The Project for a New Mythology

We Like to move-it, move-it

2011-07-04T11:32:00.000-05:00

I have moved to Wordpress with a new blog that has a slightly different intent. A Wandering Road will be a little more focused on literary issues rather than what has begun to feel like random ramblings and rantings here.

Also, The Project for A New Mythology is officially dead - as a magazine and an entity. The official website at www.pfanm.com will be maintained, for as long as I own the domain, as an archive. As always, you can find me at www.jquinnmalott.com if you need me.

This blog, and its contents will be taken down on September 8th. I haven’t decided if any posts from this site will be transferred over.

Best of luck to you, and remember: “For, let us not fool ourselves: the world is written first - the holy books say that it was created in words – and all that happens in it, happens in language first.” - Dzevad Karahasan Sarajevo: Exodus of A City.

Write a better world.

Moving

2011-06-21T22:07:00.000-05:00

Moving to a new blog.
The Project for A New Mythology is finished.

The First Something I Gestured At

2011-05-31T22:00:00.000-05:00

“The demands of the publishing business are a fetish that must not be allowed to keep us from trying out new forms.”

- Italo Calvino "Six Memos for The Next Millennium"

Every time I write a post like Gestures at Something I get a comment from an old friend and self-avowed “cham-peen” of Genre Fiction telling me that what I’m looking for is being done in the Genre world. It usually annoys the hell out of me because I can’t decide if she’s just not fully reading what I’ve written, or if she thinks I’m denigrating her favorite Genres, or if she somehow thinks I’m closed minded and incurious.

The fact is, if Genre Fiction were doing what I say I want to see done, I’d be reading it already. Despite the ghettoized, insider quality of most Genre fiction, I’m not opposed to its existence, nor opposed to reading it myself. I am a big fan of Genre mixing, blurring, and theft. But, Genre fiction - science fiction, fantasy, even mystery - just doesn’t fill the space I want filled. Sorry, Jenn, but get over it (as an olive branch, however, get in touch with Professor Carol Franko at Kansas State University, she’s a sci-fi scholar. You two can start a movement).

Even if the entire publishing world were to drop this weird fetish for Genre categorization, I still would prefer novels set within my lifetime, or earlier (my parent’s lifetimes, or my grandparent’s lifetimes, and so on), and novels that surprise me with their use of various genre tropes, rather than announcing them from across the room (yes, in the modern publishing world you CAN judge a book by its cover). Aside from the occasional “alternative history” novel, or the “first contact” novels like Carl Sagan’s Contact, science fiction currently, just doesn’t fit for me. Fantasy does it even less so.

In that first “Gestures” post, I mentioned that Young Adult literature represented a middle way - accessible, thoughtful, literature that entertains, wrestles with serious contemporary issues, and respects the reader’s intelligence - but that I wanted this middle way for “grown ups.” I’d like to expand on that idea.

First, the publishing world has fetishized Genre so deeply that, sometimes, it seems publishers are like those anal-retentive kids who pitch a fit if the different foods on their plate touch. If Michael Chabon had started off his career with The Yiddish Policeman’s Union he’d be trapped in Sci-fi land - that is if anyone had found the stones to publish that book. Daring, cross genre work is often baffling to publishers unless the writer has an established reputation they can cling to, like a life-raft in a flood.

However, within this highly fetishized world, the one “Genre” that, in microcosm, presages the potential salvation of the Literary Novel, is Young Adult. As a former bookseller, when it came time to shelve those YA books were almost never shelved by Genre (except sometimes if the subject matter was sex or sexual orientation then they would be called “Teen”), but by the recommended age level of the reader. In that universe, YA teen girl spy stories sit next to YA fantasy stories and to YA western stories. The functional genre of the book doesn’t matter in YA - the story does and story can take place in space or on a ranch or in ancient Rome or any number of places and times.

In the world of “grown-up” Literature, story, at times, seems to take a back seat to Genre conventions, and/or extreme arty-ness. There are times I like arty-ness - love it, in fact. I am a fan of the English language, and of thinking, so I sometimes get off on a well turned phrase, or a devastating, poetic image. But that’s just gravy on top of a meaty, engaging story that trusts me to imagine things for myself, to fill in the purposeful gaps, and to converse with the subtext and context of the story. That kind of story begins with respecting my intelligence and then encouraging me to expand it.

In the kid lit world, if a writer insults the reader’s intelligence, or condescends to the reader, that writer’s book will die a fast and ruthless death. This doesn’t seem to happen in the world of grown-up fiction (this is both a blessing and curse). Dan Brown makes millions of dollars insulting the intelligence of his readers (The house was entirely uninhabited. Upstairs too). David Foster Wallace is revered for cramming more esoteric philosophical concepts into one novel than most average readers are aware of, me included. Jonathan Franzen seems so deeply invested in an ironic tone that I can’t read more than a paragraph without being overwhelmed with disgust for his characters and for him (Great American Novelist my right nut).

Now, I’m not opposed to deeply intelligent writing. I’m not opposed to intellectualism, or to wrestling with ideas and concepts that don’t, at first, make sense to me. I’m also not opposed to avant-garde or experimental literature, or science fiction and fantasy, or mysteries and thrillers, or horror and romance (they are to me, oddly similar). Having at least a passing knowledge of all forms of literature is, to me, essential for doing my job as a novelist. What is also essential for doing my job as a novelist is knowing my audience, and respecting my audience.

As a reader, I am an adult audience, and as a writer, adults are my audience, but there are two major problems: one, by the time my potential audience has finished high school, most have been abused into disliking Literature (with a big L), and two, publishing has so fetishized Genre to the point that the various tropes and conventions of a Genre seem to take precedence over more basic literary mechanics, like plot in Literary novels, or fully developed characters in Thrillers and so, as a reader, I feel my options are limited or uninteresting.

Of course, that’s not an entirely bad thing. One of the many complex and intertwined reasons people become writers is because they have a hard time finding the kinds of stories they want to read.

Gestures at Something

2011-05-30T10:56:00.000-05:00

When I first arrived at Naropa University, I felt deeply out -of-place. One of the first lectures I attended during the Summer Writing Program was one by Thalia Field (I’d give you a link, but for all her avant-garde-ness she doesn’t seem to have her own web presence outside interviews on other people’s and institution’s websites). She was discussing her first book Point and Line and, as she whirled about in increasing philosophical and theoretical lines and circles, I wrote in my journal that my acceptance to graduate school had been a fluke, and that I didn’t belong. I didn’t understand a single thing she was saying, and more over, I wanted just to raise my hand and ask the simplest question ever: “What is your story about?”

Years later, after finishing grad school, but still several years before I sold my first novel, I picked up my then-girlfriend’s copy of Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code” because it had been on the bestseller’s list for nearly three years and I figured I would see what the deal was. I was shocked at how easily and frequently he insulted the reader’s intelligence.

Now, sure, I may have been a bit overly sensitive because I’m not your “average” reader. I don’t mean that ironically, or snobbishly, it’s simply that I have a BA in Creative Writing, and an MFA in Writing & Poetics and I’ve spent years studying novels and short stories and how they are put together, how certain effects are achieved and so on. Now, since I still don’t have a clue what Thalia Field was talking about that day, maybe I don’t know as much as I sometimes like to think I do. But here’s a subtle truth that I am very certain of: the only difference, really, between writers and reader is that writers know the names of the tools and the tricks. Readers know, even if they can’t say exactly what it is they know or why they know it, when they are being jerked around by a writer, or when they are being insulted. Some rightfully get angry about it, but some, I think, sigh and accept it, believing perhaps that they are, indeed as dumb as some writers think they are.

See, I believe that the average reader is an emotionally and psychologically abused person. I believe this abuse is the reason that the readership for literary works is declining (here’s a link to the 2004 NEA survey that has started all the recent handwringing about the future of the novel).

On one side, there are the writers of “Literary” works (note the capital L) who range in popularity and renown like Thalia Field, David Shields, Jonathan Franzen, Tom McCarthy, and the late David Foster Wallace, to name just a few. These are writers with a lot of education, some of it in what amounts to hardcore philosophy in addition to literature. These writers, at times, seem to be in love with irony, so much so that in seeps into and permeates their writing so deeply that it can be almost impossible to tease out anything that they really care honestly about except being ironic. These writers love the avant garde, and metafiction, and, in some cases, plagiarism - like David Shields. They see the decline of literary readership, and think that in order to compete TV, movies, video games, and the internet’s user-generated-content they need to write about that particular angst, wrestle with narrative identity, or create radical forms no one has ever seen before. Confronted with the seemingly endless variability of video games, the old idea of story, they seem to say, is lost to us and so we need something wildly different to win back readers and save the novel.

The average reader runs away from such work because they assume, and possibly rightly so, that it is way beyond their ability to grasp. The kind of novels written by the Literary elite have become geared for an audience of the literary elite. A writer writing a piece of fiction with the intent of challenging, upending, or altering the readers ideas about the “form and function” of narrative isn’t writing for the average reader. A writer creating a fiction that seeks to awaken us to the blurring of fact and fiction, and how that effect our sense of reality isn’t writing for the average reader. Sorry, they just aren’t. They’re writing for people like them, people like me with degrees in writing or literature, or philosophy.

They aren’t writing for a nurse with a couple of days off between three 12 hr shifts. They aren’t writing for an Engineer on a flight from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. An intrepid nurse or engineer might give them a shot and might even like the book in the end, but on their next day off, or next flight, they’ll probably go with someone from the next category.

On the other side, there are the writers of “sub-literary” works who have almost no concern for avant-garde angst, or philosophical dilemmas, or even, really, “the future of the novel” because, frankly, they’re making a shit-load of money right now and the future looks bright for their type of book. I’m talking about your writers of “popular” fiction, like Dan Brown, or Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb, or James Patterson. They could care less about challenges to form and would never torture their publisher with demands that text be printed vertically on the page just to change how the reader must “approach the text.” These types of writers are perfectly fine with the form of the novel as it has existed for the last several hundred years. The last major changes they adopted were the fetish for “realism” and the short (or shortish-long) declarative sentence. The problem is that their lack of interest in form has lead to their embrace of the formula and a complete denuding of any societal, emotional, or spiritual subtext or context to their work. There might be some echoes of life as we know it, some gestures in the direction of things we readers are wrestling with in the real world, but there is no true confrontation with those issues, except via violence or some other stunning, thrilling improbability. Another thing the formula lends itself too is dependence upon over-repetitive qualification.

For example: in Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code” , a character arrives in a house that has, for all intents been previously described in detail - all two stories and secret basement of it. The character, we are told, searches the house, which leads to my favorite two sentences in the whole of Brown’s book. “The house was entirely uninhabited. Upstairs too.” -- as if the writer isn’t sure the reader will understand what the word “entirely” means. Whether this is a result of the writer being unsure of his powers of description, or the writer’s assumption that the reader is stupid is hard to say. Either way, it has the same result: the reader acquires a kind of learned helplessness. After a long enough period of being talked down to in this fashion, they come to rely upon it and when a writer doesn’t over-explain, they give up and claim the book is too difficult to read.

One group refuses to tell them a story, but give them a bunch of elitist attitude, and the other group tells them a story but treats them like they’re stupid. No wonder people prefer movies, TV, video games and the internet to reading a book.

Now, there is a middle way. The problem is that right now the only people practicing this middle way are writing Young Adult novels. Here are books with compelling stories, compelling characters, and, more over, wrestle with serious issues that are connected to the world that we readers actually live in. Some of them even make interesting formal choices.

My question is, why aren’t there writers writing stories like that for grown-ups? Or, more to the point, where are they?

Indy Bookstores Sell eBooks Too, Homey. OR Would you read my novel if it only cost you a quarter?

2011-05-21T12:22:00.000-05:00

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple aren’t the only game in town when it comes to getting your eBooks. If you’re local, independent bookstore is a member of the American Booksellers Association (search for your nearest indy bookstore here), chances are they’re selling Google eBooks, which can be easily loaded into your Barnes & Noble Nook, your Sony eReader, your Apple iPad or just about any other e-reader device that uses the ePub format. You can even download the Adobe Digital Editions software for your Mac or PC and read ebooks on your desktop or laptop.

Now, here’s the fun part, and the part where you can help me out. My publisher, Unbridled Books, has teamed up with The American Booksellers Association to offer 25 ebooks for .25¢ each for three days only on June 9th through the 11th (Read the full press release here). You can buy my book alone, or all 25 Unbridled eBooks for $6.25 (that’s less than a single eBook at full price).

Three of my favorite Indy bookstores are participating: Watermark Books in Wichita, KS (my hometown indy), The Boulder Bookstore in Boulder, CO (I lived in Boulder for 5 years during and after graduate school), and The Tattered Cover in Denver, CO (we both turn 40 this year).

So, if you’ve been thinking about reading my book, but just haven’t felt like spending ten to fifteen dollars, buy it for a quarter. Give it a read. If you like it, tell a friend. If you don’t like it....you can just keep that shit to yourself.

You're Wrong ( So am I)

2011-04-21T23:02:00.000-05:00

All Things Shining - Sans Joseph Campbell

2011-03-08T06:00:00.001-06:00

I am in the middle of reading All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. Normally, to say that the reading is going slowly would be a bad thing, but in this case it should be taken as a deep positive. It is one of the few books I have read in a while where I’ve felt compelled to scrawl notes and comments in the margins. Most of the time I jot things down in a handy notebook with page numbers. I feel like I should have a conversation with this book, so marginalia.

For the most part, Dreyfus and Kelly are proselytizing to the converted. Their basic premise, that the books we read can be vehicles of deep meaning and significance in our daily lives, is something I’ve been convinced of for years (if you’re interested, check out An Argument for Moral Art). It seems I’ve always looked to literature for meaning and so never thought there was a reason to do what Dreyfus and Kelly are doing in this book, which is, essentially, to convince general readers of this notion. My arguments have always been focused on how writers should take responsibility for the kind of meaning they imbed in their stories.

However, the people who, I think, most need to be taught how literature, even entertaining literature, can give meaning to their lives aren’t reading David Foster Wallace or even Elizabeth Gilbert on their own, much less the western classics like Homer and Dante. So, these people aren’t likely to pick up and read All Things Shining. That’s a bit disappointing; however, for high school English teachers and college English professors this book will be a great teaching tool, if they are able to apply what they learn from it to the more modern classics, and almost-classics that are taught in English classes.

Unfortunately, I feel like there’s something missing. Where’s Joseph Campbell in all of this?

Now, I know that a big segment of the reading public probably only knows Joseph Campbell from the over-marketed phrase “Follow your bliss,” which, according to my girlfriend, was a big Oprah Winfrey mantra for a while (and we have a magnet on our dishwasher bearing that phrase). Frankly, it’s a shame that the great depth and wisdom of Joseph Campbell’s work has been reduced to such a simplistic, and almost trite phrase. By itself it is almost meaningless, giving people license to do whatever makes them happy regardless of their action’s effects on others. Essentially, “Follow your bliss” has been turned into the Hippy version of America’s self-serving reductionist version of Ayn Rand’s ethical self-interest.

However, “follow your bliss” is just one small segment of Campbell’s work. Like Joseph Campbell, and perhaps Professors Dreyfus and Kelly, I believe that humans are a storytelling and story-listening species. I believe it is evolutionarily encoded into our DNA to tell stories and to find meaning in those stories. Stories are our unique and delicate light against the vast darkness of the universe. There is no one I know of who spent more time, and intellectual energy, trying to understand and explain how we give our lives meaning through stories than Joseph Campbell, and he is completely missing from All Things Shining (his name doesn’t appear in the index and I’ve not come across any reference to him so far in my reading, but remember, I’m not quite finished yet).

I can’t imagine these two very learned men haven’t read or considered Joseph Campbell, so I would be very interested to hear why there seems to be no mention of Campbell in this otherwise fascinating argument for the importance of literature in creating a meaningful life.

The End of The Project

2011-03-07T20:57:00.000-06:00

By the end of this year, The Project for A New Mythology will be finished. I have one more issue to get out, and that will be it as far as an annual journal goes.

The very last issue of The Project for A New Mythology will be called Volume 5: Anthology. The plan is to select a few representative pieces from the first six print issues, and put them together as an eBook, in both the ePub and Kindle formats, and make the ebook available through various online outlets, including The Project for A New Mythology website.

This project represents the final step in my rather drawn out progression toward starting a for-profit publishing business in 2012. The very quietly self-released ebook of my essay “An Argument for Moral Art” was the first step. Volume 5: Anthology is the second.

When The Project for A New Mythology started out, I decided that it would last only as long as I felt it was relevant, and as long as it was able to feed and sustain a community. As I’ve struggled to manage writing, a full-time job, family and relationship obligations, and other things, this journal has fallen to a much lower priority for me, especially since it doesn’t seem to generate anything but more self-imposed work and deadlines.

Rather than simply fading out, I’ve decided to put together an anthology of those early, hand-crafted days, and go out in a blaze of nostalgia.

Who knows what will happen then.

Gender Gap: My take on the Vida Count and a couple of the responses. (Part Two)

2011-02-12T11:37:00.000-06:00

I first learned of the VIDA Count from a friend on Facebook. The first article I read about it was Laura Miller’s Salon piece about how men aren’t paying attention to women writers.

My first response to her was that I feel like I live in a world dominated by women. I was estranged from my father, who is now dead. My closest male friends are all married with kids and live in other towns. Most of my immediate friends are women. I live with my girlfriend. I pay attention to women all the time; therefore I prefer male writers because it is one of the few times I get to hear a male voice that I feel is worth listening to (other male voices - politicians, libertarian businessmen, athletes, aren’t worth listening to and I don’t value or pay attention to them). Michael Ondaatje, John Berger, Alexs D. Pate, Laird Hunt, James Tate, Stephen Dunn, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, and lots of other male writers are my masculine, authorial role models because there are so few in my day-to-day life.

That being said, two of my closest writing friends from graduate school, whose work I read and consistently publish in The Project for a New Mythology are women: Laura Hawley and Jenn Zukowski-Boughn. And although I value all of my writing teachers throughout the years, the one I cherish the most is Bobbie Louise Hawkins.

I am full of women’s voices. I have worked for more women than men. I have worked with more women than men. I have had little choice but to listen to women. So, although there may be some men out there who choose to ignore women, I believe they are a minority and I resent such a blanket accusation from Ms. Miller that men aren’t interested in what women have to say.

As I said in my previous post on this topic, I don’t think my situation is that unique among writers, editors, and readers younger than 40. We men 40 and younger have spent our lives watching the rise of women to the point now where more women go to college than men, more women finish college than men. More women get advanced degrees than men. More women are becoming the primary breadwinners for their families while men’s earning potential decreases and their unemployment numbers go up. More women start small businesses than me. To me, that means that by the time the Baby Boomers have been flushed out of the workforce, the economic Patriarchy that those boomers grew up with and fought against through their adulthood will be dead. That doesn’t mean there won’t be other vestiges of patriarchy, like Male Privilege, nor does it mean there won’t be a division of labor in families based upon gender. What it means is that the physical and economic world will finally be dominated by women.

Happy ladies? Let’s go for another long walk.

This also means that the physical world will finally reflect our internal, mystical, mythological, and biological world. Patriarchy, although very real in the day-to-day lives of people for many generations, is a well maintained, nearly impenetrable illusion. Men only rule the world at the pleasure of Women. From Mother Nature to your Mother in the kitchen, the world is feminine and governed my feminine power. In mythology, it is the tangible, physical world that is given the feminine aspect, and it is the unreachable and distant sky that is given the masculine aspect: Mother Earth, Father Sky. It is out of the womb of the earth that our species was born just as it is out of the womb of women that we as individuals are born. It takes a massive dose of testosterone to turn a fetus male, and if that dose isn’t high enough or never comes, that fetus will (or try to) default to its base setting of female.

Masculinity, maleness, is a fragile, and risky business engaged in as defiance of the feminine,and, at times, it is much more difficult to define. More importantly, whether the feminists like this suggestion or not, the social factors that make up manhood depends upon what women find acceptable. For the hundredth time now I’m going to quote Rebecca Walker from her introduction to her anthology What Makes A Man:

“If we want men to be different we must eroticize that difference, and stop saying we want a man who can talk about his feelings, only to marry the strong, silent type who ‘just so happens’ to be a good provider.”

If women didn’t reward men who take charge, men wouldn’t take charge. If women didn’t reward men who command attention in a room, men wouldn’t command attention in a room.

So, the VIDA Count is useful in that it serves to help identify where the old Patriarchs might still be hiding out so that behavior modification can begin. Now, if there is a male editor out there who rejects women writers out of hand, yeah, stop submitting to him, and encourage your male writer friends to stop submitting to him. But be careful, a lack of women writers in a magazine doesn’t always mean the editor is a chauvinist, and not every magazine that has an imbalance of male to female writers is the lair of a hold-out patriarchal dragon that needs to be slain. I’m pro-woman, even if I’d never call myself a feminist. I can’t watch “A League of the Their Own” and NOT cry at the end; I think women should be playing baseball with the men instead of softball by themselves. However, my magazine is still male heavy, even though I have published every woman who submitted (except for the one who wrote rhymed free verse poetry because I hate rhymed free verse whether it’s written by man, woman or purple martian space dog). And at least one of those women I published I had to coax into submitting.

I’m not so sure the gap between the number of women and men getting published has anything to do with a preponderance of close-minded male editors. Also, if I’m not mistaken, aren’t the majority of agents and editors women? The VIDA stats, and Ms. Millers’ ancedotal quiz of readers, do show that women are more omnivorous readers. I can’t argue with that, but doesn’t that then suggest that the problem of this gender gap in publishing is not, in fact, the result of men ignoring women, but of women ignoring women?

If fewer men read, and fewer men are in the publishing industry as the gatekeepers, then the industry is heavily controlled by these omnivorous women readers. And the question then becomes why aren’t women publishing more women? It can’t be because they don’t want to listen to women’s voices. It can’t be because women editors are self-destructively chauvinistic. I think it seriously has to do with literary publishers and editors simply seeing more manuscripts from men than they do from women. This leads me to a couple of very interesting questions;

1) Why do men appear to publish so much, but read so little?
2) Why do women appear to read so much, but publish so little.
3) If a publisher makes an effort to balance the press’s list along gender lines, how many worthy male writers are rejected and how many unworthy female writers are accepted?

I don’t believe that any publisher would publish a poorly written book by a woman over a well written book by a man just to achieve gender parity. What I mean to suggest by that last question is this: I believe that of the women writers who do submit their manuscripts for publication, as a group, submit more publishable manuscripts. Men, who submit more manuscripts than women, have a higher ratio of piss-poor manuscripts. It’s like buying oranges: buy 5 oranges from a small grower at the farmers market, and you’ll get 5 good oranges. Buy 10 oranges from the grocery store and chances are only 5 out of 10 will be any good.

I think there are, essentially, two things going on here:

1) Women are like the Democratic Party. Among women there has always been and will always be a plurality, a multitude of voices wrestling with each other and they will fight amongst each other as readily as they’ll fight against men and patriarchy (or even in defense of patriarchy). Some sing “Stand by Your Man” some will sing “I Will Survive” and some will sing “32 Flavors” and some will sing “Bitch”. It is widely accepted as public wisdom that the answer to the old Freudian question “What do women want?” is as varied as women themselves and that each woman is a unique and empowered individual. Men, on the other hand, are seen in the world as roughly interchangeable parts, universally interested in the same three or four things, even if they’re gay: Sex, Sports, expensive toys, and competition - and anything that seems to be an anomaly is merely a ploy for sex. which leads me to the second thing that might be going on when men get literary work published more frequently.

2) Men, when they write literary works, are giving voice to a silence that most men never break. They are dropping the armor as it were, and revealing something our society tells us they are incapable of: empathy, intuition, revelry at beauty, a nuanced understanding of human nature, and it does two things - it piques women’s curiosity at there being a male inner life that is equally as rich as women’s, but not easily accessed if all we see of men is the athlete, or video gamer, or bar hoping lounge lizard. It also provides a silent reassurance to male readers that they aren’t alone and that they aren’t the domestically bumbling, sex obsessed, brutes mass media seems to always tell us we are.

