Craftzine blog

This is cool.

This site makes me feel guilty, of course, but almost everything does that. But really, I should be making gift bags for wine bottles out of old shirt sleeves. Well, maybe I should. I assume the instructions tell you how to deal with coffee and worse kinds of stains that one finds on old shirt sleeves--because if your shirt doesn't have those stains, why aren't you still wearing it? The larger problem, however, is that I hate to sew. It's impossible to describe how much I hate to sew. I can still see that needle sliding deeply into my finger as I tried to finish off my Marimekko pillowcase in seventh grade home-ec. My mother still has the pillow, and my blood is still on it, though it kind of blends in with the yellow-orange cow-spot pattern. But I should sew. I should. Or make lamps out of cereal boxes with pin-hole images.

Anyway, "craft" apparently no longer means strangely hard cloth dolls with gingham dresses and yellow yarn for hair...

The Bay Area Maker Faire, by the way, is May 30-31.

Borrowed Fire: Notes from Underground: a new Overcoat

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

Here's Notes from Underground from Project Gutenberg.

Oh, how can you not love this book? (I'm not saying you don't love it, gentlemen; I think you do. But perhaps you are not ready to admit it.)

How can you not love this guy:

One night as I was passing a tavern I saw through a lighted window some gentlemen fighting with billiard cues, and saw one of them thrown out of the window. At other times I should have felt very much disgusted, but I was in such a mood at the time, that I actually envied the gentleman thrown out of the window--and I envied him so much that I even went into the tavern and into the billiard-room. "Perhaps," I thought, "I'll have a fight, too, and they'll throw me out of the window."

The scheme occurs to the Underground Man, by the way, as he's returning from one of his nights of "filthy vice" (i.e. visiting prostitutes). He wishes to punish himself, or rather, have someone else punish him--so he can then play the victim, and then mock himself for playing the victim, and so on into infinity. He also wants the attention that being thrown through a window will bring him. But what happens instead?

An officer put me in my place from the first moment.

I was standing by the billiard-table and in my ignorance blocking up the way, and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and without a word--without a warning or explanation--moved me from where I was standing to another spot and passed by as though he had not noticed me. I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me.

It's the UM's manner of plotting and--sort of--exacting revenge that I'm interested in today. His first attempt is to write a satirical story about the officer, but it is rejected by a prominent journal, to his great consternation (perhaps some of us can relate to this particular failed plot). So he decides he is going to bump the officer in some public place. That is, he's going to get in the man's way and not step aside; the idea of doing this makes him absolutely giddy. (This whole section is worth several reads; I think it's hysterically funny, and I'm sure as hell not doing it justice here.) But first he has to prepare to bump him, and this involves obtaining proper attire. Specifically, he needs a new overcoat.

I had got ready long beforehand a good shirt, with white bone studs; my overcoat was the only thing that held me back. The coat in itself was a very good one, it kept me warm; but it was wadded and it had a raccoon collar which was the height of vulgarity. I had to change the collar at any sacrifice, and to have a beaver one like an officer's. For this purpose I began visiting the Gostiny Dvor and after several attempts I pitched upon a piece of cheap German beaver. Though these German beavers soon grow shabby and look wretched, yet at first they look exceedingly well, and I only needed it for the occasion. I asked the price; even so, it was too expensive. After thinking it over thoroughly I decided to sell my raccoon collar. The rest of the money--a considerable sum for me, I decided to borrow from Anton Antonitch Syetotchkin, my immediate superior, an unassuming person, though grave and judicious. He never lent money to anyone, but I had, on entering the service, been specially recommended to him by an important personage who had got me my berth. I was horribly worried. To borrow from Anton Antonitch seemed to me monstrous and shameful. I did not sleep for two or three nights. Indeed, I did not sleep well at that time, I was in a fever; I had a vague sinking at my heart or else a sudden throbbing, throbbing, throbbing! Anton Antonitch was surprised at first, then he frowned, then he reflected, and did after all lend me the money, receiving from me a written authorisation to take from my salary a fortnight later the sum that he had lent me.

All of this, as you may already know, is a parody of Gogol's "The Overcoat," which of course is a satire itself. (Ooh! I see they have "The Overcoat" on Gutenburg also, only in their collection it's called "The Cloak.") And of course the parody is completely knowing, a very self-conscious bit of meta-fiction. In fact, the UM says of the officer, "Devil knows what I would have given for a real regular quarrel--a more decent, a more LITERARY one, so to speak."

OK: metafiction can be cheesy, smarmy, snotty, snooty, and tiresome. Let's not do it like that. But we can try weaving a story we really love into one of our stories. We often do this sort of thing unconsciously--let's try it consciously. We can try a complex, ultimately admiring parody that doesn't just exist as a parody, but serves to advance the story. The game here is that the UM wants to be more literary, so he rewrites himself as a fictional character that he thinks his readers will recognize (he's aware that he's already fictional, but people don't recognize him--that's the problem). Maybe the story we choose to parody could even be NfU, or some episode therein, like the bump-plotting episode.

BTW, does the UM ever bump the officer? Yes he does.

Borrowed Fire: Notes from Underground: I am (not) a spiteful man

Here is our text on Project Gutenberg.

A brief bit of pendantry to start out with, but I think it will be worth it. About those famous opening lines--"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man." The 1993 translation of NfU by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky renders the second line as "I am a wicked man." As Pevear explains in the foreword:

...the translation of zloy as "spiteful" instead of "wicked" is not inevitable, nor is it a matter of nuance. It speaks for that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a type of behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to understand Dostoevsky (xxiii).

My Russian is rusty, but it's evident from checking any dictionary that "zloy" means "wicked" or "evil." Pevear's explanation for how it got to be "spiteful" instead is intriguing, though I'm reluctant to simply attribute it to our namby-pamby (previous) century. It's true, as Pevear's foreword implies and as other critics have pointed out, translators have often felt compelled to clean up Dostoevsky's prose. They sometimes assume he was rushing to finish so he could pay off his gambling debts, and if he'd had more time, he would have said it their way (i.e. more eloquently).* So perhaps they don't believe he really meant "wicked," especially since people almost never refer to themselves as "evil." Truly evil people never do--they think they are the saviors of humankind. So what could it mean that this man, whom we are supposed to think of as an anti-hero of an anti-novel, calls himself "evil" on the first page? "Spiteful," while not a flattering way to characterize yourself, is more understandable--it's a bad habit, which is fixable. But being evil is perhaps not.

So here are a couple of writing experiments we can try.

1. Create a character who refers to himself or herself as "wicked." The character should also have a surprising, ambivalent relationship to that statement--no gleeful cackling, for instance, unless it's adulterated by at least one other emotion. What is the character trying to achieve by telling us he's evil?
   
   
2. Consider a story you have drafted, or one you are thinking about writing. Do as Pevear suggests, and translate psychological conditions into moral or spiritual ones. I'm thinking this could have the effect of raising the stakes in a story significantly. After all, Dostoevsky's characters literally go insane worrying about why God allows innocents to suffer. And I think a lot of contemporary fiction could use higher stakes.
   
   

* Update: I've edited this section to point out that "cleaning up Dostoevsky's prose" is a longstanding issue with translations.

Borrowed Fire: Notes from Underground: Gentlemen?

Borrowed Fire: a new regular feature on S and V, in which we steal writing from the gods.

Here's the text of Notes from Underground from Project Gutenberg.

Let's skip the infamous first few lines ("I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man") and perhaps return to them later. And let's approach the infamous narrator who utters them, the Underground Man, from a different angle--his addressees, whom he calls "gentlemen." For instance, here's a short passage from Part I:

You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are mistaken in that, too. I am by no means such a mirthful person as you imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble (and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I am--then my answer is, I am a collegiate assessor.

When I've taught this book in Comp Lit courses, I've seen students get quite irritated indeed by lines like these. Their reaction is something akin to what many of us feel reading stories in the dreaded second-person, to wit: "You are riding on the subway..." No, I'm not, you idiot.* The students say things like: How dare the Underground Man (or is it Dostoevsky?) assume I'm irritated? OK, I am irritated, but not for the reasons he thinks. He's putting words in my mouth; that's why I'm irritated. (Also, some will point out, we're not gentlemen.) And they read the rest of the book with a nice big chip on their shoulders.

