sexual ensalvement of women.
• Back in the 1960s, San Quentin was one of the few prisons that attempted "bibliotherapy." Because of this, prisoners became literate and several of them became writers. (And in fact, Eldridge Cleaver wrote and sold Soul on Ice while in San Quentin.) So it's very good to see that new reading programs are being tried out at various Bay Area prisons. (And for a related story, check out Mark Sarvas' account of teaching writing to at-risk juvenile offenders.)
• Terry McMillan's latest homophobia: "He's the one who is gay." I didn't realize that one's sexual orientation mattered as much as one's actions do in a messy divorce. So am I to conclude that not being gay means you're not "a habitual liar" or "a sociopath"?

Vollmann: Telling Stories is the Answer

Tito alerts me to this article at the Voice that involves sharing absinthe and conversation with William T. Vollmann. There's some fascinating revelations about what Vollmann thinks about post-9/11 politics and how Vollmann tries as hard as possible to live, as well as observe, the lives of others. But the most interesting remark is this:

"There are people dead as a result of [American] political and religious praxis," he says. "Whether we owe those dead bodies a tight, middle, or panoramic gaze, we owe those dead bodies a story."

(And for what it's worth, long gestating in the Future Entries Department is my final entry on The Rainbow Stories for The Vollmann Club. I finished the book a month ago, but hope to go through it story-by-story.)

Celebrity = Public Journal?

Kevin Smith now has a blog. What's odd is that the man is determined to chronicle everything. He has a post up every day. Even more disturbing: the man casually reveals that he eats almost nothing but sausage and fesses up to "delicious little fuck sessions."

(All criticisms of Mr. Smith's public posturing aside, I should note that Jersey Girl was unfairly maligned, that the film dared to offer a visceral take on fatherhood and life choices when Smith acolytes expected more Jay and Silent Bob, and I hope that Mr. Smith continues to develop as a filmmaker.)

Bush Administration Tries to Cover Up Rovegate with Laughs; Unconvincing Titters Fail to Detract Attention

A Midsummer Night's Press Conference

Washington. The White House.

Enter KARL ROVE

Rove: Now is the moment where Plame will pay
Made glorious by our gov'ment secured
And all the clouds that lowr'd upon the Left
Not nigh the bosom of state secrets buried.
Now are our brows bound with unilateral wreaths;
Our bruised reporters thrown in jail;
Our false alarums changed to random orange;
The dreadful bias squashed by delightful measures.
But I, that am not shap'd for Adonis tricks,
But made to court a haughty looking-glass;
I, that am rotundly stamp'd, declared an evil genius
To strut before a wanton bumbling Bush;
I, that will be pardoned before thrown away,
Eluding social justice, and bars which confine;
To set the hounds upon Prince Scott
My fingers fold for further plans;
Hark, reporters come!

Enter JOURNALISTS, chasing SCOTT MCCLELLAN. ROVE hides behind curtain.

Journalist #1: How now, odd Scott? What falsehoods hath thou wrought?
Journalist #2: In June the King did plege to purge, and now your hands are caught!
Scott: Do scratch thy pads. I'll never 'fess. The investigation's on.
I'm well aware of what I said. Your questions do now con.
I'm glad to talk when an apt sun sets
Or our polls go up, or your appetite whets
If you'll let me finish, I'll aid and abet...
Did I say that? Shit, I'm toast.
Journalist #3: You're not saying much.
Journalist #4: Where's your Midas touch?
Journalist #2: It's the same thing through and through.
Journalist #3: It's a bad spot, Scott.
Journalist #1: Out out damned spot?
Journalist #2: I'd cop or you'll be through.
Scott: Again, I've rejoined. You're aware and I know.
You continue to ask. Let me breathe.
I appreciate questions and welcome suggestions
Will you titter when I go home and seethe?

ROVE from behind curtain.

Rove: They've unearthed my grand plans!
But I'm Bush's brain. And they daren't loosen my hold
If they fry me in jail or a scum pounds my tail
I'll return, raging wolf in the fold

Here's Hoping They Whiz Right Through the Jingoism of Coriolanus

The Royal Shakespeare Company will perform every known piece of writing by Shakespare. Within one year.

That's damn ambitious and damn cool.

Here are some more details:

• 18 British theatre companies are involved.
• Sir Ian McKellen will play King Lear.
• Dame Judi Dench will be in a musical adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor.
• Patrick Stewart to be in The Tempest.

Tangerine Muumuu, You Ain't Alone!

Jimmy Beck points to this page listing writers and their preferred typewriters, which seems apropos to Ms. Frye's Not-So-Tangerine Writing Implement Epic.