I don’t want to suggest that women don’t have a rich inner life. Part of the post Feminine Mystique era is the acknowledgement of women’s internal lives and how those lives were suffocated by patriarchy. Consequently, so much of our culture now acknowledges women’s inner lives and the important of those inner lives to their personal fulfillment. What I’m getting at here is this idea, part sociological and part biological, that the outsider feeling that often drives people to write might be short circuited by women’s empowerment. That, in turn, narrows the pool of possible women writers to those who have the right kind of lesions on their temporal lobes (see The Midnight Disease studies show that writers tend to have similar brain lesions to temporal lobe epileptics who often suffer from logorrhea).

That is, of course wild speculation, but I think you see where I’m going, especially if you throw in women’s multitasking obsession.

Unfortunately, the side effect of all that women’s inner life coming to the foreground, was to assume that because men had dominated society their inner lives were not at odds with their external lives - that they were, in fact, the same. But I would argue that alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, and abuse are all the result of men struggling to suppress (or accept and justify in the case of artists) their inner lives. This is why so many of them turn to the self-expression of writing - and why so many of them submit so frequently.

In other words, I believe that verbal self-expression among women is common, therefore the urge to engage in the act of writing stories and trying to publish them is weak. I believe that verbal self-expression among men is uncommon and therefore, the urge to do it and try to make it available to the world to be seen is strong.

Gender Gap: My take on the Vida Count and a couple of the responses. (Part One)

2011-02-12T11:32:00.003-06:00

I think I live in a generational borderland.

Above me are the Gender Warriors, ready to do battle with men and society in order to break down the barriers of patriarchy, male privilege, pay inequality and the host of other things that make up that good old “glass ceiling.”

Below me, are the Gender Peacemakers, who look out at our economic landscape, at each other, and at the Gender Warriors and don’t see Patriarchy as some towering monolith. What they see is that more of their female cohorts are going to college than their male cohorts, they see a landscape where women now make up the majority of the workforce and where men are more chronically unemployed than women.

I live in a generation that is a mix of the two, that’s why I say I live in a generational borderland. In my twenty plus years in the workforce, I’ve had more women managers than men. I’ve had more women teachers than men teachers. I’ve worked side-by-side with more women than men. - And yet two of my oldest male friends both support multiple kids and stay-at-home wives. So, when VIDA comes out with its annual count of women in publishing, and writers like Becky Tuch, and Laura Miller come out with their testimonial articles attempting to confirm the validity of the numbers with anecdotal sincerity, telling my how my male cohorts are so chauvinistic and patriarchal that they don’t “listen” to women, I get a bit frustrated - more so with the likes of Ms. Tuch than Ms Miller, so I’ll start with Ms. Tuch.

First, I can’t argue with the numbers. Men do get published more often than women in the magazines referenced by VIDA. But the idea that it is the result of a gender bias, of discriminatory, sexist publishers who try to reduce an accomplished woman editor and writer to a reference guide for a potential panty raid is near sighted and disrespectful of the majority of editors who do nothing of the sort. Ms. Tuch doesn’t like the answer that women just need to submit more. She takes a Gender Warrior stance that I don’t think applies as neatly now as it may have once applied twenty, thirty or forty years ago (especially among the budding granny memoir set). It is an easy, pat, and ultimately incorrect assumption to cast women as the victims of an oppressive, monolithic Patriarchal editorial system that seeks to repress women writer’s voices.

The monolithic patriarchy doesn’t exist anymore. Sure, there’s still a Patriarchy, but for people younger than I am, “the patriarchy” is old, tired, and like the Baby Boomers, ready to shuffle off into retirement - even if it still squeals and kicks and screams from time to time. Despite a residual “male privilege” women have more advantages and choices than men do these days.

The notion presented by the women editors mentioned in Ms. Tuch’s article that women just need to submit more is probably an accurate one, but I don’t think anyone is digging deep enough to explain why and so it’s being left out there as a kind of argumentative McGuffin. The Gender Warrior takes that comment about women needing to submit more and, like Becky Tuch does, fires back that women aren’t submitting more because the social deck is stacked against them. She seems to be arguing that if only there weren’t poor single mothers, or if only a working woman’s Alpha male, type-A personality chauvinistic husband would do a little more house work then, by god, there’d be a veritable Renaissance of women’s literature.

I think the problem is deeper but less insidious than Ms Tuch, and VIDA, thinks. Of course women are writers too, but are all of them submitters?

Stick with me here, it might be a long walk.

We can trot out anecdotes and so on, women confronted with pig-ish male editors, and we can trot out anecdotes about publishers that make an effort to balance their lists, but no one ever wins a “war of anecdotes” because someone always knows someone who has a story that can counter any anecdote that someone else knows. So, let’s try to focus on this two part question: First, how many of the women who got published in those magazines are trying to be the primary breadwinners for themselves and their families by working as full-time writers? How many of the men? Second, how many of the men who got published in those magazines are being supported by a more economically successful wife (a lawyer, a doctor, a small business owner)? How many of the women are supported by high earning husbands?

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say there are more male writers trying to be the primary breadwinners for themselves and their families by writing than there are women trying to do the same thing. In other words, my argument is this: Men get published more because they submit more and they submit more because men are still judged by what they do and how much they earn from doing it - and writing is no exception. Despite the dying patriarchy, we still live in a society where it is more acceptable for a woman to be supported, in part or in whole, by her husband while men are still expected, as a gender, to work outside the home. Those men who play stay-at-home-dad are not as rare now as they were when the movie Mr. Mom came out, but they are still a distinctly microscopic minority compared to the number of traditional, stay-at-home moms (We can get into why stay at home dad status is still generally unappealing later).

Ms Tuch hints at this when she quotes John Berger on how men’s and women’s social worth is determined, and she has the beginning of a point here. Yes, men are socialized to do and women and are socialized to be. She rightfully acknowledges that this is a drawback for women, but she doesn’t seem to go deep enough to satisfy me. She doesn’t seem to acknowledge how this dynamic might also damage men. What’s also odd, is that she trots out this Berger quote, but it seems completely disconnected from her own earlier realization that society and women themselves put a lot of pressure on themselves to “DO” a lot of things in order to “BE” a women - women spread themselves thin and run themselves ragged trying to be good mothers, good wives, good lovers, good employees, good bosses, and good writers. This is the social hangover from Peggy Lee and Enjoli feminism, and man, seriously, it sucks for women.

Ever since I was an undergrad I’ve been hearing how much better women are at multitasking, but after listening to Peggy Lee and Becky Tuch go on about everything a woman does, and has to do in order to be - I’d like to voice my support for male monotasking, even if it does mean we end up sacrificing family, relationships, and clean clothes on the alter of writing and publication. My response to Ms. Tuch, if indeed her argument is that women have too many expectations placed upon them to also be expected to submit as frequently as men, is to say give up something. Resist the social demand to have-be-do everything, and focus on writing and publishing. Writers are supposed to be good at living outside the demands of society.

Here are some statistics I’d like to see come out of VIDA to give a more detailed and accurate picture of this gender gap in publishing:

1) The number of male writers freelancing to support a family vs. the number of female writers freelancing to support a family.

2) The number of single, unmarried, childless male writers supporting themselves by freelancing vs. the number of single, unmarried, childless female writers supporting themselves by freelancing.

3) The number of single parent writers by gender (we can get into the “why” of single parenthood, especially for women, at another time).

4) The number of male vs. female writers who have full time day jobs not associated with their writing and how many are married and unmarried.

5) The number of writing couples and which one submits more, and which one is more widely read.

6) The number of male writers financially supported by high earning wives, vs the number of female writers financially supported by high earning husbands - and how frequently do the supported male writers submit their work compared to how frequently the female writers submit their work.

7) What is the average age of women writers who submit most frequently, and what is the average age of their children - if they have any?

Here’s my hypothesis (if someone with a research budget would like to take it up): I suspect the imbalances might happen most in areas associated with question 1 and 6 with men dominating in question 1 while women dominate in question 6. I suspect that parity will appear among single writers, with a slight increase in the number of single mother writers (questions 2 & 3 & 4). Question number 5 will be the most interesting, and I have no idea how it’ll turn out. And, to return to question six, I’ll bet the male writers, even balancing kids on one knee and sweeping the floor with the other, will submit more. Question 7 indirectly gets at the underlying issue in question 3. I think that older women with older children will be submitting as frequently as men of all ages because, damn it all to hell, we can’t get around the narrow biological window where women can give birth without serious problems.

Again, that comes down to sacrifice, to monotasking. I’m 40, and I am still putting off starting a family in order to pursue writing. If I were a woman, I’d be in the potential Down Syndrome baby phase of my child bearing years and unlikely to have kids of my own. How many women writers are willing to make that sacrifice? How many are angry at me right now for telling them they have to make the choice? How many want to tell me that men are lucky they get to father children until they’re seventy and CAN put off making the decision.

Not many. A lot. All of them.

Essentially, what I’m getting at here is that, if Ms Tuch is right and there are too many expectations on women and it’s because of those expectations that women aren’t getting published and not submitting enough then the problem boils down to the thing that always plagues women - their vaunted multitasking ability. It’s become this shibboleth of womanhood in America that they can do six things at once, and yes, it saps women’s energy and health. It sucks to run around trying to juggle 6 different things, and to assume that everyone around them will fall apart if this one juggling woman doesn’t do everything all these other people expect of her. Part of this feeling women have comes from being told they aren’t a “woman” if they don’t work, breed, fuck, and bake with equal skill and passion. Another part of it come from society embracing the pissy, reverse-sexist idea that men are somehow these high earning, economic powerhouses who act like cultural gatekeepers closing out women, but at the same time are so domestically incompetent they can’t boil water or wash their whites separately from their darks.

Women writers, I’m going to give you a bit of advice - be a little selfish with your writing. If writing, being a mom, a wife, a lover, an active church member or socialite are all equally important to you and therefore deserve equal attention, well, men are going to continue to get published more often than you because men, for better or worse refuse to spread myself around as thinly as women. I have left girlfriends, cut off family, and generally acted like a baby when my already squeezed and narrow writing time has been encroached upon. Writing is important enough to me that I’m a never married, childless man of 40 with a girlfriend ten years younger than I am who makes about 5K more a year than I do - and I’m the one who washes the dishes and cleans the house, plus I do my own laundry (white and darks separate).

Now if it turns out that women are submitting on par with men, then maybe there is something to Ms Miller’s argument that men don’t listen to or care about women’s voices. But even that has some caveats. That will be the next post.

Experimenting

2011-01-29T19:42:00.000-06:00

I have been doing a lot of thinking about starting a for-profit publishing endeavor. In support of that I’ve been puttering around with the making of an ebook.

Now, I finally think I’ve got it ready enough to show to people. It’s an ebook of a long essay I wrote called “An Argument for Moral Art” and I’m distributing it for free from the Project for a New Mythology website. It can be downloaded as an ePub file for those with iPads, or Nooks, or some other eReader that using the ePub format. It can also be downloaded as a Mobipocket file, which is read by the Kindle reader.

Since I don’t yet have a dedicated eReader of my own, I’ve had some associates who have iPads and Kindles test the file and they didn’t seem to have any issues. If you also don’t have an eReader, never fear. The ePub file can be read by theStanza reader for Mac and PC, the Adobe Digital Editions reader for Mac and PC, and the Kindle reader for Mac and PC. I’ve got all three and a few others loaded on my Mac and Vaio, and everything looks good.

The free ebook is distributed with a Creative Commons license, so you are free to copy and distribute the ebook all over the place as long as you acknowledge me as the author.

Give it a whirl. Then discuss.

Mark Twain, Alan Gribben and the Sanitizing of Huck Finn: or Is there enough room on this bandwagon for me?

2011-01-05T18:01:00.000-06:00

        Honestly, I don’t know where to start on this one.
        Everyone, I’m sure, has heard about Alan Gribben at Auburn editing a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and removing every single instance of the word “nigger” (and the word “injun”) (If not, here) because use of the words, even within the limited context of a work of fiction, makes white people so squeamish that they have stopped reading the book.
        Do I start with the bastardization of one of the most important works of American Literature, possibly the closest thing we have to a Great American Novel?
        Do I start with the apparent loss of literary nuance represented by the readers (not Gribben) who can’t seem to understand the novel within the simple literary context of a first person, fictional narrative, or even the more simplistic context of a story set in antebellum America, when slavery was still legal?
        Do I start with the American media’s utterly ridiculous reliance upon the phrase “The N-word” as if even the utterance of the word “nigger” within a discussion of the use of the word means they’ve called every African-American within earshot a “nigger”?
        I guess I’ll start with what no one ever seems to start with: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written in the first person.
        To me, that’s all that needs to be said in defense of the use of the word “nigger” in the novel, but judging by the big media storm swirling over this, that doesn’t have the same amount of impact for other people, including a supposed Mark Twain scholar. Maybe Professor Gribben never really studied that much creative writing after all.
        A writer (in this case Mr. Samuel Clemens - staunch anti-racist curmudgeon) who writes a piece of fiction in the first person engages in the process of mimesis, which is the assumption, or mimicry, of the character who then tells the story (telling a story is diegesis) (in this case one Huck Finn, bratty, insensitive, racist runaway). This is, in essence, “acting” on the page. Sam Clemens, as Mark Twain (in the early 1880’s), pretends to be Huck Finn, a boy who uses the word nigger frequently because he is a southerner in pre-Civil War America. What other word would a boy like Huck Finn use to describe Jim?
        That’s what gets lost, in my opinion, in all of the stink raised when anyone complains about the word “nigger” in Huck Finn. It’s what gets lost any time someone gets offended by any word used by any character in a fictional work. The moment the offended person calls for the book or movie to be boycotted, censored, or shunned I want to drag them into a creative writing classroom, or an acting classroom, and show them how, in order to accurately portray certain characters a writer or actor has to actually use the words that character would use - even if they are insensitive, mean, or racist words. It would be comical (and dishonest) for an actor portraying a racist character to edit the dialogue to avoid saying a bad word: imagine the movie Mississippi Burning with the word “nigger” removed from script.
         And then I’d retell the story I once heard about a little old lady confronting Ernest Hemingway about the “foul” language he used in one of his stories and Hemingway said he was only telling the truth about how men talk on Saturday morning in the barber shop.
        “I’ve been in the barber shop on a Saturday morning and they never talk that way,” the woman said.
        “I was writing about the Saturday you weren’t there,” Hemingway replied.
        Removing this one word - nigger - from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn not only fundamentally rewrites Twain’s text, it alters the character of Huck Finn himself. It alters the characters whose dialogue is reported by Huck Finn. And to what end? To keep a bunch of squeamish white people from feeling icky every time they have to read the book?
        Ridiculous.
        One of the many reasons the issue of Race in America is so hard to talk about is because people, apparently ones like Gribben, can’t seem to separate the act of talking about a word like “nigger” from actually calling another human being a “nigger.” Instead, we get euphemisms and the comical over-use of the phrase “the N-word.” Well, F-word that, you B-word, S-word for brains, R-word, M-F-word.

        But on a positive note, think about how far we’ve come as a society. The word “nigger” was once so ubiquitous and accepted that is was plastered on consumer products (see this fake commercial from the movie Confederate States of America for a real product distributed until the 1950’s), and now, some white people can’t even get the word out of their mouths in a conversation about the word. Must mean racism is dead, right?

Hardly.

Tardy with The Resolutions

2011-01-05T06:20:00.002-06:00

I have a few resolutions.

Getting in shape is the only one I’ll really chatter about. For X-mas my family is helping me get a YMCA membership because I’m a starving, under employed writer with massive graduate school debt and I can’t pay for it on my own. I told my girlfriend that the plan was to have Ryan Reynolds’ body by the time I turn 40.

She laughed at me. Look, I know it’s not very likely that I’ll get that kind of physique, but at least I can avoid looking like Jack Black (sorry, Jack, I think you’re great but . . .)

Granted, the cape is fabulous, but still.

There are a lot of other resolutions, but I’m trying out this thing where I don’t talk about them.

First Draft of The Palace of Winds is finished.

2010-12-28T18:15:00.000-06:00

Yes, it is nearly an entire ream of paper. Roughly 491 pages in this draft (no pages breaks for chapters yet), and checking in at 123,958 words.

I expect to chop it down by a third, at least. Then build it back up. Then chop it down.

Hope it doesn't take as long to revise as it did to write.

Worth Watching

2010-12-27T20:40:00.000-06:00

A Collection of Thoughts I've Not Had Time to Write Out Completely

2010-12-17T06:33:00.000-06:00

1) I finished the first draft of my next novel. I’ve tried an alternate title, for a day, and then went back to what I originally had: The Palace of Winds.
It is planned as the first book in a trilogy.

2) I’ve started work on the second book.

3) I believe that being “tolerant” does not mean I have to give up the right to be angry at intolerant people, and tell them to go fuck themselves, or stop their intolerance from effecting other people. There have been a number of times where I have stumbled into discussions with some anti-whatever schmuck who finally trotted out some completely obnoxious gem that was designed to be a “nuclear option” to the argument (designed to cow me into submission by its shear ludicrousness and offensiveness), and I cut them off. At that moment, the schmuck trotted out the nugget “Oh, I see how it is. What happened to your liberal tolerance, huh?” To the schmuck, that was checkmate. At that point I would, in the schmuck’s view, have to surrender the validity of my argument for tolerance because I got angry and showed intolerance towards the schmuck’s vile assertion and put a limit upon the level of intolerant bile I was willing tolerate. If I were as “tolerant” as the schmuck seemed to want me to be, then, as a liberal, I would have to “tolerate” things like the extermination of the Jews, or the lynching of black people, or the execution of gay people, because to be intolerant of those actions would make me no better than those people displaying their intolerance of Jews, blacks, or homosexuals.

4) The persecuted hegemon: the link goes to an illustration of the term, but heres’ the capsule definition from the same post: “those who claim the privilege that in their view pertains to being a dominant ethnic or sectarian majority while simultaneously posturing as a persecuted and put-upon minority.”

5) The documentary “Lord Save Us From Your Followers” is worth a watch. If you have Netflix, it’s available as an instant play. The documentarian is a Christian by the way, so it does come across as generous to Christianity (Rick Santorum is taken seriously), but it also is extremely critical of the public face evangelicalism has put on and the thoughtlessness it promotes. The mock “Family Feud” segment where the producer hosts a game show between teams of “agnostics” and “Christians” is highly entertaining and incredibly shocking.

That’s all I have time for this morning.

Refuting a Single Sentence.

2010-12-07T19:39:00.001-06:00

I’ve been wrestling with the ending of my new story for perhaps the last four or five weeks.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I have in my head this image I want to get to. The image has been hanging around out there since I started the story, even as the intent of the story has changed. The problem is that it continues to stay at a certain distance even as I have begun to feel that the story has reached the last lunge to the finish. Perhaps the image is something I simply need to let go, throw out, or destroy.

Struggling like this used to make me panic. I would figure the whole story was junk, or that it had reached a dead end, and so I would throw it out. Of course, a lot of the time I had only written a few pages, maybe a hundred or so and would simply give up. Now I have somewhere around 450 pages. If it was going to dead end, it would have done so a long time ago. No, what I’ve got here is a case of bad story-time management.

It has proven tough to cram a decade worth of a character’s life into a 500 page novel: especially when that decade is the 1930’s. There was so much that happened in America between 1929 and 1940. So much that, to me, it has the cast of epic mythology to it, and yet, it seems to be completely overshadowed by the grandly epic event our country seems preternaturally obsessed with: WW II.

On one level, World War II is easy to grasp for us Americans. We get to cast ourselves as the good guys, fighting the good fight against the evil Nazis and the imperialistic Japanese. There’s a bright, clear line to be drawn between what is right and what is wrong and what should be done about it. It’s the Nazis or the Japanese who kill people for not being Christian, or launch unprovoked wars. Americans don’t do those things.

The Great Depression doesn’t seem to offer that kind of clear separation between an evil other and a good us. We are both in that story. Looking at the Great Depression we have to confront the fact that we, ourselves, are one day the homeless, out-of-work person with his hat in his hand, standing at the back porch asking for a little something to eat, and the next day the scoundrel who punches the destitute for blocking our way, and yet, on another day, we are the kindly person who places a sandwich in the outstretched hand at our back door, or invites the person in to share our own meal for the day.

In my research I read stories of tremendous charity and generosity - of lonely, desperate people being aided by shop owners or grocery store owners, or more often by someone who was only a little less lonely and desperate. I also read stories of incredible meanness and cruelty, of farm owners promising transients looking for work a meal in exchange for a day’s labor only to give the already hungry and now exhausted transients rotten, or maggot infested food. I read of entire towns turning their backs on sick men and, instead of taking them to a hospital, driving these men outside of town and dropping them by the side of the road to make their own ways.

It seems at times that we are, still today, fighting the ideological wars of the American Depression. On one side, Hoover’s and the Republican’s belief that personal industry, personal charity and volunteerism would carry America through the hard times. On the other, Roosevelt’s New Deal and the safety net of social security, unemployment insurance, and direct government intervention. Neither is entirely wrong, even though it seems that in or current age we are required to pick just one.

Personal industry and personal charity is admirable, but it has its limitations. Before the 1932 election there were several cities, most notably Philadelphia, where the city’s wealthy banded together to fund a private relief organization to aide those who’d been put out of work and couldn’t find jobs. If I remember correctly, it lasted about a year before the demand grew so great that the wealthy funders all backed out, leaving those in need completely destitute. In those days, there was no safety net: no unemployment insurance, no food stamps, no medicare. So, when the man of the house lost his job it was only a matter of time before the entire family was reduced to begging on the street. Kick a worker to the curb, leave that worker unable to pay for even the basics of food and shelter, and as the Great Depression showed, the whole economy crashes.

It wasn’t until Roosevelt was elected that there started to be some improvement. But not everything Roosevelt and the New Dealers tried worked. The National Recovery Administration didn’t last long, and was, in fact, had major parts of its functions deemed unconstitutional. Roosevelt, for all his popularity, was decidedly weak in his support of labor unions, in effect allowing a farm workers union in the south to be killed so effectively that it has never resurfaced. Roosevelt’s agencies also destroyed rancher’s and farmer’s herds and crops in order to stabilize market prices and, in some cases, forcing those ranchers and farmers onto to government dole. But things like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration were tremendously beneficial to people and society (the access and services to our National Parks was increased, rural electrification was started, dams, flood control projects, and countless other public works were built by agencies like the CCC, the TVA, and so on. The Federal Writers Project not only gave us the fabulous WPA state guides, but along with the other Arts project created a deep, vibrant historical record of our country as it was before the mass homogenization project that TV culture has proven to be. Moreover, these organizations gave people jobs, got them out of the soup kitchens and bread lines, off the trains and highways, put some money in their pockets so they could buy their meals rather than beg for them. And there is, I believe, nothing that compares to the basic human dignity of not having to beg.

All of that, somehow, has to fit into this 500 page story in some fashion and then, gracefully, slip itself into this image I’m writing towards - an image that is oddly personal, mythic, and prophetic all at once.

Once I get that done it’s time to revise.

Art Is Not Meaningless, Mr Lethem

2010-11-08T18:43:00.000-06:00

Monday at work I was listening to the “Reality” episode of To The Best of Our Knowledge and heard an exchange between Jonathan Lethem and Jim Fleming that reminded me why, despite being published, I live in defiance of the observation that Brain Evenson once made during my first Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. He’d observed that unpublished writers tend to cling to their aesthetic because it is the only thing that justifies their claim to being a writer to their friends and family. Having had my first novel published, I find that I still cling to my aesthetic not because it justifies my existence as a writer, but because it justifies the continued existence and relevance of my profession as a whole to the great forward thrust of society.

Lethem, essentially, argued that art is “peculiar” in that it’s not very productive because it doesn’t “generate wealth” in the way that say, oil exploration does, it doesn’t feed or dress people, - and mostly shockingly to me - doesn’t “improve things” and it “doesn’t educate as well as education does” and that it’s just a “thing.” He goes on to say that he likes art’s resistance to usefulness, and that he just wants to make something that people can be amused by. When Jim Fleming asks him if writing can help people to make sense of life, Lethem comes back with “Well that’s a very nice kinda productive Protestant work ethic excuse for art that you’re offering me, but I actually think that it’s not that, it’s that it’s to make you experience something, not to explain your experience, but in order for you to have a new one, and maybe also to remember and embody, sit inside, abide with your own experiences more deeply in a more conscious way, but not to explain them, because it couldn’t possibly do that. It could never help you really understand, could it?”

