Rec'd from Stanford's Contracted Services Group

...and posted without comment:

Subject: Changes to the toilet paper

All,

We are now seeing yet another repercussion from the economic problems affecting our manufacturing businesses. The major paper companies have universally reduced the width of toilet paper by 1/4”. In most cases this does not affect the functioning of the dispenser however, in the models with folding end pieces there is a problem. Our current supplier is providing extensions to place beside the TP to keep it in the holder and the janitors are adding them now.

We are also looking into the new, smaller sustainable companies coming on the market to see if they have products which have the old dimensions and are green.

Please bear with us through this and let us know if your building is experiencing problems.

The Bigfoot Discovery Project

Last Sunday Trev and I visited the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is an exceedingly interesting place and well worth a visit. I was a little overwhelmed. The most exciting thing to me was a first-edition copy of Roger Patterson's Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? That's the academic in me: I was so taken with the sight of book that I ignored the casts from the Patterson bigfoot site on the shelf just below. No bigfoot hunter I! Anyway, it's impossible to overstate the fascination that the Patterson-Gimlin film and the story of its making have had for me over the years. Robert Michael Pyle's wonderful book Where Bigfoot Walks has a good overview, and this Wikipedia article goes into more loving depth--including the tidbit that Bob Gimlin, who will be in Felton for the BDM's festival next Saturday, acknowledges that the film might have been a hoax, though he was not in on it. Anyway, read the whole article and see if you don't get obsessed.

While we're on the subject of me being a dweeb who misses the bigfoot for the book: I see on the BDM site that they have mitigated the singular / plural problem I've always wondered about. Supposedly there are many Bigfoots, or bigfeet, or whatever, but "Bigfoot" suggests that, like the Highlander, there can be only one. However the BDM uses a lower case "b," and seems to employ "bigfoot" as a collective noun that's the same as its singular form, like "deer." Problem solved; and in the process the monster is converted to a more-or-less regular forest critter. (I suspect certain style guides have already instituted this preference. When I published my article in Tin House, I noted in my bio that I was writing a novel about Bigfoot--and the editor, lc'd the "b." At the time I thought it was a mistake, but it turns out they were ahead of me.)

Remembering anthrax

Glenn Greenwald is right, as always. Even as our "President" and the candidate to succeed him relentlessly flog 9-11 to this day, they never mention the anthrax attacks that came in the immediate aftermath. As Greenwald says, the anthrax mailings ratcheted up the fear level tremendously. The notes that went with the mailings, as well as plenty of news analysis, led us to believe Middle Eastern terrorists were everywhere in the US, just beginning to reach into their limitless bag of tricks. It now appears the attacks were carried out by a deranged researcher working for the US government--a fact that the administration was too inept, or too uninterested, to discover.

UPDATE: Greenwald, along with today's NYT, points out that there still is no solid evidence against the scientist in question. We may be in for another thrilling ride on the government / media bullshit roller coaster.

The Stone Gods

I'm now reading Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods and am consumed with jealousy. Just when I feel like I'm getting reasonably good at writing, just as I'm thinking "I can do that" when reading published novels of some repute, this comes along.

Must remember: Do not envy. STEAL.

Reading Gibson

I'm about 3/4 done with William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I'm finding it a lot easier to follow than Neuromancer, which I read about a month ago--although much of that reading took place on bumpy flights to and from Cleveland, so my concentration was not at its best. Anyway. Pattern Recognition is a lot like DeLillo in its concerns with corporate imagery (loving and hating logos), found art, and terrorism. But Pattern Recognition stays closer to the ground; it proceeds narratively rather than lyrically, though it is almost lyrical.* Gibson makes lots of interesting connections and creates a sort of shimmer around various terms and events. I like that he underplays the plot points connected with September 11, making this book one of the more successful treatments of that subject. However, it's also clear that his main character is little more than a mouthpiece for Gibson's observations about how the world works. Overall the novel appears to be an essay in the form of a narrative. Which is not a bad thing. I'd rather read this than a book of cult crit just about any day.

*Stuart Dybek does a wonderful job explaining the difference between these terms in the latest Missouri Review.

UPDATE: Having finished the book now, I can say that in the last hundred pages or so, Gibson outshimmers and out-DeLillos DeLillo. While seeming to leave me somewhat cold, the book has stayed with me in a way that more immediately emotional stories have not--which is also true of DeLillo's work, especially Mao II. So here's Gibson:

And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has.

Not afraid

I've said this before, but--as Todd Gitlin reminds us--we need political leaders who say to the world, "we are not afraid." FDR did it over 60 years ago. True leaders would also tell us the same thing. Fear is out. It's your grandfather's Oldsmobile (except your grandfather was probably never as afraid as Americans are today).

Ever since the Reagan era, Republicans have been equating fear with patriotism. Not just fear of foreign enemies, although that is the target of FDR's speech, and the entirety of the Bush/McCain campaign strategy. Good Americans are also supposed to fear gays, uppity and / or single and / or child-free women, people with dark skin and unfamiliar names, people who think, people who read, artists, urbanites, non-Christians, non-hunters, non-American-Idol-watchers, people who walk to work, unusually calm people...I know I've left out over half the categories. From fear comes helplessness, and, yes, "clinging" to old habits, old ideas. As Bob Herbert said a few days ago, since when have we become such a can't do society?

There are plenty of reasons to be worried, even frightened--the biggest reason being politicians who exploit fear. It means they have no other justification for their positions, and that means all their actions are aimed at consolidating power. Fear is the tool of dictatorship, not democracy.

From the downfall of Gnosticism, through the pickle, to Dr. Horrible

In The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels explains one reason we don't have passels of Gnostics roaming the prairies anymore. In the early days, the fathers of what we now know as Christianity decided Gnosticism (which had a lot in common with early Buddhism) was too exclusive. It required years of study; it had a sort of expertise ladder which adherents had to climb. It was not a "real world" religion but a monastic one--you couldn't have a job and a family and be a true Gnostic. The "fathers" wanted a religion that anyone could participate in, and--this part's crucial--that anyone could understand. So they boiled the doctrine down to a few basic tenets, which, once swallowed, rendered one a Christian. No study, no robes, even no reading, really.

We now reap the, um, benefits of this decision's extraordinary success. Being a Christian's so easy, anyone, and I mean anyone, can do it. Which is both this guy's message, and the reason for his absolute lack of self awareness in delivering it. It's important to watch the video all the way to the end, where events turn spectacularly dark. (Could this be a hoax? Could it?)

Dr. Horrible also got dark at the end, which surprised me at first, but which, on reflection, seems appropriate. At least that ending was intentional. Maybe it's just me, but Dr. Horrible and the pickle video somehow share a core narrative.

Thanks to Zach for the tip.

Everyone must watch

Dr. Horrible.

Two small proposals for reconfiguring thought

Here are two words I am going to try not to use anymore:

1. Pig (or ape or shark or any other animal name) as a derogatory term. Pigs are fine animals. But even if they weren't, who are we to judge them? Better to call a poorly-behaved pig a human; except there's really no such thing as poor behavior in pigs, just behavior that is less convenient for those trying to imprison and kill them. And that is, actually, good behavior.

2. Nonbeliever or unbeliever for atheist. Even "atheist" has a negative prefix, which gives the impression of absence and nihilism. This built-in absence makes it easy for theists to claim "they have no morals, no conscience, nothing to aspire to"--when in fact we believe in a great many things, including reason, imagination, progress, beauty, wonder, brilliance, mystery, and even the sacred. The fact that there are no good alternatives for "atheist" shows the extent to which theists have controlled our language. I do not, however, find much power in the term "Bright" as proposed by Dawkins and Dennett. (It does have the advantage of being every bit as smug as "believer" or "Godly" is for others.) I'm a believer, but not in God.

Sociological observations based on forced viewing of Fox News and Maury Povich simultaneously

I begin by saying I'm very grateful to the Arrillaga family for providing Stanford University with a state-of-the-art* workout facility. I take advantage of it several times a week, and I can say it has contributed markedly to my physical and mental health. However a pestilence has recently invaded this pristine territory. I don't mean the flesh-eating bacteria that supposedly thrive on the handles of elliptical trainers. I mean television. Some misguided soul has hung six viewing screens (in two rows of three) in the cardio area, and try as I might, I cannot ignore them. And the shows are helpfully closed-captioned, so I won't miss any of the stupidities uttered by the braindead megaphone.**

More often than not, I have found myself with the choice of the following emanations: ESPN, probably the least offensive of the three, and admittedly wonderful when they show tennis; Fox News; and--no, he's not dead--Maury Povich. Today I had the opportunity to ask myself: which is worse, Fox or Maury? Fox needs no introduction. Maury, for those who don't remember, hosts a talk show in which people, usually couples, usually African-American, are lured on to participate in an emotional cage-fight. Secrets are revealed (the baby isn't his! She slept with a woman! He's a peeping Tom!), leading to screaming, crying, chasing around the studio, and, rarely, a tentative reconciliation which belies the fact that these two have just ruined each others' lives. Maury appears to function as a kind of Satanic therapist. However, I was not really able to come up with an answer about which show I would choose to watch while being tortured.