Roundup

• Just when you thought it was safe to return to the bookstores, an author named Barbara Delinksy has actually revived the Peyton Place series. Is Peyton Place as scandalous as it once was? Can it hope to restore the same admixture of wonder and scandal that Grace Metalious used to enchant Eisenhower voters? Well, I have my doubts. Not because Delinsky's written 70 books or because she was kind enough to write to us from the lake, but because she can't spell "germane ".
• A Yeats album has fetched £72,000 at an auction. The album includes 18 letters from Yeats to his friend, Sir Sidney Cockerell, and the manuscript of his essay, "The Tragic Theatre." There is also an original draft of one of Yeats' poems that reads, "When you are old and grey and full of water,/And a WC cannot be found and you shall burst, scream for help." But this work appears to have been abandoned.
• Gunter Grass is interviewed by Deutsche Welle during one of his regular visits to Gdnask. I wish I were making this up, but it looks like Grass was even asked to beat a tin drum. What next? Asking Grass to wear a dog suit or asking him to play cat and mouse?
• For the 100th anniversary of Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Herkimer County hopes to commemorate the murder that inspired Dreiser. Police have been commissioned to prevent die-hard Dreiserites from going too far during the festivities.
• Pop quiz: Does the phrase "Thousands more are demanding ownership" come from an article on eminent domain or the Harry Potter hoopla. Here's your answer.
• As widely reported, publisher Bryon Preiss has died.
• And bookmobiles may be dying in the States, but they're thriving in Indonesia.

More Than Parr for the Course

A hearty congratulations to Bud Parr, who celebrates two years of blogging at the always excellent Chekhov's Mistress and can also be found contributing at 400 Windmills and the (nearly finished!) Sonnet Media.

Rose-Colored Glasses

It appears that the J in M.J. Rose's name stands for "Julavits."

Without naming names or citing any specific examples (or, for that matter, actually invoking an argument for why any of it is bad), M.J. Rose offers us yet another piece of flummery complaining about what she identifies as "whining" (and what the rest of us might call identifying and criticizing specific publishing issues so as to better understand them) on the blogosphere. Her ostensible point is "because there are over 195,000 books published a year and they can't all get reviews in the NYTBR."

Well, it's clear that Ms. Rose fails to comprehend the argument. The amount of books being published is not the issue. It's the substantive nature of how the current publishing industry is being covered and represented in print that the blogosphere is being taken to task. It's not all bad. But as demonstrated here and at other places, it has been repeatedly shown that the NYTBR continues to give fiction (and specifically literary fiction) the shaft and maintain a balance of male-to-female book reviewers that is completely out of step with the current population (and, in particular, readers). (By the way, a Tanenhaus Brownie Watch is in the works for last Sunday.)

Second, what's wrong with complaints anyway? Voicing grievances is often a good way to get a discussion going and it allows all of us to work together towards contemplating a solution. Plus, it serves as a catharsis for all involved. Publishing is a tough business, one that involves working on a book for years only to see a meager advance completely out of proportion with the labor expended. It's enough to drive just about any stable person crazy.

But most importantly, there's something important that needs to be said here. Why should anybody take an opinion seriously when the person who posits it continues to engage in a passive-aggressive approach to intellctualism without a specific example? I say this because Ms. Rose continues to perpetuate an image as a publishing wag, yet continuously refrains from stating her larger points, stopping at "You'll notice I haven't linked to any of the whining." Either she's afraid of offending or interested in getting out of her "arguments" when backed into a corner, presumably so that she can tell you in person, "Oh, I wasn't really talking about you!"

If Ms. Rose has a beef with me or another blog, that's fine. I'm not going to take offense. What I do take offense to is the idea of anyone presenting herself as an expert and then using their blog as some sort of reserved pulpit instead of contributing to the active discourse.

There have been many times where I've vehemently disagreed with many of the fine folks on the left, both publicly and privately. But I also respect them as adults -- meaning that I know that they are grown up enough to engage in a conversation and not take some of my more exuberant views too much to heart (or vice versa). We're all passionate about books and publishing, but that doesn't mean we all think the same or can't challenge each other.

So my question to Ms. Rose is this: Why not have the courage to say what you genuinely think so that some of us out here can actually understand your points? Or is that too much to expect from someone long in the habit of applying the hypocritical "etiquette" of Emily Post to the blogosphere?

Actually, Wouldn't People Be More Offended by Yet Another Soccer Game in a British Novel?

It looks like the levels of post-terrorist incident guilt that we've had here in the States are being reproduced in London and affecting the literary world. Chris Cleave is asking whether or not it's appropriate for him to promote a novel that includes a fictional terrorist attack at a soccer game.

As someone who forced himself to continue writing a screenplay involving terrorism the very week after 9/11 while in another country, I'd say that the answer for Cleave is very simple: grow some balls and don't let the bastards get you down. These folks aren't afraid. Why should writers be? To remain in a suspended state about whether art is appropriate or not is to let the terrorists win (or some similar crazed sentiment that isn't so half-baked and hackneyed). It's also damn spineless to boot.