The last line he delivered to Fleming with, quite possibly, the most condescending tone I’ve ever heard in my life: as if to ask Jim Fleming if he really is that naive about “art” to think that it means anything at all. The condescension seemed to so fluster Fleming that he stumbled into asking Lethem to read (When I ranted to my sister in New York about it, she downloaded and listened to the podcast. She later sent me a text message that read “Oh sweet jeebus almost 9 mins in & he sure does sound like a Park Slope hipster tool.” - I love my sister.).

But it was more than his tone that irked me. It was his whole stand on the general uselessness of his profession and product as a writer for anything more than amusement and self-referential navel gazing.

It’s kind of hard to argue that books aren’t lacking a certain amount of utilitarianism in the world. Obviously Art isn’t as immediately useful as a hammer, or a step ladder, in building a house, or a cathedral; however, there should be no doubt that a book stands behind the grand and symbolically moving architecture of a cathedral while little more than classroom practicality and self-indulgent displays of wealth stand behind most homes built today.

I also find it disheartening to hear people describe “wealth” only in monetary terms. In a very narrow way, Lethem is right when he argues that writing does not generate a lot of monetary wealth considering the number of people who write professionally. I’m certainly no richer than I was before selling my book, and neither is my publisher. By that narrow definition of wealth, both me and my publisher should give up and become plumbers: by Lethem’s definition that would be both more useful and financially rewarding for us. But in a world already so deeply impoverished that someone like “The Situation” is both wealthier and more well known than even Jonathan Lethem, I think we need to reevaluate this idea of wealth. For me, wealth would be a comfortable life, but not extravagant, a life where I earn enough money that I do not need to worry about paying my bills every month the way I do now, or dying of a curable disease, and where I can write more than I currently do. But, more than that, I consider the books I have collected and read and value deeply to be a form of wealth: my experience and understanding of the world, I believe, would be incredibly impoverished if I’d never read “The Alexandria Quartet,” or “The English Patient,” or “The Sun Also Rises,” or “On The Road,” or “To The Wedding” (oh, how poor my life would be without that one). This form of wealth, this richness, should not be diminished because it does not generate cash the way coal mining does - but that seems to be exactly what Lethem is claiming.

It is that richness of experience that brings me finally to the most confusing part of Lethem’s snipe - at least for me.

After Lethem made his statements that art doesn’t educate us as well as utilitarian classroom exercises, Jim Fleming tried to defend art by arguing that it has a utility, that through it we make the imaginative leap into understanding a world that we could not have acquired through our own, direct experience. What Fleming was getting at was empathetic imagination - the ability to imagine for ourselves what it is like to be The Other. Lethem seems to shoot that down, but it also seems that he doesn’t quite get what he is talking about.

Lethem said: “I actually think that it’s not that [to help us make sense out of life], it’s to make you experience something, not to explain your experience, but in order for you to have a new one, and maybe also to remember and embody, sit inside, abide with your own experiences more deeply in a more conscious way, but not to explain them, because it couldn’t possibly do that. It could never help you really understand, could it?”

So let’s see if I can reconstruct the train of thought: according to Lethem, art doesn’t teach us anything, it makes us experience something, but doesn’t explain it, it gives us a new experience which is also supposed to make us remember our experiences and abide with our experiences in a more conscious way, but not explain them. In other words, Art doesn’t teach, it just makes us experience something that may or may not be new and if it’s not new then it references our past experiences, which we are supposed to dwell on with our conscious mind but not understand.

Got it? Yeah, neither do I.

First off, let me throw out an old aphorism: Experience is the greatest teacher.

It is the experience of something that best teaches us how to cope with the vagaries of life, correct? Sometimes the experience comes to us first hand, sometimes, it comes to us second hand. Or, to put it another way, some of us learn not to touch fire by getting burned; some of us learn not to touch fire by seeing someone else, or something else, get burned by fire. Art is, at its most basic, second hand experience; however, transcendent art contains a certain mimetic quality - that empathetic imagination I mention before - that can act like first hand experience, and wake us up to things in the world that we could not have otherwise learned.

For years I have held the belief that the stories we tell can and do have an effect on the world. And it’s not just my naive, midwestern, Lutheran upbringing now semi-Buddhist leanings, that gave me those ideas. The same ideas are held by the likes of Dzevad Karahasan, a Bosnian Muslim writer who weathered the siege of Sarajevo, and which he expressed in his book “Sarajevo: Exodus of a City.” Lethem’s argument to Jim Fleming seems to me to embody what Karahasan and I would call “Art for Art’s Sake” - a self-referential game that is unconcerned with the rest of the world: a piece of fluff asserting its meaninglessness upon us. The problem with art that asserts its meaninglessness is that by providing this particular kind of “experience” of meaninglessness, it teaches us that anything we experience is meaningless. I have found that such nihilism makes a person susceptible to the kind of manipulation at the hands of demagogues who promise to provide that missing meaning if only we’ll do as they command.

My Thoughts on Smoking Bans

2010-10-21T20:54:00.000-05:00

        Recently, the Kansas Legislature passed a state-wide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants. And, of course, the debate is rancorous. The smokers are upset and argue that their right to smoke is being restricted, bar owners are upset and claim that the ban on smoking will hurt their business because smokers will choose to stay away. And, of course, the law itself is flawed by the hypocrisy of the state allowing smoking in state owned casinos – because the state fears losing revenue when the smokers decide they can’t gamble without smoking a cigarette.

            Personally, I’m glad for the ban. I’ve struggled to remain a non-smoker for the last ten years. When I lived in Boulder, CO, it was easy: there were lots of bars and a smoking ban for bars and restaurants, so I was able to go out, drink and not be surrounded by cigarette smoke and the temptation to light up a cigarette for myself. Until the smoking ban hit Wichita, if I wanted to go out with friends for a beer, I didn’t have many choices for non-smoking places to go – especially since a lot of my friends smoke. It wouldn’t do any good to go and drink at my friend’s homes – again, because they smoke, and they weren’t keen on coming to my place because they’d have to smoke outside. They old saying is that there is no one more aggressively anti-smoking as a former smoker (or as anti-drinking as a former drinker, etc), so keep in mind that I am a person who, 98% of the time, is a non-smoker. The other 2% of the time is when I’m around my smoking friends.

        So, It is to my smoking friends that I address this piece.

        I think my smoking friends and I can all agree that smoking is dangerous. We can also agree that second hand smoke is dangerous. Recently, there have been studies on what is colloquially called “third hand smoke.” Scientists are finding that because you can smell cigarettes long after they’ve been put out, it means that there are still dangerous toxins present to be breathed in (There’s 250 poisonous toxins in cigarette smoke including lead, cyanide, and arsenic). That means a non-smoking mother who goes to a smokey bar with her friends, doesn’t just put herself at risk, she could, potentially, put her child at risk when she slips into the child’s room to kiss him goodnight because those toxins are still being emitted from her clothes and hair.

            Now my stand begins with the assumption that a) smoke-free breathing is the universal baseline: we don’t smoke when we sleep, we didn’t pop out of the womb with a cigarette in our mouths, and b) smoking is optional, people choose to begin smoking. Because not-smoking is the basic human state, breathing takes precedent over smoking. This is why smoking in airplanes is prohibited, it’s why smoking in confined spaces with newborns is frowned upon.

            Furthermore, a society has the right, if not the duty, to control and place restrictions upon activity that is harmful to people who participate in that activity, but especially so when such an activity might be harmful to those nearby who are not directly participating in the hazardous activity. Take traffic laws, or football, for example.

            I think we can all agree that football is a dangerous activity. Just in the last week or so, there have been several serious injuries, including a young college player who was paralyzed from the neck down. Those who participate in football do so of their own free will, like those who choose to smoke, and they are aware of and accept the dangers associated with participating in that activity. However, we don’t allow football players to play football in a room full of bridge players, even bridge players who are football fans. We don’t allow football players to randomly tackle people on the streets. Football is restricted to football fields, and even then there are further rules and restrictions meant to confine the risk associated with playing football localized to a specific set of participants. Football plays don’t take place in the stands among the fans where a heavily armored, fast moving player can endanger a slow, unarmored observer. And although the players and coaches on the sidelines accept a certain level of risk by being close to the hazardous action, play stops when the players leave the defined field of play and enter the sideline. Play also stops if a non-player enters the field of play. Of course that doesn’t mean the non-player won’t be hurt by one of the players (or despised or ridiculed or hated) but, those who have entered into the contract to play football stop to remove the non-player who, despite their sudden appearance, has not fully entered into the contract.

            We would find it ridiculous and unreasonable if, when we went to a football game we were told that, even though we were non-players, we were required to stand on the field and be part of the action, and that we must accept the risk of being treated like a football player and allow the players to make contact with us even though we aren’t football players. We would find if doubly unreasonable then, if we protested and were told that if we don’t want to accept this risk, we shouldn’t come to watch a football game.

            This is the basic attitude held by smokers. The smoker’s choice to risk their health takes primacy over the baseline universal within the confines of a bar. I have heard smokers make the argument that by choosing to enter a bar, a non-smoker must accept the risks of smoking even though they do not choose to light a cigarette, or stay at home. Once upon a time, when I was a full-fledged smoker, I probably made the same argument. But now I wonder why should the price of going out with my friends for a drink be my health? Or to put it another way, why do my smoking friends insist that in order to be friends with them, I must choose to be a second hand smoker?

        I don’t know how many times in the years before the smoking ban was in place here that I or one of my friends would try to quit smoking. We’d do all right on our own, we’d do okay if our smoking friends came to our houses, or joined us at a movie theatre. But, even if we managed to avoid lighting a cigarette when we visited our smoking friend’s homes, we would, essentially, spend the night second hand smoking. To quit smoking, to make the choice to return to our baseline, non-smoking condition, especially with smoking friends, can often mean having to choose between our giving up our health or giving up our friends. Giving up our dangerous friends for our health might be the best choice, but it doesn’t feel very good.

            We would not go to football games if we were told we would have to passively stand on the field, waiting to be hit by an armored player. We would not long be friends with someone who demanded that each time we saw them we had to viciously smack ourselves on the head with a two-by-four. And yet, with smoking and our smoking friends, we non-smokers are asked to do just that.

        Now, as much as I would wish that my smoking friends, and my smoking sister in particular, would give up smoking, I’m not going to continuously beat them over the head about it. This essay will be the last of it. If they choose to smoke, fine, I’m not going to pull the cigarette out from between their lips and throw their packs in the toilet. But I am going to start asking why they have to smoke when I’m around, and that if they want me around, they should not smoke when I am around. Although I may voluntarily visit their homes, it seems to me only the good manners of a host for them to be mindful of my decision to not smoke. Think of it as if I were Jewish, and cigarettes were pork. No one with any amount of consideration would invite a Jewish friend over and serve that Jewish friend ham, purposefully, and then be so rude as to tell their Jewish friend to leave if they don’t want to eat the ham.

First Remix on PFANM VOL 4

2010-10-14T23:04:00.000-05:00

Got the first remix of a story posted at the magazine. Check it out here.

Workshop Blues

2010-10-12T22:02:00.000-05:00

        So, lately I’ve been wanting to start up a workshop group of some sort. I am desperate to get some feedback on my new project, and equally desperate to exercise my own critical muscles. Of course the other thing I’d like to do is be able to sit down and talk with other serious prose writers on regular basis.
        None of those things are happening for me right now.
        I did consider having some kind of on-line workshop, but for me I just don’t think it would work. Unless everyone is set up to video conference, we’d then be reduced to emails, write-ups, and no spontaneous conversation.
        No, what I want is a face-to-face, in person workshop. Such a thing would force me to read the submitted manuscripts, plus it would get me out of the house - or at least get other people into my house.
        The only problem is I can’t seem to scare up some mutually interested writers in these parts. Of the prose writers I know, one has a travel heavy day job, one is already in a workshop and the workshop is an ad-hoc online endeavor, two others seem to think I’m too square or otherwise unhip, another is just plain uninterested and I can’t tell if it is out of insecurity or some kind of intellectual snobbishness, still another is a professor of creative writing who also seems completely uninterested in me the few times we’ve met, and the last two I know write kid lit for the preteen set.
        I’ve been told that I just need to get out more, which makes sense only on the surface level. Outside of the academic setting most working writers have day jobs and aren’t out doing a lot of socializing in their spare time.... they’re off somewhere writing. And if they’re anything like me then they’ll pass pretty innocuously through most social events.
        This all leaves me in a pretty dismal and isolated position.

New Issue is Up

2010-10-07T22:33:00.000-05:00

The new issue of The Project for A New Mythology is up.

Volume 4: Remix is waiting for your participation.

A Case Against Ideologically Based Genres In Fiction

2010-09-23T20:19:00.000-05:00

Lately, one of my side projects has been kicking around the idea of organizing a literary festival here in Wichita. The general thinking is that since I’m not having much luck (or maybe more to the point I’m not pressing my luck) at getting relocated somewhere more friendly to creative, generally unemployable people like me, then I should quit bitching about how dismal it is to be a non-academically employed literary writer in Wichita and do something about it. In essence, try to bring the fun to me if I can’t get to the fun. Still means I’ll be dirt poor and on the verge of bankruptcy (I can feel the concrete of mom’s basement beneath my feet already), but what the hell.

In pursuit of that I’ve been chatting with people who have done this sort of thing before here in Kansas. In one of the recent conversations, which took place in the midst of a busy book festival, I was told that I should include “Christian writers” because there are some people doing some good work in the Christian fiction genre. My response was immediate and visceral. No. If we had been in a kid-free zone, I would have said “Fuck no.”

Anyway, we were interrupted then and never really got to finish our talk about this matter. I was going to send an email to the person, explaining myself further, but the email got a bit long winded so I decided it would be best as a blog post.

First, let me say that I’m not opposed to writers who happen to be Christian, nor am I opposed to a book about the Christian “experience”: however, I am opposed to any genre of fiction that has as its central requirement the adoption of, or an adherence to, a certain ideology. And I feel this way about any and all ideologies, even my favored ones (Buddhism, socialism, etc). An ideologically based genre is prone to producing, and legitimizing, what I call Dogmatic Literature. Dogmatic literature, either fiction or non-fiction, is the source material for nearly every major, man-made societal tragedy and horror I can think of. In Dogmatic literature, the characters seem to be motivated by a sound, internal logic, and, at first, they seem like well rounded characters. However, by the end of the book, they have either subjugated their personhood in favor of the author’s ideology and been rewarded, or they’ve rejected the author’s favored ideology and are utterly destroyed. By the end of the book, these once logically constructed characters stop doing the things they do because they are human beings and instead do them because they are good Christians or good Socialists. Examples of this type of literature are books like “The Turner Diaries,” or “Atlas Shrugged,” or the entire “Left Behind” series of books.

Much like the old war-time propaganda tactic of dehumanizing the enemy to maintain passion for the war effort, and a willingness to kill, Dogmatic literature acts upon the fundamentally pedagogical and emotionally influential nature of storytelling to reinforce people’s misperceptions of others who do not share their belief in the ideology professed in the story. When Jenkins and LaHaye offer up cold, sensationalistic descriptions of the horrible, gruesome deaths of non-Christians in the Left Behind series, essentially reveling in their proxy revenge on those horrible secular humanists they see as persecuting good Christians, they are taking the stand that people not willing to accept Jesus Christ as their savior deserve whatever horrible, inhumane things happen to them.

The best analysis of the hypocrisy, and heartlessness of the Left Behind series is done by The Slacktivist (a liberal evangelical Christian who likes to write using the language of secular humanists). By tackling the biggest selling Christian Fiction books of all time, he also, by default, tackles what is wrong with Dogmatic Literature in general. This is especially important since Jenkins has slapped his name all over the “Christian Writers Guild” where one of the endorsers, Francine Rivers, is quoted on the CWG website as suggesting that if people join and learn from this guild, God will “take back” the arts. Other endorsers also use such militaristic language.

How can “Christians,” who, according to census results, make up 80% or more of the American population, not already have control of the so-called “secular” marketplace? Well, to answer my own question, the do it by believing that the number is a lie and that not everyone who calls himself a Christian is a Real-True-Christian, and that they, the RTC’s, are threatened and endangered unless they get all militant and “take back” the arts/the government/the military/the media/whatever.

Such language, the language of a group that believes itself to be a victimized minority when it clearly isn’t, is the language adopted by the writers of Dogmatic Literature. The most stark example of this is from the Bosnian War and its aftermath. Despite the Bosnian Serbs receiving military support from Serbia proper (tanks, helicopters, and manpower), despite having control of the majority of the equipment left in Bosnia by the Yugoslav National Army after Bosnia & Herzegovina declared its independence, despite the Bosnian Serbs being the ones who surrounded every single besieged city in Bosnia, and despite the fact that the Bosnian Serbs were the ones who put up internment camps that reminded the world of concentration camps, the Bosnian Serbs and the Serb Nationalists who supported them, still say that they were the victims and that the Bosniaks were the aggressors out to commit genocide against the Serbs.

Essentially, this is why I am opposed to inviting anyone to participate in a literary festival who writes fiction pushing a specific ideology - but especially in our current social climate, a “Christian” ideology. Now, I can hear the rumblings already: “What happened to your so-called liberal ideal of tolerance, huh?” Well, let me ask you this: if I invite a Christian fiction author who fervently believes that I have a sickness and am going to hell for being a Buddhist, should I also invite the author of “The Turner Diaries” or some other representative of white supremacist fiction who fervently believes that my friend Alexs D. Pate should be enslaved or killed because he’s black? When I look at the ideology of writers like Jerry Jenkins and his cohort Tim LaHaye, what I see is an ideology that embraces the elimination of those they deem non-believers, and that is the same style of ideology expressed by the author of The Turner Diaries against non-whites.

I will not grant white supremacists my tacit approval by inviting them to participate in otherwise legitimate, polite society, and I will not grant tacit legitimization of a Christian Dominionism marked by its often violent rhetoric (and occasional paroxysms of actual violence), towards non-Christians, homosexuals, and others who fall outside their circle off acceptance.

If writers of “Christian Fiction” want to attend any literary festival that I organize, they are welcome to. They’re even welcome to open a discussion of their belief that “secular art” needs to be “taken back” by God. However, I will not offer any kind of tacit approval or sympathy for their cause by giving them an official platform from which to disseminate their odoriferous ideas about writing and art as a means to proselytize a belief system that encourages the dehumanizing of nonbelievers. That will only lead to suffering.

They can start their own literary festival. I’ll be quite happy to ignore them and not to attend.

The Kid Who Never Grew Up.

2010-09-19T15:16:00.000-05:00

        When The Corrections came out, and there was the little Oprah spat, I became quite interested in the book and picked up a copy in hardcover. At the time I didn’t have a very kind disposition toward Oprah’s book club, so I was very interested to read something by a writer who seemed to also feel that Oprah’s book club was a little questionable.

        When I finally sat down to read The Corrections, I read the first page and a half and then threw it on the floor as if I were trying to use it to break up concrete. There was something fundamentally annoying about the writing that, for the longest time, I was only ever capable of describing as irony. I heard the same ironic tone when Franzen was on Fresh Air and read a few passages from his new book, Freedom. My big problem with saying anything more is that I simply don’t have the stamina to read an entire Franzen novel, not when the tone I encounter in the first couple of pages is annoying enough that I feel the need turn the book into a sledge hammer.

        But then I found this review by B. R. Myers in a recent issues of The Atlantic. I’ll let B. R. Myers’ review provide the fireworks against Franzen’s work, but I would like to quote a bit from the review:

        [...] although the narrator of Freedom tells us on the first page, “There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds,” one need read only that the local school “sucked” and that Patty was “very into” her teenage son, who in turn was “fucking” the girl next door, to know that whatever is wrong with these people does not matter. The language a writer uses to create a world is that world, and Franzen’s strenuously contemporary and therefore juvenile language is a world in which nothing important can happen. Madame Bovary’s marriage sucked, Heathcliff was into Catherine: these words fail the context not just because they are of our own time. There is no import in things that “suck,” no drama in someone’s being “into” someone else. As for the F word, Anthony Burgess once criticized the notion that to use it in matter-of-fact prose is to hark back to “a golden age of Anglo-Saxon candour”; the word was taboo from the start, because it stands for brutal or at best impersonal sex. “A man can fuck a whore but, unless his wife is a whore, he cannot fuck his wife … There is no love in it.” A writer like Franzen, who describes two lovers as “fucking,” trivializes their relationship accordingly. The result is boredom.
Franzen does not take his story very seriously, but the irony is indiscriminate and directionless; he hints at no frame of reference from which we are to judge his prose critically.

        This indiscriminate and directionless irony, created by what fundamentally amounts to poor word choice, was exactly what I was sensing when I attempted to read Franzen all those years ago. It really baffles me why so many critics comment on Freedom as being some kind of full maturation of Franzen’s abilities when, in truth, it seems he’s just doing the same old thing.

        Myers’ line, “The language a writer uses to create a world is that world” seems to me to be one of those fundamental and obvious truths about being a writer. However, it may be something that those who do not practice poetry don’t easily understand. It also echoes with the Dzevad Karahasan quote that seems to inform nearly everything I try to do as a writer: “For, let us not fool ourselves: the world is written first” (the full quote is at the top of my blog). I won’t try to hazard a guess at the kind of world Franzen’s language creates, but for those who can stomach him long enough to read him, I would suggest that you go and pick up the book To The Wedding by John Berger, or In The Skin of A Lion by Michael Ondaatje and pay attention to the language used to create those worlds.

        The quality I hope people see in those books, and that I hope exists in my own, is one of deep generosity for the characters. And then I’d like those people to try to imagine how poor those stories would become if they were written with the poetry stripped out and replaced with the baser family of words like “sucked” or “fuck,” or even the colloquial phrases like “being into someone.”

        When I used to teach composition, one of the earliest lessons I gave my students was to avoid cliches and colloquialisms. I told them that such things were essentially emotional shorthand, and only meant something to the writer and to the people who know the writer best, like the writer’s family. I can tell you I was “mad as hell,” but you won’t understand exactly how mad that is in the way that my mother, or my sister, understands it. In order for you to understand exactly how mad something made me, I’d have to describe, in detail and with precise language, what I felt, said, or did to express that anger. Take my description of how I reacted to the first page and a half of The Corrections. That is a visceral image (I hope). It’s certainly more precise than saying “I threw it across the room.”

        Our characters can use those words because that may, in fact, be how they speak to each other. But writers, the world builders, we should choose our words more carefully. We should shun emotional shorthand of every variety when we write of our characters. We should endeavor to find the poetry of their pain, of their joy, of their shame and self-loathing, of their pride and passion, and render it to our readers with as much compassion and generosity as we can marshal to our cause - we should not describe them with the same base words they might use to describe themselves.

        Think about all the times we describe ourselves to others. How often do we use sarcasm, irony, black humor, or understatement because we don’t want to seem arrogant or full of ourselves? People who aren’t at least a little self-effacing generally shunned. But if we begin effacing someone else, we literally, as the word suggests, wipe them out. We make them smaller than even they believe themselves to be. In the real world, that can be countered by other people who know that person. In the fictional world we create, those characters we create with a too heavy dose of sarcasm and irony, whose passions and desires we describe with inappropriately base terms, will be too diminished to elicit any emotion from readers except scorn. And it’s only a matter of time before the scorn we learn to feel for made up people translates into feeling scorn for the real life people around us.

Volume 4 of The Project for A New Mythology

2010-09-12T15:38:00.000-05:00

I’m at work on the next issue of the Project for a New Mythology. I’ve also been busy writing the next novel, so it often seems as if my days are full of nothing but computer screens and black text.

For those who might be finding the magazine website or this blog lately, I need to get you caught up on what the next issue is going to be like. (Here are some earlier blog posts about the idea from June 7th #1, June 7th #2, June 9th, and June 12th).