I would have given the nod, very reluctantly, to Fox, except for something I observed about the commercials on both shows. I was watching at about 2:30 in the afternoon, and Fox showed a preponderance of ads for what you might call less-than-vital household products. There's a thing called a Green Bag that keeps your fruits and vegetables fresh for days, nay weeks, longer. Carrots kept naked in the crisper are bendy and brown, while Green Bagged carrots crack, like so! There's a similar, more industrial looking device for meat, thanks to which you can now buy pork chops in bulk and save money! (Vegetarian rant postponed; just go give PETA some bucks.) I also saw at least two ads for a plastic globe, available in several colors, that you fill with water and stick in your houseplants, to avoid the agony of pouring water directly into the plants.

I conclude that at this time of day, Fox assumes its audience to be middle-aged housewives with no aspirations besides tinkering around the edges of their domestic systems. Whereas during Maury, which certainly offered its share of ads for dumb stuff, I also saw several commercials for Heald Technical College and possibly another school as well. These ads featured women of all races earning degrees and getting jobs. Women who watch Maury, it seems, are home, but don't want to be there--at least not for long. Judging from what we see on Maury, they're wise to get out as soon as possible. But on Fox, we learn that everything outside is scary: rapist camp counselors! Terrorists! Black people running for president! Better to stay inside and tend to your carrots and plastic balls.

*minus lockers or showers, a widely discussed and mystifying omission
**trademark George Saunders

Not taking notes

I'm trying an experiment with my novel, which is to stop taking notes about it. In Novel Voices Ann Patchett says she doesn't take them, because she's afraid of getting too attached to them and never actually writing. I think I see what she means. Until recently I've been an obsessive note-taker, often scribbling frantically in my notebook as I ride the train to work. **KYLE IS NOT A VETERAN. **DOES HE SPEAK SPANISH??** The next morning I start revising with these notes in mind, discovering, more often than not, that it still doesn't work and what I need is to write through the problem, rather than think through it. As a mostly former academic, this is tough for me to accept. I'm afraid of forgetting. But as I think Patchett implies, if it's really important, you'll remember it, and the rest of the stuff is probably better forgotten because it's all interim thinking. It's true that I still type little two-sentence notes at the end of paragraphs sometimes, but I restrain myself from expanding on them or going back and turning the whole manuscript upside down as a result of these half-baked thoughts.

Patience with uncertainty. That's the key.

On having a reborn robot servant

So last week we thought the Roomba died. We heard it whirring away in the other room, when we heard its musical "help me" beep. Trev went in to find it spinning in a circle. He restarted it, same thing. The female voice, which may or may not be Roomba's own, eventually said "Please inspect and clean Roomba's wheels." One wheel was pretty much stuck, but we couldn't find anything wedged in there or any other reason for the problem. On the third restart, we watched in misery as the thing spun, stopped, tried to shake its wheel loose, and kept spinning. Finally we decided we had to send it back, and Trev filled out an online form for that purpose. As he carried the disabled bot into the other room, both cats gave off a distinct "our work here is done" vibe. Their tails went up and they swanned around the living room. It was hard to tell what, exactly, they had done; but if wishing could make it so, they're responsible.

Anyway, a few days later, Trev got an email advising him to flip the Roomba over and bash the wheel repeatedly with the heel of his hand (I paraphrase). He did, and after a few tries--it worked! The Roomba shot across the carpet and cleaned steadily for longer than it ever had before. It didn't even want its brushes cleaned.

A matter of language?

Trev and I went to the monthly all-day sitting with the Everyday Zen sangha. I'll perhaps comment later on how these sittings, instead of making me more mindful the next day, make me incredibly foggy. I suppose the word for that is "tired," but it's more like my brain is simply not engaging. Anyway, I'm better today.

Norman Fischer's dharma talk was on atheists, especially Daniel Dennett, and their quarrels with "believers." Norman said the argument seemed to him "beside the point"--that we all have religious inklings (Dennett says we are naturally selected to be religious), and the issue really is the language we use to express those feelings. So "God" for one person might be, perhaps, "wonder" for another person. However, Norman also suggested that the language, or concept, of an authoritarian guy on a throne, manipulating us from above and outside, is not a helpful one. We all have to avoid "clamping down" on our concepts, which is what makes us intolerant and judgmental and destructive.

I tended to agree. When people ask me if I believe in God, I always want to ask, "What do you mean?" Guy on a throne? No way. But do I have a sense of the sacred, of something larger? A sense of wonder and awe at the universe? A sense of responsibility toward all creation, even without a creator? Yes. I'd like to think I feel responsible because I care about my fellow beings, not because I'm afraid of punishment or because I want a reward. I think that's called being an adult, and I would like to be one some day.

I'm very glad Dennett and Dawkins and PZ Meyers and all the other atheists are kicking up a ruckus, and by the above definition I'm one of them. On the other hand, I'm not always sure what they're arguing against. If it's the guy on the throne, though, count me in. That guy, even if he exists, should be resisted unto death, and beyond.*

*Update: Here's a helpful post from Tristero, which tells me I need to read my New Atheists more thoroughly. Yes, they're fighting Throne Man, and therefore I cast my lot with them.
But the language here really *is* a problem. "Atheist" seems to me to cover too much ground. As does "God," possibly.

This is good.

Good, good, good, good, good.
How did I not know about this until now?
The Slacktivist reads Left Behind so we don't have to. And sends LaHaye and Jenkins to writing school.

Humanities PR

Here's a pretty cool thing, wherein the humanities make a case for themselves. It was just launched by my colleagues at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Cosmic realism

Via Maud Newton, a very interesting essay by Francesca Mari on the genre called "cosmic realism." Marilynne Robinson's a practitioner, credited with coining the phrase. Antecedents include Virginia Woolf, especially in the "Time Passes" section of To the Lighthouse, also Proust, Thoreau, and Emerson. In Mari's short definition, cosmic realism "encompasses a range of description-driven novels steeped in transience and obsessed with iterations of ephemerality."

On having a robot servant

Trev and I have always avoided vacuuming because of allergies and because of the noise, which makes any concurrent activity impossible in our small condo. Also it scares the cats; it takes hours for them to recover from the trauma. But of course it's the cats who make the need to vacuum all the more urgent. With two white cats, it takes approximately two days for a clean room to become coated in what looks like an early morning frost. Yet the more hair there is, the less we want to vacuum, and the terrible spiral continues.

So we recently bought a Roomba. I hate buying anything (except Moo Shoes and food), and as I've said, I hate the very idea that a product could "change my life." But with the Roomba, resistance is futile. It really makes a difference. Now we can actually be doing other things while vacuuming--frantically doing dishes and cleaning the bathroom, for instance, in anticipation of company, or simply talking (about the Roomba). Best of all, it does not scare the cats. They watch it warily when it first starts up and back away if it charges at them (which it does once in a while, randomly of course); but then they go about their business. No recovery time necessary.

The troubling thing about [the] Roomba (it refers to itself as "Roomba" with no definite article) is its servant status. When we're done with it we take it to the spare room, put it on its charger, and close the door. It feels very Upstairs Downstairs. Maybe if the Roomba weren't so cheerful, with its blooping noises and pleasant requests for assistance ("Please remove and clean Roomba's brushes!") it would be easier. I could do with a little class resentment, a touch of sullenness. Better yet, I'd like it to speak in the voice of George W. Bush. That way I could make it work all day long and not feel the least bit guilty. As it stands I still feel, after a half hour or so, that it really deserves a break.

Hats off to Hillary

I ended up getting fed up with Clinton's campaign and wholeheartedly rooting for Obama. (I regret not being able to vote in the Dem primary--in protest over the first gulf war I registered as a Green, and have not yet switched back. Some small part of me still does not want to be a Democrat, and this part starts to hurt whenever the Democratic congress rolls over yet again, exactly like trained dogs, to yet another Bush. But Ralph Nader? Feh.) As I've said before, I think Clinton is a prisoner of the compromises she's been forced to make. In a way it's tragic, except--hey, she nearly got nominated; she's a senator; she still has a distinguished career ahead of and behind her. In fact, now that the presidential pressure's off, she may be able to extricate herself from some of those compromises (maybe even from Bill--now that, I would dance about). She could really shine.

I don't think misogyny alone doomed her campaign, but I do agree with this, on the Hillary nutcracker. Whoever bought or sold this deserves to have it used on him.