Covering All Bases

God damn you all to hell, Dalkey! Quit this whole 100 books for $500 bidness! Why, for that price I could probably summon an outcall and maybe get the escort to read me some Flann O'Brien just before performing fellatio on me! Hell, maybe she could do both! (Yesterday, I felt my futon showing signs of collapse after two years of solid sleep and other activities. I turned on my side and, when I felt that nobody was there beside me, I weeped into a pile of hardcovers and rearranged these sturdy squares into the form of a woman under the blanket. Sadly, my penis collided into one of the spines, causing a large and painful bruise, and I have been applying ice to my crotch ever since. I understand if other people choose to stave off loneliness in other ways.) All this is a roundabout way of saying that you should give your money to Dalkey because what they do is fantastic and that nachos are nothing to be ashamed of.

Thought of the Morning

With all the recent talk about movie box office slumps, could it be that the declining grosses have something to do with the rising ticket price? In the past year, we've seen movie ticket prices rise from $8 to $10. Those two dollars may be small potatoes for most of us, but let's say that you're a family of four operating on an extremely tight budget. Suddenly, you're now paying eight extra dollars per week (or what was once the price of one movie ticket).

Factor in the loud movie ads that thunder during those hideous "20 Minute Countdown" presentations before the movie, working against parents who are trying to get the kids settled down, and the fact that movies have seriously declined in quality, and the problem from a family perspective becomes apparent. Moreover, considering the rise in talkers, I wonder if this has less to do with home theatre environments and more to do with walking into a theatre and hearing not some soft music playing over the speakers so that people can settle down, but getting a projected movie with advertisements and hollow trivia.

And lest any sleazy Michael Medved types come around here preaching about "indecent" films that families don't really want to see, I don't think it's the content or type of movie that matters. But families do go to movies. All types of movies. Everything from the latest Dreamworks animated epic to a serious drama.

If the movie business truly wanted to halt the gradual taper, then they might consider (1) reducing the ticket price from $10 to $8 by promising movie theatres a greater percentage of the gross, (2) reduce second-week dropoff by reducing supply (i.e., number of screens) and increasing deamnd, (3) demand a theatrical environment that is less intrusive and ad-centric and that actually relaxes people as they sit down, and (4) stop treating audiences as morons and make smart, entertaining, and story-centric movies.

If There's a Lesson Here, It's This: Sleep with the Network Administrator

Gawker has been mining this MySpace blog about a 26 year old working in the publishing industry who was fired for blogging. The only thing we have to say is that we're extremely distrubed that anyone in their mid-twenties would use "totally" on a regular basis in their writing (and to be clear on this, using this modifier before the verb rather than after), let alone hired in the publishing industry or (since things have LIKE TOTALLY turned up for bluegirl24ny), a copy editor.

We wouldn't mind being copy editors ourselves, but we haven't been hired because we TOTALLY read the Chicago Manual of Style for pleasure (preferring to revere language instead of butchering it), we live in San Francisco (about as far removed from the center of publishing as one could get), and we don't really have the sexy curves of a nubile twentysomething young lady who plops nothing but Nutrabars on a supermarket checkout scanner. So we're SOL. TOTALLY!

Until Irving Finds Something New

Michiko Kakutani: "Jack's 'melancholic logorrhea' might yield some useful therapeutic results, but in terms of storytelling, it makes for a tedious, self-indulgent and cruelly eye-glazing read."

The Cleveland Plain Dealer: "Perhaps in an attempt to depict that innocence, Irving has created a personality-free main character who spends much of the story in a curiously passive state. Do such people exist? Everywhere. They are as frustrating in real life as they are in books."

Boston Globe: "Irving takes no more notice of an amputated limb than a stray pimple. A shattered life impels no more wobble in his plot's dense tread than a crumbled cookie strewn across a graying plate, so the reader is deprived of a useful collision with a sensibility truly at odds with one's own."

New York Daily News: "[T]he book is emotionally barren, antsy in its execution, and too precious by half."

[ALSO RELATED: Jimmy Beck's "Hip Hoputani"]

Automatic Renewal -- The Back-Door Scam to Keep You Subscribed for Life

Magazines have long pulled the ignoble trick of getting their subscribers to sign on for multiple years, suggesting with repeated correspondence and feverish pitches that subscriptions are in jeopardy when there's still plenty of time to renew. And if you're a person (like me), who subscribes to about six billion periodicals, then you send in your check on impulse, only to find that you've unexpectedly signed on for another two and a half years.

(I won't name names, but I'll just say that certain magazine empires are even more egregious than this. When the magazine folds after a handful of issues, they don't even bother to refund a partial amount to their subscribers unless the subscriber calls them. But most of them forget and, of course, take their sweet time in sending out the checks.)