Essentially, The Project for a New Mythology is trying out an experiment in User Generated Content, via the Creative Commons License program. I have 7 recruits, plus myself, who have agreed to provide “seed stories” for the website. The stories are each registered under their own Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike Creative Commons license and will be available for users to download and remix. All that PFANM asks, is the users abide by the CC license and let us know when their remixes are posted (or they can send their remix to me and I’ll post it to www.pfanm.com).

I, and my fellow writers hope it will be a smashing success. Now, back to work on the website so it’ll be ready by the first week of October.

A Recommendation

2010-08-30T21:50:00.000-05:00

I have been reading “Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality” by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. It has been incredibly enlightening.

It has also made me reevaluate some of the ideas I’ve had lately (see my previous post - and the entire train of thought at Women Hate Me(NSFW)).

Of course, I’m not completely giving up on the idea that competition for mates is at the root of a lot of bad decisions in society. Especially in a society that has made the naked pursuit of individual self-interest at the expense of other people’s well-being something like a fetish.

I am, after all, a devout pessimist when it comes to human nature. I hold out very little hope that we will ever become wise enough to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow above, beyond, and superior to all other life on the planet.

But I’m going off on a tangent and I wanted to recommend this book.

Give Sex at Dawn a whirl. It might just make you reevaluate a few things as well.

All Philosophy Is a Mask for Reproduction

2010-08-18T20:22:00.000-05:00

Karl Marx and Ayn Rand each made a very simple mistake: They were both optimistic about the core nature of human beings.

Marx believed that class and people’s relation to labour bent people towards misery and suffering and that in a classless society people’s core nature of goodness and creativity would flourish because no one would be in a position to alienate someone else from the product of their labour. Rand believed that servitude and altruism bent people towards misery and suffering and that in a society ruled by objective self interest people’s honor and morality would flourish because to act dishonorably and immorally would damage their self-interest.

First off, people’s core nature isn’t good or bad. It’s reproductive. My alter-ego has written about this a bit at Women Hate Me (and until today, I’ve kept that alter ego separate from my “real” personae - they’re still separate, really). Essentially, the point is that goodness, ethics, and honor, all of it goes out the window if doing otherwise might provide us an advantage in the mating game (how homosexuality fits in with that is another post for another time).

Now, that may over-reduce the point, but what I hope to get across is to remind us that there’s a lot about human psychology and social behavior that we deny, ignore, rationalize, and simply don’t know because we are at once a highly intelligent species and a highly stupid species. We devote a lot of brain power and creativity doing essentially two things: 1) avoiding the knowledge that we are animals, and 2) manufacturing and maintaining wacky beliefs and the supposed evidence that supports those wacky beliefs.

Take the Creationist “Museum” (no, I will NOT link directly to their site) that has a whole display trying to show how Noah could have fit every single land and air dwelling creature (including dinosaurs) on the planet into a single, hand-made boat, and that all of human history has happened in less than 10,000 years.

But I digress: reproductive access alone doesn’t explain the high level decisions at places like BP that lead to the Deepwater Horizon spill, or the carelessness that lead to the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India or flaming water faucets in Texas, or the flaming Cuyahoga in 1969. But reproductive access does provide the root impetus to secure social status, and thereby secure and maintain access to viable reproductive sources. Now, that reproductive angle is buried deep in our lizard brains, but gaining social status is not buried there. Gaining social status is very much in our forebrain, even if we don’t fully understand the source of our drive to acquire status symbols. And nothing in our society confers social status quite like money – lots and lots of money. Money can even deflect damaging critical and social attention from a person: Ask the Bush family, ask the Kennedy family.

Because of this blindness we possess and our willingness to lie to ourselves and obfuscate our motives, we cannot always live up to our lofty ideals.

Pure communism is a utopian dream because we cannot purge ourselves of the compulsion to exploit other people’s labor if doing so gives us an elevated social standing, which, in turn, increases our access to viable, fertile mates.

Objectivism is a utopian dream because we cannot purge ourselves of the compulsion to jettison ethical behavior if doing so without much fear of punishment can give us an elevated social standing and greater access to viable mates.

If we think about it, this dynamic - gaining and maintaining an elevated social status - explains nicely why powerful men cheat on their wives: it’s because their wealth and power grants them this “privilege.” And the fear of losing that privilege is exactly why so many businessmen make dangerous, risky, even reckless and careless decisions: more money equals more status and more status equals better mate selection.

Of course none of them will cop to that. They’ll pull in theories about free markets, about profit maximization for shareholders, about “freedom,” about self-interest and about the economy. But they’ll never admit that it all has to do with sex, and that in the world of sex and reproduction, lying, cheating, and killing are all acceptable in order to preserve your genetic progeny lives on and the other person’s progeny does not.

But that doesn’t mean we should give up on our various philosophies, or ideals that we use to convince ourselves that we are a “higher species.” We should just make sure that our base assumption about ourselves isn’t clouded by a rosy, optimistic opinion of our nature. When our species began, we were at the mercy of the environment, and predators, and disease. Estimates put world population in 70,000 BCE to be less than 1 million people. Today, world population is over 6 billion and is expected to reach 10 billion people sometime after 2050. To put it simply, they style of mating that we originally evolved with does not apply today.

We are not in any danger of naturally going extinct; however, we might very well kill ourselves off if we don’t use our elevated brain power to figure out how to control our baser human urges to lie, cheat, and kill.

More on Choice (Thanks for Playing Addendum)

2010-08-13T20:24:00.000-05:00

An additional talk to go along with my earlier post about choice.

The Children's Bicycle club.

2010-08-10T19:14:00.000-05:00

Bob spent all day designing and building cars. The cars Bob designed were big, boring, and emitted horrible things into the atmosphere, but everyone Bob knew had one because that was what grown-ups used to get around town and go to adult things. A big boring car was just something that grown-ups needed to have. Bob’s job was tedious. The designs didn’t change very much, and the cars didn’t change very much. The cars simply became more and more complex, and more boring, and more like every other car designed and built at other car factories.

When quitting time came, however, Bob didn’t trudge out of work, defeated by his monotonous job designing and building big, boring, nasty polluting cars. He raced home, his mind already filled with images of handlebar tassels, banana seats, and the sound of playing cards being slapped by glinting metal bicycle spokes.

You see, once or twice a week Bob would meet with his Kids Bicycle Club for Grown-ups and they would build and fix and ride children’s bicycles. Once, Bob had been ashamed of his love of children’s bicycles, but then he’d found other adults who loved children’s bicycles and so they started a club so they wouldn’t have to be embarrassed about riding children’s bicycles while other adult still insisted on going places in their big, boring, pollutionmobiles. Bob’s boss, Bill, who owned the car company Bob worked for was a member, as well as several other car engineers. There were also people who built things that went into the cars Bob and Bill made. And there were people in the club who sold the cars Bob and Bill built at work.

Bob and Bill loved their children’s bicycle club. They were often heard talking about how much more fun the bicycles were, how they were able to customize them, and how much cleaner they were than the smelly old boring cars for grown-ups. And they were always trying to get other adults to join their children’s bicycle club and ride children’s bicycles. They were down-right evangelical about it, in fact. Bob sometimes wrote editorials about children’s bicycles that got published in the town’s newspaper.

Then one night after particularly spirited meeting of the children’s bicycle club Bob and Bill were sitting on their fancy, decorated children’s bicycles in front of Bob’s house where his big, boring, toxin spewing car sat. They chatted awhile about their favorite parts of the meeting. Then Bob, feeling wistful, and young, and imaginative - even more so than he normally did while riding around on his children’s bicycle - looked at his boring old car then up at the night sky and said to Bill “Wouldn’t it be great if someone would make a car for grown ups that was as fun to ride around on as a children’s bicycle?”

“That would be awesome,” Bill said.

But the next morning Bob got up and went to work where he designed another big boring polutionmobile never once thinking about what he’d said the night before.

The Kids' Books Are All Right - - - If You're a Kid.

2010-08-09T17:34:00.000-05:00

If there’s one thing that will continually set me off, it’s grown-ups trying to defend the reading of kid’s books by grown-ups as some kind neuvo-rebellion against the “plotlessness” of adult literature.

Leave it to the NY Times Book Review to deliver such an argument on a day when I feel a boundless urge to bitch about something.

I first learned about Pamela Paul’s essay “The Kids’ Books Are All Right” through the NY Times Book Review podcast, which I listen to every Monday at work (sometimes not all the way through because the books or authors they decide to focus on make me want to pluck out my eyeballs). After listening to Pamela’s discussion with Sam Tanenhaus and then reading the article, I could barely contain myself at work. I wanted to leave right then at about 9:30 in the morning, but I have bills to pay, dammit, and can’t use the office computer to write my response without possibly getting in trouble.

So, here I am, finally at home, and finally getting down my response.

The piece starts out with this line “While the au fait literary types around town await the buzzed about new novels from Jonathan Franzen and Nicole Krauss, other former English Majors have spent the summer trying to get hold of “Mockingjay,” the third book in Suzanne Collins’s dystopian trilogy. . .”

Now, maybe being out here in the sticks of Kansas, I’m not “au fait” enough for it to matter to Pamela. However, if in order to be “with it” as an English major in any city, I have to eagerly anticipate a new novel by either Franzen or Krauss, much less a Young Adult novel by anyone I don’t personally know (hi Brian Farrey), with the kind of fevered curiosity she seems to describe then well, I’ll gladly give up my degree in English (hell, I’ll give up my MFA too, fat lot of good either is doing me right now). I’ve not taken Franzen seriously since I couldn’t get past the first page of “The Corrections.” Whenever people like Pamela Paul or Sam Tanenhaus talk about irony in American letters the first writer I think of is Franzen. As far as Krauss goes, meh. Whatever. Maybe I’ll read one of her books when she reads mine.

After that overly presumptive opening, she goes on to describe how Collins’s Hunger Games fan page on Facebook is mostly adults, and how it’s not just the kids who grew up reading Harry Potter that are reading all this YA fiction but 42 year olds. She quotes one reader as saying “Adult literature is all art and no heart,” and that YA lit “is like good television.” Paul even quotes grown-up champions of YA lit as saying that YA is “easier to read, and people are tired.”

Overall she makes her case in favor of the “superiority” of YA lit with a lot of facts and surveys and quotes . . . but here’s where her argument collapses for me and where I’m just about to start banging my head against the wall until I’m unconscious.

As she builds her case, she points out that a number of the members of her Kidlit book club are New York literary types, one is an agent at I.C.M, another is a senior VP at Harper, there are also “several top agents and editors” who are members of this Kidlit book club. Paul even mentions a couple of writers of supposedly adult fare who are part of the club.

The basic argument all these people are quoted as saying, and which Paul is pushing, is that YA lit focuses on storytelling, fast paced action, and themes relevant to today’s issues, while adult literature is burdened with excessively grown-up themes and a need to be “subtle and coy.” Adult readers, they argue, just like kids, want to be told a good story that they can get engrossed in, discuss passionately, etc, etc, and since adult literature doesn’t offer that, adult readers are turning to a genre that does.

Now, I can understand this coming from the average reader who has a day job as an accountant, or a nurse, or any of the thousands and thousands of jobs that aren’t in publishing, but seriously, if you’re a writer, or an agent, or an editor, or a publisher who, by day, deals with “adult” books then spends your recreational time reading YA books because they give you something that’s missing from adult books then you’re the problem. As a reader, these publishing professionals are their own (and by extension our) dissatisfaction with “adult literature.”

Is there a rule somewhere that says literature written for adults about adult things has to be subtle to the point of making a big deal out of the length of grass yesterday as compared to today? Is there a rule that adult literature has to be coy and burdened with irony? Is there a rule that says adult literature has to be afraid of plot (or be so overly plotted that characterization suffers like in most mysteries and thrillers)?

The answer to those questions, in case you were wondering, Ms. Paul, is - No, there are no such rules.

So, why don’t these writers, agents, and editors go out and write or find adult literature that isn’t subtle, ironic and plotless? As writers, agents and editors they have the power to do so. Except they don’t seem to be doing it. Instead they sit around one day bitching about the decline in readers of literary fiction, and the next day complaining that adult literature isn’t as interesting and fun to read as kid lit, then they turn around and give another big contract to an adult writer of plotless, ironic, crap. Why?

Well, I think I have an answer to that: They don’t want to grow up and act like adults, which is odd considering that built into every YA book is the inevitability of growing up.

Thanks For Playing.

2010-08-05T20:53:00.004-05:00

A couple of days ago I inadvertently stumbled into a conversation with a conservative, who I didn’t know, about whether or not we choose to be poor, fat, unhealthy, etc. The conservative’s belief was that government aid programs like unemployment insurance, food stamps, and other curbs against poverty were bad and that people who used them were all doing so by choice (there was also some anti-immigrant undertones to his comments).
One area I tried to bring up to illustrate that choice is often limited to what is most readily available was access to food. People living in urban “food deserts,” and without adequate transportation, eat convenience store food, junk food, and fast food. His stance, of course, was again that they didn’t have to choose to eat that stuff if they’d just choose to walk however far they needed to in order to buy food at a grocery store. He also did not believe that people in underserved communities could be truly ignorant of all of their options – again his view was that these people simply made the choice not to make themselves aware.
I don’t think I need to but I’m going to spell it out: this was a white man with a good education and a good job. What his views say to me is that he fails to understand certain caveats when it comes to choice: the choices available to him are not available to everyone else. When people grow up never being truly denied anything, it’s often hard – if not impossible – for them to grasp the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that restrict the choices of those who aren’t fortunate white men.
In America, we like to believe the playing field is level, even when it isn’t.
In my experience, there are three things that make this notion that the predicament of the poor is a matter of choice not as clear cut as my conservative co-worker thinks it is. First, there are certain deep, psychological issues. Second, and closely related, is ignorance. And the third is the big one, the built-in errors of human judgement (this third one will come with video).
Learned Helplessness:
When we claim that every bad situation, every bad outcome, is the direct result of our choices (or failure to choose), we operate on the fallacy that everyone feels they can control the outcome of a situation. This simply isn’t the case. Learned helplessness should not be discounted when dealing with people who seem to make bad decisions, or who simply suffer through miserable conditions. The hallmark twist to learned helplessness is that once a person has been conditioned by the circumstances of his life to believe that he cannot control the outcome of anything he does, that person will continue to remain in bad situations even when the option to escape is presented.
Now, of course, there are a fraction of people who don’t seem to learn this helplessness, either because they are inherently optimistic, or are able to separate themselves psychologically from the bad conditioning; however, most people don’t seem to fall into those two categories very often.
Another aspect of learned helpless doesn’t have to do with pain, but merely direct experience of control. A learned helplessness experiment in 1969 was done with infants. Here’s the description from Wikipedia:

One group [of infants] was placed into a crib with a sensory pillow, designed so that the movement of the baby’s head could control the rotation of a mobile. The other group had no control over the movement of the mobile and could only enjoy looking at it. Later, both groups of babies were tested in cribs that allowed the babies to control the mobile. Although all the babies now had the power to control the mobile, only the group that had already learned about the sensory pillow bothered to use it.

This example dovetails nicely with my second point about ignorance. What we see going on with these babies in this experiment is a kind of ignorance my conservative co-worker doesn’t believe exists. The second set of babies were not taught to believe they could not control their environment, and so, even when given the tools to do so would not take control of their environment.
The interesting question to ask is how many of the babies from the second group stumbled upon the sensory pillow and taught themselves what they had not previously learned, and how many did not? How many needed help to unlearn their helplessness?
Ignorance:
It’s easy to blame people for not “choosing” to educate themselves if we operate on the assumption that everyone is as aware as we are of the opportunities and avenues of education. It’s also easy to blame people for not choosing to educate themselves if we insist on ignoring the simple fact that people 1) believe weird shit, 2) receive incomplete information, and 3) are simply lied to.
We can’t choose something that has been hidden from us, either by distance or someone else’s dishonesty. We won’t choose something if we are told it is a bad choice by someone to whom we have granted authority, or given our faith to, and who wishes to deceive us.
Of course, my conservative co-worker would simply say that we should then choose different people to grant authority to, to give our faith to - but how will we learn to do that if we have instead learned to be helpless, or not learned that we can choose?
But, even then, I would argue that we, as a species, are faulty choice machines. Why do two people equal in nearly all regards, choose to be on opposite sides of the political spectrum? Why does one of those people, seeking to alleviate their ignorance of world events, choose to turn to Fox News, while the other choose to turn to Al Jazeera?
The answer to those questions might be best handled at another time, but what is important here is this: choice does play a part in where we find ourselves in life. The problem is that we humans seem to be evolutionally hardwired to make bad decisions.
Mistakes We Make - And Can’t Stop Ourselves From Making

In a recent TED Talk Laurie Santos talked about an experiment she ran with monkeys (watch her talk for the full description). Essentially, what Laurie’s experiment shows is that we humans, even when all options are available to us will pretty consistently make risky, even dangerous decisions based solely on the possibility of a rich pay-off. Then, shockingly enough, even if we’ve been burned several times by our “poor” decisions, we’ll still make that same risky decision again because we see others make that decision and get rewarded.
That means that when we get right down to it, it’s not solely our choices that lead us to success or failure . . . but a combination of our luck and circumstance, and the choices that other people make.

2010 Kansas Notable Book List Released. There's something familiar here . . . Oh, yeah, It's me.

2010-07-22T05:31:00.002-05:00

The State Library Of Kansas and the Kansas Center for The Book released the 2010 Kansas Notable Books list yesterday.
“The Evolution of Shadows” is on it, along with the likes of Antonya Nelson, and Denise Low, who edited a poetry anthology that made the list.

New Issue Coming Together

2010-06-30T22:29:00.000-05:00

I’ve been at work on the new issue of the Project for A New Mythology.

Volume 4: Remix is coming together. It’s going to be an entirely online issue, with the stories being put out there under Creative Commons licenses that will allow readers to take the stories and remix them. We’ll specifically be using the Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license (read its legal deed here and legal code here).

I solicited stories from past contributors, and a few new acquaintances. I had hoped to get, at the very least, four volunteers — six at the most — to join me in this experiment (see the Australian site remixmylit.com to get an idea of what we’re doing). I got eight, with my contribution, that’s nine stories.

The goal is to have everything ready for a late September, early October release. Then, with the pages up, we will invite our readers, fellow writers, internet passers-by to remix the stories under the same creative commons license agreement, and to share those remixes with us by either submitting their remixes directly back to The Project for A New Mythology, or swapping links with us to where ever they post their remix.

I’m very excited about this.

Father's Day

2010-06-20T14:57:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was my first Father’s Day without my father.
In the last few years before my father’s death, we were not very good at talking with each other. Although the conversations we did have were peaceful, even pleasant, they were somewhat empty. I’d call on the mandatory days like his birthday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and, of course, Father’s day. We’d get caught up on things we were doing, the condition of my automobile, what I was writing, and what my half-brother, Will, had been up to. Many of the questions he’d ask, would be re-asked many times during a single conversation. He could never remember my girlfriend’s name, would forget other things I’d told him during other conversations. Because of that and our mutual desire to avoid yet another fight, our conversations never got terribly significant unless he felt the need to apologize for something from the past that had crept up in his memory and was gnawing at him.
That was the irony of the last years of my father’s life. I think there were times that he felt pained by the distance that had developed between himself and his two oldest children. He also struggled to remember things, which, for an insulin dependent diabetic, could sometimes be dangerous. There were times he would be able to remember something he’d done twenty years before, but couldn’t remember something my sister or I had told him twenty days before. Finally, his memory got so bad that he finally went to see a doctor about it, probably fearing it was Alzheimers. Around Christmas of 2009, he was diagnosed with hydrocephalus (water-on-the-brain). In late January or early February of 2010 he went in for surgery to have a shunt placed in his head to drain the excess fluid into his stomach. The one time I talked to him after that, he said he was feeling much better, much more clear headed, but that it would be a while before he was back to normal.
Normal would have been an interesting place for us to be. Especially after the last twenty years or so.
There were so many years of bitter fighting between us that things like Father’s Day, or calling him on his birthday, or the three or four hour visit on Christmas or Thanksgiving, didn’t mean anything to me but a painful obligation. Those were days where I was compelled to speak to my father, even if I didn’t feel like it, and to deal with this new configuration of a family that felt as foreign to me as a tribe of pygmy cannibals.
During my high school years, college, and the first ten years or so after my parent’s divorce (and his remarriage), it seemed that all we did was argue with each other. We argued about things he did, we argued about politics, about religion, about the break-up of our family, about his attempts to compare and contrast me with his new son, about what we expected from each other. We even argued about his attempts to apologize and make amends.
It has always been hard to explain why my father and I never got along after I became a teenager. I’ve always tried to describe it and failed. Some, I suppose, will want to chalk it up to the typical surliness that comes with teenagers, but the truth is that my surliness was really a small part of it.
When I was young, before high school, my father and I were close. He made time for me, even after long days at work. If I were having troubles at school, he’d take the time to sit and listen to me, and offer advice. On weekends, when I was set on becoming the next Roger Staubach, he would run pass routes for me in the front yard - even though he’d been a smoker since high school. During little league summers, he would swing a baseball at the end of a rope while I practiced my swing (my hitting never improved). He was involved with my Scout troops, and went on camping trips with us, helped me build my racers for the soap box derby, and taught me how to shoot a rifle.
I spoke about his dark side, his moodiness and sudden temper, in the eulogy I gave at his memorial service. Until those things reached their apex in me, in high school, I suppose they remained, if not invisible, at least overlooked. When we moved from Dodge City to Wichita just before my freshman year of high school, things began to crumble. I was fifteen, my sister was ten. It’s amazing was five years difference can do. My sister has very few good memories of our father. Most of her memories come from that period in Wichita when the family began to fall apart.
We’d made the move so my father could go to graduate school. He never did. And I think that was my first encounter with being disappointed with my father. Kids, of course, are selfish. I hadn’t wanted to leave Dodge City, and then when the reason we were given for the move never happened, I suppose I felt betrayed, or maybe it was disappointed. Either way, those dark eight years or so, from the time I was about fourteen, when we knew we were moving, until my parents divorced just after I turned twenty-two, set the tone for our relationship for the rest of his life.
I want to be clear on this because sometimes it’s easy for me to forget: my father was a good and decent man, but deeply flawed as well. It’s something that can be said for a lot of fathers - and for a lot of human beings. We are seldom capable of overcoming all of our flaws, all of the places where we have been broken, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get credit for trying. My father was trying.
One of his more frequent apologies over the last few years always dealt with parenting. After working for Early Head Start, after starting to raise a third child in his fifties, he often said he had begun to see the things he’d done wrong with me and my sister. I tried to understand why he felt compelled to confess this to me, but at the same time I resented the subtle suggestion, buried in his apology for being a young parent, that I hadn’t become the man he’d hoped I would become.
Untangling ourselves from each other was messy and impossible. Neither of us, I think, could quite get a handle on the other. I was skeptical of everything he said, and, perhaps, he wondered why, after a childhood of talking to each other, I never seemed to want to talk to him.
I saw him in hospital about three or four days before he had the massive heart attack and stroke that killed him in April. He was awake that day and it appeared that he was finally recovering after the car accident that had broken his left arm and caused bleeding on his brain. They had finally removed the drain from his head, but still had a feeding tube up his nose and down his throat still, so, he wasn’t able to talk. We spent most of that visit in silence. The next time I saw him was the day his wife, his sister, Helen Jean, and I made the decision to take him off life support.
My father was sedated, unconscious, and mostly brain dead, but his wife and his sister held his hands while he died. I stood in the back of the room, in the shadows behind the small, rolling table where a nurse sat making notes on my father’s chart. I stood there with my arms crossed over my chest and I refused to cry. I was angry. I was angry at him. I was angry at the doctors. I was angry at his wife for giving in to my father’s insistence that he could drive to Topeka and back just two months after having a shunt put in his head.
I was angry at myself for letting time get away from me.
So, on Father’s day, I talked to my sister, and to my mother. And then I sat down to write about my father.