But what if Dostoevsky, and the Underground Man, want us to read with that chip? Let's assume the UM knows we think he's misread us, and that we'll therefore resist what he has to say. What might be Dostoevsky's purposes in doing that? And how does that affect the narration?

So here's a writing experiment: creating a reader--to whom you explicitly refer in your story--whom your narrator deliberately, strategically misunderstands. This should go beyond the exercise of, say, writing a letter to a hostile or skeptical recipient. Your narrator is toying with the real reader by creating a sham version of that reader--a kind of voodoo doll that the narrator pokes to get a reaction out of the unseen person it represents. What strategies would you use for poking? Why and how do you want the reader to resist?

*By the way I have written a story in the second person. But I expect a fair number of people to loathe it.

Borrowed Fire: a new feature on Swerve and Vanish

I'm starting a new regular feature on Swerve and Vanish, called Borrowed Fire, or Stealing Writing from the Gods. My first thought was to start a whole new blog devoted to this subject, and briefly did so late last night. But even later last night, I thought--am I crazy? Two blogs? So to avoid confusion and possible redundancy, Borrowed Fire will be a feature here on S and V. All posts under this rubric will have the Borrowed Fire tag and heading.

What, then, is Borrowed Fire?

Borrowed Fire is a place for aspiring writers like me to learn more about our craft. Our goal is to study the techniques of great writers in order to add fire to our own work; each of us will transform what we borrow into something that is uniquely our own. Our motto will be Do not envy--steal. Actually, it's OK to envy great writers, and, believe me, we will. But we'll also channel that envy into learning what they do and how they do it.

No god is beyond our reach. I'm going to start with Dostoevsky, and move (perhaps not in this order) to Melville, Thoreau, and other traumatizing figures from high school English. I intend to draw only from authors whose work is posted on Project Gutenberg, so that everyone who comes here can access the work immediately and for free. The other advantage of Gutenberg is that it will confine us, for the most part, to the early 20th century or before. That means we'll be looking closely at stories, novels, essays, and even poems that aren't frequently used as models in creative writing classes. But of course there's plenty in these works to learn from--and their relative distance from our time will give them a productive strangeness.

I don't intend to go page-by-page; I may do anywhere from one to twenty posts on each work. I'll be discovering some for the first time, and rereading others--even some I wrote about in my dissertation years ago, back when I called them "texts." I'm looking forward to seeing them in this different light, the light of borrowed fire.

I hope we all find this experiment helpful.

The sentence as found object

It 's been weeks since I first read Louis Menand's commentary on Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty's new biography of Donald Barthelme. But I still get a shot of adrenaline every time I read this part:

In the production of found-material art, the painter has an obvious advantage, and Barthelme was aware of the problem. [....] The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals with only one kind of material: sentences. The solution, therefore, was to treat sentences as though they were found objects.

We rarely experience sentences this way, because we're trying to look through them to the things they represent, just as, in traditional easel painting, we look through the canvas, as though it were a window, onto the world it represents. That's the kind of looking and reading that modernism was committed to disrupting.

Back when I thought I was a visual artist, I was most interested in found-object art. I was drawn to the opaque, disruptive scrap, and to artists like Rauschenberg, with whom Barthelme worked as a museum director and magazine writer. But when I started writing fiction--probably because of my academic background, along with the still-current fashion for minimalist realism--I kept aiming for the window model. And failing. For whatever reason, I'm just too fond of strewing around clunky, inappropriate sentences that mar the view.

I hasten to point out that I'm talking about deliberately clunky writing in this case. But one solution for clunky writing is to go with it, build a voice out of it, rather than trying to beat it back. There might be a reason it's happening, other than pure authorial ineptitude. If you're going to go this route, however, you have to do a good job of being clear, or at least deft, with your sentences when you need to be. Show you're aware of the clunks and are controlling them, for a purpose.

I've found it incredibly liberating to contemplate fiction as collage--not on the paragraph or section level, but on the sentence level. This creates a really fascinating set of challenges. In addition to managing deliberate badness, one has to create some kind of satisfying arc, something that serves the function of plot without necessarily being plot. Barthelme does this brilliantly, in a story like "The Zombies," for instance. Somewhere underneath all this bland chatter and fake / real folklore there's a conflict, resolution, and denouement. I can't quite point to where they are, but I sense them. It's like a plot inside-out.

Tree report

So the plum tree outside our living room window has already bloomed and most of the petals are gone already. Last year's tree report, from March 10, indicates the blooms had just passed peak on that date. I'm going to guess it bloomed two weeks earlier this year.

Also, last summer an extremely large plum crop bent most of the branches at a right angle, and they've remained that way. Beware--from the west it comes! the tree seems to be saying.

Ah, the ominous flowers of springtime.

Is shopping online greener?

I've often wondered about this. The answer appears to be yes, with caveats. Obviously taking mass transit and shopping local stores is better. And what of the drive-to-independent-bookstore vs. shop-at-Amazon dilemma?*

Then there's the greenest solution of all: just quit buying crap. My problem is that I find it far more pleasant to buy things online than to go out shopping. I prefer to wear clothes that don't even fit to the prospect of being in an actual store, being attended to (god help me) by a salesperson, and trying things on. So for me, going out to shop may be greener. I'm more likely to leave empty-handed, and probably to decide not to go in the first place.

*UPDATE: Looking at the article again (i.e. actually reading instead of skimming), I see that buying books at Amazon is not so green. You only want to buy from aggregators that don't ship out of central warehouses, which is not the case with Amazon's "media" products.

Christianity without God

This weeks Beliefs column in the NYT discusses Phil Zuckerman's new book on Danish and Swedish nonbelievers:

Anyone who has paid attention knows that Denmark and Sweden are among the least religious nations in the world. Polls asking about belief in God, the importance of religion in people’s lives, belief in life after death or church attendance consistently bear this out.

It is also well known that in various rankings of nations by life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness, Denmark and Sweden stand in the first tier.

The upshot is that Scandinavians really don't think about religion much at all, though they tend to think of themselves as Christian. They believe in Christian principles, like "helping your neighbor," and they enjoy holiday rituals, which seem to serve a community-building function. They simply aren't interested in God, or in related questions of what life "means."

This strikes me as utterly sensible. Remove God from the equation, and you have a very "nice" (again, as interviewees put it) set of principles on which to build a just society. God would seem to get in the way of those principles. Say you have a workplace with a remote, mercurial, power-mad boss--along with a likeable but extremely co-dependent Vice President. There's a handful of people who'll try their mightiest to suck up to that boss, eagerly doing his dirty work and hurting their coworkers further in the process. Eliminate the boss, and all you have is you and your colleagues, doing the best you can together. And the VP is freed to be him(her?) self--a good person with good ideas you can use.

Dismay and Barthelme at Redwood City Honda

I took the car in this morning for an oil change. Still recovering from a cold, I decided I would tough out an hour in the customer waiting room, rather than walking several blocks down to Whole Foods and lumbering back with bags I can barely carry that far in the best of health.

Ah, but I had forgotten. The law dictates that any enclosed space shared by more than one member of the public must include a large, blaring, impossible-to-turn-off television. When I got there, President Obama was speaking about getting out of Iraq. So I at least had that moment of reassurance that, no, I didn't dream it; he is the President, and we maybe won't be in Iraq for thirty years after all. Then Charlie Gibson jumped in and cut off the rest of the speech (which was taped), summarizing briefly before turning it over to some blond woman who proclaimed the very idea of ever leaving Iraq total bullshit (She knew! She had talked to the troops!).

Then we were bounced back to Regularly Scheduled Programming, which was Regis and Kelly, only Regis was elsewhere so we had Anderson Cooper and Kelly. I had never seen this Kelly before; she is obviously insane. And wasn't Anderson Cooper supposed to be dignified or something? Well, forget about that! Anyway, first up was...

[Let me just point out here that I came prepared for the waiting room, or so I thought. I had brought Barthelme's Sixty Stories and was attempting to read "Paraguay," which is utterly brilliant; every story I read in this book--most of which I'm rereading--seems more brilliant than the last. Anyway, I did kind of read it, but this thing, this deranged televised festival of ding-dongery, kept intruding. BTW this is not going to be the post about Barthelme that I'm still planning. My point here is, once I realized my situation with the TV, I tried to put myself on the low-energy, just-get-through-it setting I use for plane rides and MRI machines. But I was overmatched. Of course, Barthelme's work is about various debased forms of language, like bad TV and instruction manuals and sanctimonious travel narratives, all slugging it out, so it was all kind of appropriate.]