But Wired's treatment of its subscribers takes the cake. Apparently, Wired assumes that if a subscriber doesn't renew his subscription, then the magazine automatically assumes that the subcriber wants to renew. If there is no written notice provided by the subscriber, they sic the North Shore Agency, a major debt-collection firm, upon the reluctant renewer.

One San Francisco resident, Bob McMillan, received a variety of letters reading "Request for Payment" and "Account Status: Delinquent." (A sample letter can be found here.)

There is no doubt in my mind that Boing Boing will not mention any of this. After all, all of its authors contribute regularly to Wired. This seems hypocritical to me, considering how EFF-friendly and pro-individual they present themselves to be.

Further, Wired isn't the only one doing this. One subscriber reports that PC Magazine has been nebulous about the number of times the magazine is published and automatically renewed his subscription without his permission. Another blogger experienced a Kafkaesque moment when he was hassled on the phone by Time. (See the May 28, 2005 entry.) (And interestingly enough, the Time Inc. Magazine Group was the subject of a multi-state investigation into their subscription practices two years ago.)

Apparently, Wired is able to do this through direct-mail solicitations that contain a clause in fine print -- what is sometimes referred to as advanced consent marketing. But are these clauses clear and conspicuous enough to the magazine subscriber. Even the MPA notes that magazine subsciptions have guidelines, subject to Federal Trade Commission regulations:

The customer must take an action to demonstrate affirmative consent, such as checking a box, affixing a stamp, pushing a number on a telephone keypad, pushing a key on a computer keyboard, clicking a mouse, giving an oral response, or returning an order form. The customer should have all the material terms of the sale, disclosed in a clear and conspicuous manner, prior to taking the action demonstrating affirmative consent.

The FTC suggests that anyone who has been misled into automatic renewal to contact their state Attorney General or local consumer protection office.

But if automatic renewal has become such a major problem, then perhaps government legislation that upholds the clear and conspicuous consent of a consumer and that enacts substantial fines and punitive damages upon the magazines who mislead their readers is a better answer.

Les Claypool Was Too Busy Being Co-Opted by ILM

There are two types of people: people who get geeky and groove to Rush and people who don't. If, like me, you're one of the former, then you'll enjoy this eyepopping CGI animation of Peart playing the drums for "YYZ." (via MeFi)

Writing: It's a Bit Like Being a Pre-Op Transexual, But Without the Conflicting Hormones

Solid coverage from The Mumpsimus regarding Readercon:

Jonathan Lethem Samuel R. Delaney said that he read a western story by Theodore Sturgeon that, in the first half, was a beautiful Sturgeon story, and then in the second half was also a beautiful Sturgeon story, but a different one, and the experience of reading this story then made him want to write a western that was more unified but still beautiful, and this impulse was enough to get him thinking about something new to write [I forget what he said it was came out of this -- maybe one of the stories in his first collection]. Writing, he said, comes from an urge to write something like someone else who inspired you, or to fix something that you read by someone else.

[UPDATE: It was Delaney, not Lethem. Thanks, Kathryn!]

Hollow Words

M. John Harrison: "My gut instinct is that we ought to talk less to each other. Some people think that religion is to blame here. I think it's something prior to that. I think it's language. You can't do religion until you have language. You can't promise someone 'freedom' (Bush) or 'paradise' (bin Laden) except with words; those items are labels without a referent. And if I have to read another article by Martin Amis or Ian McEwan -- middle class wankers who have never been in harm's way their whole lives, competing with one another to produce dully clever, middle-aged Britpap about real events; or if I have to hear another soundbite in which Slimy Tony, dressed up in a casual jacket to look 'hard', licks the arse of the biggest bully in the global playground by 'pledging' himself; or if I have to hear any more investment bankers presenting themselves as wounded martyrs in the ruins of the Church of Money; or if I have to hear another Islamic spokesman misappropriate the words 'caution' and 'evidence'; I think I might fly an aeroplane into something myself. Only so I don't have to hear words any more. Do you see? I'm fucking sick of words because I've spent nearly forty years manipulating people with them for a living, and they don't come near being the thing itself. All rhetoric, including mine, is empty rhetoric. Every death is a real one."

More Harrison interviews can be found at Strange Horizons, Cyberdark, and Zone SF. His work is highly recommended.

And While You're At It, Throw In a Long "Patriotic" Speech from George Bush.