The Project for a New Mythology Volume 4: Remix

2010-06-12T10:26:00.000-05:00

As you can probably see from the previous blog posts about copyright, remixing, and UGC, I’ve got a certain interest. It has also been the spark that finally lit the fire I needed to push forward with a new issue of the Project.

I’ve always thought of the Project for a New Mythology as first, a means to publish interesting writing by writers and artists I know and the writers and artists I encounter on my travels around the net. It was never meant to be a profit driven enterprise. It was also never meant to be something that would live for a long period of time. It would live and die with my level of interest and the level of interest displayed by my contributors and readers.

For a while, I’ve not had a lot of interest. I’ve also not wanted to do exactly the same thing again and again, and I think after the last two or three print editions of PFANM, I’d done just that. The online issue with eh downloadable PDF documents was fun, but there were complaints. People didn’t have printers, or didn’t want to print the things out and fold them and staple them . . . And, of course, there were the readers I’d acquired through Watermark who simply never visited the website.

So, I wasn’t too thrilled about doing yet another “print” magazine. It would cost more money than I can afford to spend, it would take more time that I would be able to allot to it, and, as always, it’s been difficult to secure the volunteers to put it all together. Then I engaged in a long rant about copyright, David Shields and a host of other people and ideas that were gnawing at me about the current war between digital book culture and printed book culture and copyright and the economic viability of writing as a profession.

And then it hit me: I should do a “remix” issue of the Project. It would be inexpensive, and, best of all, it would put into action the other ideal I had for the Project - namely that it represent a community of writers and artists and musicians who would, through this magazine engage in a conversation about art, its impact on society, and its ability to make the kind of world we want to live in.

So, over the next few days I’ll be contacting a number of writers and artists about contributing seed content which will be made available at www.pfanm.com under a Creative Commons license, particularly an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (details here) allowing others to adapt and remix the work. The remixers will then be asked to provide links to the places where they repost or distribute their remixes (or if they do not have their own websites, or blogs, they can send the remix to PFANM and we’ll post it on our website).

As I get closer to launching the original content pages, I’ll have more details. So, keep an eye on the blog and the website.

Thievery, Copyright, and the Future of Living as a Writer Part 2 (Laura Mullen and I Make a Mash-Up)

2010-06-09T20:34:00.000-05:00

When I was in graduate school, I took a week long class with the writer Laura Mullen. In it we appropriated someone else’s text, “edited” it by deletion, and then added in our own text, followed by yet more appropriated text from another source (you can read my results in this earlier post). That piece was an early, literary version of the kind of mash-up, remix, User Generated Content that we see in such volume on the net right now.

It’s possible to argue that what I did with William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily” and three HUM songs from “You’d Prefer An Astronaut”* is exactly what David Shields is advocating, and I can’t rightly or honestly say that it isn’t the case. I appropriated from Faulkner and HUM, directly quoted passages and, in the case of Faulkner made only minor edits via subtraction. The one difference is that when that piece appeared in the Naropa SWP anthology for that summer of 2000, the authors of that piece were listed as “Jason Quinn Malott, William Faulkner, and HUM.” But who knows, maybe I’m opening myself up to litigation right now.

I see the value in the creative mash-up and remix, both as a means of creating new forms of expression and new texts, but also as a means of refueling the creative batteries. Done properly, it forces the creator and the reader to address the plasticity of words and meaning. It also can display for those of us willing to look at it long enough, the hidden and often ignored interaction between the distant writer and the present reader. We often fall into the trap of thinking that reading is only an activity when, in truth, it is a “re-activity” - whether it happens consciously or in the subconscious, we react to the things we read and the things we read can have a reactive quality - both in the sense of an explosion and in the sense of animating us.

Most writers, and a number of readers, throughout time have read books with a pen or pencil in hand. Finding a book filled with the marginalia of an active reader has often been some of the most interesting things I’ve ever found in books. There, in faded pencil, or indelible ink, is the evidence of a mind at play, a mind (the reader) wrestling with another mind (the writer). The natural progression from marginalia is to actively manipulate that text we have wrestled with in our minds.

Where it seems that Shields and I differ is that he thinks burying the other mind, and presenting that mind’s thoughts as his own is acceptable and constitutes a new and inevitable form. I just call that plain old plagiarism because by rejecting and obliterating the identity and the source of the thoughts and words he has wrestled with, he rejects that literary lineage and disrespects the creator. This is “making it new” by deceit. It’s akin, in my mind, to the old Egyptian practice of destroying any representation of a dead pharaoh’s face in order to erase that pharaoh from history.

For me, I think that sampling and remixing is fine - as long as the remixer provides, at the very least, attribution of the source material to the creator. This type of model now exists in music, even if David Shields has never bothered to read the liner notes on all the rap albums he supposedly listens to. Pick up a post 1990 copy of Vanilla Ice’s lone hit “Ice, Ice Baby” and you’ll see that David Bowie and Freddie Mercury now share the song writing credit with old Van Winkle - And the same should be true any time we hear a new song that uses a familiar hook.

This kind of thinking is where Lawrence Lessig goes and I agree with him. The creators of original material shouldn’t fear being sampled and remixed - but those creators also shouldn’t be stripped of the opportunity or, more importantly, the ability, to earn money from and recognition for their work. Like Lessig, this is where I think a Creative Commons license is a good idea. In fact there has already been one literary experiment in Australia involving short fiction and Creative Commons licensing called Remix My Lit. However, the site doesn’t appear to have been active since September 2009. Cory Doctorow has released several novels under Creative Commons licenses, but I know of no remixes yet.

The point is this, and it’s one that Doctorow has made as well, is that the type of community sharing that is going on now, the remixing of existing cultural artifacts by their users, if a good balance is struck between UGC and Copyright, can actually increase sales of the original content.

Also, allowing the audience to reinterpret a work to which they have brought their intellect, their own creativity, and their life’s perceptive angle can only expand the significance of the original work. The Creative Commons license seems to both allow this kind of cultural and perceptive conversation to occur while respecting original work and its creator and respecting the conversation between the original creator and the active perception and native intelligence of that original creator’s audience.

I’m thinking The Project for a New Mythology might try to do its own “Remix My Lit” type of experiment.

* The HUM songs were: “Stars,” “Suicide Machine,” and “I Hate It Too”

Thievery, Copyright, and the Future of Living as a Writer Part I

2010-06-07T21:09:00.001-05:00

David Shields seems to think that a lot of the anger directed at him, and his book “Reality Hunger,” is because he’s sounded this clarion call to action, shaken the staid, comfortable base of thinking about novels and memoirs and intellectual property rights among writers. The possibility never seems to have crossed his mind that, when someone with a comfortable, tenured university job and with ten published books, makes the argument that every writer who emerges in his wake is to be denied the same economic opportunities he had, it might be slightly offensive to those emerging writers. It’s kind of like saying, hey, I know you work 40 hours a week making widgets and getting up two hours earlier than you need to in order to write that first novel, all in the hope that you might get some kind of advance and a chance to land a teaching job like mine, but I’d prefer it if I could “appropriate” bits of your work, not tell anyone I did it, put my name on the resulting hodge podge, and then us that to land me on the Colbert Report while you make more widgets.

Shields, who has spent the last 30 years in his academic ivory tower has forgotten something. I’m not sure what it is, but his idea of the demise of publishers, his idea of a downloadable, music style, direct to the reader publishing system combined with willful plagiarism, means that writers like me will never have a chance to make a living off of my work. And he doesn’t seem to realize that relegating a whole generation of writers to constant sharecropperism while elevating the plagiarist to the top of the creative heap is not just offensive, but disgraceful and potentially destructive to the very thing he needs to generate his self-reflexive collages: New Material.

Shields is making an argument similar to the one made by Johanna Blakely, which is that a complete lack of Intellectual Property rights - or copyrights - would be a tremendous boon to creativity the way it is in the fashion industry. She makes points about the utilitarianism of clothes and seems to think that this same utilitarianism applies to movies and books. Her whole premise is that plagiarism won’t harm the original creator of a book because the theft of a fashion idea doesn’t harm the haute couture designer who came up with the original idea. And she never seems to connect the idea that she herself presented to the fundamental improbability of that model working in the world of books: the haute couture designer doesn’t design for the masses, he designs for the wealthy who will spend $2,000 for a pair of pants with the designer’s name on it. To that designer, a $40 pair of knock-off pants sold at JC Penny to a struggling waitress doesn’t mean anything. No one mistakes those JC Penny jeans for that designer’s $2k jeans. However, in the book world, we all write to reach as wide an audience as possible, and if David Shields picks up my book, plagiarizes a passage or two word-for-word and does so without permission or acknowledgement and with the intention of making money for himself, I get nothing and am robbed of the chance to earn something for my 8 years of work. This is theft of the bad variety - that is, as Stephen Colbert says in his interview, breaking into our neighbor’s houses and saying “You know what would look good in my house? Your things.”

Sure he can argue that “theft” and “appropriation” have been part of the literary landscape since the first writer retold someone else’s story. But usually, when such theft occurs, there is a certain level of artful deception and masking that goes on. I “stole” from Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient” when I wrote “The Evolution of Shadows” - I didn’t boost any passages or phrases, but I stole (or tried to) from the structure of the book, I stole from the tone of the prose. In effect, I stole a kind of skeleton and hung my own meat from it as if I were a literary Dr. Frankenstein. I “stole” in this artistic sense from other writers as well. The scene in my book where a Bosnian soldier who had been beaten by his captors and had land mines tied to his body before being sent back across no-man’s land towards his comrades and is then blown up is my fictionalized retelling of an event witnessed by the journalist Anthony Loyd and recounted in his book “My War Gone By, I Miss It So.” I used none of Loyd’s passage about that incident, none of his words, so it’s not plagiarism . . . but it is appropriation of a kind, it is “theft” of the classic literary sort (and I duly mention Loyd and his book in my acknowledgements) - I took the skeleton of a story I’d read, and retold it.

In the second video of Lawrence Lessig that I posted on Monday, he talks about the Star Wars website where fans can go and make their own Star Wars mash-ups, remixes, collage type videos. Lessig then points out that although fans can do whatever they want with Star Wars on this site, Lucas retains the world wide rights to those video remixes even though he didn’t create them. Lessig compares the fans who do this and who lose any rights to the items they have created, to sharecroppers. In this model created by Lucas, the original creator owns all the rights to anything and everything having to do with their creation (the land, the seeds, the harvest, the air over the land) - even things not yet created by people not yet born - and gives none of them away, and shares none of the money made off of all of it. Fair Use and respect for the remixer is completely obliterated.

Remix in books is a slightly different beast than the remix of film or music. It’s harder to pass off a visual image as your own when the image is already widely known. Words are another matter. If Shields and Blakely get their way, the literary Remixer (read plagiarist) would supplant the original creator at the top of the creative/literary food chain making the original creators even more like sharecroppers than the people making Star Wars mash-ups on Lucas’s website. Those amateur remixers on the Lucas website can take their skill somewhere else, but it the primacy of the original creator is obliterated, where can that original creator go? An original creator would therefore make something, and it could immediately upon its release be appropriated by someone else without attribution or payment and used to make money for that individual.

Lessig is on a more productive track, at least in terms of addressing the legal and practical ideas of appropriation and remix. Shields is taking the remix world he sees online and has decided that it applies to everything absolutely and seems to believe that since stealing and appropriation has always happened and continues to happen no matter how archaic he thinks copyright law is, then no copyright law should exist since people are going to do it anyway. Here’s an article about a specific case of Shields-like appropriation in action. It’s about Shields and his German teen soul-mate Helene Hegemann who was caught stealing from other writers. Randy Kennedy, who wrote this article for the NY Times, asks what I think is the best line of questioning (but, of course, there’s no speculation as to an answer):

You could argue, of course, that Warhol’s use of a soup can or Danger Mouse’s use of the Beatles and Jay-Z on the Grey Album represent one thing, a re-contextualizing of cultural artifacts so well known they are a kind of shorthand. But does lifting from an obscure blogger — or even importing a description of a sunset by Steinbeck or a suburban tableau from Updike — accomplish the same thing?

David Shields, Johanna Blakely, and Helene Hegemann what us to believe that appropriating anything, even unknown and obscure things, for personal profit is just like sampling a classic song in music, or the amateur appropriation and remixing of Star Trek clips online to make tribute videos to Jean Luc Picard, or taking a $1,000 Yves St. Laurent belt and making a $20 version to be sold at Target all accomplish the same thing. It’s not that it seems naive to me . . . it’s that is seems wildly lazy, and self-serving, and, as Lessig would say: disrespectful of the creator (and the creator’s intentions).

The creator is the one who generates original items, but it’s also the remixer who takes an existing piece of well known work and does something new with it. In the first Lessig video I posted yesterday he talks about a Read/Write culture. In his legal interpretation, he argues that there is a distinction between the appropriation of material for amateur use - essentially cultural sharing - and commercial appropriation for personal profit. It seems that Shields wants to blur, perhaps even destroy, that line between the Sharing economy he sees online and the Commercial economy that has made him financially secure, and claim that’s the best thing for the future vibrancy of literature. In other words, he seems to be arguing that he best thing for literature is ensure that no one after him makes a living at it except the plagiarist.

I just don’t see how that would work. I’m sure I would be compelled to write no matter the state of copyright law; however, I’m not sure I would be willing to share that writing with anyone knowing that it could be appropriated by someone else, mauled, raped, twisted for their own profit, while I made nothing off of what might amount to years of effort.

The Copyright Battle

2010-06-07T20:17:00.001-05:00

There are a lot of people out there who think that the existing copyright laws need to be changed. Some have good ideas. Some do not. Here is a collection of videos and articles I've put together that illustrate some of the views out there.

Later, I'll make my argument why Johanna Blakely and David Shield should lose, and if copyright law for books is to be loosened it should be done along the lines of Lawrence Lessig's ideas.

Here's Johanna Blakely arguing that the copyrights for books should be handled the same way it's handled in Fashion; i.e. there are no copyrights in Fashion.

Here is David Sheilds on The Colbert Report

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

David Shields

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

And here's an interview with David by Brad Listi. And if you need some unfiltered David Shields here's an article he wrote for The Millions.

Note to poor struggling writers without cushy university teaching jobs, and who have not yet made back their small advances from small publishers: Try not to pull out all of your hair. You should try to look at good as possible for your jacket photo.

Lawrence Lessig in 2007

Here's Lessig in 2010

And here's Lessig on The Colbert Report

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Lawrence Lessig

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Fox News

Discuss.

Working a New Project - Notes at 100 days

2010-06-06T17:21:00.000-05:00

Since February, I’ve been working on a new book. It feels like it’s been slow going, even though here I am, four months into the project, and I’m close to halfway through the initial draft.

At some point, I think I sat down and tried to figure out how long it would take for me to finish and I think I put that date somewhere at the end of this month, or maybe the end of July. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’ll happen. Like any plan there’s always something that comes along and disrupts it, or redesigns it.

I am now 100 days into this new project and have 163 pages. That averages out to about a page and a half a day. It’s not much. Another 100 days at a page and a half clip will put my finish date for the draft some time in September - that is if things stay steady, which I doubt they will. That’s just the way life goes, especially with a full-time job.

If I go to bed at the right time, get up at the right time, keep disciplined in the mornings and in the evenings, it might actually go faster. It will also go faster if I spend more time on the weekends plugged into my writing desk. What’s disturbing about all of that is that it probably means another year of not getting in shape, another year cut off from the world, and another year of generally being a giant stick in the mud when it comes to spending time with friends and family.

That was one of the great things about living in Colorado for 5 years. There were only friends to worry about. Of course, none of my attempts at romantic relationships worked out. I don’t want that to sound like a lament. At that time there was nothing to do but write; however, there was virtually no support system for me out there. When things went wrong (the car broke down, I got sick, needed dental work, lost my job) there was no one around to lean on.

Now there are people to lean on, but in order to lean on them I also have to meet certain obligations regarding my time. It makes for a difficult balancing act; hence the page and a half a day and the constant obsessing over my running page count. These are my markers, my sign posts of productivity.

Why does The Project for a New Mythology exist?

2010-05-14T21:37:00.000-05:00

(As I try to prepare a new issue of the Project for a New Mythology, I am also thinking of ways to refine its vision in an ever more succinct manner. Here is a new mission statement.)

The Project exists because literature is more important than we realize. Dzevad Karahasan, a Bosnian writer, wrote the following passage while trapped in Sarajevo during the 1992-95 war: “For let us not fool ourselves: the world is written first - the holy books say that it was created in words - and all that happens in it, happens in language first.”

Karahasan looked around his city, his newly formed country destroyed by war, a war created by feelings of nationalism, religious hatred, violent political rhetoric that turned long-time neighbors against each other, and, as someone who had once believed that literature could exist as a “pure form,” and be free of its obligation to society, saw his own profession’s culpability for the current state of affairs. It was writers - poets, novelists, essayists, playwrights - who had planted these ideas in the population. There were the writers who spread indifference by creating popular, and empty art forms that presented the lie that art and literature didn’t have to “mean” anything. Then, once the populace was lulled into indifference, the writers who had an ideology to push stepped in with their dogmatically Heroic literature that subtly reassured people that, if only they believed and acted a certain proscribed way (like true Serbs, or true Croats) then their glory would be restored, their country made great, and their enemies vanquished.

In Karahasan’s book “Sarajevo: Exodus of a City” he outlines three types of literature and two of them are bad: Heroic Literature (I prefer to call it Dogmatic literature), and Art for Art’s sake, which was the kind of literature that Karahasan himself produced before the war. The third kind is Good Literature, and that is what the Project for a New Mythology aspires to find and collect.

At the end of Karahasan’s chapter about literature and war he writes: “Maybe one of those who slaughters people now would be quietly sitting somewhere instead if I had cautioned him in time about the kind of literature he admires.” Warning our fellow citizens about the Bad literature they admire is another goal of the Project.

Bad literature here doesn’t mean simply that it is poorly written, or amateurish. It is a moral judgement. Bad literature is literature that peddles indifference toward the world and other people (Art for Art’s Sake). Bad literature is literature that peddles binary choices: conform or suffer; obey or die.

The antidote is, of course, Good Literature.

The novelist and teacher John Gardner writes that good art is art that has “a clear positive moral effect, presenting valid models for imitation, eternal verities worth keeping in mind, and a benevolent vision of the possible which can inspire and incite human beings toward virtue, toward life affirmation as opposed to destruction or indifference.” Later, he writes “We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority or force, it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach.”

But, as with all quests, and all good fights, there are obstacles and hurdles that make the simple replacing of Bad Literature with Good Literature difficult. We must first break down any misconception that Good Literature (as I’ve defined it here) isn’t, or can’t be, entertaining. As soon as someone begins talking about the moral, instructive quality of Good Literature, the average reader tunes out, and professes to only want to be entertained - never realizing that the supposedly “empty” entertainment they prefer is also teaching them something: it teaches them at best to be indifferent,; however, at its worst, it teaches them that the world is only as they already see it, and that no other concept of the world is as accurate, or true, or valid as their own.

The Project for a New Mythology wants things that will teach us empathy. We want stories and poetry and essays and artwork that will transport us into the experiences of others who are unlike us so that we might apply that empathetic imagination to the world around us.

Resistance Is (sometimes) Futile . . . so, resist anyway. (thoughts of an almost juror)

2010-05-10T15:18:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I reported to the Sedgwick County Courthouse to spend the day sitting in the jury pool. I didn’t have to sit long before I was sent up to a courtroom to be interviewed for a jury. The case involved a young man accused of resisting or obstructing a Sheriff’s deputy in the process of serving a writ or warrant or something. It was the only charge this guy was facing so, he wasn’t even the one the cops were after. Now, I don’t know the facts of the case because, ultimately, I was struck from the jury and then, at the end of the day, released from jury duty all together.

During the jury interview, one of the most predominate questions asked by the prosecution and the defense was whether the potential jurors believed it was ever OK to resist or defy a cop. A number of people, include a couple of the minority jurors, expressed an opinion that it was never OK to resist or defy a law enforcement officer. Even when asked directly about such actions as civil disobedience during the civil rights movement, they stood their ground: no, one should never resist a cop. “I’ve got nothing to hide,” was the common phrase that went along with it.

I was shocked. First, we live in a country born of disobedience, and of resistance. Second, this idea that since we believe we have nothing to hide it’s ok to allow someone with a badge to snoop around whenever they please opens the door for inadvertent self-incrimination. Just because we think we have “nothing to hide” doesn’t mean we aren’t doing something that could be interpreted as illegal.

But, what finally settled in my mind wasn’t the nature of law, or people’s understanding of it - that they have a right to stand up to a cop, or even run away from a cop - it was this idea that because the cop represents an authority figure, they should be obeyed without question.

I’ve written about Stanley Milgram and the Milgram Experiment before. This was the controversial experiment that began in 1961 where Milgram brought in subjects who were told their job was to administer increasingly higher electrical shocks for wrong answers to a test being taken by a second subject (the second subject was an actor and was never actually shocked with anything, except perhaps the cruelty of the person who believed he was zapping someone). Milgram’s experiment was inspired by the common defense statement at the Nuremberg trails of Nazi concentration camp soldiers that they were “only following orders.”

Milgram found that the subjects often - more often than not, actually - obeyed instructions to shock the fictional test taker with higher and higher voltages even as the test taker yelled in pain, pleaded that the test be stopped, and eventually fell unconscious.

Now, in this controlled environment, the authority figure that pushed the subject to administer lethal voltage levels, was dressed in white lab coat and had nothing more dangerous or intimidating than a clipboard. These authority figures had four phrases they used to compel the obedience of the subject:

1) Please continue.
2) The experiment requires that you continue.
3) It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4) You have no other choice, you must go on

There were no threats of violence, no threats of punishment, no yelling, and, of course, no weapon in the hand of the authority figure. It’s shocking to me how easily people can be bent to the will of another.

Now, although such an experiment can’t be repeated exactly, there have been several variations, each resulting in similar results. Those results have been explained by the theory of conformism and by the agentic state theory, but also by learned helplessness - where someone goes along because they feel powerless to control the outcome.

All of these are, to me, disturbing results. And, to have them on such willing display has troubled me even more.

During the jury interviews, I was never directly asked that question, but I was asked about experiences with cops and in course of saying that I’d never had a pleasant experience with a cop, I flippantly threw out that comment that I tend to resist authority. On one hand, I’m glad I did. On the other hand I wish I hadn’t: I’m worried about that young man standing trial, saddled with 12 jurors who expressed a view that authority should not be questioned or challenged. But the assistant DA trying the case, I’m sure, didn’t want someone like me on the jury: a resister and opponent of unfettered police authority.

Like I said, I don’t know the facts of the case, but since the young man was only charged with resisting or obstructing one sheriff’s deputy and no other criminal charges seemed evident, it suggests he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and did not adequately heal to the commands of a man with a gun. Now, maybe upon hearing the facts of the case I might change my mind, but right now, I’m on the defendant’s side. In the American legal system, which relies upon believing the defendant is innocent until proven guilty, that’s not a bad place to be.

I wish that young man the best of luck.

Make Mine Mythological.

2010-04-30T06:49:00.000-05:00

        As I’m working on this new book, trying to stitch together the Jason & the Argonauts myth and my grandfather’s life, I find myself bumping up against a lot of things that I’ve made gestures at before; namely the use of mythology to make sense of experience, and the creation of new myths as a means of explaining the deeper, long term significance that is embedded in historical events.

        My first idea comes from the notion that Herodotus wrote of Helen of Troy and Paris staying in Egypt for a time during the Trojan war as fact, plus someone had to have written a contemporary history of some sort of the war, but all these thousands of years later, it’s Homer’s Iliad, a mythological account, that has survived and is read more often. The history of the actual Trojan War itself is, if not lost completely, is subdued by this made-up version.

        Second: I was reading an article about an upcoming movie having to do with the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays (I’m in the camp that says Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays), and in it, someone made the argument that look at the biographical information of the author and trying to match that biography to the events in the plays was (my term here) “intellectual masturbation” because, during that era, authors didn’t draw on their biographical information to make their stories. Authors and dramatists drew on other stories, and on history, which is why scholars say Romeo & Juliet was taken from other sources (A poem by Arthur Brooke and a prose story by William Painter). And, of course, Shakespeare’s Histories were pulled from real events, but I’ve never been taught Shakespeare’s Histories as if they were somehow representative of the real events or people they’re taken from. Instead, Shakespeare’s Histories are treated exactly as literature, and the lessons and ideas we draw from them aren’t about strategy, but about the workings of the human condition (greed, power, revenge, hubris, etc) – just like his tragedies and comedies.