...Tom Selleck! I kid you not. The man is alive, and doing some sort of "project" which is being filmed, and which he is getting paid to promote on Regis (Anderson) and Kelly. Kelly slobbered all over him about Magnum PI, and please, please, weren't they going to do a movie version of Magnum all these years after anyone has ceased to care, and Selleck said--well, I don't quite remember what he said, only that they might hire someone else to be Magnum because Selleck is now 100 years old. Kelly thought that was terrible, the possible hiring of someone else I mean. Then a chef came on and started frying bacon and dumping cream all over it. Then a guy in the waiting room got a call on his cell phone and stepped aside so as not to bother the rest of us--a full two steps away from the seating area--and hollered so loudly into his Bluetooth that he briefly drowned out the TV.

I tried listening to Beethoven on my MP3. Beethoven, Barthelme--I almost never pile the highbrow stuff quite so high, but this was my protest, except no one noticed or cared...

Daydreaming is work, dammit

I'm becoming less enamored of the school of thought that says writers must chain themselves to their desks, or laptops, fingers stuck gecko-like to their keyboards, typing constantly. The worst thing, as I understand this paradigm, is to not be typing. You must type nonsense, if need be, in order to produce a predetermined number of words or pages every day. Any failure to always be typing is strictly punishable by an immediate diminution of self-worth, accompanied by muttering. You know you're kidding yourself, sweetheart. You're not writing. Moreover, you are one of those people who claims to be a writer while not even doing it--a pretentious weenie of the worst sort!

So allow me to offer a defense of lying on the couch and staring into space instead of typing. Yes, helpful stuff does occasionally come out in the nonsense. There's pleasure in hearing your keys clack busily as your words darken the space before you, like a swarm of locusts. But I'm finding there's value in not chasing the story quite so urgently, and instead letting it come to me. I don't mean just sitting there waiting for inspiration, expecting lightning to strike and doing nothing to prepare for it. I mean letting the story turn quietly in my mind for days, even weeks or months, before writing a word--or maybe after I've written some words, but didn't get all the way to the end.

For me, even digital words have a kind of permanence that makes me feel slightly committed to them. I begin to feel the story is "taking shape," when, often, the shape itself needs to remain in question. Daydreaming allows me to play with the shape itself, even to see that shape, in a way. That is, I can envision that shape fluctuating; I see its openness, though not its actual form. I allow it to move in directions that the linear format of typing, even typing nonsense, already restricts. I also get a sense of how much the story really needs to be written. If I don't write it and it keeps coming back, and keeps moving, then I know I should do it. And at that point the writing is relatively easy.

I imagine this doesn't work for everybody; it's probably some manifestation of my particular learning style combined with my aesthetic ambitions. I want to experiment with structure, to let not only characters and events, but language itself shape the narrative. And I'm beginning to believe that typing too soon interferes with this process. I think the process is in part non-verbal or pre-verbal or extra-verbal. Words are only one part of writing.

To which I'll just add, in preparation for another post: Barthelme! Barthelme, Barthelme, Barthelme, Barthelme! Barthelme!

Tearing Reagan down

Since I occasionally rant on this blog about Ronald Reagan and the general acceptance (even by our current president) that he was "great," I am heartened to learn of a new book, Tear This Myth Down, by Will Bunch. You can listen to Terry Gross's interview with him here, and then buy the book to help support NPR, which I would do if I wasn't so cheap. Anyway, Bunch's main point is this: during and especially after Reagan's presidency, the GOP frame factory went to work on building him up as a mythical figure. There is, in fact, an ongoing Reagan Legacy Project, and their methods are legion. For instance they continue to try to name as many buildings, hospitals, airports, etc. after Reagan as possible; the goal (though it has not yet been reached) is to have something named for him in every county in the US. You cannot drive down the Ronald Reagan Highway on a sunny day, as Bunch says, and not think, Wow, he must have been a great man--regardless of what you might remember, or what you might be too young to remember. His funeral was a critical moment in this process, planned with the legend specifically in mind.

The key reason for the mythmaking, Bunch points out, is to cover up for the fact that the Republican party has been out of ideas for some time. When asked about policy, they instead conjure Reagan and his golden aura, and everyone (the media) sighs and forgets what the question was in the first place. Witness, for instance, the Republican debates during the last election, Romney and McCain each trying to utter "Ronald Reagan" with more vibrato.

Naturally the legacy project dovetails with the current conservative mindset, which is authoritarian, always seeking a single, magical figure to worship. These guys often accuse liberals of "worshiping" Michael Moore, for instance, or Gloria Steinem, or Richard Dawkins, or some other bete noir of theirs. They also say we "worship" Obama. And the problem is not the worshiping, per se, but the falseness of our gods. But, to take the Obama example: no, we don't worship him; we like him. Some of us like him a whole lot, and most of us are just freaking relieved that he won. But the whole purpose of being liberal is not to subordinate yourself to any one authority. You examine, you compare. You gather from many sources, sift and weigh. Some of us even "worship" a god (although I don't), but I strongly suspect it's a very different kind of worship than the conservatives'. I'd think it would take forms like gratitude combined with questioning and--this is important--deep challenging. It would not be a substitute for hard thought.

Also, of course, Reagan was always already (thanks, Jacques D!) a myth in the making. His whole purpose in life was to mythologize himself--that was his way of serving his country and his party. In terms of his party, it worked, at least in the short term; but it deprived them of any need to challenge themselves morally or intellectually, so ultimately he hurt them. It was no accident that he was an actor. His most successful character was himself, and that character, like other fictions, knows no death.

A Mercy

My friend Anita Feferman reviews Toni Morrison's new novel.

Surviving

In this week's NYT Book Review, Jennifer Schuessler brings up a really interesting point made by Greil Marcus twenty years ago. Apparently I missed it the first time around, but it seems more true today than ever: the word "surviving" has come to mean the same thing as "living."

In his 1989 cult hit “Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century,” Greil Marcus uncorked a memorable riff about the obsession with surviving in ’70s pop hits like “I Will Survive,” “Soul Survivor” and “Staying Alive”: “Through the magic of ordinary language, ‘survival’ and its twin, ‘survivor,’ wrote the 1960s out of history as a mistake and translated the 1970s performance of any act of personal or professional stability (holding a job, remaining married, staying out of a mental hospital or simply not dying) into heroism. First corrupted as a reference to those ‘survivors’ of ‘the Sixties’ who were now engaged in ‘real life,’ the word contained an implacable equation: survival was real life.”

Schuessler goes on to note that the NYT archives show 134 occurrences of the word "survivor" in 1980 and 652 in 2008. She does not make any suggestions as to why this has happened, and since I haven't read Marcus, I can only venture what is probably a platitude about post-war generations who feel guilty about being too comfortable. With few exceptions, the privileged classes in this country have not been called upon to do much of anything, other than hold a job and--if it suits us, or is allowed to us in the first place--remain married.

It's one reason Bush's admonition to the nation after 9/11--Go shopping!--was profoundly disappointing to the point of ruin. We aren't capable of anything else, he seemed to be telling us; and worse, he said it with no sense of how little we'd all come to expect of ourselves. Again, I think it started with Reagan, who, with great rhetorical skill, turned selfishness into patriotism. Want to help your country? Call your congressman, he told us, and tell him you want lower taxes. Don't help the poor; don't volunteer for the Peace Corps or the military (it's the poor's job to get killed, and we'll be sure to praise them to the heavens for doing so). Don't plant those damn polluting trees. All these things are counterproductive. But sit on your growing ass and gloat about not toppling over--you're a patriot!

For a generation, we, the relatively well-off,* have had no expectations placed on us as citizens. So many of us have turned to asking things of ourselves for ourselves--overcoming addictions, real or perceived, for instance. As the flip side of what we now call survival, self-improvement is certainly not a bad thing. But it has become an end in itself. With no larger implications, all one's personal struggles and triumphs become magnified to epic scale.

People do want something to be asked of them. They want to struggle with inertia, to translate their personal success into lasting significance. It's clear that part of Obama's appeal is that he promised to ask us to sacrifice, though what that entails, none of us really knows yet. In any case, with this economic collapse, we will suffer more, whether we want to or not. I really hope Obama and our other leaders use this opportunity to reframe our self-image as Americans. What we ultimately must overcome is the stultifying mindset brought on by decades of globalized consumer capitalism.