As if the 9/11 victimhood card being played by politicians to start wars based on fixed intelligence and now being used by priapic reactionaries to prop up London as a fait accompli for living in chronic fear* weren't bad enough, it seems that the Portland Tribune has seen fit to offer yet another ridiculous article about how 9/11 has made it difficult to finish novels. Here's what novelist Richard Rinaldi has to say:

"And because so much had changed, I was aware that I’d probably lost a novel, but so what? In the scheme of things it didn’t matter. My options were to just throw it away or put it another city. But my agents were leaning on me to include 9/11. Initially I was very reluctant, but I came around and said, ‘All right, I’ll give it a try.’ "

For those who haven't been watching the calendar, 9/11 was three and a half fucking years ago. In other words, most of the time it takes to finish an undergraduate degree (assuming that you're on the four year plan).

While certainly 9/11 has changed American life, I'm disheartened by the idea that a novel itself must completely change or drastically alter its content to reflect the jingoism of its time. Particularly when authors are, for the most part, paid a pittance to sweat over a novel that they've labored over for many years. The thing that matters is what the author has to say at the time he writes it. Wrapping a novel around the American flag or a sense of victimhood that will date poorly is hypocritical to the nature of art, and I would argue that it's akin to a total sellout. Do we really need a marketplace saturated with potboilers that represent today's answers to Peter Bryant's Red Alert? Further, is a literary effort truly literature if it answers to the dicta of what's hot with the public? Besides, from a marketing standpoint, this seems anathema to the nature of publishing, given that a book undergoes a two-year production process and attitudes are likely to change.

Technorati Tags: publishing, artistic integrity, Richard Rinaldi, jingoism, sellout

* -- For more on this subject, Ian McEwan has penned an essay for the Guardian on how the London bombings were inevitable.

At Least They Didn't Style It "The Monthly"

The battle between the two San Francisco alt-weeklies (one a New Times offshoot; the other indie and full of piss and vinegar) continues. But as the Guardian has reported, things have become a little sleazier. It seems that Clear Channel, known for promoting conservative radio and restricting free speech, has entered the fray. Bill Graham Presents, which owns the Warfield Theatre, is a Clear Channel subsidiary. In exchange for an exclusive advertising deal with SF Weekly, the Warfield over the next three years will be renamed (wait for it) the SF Weekly Warfield.

Pacific Bell Park was silly enough. But I think this corporate subsidizing takes the cake in the preposterous department. For one thing, "weekly" has transformed from a noun to an accidental advertising. One can only imagine future conversations among avid concertgoers:

Abbott: Hey man, you gonna check out the Killers?

Costello: Aw shit yeah! Gotta grab some tickets. Where they playing?

Abbott: The SF Weekly Warfield?

Costello: Where is it this week?

Abbott: No, the SF Weekly Warfield.

Costello: I know it's weekly, but what kind of Warfield is it going to be?

Abbott: That's the theatre's name.

Costello: Gotcha, but where's it going to be?

Abbott: In San Francisco. At the Weekly.

Costello: The Warfield?

Abbott: Yup.

Costello: And it changes every week.

Abbott: Yes. The music, not the place.

Costello: So where's the Warfield going to be?

Technorati Tags: alt-weekly, warfield, San Francisco

"Remember the Ladies, and Be More Generous and Favourable to Them Than Your Ancestors."

I've let the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch updates slip for the past month. However, I'd like to ensure RotR readers that this Sunday, the weekly test will return, including the seminal male to female book reviewer test. In the meantime, the prolific Lauren Baratz-Logsted offers a guest essay over at Booksquare about bias against female reviewers. Ms. Baratz-Logsted offers her thoughts on this issue, takes up the troubling divide between male and female authors, and points to "[a] book review created by, for and about women; a book review that has room for Joyce Carol Oates, every single one of her books as they come out, but that also has room for all genres." Until this utopian ideal happens, I direct readers to Domestic Goddess, a moderated e-journal devoted to womenwriters who pen domestic fiction, A Celebration of Women Writers, which has been attempting to collect online information on women writers for the past eleven years, Scribbling Women, and the Women Writers Project, which collects texts penned by women between 1400 and 1850.

Technorati Tags: women writers, NYTBR

Andrew Adam Newman: Paid Conduit (Read: Hack) for Blog Ideas to Gray Lady

I'm hoping it's either serendipity or perhaps a subconsious riff on the deisgn similarities manifest within book covers, but it looks like the New York Times may have ripped off Nathalie Chicha. Not only did Andrew Adam Newman use the same examples that Nathalie used, but he quoted the blog Foreword, quite literally jonesing Foreword's proprietor for examples rather than doing the legwork himself. (That would involve going to a bookstore and using a pair of eyes.)

It can be argued that a good journalist essentially collects information and assembles it. But the real question I have to ask is why Newman didn't at least consult Nathalie in the course of writing his article, particularly when she was the one who ferreted out the issue in the first place and when a link to her visual examples was featured in the comments section at Foreword. Newman could have included a simple sentence along the lines of "Nathalie Chicha, editor of the blog Galleycat, has collected several interpretive examples of what these covers might mean."