        Third: Although my writing seems to be strongly influenced by the pseudo-realism of the Modernists, I’m not a fan of the “modern realism” exhibited in a lot of novels today. I don’t like our “authority” requirement for novelists (even though Author and authority share root words), and I don’t like the literalization of the “write what you know” guidance to the point that it means “only write fiction about things you’ve actually done.” That, to me, defeats the purpose of fiction, which is to act as a space for moral experimentation. Such a stand, rejecting the authority requirement and embracing the moral experiment model is the only way we can confront books like “Lolita” without having to rationalize the implied and manufactured requirement that Nabokov himself have experience in molesting young girls. Our current requirement that an author have first hand knowledge of something in order to write a made-up story about it would also require us to remove Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” from the American canon.

        Fourth: When my father was a young boy, he was constantly afraid that Nazis were hiding in the closet in his bedroom. The family story goes that every night before going to bed, his mother had to open the closet to prove to him there were no Nazis hiding in there. Consequently, his favorite reading topic through out his life was World War II. It rubbed off on me and, when I was boy, I spent my childhood trying to read books like “A Bridge Too Far” and “The Longest Day” which dad had on our bookshelves at home. The books I most frequently checked out of the library were the Time/Life books on World War II. That lead to my general fascination with war and military history. Today, of course, we have Stephen Ambrose and his books, and Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg and their canon of WWII movies and series’, mining the biggest world conflict ever for stories. I’ve watched “Band of Brothers” and am currently watching “The Pacific.” On one hand these movie could be described as War Porn. They’re going to great lengths to display combat as realistically as possible, but at the same time cast their central characters in terms as romantic as possible. But, with all that realism in the portrayal of combat, are they really being honest about the human condition if they continue to rely upon certain tropes when it comes to the portrayal of the people?

And that brings me back to mythology. I suspect that every century is stained with blood, and with families shattered and scattered by war, but there’s something epic, something mythological about the 20th Century. World War II will generate the next Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid for our descendants thousands of years in the future (that is if we don’t destroy ourselves). But, I think, in the immediate future, mythology - especially the act of myth-making, can serve to salvage literature from its current pseudo-journalistic path. We need writers more concerned with exploring a moral landscape than with creating “historically accurate” made-up stories. Religion is failing us, turning people into monsters, and psychology and humanism give us only a kind of cold analysis of ourselves without imaginative examples of how to actually “act” as human beings. Fiction is the crucible of our salvation as a species. It allows us to act out, imaginatively, our darkest and brightest urges and, if we are honest, to witness their consequences. Sometimes, that means throwing out the facts and throwing out the idea that a writer using an historical event or person in fiction must be an authority on that event or person in real life.

Now, I’m not trying to resurrect my failed novel “By The Still, Still Water” for my publisher. That is dead, and justifiably so. However, what this whole missive is driving at is that a whole bunch of stuff I’ve never actually done is going to come up in what I write, and myth-making is the only way it’s going to make sense.

Doctor Shortage? Here's a fix.

2010-04-25T09:17:00.000-05:00

A while back I had a discussion with a cousin of mine who is opposed to any kind of health care reform. One of his arguments was that we’d only institute long waiting lines for care because there’s a doctor shortage. Kind of silly argument: because there aren’t very many doctors, we should deny care to poor people so that the rich won’t have to wait in line with the unwashed masses to see the doctor.

Now, the way I see it is that there are two reasons there’s a shortage of doctors and they’re very closely related.

First, medical school is almost prohibitively expensive (here’s the AMA’s page on medical school debt). The AMA points out that this excessive debt has many repercussions throughout the medical system: there’s a decrease in the diversity of doctors, in essence fewer doctors from low-income and minority populations; it can also lead to unsafe practices, moonlighting by doctors in other professions which leads to fatigue, and which, in turn can lead to bad decisions and inattentiveness.

The biggest consequence, in my book is the decrease in general practice, or primary care physicians - i.e. the old fashioned family doctor who treats everything from colds to broken bones. Family care is the least well paid branch of medicine and med students, burdened with $100,000 plus in student debt, debt that continues to accrue interest even as they start paying it off, are running away from family practice as if it were the plague. Instead then go into specialties where the money is better and they stand a chance of paying off those student loans before they’re, oh, say 50 or 60 years old.

That is the doctor shortage my cousin and others are worried about.

Now, further down on that AMA page, they list things that they want to see done that will reduce and control medical school debt, and encourage more people to become doctors. Tuition caps, adequate scholarship funding, changes in fee policy, tax deductions, changes in repayment policy, etc are all mentioned there.

But here’s my two part idea: total student debt forgiveness for doctors who go into primary care or family practice permanently. Then, for those who wish to go into a specialty, they can receive a percentage reduction in their student debt if they put their specialty on hold and go into primary care. Their percentage reduction would increase for each year they maintain a primary care practice.

Congress Made a Gesture: Now the People must Act on Health Care.

2010-04-24T22:32:00.000-05:00

I’ve been busy and preoccupied over the last few weeks or so. First there was the novel and my push to get to 100 pages (an old writing axiom I picked up in grad school was that the first 100 pages are the hardest), then there was my father’s death.

Now, I have some general problems with the quality of treatment my father received after his car accident. From what I got from the doctors was that his fatal heart attack was the result of massive blockage to one of the arteries. Shouldn’t they have noticed a potentially dangerous blockage was on the way when they had him in the hospital a month earlier and thought he’d had a heart attack after they’d put the shunts in his head to drain the excess spinal fluid in his brain (hydrocephalus)? Now, I know that sometimes, blockages can be the result of a clot developing somewhere else and traveling to the heart, but he was on so many blood thinners because of a heart valve replacement several years before, so, ... anyway, whatever.

Now, my dad, I assume, was on my his wife’s insurance, and she is a state employee. That means that the portion of her health insurance that was paid for by the state was paid using the taxes and fees that I pay to the state of Kansas every year, and every time I renew my license plate, or my driver’s license, or pay a parking fine, or sales tax. In essence my dad and his wife, receive state funded health insurance and, by extension, state funded health care.

Funny thing is, my dad and his wife, I’m sure, were both wildly opposed to any kind of health care reform and were especially opposed to any kind of “public option” or single-payer style of health care.

I can’t afford to buy into the health insurance my employer offers, but come 2014 I will be required to buy health insurance. Now, maybe I’ll qualify for tax credits or some other kind of subsidy - but maybe I won’t. Either way, I won’t like it.

Now, let me say that although I have problems with the Health Care Reform bill that was passed - mainly that there was no public option - I believe it was a gesture in the right direction. I take it as just a great big statement that, finally, our society is going to make an effort to ensure everyone can get preventative care to help them stay healthy and adequate treatment when they are sick.

A population that is healthy is more productive, they stay in school, and therefore are able to buy more, do more, and cost the government less when it comes to unemployment insurance, disability pay, and other types of social safety net payments. And guess what, all of that education and productivity and spending will help the economy because they more people who are able to work both produce more and consume more.

Right now, our society is set up to squeeze the as much money as possible out of fewer and fewer people. It is a health insurance company model. What do the health insurance companies do? They kick out the people who cost them money, then charge those who are left more for their coverage. Then, when those healthy people get sick and start costing the more money than they’re worth, they kick them out and charge whoever is left more to make up for the money lost on the sick person, and to buy the CEO his new house, car, yacht, or whatever.

And that, despite the passage of the recent health insurance reform bill, won’t exactly change. We see it now as the health insurance companies try to pick apart the language of the bill in order to find those loopholes that will allow them to continue to deny care to sick people - even though they government just handed them millions of brand new premium paying customers.

Now, I don’t have a problem, necessarily, with the mandate to buy health insurance. We already have a mandate every car on the road must have car insurance: individuals must insure their cars and businesses must insure their fleets. And, for the amount of coverage received, the cost is relatively cheap. In effect, health insurance should work the same way.

The problem I have is that I do not want to do business with the for profit health insurance companies. I believe they are immoral, heartless, greedy, insensitive, and evil. I do not want to make them richer than they already are - and they’re pretty fucking rich (here’s an article from 2009 covering 2008 salaries - these fuckers make enough in one week to buy a nice family house in most parts of this country).

So, in 2014 I’ll be required to buy my health insurance or be fined. I’ll also be expected to continue to pay into Medicare with my payroll deductions. So, I’ll be working to pay for myself, any immediate family I might have by then (wife, kids) and I’ll be paying for some retired anti-government boob who doesn’t think I should get government funded healthcare to get for himself government funded health care.

Now, maybe it’s not feasible, but here’s my idea: let’s file a class action law suit to force the government to open Medicare to everyone by 2014 so that those of us wanting to comply with the mandate to buy health insurance can get that health insurance from a not-for-profit source. Yes, we know it will mean an increase in our payroll deductions, but at least I’ll be getting a direct benefit from that deduction.

Immediacy imsheediacy. Anna Quindlen is being a Dope

2010-04-19T20:08:00.000-05:00

As if having to stop writing and go to work on a Monday morning weren’t enough to make me grumpy, I also listen to the NY Times Book Review podcast from time to time at work. I do it just to make sure my blood pressure stays high enough that I don’t doze off in my cubicle.

The April 9th NY Times podcast, where Good Ole Sam interviewed Anna Quindlen, was possibly the first time I ever stopped what I was doing and angrily shook my fist at my iPod.

Here’s what ticked me off: old Anna tells Sam T. that she wrote her new book in the present tense to give the reader a sense of immediacy so they could discover the story as the characters do.

Intense fist shaking on my part again, right now as I write this.

Of all the reasons out there to break from the literary convention of writing in the past tense, the idea that present tense is more “immediate” is f*cking stupid. The immediacy of a story doesn’t come from the bloody verb tense. A reader can feel like they are “discovering” a story in time with the character even in past tense - hell, ask anyone who’s ever read Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett.

A sense of immediacy and discovery is a result of the story; it’s a result of the building of dynamic characters; it’s a result of finding the tension within the interaction between those dynamic characters. Immediacy and discovery is NOT the difference between “He closed the door” and “He closes the door”. To think that is the bloody case is ludicrous, stupid, and a sure sign of weak skills.

For me, present tense does two things: 1) it creates a natural transition between present action and memory, which is crucial to my obsession with how memory plays upon present action. Verb tense then, for me, signals the transition from External to Internal time and allows me to make shorter, less cumbersome transitions between present action and flashbacks. 2) It forces me, in a very odd, round-about way to confront the poetics of a line, rather than its simple journalism. I don’t have a very florid style, it’s rather matter-of-fact most of the time and present tense - although it might not seem on the surface to have an effect - forces me to consider how I build my sentences. Now, it might not do that for anyone else, but it does it for me.

Quindlen, however, has trotted out the worst reason to do it. The lamest reason to do it. The one reason that is completely and utterly misguided. If a writer is doing her job properly, the story will have a immediacy, and a reader will feel a sense of discovery no matter what verb tense is used.

Dennis Carl Malott 1947-2010

2010-04-14T05:23:00.002-05:00

[I read the following eulogy at my father’s memorial service, Tuesday, April 13th, 2010]

I would like to start by sharing a poem by Gareth Evans that he wrote for the novelist John Berger, and that today I’d like to dedicate to my father. And, because my father would expect me to, and perhaps be disappointed if I did not, even at this time, remain true to my own convictions and beliefs, I will share with you chapter 76 from the Tao Te Ching, then a bit about my father, and finally close with a Zen Buddhist passage that is traditionally read at funerals called “On White Ashes.”

Hold Everything Dear

as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey
as the rose buds a green room to breathe
and blossoms like the wind

as the thinning birches whisper their silver stories of the wind to the urgent
in the trucks

as the leaves of the hedge store the light
that the moment thought it had lost

as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a wren in the turning air

as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky
and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark

hold everything dear

the calligraphy of birds across the morning
the million hands of the axe, the soft hand of the earth
one step ahead of time
the broken teeth of tribes and their long place
        steppe-scattered and together
clay’s small, surviving handle, the near ghost of a jug
carrying itself towards us through the soil

the pledge of offered arms, the single sheet that is our common walking
the map of the palm held
in a knot
                but given as a torch

hold everything dear

the paths they make towards us and how far we open towards them

the justice of a grass that unravels palaces but shelters the songs of the searching

the vessel that names the waves, the jug of this life, as it fills with the days
as it sinks to become what it loves

memory that grows into a shape the tree always knew as a seed

the words
the bread

the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door

the yearning to begin again together
animals keen inside the parliament of the world

the people in the room the people in the street the people

hold everything dear


Tao Te Ching - 76 (as translated by Sam Hamill)
People are born soft and weak.
We die stiff and unyielding.

Everything - grass, trees -
begins soft and tender,
and dies, decaying, rotting.

Therefore the hard, the unyielding
are death’s companion.
The weak and pliant belong to life.

The unyielding army cannot prevail.
Unbending trees are felled.

The great unyielding belong below,
the pliant and tender above.

        Some here today, only know me through the stories my father may have told you. Some here today only know my father through the stories my sister and I have told. A smaller number of people know something of both because you shared the living of those stories. Because of that I understand if some are concerned about what I have to say about my father. Even my mother had to ask me if I was going to be mean. I told her no, I won’t be mean. I will be honest.
        When I spoke briefly to Reverend Ward after my father was taken off life support, I told him that I would be speaking at my father’s memorial service. I also told Reverend Ward that I dislike funerals that seem to be nothing but a sentimental whitewashing of the deceased person’s life, trotting out hallmark greeting card type emotions to reassure everyone how much the deceased loved us and how much we loved the deceased, and ignoring the fact that, at times, the people we love the most and who love us the most are often the ones we hurt the most.
        One of the things Reverend Ward also told me was that he felt everyone who attends the service should be able to recognize the man being memorialized no matter when we knew him. And that made me realize it wasn’t just that I wanted to speak, it was that I had to. You see, if I were to leave this funeral hearing only the version of my father that Reverend Ward knew, that Maureen and Will, and their family knew, it would only be a small fraction of the man I knew. Every argument, every struggle that shaped and bound and described my father and his relationship with me, my sister, and my mother in the years of his life before his marriage to Maureen would be hushed.
        Some of you knew my father as a regular church-goer, a person who prayed before meals, who prayed to his God for guidance during difficult times. Some of you may know that he was active in his family’s church in Augusta when he was young. But that time between marrying the Lutheran minister’s daughter, going to college, serving in the military, and fathering me and my sister, he lived as an Agnostic.
        As I grew up in Dodge City, my father rarely, if ever, attended church with us except on Christmas, or Easter. As any curious child would, I asked my dad why he never came to church. He explained as best he could to a child, what he meant by agnostic, and that he wasn’t sure there was a god and that he didn’t think going to church and believing in a particular God kept him from being a good person. And so I became a thorn in the side of my Sunday school teachers as they tried to teach us that a belief in Jesus Christ was the only path to Heaven, to salvation. It just didn’t seem fair that my father, who at that point in my life, I held in as high regard as I did Jesus, couldn’t go to heaven because he wasn’t sure this demanding, invisible, god existed.
        Skepticism was one of my father’s greatest gifts to me, and doubt one of his greatest curses upon me. A gift because that skepticism taught me to question everything, including those in positions of authority, but especially institutions of faith. A curse because doubt has clouded every relationship in my life and has often left me uncertain of my own emotions, timid in matters of the heart, and paralyzed at the moment of decisive action.
        My father’s struggles with his beliefs also reinforced every lesson I learned about empathy and compassion, and even, reinforced my tendencies to be stubborn and judgmental.
        That is part of the paradox of my father as I knew him.
        On the good days, my father was a purveyor of puns, bad jokes, and general goofiness either on purpose or completely by accident: When the Ford Taurus first came out, my father quipped “next they’ll come out with the Featherus.” Once, on a trip to Chicago, driving down highway 80 in Iowa, held to the road it seemed by the green walls of corn fields not yet ready for harvest, he suddenly burst into our traveling silence and said “Look at all the Wheaties!”
        On bad days, my father was one misstep away from thundering anger. Sometimes focused inwardly on whatever pain or heartache was plaguing him he would lash out at me for not responding as he wished me to.
        “Good night, I love you,” my dad would say, the phrase heavy with meaning and need and insecurity.
        “Ok, night,” I would say, wrapped up in my own thoughts, my own world, or whatever troubles were bothering me.
        “What’s your problem?” he would yell and lurch off the couch to chase me down the hall to my room, angry, demanding an answer.
        I guess the arguing became a habit for both of us. As my father broke away from his first family and began his second, it seemed there was always some new thing there to fight with him about. Nothing more so than his sudden embrace of religion and his need to express his regret that he wasn’t a better spiritual guide for us - as if all those Sundays my mother wrestled my sister and me out of bed in time for Sunday school had meant nothing - as if his helping in that would have kept his son from becoming a Buddhist, or his daughter from becoming an Agnostic. Maybe it would have kept us in the church longer, but I think our lives would be smaller for it. And so, we wrestled over that as well - my sister and I baffled at how he could go from being proud of us and the people we’d become in one moment, to apologizing to us because he’d failed at making sure we had secured a place in his heaven. My father apologized for a lot over the last decade of his life, and that too became tedious because, as much as we knew he felt the need to make amends for the things he thought he’d done wrong, my sister and I had adjusted quite well on our own, had become comfortable in our own skins, and so, his apologies also strangely felt like he was sure that we were stunted and still needed a salvation that only his newly rediscovered faith could give us.
        I feel as if I have descended into a litany of what I see my father’s transgressions to be, so let me say this: like everyone, my father was a work in progress. Even during these last few years as his body was breaking down, he was a work in progress. I think he was finding a way to accept the things from his past that he once regretted. I think he was trying to find a way to be at peace with me, and Amber and we were trying to find a way to be at peace with him. All of it a delicate navigation around our sharper edges.
        Right now, it would be easy to believe that this tragedy means all of that has stopped, that my father’s evolution as a person, and the evolution of our relationship with him has been suddenly ended, terminated. However, as sad and unfortunate as this is, as much of a loss as this is and as much as I wish I weren’t standing here, almost talking out of class about my father, I do not believe that my father and our relationship with him has been shunted off into a kind of stasis until we, too, die.
         Buddhists believe that our relationships with people continue even after their deaths, Christians believe a version of this as well, saying the dead live on in our hearts. But Buddhists also believe that our relationships with the dead change and evolve over time. We believe that the dead can still nurture us and guide us and comfort us, if we make time to listen and to honor them. I lost my father’s material body on Thursday, and yet I have not lost one atom of him, and I always know where to find him. He will arrive every time I listen big band music, to doo-wop, to motown. I can conjure him with James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel, the Police, Van Morrison, Jim Croce, or some obscure novelty hit that no one has listened to in forty years. And I will feel him cringe every time I play the soundtrack to Purple Rain. Except for Prince, and some heavy metal, we never fought over music. Music was my father’s grace, and our neutral ground. Of all the stories he told me as a child, I think the ones that made him happiest were the ones about being part of The Augustones. And I think the most at peace I ever saw him, was when he had plugged in his headphones to listen to one of his records, or a tape. My father’s music collection I think numbers somewhere in the thousands, and at one point, the records alone filled floor to ceiling shelves on all four walls of a single room. If we were to play all of his favorite songs, we’d be here for weeks, and each of us, lesser music lovers that we are, would hear all of our own favorite songs long before we got to the end of his.
        So, although I have not yet said all the things to my father that I may have wished to say while he was alive, and while I am sure we will continue to struggle with each other, there is still time while I am alive to make peace.

        Before I close with the letter On White Ashes, a little note about the end of the letter. In the particular sect of Zen Buddhism this letter comes from, it is believed that reciting the name of the Buddha eliminates bad karma, and frees the way to nirvana, and oneness with the universe.

On White Ashes
         If we look realistically at the nature of human life, we see that it is fleeting and unpredictable, almost illusive. Birth, life and death pass by in the twinkling of an eye. Thus we never hear of the human body lasting for ten thousand years.

And who today can keep the body young and healthy for even one hundred years? How quickly our lives slip away. Whether I am the first or someone else, whether today or tomorrow, our lives on earth do indeed one day come to an end. Life seems to vanish unseen like ground water, or to evaporate like the morning dew on the summer lawn.

Thus our bodies may be radiant with health in the morning, and by evening they may be white ashes. If the right causes and conditions prevail, our two eyes will close forever, our breathing cease and our bodies lose the glow of life. Our relatives can assemble in great numbers and with great wealth, but they are powerless to change our situation. Even the rites and rituals of grief and mourning change nothing. All we can do is prepare the body for cremation; all that is left is white ashes.

In view of these facts, does it not make sense to focus on the things we can change? We cannot control the passing away of both young and old alike, but each of us can take refuge in the Buddha of Infinite Life who promises to embrace, without exception, all beings who but recite his Holy Name - Namo Amida Buddha.

With friendly reverence, I remain,

Thank you.

[Addendum - The night before my father died, I met with his current wife, Maureen, to discuss matters pertaining to my father’s cremation and the possible internment of his ashes at Elmwood Cemetery in Augusta, KS, at the foot of his parent’s graves. While my father was alive, he had often expressed his wishes that someday, my sister, Amber, and I would have a relationship with our half-brother, Will I had always been reluctant, but when Maureen repeated my father’s desire that night, I said that I too was open building a relationship with my nine year old half-brother. However, after the memorial service, and the reading of my eulogy, Maureen disappeared from the church and sent me the following text message: “I retract my willingness for you to pursue a sibling relationship with Will as I will not allow you to infect him with your sickness.”

I have not responded to her text message, nor do I plan to. After my parents divorced, and my father married Maureen, my father became a devout Christian, and, his early conversion years were marked by several comments from him and his new wife where they expressed their concern for my sister’s soul because she wanted a career in theatre and film in either New York or Los Angeles, and they feared that she would be damaged by such close associations with gay people.

In truth, I am not concerned about having a relationship with my half-brother. Some day, he may become curious about me and my sister. We’ll be easy enough to find if that time comes. What does worry me is this: did my father, despite his protestations of pride at my accomplishments, also believe that I am possessed of a sickness for shunning Christianity and adopting the loose, stripped down Buddhism that I lay claim to?