*UPDATE: By "relatively well-off" I mean the various, always shifting levels of middle class and higher.** This brings to mind another point about "surviving," inherent in the original Marcus quote. Being a "survivor of the sixties" means, in general, crossing the gulf from dirty fucking hippie (DFH, a phrase I think Atrios coined) to Nixon's Silent Majority. Not that the former DFHs believe what the Silent Majority believed, exactly, but they started to resemble them for all intents and purposes, and that caused no end of anxiety.

I've been dipping into Rick Pearlstein's fascinating book Nixonland, which explains in great detail how Nixon, aided by Agnew, Saffire, and others, created the Silent (White) Majority specifically in contrast to the DFHs and Angry Scary Blacks. Those who played by society's rules--an act which by definition entailed silence--were explicitly elevated to hero status. So it seems like two strains of "survivors" actually come from this. The first, as Marcus suggests, is the former DFHs who may repudiate their former actions, while at the same time wishing they were still doing them, or at least hoping those acts had some value. The second is those who bought Nixon's line that ordinary life, i.e. compliance with the status quo, is heroic. Obviously these two strains are not mutually exclusive by any means. I'm sure I've taken comfort from time to time in the thought that I'm a good person for doing what I've been told--and it's an easy hop from "good" to "heroic." One needs such compensation especially when compliance does not seem to lead to any very compelling rewards. One gets to keep one's job and one's health insurance a little while longer, is all.

**Of course, the financial crisis also reveals that the "well off" are not so "well off" after all. Built on absurd mortages and credit-card debt, much of this well-off-ness was quite literally fiction. We can certainly expect a spate of memoirs about surviving foreclosure and so forth. But is it heroism or just regression to the mean?

I'll leave for another time my thoughts on this even-more-wonderful-than-usual Slacktivist post, detailing the shift from progressive optimism to apocalyptic vengefulness in American evangelical Christianity. But it definitely has something to do with this inwardly focused concept of surviving, and the idea that trying to improve life on earth (as opposed to one's own soul) is a waste of time. I'll just say that in sympathizing with this view, Reagan, that supposed relentless optimist, was a pessimist.

Why we need Bigfoot hunters

From Amy, blogger-by-proxy, this Salon article explains why the crypto can't be completely cut off from zoology.

The hunt for cryptids isn't just quixotic. It's motivated by the same 
ambitions that have led to key zoological discoveries. You might even 
say cryptid hunters keep warm that place in science where
 anything is possible. And it's from that place where some of the 
most astounding advances in the sciences are derived.



At the turn of the 20th century, for instance, the Mountain Gorilla and the
 platypus were thought to be legend or hoax. Pearl fishermen of 
Indonesia told tales of enormous prehistoric-like creatures on a remote 
island; the stories turned out to be real and the animals were named 
Komodo dragons. (An animal, even today, has not been "discovered" 
until a bona fide scientist says so, no matter how many locals claim 
its existence.)



Similarly, I'm open to the possibility that there are moderate Republicans, but I'll only believe when I see one.

The geography of the middle-aged mind

Trev and I are having one of our recurrent discussions on buying a place "in the country." The immediate trigger this time is probably the economy. Since we're both currently working, we suddenly feel very rich, and inclined to prey upon desperate souls forced to give up their homes "in the country" for bargain prices. The discussion goes something like this. I'll leave you to guess the speakers' identities, although, to a large extent, they are interchangeable.

X (looking at realtor.com): This is a great deal. We should buy this (pointing to large, tilting structure with no windows on 30 acres outside of Susanville).
Y: Why aren't there windows?
X: Maybe that's not the actual house.
Y: Then why's there a picture of it?
X: We could put solar panels on it, and great big windows.
Y: But that would be hard.
X: True.
Y: What would we do for a living out there?
X: Grow quinoa on the 30 acres and sell it.
Y: But that would be hard.
X: True.
Y: Maybe we should live in the city.
X: That might be cool.
Y: Here's a great place right by 280.
X: That would be noisy.
Y: True.

And so here we stay, in a condo on the Peninsula, between house and apartment, between country and city, in one of a series of side-by-side towns that owe their existence to a railroad. Our walls are eggshell; our kitchen counters still covered in the fake butcher-block veneer that I vowed we would get rid of if we did absolutely nothing else to the place. The tiles in the bathroom remain old-lady pink. What's the point of remodeling? We won't be here forever, and the next owner will want to redo everything anyway. Why throw money literally down the drain? Or maybe we just don't care. Remodeling's not our thing. What is our thing? Do we have to have a thing? Is this it?

We have been here for almost exactly five years. Are all these signs of transition a smokescreen for permanence? Do we like it here? Are we stuck or settled? Are we ambivalent or content? Is happiness simply making peace with ambiguity? Or is that giving up?

Rejection forever!

Via Glimmer Train, some en/discouragement from Steve Almond.

New template for a new day

I don't know about you, but I was getting kinda sick of that green.

Anything worth doing is easy

Here's a great excerpt from Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life?, republished on TheRumpus.net. I'm always thrilled when successful writers' trajectories are similar to mine (except I have yet to experience the "successful" part in any major way). I definitely relate to Bronson's sense, before his first book was published, of not writing the way I'm supposed to write. Until recently I felt like my deepest instincts on both subject matter and my voice--not separate entities, after all--were not artistically serious. Minimalism, childhood experience, and travel stories still seem to dominate the literary market, making other modes, such as humor or satire, and stories set in the workplace, seem like fluff. I do write from the point of view of children sometimes, and a couple of those stories have been published. But I'm not very interested in actual childhood experiences, only in the off-kilter, naive viewpoint, which can, I've come to realize, be created just as well through a goofball adult. In fact I currently prefer the goofball adult, since that presents interesting choices about what that adult (sometimes not a real character, but just a narrator persona) has decided to know and not know about the world. I can make these narrators wilfully blind to something a regular adult would understand implicitly. With children, I feel more constrained by what a real child could actually understand and say at that age. Come to think of it, though, there's no reason for this constraint, since I'm chucking realism over the side anyway. Why not have a four-year-old narrator who speaks like a college professor? Hmm.

Anyway, I found it reassuring to read about Bronson's struggles to defend his breakthrough story. He realized it was a breakthrough long before most other people saw it that way. He was repeatedly advised to dump it, because it was so different from everything else he had done. But it was his experience in writing it, the pure joy and the surprising lack of exhaustion and struggle, that told him he was on the right track. And I've found this to be true: the stories, or parts of stories, that I've really had to wrestle with have ultimately turned out not to be very good. The stuff that comes easily, that makes me laugh and lets me write for hours on end without constantly backtracking and tweaking, with no need for food or coffee (until after I finally stop, when I stand up and see spots)--that's the stuff that I ultimately believe in. It also provokes the strongest reactions in others, I've realized--both love and hate, but no middle ground.

In other words, one always hears that anything worth doing is hard. But when it comes to writing fiction, what's most worth doing might be what's easy.

On public humiliation

I understand Bush was made uncomfortable by Obama's speech at the inauguration, and by the booing he received when he (Bush) was introduced to the crowd. I admit, I cringed a little on Bush's behalf. I can't stand to see people embarrassed or humiliated; I can never watch shows like "Jerry Springer" or even "Survivor" for that reason. As I kid I found "I Love Lucy" reruns pure torment--though it never occurred to me to turn the show off, on those long afternoons lying in bed with some mysterious ailment. Perhaps I saw it as my punishment for missing school, for maybe not being quite as sick as I had made it seem.

Nevertheless, in the case of Bush, I think having to sit there and take a few mild smacks from his successor--and to maybe hear the booing and singing, which he could, with his mindset, have passed off as the wind--was deserved. In all likelihood, this was the worst punishment he is ever going to receive for what he's done. Obama has signalled he wants to move on. Let's not bicker and argue about who tortured who; it's all waterboarding under the bridge, right? Bush will retreat to his Dallas manse and emerge in a few years as the baseball commissioner (his real goal in seeking the presidency, as I've heard). He has been and always will be insulated from any consequences. That's how he came to be who he is. The inauguration was the one moment he was vulnerable, and the crowd, perhaps sensing that, did their best to dispense justice, in a non-violent, even humorous sort of way.

Obama could do a lot more on the justice front, but maybe he feels the speech did the job. I hope not.

World's most horrifying robot

This is way beyond--way beyond--Japanese robo-toddlers.