Ubuntu

We went here for my birthday dinner. It was pretty amazing. I am continually struck by how much I have to learn about vegetarian cooking--how much we all have to learn. What happens when you really, really take meat out of the center of the plate? When you stop trying to recreate meat dishes using vegetables? The entire structure of food, not to mention entire meals, changes.

Novel update

For those of you keeping score, I have now re-started my novel for the fifteenth time. (OK, that's actually a guess, based on all the fragments of chapters in my "novel" file dating back to 2004. Many of these are from the point of view of the former main character, who currently does not exist.) As Andrew Altschul said in the class I took with him last year, a story or novel that keeps grinding to a halt usually has a problem with point of view. For me, the solution seems to be the omniscient narrator who is conceived as a character. He or she may or may not play a minor part in the story itself, but the primary role is as a kind of liaison to the reader. It's the best of both worlds--I can create a distinctive, untrustworthy and loopy voice, which I can't seem to do without in my fiction. However, I can also, by fiat, see into the thoughts of any character at will, and make sweeping pronouncements about the world, a la George Eliot. I can even get away with bad writing! (It's not me, it's my narrator!) So far, I'm not seeing a downside.

New word

First heard at the "Legal Frontiers in Digital Media" conference here at Stanford:

Nugatory.

It does not mean "of or pertaining to a Three Musketeers bar"--but "of little value." I suppose we did need a single word for that concept. So the word itself probably isn't, you know, nugatory. Time will tell.

At the conference I realized that I've never been in a room with 150 lawyers before. I'm rarely in a room with more than one lawyer; in the rooms I'm in, there are almost always zero. I'm pretty sure my colleague and I were the only ones cracking up and passing notes about "nugatory."

Cat, by robot

Here is a picture of Bella, taken by Trev's new SRV-1 Blackfin Robot, the Open Source Wireless Mobile Robot with Video for Telepresence, Autonomous and Swarm Operation.

As you can see, Bella is somewhere in the middle on the "impressed with robot" scale.

That's me in the background, not working on my novel.

Alaska Quarterly Review

Good news! I've had a story accepted by the Alaska Quarterly Review. It will be out sometime in the next year.

On Speed Racer

As a child, I did not grasp the concept of camp. I remember being extremely annoyed at the styrofoam rocks of the original Star Trek, to the point where it ruined any interest I might have had in the storyline.

The same went for Speed Racer. The crappy, repetitive animation and the un-synched soundtrack caused me to wave my little fist in the air and shout epithets. But more than any of these aesthetic failures, I hated Spritle. I hated his concentric-circle cap, especially the fact that it matched the chimp's, which I found inexplicable and somehow gruesome. I hated his stupidity (half the plots, as I recall, revolved around Spritle and the chimp getting into some kind of trouble from which Speed had to rescue them--like he had nothing better to do!). And--above everything--I hated Spritle's voice. God, how it grated. To this day I curl up like a potato bug when I even think of that voice.

Interestingly, I watched a lot of Speed Racer. It never occurred to me to Turn It Off if I didn't like it. It must have been between two shows that I did like, or something. But I'm afraid this says something about me, and possibly about the well-trained young TV viewer.

Journaling

Cynthia Gregory, winner of Glimmer Train's most recent Very Short Fiction contest, advises writers to keep a journal.

Your journal isn't about you. No offense, and as important as you are, your journal is not an extension of you. Rather, it is like a Polaroid camera that you aim at everything around you and with which you snap a photo. This café. That conversation. That wide, beautiful coastline with clouds hovering over the water like cotton candy and the smell of the surf pushing spring toward the dessert on a mission from God.

For the life of me I have never been able to grasp this concept of a journal. Exhibit A: this blog, which is about me, me, me. If I make a written snapshot of "this cafe," it's "this cafe" with the back of my head in the foreground. You can see me looking.

I suppose this has something to do with my resistance to "show, don't tell"--the dictum to do every part of the story in scene and not summary. In telling, I, the author, can be more present, as in "look at me telling you this." Whereas in scene, one has to efface oneself, become a window through which the reader looks. Bleh.

The best example of the Polaroid style of journal that I can think of is Yuri Olesha's No Day Without A Line. It really is a book of snapshots, written with surreal visual clarity.

The only film I have watched during which I was genuinely worried about having a seizure:

William Gibson: No Map For These Territories.

The film is an extended author interview, and Gibson has interesting things to say. As IMDB puts it, however, "you see Gibson talking in the backseat of a car, often with a cigarette in his hand, while the world goes by. Interviews are spliced with quickly edited footage of modern day life and the effect, for the most part, works." Works, if by "working" you mean inducing seizures, an endeavor which I suppose could be valuable in some military or scientific context. Plus, dissonant background music by The Edge makes it impossible simply to shut one's eyes and listen.

This movie literally is out to get you.

The responsibility of the first-person narrator

Thrashing on in my struggle with point of view in my fiction, I'm reminded by my friend Kate that the first-person narrator's responsibility is, first and foremost, to the reader. In my first-person stories my narrators spend a lot of time in self-reflection and commentary. That's because I gravitate toward hyper-self-conscious narrators, and also because I'm flummoxed by "narrative occasion"--why is the narrator telling the story now?--which leads to questions of what he or she knows, and when, which leads to more reflection. Not unexpectedly, the actual story tends to suffer under these conditions. As important as it is for *me* to understand what the narrator knew and when she knew it, it's more important to hold the reader's attention. So that's the narrator's real job: tell the story as well as it can be told. Displaying my awareness of narrative occasion and its pitfalls is for me, not the reader.

Two ways of looking at Yosemite

That's my photo from Inspiration Point. Pretty and all, but most notable for our purposes today is the depopulation. I stood on a stone wall to get over the heads of the people and cars in front of me, so as to produce an image such as John Muir, and the many who came before him, could have seen.

Now Trev's:

He says this is the "National Geographic" style of photo, showing what the place is really like--people interacting with the landscape. (Mind you this was taken in spring, which explains both the waterfall and the relatively sparse crowd--which was still too big for me.)

I tend to think that when people (non-native at least) and cars show up in nature photographs, they somehow invalidate the whole picture. But why would I think that? Are these people not part of this place? Are they not using (by driving through, photographing, walking on) the land? Especially in Yosemite, how are tourists anything but a central feature of the landscape?

On blocking

No, not writer's block, but writer's blocking. I learned this from Eric Puchner last fall and it's helping me in my never-ending quest to slow down and unpack. (Ann Patchett says that a teacher once compared her work to "concentrated orange juice" which needed water. I have the same problem; it's nice to have something in common with Ann Patchett!) Anyway, blocking is basically what they do in the theater. Where are the characters? Who's standing where and in what relationship? How far is the floor lamp from the vampire's coffin? I'm now beginning to see why some writers physically sketch out scenes, even storyboard them. Of course one doesn't want to go overboard: "She stood in the middle of the front lawn ten feet away from him (with her on the lower left end of a diagonal line and him on the upper right). Her gaze was aimed perpendicularly to his, so that in order to speak to him, as she will as soon as I'm done explaining the blocking, she had to turn her head approximately 45 degrees. Because she was angry at him she chose not to face him directly, and she turned her head without moving her feet, which was awkward but she had a stiff shoulder from sleeping on it the wrong way the previous evening (also due to anger), and besides the grass was slippery from the dew (it was morning) and she was afraid of losing her footing." Yet the writer does have to have such a clear physical picture of every scene, and how the characters move through it, in her own mind.

Lately I've been looking at houses on distant hills (because I'm writing about someone who spies on people in such a house through a telescope) and trying to figure out how far away they actually are and how high up. The question adds certain dimensions, as it were, to the story--I begin to wonder how long it would take the spy-ee (once he's discovered the spy-er) to drive down the hill in a rage and bang on the spy-er's door. All this does help add texture and create a sense of being there in the story. So I hope, anyway. I've always tended to leave my characters suspended in the air, not being especially interested in setting on the technical level. But now I'm beginning to see how setting, and specifically blocking, have their own ways of driving the story.

Lightness

Amy Hornstein's Six Sentences have been posted.

Poem in your pocket day - April 17

In celebration of National Poetry Month, April 17 is Poem in Your Pocket Day. Carry a poem in your pocket; produce and read it unbidden for friends and strangers!

h/t Natalie.

Update: Speaking of Natalie, here's her column on the subject. She's got it covered.

Mining your territory

People own the territory that they are born into. That's the richest ore writers can mine.... Get in touch with where you're from. No matter where you're from, even if it's a subdivision in Kenner, Louisiana, that is your literary heritage. If you look at it closely enough, you'll see that it is as exotic and unique as some Central or South American culture in the mountains.