I shall miss my father, but our conflict continues. - JQM]

I Am Fed Up With

2010-03-19T21:18:00.003-05:00

1)Republicans and their obstructionism.
2)Democrats and their lack of a spine.
3)The Tea-Party and it’s complete stupidity.
4)Rich politicians that get government funded healthcare and who think the rest of us shouldn’t have the exact same government funded healthcare.
5)Old people on Medicare who don’t think government run health care is a good idea for everyone else and are actively working against a public option.
6)Ignorant people who think talking to a doctor about a living will, and end-of-life decisions is a “death panel” while some health insurance adjuster in a cubicle can decide that a five year old won’t get life saving care because it’s too expensive and not profitable for the health insurance company.
7)People who want to slash taxes and then get angry when the government services they rely on are slashed for a lack of funding.
8)Old white men trying to control what young women do with their own reproductive organs.
9)Right-wing “Christian” terrorists like Scott Roeder.
10)People who think money is the same thing as speech.
11)Fox News and their blatant lies about everything.
12)Egotistical mis-informed blow-hards who think stopping everything dead in its tracks is the same thing as “doing something.”
13)“Christians” who think God hates people
14)“Christian” men who make a career out of demonizing gay people, but are themselves gay.
15)Wall Street Executives and corporate CEO’s who make millions every year and give themselves million dollar bonuses while the bulk of their employees’ wages have remained stagnant for almost 20 years.
16) The middle class enablers who defend those CEOs and Executives in the hopes that they will be invited to the club – let me clue you in on a secret: the Rich don’t like you either.
17)Texas in general, but especially Texas’s love of the willfully ignorant as seen in their recent demands that Thomas Jefferson be removed from a list of Eighteenth Century writers whose work inspired revolutions and replaced him with Thomas Aquinas in the hopes of reinforcing their incorrect belief that American was founded as a specifically “Christian” nation and therefore should be subject to “Christian” laws only.
18)Ignorant Christians who cherry pick Biblical rules to reinforce their prejudices against gay people, autonomous, self-determining women and anyone else who isn’t just like them.
19)Infighting among Liberals – it gives the conservative assholes victories they don’t deserve.
20)That fat, oxycontin, Viagra popping, child prostitute fucking, blowhard Rush Limbaugh
21)Every idiot that supports the privatization of government agencies.
22)Climate change deniers who think a severe snow storm in the winter means “global warming” is a hoax.
23)The New York Times Book Review thinking that one or two articles a year, and each article about two or three independent publishers collectively, constitutes adequate coverage of the thousands of books published each year by independent publishers.
24)Book people who think that because a big publisher paid a lot of money for a book, it must be better than a book that a small publisher paid a small amount of money for.
25)People who think that all writers are paid like the “bestselling” hacks.
26)Being out of shape
27)Reality TV
28)The fact that MTV doesn’t play music videos anymore.
29)Linguistically challenged people who think that pointing out that the “Theory of evolution is just a theory” constitutes a well thought out argument against science and in favor of the myth of creation.
30)Jobs with no future.
31)Never having the amount of time I want to write.
32)Slow drivers
33)With the fact that the rich, ever since the revolution of 1776, have been trying to reestablish a feudal system with themselves as the royalty.
34)People describing that delusional, fat, weepy, pasty, lying sack of shit Glen Beck as “talented.” I didn’t know being a giant douche-prick took “talent.”
35)People who think a business should be treated just like a person.
36)People questioning Obama’s citizenship even thought he was born in Hawaii, calling him a socialist when he’s not, and generally looking for all sorts of other weak fabricated reasons to claim they oppose him when what they really want to say is that they hate him because he’s black.
37) Working full time and still never having enough money to make ends meet.
38) Rigged competitions and stacked decks.
39) The Celebrity Publishing model that makes it harder and harder for good, new novelists to be discovered.
40) The self-absorbed, self-important, snobbishness of the New York publishing planet.

It's All Rigged, And You Don't Stand a Chance.

2010-03-18T20:24:00.000-05:00

On St. Patrick's Day, I journeyed to the PEN/New England page to see who had won this year’s PEN/Hemingway award. Here is the list of mentions:

2010 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award 
Winner
BRIGID PASULKA A Long Long Time Ago and Essentially True (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Finalists
C.E. Morgan for All The Living (FSG)
Abraham Verghese for Cutting For Stone (Knopf)

Honorable Mentions
Mary Beth Keane for The Walking People (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Lydia Peelle for Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (FSG)

The award was judged by three writers: Julia Glass, who is published by Anchor books, which is an imprint of Random House just like Knopf, Michael Lowenthal who is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s imprint, Mariner Books, and Gail Tsukiyama, who is published by St Martins, which, along with FSG, is owned by Macmillan.

Do you see what I see? Look, I don’t know how these writers went about making their choices, but it’s kind of hard to believe there wasn’t something fishy going on. Out of all the first novels the PEN New England center must have had submitted to them for this award, it just seems unlikely that the 5 best books would come from the same three publishers that also publish the judge’s books.

Now, my publisher submitted my novel, “The Evolution of Shadows” for consideration by the PEN/New England foundation for the award. So, I’m sure some might say I’m just being a sore loser, or that I’m so pretentious and arrogant that I believe I should have won. Sure, I believe in my book, so does my publisher, but, I’d have to be delusional to think everyone should share my belief in my book.

Look, of those three publishers, Random House has the most imprints, but only has one book on the list. Macmillan is the next biggest and has two. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is the smallest and also has two. During any year, these three publishers each publish thousands of books, and that means they publish perhaps dozens of first novels. In fact, in one year a publisher like Random House has more first novels on its list than the entire list of some small publishers. So, the law of averages would suggest that the big publishers are going to appear on award lists with more frequency than small publishers; it also suggests that in almost every case, a contestant will be judged by a writer who is published by the same publisher. Most of the time that won’t raise any questions because there will be just enough variety to, at least, give the illusion that the judges did their jobs and at least tried to read all the submitted books.

But I find it hard to believe that no first novel was submitted by Simon & Schuster. I find it hard to believe that there was no first novel submitted by Harpercollins, or a first novel from Penguin. And I’m sure there were lots and lots of other books submitted by other large publishers, like Grove Atlantic (distributed through Perseus), or W. W. Norton, or by one of the Hachette Book Group imprints. Those publishers put out almost as many first novels every year as Random House, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Macmillan do, but not one of them made the award list for the PEN/Hemingway. Did they publish no remarkable first novels this year? Did no small, independent press publish any remarkable first novels this year (even if mine is not considered to be one of them)?

I would be less suspicious of how these books were picked if at least one other publisher was represented. There’s no accounting for taste, as the old saying goes, but come on . . .you’re telling me that the 5 best first books of fiction in 2009 were all published by the same three publishers who published books by the judges?

I find that hard to believe, and insulting: Not for me specifically, but for every other first time novelist who was published in 2009, had their book submitted for this award and, seemingly, didn’t even get read and seriously considered by the judges.

The Economic Royalists.

2010-03-11T20:08:00.000-06:00

        I’ve been reading about the Great Depression lately as research for a new project, and one of the things that popped up, and wasn’t defined much by the author, was a term that Roosevelt used: “Economic Royalists.” He applied the term to President Herbert Hoover and the people who supported him, both wealthy and not so wealthy.

        We’ve all had moments when we encounter a term for the first time and it seems that it fits an idea, or a set of ideas, that we’ve held and collected together but, until then didn’t have that one, handy, clear, and piercing term that could encompass all of those ideas together.

        I’m not sure if my ideas fit closely with those of Roosevelt, but I’m going to see if I can explain the collection of ideas that I have, which I am now lumping under the term “Economic Royalist” to describe a certain class of American citizen. When I’m done, I’m sure some will say that I’m simply describing Marx’s “bourgeoisie” or the “capitalist class” and, to a certain degree I am, but what’s missing from those terms is the implication I want of snobbery and elitism that, for me anyway, is tied to the word “royal.”

        Americans have embraced, probably to a fault, the idea of the self-made man. It’s part of our mythos that, with a lot of self-reliance and hard work we can, in any hardship, “pull-ourselves-up-by-our-bootstraps.” That mythos is so ingrained in our psyche that it seems we also believe that someone who can’t “pull-himself-up-by-his-bootstraps” is lazy, or unskilled. It also seems to foster an attitude that those unable to achieve financial security don’t then deserve financial security: they only deserve charity, pity, and disdain in alternating patterns from those who have money.

        At the onset of the Great Depression, Hoover, who will stand in as my prototypical Economic Royalist, believed that volunteerism and personal charity would see America through the worst of the hard times. And people, both rich and poor, did their best at this. In some places, like Seattle, the unemployed set up their own networks, bartered for goods, and received both in-kind donations and monetary donations from the local Government and some businesses (there doesn’t seem to be one single source online describing the Unemployed Citizens League, but here’s the Google search results). In Philadelphia, wealthy families formed a charity, The Committee for Unemployment Relief (again, not very well documented online at all, you’ll have to pick up a book like T.H. Watkins’ “The Great Depression” or “Philadelphia: a 300 year history” By Russell Frank Weigley, Nicholas B. Wainwright, Edwin Wolf). The Philadelphia Committee for Unemployment Relief was able to fund local relief efforts for a year before needing to secure more donations. Their second wave of donations lasted for three months. Their third pile of cash was gone is a month. The economic situation was so bad by then, they couldn’t raise any more money and had to shut down. In Detroit, despite one wealthy family’s attempt to organize a similar local charity for the unemployed, no other wealthy Detroit families would help - including Henry Ford ( a side note: Ford so despised labor that he was the last auto maker to recognize the United Auto Workers Union and that didn’t happen until World War II).

        There are limits to personal charity and volunteerism. They work for mitigating the immediate effects of short term tragedies, like earthquakes, fires, floods, etc, but they don’t work for long term, endemic problems like poverty, or protracted economic downturns or collapses. That is the first real difference between Economic Royalty and the rest of us. For an Economic Royalist, the ups and downs of the economy are weathered fairly well because they simply have a much larger economic cushion. When the Great Depression began to cut into Henry Ford’s profits, he simply laid off workers, shut down plants, and stopped production. For his workers that was a tragedy, often leading to months and years of unemployment.

        The same dynamic exists today, except now there is a social safety net that provides for the elderly who no longer work (or can’t work), and for people who are put out of work by the Economic Royalists who are trimming their expenditures to keep their profits up. However, the Economic Royalist don’t like this arrangement as much as they do the idea of a return to pre-New Deal America.

        One of the beliefs that Hoover had, was that if people who were in need were assured of support from their government, they would become soft, and less self-reliant. They deserved a little charity, so they wouldn’t starve or go naked, but other than that, Hoover and the Economic Royalist believed everyone should “pull-themselves-up-by-their-bootstraps.” And, for the most part, the American people wanted to oblige that sentiment. After Roosevelt took office and started major government funded relief efforts, the government relief workers were often met with angry hostility by the very people who came to them for help. These proud working people were doing what they needed to do to feed their families, but they would have preferred work to being on “the dole.” Work, even for wages that were barely enough to pay rent and buy food, and no health benefits, was preferable to accepting a handout.

        I think to a certain extent that still exists today. Work provides dignity, a sense of independence - even if that dignity and sense of independence are fleeting or ephemeral considered against the whimsy with which corporate executives (the Economic royalty) hire and fire their workers. A social safety net, however, makes the threat of losing a job less frightening. It also makes a worker less likely to endure intolerable working conditions. And that is what really upsets the Economic Royalty. If the working class has is confronted with the choice between continuing to work, no matter how low the pay or how intolerable the conditions are, or being destitute and begging, they’ll work if only to avoid the shame of begging.

        And that’s the way the Economic Royalists want it, even today. What they want is a New Feudalism based not on heredity so much as money and the ability to make money. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, and Unions, are considered the enemy because they provide the worker with leverage against the people who wish to be their “kings.”

Being Independent

2010-03-06T09:38:00.000-06:00

I used to be a bookseller, so I think I understand a bit. The Big Six publishers control a lion’s share of the book market – it comes with the territory of being well, BIG. In any bookstore, whether it is a chain bookstore or one of the large independents, or one of the thousands of struggling, independent, hanging-on-by-their-fingernails small bookstores across the country, the majority of their sales will be of books published by the Big Six publishers.

This is a fact that every small publisher, and every writer with a small publisher, has to face and wrestle with.

We in the indy publishing world also have to deal with the fact that the Big Six also have the economic clout to buy prime display space, even in the independent bookstores. The Big Six all operate co-op programs where, if a bookstore orders a certain number of books selected by the publisher, and displays them prominently, or mentions them in the store’s newsletter, or writes a review that the store distributes to its customers, the bookstore will receive money from the publisher (it could be anywhere from $50 to $150 dollars, sometimes more, depending). The bookstores then use that money to help defray general advertising or marketing costs. For some bookstores, I’m sure, co-op money makes up the bulk of their in-store advertising budget. Now, I can’t say for sure, but I’d bet even the chain bookstores have some kind of similar arrangement, as do groups like the American Booksellers Association and their associated, regional groups (Midwest Booksellers Association, Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association, etc). It is part of the Big Six publisher’s marketing strategy.

So, let me be up front on this: I’m not opposed to co-op programs, nor do I oppose bookstores for using it. Booksellers have to eat too. However, I wonder if some haven’t forgotten what makes an independent bookseller, well, independent. Don Linn, in a Twitter post, noted that he was amazed that indy booksellers don’t seem to include very many, if any, books from Independent presses in their recommended lists or various award lists.

Again, as a former bookseller, I get it that there are, really, too many books out there for any bookseller to be aware of and to have read all of them. I also understand that the majority of books in any bookstore these days come form one of the Big Six. They publish thousands of titles a year, while some independent publishers might only publish six to fifteen books a year, plus, the Big Six can offer bigger discounts to bookstores, free shipping, and often have more liberal return policies. Some, but certainly not all, independent and small publishers can’t, economically, match that kind of structure and it makes it frustrating for booksellers to deal with those publishers. Also, in these shaky economic times, if someone’s going to offer you $50 to $150 to put a book on a table, or jot down 250 words summarizing the plot, a struggling indy bookstore would be stupid not to take it.

But, if an independent bookseller only promotes and reviews and sells the things they get co-op for, which means they’re only promoting, reviewing, and selling books from the Big Six publishers (books that also tend to get much better national, and big media coverage - think the NY Times book review, or the NY Review of Books, etc), how are they any different from Barnes & Noble? How are they anything but an extension of the NY Times? Sure, they can trot out the old saw about better customer service, but in a society of instant gratification, why would someone special order a Random House book from an indy when they can walk into the Barnes & Noble down the street and get the exact same book at a discount? There will be some people who will do that, especially the loyal regulars, but that’s not a solid enough business model.

It just seems to me that independent bookstores, armed with their more “knowledgeable” staff, their more individualized customer service, and their closer connection to the communities they serve, can have a tremendous impact on the industry by, well, being a bit more independent and making a point of promoting those small press books they love, but don’t have the clout of the Big Six behind them. - By, in essence, every now and then, choosing to champion David over Goliath.

Call for Submissions & volunteers.

2010-02-18T06:20:00.000-06:00

Well, it’s time to come out with a new issue of The Project for a New Mythology. I had wanted to get one out last year, but just never got the timing right what with the general business of life, trying to write, and futzing about with that whole book publishing thing.

This year doesn’t look to be as distracting, although there are a lot of things I have planned. One of the things I have planned is a new issue of The Project for a New Mythology. The plan is to have it come out in October, which should give me plenty of time to plan, and plenty of time to get in as many quality submissions as possible.

Here’s a link to the “Rebirth” page at pfanm.com. Consider submitting a piece or two, donating (there’s a link for that too), or volunteering.

One of the reasons I failed at getting an issue out last year was that I didn’t ask, and therefore didn’t have any help. This time, I’m asking for help . . . all kinds of help. One of the originating ideas of the magazine was to create a community, but there at the end, it turned into something that I just did. So, if you want to help produce the next issue, have some ideas on how to present it, distribute it, - whatever, get in touch.

I look forward to hearing from you.

What Is A Book Worth

2010-02-16T20:47:00.000-06:00

It seems that publishers, according to a few comments on my previous blog post after I shared it on facebook and a few other places, are currently getting a bad rap in the ebook pricing wars. Some people thanked me for standing up for publishers, some said they don’t mind the writer getting more money as long as higher book prices didn’t go to the publishers.

To one group, I want to say that publishers, especially the likes of Macmillan or Hachette Book Group, or especially Random House, don’t need a little old writer like me to stand up for them. To the other, I want to say that if the publisher doesn’t get any money for the books it publishes neither does the writer.

Yesterday’s post was an exercise in absurdity. Cents per hour, or cents per word is absurd (it would look better if I said I was paid $22.00 per page though, wouldn’t it?). But behind that absurdity is a very real question that every writer has: What is my work worth?

No one would dare argue that cars, or dishwashers, or iPods, or even lunches should be given away for nothing to everyone. So, why do people argue that information (read: a book) just wants to be free? Books have always been traded and loaned. Almost any book a person wants to read can be borrowed, for free, from the public library. It’s been that way since the invention of books. Because of that, publishers, even the large conglomerate publishers who published J. K. Rowling, or Stephenie Meyer, or John Grisham, have learned a nifty trick: how to price a book so that everyone who had a hand in producing it can earn some kind of a living while still keeping that price reasonable to the reader.

Built into that trick is a simple understanding that, it seems, no one outside of publishing really seems to grasp: publishing is not a get rich type of business. It’s a break-even business. Most books that the mega-publishers put out actually lose money. The loses generated by the clunkers are cleaned up and covered up by the occasional mega-bestseller. The enormous success of J. K. Rowling erased the red ink on nearly every other book Scholastic had published and that never sold enough to earn out the advances paid to the writers. For small publishers, the balancing act comes at the front end, rather than at the back end the way it does for the conglomerate publishers. A small press, in other words, can’t throw giant advances at authors, it also means that they can’t sell the book to wholesalers or retailers at the kind of steep discounts that the conglomerates are able to provide.

All of this makes it hard for writers to determine what their books are really worth. If we were making widgets, that worth would be easy: cost of materiel, shipping, and labor to manufacture it, plus a bit of a mark-up for profit to allow the widget company to buy more material and pay the employees to make more widgets. Well, books don’t work that way. Art in general doesn’t work that way. Nora Roberts writes two books a year (one as herself and one as her alter ego J.D. Robb), but Michael Ondaatje writes one every seven or eight years. Nora Roberts probably makes more money per year but, let’s face it, Ondaatje’s books are more valuable in that cultural and artistic sense.

Then, add on all the people it takes to turn a writer’s single manuscript into a published book and get it into a bookstore: the agent, the editor, the copyeditor, the book designer, the printer, the publicist, the sales rep, the wholesaler, and finally the bookseller. Sure, ebooks cut out some of those links, like the printer and the wholesaler, and sometimes the bookseller, but it adds the programmer. So, even an ebook still leaves a lot of people out there whose livelihoods depend upon the writer, and what worth that book is determined to have by the publisher AND the reader.

Publishers have, literally, hundreds of years of precedent on how to price a book so that people will buy it, and so they can pay everyone along the chain of production - including the writer. Amazon doesn’t subscribe to the same pricing model that book publishers and bookstores do. It subscribes to the Wal-Mart model of pricing. In the Wal-Mart model of pricing, Wal-Mart tells the suppliers like Coleman, or Hasbro, or whatever company makes something that Wal-Mart wants to sell at a cutthroat price, what that cutthroat price will be. Usually, it’s a price so low that the company begins to worry about being able to pay its American workers. So, those companies move the production of that item off-shore to China, or Taiwan, or Bangladesh, where they can pay a brown person to make the widget for cents on the hour - maybe even .35 cents an hour, or .35 cents per widget. (Yes, I’m comparing writers to sweatshop labor, but remember, most writers have day jobs that pay them a living wage).

Sure we get a super cheap product, but now we need that super cheap plastic piece of crap because the well paid American factory worker is now an under paid greeter at Wal-Mart and can only afford to buy cheap plastic things.

Now, tell me, what part of publishing a book can be outsourced to someone who will A) be able to work cheaply enough to support a $10 price point, and B) be able to read English? How many reader’s hearts just skipped a beat at the tone of that comment? How many people think that sounds vaguely like a Tea Partier? Scary, isn’t it? But the truth is that everyone along that production chain of a book reads the book. Why? Because it’s part of the job. We can’t outsource the Editor or the Copy Editor, they actually need as firm a grasp on English spelling and grammar as the writer. And it costs less when the typesetter speaks English well because that typeset manuscript gets proofread once it’s done. The best book designers read the book and design the covers and even pick the typeface to fit the tone and style of the book. And, of course, all the people engaged in determining the marketing of the book and the selling of the book do a much better job of pitching it if they’ve read it.

Face it, if you love books, even ebooks, your friends in this battle are the publishers and the writers and the independent bookstores and, believe it or not indy booksellers, the chain bookstores. But not Amazon or Wal-Mart.

If Amazon and Wal-Mart begin to control the perception of “worth” in the publishing world then get ready for the death of literature, and our culture.

Who Works for .35 cents an hour?

2010-02-15T18:02:00.004-06:00

In a recent NY Times article about the coming price war in ebooks, NY Times bestselling author Douglas Preston is quoted as follows:

“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”
Amazon commenters attacked Mr. Preston after his publisher delayed the e-book version of his novel by four months to protect hardcover sales. Mr. Preston said he was not sure whether the protests were denting his sales. But, he said, “It gives me pause when I get 50 e-mails saying ‘I’m never buying one of your books ever again. I’m moving on, you greedy, greedy author.”

Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a “sense of entitlement” because I don’t think people are unwilling to pay the “real” price for a book. What I think the problem happens to be is a combination of things.

First, I think it has to do with a general devaluation of writing in our anti-intellectual society, combined with a malicious dumbing down of the literary landscape: we praise and reward writers who, essentially, abuse the craft. It’s a topic I’ve gone on at length about here and won’t get into it again. However, I think it is important to point out that the financial reward that these types of writers receive - the million dollar advances, the automatic million dollar movie deals, etc - creates for the average reading audience a certain skewed, and warped sense of how writers actually work, live, and earn money.

I’ve had conversations with people about the publication of my book where the word “famous” has gotten thrown around, partly as a joke, but also because, I assume, they either think I was paid a princely sum for my work, or they assume it’ll sell so many copies I’ll be able to live off my royalties (or they’re mocking me because they think I self-published). They are surprised when I tell them that it took me 8 years to write and sell “The Evolution of Shadows,” that I racked up 50 rejections from agents, and that my advance was considerably less than $10,000. Then, if they stay around long enough after that to find out all the inside nastiness of the publishing world - especially that most writers rarely see a royalty check and, even if they do, it’s based on a measly 10-15% of the cover price - they end up telling me that they didn’t realize how tough it is to get published and make a living at it.

Whether that translates into them making the connection between that and Amazon’s cutthroat pricing tactics is hard to say. So, I did a little math to help out - and just like in high school algebra, I’m going to show my work:

Now, to make this easy to grasp, lets say that the average writer puts in a five day, 40 hr work week on his book (granted its 40 hrs crammed around his regular 40 hr a week job sitting at someone else’s desk, in someone else’s office, doing “the man’s” work). That roughly, that translates to 2,080 hrs of labor a year on the book (research, planning, writing, revising, on the creative side, then there’s the business side of submitting). Over an 8 year stretch that comes to 16,640 hrs of labor to get that one sale.

Depending on where the writer is able to sell that book, and how much the publisher thinks it will make, the writer could receive an advance from anywhere around $250 to $250,000 (or more even, but let’s be rational). For argument’s sake, let’s pick a nice round number: $10,000. Our writer gets a $10,000 advance. Divide that advance by the hrs worked for that 10K and it comes about .60¢ an hour.

Now, ask yourself, who in their right might would work for a .60¢ an hour wage?
Now, just for argument’s sake, let’s give it another perspective, let’s say the novel came in at exactly 60,000 words. That is the bottom range of what the publishing industry considers a “novel” length manuscript. A $10K advance on a 60K word manuscript comes out to .16¢ a word.

That’s the toughest .16¢ anyone will ever earn. And, that’s all before any copies of the book are sold. In order for a writer to see a “royalty” that writer has to earn back that advance. If the writer never earns back his advance, that $10K he got up front will be all he ever gets for 8 years of gut wrenching effort. But, let’s say the writer gets lucky and makes back that advance and starts earning the mythical royalty.

Now, let’s specifically address that $9.99 price point that Amazon is charging out there. Sure, some of the stuff I’ve heard is that Amazon and other ebook retailers are offering to pay authors 65% to 70% of that price in royalties. That means the author will get anywhere from $6 to $7 dollars for each book sold. It sounds good on the surface, but it doesn’t effect our hourly or “per word” rate very much.

Let’s figure high and say our writer gets a $7 royalty for every book sold: that figures out to be an additional .0004¢ per hour, or an extra .0001¢ per word.
This, sad to say, is the pay scale that 99% of novelists work in. Only 1% or so, work in the per hour/per word pay scale of the J.K. Rowling’s, or the Stephanie Meyer’s or the Dan Brown’s who pull down multimillion dollar advances on books they write over two years, which means they’re earning several thousand dollars an hour/per word.
So, a $9.99 price point wouldn’t hurt the likes of J.K. Rowling. A few extra .0001¢’s per word won’t make a difference to someone pulling down a million dollar advance. But since most writers don’t land million dollar advances, that ten-thousandths of a penny is a big deal to the rest of us writers who are all working two or more jobs to support this crazy passion we have for telling stories for other people to read.

eReaders, iPads, and the Art of Self-delusion

2010-02-02T06:01:00.000-06:00

You know, when the iPod came out in 2001, it wasn’t fully formed with photo and video capability. It had a black and white LCD screen just like every other MP3 player out there. It was even three years late to the game and a gigabyte smaller than an MP3 player offered by another company.