I would suggest that tracking the original source of an association is what a paid journalist should be expected to do. It's decent and ethical and it also allows you to swap information with the enthused experts. Everybody wins.

(While I am not paid to blog here, I do go out of my way to attribute the original source, if I have found an item from somebody else -- because it's just possible that for anyone interested in the topic, there may be a debate or an additional debate or possibly a fantastic rabbit hole to head down.)

Most bloggers do this. It's not entirely perfect, given that we're posting entries on the fly, but it is possible to track linkage. However, if this is a case where bloggers are doing a better job of accrediting a source than Andrew Adam Newman, the real question is why the Times didn't hire Nathalie Chicha to write the piece. She had the knowledge, she had the curiosity, and if a bit of cash and a shrewd and encouraging editor had been thrown her way, I'm convinced she would have dug up the reasoning behind the design similarities.

RIP Evan Hunter

As widely reported throughout the blogosphere (and with a particularly heartfelt tribute from Sarah), the man who signed his checks Evan Hunter and who offered books under the names Hunter and Ed McBain has passed on. He was 78.

My first introduction to Hunter's books were through a few hardcovers that somebody had given to me. This person was going to throw the tomes away and, being a selective packrat when it comes to books, I stopped him in the nick of time. Let's just say that I was dubious about the "sultry" women on the covers, who sported pistols and wore their hair in dated feathery 1980s efforts to look what some publisher perceived as "trashy." Presumably, it moved books. But the look of these ladies, to my eyes anyway, was about as morally compromised as It's a Wonderful Life's George Bailey.

But I read them anyway. And found that the text itself was far from the pinup cliches on the cover. These were cops who had sizable problems, inhabiting a gritty world that was damn near hopeless, but bristling with life as if to defy the hard breaks. What made the McBain novels work were the telling details tossed so effortlessly throughout the text. A carefully wiped counterpane or a hastily tied garbage bag wouldn't just give you a hint to the crime. It would tell you everything you needed to know about the people.

I've only read a few of his novels and that was many years ago. But now than Hunter's gone, I hope I can work in some time to check out a good deal more.

London Headlines IV

• Emails being sent in to The Sun.
• Someone has already turned the attacks into a comic. Incredible turnaround time.
• Specific details on the blasts from The Guardian.
• Flickr: The London Explosion Pool.
• At the Huffington Post, Andrei Cherny suggests that the bombings will be a test to see if the U.S. can reciprocate Tony Blair's pledge to America during 9/11 and Simon Jenkins pleas for normalcy.
• "The front of the building was covered with blood."

Technorati Tags: London Underground, terrorism, London, headlines

London Underground Headlines III

• Cameraphone video showing trapped commuters.
• Raised alerts everywhere in U.S. but San Diego. Why?
• Sterling drops to 19-month low.
• American Communist Party issues statement condemning attacks.
• Queen in shock, Buckingham Palace sealed off.
• Eyewitness account from Marketwatch.
• Mayor Ken Livingstone calls attacks "mass murder."
• David Plotz in Slate.
• Israel also holding economic conference near one of terror sites.

London Underground Headlines II

• Eyewitness reports from BBC.
• Wikipedia has an entry up on the attacks with some emergency numbers, if you need help. I understand that mobiles are down, but you can still text message.
• Numerology probably has nothing to do with this, but is there any significance to 7-7?
• The Guardian is now reporting 40 dead, 350 injured.
• London hotels are being overrun by commuters.
• Stocks take a dip on news of London bombings.
• Putin says attacks demonstrate that world is not united.
• G-8 talks postponed.
• Here in San Francisco, subways are delayed and many cops are patrolling the streets. I saw at least ten during my walk up Montgomery Street.
• CNN: "U.S. government sources told CNN that there was no specific or credible information indicating that there might be a threat to the United States."
• Already, UPI is pinning this on al-Qaeda.

News Reports

• IOC: London will still be home to 2012 Olympics.
• Blair says terrorists are behind attacks.
• Text of Scotland Yard statement.
• Flickr London
• US warns to be vigilant in subways.
• Australian narrowly escapes subway blast.
• There are apparently a total of four explosions: three on trains, one on a double-decker bus. First attack: 8:51, 7 people dead. Second attack: 8:56, 21 dead. Third explosion: 5 dead. Bus explosion: fatalities, unknown. This news report says 40.
• US to step up security on public transportation.
• Eyewitness account of paralyzed London.
• Is this a G8 protester or Al Qeada? Or someone else?
• By way of comparison, I should also point out that last year, there was a Moscow subway explosion that killed 39 people. But it didn't receive nearly this amount of coverage.
• Warren Ellis updating. (via Bookslut)

Technorati Tags: London Underground, terrorism

The Bastards

Jesus Christ. Major explosions have rocked the London Underground. Numerous fatalities. More news as time permits and I can link to it today. My heart goes out to anyone who has lost loved ones.