I can't understand these people who say that anybody can write about anything and any time if they do enough research because they cut themselves off from the speech of those they grew up with.

--Tim Gautreaux, Novel Voices, ed. Lavasseur and Rabalais

Gautreaux writes about southern Louisiana and its "priests, drunks, train conductors, unemployed workers, and card-playing grandmothers with sharp-tongued wit." All very well. But what if one's heritage is rust-belt suburbia? (OK, it does sound kind of exotic when I put it that way.)

Thoughts on persistence

Willpower is a muscle, according to this from the NYT. You exercise it; it gets stronger.

Willpower and persistence are relatively new concepts for me. Most of my life I've assumed that if something doesn't go well the first or second time I try it, that means it's not going to happen. The idea of regrouping, coming back, regrouping, coming back, etc., still seems like a revelation. These days I'm surrounded by highly successful, highly persistent people. Some are almost like machines, moving inexorably forward--they roll into a closed door, bounce off it, and roll at it again until they push it open.

I also learned about persistence from Norman Fischer's book Taking Our Places (and thanks to Sara for this recommendation). Zen meditation is the practice of persistence, especially because, in my experience anyway, it is not immediately rewarding. One sits there and wonders why one is bothering. Enlightenment does not come; relaxation, even, does not always come. Yet one sits down and does it, at the appointed time, again and again. (I say "one" because at the moment *I* am not doing it persistently, or even very often. OK, but I did get the concept; really I did. And I am persisting in my writing, despite hitting a dismaying patch that I won't go into just now.)

A big part of persistence is recognizing the value of what you're persisting at, even--or especially--if no one else does.

Stubbornness and passive or active aggression are not persistence. It can't be done in anger or revenge, or to prove a point. It should not be destructive. This is why I'm having a hard time admiring what Hillary Clinton calls her "resilience." Yes, she's a survivor, but that seems to be all she is and all she can ever be at this point. It's not her fault, entirely--she's had to make compromises and those compromises have trapped her. But surviving is not governing, and I'm afraid it's not even a good example in this case.

Should we worry about the LHC?

I'm in high anxiety mode these days, so when I read about the lawsuit against the Large Hadron Collider, I added it, Outlook-style, to my task list of worries. Seems a couple of scientists (at least one of whom, according to the Bad Astronomer, is way out there) think the collider could create a black hole or else a kind of cascade of "strangelets." Both of these things would be bad, although the word strangelet is quite good. Anyway, the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, says not to worry. I'm glad, because I really want to like the LHC. I'm a particle-smashing groupie, have been for years. Besides, now I'm consumed with cell phones (and wireless) causing brain tumors.

Walden revisited

Just before I quit academia in 1995 (to return eight years later in the odd hybrid form I now occupy), I had a paper accepted at American Quarterly. The paper was my dissertation chapter on Walden. AQ wanted some revisions, which I never did because I had decided to sever all ties to my old life. It was an interesting time, when something that seemed supremely important one minute--publication in a major journal--meant nothing to me the next.

For a long time I couldn't bear even to look at Walden, because it was so closely woven into all my academic work. I couldn't read it outside of that tense, grinding mindset--must find more ways Thoreau is a masochistic fascist! While I think the Thoreau piece is my best work from that era, I'm glad it wasn't published. I can see in my marginal notes on the pages how aggressive I was as a reader. My goal seemed to be to prove myself superior to this great, influential, and brave (yes, I know the cabin was in Emerson's backyard) thinker. So lately I've been rereading Walden as more of an aspiring kindred spirit.

I doubt I'll do any more academic writing beyond the occasional half-baked thought on this blog. But if I did, I'd like to write on this bit from the first section of Walden, "Economy":

I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails,and removed it to the pond-side by small cartloads, spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley, an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy.

So much going on here. Thoreau has bought and dismantled another Irishman's cabin to reuse the boards for his own. We've just seen that Irish family walking off into the unknown, all except their cat, who "took to the woods," became wild, but then died (Thoreau has heard) in a trap set for woodchucks. I'd like to say more about these vanishing scenes at some point. I'm sure this very scene has inspired similar ones in my fiction.

But what I'm most interested in here is the way Thoreau leaves the stage and lets someone else, young Patrick, and Seeley also, take over the narrative. It's like the line in To the Lighthouse, the boiling-down of Mr. Ramsay's philosophy: "think of a kitchen table when you're not there." It's a moment when the first person narrator, a stand-in for all of us, who are always the first-person narrators of our stories, sees himself as peripheral. Life goes on in our absence, our plans and our cabins quietly dismantled. Thoreau returns to claim Seeley's thefts as lending grandeur to his little project; he's joking and not joking at the same time. Still, that doesn't change the fact that he has left both his boards and his story in others' hands, "in the intervals of the carting."

Another ending, another beginning

I just turned in my grades for winter quarter and am feeling blue. The students did fine (as usual) and reading their final papers was painful only because I realized this was the end--the last official exchange we would be having. Almost everyone's gone for spring break, the campus silent except for a few echoing footsteps on the arcade. The weather is beautiful, so it feels like it should be summer, but it's not; in a week everyone will be back, and I'll be back to my old afternoon work schedule. I'll have more time to write, which is nice, which is the point, in fact... But I'm really going to miss teaching. I haven't applied to teach again next year, which will be a first in five years. During the eight years before that, when I wasn't teaching--when I had what I thought were "real jobs" in industry, which I wouldn't take now if you paid me a whole lot--I used to dream about it. Usually I was teaching a huge class in some high-ranking but chaotic community college (De Anza, I think), but sometimes I did dream about Stanford itself (where I had taught briefly in 1994). I always woke up feeling like I'd been to an exotic place, or like I'd done something wild and exhilarating, like ski-jumping. Now I've been able to do that for real at Stanford, and it's been marvelous.

Obama's speech on race

It's a fairly sad commentary that Obama had to make the speech in the first place. As one letter to the NYT said this morning, a black man shouldn't have to reassure whites that responsibility for 300 years of oppression won't be laid at our feet. That said, I have a question: can anyone picture either Hillary Clinton or John McCain making a similar speech about, say, gender, or religion, or race, for that matter? Can anyone imagine them not equivocating, pandering, playing small ball, and blaming others for the conflict--even if that blame was well founded? Would they ever attempt to address our better instincts, long dormant during the Bush years; would they even know where to find them?

How the right controls language

This is a question to which I've never received a great answer. Why does the right have such a complete lock on our national discourse? If the left is the party of writers, artists, intellectuals, shouldn't we be the best word-slingers? The New York Times Magazine attempted to address the first part of that question again this weekend, with an article by Farhad Manjoo. (Digby's comments on the article are here.) Basically the right repeats every slur relentlessly, until it becomes something everyone thinks they know. People don't even know where the slander comes from, or whether or how often it's been debunked. Because they've heard it so many times--even from the same person--it seems familiar, and familiar (according to psychological testing) = true.

I asked Hayden White a similar question a few years ago, and he said the problem is that the right has mastered "normative" language--in other words, they speak to our deep, collective desire to be "normal." The left may not even know this language, because (as artists, intellectuals, etc.) we are outsiders. We spend our lives extolling and defending the different. I suppose by making something sound familiar by repetition, one also makes it normal--something everybody who is normal knows. And how do we cut through this falsely comforting haze of familiarity? The familiar, after all, is the primal urge of conservatism.

I think one step would be to associate that need for familiarity with fear. The right manipulate fear, but we should constantly call them on it. Not just by saying they're fear-mongers, but that they are afraid themselves. They are scared little boys and girls quivering in their caves, while the rest of us want to go out and become better. The American self-improvement imperative could help here.

Tips for SF and other short stories

From io9, "8 Unstoppable Rules for Writing Killer Short Stories." These are rules for SF, though the article suggests that SF writers pretend they're writing for the New Yorker. It's interesting to compare these rules to the ones we learn in Creative Writing (literary) workshops. Should world-building be "quick and merciless"? Should characters be "a little fucked up," but mostly positive? Is the character-based / plot-based dichotomy a hoax?

As for io9 itself, I quite like it. They post constantly and I don't always have the patience to read the actual articles, but they have awesome pictures and the tags (Triviagasm, Steal This Pitch, Retro Futurism, Tanks...) are entertaining in and of themselves.

Plum tree redux

For those of us worried about climate change, it's somewhat reassuring that the plum tree across from our balcony is in bloom as it was at exactly this time last year. At this point the blooms are past peak, and most of the petals are floating in the building's communal pool. Unlike last year I am not resisting spring. I need it. I want it. Although spring in California, for the transplanted Midwesterner, always brings guilt. My hometown of Rocky River, Ohio, is under twenty inches of snow. Meanwhile I look through my office window at a cobalt sky, and will walk to the train station this evening with my jacket tied around my waist. In Ohio you really feel like you've accomplished something when those first crocuses push through the crust of blackened snow; here, the plum tree has been bare for a mere six weeks. On top of that, we're back to daylight savings time, which must be bizarre for Ohioans staring through the bright evening at another Arctic clipper. Anyway, I feel I should be suffering more. Fortunately, I have hay fever from all these blooming trees.