A new day

Beth puts it more eloquently than I can. But all I've been thinking this morning is:
Our long national nightmare is over.
Our long, lingering, sense of shame as Americans, like a low-grade fever, has broken.
The sky feels higher today.
Even Rick Warren can't wreck that. Plus Lowry was awesome.

Arts and Letters Daily

I went to hear Denis Dutton at Stanford last evening. Still processing the talk...in the meantime, here's his web site, Arts and Letters Daily. My, there's a lot of those arts, and letters.

Hollow Earth

I'm happy to report that I'm back working on my novel, after the two-week mental and physical implosion known as the holidays. Well, sort of back. I'm doing some research (aka procrastinating) by reading Hollow Earth by David Standish. I bought it for Trev a couple of years ago, and he just cracked it open for the first time, looking for a reference to City of Ember, a book that's been turned into a movie with Bill Murray--who knew?--and which he watched on the plane back from Cleveland. That reference does not exist. However, it dawned on me that my novel includes some hollow earth--what do you call it, theory? imagery?--so I picked it up. It's fascinating. One of many things I didn't know: ground zero for nineteenth-century hollow-earth thinking is...Ohio! John Cleves Symmes, he of the critically important Symmes's Holes (oh! there's a Museum of Hoaxes!), is buried in Hamilton, and his sidekick / rival Jeremiah Reynolds was born in southwestern Ohio. It was Reynolds's name that issued repeatedly from Edgar Allan Poe's dying lips--why, evidently no one knows. But his and Symmes's ideas of polar exploration leading to voyages into the earth's interior inspired Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Which is one hell of a narrative. Also ape men are big in underground narratives; there's a Bigfoot figure, in the form of a large, hairy shepherd, in Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.

It also occurs to me that on our flight to Cleveland for Thanksgiving, they showed Journey to the Center of the Earth. Twice. (SFO-Houston, Houston-CLE). What is with Continental Airlines and the hollow earth? Will they be adding Symzonia to their route map?

Vegan Akron

Here's one of several places we meant to go on our last visit to Ohio, and didn't: Vegiterranean, Chrissie Hynde's new vegan restaurant in Akron. Say it again: vegan restaurant in Akron. I hope it succeeds, even if it's awful. I couldn't get excited about the menu, which is built around fake meat--veggie hot dogs, burgers, chicken-like bits, etc. I get what they are trying to do; diners in America's erstwhile tire capital, they figure, won't cotton to a pyramid of mixed seaweeds alongside quinoa fritters with tamarind sauce. On the other hand, you have to make a *really good* veggie burger to get people to forget the original, if they aren't inclined toward vegetarianism to begin with. I'm not sure I've ever had a *really good* veggie burger. (Perhaps Chrissie's was the one, and I've missed it!) What I have had are surprisingly good veggie burgers, inoffensive "chicken" nuggets, veggie dogs no worse than the average Ballpark. It seems to me the best bet is something like Ubuntu, where the entire concept of the meal is reconceived with vegetables, fruit, or grains at the center. But then again, perhaps you have to let people know that they don't have to give up hot dogs and hamburgers to be vegetarian. And if you offer more radical veggie food, as Vegiterranean sort of does, people may transition over to it. Anyway, good luck, Chrissie. Next time I'm in Akron, I will go.

UPDATE: I think what I'm getting at here--which I will express in the form of an SAT flashback--is as follows:
veggie burger: beef burger :: movie: book
That is, the best veggie burger (or dog, or mcnuggetty thing, or whatever) is somehow inspired by the original item but does not attempt to copy it. It has to be a veggie thing, first and foremost. Just as movies that try to reproduce the original book on film are always overcrammed, literal minded, and bad. The movie has to be a movie. It can't be a book or imitate a book, because it's a different art form.

Little conundrummer boy

This year I banned Christmas music from the household. However, I have ventured outside these past few weeks and into stores, where the only song that ever seemed to be playing was "Little Drummer Boy." It was never the same version twice--at least I don't think so--and I see on Wikipedia that there are over 200 recorded versions of this exceedingly virulent earworm.

So here's what I've been wondering:

Does the playing of "Little Drummer Boy" in stores over and over and over subtly undermine the capitalist enterprise? The song, as you will recall, is about a "poor boy" who visits the baby Jesus, but has "no gifts to bring"--at least none "fit to give a king." In desperation (?) he plays a little number on his drum and the baby Jesus smiles at him. So this could suggest that material gifts are not necessary, and never were necessary, at Christmas. The wise men weren't so wise to haul that gold and frankincense and myrrh across the sands after all. The boy gives of himself by sharing his special (and perhaps only) talent, which is all Jesus really asks.

On the other hand, perhaps the drummer boy only gets a pass because, as he explains to the linguistically adept newborn, he is a "poor boy too." If he weren't poor, he would have been expected to cough up something nice in a gold or a myrrh. Each according to his means, in other words, which could be a nod to either communism or pre-easy-credit capitalism. But if he hadn't pleaded poverty, would Jesus have been pissed at getting a drum solo when he expected something he could melt down and sell later on?

So what's the message of this song, and how is the message affected by hearing it on a Muzak program amid the glare of fluorescent lights and the whir of hysterical consumption? As we shop along to its insidious thrum, do we think, wow, I'm glad I'm not so poor as to be reduced to playing a drum. I can offer the finest gifts--or I ought to, anyway. Maybe I haven't spent enough on Aunt Martha. OR--what the hell am I doing here? All this junk I'm buying just reifies, and further complicates, the family psychodrama that blows into town like a storm system every year. By god, we need to simplify our lives! I'm putting this chafing dish back! Aunt Martha will understand, if I just explain it in exactly the right words...

Certainly if the song is meant to be subversive, it isn't working. Merchants see it as no threat. Or perhaps the constant repetition is what robs it of its power.

Barack is down

OK, I took the Obama widget off the site. I suppose he has all the money he needs anyway. I'm still glad he's going to be president, and I'm even more glad we didn't get the alternative. Can you imagine McCain, let alone SP, "handling" the auto bailout, the economy in general, global warming...can you even imagine them handling the transition? The bizarre cabinet appointees popping up like a George Romero version of Whack-a-mole? I suspect it would have been an even more unsettling holiday season than it has been.

But. The Rick Warren invocation is unforgivable. Not only for all the reasons that thousands of bloggers have already mentioned. But because it fucks up the inauguration for us. This was supposed to be our--progressives'--moment to celebrate so many victories against considerable odds. Now the whole thing feels icky. I am not even sure I want to watch, whereas at one point I was seriously considering trying to go to DC for the event. Warren is Pat Robertson in a fat-and-younger suit. It is sickening that 1) there is assumed to be such a position as "America's preacher," which must be filled now that Billy Graham...is he dead? I forget... and, anyway, 2) Rick Warren is, by fiat, that preacher. If we must have a cartoon balloon hovering over the country to represent our values, how about Underdog from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade?

When in doubt, cook

I can't remember a holiday season that I've felt more bleak about. Clearly it's the economy (and one is now more compelled than ever to add: Stupid!). We assembled the tree yesterday, and I flat-out refused to have Christmas music playing during the ritual. And honestly I only agreed to the tree for the sake of the cats, who like to sleep under it, and in past years have put aside their mutual hostility to actually snuggle under its fire-retardant boughs...

On the other hand, we had a lovely dinner with friends last weekend, for which I made the vegan moussaka from Veganomicon. That one's a definite keeper, and the pine-nut cream sauce more than makes up for the absence of cheese. And this weekend I made bread from scratch! I don't believe I have ever done that before--meaning real bread, with the damp towel and the kneading and the waiting around. The recipe was from this month's Vegetarian Times, which offers several good-looking recipes, most of which seem veganizable. I made the rye, which turned out great. I've been looking for bread recipes after the repeated failure of the extra-fast, no-knead recipe from the NYT. Could have been me, no doubt, but this thing was a brick, twice.

Actually I feel a little less bleak just having written the above. When in doubt, cook, or write about it, I guess.

What is money?

This is a question I've had for a number of years, and it's even more baffling now. I am beginning to gather that one reason for the current financial crisis is that no one really knows. Perhaps everyone is beginning to realize that money is a species of mass delusion like religion--only worse, because questioning it brings about real and immediate consequences.