The Neurotic Chronicles Part Two

Part Two (6:21)

[WARNING: NSFW]

Technorati Tags: podcast, Neurotic Chronicles, serial, audio narrative, naughty neighbors

Desperate Lede of the Week

St. Petersburg Time: "Richard Dinon saw the laptop's muted glow through the rear window of the SUV parked outside his home. He walked closer and noticed a man inside."

First off, if you can't secure your own damn wireless network, you have no business bitching about people siphoning off your line. You ain't a victim. You're uninformed. Shut up and learn the basics, bitch.

Second, the menacing glow of a laptop makes for unintentionally hilarious "crime" reporting. Someone scare the bejesus out of St. Petersburg Times reporter Alex Leary so that he can write us a truly paranoid masterpiece.

Technorati Tags: dubious journalism, wireless, laptop, desperate lede

But Does He Speak French and Point at Funny Lights in the Sky?

Holy Christ. Bob Balaban can be found over at the Old Hag's.

Technorati Tags: Bob Balaban, funny lights, heckling, guest bloggers

Hopefully, They Got the Formula Right for the New Koch

Fans of poet Kenneth Koch (Koch's Coffee House output was reported in the final installment of my BEA coverage) and David (Fraud) Rakoff might be interested to know that Rakoff can be heard reading Koch's "To Jewishness" over at Nextbook.

Technorati Tags: Kenneth Koch, poetry, David Rakoff, poems

Wallace Stegner: Beating a Dead Thematic Horse?

Due to other obligations, my daytime posting will have to be brief. But I wanted to briefly touch upon the strange legacy of Wallace Stegner. Stegner is a guy that I've never been all that crazy about as a novelist. This may be framing Stegner's work too generally, but he seems to me someone who might be styled the Merchant-Ivory of literature (and I mean this in the insufferable sense of the comparison), meaning that with a Stegner novel, you're going to get some tale of a crotchety old man, endless florid details about landscape and nature, and a storyline that is about as predictable as the perrennial constant of San Francisco weather. A Stegner novel is largely about the elegant prose and the way that humans are ensnared into a natural landscape. This is not to suggest that Stegner's voice is without validity or his prose without grace. Right now, I'm reading The Specator Bird (it's a book club selection) and am struck with how the novel takes something as banal as rustification and profiles it from multiple perspectives (it is honorable from the point of view of the main couple in their seventies; it is dishonorable from the perspective of a brash Italian novelist who comes to visit about a third of the way into the book). But simultaneously, the scenes with the countess (as profiled in the diary-within-the-novel) feature some of the stiffest dialogue one can endure. And unless Stegner is trying to make an internal point about the prosaic way that the retired protagonist Joe Allston is chronicling his life, I'm truly baffled why we are permitted such redundancies. (To contrast this with proper use of redundant dialogue, I refer to the cocktail party banter that proliferates William Gaddis' The Recognitions. The banter itself is banal, but it almost serves almost as a time capsule portraying the intonations of a particular scene (affluent New York). One senses this, as one sifts through its preposterous questions and the conversational arcs that will not die. I wish I could say that I felt this same instinct in Stegner.)

To some degree, Stegner's work strikes comparisons to that of Frederic Prokosch, another novelist who was criticized for prioritizing environment over the human spirit. But while I can accept this criticism to some degree, I nevertheless find Prokosch's novels to be coruscating diamond mines that dare to portray a rather grim view of the human condition through metaphors and imagery. A Prokosch novel will frequently involve an American or Westerner (or a group of some sort, as in The Seven Who Fled) who is traveling around the world trying to find an identity, only to become acquainted with the seamy underbelly often left unmentioned and unexposed. Whereas a Stegner novel will essentially reveal what seems to me two obvious and less original truisms: (1) humans must come to terms with their past just before passing on; and (2) nature is strong and may consume humanity at a passing whim.

But it is Prokosch's subtext that speaks to me more. And yet I wonder if this is a fair criticism because what I personally perceive as ambitious may be old hat to a literary traveler. So the rhetorical question I offer is this: Is a novelist worth less if he dares to deal with thematic dead horses? Further, if there are any Stegnerites in the peanut gallery (and there are certainly many in the Bay Area), do you have some hints and/or defenses for how and why to read Stegner?

Technorati Tags: Wallace Stegner, Frederic Prokosch, Gaddis, dead horse, books, literary, themes

Clarifying the LBC Controversy

Over at the LBC blog, the minority opinion for Case Histories has been unveiled. Unsurprisingly, there's a good deal of controversy. You'd think that some of us were swing voters resigning from the Supreme Court at the last minute. But I'd like to address the main concern -- chiefly, the "solo songs of appreciation and endorsement" that are allegedly sung by Mark Sarvas, Scott Esposito and myself.