Werner Herzog at Stanford

Last week Trev and I fulfilled a dream we did not know we had, which was seeing Werner Herzog live in conversation. We've watched many of his films on DVD and listened to the commentary, so we already knew his basic philosophy--"Nature is hostile"--and the more famous stories about trying to film Klaus Kinski and drag a ship over a hill in the jungle at the same time. So what did we learn? First, that Grizzly Man is possibly the most brilliant film ever made. Seeing it on the big screen (before the interview with Herzog) was stunning. I kept seeing parallels with To the Lighthouse, which I happened to be teaching last week. I doubt Herzog, the most macho of filmmakers, would appreciate the comparison; I'm also not sure my students bought it. But I tried to make a connection between the way Herzog "brackets" the audio recording of bears mauling Timothy Treadwell and Amy Huguenard to death with the bracketed sentence describing Mrs. Ramsay's death in TTL. "[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]" In the film, we find out that Treadwell's camera was rolling, but the lens cap was on, when he was killed. Herzog refuses to play the recording for us, the audience. Instead, he listens to it through headphones, and we see him from behind while Jewel Palovak, Treadwell's friend, watches Herzog's face and reacts. Here's a still, after he has just asked her to turn off the tape. In both cases there's a kind of privacy for the dying, and death becomes present through stumbling or wincing by the living. (For more about grief and the sense of a "phantom limb," see "Doubtful Arms and Phantom Limbs: Literary Portrayals of Embodied Grief" by James Krasner (PMLA 119:2, March 2004).)

What else did we learn? We did not love Rescue Dawn, the film screened on Tuesday night. Despite Herzog's protestations, it really did seem like a straight-on adventure (he hates the word "adventure") with no attention to moral complexities or the curious meanderings of his other films. It seems like he was too close to the subject, Dieter Dengler, and wanted to memorialize him as an ingenious hero; Dengler was dying while the film was being made. Also the actors playing prisoners, especially Jeremy Davies, lost way, way too much weight for their roles. Really, I am willing to suspend disbelief. Put some dirt on the guys' faces, give them some baggy clothes, and I'll happily believe they are prisoners. I'm not interested in weight loss as extreme film-making stunt.

Thank you, James Wolcott

I do not read Wolcott enough. That will change.

Lunch room, locker room: the trash talk is still being batted around about women as if everything's the fault of a few feminist bitches with frigid temperatures and Tilda Swinton hauteur who insist on being where they're not wanted, going where they don't belong. And underneath the trash talk is the even more unattractive noise of white men whining because things aren't like they used to be. No, they are not. This news should have reached you by now and soaked in. Things haven't been like they used to be for about thirty years now, hell, maybe forty. So set your inner Pat Buchanan free in that patchy stretch of woods along the interstate and accept the reality of women's equality without being such a bullying baby about it.

Bigfoot at Berkeley

Plaster footprint casts from Grover Krantz's collection are now on view at the Hearst Museum. Turns out Krantz and I have something else in common besides an obsession (differing mightily in degree) with Bigfoot: we were both grad students at Berkeley.

h/t Amy

Acting workshop

I've been meaning to write about the excellent time we had in class last week with Rachel Anderson, a grad student in the Stanford Drama Department. She has directed several productions at Stanford including Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Osofisan's Farewell to a Cannibal Rage. She's also an actor.

For the first part of class we talked about what it takes to put on a play; what was interesting is that we understood all the parts except the one between "getting money to finance" and "opening night." What goes in rehearsals? How do actors find their characters? How do they work together? I wondered why the "tech rehearsal" occurs so late in the game--that's perhaps the first time actors get to put on the full costumes and make sure dresses don't get hooked on furniture, etc. But if an actor needs to wear the costume to understand why, for instance, she can't bend over or wave her arms a certain way, why not wear the costume sooner? Answer: because the costume, more likely than not, hasn't been made yet. So it seems harder to work outside-in under these circumstances. For practical reasons, it seems, psychology often has to come first.

During the last half hour or so, we did a few acting exercises. One was to make a brief statement about something banal that had happened to us that day (mine was about buying a latte). Then we repeated the line while doing different things with our bodies, such as glancing around the room, or, in my case, lying back in the chair like a client on the therapists' couch. (I must have been radiating something for Rachel to suggest that.) Anyway what was amazing is that changing position and action really did change the line delivery. Not only was it harder to make my voice do certain things when I was lying back, that difficulty--or maybe the position itself--changed my emotions slightly. So by lying back I started speaking more slowly and dully. No other effort was required to make this rather striking change in how the line came out. I, for one, really am malleable from the outside in. Shiatsu massage, here I come.

Another grammar experience

About a week ago Trev and I were walking along the seaside trail that stretches between Monterey and Pacific Grove. Just ahead of us were a boy, about 8 years old, and his father, riding bicycles. We caught up to them for just enough time to hear the boy say, "If my name were to be Dave, my name backwards would be Evad." We were both struck by the complex use of the subjunctive in a person so small. Not only was he commenting on the fact that his name was not Dave; he was holding out the possibility, however slight, that it could still happen.

Later we caught up to them again and the boy had somehow gotten his bike wedged against a pillar. Not surprising, given his loftier preoccupations.

(edited to remove crummy analogy)

Monosyllabic review of the film Venus starring Peter O'Toole

Ugh.

Monster Spotter's Guide to North America

A former student, Natalie Jabbar, who writes an excellent column for the Stanford Daily, gave me a copy of The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America. The publisher sent her the book in the hopes that she'd review it. She has declined, so I will now do the honors.

This is by far the best field guide to North American monsters that I've read this year. First off, the cover is waterproof, an important consideration since many American monsters live in lakes and swamps. The text, by Scott Francis, takes an appropriate tone on the whole endeavor. From the introduction ("The Perils of Monster Hunting"):

Monsters are illusory--another one of their character flaws. Chasing after evidence of them can cost you more than your life. You could lose your livelihood, your spouse, your friends, your credibility, your sobriety and your sanity. So where does that leave you?

Like me, maybe you really like monsters. You watch Buffy and her friends go out and dust themselves a vampire, or cage a werewolf, and you think about going to your job the next day and it really, really, sucks. You wonder why you can't live your dream and chase after monsters. You don't even care that much if you get superpowers or not--you could just work out a lot and train to be proficient with weapons. Then you remember that monster hunting doesn't pay and that just yesterday you dropped fifty bones at the comic book store.

The monsters themselves are organized by geographic region, with, I'm pleased to note, particular emphasis on the Midwest, where both the author and illustrator are from. Notable here are the Guyascutus, whose only agreed-upon characteristic is its "legs of adaptable length"; and the Lake Leelanau monster, which can disguise itself as a branch and is conveniently located in a lovely vacation spot with good restaurants nearby. Each entry begins with a well-thought-out quick-reference box and is categorized using a truly brilliant series of logos (a pair of leathery wings for flying monsters; a webbed hand for reptilian humanoids, a furry face for Bigfoot-type monsters, etc.). Many though not all of the entries are illustrated by Ben Patrick, and he manages to make the monsters look both humbled and pleased to have been included.

A few of the entries, however, seem perfunctory, perhaps due to lack of any information, reliable or not--but why be perfunctory about a monster? For god's sake, man, make something up. Add something to the lore. It certainly doesn't take much to do so--one drunk guy staggering home can see a raccoon and spawn a dozen articles in the local paper.

Anyway it's a good book and you should probably buy it. Thanks, Natalie!

My self and the motion detector

Today in class we talked about what we think of (or feel) when we think of our selves. We sense the presence of a self, but where is it located, and what is it made of? The discussion was in conjunction with psychologist Dan McAdams's article, "Personality, Modernity, and the Storied Self" (Psychological Inquiry 7:4, 1996). In one section McAdams paraphrases several theorists on the postmodern self:

Psychologically, what the I has traditionally considered to be "my" self--that which is mine, that which I have self-reflexively authored, made, constructed, explored, controlled--may no longer be mine...Persons are creatures whose very identities are constituted by their social locations or their momentary locations in discourse.

McAdams then asks:

It is difficult to know just how literally to interpret some characterizations of the postmodern self. One wonders: If the multiphrenia of postmodern life is [so] extreme... why is it that most men and women are still able to function more or less adaptively in daily life, rarely forgetting their names, histories, and goals?