I remember being taught, as a little kid, that every coin or dollar bill I had represented an amount of gold in Fort Knox. If I wanted to, I could show up at the Fort and demand my bit of gold in exchange for my currency. The system was designed to save our backs; otherwise we'd all have to drag around sacks of gold and the most wealthy would end up horribly crippled--who wanted that? It all made good sense, and I happily did my part as a consumer for many years, a little gold nimbus hovering in the back of my mind every time I performed the ritual of exchange. Apparently, though, none of this has been true for quite some time, and the only people who want it to be true are right-wing, tin-foil-hatted survivalists.

The gold standard is problematic for a couple of reasons I can think of. One--mining gold is terrible for the earth and for the people who do it. Two--what's really so great about gold? It's pretty, it's malleable, it's hard to get (see One, above)--but so what? There are other pretty objects, as different civilizations have shown by trading in beads, shells, etc. So is the issue beauty combined with rarity? But if rarity, or difficulty in attaining (which may be, in fact, the same thing), means *doing damage* in order to attain, what's the value there? In one way or another, we have to pay for that damage.

OK, so back to what money is now. If it represents the combined value of all goods and services produced in this country (and in the world, too, I guess), that seems to be a tautology: money is worth what we buy with it. There are goods we don't buy, services we don't use. In any case, we're back to mass delusion. Now, we're all deciding that Hummers, for instance, aren't valuable after all. What happens if the concept of value starts getting radically separated from the material world? Can we monetize time, for instance, in a way that would support our current economic system? Or is that just another form of barter--if I give you five hundred hours of my time for a Prius, does that just mean I'm doing something I'd rather not be doing during that time, like working? And how do I prove I've worked, if you weren't there to watch me--by giving you the money? Is there no escaping the material world? Does value always entail some form of money?

Some economist on Marketplace last week finally raised this question, and said something to the effect that money is now nothing but numbers on screens. Because of all these complicated financial instruments (like derivatives), no one knows what the numbers really represent. The problem is, in a nutshell, that everyone has started wondering. And the powers that be want us to just shut up and stop asking questions--don't even think the questions, or you are sinning and there will be consequences. The system will crash and you will be poor.

Oh, my goodness, gracious

What you can buy off the Internet!

The poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, set to music!

Speaking of air travel

In general I am not a happy flyer--as my Pindeldyboz story attests. (The story is otherwise completely fictional! I assure you! Except for the witch thing; that actually happened, though not quite in the same way.) Flying back from Ohio last Sunday was, however, rather interesting. We usually fly direct, but this time that particular flight was $1000 apiece (for coach!). So we went through Houston. On the first leg, Cleveland to Houston, I was the picture of misery. Stuck in the middle seat on a relentlessly bumpy flight--and nothing but whiteness outside. But the flight from Houston to SFO was almost lovely. We flew over New Mexico, where there was a bluish haze over the mountains, and that kind of gold New Mexico light. Then we flew up the California coast as the sun was setting. We saw everything from the Central Valley, which was under a fog blanket that looked just like snow, to the ocean, which was glassy. The sunset was brilliantly striped, like a Gap sweater. Best of all we were in bulkhead seats, with plenty of legroom, and the ride up there--I had forgotten this--is much smoother. It was like being in first class, without the assholes.

Thought for the holiday season

Put your own mask on first before assisting other passengers.

The Christmas Tree Reef

I just read in William Ashworth's book Great Lakes Journey about a wonderful idea they had in Collingwood, Ontario, Canada. They (i.e. smart Canadians) collected discarded Christmas trees, stuck the trunks in cement, then sank the whole thing into Lake Ontario. Voila--a new reef for fish. The next year fish populations rose something like 1000%.

This year's vegetarian Thanksgiving

Last year I made these items for festive vegetarian meals around the holidays. I'd say both were better than average, though the white-bean thing gets a tad gloppy. Tomorrow, for a pre-Thanksgiving dinner with my in-laws (since we're going to Ohio for the actual day), I'll be making the Vegetarian Times' Holiday Cashew Nut Roast. It's true that when your vegetarian friend (or daughter-in-law) offers to bring the "Holiday Cashew Nut Roast," your smile grows a little stiff, and you say, "Wow! That sounds interesting!" But this one looks pretty good, and not too difficult. Unlike, say, the Tassajara Recipe Book's Cheese and Nut Loaf, which I guess was OK, but Jesus, it was a pain to make. The animal products are, I think, not a selling point, and it is about as heavy as a cinder block. Nothing against Tassajara, or Edward Brown, who seems like a wonderful person--but there's a certain assumption with these recipes that you are cooking as part of your Zen practice. Meaning you welcome, or don't notice, all the damn ingredients, or the fact that you forgot to cook the brown rice ahead of time (watch out for those recipe lists that say "1 cup brown rice, cooked"--the Cashew Roast has this, too). Anyway, making that loaf filled me certain un-Buddhist furor. But the Veg Times has yet to steer me wrong. Brewer's yeast is about $15 a pound, though.

UPDATE, 11-24:
So this thing turned out pretty good. I'd say 3.5 stars out of five. A few caveats: I think next time I will use roasted, unsalted cashews for more cashewy goodness. One could maybe add in other nuts, like walnuts, for variety. It should also be noted that sauteeing nuts is not an activity one can wander away from. They burn. I caught them just in time. I might make more layers: eggplant/stuffing/eggplant/stuffing/eggplant/tomatoes. But I'm like that with eggplant. I am not sure the brewer's yeast is all that necessary; you could probably use nutritional yeast, or just throw in some more herbs, like sage. Vegetarian / mushroom gravy and cranberry sauce* really do complement this.

*I finally made cranberry sauce from scratch--there's nothing to it. (I know you know that. But I grew up with the purplish stuff shlooping out of the can, so this is a thrill for me. Damn, it's good.)

Slack is back

I am practicing being a glass-half-full kind of person. To that end, a Monday litany of good news:

• Barack Obama is still President-Elect. Evidence is mounting that we did not dream it.
• Our cat Bella took her first trip to the vet (that was bad) but she is OK. The vet is two blocks away, which is also good news.
• The Slacktivist has resumed his Left Behind Fridays with his first critique of Left Behind: The Movie. And it includes a pretty fine explanation of why bad books make better movies than good books (even though, in this case, a bad book also seems to have engendered a bad movie, which is good news for Slacktivist fans). (OK, and technically that's Friday good news, not Monday good news, but I found it on a Monday, when I needed it a lot more.) (One thing glass-half-empty people do is nitpick about details and then use them to buffer their announcement of having enjoyed something, even though they did not, because they were nitpicking in preparation for the apology they knew they would have to issue for having pleasure.)(Well, I still enjoy the Slacktivist, and will probably save the LBFs for Mondays in the future.)
  
• (Meanwhile Bella plots her revenge.)
  

Maybe not palinating

Two days later, I'm thinking--what if we just ignore her?

Growing up, I was taught that if someone bullies you, you should ignore them. Don't give them the satisfaction of reacting, and they'll go away. As anyone who's been bullied knows, this is bullshit. The solution is martial arts. Even if not applying the techniques to the bully's face and nuts, the training gives one bearing--an ever-so-subtle, don't-fuck-with-me stance. But I digress.

My point here is this: if you think of Palin as a bully, and I do, then she has to be taken down (I mean rhetorically and conceptually, not physically). The constant ridicule has been important in this regard. But what if we think of her, in addition, as a pathetic attention-sponge? Or maybe she's like those aliens in Star Trek (or the carnies in Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, which was a terrible movie, Wired's recent recommendation notwithstanding?)--what if she feeds on negative emotions, our twisted longings and resentments? We on the left have those too, you know. Since she's largely a media creature, if we ignore her, she will on some level cease to exist. Joe the Plumber has already been flushed.

Maybe I'm just finally saturated. Something snapped about 8:45 this morning when I popped over to Andrew Sullivan's for his latest SP tidbit, and, honestly, I just didn't care. (Also one of his readers begged him to give it a rest, and Josh Marshall has said the same thing--It's Over, Sarah.) If only.

Palinating

Via Daily Kos, I see Sarah Palin is now both a noun and a verb. It does seem unfair to Michael Palin, who's done plenty to attach better meanings to the name.

Trev thinks I should let go of the whole SP thing, now that the election is over. I will, once I'm certain that she's been utterly and irretrievably destroyed as a political force. This Urban Dictionary entry should help.