Yes, it's true that the three of us are now playing in an emopunk trio called the Banvilles (with Lizzie occasionally stepping in to provide sleazy lyrics while tying Scott up to the ride cymbal stand). You can catch us every other Tuesday at various nightclubs in Santa Monica. We even have a special performance set for August in Helsinki. But since the band itself has only been together for six months, I think it's safe to say that nobody is polished enough to embark on a solo career. The problem, beyond the fact that individually and collectively we have very specific tastes that prevent us from performing with "appreciation and endorsement," is that while we toss books at our audience, the performance highlights are hinged upon mock fistfights between Mark and I that are intended to evoke the animosity of the Gallgher brothers.

No one is injured in these staged battles, but it does get the crowd going. Because most of the audience understands that both the performance and the stage presence are intended to exude a certain informed passion for books and that everyone has different sensibilities. After the end of a performance, the trio gets together to watch a 16mm print of "Free to Be, You and Me" to get the adrenaline out of our system. Sometimes, we share small cartons of milk and give each other hugs that serve as surrogates to mantras of self-affirmation. Opinions are respected and informed dissent is reclaimed.

Really, at the end of the day, it's the music that counts. And we sincerely hope that most people comprehend that our songs cut across a wide swath of feelings.

If this doesn't clear anything up, I invite any and all readers to send clothespins (also known as C47s) to my P.O. Box, ideally with an explanatory note if you happen to remain perplexed. I will happily distribute these clothespins on to the appropriate parties so that they can affix these painful items to their nostrils. Hopefully, this will preclude any given LBC member's nose from staying in the air too long.

Technorati Tags: LBC, clothespins, amateur emopunk, Santa Monica, controversy, explanation, nostrils, Case Histories, Helsinki, Marlo Thomas

Return of the Roundup

• The gang Long Sunday talks with RotR fave China Miéville. Some of the topics discussed: genre, "voracious" narrative, the constraint of plot, and Jane Eyre. And what's even crazier is that these two interviewers are just getting started. (via Mumpsimus)
• Indisputable proof that JSF is a younger J-Franz: "I remember, as a kid, I used to read the phone book and think that in 100 years, all these people would be dead." Next thing you know, we'll be reading a lengthy New Yorker essay about how Heathcliff saved JSF at a young age.
• And speaking of the New Yorker, there's a lengthy profile of Roald Dahl this week. I'm not sure if I buy the idea that adults have always hated him, particularly when Margaret Talbot doesn't cite a lot of examples to prove her thesis. If it's controversy that Talbot is after, I would contend taht Dahl, like any original children's author, has received no more and no less the amount complaints as Shel Silverstein.
• Blogging: good or bad for authors? The Times is so obsessed with these blogging articles that I'm awaiting the inevitable "Blogging: With Clothes or Without?" article, which should successfully merge their ridiculously genteel approach to the risque with its obsession with blogs as the new voice or the new something.
• And here's yet another inconsequential Gray Lady correction: "An article on June 10 about criticism of Howard Dean, the Democratic Party chairman, over several derogatory remarks he made about Republicans paraphrased incorrectly from his comment during an appearance in San Francisco. He said that the Republican Party was 'pretty much a white, Christian party' - not that it was made up 'only' of white Christian conservatives." You see? Big difference.
• In Korea, blogs are being taken seriously by publishers.
• Bruce Campbell is big on the Dayton, Ohio bestsellers list.
• Another reason to hate Microsoft: they're spoonfeeding your kids. A new Office add-on, MS Student, offers book summaries of literature and a time management program for homework. It also features a Bill Gates-led instructional video on how to not pay attention and stare vapidly into space, associating the blackboard with the "evil of Apple."
• There's a new development in the "chick lit" debate: Christian women.
• H.L. Mencken in defense of the Enoch Pratt Library.
• Proving once again that the Book Babes are advancing culture better than any journalists of our time, we now find them rating the "top 10 fictional hunks." You know, if you're going to go down that silly route, why stop there? Why not rate the top 10 fictional penises? My vote goes for Portnoy.
• If litbloggers aren't havens for kinky librarians, then clearly the wild orgy I had with five librarians over the weekend (which involved being tied up while three of them read excerpts of David Mitchell and the other two serviced me) means I'm doing something wrong.
• And I'd be seriously remiss if I didn't mention the free download of Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen to tie in with the release of Magic for Beginners. To read more on Link, you can check out Gwenda Bond's interview with her on these pages back in September.

Technorati Tags: Roald Dahl, Kelly Link, China Mieville, JSF, New York Times, Bruce Campbell, chicklit, Mencken, Book Babes, kinky librarians, litbloggers, Howard Dean.