I asked the class what constitutes their personal senses of self, despite what we know to be all its contingencies. We came up with notions like morals and values, memories of the past, a sense of consistent qualities or behaviors, the way others think of us--and the fact that they do. We didn't talk much about the physical aspects of selfhood--how important a role the body plays--though we described how we feel other things and people are parts of our selves (of the "me" that the "I" works to create, in McAdams's terms).

After class today, as I stood washing my hands in the restroom, the motion-sensing lights went off. I waved my arms and took a step forward, then back, but the lights stayed off. I dried my hands and left the room, and just as I opened the door the lights came back on. So I began wondering. Not whether I cease to exist when motion-sensors can't see me (I haven't gotten that Philip K. Dickian), but what aspects of self cease to be. It is quite humiliating to be ignored by a sensor--to not "show up," to have one's departure mistaken for an entry. I've found in airport restrooms that faucets won't turn on for me (and for me alone). At times like this my sense of solidity starts to frazzle around the edges. I'm not as "there" as some other people--bigger? Less transparent? Who move in a way that's more convincingly human?

Just when I needed it...

The winner of Glimmer Train's latest "Family Matters" contest, Erica Johnson Debeljak, talks about two pressing concerns of mine: becoming a writer later in life, and struggling with the pressure to write formulaic fiction. The two issues are not unrelated--if you aren't groomed from a young age in the American MFA system, you're more likely to look askance at the "hook-backstory-resolution" shape of the contemporary American short story. There's nothing wrong with the formula itself, only with leaving no room for anything different. Debeljak also talks about creating stories by juxtaposing two images or scenes, which Stephen King recommends as well.

Haunted grammar

At least two grammatical facts I know--or think I know--are so closely associated with the teachers I learned them from that I actually see these women's faces whenever I use those constructs. Using the possessive with a participle (as in "We should discuss Sally's wanting to quit her job," as opposed to "...Sally wanting to quit...") is Mrs. Gretar from high school. Saying "the lady who..." as opposed to "The lady that..." is Miss Seckel, fourth grade. ("Lady" for "woman" was just fine, but "that" implies an inanimate object. I remember sensing at the time that this was a personal issue for Miss Seckel.) Frankly I'm not sure either of these usages is correct; I find myself wondering about them, and that's when one or the other of these faces appears before me. And I get scared of trying anything else.

Peaceful progression

I dislike the "Possessed" column in the Sunday Style section of the NYT as much I revile the "Consumed" column in the Sunday Magazine. Must there be not one but two overt celebrations in the very same paper of having, accumulating, buying, owning, to say nothing of the myriad implied celebrations in a good chunk of the articles, plus the ads? Are we not more than this? At long last, are we not more?

However, Trev told me that a present I gave him for Christmas (which he picked out) has changed his life. It is this thing: the Hammacher Schlemmer Peaceful Progression Wake Up (not Alarm) Clock. It's about a foot high and looks like a robot servant from a 50s science fiction movie. It's even in black-and-white, except for the green display and the ladder of lights that discreetly come on, one at a time, a half hour before your wake-up time. If you're lucky, the first light wakes you up with a red-orange glow that is not unlike dawn. In our case the alarm sits next to a bunch of orange-red fake flowers that I can pretend is a cloud, so the whole effect is quite pleasant. At T minus 15 minutes, a sound begins to play. We chose the Zen music (the usual flutey stuff) because the cricket and bird sounds were those of terrified crickets and birds, and the ocean sound was a tsunami. At Wake Up Time, however, it's no more Mr. Zen Clock and the beeping that you know from every other alarm clock begins. This feature cannot be turned off, and you lie listening to the Zen music in increasing dread of the beeping. So you get up.

Trev says he sleeps better knowing that he'll be awakened in this relatively humane way. So consider this my Possessed and Consumed column. I do not go so far as to suggest that you order one of these clocks, which appears in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog on an airplane near you--alongside, I'm not kidding, a motorized cooler that you can ride.

The Martian Bigfoot

Roger Patterson, where are you when we need you?

OK, here's a pretty interesting analysis.

(h/t Bad Astronomer.)

Jane Austen's Ghost World

Yesterday I did an exercise with my students in which we rewrote a scene from Ghost World (graphic novel or movie) in the style of Jane Austen. The "write in the style of Austen" exercise is not a new one, neither to me nor to teachers around the world, but I think the Ghost World component is unique. It's the second time I've done this and it was, again, a blast. It reminded me once again that constraints make for great art. Of course you immediately realize you have to break down the dialog of Enid Coleslaw and her snide pal into polite or seemingly polite ripostes, adding adjectives and adverbs. What you then see is that the irony in Austen's characters' speech, while equally edgy, is sort of an outside-in version of Ghost World's. (I haven't quite figured out how they mirror each other.) Also Ghost World is, in fact, a social "novel" that explores the niceties (or lack thereof) of relationships.

NYT on MLK

Leave it to the NYT to have an op-ed page full of columns by white people on Martin Luther King Day. Nevertheless, two pieces were outstanding (coincidentally, the ones that weren't William Kristol's). Sarah Vowell's "Radical Love Gets a Holiday" deserves to be anthologized in the Best American Spiritual Writing and many other places. Paul Krugman's column made the point that the biggest failing of the Clinton years was the Democrat's inability to change the narrative about Reagan. He was *not* a good president. But because Bill and the others didn't say that, Republicans are still invoking his sainted name, as is Obama. And they're all still competing to see who can try once again to force Reagan's bad ideas on the country and the world. Vowell also manages a nice shot at Reagan in the beginning of her piece. Maybe it's not too late to call off the canonization.

The Image-World

It's time once again for a quote from Susan Sontag's On Photography (now you know what we're reading in class):

[R]eality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist about their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up--a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing--that "it seemed like a movie." This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was. While many people in non-industrialized countries still feel apprehensive when being photographed, divining it to be some kind of trespass, an act of disrespect, a sublimated looting of the personality or the culture, people in industrialized countries seek to have their photographs taken--feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs.

Or by blogs, or Diggs, or Twitters...(I still don't understand Twitter).

What secret are you keeping from yourself?

I'm always amazed at how certain pieces of writing (and other) advice can bounce right off me a hundred times, then all of a sudden they make sense. I suppose it's like cosmic rays; they're always bombarding us, just like advice--but every now and then because of how we're aligned in the universe, or something, one hits and sticks. (And there's where the cosmic ray analogy ends, because if one of those stuck it would be a disaster.) Anyway, here's the little nugget that hit me this week. It's from Melissa Pritchard, interviewed in Glimmer Train's publication Writers Ask:

[In writing "Revelations of Child Love"] I wanted to strike a certain nerve on the page, but when I tried to write a conventional story, I couldn't get to the emotionally dangerous point I needed to get to. I had to wait for the right voice--the right form--that could carry the charge and danger this story needed. [...] I go by the same advice I give my students: If you aren't sure what the danger point is after finishing a draft, ask what secret you are keeping from yourself.

Reading at Bernal Yoga on January 19

I'll be reading my short-short story, "Airspell," at the Bernal Yoga* Literary Series on Saturday, January 19, 7 p.m. I'll be reading for about 5 minutes, but, you know, it's part of a very festive bigger picture. The headliners are fiction writer Catherine Brady and poet Jessica Fisher.

Here is more information about the series:
http://www.bernalyoga.com/Events.html (Scroll down to read about the series.)
And directions:
http://www.bernalyoga.com/Location.html

* No yoga will be performed.**
** Not by me, anyway.

Imitation of Life II

My winter quarter class starts tomorrow. I'm teaching Imitation of Life again. Here's the course description:

To a large extent this course is about characters and characterization: How do authors and other artists create characters, both human and non-human? How do readers decide whether a character seems real, and what if the characterization is a bit off from our sense of reality? After examining techniques and experiences of characterization, however, we'll go further, by questioning the boundaries around characters. What is inside and outside a character? What is a character and what isn't? And more basically still: how do artists portray aliveness itself?

While discussions will be fluid and topics will merge and diverge, the course falls into three basic sections: Claiming Reality (weeks 1-3); Building Characters (weeks 4-6); and Consciousness and Point of View (weeks 7-9).

Course Materials:

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

Daniel Clowes, Ghost World

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

Edward P. Jones, The Known World

Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Films: Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, dir.); Vanya on 42^nd Street (Louis Malle, dir.); The Cherry Orchard (Michael Cacoyannis, dir.)

+ Class visits by Rachel Anderson of Stanford's Drama Department, and fiction writer and Stanford Creative Writing instructor Eric Puchner.

+ Gallery talk by Patience Young, Curator for Education, Cantor Art Center on works by Richard Avedon, Joan Brown, Chuck Close, and Duane Hansen.

+ Additional articles/excerpts by Erich Auerbach, Sigmund Freud, Sherry Turkle, Alex Woloch, and others will be handed out or available for download from Coursework. There is no course reader.