I'm happy but...monotheism is bad

I think I'm more stunned than anything about Obama's landslide. (Is it a landslide? What's the cutoff?) I'm shocked that there weren't more dirty tricks from the Repubs. I'm amazed that after everything BushCo did, we still have a functioning democracy. Our slide into a new Dark Age has ground to a halt.

Except:

1. What Aravosis said. I'm still mad as hell at the right in this country. I do not want to offer them a seat at the table. We did that before. Each one of their asses took up at least two seats. They made us say grace to their mean, nasty little god. They threw food and knives. They spilled blood, human and animal, on our tablecloth and claimed it was their own. They hollered with their mouths full and cranked up Rush Limbaugh while we were trying to talk. Then they left us their mess to clean up.

2. And they will scorch the earth in retreat. See: passage of Prop 8, in California. This is shameful. But already the good guys are fighting back (again from Aravosis).

So here's why monotheism is bad. When there's just one god, it's too easy to confuse yourself with him. (Isn't it amazing how God always wants what I want? What a great God!) Whereas, if there are many, you have to wonder--well, Dionysis seems to want x, but Appollo wants y. What are ya gonna do? Either you throw up your hands, or you have to choose a side and let them battle it out on Olympos. Sort of like representative democracy.

A Halloween mystery!

I just noticed something amazing about one of my Red Rock photos. A human figure in the upper left corner:
See it? An archer. Jesus with a bow and arrow?

On gloom

I was getting ready to blog this morning about the end of Daylight Savings (I know it's "Saving," but I find that gross to say) Time--about how it seems to me like the end of the world--but then the power went out due to a storm. So here I am at a little after 5 p.m., the sky a pale green, darkness about to clang down all around us (not to mention sugar-crazed children and their minders out terrorizing the streets; thank god for our second-floor condo and security building). As a lifelong Californian, Trev does not understand my problem. It's true that here we have plenty of sun in winter, and much-needed rain, which causes spring to happen round about December, just when life is really starting to suck for the folks back in my place of origin. That would be Ohio. It's clear that my seasonal gloom is hard-wired into me from growing up there. Daylight Standard Time means Time to shrink. I feel my muscles contracting even now. Going anywhere is a project: you stuff your feet into boots which never, ever keep your feet warm, and wrap your neck in an itchy scarf which does not quite address the fact that your coat leaves a mysterious gap in coverage in the center of your chest, which the wind then finds and slugs with fists of ice. Don't get me started on hat hair. The fact that I don't have to deal with severe cold and snow anymore only engenders guilt and alienation, which causes me to focus more and more on the darkness, which none of us escapes. Dark at 5:00. That is madness.

However I would trade six months of a full-on Cleveland winter* for:
--Obama win
--Defeat of Proposition 8
*I offer this only if there are no alternatives; i.e. if these things weren't going to happen unless I personally volunteered to experience a full-on Cleveland winter for six months. In that case I'd do it for a year if I had to. But only if.**
**For an Obama landslide, I'm prepared to offer three months, with same conditions as above applying.***
***Lots of liberals, including me, think they are magic. That is, they think they personally can doom the election through any expression of optimism. Maybe we're narcissists, infants, just like everybody says; or maybe the fact that any human being could be so deluded as to vote for McCain/Palin or so cruel as to vote for Prop 8 is inexplicable by any form of rational thought, so we turn to magic.****
****We are not magic. But we have power.
Barack Obama for President.
No on 8.

UPDATE:
This cheered me up. Especially this part:

The I Forget How to Turn a Doorknob Effect This is expected to keep roughly one percent of Republican voters from leaving the house.

On blooming late

I was ecstatic last week to find, in the New Yorker, a justification for my existence. At last! Malcolm Gladwell writes in the Oct. 20 issue about late-blooming creative types, like Ben Fountain and Cezanne. OK, the problem with laties is that they do look, for much of their lives, very much like another group whose designation starts with "l" (followed by "o," "s," "e"--you get the picture). So they require a good deal of forebearance and faith from those around them--those who may even have to financially support them, while telling them over and over that they don't suck, even when, at the time in question, they do. The early work of the late bloomer is indistinguishable from that of the loser. But Gladwell's point is that late-blooming is not simply a matter of figuring out, late in life, what you are good at. There are, in fact, two different kinds of creativity. One is the "young genius" kind that we are most familiar with, in which beauty springs fully formed from the often equally beautiful young creator. The other is the "experimental" kind, which requires years of gathering and testing and reviewing and rehearsing. Yes, years! Decades, even! Did I mention Cezanne? How about Mark Twain--it took him 10 years to write Huckleberry Finn. I've only been at my novel for four...and a half...

That's my new story, and I'm sticking to it. Thanks, Malcolm!

Red Rock Canyon

Mind still blown from Mojave trip. Here are photos of Red Rock Canyon, while we wait for my words to come back:

Kernville

Off to Kernville tomorrow to visit my cousin and poke around Bakersfield and the Mojave Desert--both settings for my novel, about which I know rather little. (The way things look now my next novel will be set in Cleveland. Why can't I think of stories about Maui?)

One thing we will not be doing in Kernville is kayaking on the Kern River. My cousin took us out for a spin, literally, about four years ago. We beginners got to use inflatable kayaks, which, OK, don't tip as much, but they do get blown along on the current like giant leaves, causing smaller persons borne thereon to outstrip all the people in the other kayaks who know what they are doing and can shout instructions as you dive over the rapids. Not that instructions might have helped at that point. Oh, the other thing these inflatables do is they spin around backward, which is how I went over the dreaded Ewing's rapid the first time out. The second time, I actually came out of the boat (this all really did happen in slow motion) and hovered above it for a few moments; but I was somehow able to polevault myself back in, using my paddle.

So a little car trip through Oildale doesn't seem so bad now.

George Saunders

Have I mentioned lately that George Saunders is this atheist's God? We saw him last week at City Arts and Lectures with our friend Amy. (He's also coming to Stanford in February.) He was of course funny and passionate, and he gave the following advice to someone in an MFA program: write what only you can write. It sounds like a variation on "write what you know," but it isn't. He went on to relate his experience, which I share, of discovering to one's dismay that one's best writing is funny. Which leads one to worry that one is "just" a comic writer or a humor writer or a satirist, as if humor were not also deeply serious. I love Saunders' work because it is so relevant, whereas more earnest-seeming pieces often aren't. It may often be the case that the kind of writer you most fear being is the one you are.

Where are the pastors?

Via Talking Points Memo, this is a start, as a former supporter calls McCain out:

John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us," I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.

However, where are the nation's great Christian leaders at this moment? Where is Rick Warren, for example, the oh-so-reasonable one? Does Christianity have nothing to say about "instigating violence"? The silence from the pulpits is astounding.

The mush-mouthed among us

I used to think that George H. W. Bush stumbled over his words when he was lying. Somewhere not terribly deep inside him (because he was not terribly deep), he felt that what he was saying was wrong--and indecent. The structures of grammar and common morality, somehow intertwined, were fighting him at those moments. This was before I had plumbed the true evil of the Bush family, so I may rethink that theory. However, as many have already noted, Sarah Palin and W. also share the gift of garble. And they speak most clearly and forcefully when they are lying ("thanks but no thanks," etc.). So what's happening? Is it sheer stupidity, a lack of contact with sentence structure in general which one gets by, say, reading?

A few years ago someone (I can't remember who, unfortunately) observed that W. stumbled most commonly when speaking about caring for others ("Is our children learning?" "I know how hard it is to put food on your family"). These notions either brought up some kind of weird emotional blockage, or else were so foreign to him that he could not even use the language. As for Palin, I don't know for sure. But I think the issue is foreignness. Anything not directly related to Sarah and her quest for power is simply baffling. Other people? Other countries, opinions? Newspapers, you say, with, what did you call them? writers...? Does...not...compute....

Not yet a vegetarian

So we were watching "Mythbusters" on DVD, another desperation selection from the San Carlos library. I gather it's meant to get kids and juvenile adults excited about science, but the methods seem dicey to me and in any case the real point is to blow things up. So anyway they did an episode on Diet Coke and Mentos, the phenomenon that's "sweeping the Internet!" (the episodes we watched were obviously a few years old). They wanted to find out why a liter of Diet Coke will erupt when a Mentos (Mento?) candy is introduced into it. First question: why does the guy have to wear GLOVES and a RESPIRATOR when working with the ingredients in Diet Coke? That aside, I learned that an ingredient in Mentos is gelatin. Of course! To make it smooth! Turns out that shit is in everything, including the multivitamins I've been taking for years. Ah, how ignorant I was, popping that giant "horse pill"--literally--thinking I was just being extra cautious in case I was missing something in my virtuous, cruelty-free diet. Fucking Safeway. But so-called vegan multivitamins invariably seem to be megadose, as if individuals of this persuasion can also be counted on to be *psychos.* How about just a nice, normal, 100% RDA multivitamin, not made of horse, that won't make me magnetic or cause me to roll up like a potato bug in five years? Too much to ask?

