Month / July 2005

by DrMabuse

Actually, “Wild-Eyed Cowboy” Comes to Mind

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

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

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

by DrMabuse

Books by the Bay Report

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

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

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

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

WRITING IN AN UNREADERLY WORLD

Panelists:

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MORE THAN JUST A JOB

Panelists

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIFE EXPERIENCES

Panelists:

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

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

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

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


Rebecca Solnit.

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

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

FIRST NOVELISTS

Panelists:

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

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


Elizabeth McKenzie and Joshua Braff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOOKED BY BOOK GROUPS

Panelists:

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSIONS:

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

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

[UPDATE: An additional account can be found at Ghost Word.]

[UPDATE 2: The one and only Michelle Richmond has another account over at the Happy Booker.]

by DrMabuse

The Bat Segundo Show #3

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This Week’s Author: Jonathan Ames

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

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

by DrMabuse

“Living Off the Grid” Apparently Means Living Away from Solid Influences

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

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

by DrMabuse

Paul Reubens Day

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

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

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by DrMabuse

Live from Books by the Bay

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

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

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

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

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

by DrMabuse

Longhorn Gets a Name

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

This is, of course, a preposterous appellation.

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

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

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

Who were the marketing geniuses who came up with this?

by DrMabuse

AM Roundup

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

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

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

by DrMabuse

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

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

by DrMabuse

Roundup in the Morning

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

The Lost World of Rebecca Solnit

“You rely too much on the brain. The brain is the most overrated organ, I think.” — Isaac David, Manhattan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by DrMabuse

Behind the “Peanut Gallery”

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

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

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

The Word Detective weighs in with this:

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

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

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

by DrMabuse

Comic Book Article Cliches

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

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

by DrMabuse

John Roberts — A Justice Who Must Be Stopped

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

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

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

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

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

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

From NARAL: Tell your Senator!

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

by DrMabuse

SF Sightings — Jonathan Ames

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by DrMabuse

Beware the Cat Ladies and Gentlemen of the Night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by DrMabuse

Fortune 500: Individuals with Riches or Madness?

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

by DrMabuse

“Nourishment” Secretly A Code Word for Desperate Live Act Revival

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

by DrMabuse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep watching the skies.

by DrMabuse

Like a Fiery Antiquarian

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

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