I'll introduce the course with LonelyGirl15, and its self-conscious gestures toward "dorkiness"--a marker for realism.

We Freeze to Please

Flying out of Cleveland in a snowstorm New Year's night, I was grateful for my father's work on de-icing technologies at NASA. A few years ago my dad was interviewed for a book on the ice tunnel at NASA's Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center. The book, We Freeze to Please, is also available as a PDF, here. On p. 70 (82 in the pdf) there's a photo of my dad in 1949, standing on top of a large ladder with a "spray system for dyed water impingement studies."

War is a force...

For some holiday uplift, I am reading War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges. It is truly frightening because the book was published in 2002, just as BushCo was beginning to beat the lie drums for the Iraq war. Referring mostly to the first gulf war and the Balkan Wars, Hedges predicts exactly how things have gone since the book was published. All wars, even "good" ones, tend to evoke the same powerful ambivalences in those who fight them. There's less ambivalence for the armchair cheerleaders, who avidly consume the myth of war, but never see the reality. The title of the book sort of says it all, but:

In mythic war we imbue events with meanings they do not have. We see defeats as signposts on the road to ultimate victory. We demonize the enemy so that our opponent is no longer human. We view ourselves, our people, as the embodiment of absolute goodness. Our enemies invert our view of the world to justify their own cruelty. In most mythic wars this is the case. Each side reduces the other to objects--eventually in the form of corpses. [....]

The potency of the myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives a justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness. It hides from view our own impotence and the ordinariness of our own leaders. By turning history into myth we transform random events into a chain of events directed by a will greater than our own, one that is determined and preordained. We are elevated above the multitude. We march toward nobility. And no society is immune (23-24).

Isn't it interesting that the religious right, who claim to have so much meaning in their lives in the form of God and Jesus and the unwavering certainty of their own goodness--that these are the people who scream loudest for war, whenever the possibility even faintly appears? I thought we atheists were the ones who pathetically had no meaning in our lives, who were dangerous because of it. (We don't think God is watching us, so we naturally are immoral; even as adults, Christians apparently do the right thing only because they fear punishment.) Yet it would seem the fanatics are the meaning-starved ones. Their religion proves inadequate; they must have blood and sacrifice (of others), and still they aren't satisfied. Will someone please, please give these peoples' lives some real meaning? And is that what W, that empty shell of a human, is really craving?

Oh, and in case you were wondering, war correspondents and the press generally don't see their role as uncovering the realities of war. Hedges, who was a war correspondent for years, points out that the press is "eager to be of service" to the myth. The fact that we're now seeing more negative reports about Iraq is a reflection of American public opinion turning against the war. The press follows the trajectory of the myth, bolstering it till they can no longer credibly do so.

I'm grateful to the many bloggers out there who have kept the press more honest in this war than perhaps in any other. Though a lot of crap has slid through the cracks, war-myth making might be harder in years to come.

Giuliani and Bozo

Al Sharpton has said of Rudolph Giuliani (paraphrasing from this week's New Yorker): "He didn't bring us together after 9-11. Our pain brought us together. We would have come together if Bozo had been the mayor." I think that's true, but I have another take. Bozo was in fact the President on 9-11, and his failure is what made Giuliani look so good. On 9-11 Trev and I were at the Alisal resort, on our honeymoon. We watched TV most of that day and waited in vain for Bush to appear and say something. Cheney did (and I remember him saying Saddam had nothing to do with it because he was "bottled up"--does anyone else remember this?). Bush, as we all know, was darting around the country on Air Force One, landing here and there like a fly on a meatloaf. Very late that night, I think around 11, he came on and gave a short deer-in-the-headlights speech that even he didn't seem impressed with (how often has that happened?). The next day he gave a lurching press conference, looking like someone had physically shoved him in front of the camera. The highly touted Bullhorn Moment at Ground Zero came quite late, and, like Giuliani, only looked good in comparison to what had come before. Meanwhile Giuliani was on camera, speaking relatively clearly and eloquently (again: relative to nothing). He literally filled a void that should not have been there. For that the country canonized him, as it soon did with Bush, just for finally showing up.

When you feel global doubt

Richard Bausch, from Off the Page: Writers Talk about Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between (ed. Carole Burns):

I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel global doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don't have any doubt. And it's figuring that out and learning how to put all that stuff behind you and just do the work. Just go in and shake the black cue ball and see what surfaces.

One Punk Under God

One Punk Under God was a miniseries on the Sundance Channel about Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye. He's a preacher himself and founder of the Revolution church, which is in many ways the anti-PTL. Where PTL (his parents' infamous ministry) was enormous, cheesy, Disneyfied, televised, and ghastly, Revolution is low-tech and--I guess you could say--punk. In Atlanta the church met in a bar. Judging from the show, Jay Bakker's preaching seems mainly to consist of him working out his "dad" issues in front of a supportive crowd. Maybe that's what preaching is these days, or it's always that way and I just never realized it. Anyway he goes around putting stickers on lampposts that say "as Christians, we apologize for being self-righteous bastards." He decides during the course of the show to make Revolution a gay-affirming church. He's a dead ringer for David Cross, and his wife is extremely colorful--an odd inverse of Tammy Faye. He'll never bag me as a convert, but things could be worse. They mostly are.

Rosebud story

The issue of Rosebud with my story, "The Temp," is out.

Ratatouille

I finally saw this film, which sent A.O. Scott of the Times, among others, into paroxysms of praise. Never before has an animated film, etc. It's the story of a rat who dreams of being a great chef, and succeeds with the help of the goofy young garbage boy (who does the actual cooking since the rat can't, or shouldn't, use kitchen tools). Apparently the tale was sincerely uplifting to many sophisticated critics. The animation is state of the art, though marveling at how realistic something looks seems less and less like a meaningful aesthetic experience. And overall I found the movie incredibly dismaying. Pardon my Berkeleyism, but:

--There is one female in the entire film, not counting possibly a few shadowy diners who never speak. The female is an ambitious underling who expresses rage about the male-dominated world of restaurants by slinging her knives around. (Male viewers laugh nervously and knowingly.) She is supposed to be great at her work, but her role in the film is to step aside while the rat-and-boy team climb to the top in a matter of weeks. There are no female rats in the entire large "clan." Maybe the filmmakers thought this was a compliment of sorts, but note this: both the garbage-boy, Linguini, and the rat-chef Remy are motherless. Linguini's mother is dead; I don't remember what happened to Remy's mother, if it's even explained. Yes, that's the usual Disney Bambi terror/fantasy, but the overall impression is that the filmmakers like this boy's world just as it is.

--The villain in the film is a dark-skinned North African type. There is one other dark-skinned cook in the kitchen who plays a minor role, and all the other humans are white. Yes, I hope we've moved beyond the tentative Deep-Space-Nine Star-Trek-Enterprise universes, where the writers are so afraid of offending that the black characters are not only moral paragons, they have no personality whatsoever. But in an animated film, skin color is a very specific technical choice. They are not working with a specific actor's appearance, but assigning the exact appearance they want to the character. Villain = dark person with heavy accent.

--It goes without saying that the "good" people have American accents, and the "bad" people have either English or French accents. The film is set in Paris and all the characters are supposed to be French. (The female love interest does sound vaguely French, but we've already dealt with the fact that she's female and therefore second-class. She can afford to have an accent.)

--Finally (as Trev pointed out) several characters insist over and over again on the most important moral principle in the world: Do Not Steal. Not even if you're starving can you steal a chunk of bread. It is OK to kidnap and tie up the dark-skinned man and the health inspector and throw them in a closet. But Do Not Steal, especially from companies; it is Wrong. So don't even think of illegally downloading or copying any Disney products, kids.

If this movie is our current inspirational message to the young, I'd say we have gotten exactly nowhere since the 50s. The progress in animation technique may even serve to disguise the retrograde message--and it is a message, believe me.

Compulsive revising

How do novelists stop themselves from endlessly revising the beginning pages of their novels? I gather this is a fairly common problem. By nature beginnings get more work since they're around the longest, and you see novels that seem better crafted in the beginning and more scattered as they go on. However if you aren't all the way through a first draft, as I am not, revising makes little sense. It's likely I will end up throwing out the beginning, or cutting off the diving board, as someone said at the Tin House workshop a few years ago. But how can I stop? Do I really need to open a new file every day, as I've tried in the past, so I can't look back at what I've written? Should I take what I have so far off the computer and store it on disk in the Nevada desert? Here's the thing: I still feel I need to understand what happens in the beginning before I can write what happens next. The rewriting is part of figuring out the characters' motivations. But maybe I can figure those out as I move forward, and revise the beginning later. Perhaps I don't trust that I will remember how things have changed, so I feel I have to go back right away. But then things change again, and the beginning gets messier and messier and covered with claw marks. So I am actually not even making the beginning better, let alone progressing.