God.

I gather there's a world financial crisis or something going on, too.

Congratulations, I guess

Congrats to Bristol and Levi, who now have the world's biggest shotgun pointed at their heads: John McCain's ego.

Question of this day

Who is running the country right now?

Question of the day

Doesn't Hamid Karzai have better things to do than be a prop in the Fascist Barbie UN Play Set?

In the grip of Sarahcosis

If it takes me another two years to finish my novel, I should probably blame Sarah Palin. For the past 3+ weeks I have been unable to stop checking blogs for more than 15 minutes at a stretch. It's all I can do even to go to bed. I've played whack-a-mole with my RSS reader--staring at it till the yellow flash told me there was a brand-new post on some blog, clicking before the color had even faded. Now even that is too slow for me. I simply start with Americablog and click through the blogroll, occasionally playing a sort of "blog golf" along the way (can I get to TalkLeft from Andrew Sullivan in 2 clicks?). All of this takes time and emotional energy and contributes absolutely nothing to the cause. But I will give more money to Barack Obama today.

I couldn't sleep last night because of the Lifetime poll that said the M-P and O-B tickets were about even on "women's issues." The upshot, apparently, was that women now think McCain understands them because he has one standing beside him, hollering quasi-fascist inanities and lies. Today TalkLeft and others provide some perspective. But there is a parallel universe, separated from ours by an infinitessimal membrane, in which McCain and Palin are considered legitimate presidential candidates. And the membrane is porous.

The Great Blue

Please read Kate Steilen's beautiful, perceptive new blog.

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was one of those writers I didn't even bother envying--his talent and his energy were simply on a different plane, one I could only reach by Star Trek transporter. I never read Infinite Jest, but Brief Interviews with Hideous Men has been on my bedside table for over a year. I look to it whenever I feel trapped by the conventional short-story form. I've broken too many stories by trying to force them into Freitag's triangle. Whereas Wallace would be, like, what triangle? What the hell are you talking about? He simply blows form away, turns it inside out. His stories are all voice, and for him voice is far more than enough.

Amanda Marcotte makes the interesting point that all of us are complicit in a creative person's suicide; we feed off that person's sadness (though he was willing, more than willing, to let us do so). I'm not sure how I feel about that idea. The late and equally lamented Joe Strummer once said non-smokers should be banned from enjoying any creative work done by smokers. After all (I'm interpolating a bit), they're the ones who scorched their lungs and risked cancer as part of their creative process. It's not fair that we get to have it risk-free.

Swing Me Close

Read Natalie Jabbar's Six Sentences.

Ocean sunfish

Here's a photo of an ocean sunfish (mola mola), from our boat trip to the Farallon Islands:


According to Wikipedia, this mola mola is probably basking, which it needs to do frequently in order to warm up and not freeze to death. As the article says, the fish resembles a head with a tail stuck on it. We saw three of these on our trip, all doing the same thing, and have seen the much larger one at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Bottom line: there is no Intelligent Designer. I mean, what could the Smart One have been thinking? Floating like a dying goldfish, or tottering through the chilly water that threatens to kill it, this slapped-together model is, at best, a transition. Is this the pelagic Sarah Palin? Oops, we didn't have time to do the QA on this one, but the boss likes it so--it's a FISH, dammit, the best fish ever.

The language of choice

At MyDD, Natasha Chart writes an eloquent post addressing the Repub's newfound feminism. (She also makes some nice comparisons between Repub positions and the many things Jesus had to say about compassion.)

Chart points to several examples of progressive language in the R's lines about Palin. I suspect she is partly kidding when she says this: "as irritating as the zealotry of the newly converted always is, I'm glad to see that they're starting to come around."

I want to take a closer look at one statement, because I think it's not just a matter of "coming around" (no matter how hypocritically). It's also a problem of linguistic alternatives:

"We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby ..."

As many have noted, the language of choice is on full display here. Feminists have fought for decades so women can freely choose parenthood *if and when we want it.* But how would this sentence work if the Palins' true ideology lay beneath it?

--"We're proud that Bristol was forced to stay pregnant and give birth at age 17."
--"We're proud that we have taught Bristol that there is never a choice when it comes to pregnancy."
--"We're proud that Bristol never had a choice in this matter."

Notice how unloving the parents now sound. It's impossible to be "proud" of a girl who has no autonomy, no choice. Bristol doesn't sound like a person here, but a prisoner, a mere receptacle for sperm and her parents' tyranny. Few parents could be proud of being that cruel, that dehumanizing. In fact there's no way to make this kind of statement in anti-choice terms and come off as anything other than monsters--who, at best, kept their daughter profoundly ignorant (hence the pregnancy in the first place), or, at worst, forced her into giving birth in order to save their own reputations.

The statement shows the Palins do love their daughter--because they gave her a choice.

Olympic National Park

Just coming back from 5 days in Olympic. Words, for the moment, fail. Here are some pictures for the meantime, taken on the Klahhane Ridge Trail.

Just in time, a new hoax

Just as the sailboat of my novel had run aground on another sandbar of confusion, the Georgia Bigfoot hoaxers came to my rescue. I still find it hard to believe that this got so much attention from the NYT, National Geographic, etc. I didn't have the impression that bigfoot hoaxes were that rare or newsworthy. However, I'm glad it happened. In my novel (and in some of my recent short stories also) I've been struggling with the question of why people hoax. Generally hoaxers are considered low-lifes and con artists, out for a buck. It seems like a very hard way to make a living; how much are you likely to get for a bf carcass, seeing as there's no X prize for cryptozoology? So maybe they want something else, most likely unsavory, but what? Fame? Fame for being a bf hoaxer? Or power? I think there's something to the power angle, in being able to "put one over" on somebody--the same thrill some people get from practical jokes. I guess what will happen once the hoax is exposed doesn't concern these guys (one of the Georgia hoaxers got fired from his job as a cop as a result)--or they think, perhaps rightly, that infamy will become a more benign and lucrative sort of fame soon enough.

I'm still ruminating on all the implications, but one aspect that struck me is how seriously the bf community polices itself. Note, for example, the comments by Michael Rugg, founder of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton (which we visited a few weeks ago). Belief based on the most fleeing vision is fine, but deliberate hoaxing gives the whole enterprise of finding bf a bad name.

Going after McCain

Why is Obama still playing defense, and rather gently at that? Why isn't he taking the fight to McCain's ground? I don't want to play pundit, and I sense--or hope--that Obama's team is smarter about all this stuff than Kerry's was. Still...if this is happening, could it be because there's an embarrassment of riches? Like Bush, McCain presents so many targets that it's almost baffling; it's a peacock display of stupidity and corruption. Should Obama go after the incoherent policies (foreign, domestic?)? The constant "gaffes" (confusion)? The lobbyists running the campaign? The whole non-maverickness of the supposed maverick? The belligerence and terrible temper? The misogyny? The affair(s)?

Here's one for the family values crowd: the team currently running McCain's campaign is the same one that created the ugly, racist "whisper campaign" about his adopted daughter in South Carolina in 2000. What does it say about this man that he is now selling out his own family, his own daughter, for political gain? Why won't he stand up for his own vulnerable child? Who would do this?

(Also: why does Blogger put a red "misspelled" underline below Obama and not McCain?)

She who hesitates

...finds out that the amazingly insightful blog post she was dreaming about a few days ago has already been written, at Sadly, No!

“[E]litism” in this country isn’t defined by how much money you have, but whether you ever enjoy your life. For instance, you can make a lot of money and not be an elitist if your work is joyless and purposeless. This is why the Waltons are considered salt-of-the-Earth types, even though they’re the richest family in the world: because the only joy they get out of life is exploiting cheap labor both here and abroad to produce and sell cheap plastic crap. And since the Waltons are such miserable people, it’s hard for the average spite voter to feel much resentment toward them, since they’re basically richer versions of themselves.

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.