I'm afraid of finishing. That's it! I'm afraid of finishing and finding out I have a disaster on my hands.

The Poetry of the Universe

I bought this book by Robert Osserman years ago at a used book store and finally started reading it on the plane to Cleveland last week. It is wonderful. For the first time, I feel I am starting to "get" spherical geometry. Not that I could do any calculations or anything, but Osserman explains it by starting with the basic problem of map-making: there's no way to make a two-dimensional map that is not distorted; the issue is how best to manage the distortion for the purposes of the particular map. He then translates this problem into mapping four-dimensional space using three dimensions. Apparently Dante's "map" of the earthly vs. heavenly spheres uses pretty much the same idea as the mathematical "hypersphere." If Osserman can even begin to get this across to a spatial illiterate like me, he must be onto something.

I wonder what would happen if math teachers taught this book or a similar one, along with the usual calculations and story problems. The students could read a chapter and they could discuss it for a half hour once a week or something. I understand there's no time in the high school classroom for this sort of thing, but it would be great. I never cared about figuring out when two trains would pass each other--but learning that I could use math to understand how the universe works would have hooked me a lot more.

Chancellor May

Congrats are in order once again to Brian May, who's now a university chancellor.
h/t to Amy

Props to the NYT

For vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes. I'm going to try this one for sure, the Pumpkin, White Bean, and Kale Ragout. I know from my experiments combining Vegan with a Vengeance and Tassajara Cookbook recipes that white beans and kale are great together, and you can't go wrong adding butternut squash or pumpkin. The ingredient list is in the middle range, not quite the 40,000 typical of NYT recipes (and Tassajara).

Here's another one from the same article, Curried Lentils with Sweet Potatoes and Swiss Chard. I've come a long way from the days I swore I could never be a vegetarian because all they ate was lentils, which reminded me of guinea pig food. The fact that I have a very strong sense of what guinea pig food tastes like might give you pause. But this recipe sounds good too.

I'm not so sure about the Corn Bread and Broccoli Rabe Strata, especially because of the "resting."

Anyway, good on the NYT.

Meteor shower

Trev and I went to Sea Ranch last weekend and scored the best room in the house--top floor, corner, with a 180 degree view of the ocean. We watched the Leonid meteor shower from the comfort of our window seats (Trev woke me up at 5 a.m., after it stopped raining, but I was surprisingly polite). We also watched the stars fade into daytime. It was somehow comforting to be reminded that they're always there.

Writers' strike

Joss Whedon has a great post up about the writers' strike and why it matters. And the guy really can write.

Strikeforce

Last Thursday Trev and I were sitting in our favorite "family restaurant" (it calls itself a "creperie" but has nachos and the occasional screaming kid), waiting for our clothes to dry at the laundromat next door. I reading Anthony Grafton's article on the library of the future in the New Yorker, when my eye was drawn to the television over the bar. A shirtless, heavily tattooed man was dancing under a spotlight. I thought it was some kind of dance-contest show, but then the man trotted down a ramp into a large octagonal ring surrounded by a chain-link cage. Another man appeared from the opposite direction, and the two of them started punching and then kicking each other in the head. I put Grafton down.

I studied karate for four years before destroying my ankle. These guys seemed to have some technique. Apparently they were engaged in a practice called Strikeforce, which I learn from Wikipedia is "an American professional kickboxing and mixed martial arts promotion based in San Jose, California." (At the time I thought that might just be the name of the company that made the mat.) The bout ended quickly, though I don't quite remember how, and then another bout started with two new heavily tattooed guys. These guys immediately went to the floor, wrapped their arms and legs around each other, and sort of scootched around the mat. Eventually the ref separated them, then they did the same thing again. They looked like a couple of brothers fighting, or a couple of drunks, as Trev said. It was impossible to tell whether they knew how to fight. The effect was hilarious and boring at the same time, suggesting that if no holds are barred, skill becomes irrelevant, and/or aesthetics goes out the window. Or perhaps they were really fighting. My karate teacher told us about a real fight that broke out during a sparring competition. The guys immediately dropped all their fancy training and started windmilling and slapping each other.

What does this mean for the library of the future?

Is Star Trek a religion?

Trev thinks so. Consider:
--It has dieties (it is probably polytheistic).
--It has rituals (conventions, role-playing games).
--It has relics and iconography.
--It has sacred texts (the original series, maybe Next Generation).
--Many Trekkers have formed groups that engage in social activism.
--All are welcome, misfits fit in.
--It has a utopian vision for humankind's future.

I would argue that Star Wars, while more blatantly religious, is not a religion, though it borrows from another one. The Force is just warmed-over California Buddhism. And I don't think Star Wars inspires in the same way.

When pondering this question you may wish to view the film Trekkies. (I notice Blogger underlines Trekkies as a misspelling, but not Trekkers. Interesting.) We first saw Trekkies at the Tanforan Theater in South SF, years ago. I don't know if it still exists; back then it was in post-apocalyptic decline, with upturned buckets of popcorn in the bathroom and drifts of it in the aisles. Not only did your shoes stick to the floor, they came off when you tried to lift your feet. The projectionist started screening the wrong movie, then the aspect ratio was off so everyone looked like an ET; finally they got the film going but never centered it on the screen and all the informative text (like who was speaking) was cut off. It was perhaps the greatest movie-going experience of my life.

Robot patient

If Sherry Turkle is right, that we attach to what we nurture, how do the nursing students feel about this? Also in the works: the first robot birth.

h/t Natalie.

You can never get away from yourself

From Constantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares:

Do you expect an actor to invent all sorts of new sensations, or even a new soul, for every part he plays? How many souls would he be obligated to house? On the other hand, can he tear out his own soul, and replace it by one he has rented, as being more suitable to a certain part? Where can he get one? You can borrow clothing, a watch, things of all sorts, but you cannot take feelings away from another person. My feelings are inalienably mine, and yours belong to you in the same way. You can understand a part, sympathize with the person portrayed, and put yourself in his place, so that you will act as he would. That will arouse feelings in the actor that are analogous to those required for the part. But those feelings will belong, not to the person created by the author of the play, but to the actor himself.

Never lose yourself on the stage. Always act in your own person, as an artist. You can never get away from yourself. The moment you lose yourself on the stage marks the departure from truly living your part and the beginning of exaggerated false acting. Therefore no matter how much you act, how many parts you take, you should never allow yourself any exception to the rule of using your own feelings. To break that rule is the equivalent of killing the person you are portraying, because you deprive him of a papitating, living, human soul, which is the real source of life for a part. (Trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. Italics in original.)

The Cleveland Indians

So I see that the Indians blew a 3-1 lead in the playoffs amid news that one of their pitchers is turning into a cow. My father would have been beside himself.

Someday I will have to write about growing up as an Indians fan. I remember going to a game on my birthday, watching the Indians pitching staff walk fourteen Detroit Tigers to the sarcastic applause of the 3000 or so fans. (The old Municipal Stadium held 80,000.) When the pitcher finally threw a strike, the crowd booed, but the catcher leaped up and pumped his fist--see, you can do it, he was saying. But that wasn't true.

The short story -- dead or sleeping?

A thoughtful response to Stephen King's recent laments on the short story, by Jean Thompson.

Their book deals ruined their lives

I don't know if I should be happy or sad about this.

It also says blogging is the literary equivalent of living in a trailer.

h/t Sara.

Bad Buddhist

I have not meditated in weeks, at least not on the zafu. I think it's because I've been doing yoga nearly every day instead (with my revered Rodney Yee DVD). Yoga is more fun. It also has the additional benefit of being exercise, which means one is multitasking, therefore not really meditating but doing the opposite. But because, in yoga, one has to fully concentrate on, say, not falling on one's head while doing a backbend, the mind clears wonderfully. Whereas if one is "just" sitting, one has to listen to the unending stream of annoying mental chatter that one has yet to let go of or thin out in any significant way. Of course having this goal of getting rid of the chatter is non-Zen.

Noble failure

From an article by John Aravosis, excerpted on Americablog and available on Salon. Why can't liberals win? This is why:

Conservatives understand that cultural change is a long, gradual process of small but cumulatively deadly victories. Liberals want it all now. And that's why, in the culture wars, conservatives often win and we often lose. While conservatives spend years, if not decades, trying to convince Americans that certain judges are "activists," that gays "recruit" children, and that Democrats never saw an abortion they didn't like, we often come up with last-minute ideas and expect everyone to vote for them simply because we're right. Conservatives are happy with piecemeal victory, liberals with noble failure. We rarely make the necessary investment in convincing people that we're right because we consider it offensive to have to explain an obvious truth.