So, the iPad (insert feminine hygiene product joke here), in its first incarnation, doesn’t toast yer’ nuggets and replace your significant other. So what? The way the tech-head gossip mongers wrote about it before its arrival you’d think the damn thing would be able to drive your car, start your coffee maker, kill the Kindle, and perform brain surgery on your cat all at the same time just by reading your mind.

It won’t replace my MacBook, nor will it replace my iPod, but I tell you what, it’ll have its place in my gadget arsenal. Hell, it won’t even replace my Moleskine, or my library of printed books. But here’s the truth: I never like to be without a notebook of some kind when I leave the house, and often I take my laptop with me, and a book. I never know when I’ll have time to jot something down, or buy a coffee and sit for a while. Right now, I carry with me, on any given day, a bag that weighs maybe ten pounds. There’s my laptop, my camera, assorted gadgets for said laptop, iPod, pens, two composition books, a Moleskine, and four books I’m trying to read (Cranioklepty, Sometimes We’re always real Same-Same, The Invention of Morel, and The Country Where No One Ever Dies). The iPad, even in this, it’s early stages, would be able to reduce my load by more than half. I could get a smaller “murse,” leave the laptop and the printed books at home.

That’s just cool.

But that’s not really where I wanted to go with this. I’m more interested in the impact the iPad and its iBooks tool will have on the ebook market and how publishers, especially small ones, will interact with the device and its users.

First off, the printed book isn’t dead. Digital books won’t kill the printed book just like photography didn’t kill painting. Also, in a previous post, I speculated on how the eBook could strengthen the independent publishers - especially as Print-on-Demand quality begins to rival traditional off-set printing.

The iPad, wisely, has adopted as its eBook format the EPUB format, which is what the publishing industry prefers to use. This also means that the iBookstore won’t be the only way to get eBooks for the iPad. I’m sure that just like iTunes, you’ll be able to import EPUB files the same way I can import MP3 files that I didn’t buy through iTunes. This, of course, will become an even bigger issue as more and more publishers, like Macmillan begin to chafe at Amazon trying to gut ebook pricing (and by extension, book pricing in general - see the recent Amazon, Wal-Mart price war). For publishers, authors, and especially independent bookstores, Amazon is a real threat to our livelihoods. The fact that it can pull books from the Kindle and get away with it, decide to not offer books at all, and generally undercut everyone’s price point, makes them nearly a dangerous monopoly. The real threat to the publishing industry comes from a fundamental balance that now exists. Amazon is buying these books that they are selling for $10 and less, at the bulk retailer discount of about 50% (paper books to brick and mortar indy stores ranges from 40-50% depending on situation, promotions, etc.). That means Amazon, right now, is taking a huge loss on these books. The fight with Macmillan is seen as the first step by Amazon to demand that the loss be shifted to the publisher. This is what Wal-Mart does to manufacturers - demand that a product, regardless of what it costs to make, or what the manufacturer needs to make to be profitable, meet the retailer’s desired price-point (thus causing manufacturers to move their factories to places like China where they can pay workers a fraction of what they’d make in America).

Amazon is waging a propaganda war when the say they’ll increase Author royalties to “70%.” That sounds appealing, but then you have to realize that, effectively, Amazon becomes your publisher, and they don’t have an editorial staff, nor any kind of vetting process. That begins to blur the line between self publishing, and legitimate publishing - which is another story all together.

What the iPad, using the EPUB standard and allowing the publishers to set the price for their eBooks, will do is protect the author, ultimately, and allow legitimate publishers and even independent bookstores to stay in business.

Here is an interesting take on the Macmillan vs. Amazon fight from Susan Piver on Huffington Post, Susan is an author, and former music exec. I’ll have more on this later.

Reading List & A Plan

2010-01-23T22:22:00.000-06:00

I have yet to decide on my Spring Training baseball book for this year. My options include a biography of Joe DiMaggio that has been sitting on my shelf for a while, “The Dixie Association” by Donald Hays, or finding something new. And yes, I thought about the recent Satchel Paige biography, but the hardcovers are all on their way back to the publisher right now because the paperback is due in May. So, that will be an option for Spring, 2011. Catchers and pitchers report in a few weeks, and I’ve got have a book picked out. If you have any suggestions, drop by my LibraryThing library and take a look at what I already have first (search the term baseball, and you’ll find all my baseball books).

Other than that, my reading list is, well, huge.

Currently, I’m reading Cranioklepty by Colin Dickey.

After that I plan on reading another Unbridled cohort’s book Mattox Roesch’s Sometimes We’re Always Real Same-Same

Here’s a short list of what I expect to get to this year:

Once In Europa by John Berger
Lilac and Flag by John Berger
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
The Exquisite by Laird Hunt
Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt
Havana Nocturne - T.J. English
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
Ransom by David Malouf
Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis by Mels Van Driel
31 Hours by Masha Hamilton
Travel as a Political Act by Rick Steves
The Country Where No One Ever Dies by Ornela Vorpsi
The Procession of Mollusks by Eric Olson
The Floating Order by Erin Pringle
The Accordionist’s Son by Bernardo Atxaga
Another Hill by Milton Wolff
Arts, Inc: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our cultural Rights by Bill Ivey
The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor
The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell
The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921by Tim Madigan
All for volumes of A Dance to The Music of Time (no really) by Anthony Powell
The Hell Fir Clubs: Sex, Satanism, and Secret Societies by Evelyn Lord
Masters of Sex by Thomas Maier
The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

That’s about as long as I’m going to make it; however, I have a lot more on the book shelves that need to be read. And, who knows what other books that come out this year will be added to the list. I know Emily St. John Mandel has a new one coming out this spring.

Part of this ambitious reading plan is that I need to refill the well, and clean out the bad mojo that’s been working on my for the last few years.

There’s an old turn of phrase that goes “You’re only as good as your last book, game, show, album, stunt, etc.” Thanks to the wisdom of my editor, no one is going to see just how awful By The Still, Still Water turned out. It has now been shuffled off to the dead project file.

It’s actually liberating. I think I’d been hanging on to that book for so long, thinking it had to be #2, and that I had to sit down and work on it. Then, when I didn’t sit down and work on it, I beat myself up over it. All of it was a battle that I kept buried. Part of me knew it was crap, but didn’t want to admit it, and so I froze. For years. So, I was partly delusional about it, and the other part was that I wrote the whole thing in a vacuum after graduate school.

One of the benefits of grad school, or any writing program, is that opportunity to workshop. With the right group of people, it’s possible to try out new things, get immediate feedback, and scrap the crap. None of that happened with By The Still, Still Water. So, my plan this year, on top of my reading list, is to seek out a writer’s group. Online will work, if needed, but I’d prefer one that meets in person on a regular basis and reads and critiques each other’s efforts.

We’ll see how that goes.

I've Got Your Counter Trend Right Here, Pal Part II Babes In Literature Land

2010-01-11T05:49:00.000-06:00

Saturday I put up this post in response to Bob Miller’s “It Was The Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times” post on the Harperstudio website.

In that I said I would deal with his #9 Trend/Counter Trend set later, well, here it is. Now, where’s my sippy cup?

Here’s the entire set:

Trend: As the Boomers lose their eyesight and their children become teenagers, demographics will favor books for young adults over books for adults. This is also the generation most likely to embrace a variety of online and offline formats, without feeling the need to choose one over another. Counter trend: While auctions and advances diminish for adult titles, they could heat up for young adult material as publishers bet big in search of the next Stephenie Meyer. (Prediction: publishing houses will soon have entire departments devoted to developing books about the undead.)

All at once this trend and counter trend seems to suggest that as my parent’s generation dodders off into old age they’ll stop reading books long before they die - and, once they die, the rest of us will be forever trapped in some permanent adolescence and only interested in reading multiple permutations of “my boyfriend’s a blood sucking fiend, but oh so sparkly/dreamy” books. This bit strikes me as the Big Publishers finally breaking down and admitting they want to be just like the Pop Music world, forever chasing the allowances of teenaged girls and the wallets of their over-indulgent parents (read: delusional, immature mothers - see “The Twilight Moms” phenomenon).

This idea that the big publishers will throw off the noble pursuit of publishing literature to begin chasing the elusive and fickle interests of teenaged girls is . . . disheartening. But it’s not a trend I haven’t already suspected since, oh, somewhere in the mid-1990’s. As a member of the generation Joshua Glenn has called The PC Generation (the first to grow up with Personal Computers and who had the misfortune of hitting high school and college during the height of the Political Correctness craze), I’ve had a front row seat to the rejuvenilation of America. The problem is that what started out as my generation trying to define for itself “success” and “maturity” has, of course, been taken over by the marketing world and simply made into childishness and infantilism. Now, just the like the rebellious, peace and love vibe the Boomers had in the 60’s turned into the drug and sex addled 70’s and the drug and greed addled 80’s, my generation’s ambivalence towards the adult banalities of our elders has been mutated into an unhealthy obsession with the interests of a hormonal thirteen year-old girl.

The point being that, in between the Boomers and the current sub-Twenty set (Glenn’s young Millennials and the unnamed 1994-2003 generation) there’s a whole swath of the reading public that Miller suggests aren’t worth worrying about. To him, the three and a half generations born between 1954 and 1989 or so, either don’t read, or will be content reading whatever the Big Publishers feel compelled to publish based on their market research concerning the preferences of a set of the population that, on any given day, can’t decide if they’re going dress like a princess or a hooker and whose male counterparts can’t seem to get their pants pulled all the way up.

Now, I don’t necessarily mean that as a jab against young people, I was young once. It’s tough, and there’s rebellion involved in the fashion choices of the young. Hell, my generation pegged their pants and wore Picasso-esque asymmetrical color block shirts and permed and hair-sprayed our hair to gloriously ridiculous cotton candy-like heights. No one is above stupid at the age of 16. But adults should know better than to try to pander to that set. They’ll have them enthralled for a few early years, but come high school, those kids are going to begin rebelling. There’s a reason boy bands and teen pop princesses have such short careers - they grow up and so do their audiences.

Hell, it might not be a bad idea for the big houses to chase the kiddie market while ignoring the fact that people spend most of their lives as grown-ups. When those kids start wanting some intelligent, thoughtful, mature books they’ll come to the small presses.

I've Got Your Counter Trend Right Here, Pal.

2010-01-09T07:28:00.000-06:00

The problem with having to work forty hours a week, keep house, get the third novel written, and occasionally pay attention to loved ones means that sometimes I don’t have time to sit down and write about events as they’re happening. That may or may not be a good thing. As of this writing, January 9th, I have two topics I want to write about - a) the “future trends” piece on Harperstudio by Bob Miller and b) a few more thoughts on airport security. Maybe I’ll have time to get to both of them this weekend, maybe not.

Essentially, most of Bob MIller’s predictions are pretty reasonable, and he sets the trends up with counter trends to show there’s a path and a solution for everything.

For instance, Trend #4 is “the amounts paid for brand-names will continue to increase, with seven-figure or eight-figure acquisitions commonplace among authors with established track records” while Bob says the counter trend is “an increase in five-figure acquisitions (perhaps with profit-share arrangements) for less predictable material” while the six figure advance will be a thing of the past.

However, trend sets 1 and 2, (I’ll save trend 9 for another post - so, make that three posts to do this weekend). . . how can I put this: completely disregard or ignore the existence, tenacity, strength, ingenuity, and importance of the independent presses.

In trend/counter trend set #1, Bob predicts that the big houses will continue to cut overhead as profits shrink. His counter trend is that the “Big Six” publishers will merge to become the “Big Three.” How the hell is that a counter trend? That’s just more of the same stuff we’ve been seeing in the publishing industry for the past, oh, thirty years. It seems to me that if the trend is for big houses to cut overhead and merge then the real counter trend will be for the small, independent, and innovative publishing houses to flourish. Take my own publisher as an example. Unbridled Books has a decentralized business plan, which means there is virtually no overhead. Since they don’t have to pay to keep the heat on in the office, or buy coffee for the break room, they can put their money to better use.

Now, consider the rise of ebooks. This is, perhaps the biggest boon for small presses. This trend in ebooks can further reduce the cost publishing a book - I’m not predicting the demise of the printed book with this, but imagine the reduction of risk presented by publishing an ebook. A daring, innovative press could buy a book, test the waters with an ebook version and, depending upon demand, print paper copies to then meet the demand for book signings and collectors. This particular model will become even more feasible as Print-on-demand technology becomes more polished and begins to more closely resemble off-set style printing.

Imagine this: a reader who buys most of his books as ebooks, likes a book and wants a printed copy, or wants a bound copy for an author signing, or to simply put on a shelf in his home (the book as objet d’art). He might be able to click a button on his reader and for a slight charge (the lovely micro-payment idea) a message is sent to the publisher that a bound copy has been requested by this reader. The book is printed, bound and shipped straight to him. Or maybe he has his reader set up to do this through his favorite local bookstore. Another option might be for him to take his ereader device to the bookstore itself, where there is a printing kiosk. He downloads the book to the kiosk to be printed, then browses the store or goes to have a chai in the store’s cafe. An hour later, the books pops out of the machine and he’s off with his objet d’art.

No, Bob, the counter trend to the coming Big Three Publishers is the proliferation of small houses.

Very closely related to Trend/Counter trend #1 is the T/CT #2, where Bob predicts, and I think accurately, any of the big houses that survive will focus on the so-called “brand name” authors and that title count will shrink (because there are only so many celebrities) by 50% over the next decade. But Bob’s counter trend is so far off the mark as to be comical, almost a joke, except that he’s serious. His counter trend to fill the gap of decreased titles offered by the big houses is that self-publishing will increase, along with partnerships between these self-publishers and the future “Big Three.” That is the path by which Bob thinks the current generation of “brand name authors” will be replaced with the next generation: by a false Darwinian dynamic of who can afford to self-publish, or, to put it another way, Bob thinks that the answer to fewer big publishers is to embrace the polished up, supposedly now legitimized old scam of milking the author for money. When I first started figuring out the business of getting published, the most prevalent lesson I was given was to watch out for publishers and agents who charged up-front fees to read, represent, edit, or publish your book. Such people were scam artists. Bob’s answer to the Big Publishers cutting off unknown writers and not taking risks on new talent is to force the talent to buy their way in by going through vanity presses.

Again, Bob completely ignores the small presses out there. Not only that, he completely ignores the fact that as the big publishing houses shed overhead, they’ll also shed employees. What will all these out of work editors, designers, publicists, and proofreaders do? I’m betting some of them will start their own publishing companies, or try to find jobs at the small publishing houses that will be sprouting up to fill the giant literary gaps left by the big houses abandoning the future literary gods in favor of celebrity cookbooks and political screeds by the TV punditry. The small houses will be where all the unemployed editors will go, suddenly filled with the knowledge that, at a small house they will be able to publish books that they actually give a damn about, as opposed to the next ghost-written book by Sarah Palin, or maudlin Christmas story by Glenn Beck.

The big mistake that the big publishers make is believing that readers, true readers, are just like teenage girls, and that book publishing can be handled the same way the Jonas Brothers, or Hannah Montana, or High School Musical is handled. Find what the largest set of people can like without too much thought or effort and amp it up until no one can escape it. Welcome to the monoculture.

Some readers will just give up, and some will do what I’ve started doing. I’ve already reduced the number of books I buy from the Big Six. I only buy certain established writers from them - like Michael Ondaatje and John Berger who are with Random House now because that’s who bought up the presses they originally published with. But the future writers who replace them won’t be with the big houses. They’ll be at the small ones.

Most of the books I’ve purchased recently have been by new or early career writers who are published by the likes of Unbridled Books, The Permanent Press, The Dalkey Archive, Bootstrap Productions, Coffee House Press, and Astrophil Press. The reason for this is simple: I’m a picky reader. I’m looking for something that is, all at once, a good read, challenging, and original by authors who aren’t going to be pigeon-holed by their publisher to write certain styles of books (I’m reminded of a story I heard from Laura Moriarty about how her publisher keeps pushing her to write more books about women’s relationships and how Laura herself would like to write about other things), and haven’t been incorrectly anointed by some isolated New York writer in the NY Times Book Review as the modern day replacement for Norman Mailer, John Updike, Philip Roth, or any other great, old or dead, receding writer.

Seriously, the future of book publishing isn’t in New York with the old dinosaurs of conglomerate publishing. It’s out in the boonies, on the frontier, with the small presses and the university presses who are publishing books they love, books they believe deserve to be read, and who are testing out innovations in publishing and building a loyal set of readers. That’s where the next writer of Updike-ian significance will come from, and it will be decided by the scope and skill of that writer’s work, not by a decree from New York.

Something Cool

2010-01-07T21:52:00.000-06:00

In August, 1990, my parents took me and my sister on a road trip to Chicago just before I started college. While we were there, we got to see a baseball game at Wrigley Field on August 14th. The Cubs vs. The Astros.

Here’s the box score from that game at Baseball Almanac.com

It’s turning out to have been quite a significant game. It’s not very often that someone who had never been to a major league game before and has only been to two more since, gets to see a game that features multiple future Hall of Famers.

I can now say I’ve seen two Hall of Fame players play the game. Ryne Sandberg (HOF 2005) and Andre “The Hawk” Dawson (HOF 2009) - and Sandberg hit a home run that day.

Of course, in the coming years there will be a few more I can add to that list. Greg Maddux pitched 7.2 innings that day, and there’s no reason but spite to think he won’t be a first ballot selection in 2014.

Other potential Hall of Famers could include Mark Grace and Craig Biggio - certainly Biggio who’s a member of the 3,000 hit club; Grace might be a long shot, since he was a 1st baseman who hit for average instead of power, but he is one of my favorite players.

So, there’s a chance that in one game, I will have seen, at the very least, three Hall of Fame caliber players, maybe more.

Then I and 40-some thousand of my closest friends, got to sing the 7th inning stretch with Mr. Harry Caray himself.

It was a perfect baseball day.

The Collapse of Mainstream American Culture

2010-01-05T20:22:00.000-06:00

Monday I was getting caught up on my NPR podcasts and there was a piece (it might have been on Fresh Air) about how Sociologists are wringing their hands over the loss of certain broad cultural touchstones. Gone are the days, they say, when significant swaths of Americans will be able reference things like, The Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan, or the last episode of MASH or Seinfeld. They seemed to lament that nowadays, we don’t all get our news from a single, somber, honest Walter Cronkite type reporter, whether we are Liberals or Tea-baggers.

Instead, they say, our society has become fractured by the proliferation of cable news channels, internet news sources, the demise of newspapers, and the general ability for people to locate a subculture and completely disappear into it and never have contact with mainstream Americana. Trekkies can now spend large parts of their day buried under mountains of Tribbles, and, of course, Christians can completely detach from mainstream America and spend their whole lives buying goods from faith-based stores, getting their cars repaired at Christian auto repair shops and listening to Christian rap.

I understand their argument. On my horribly pessimistic days, I agree with it. The loss of more universal cultural touchstones has allowed the Tea-Baggers to ensconce themselves in a world where they’re not only entitled to their own opinions but entitled to their own facts upon which to base their opinions. Conspiracy theorists on both sides of the political divide can manufacture fabulous tales of government nefariousness out of whole cloth and completely dismiss, or not even know about, the mountains of empirical evidence that disproves their fantasies. This is dangerous, as we are beginning to see.

But, as NPR pointed out, there is an odd little side benefit. This same news bit also contained the story of a young woman in a small American town who is a huge Dr. Who fan. No one else in her high school knows this show, or cares. However, because of the internet, she is able to connect with other Dr. Who fans across the world - and talk about it and be a part of a community. Before the internet, before the “fracturing” of mainstream culture, she wouldn’t have had such an easy connection with other Dr. Who fans.

And here is where my imagination really gets going. Sure, mainstream American culture, or mainstream French culture, whatever, might be fracturing, but WORLD culture is now possible.

Specific societies will continue to have their big Cultural Touchstones. Everyone in America probably remembers where they were on September 11th, 2001. Every English person probably remembers where they were on July 7th, 2005. Every Spaniard probably remembers where they were on March 11th, 2004. No matter how fractured societies become, there will still be certain universal events that they can all relate to - they won’t always be violent and tragic. They election of Barack Obama is a cultural touchstone, whether you like him or not.

Something, even if it is tragedy, will come along to give every large society something to reference.

But the smaller cultural touchstones, the pop culture touchstones, these are the things that are fracturing - and, in a way, that is a good thing. That’s what gets me excited. What happens when an American in a small town who is a Dr. Who fan gets online and begins meeting people from other countries, other religious backgrounds, different life experiences? Well, we just might begin to see the “mysterious other” as not so mysterious anymore, and basically, not so much different from ourselves.

One of the first things that happens in a conflict is the dehumanizing of the designated enemy. Take a look at propaganda posters from World War I for example. There are images depicting the Germans as club wielding gorillas, fat men with bloody swords standing on top of dead babies, monsters with bloody arms trying to clutch the world. A society that is unified in its cultural touchstones can be more easily swayed by such propaganda to believe the mysterious “other” is subhuman and needs to be destroyed. Achieving the kind of universal hatred, fear, and dehumanization of the enemy is harder when people individually know someone who belongs to the group someone else is trying to dehumanize.

My rosy optimistic idea is that the more we begin to bind ourselves to people in other cultures, the less powerful our manipulative political demigods become. It’s a thin line of hope I think, sometimes, but it’s better than thinking we’re falling apart and nothing but automatons to the morons who scream the loudest.

I've got a bomb in my pants

2010-01-02T14:07:00.000-06:00

I’ve been sort of following the Underwear bomber story, slowly picking up bits and pieces and trying to avoid all the hyperbolic screaming and teeth-gnashing and fear-mongering.

But one thing that I’ve been wresting with is the ACLU’s (and even some Republicans) stand against full-body scans as an issue of privacy.

In a way, I’m torn. Taken completely out of the context of air travel, a full body scan is an invasion of privacy. I wouldn’t stand for them to be done before boarding a bus, or upon my entrance to a building, or before hopping on the turnpike. But when I weigh my own right to privacy and other people’s right to privacy against air travel, I want a full body scan.

I know that some might argue that if you allow it this case, eventually, it’ll creep into other areas. Well, let’s deal with that if it happens, but right now, I would rather put another layer of safety between me and 30,000 feet in the air.

Here’s my point: survivability and escapability.

Modern day life comes with a tremendous amount of danger. I could die in a car wreck tomorrow. A suicide bomber could set himself off in the mall while I’m there. A crazed gunman could speed down the freeway shooting people in other cars. I could buy a bus ticket to Kansas City and some crazed underwear bomber could set himself off in the back row. The difference between all of those things and an airplane comes down to survivability and escapability.

The underwear bomb, I’ve heard, would not have been big enough to detonate the entire plane, but it would have been big enough to blow a hole in the fuselage. At 30,000 feet, a hole in the body of a plane presents many, many hazards beyond the initial explosion. Could the plane have survived the stresses of flying with kind of damage long enough for an emergency landing? The explosion may have killed the people immediately around the bomber, but how many would have been sucked out of the cabin to plummet 30,000 feet to their deaths?

If I’m on a bus, and someone starts trying to light his britches, or a shoe, the bus can stop quickly and allow the passengers to flee. A plane can’t simply stop and let people off. On the ground, people can flee, they can hide, they can take cover. In an airplane at 30,000 feet, none of that is possible. We are trapped in a metal tube, relying completely upon the sturdiness of that plane and its ability to survive the damage inflicted by a bomb, upon the skill of the pilots, by our luck in where we have been seated, by the strength of the bolts holding our chair to the floor and our seat belts holding us to the chair.

For me, there’s something about being attached to the ground that makes me less afraid of some jerk with a bomb strapped to his junk than when I’m 30,000 feet in the air, without a parachute. And I’m perfectly willing to let some TSA scanner get a good look at my private parts if that means I won’t later be sucked alive out of the airplane and flung into the cold void 30,000 feet over nowhere to fall to my death.

Every time I’ve gotten on a plane this year, it’s been in the back of my mind that I could die. There could be a mechanical failure, the pilot could fall asleep, or be drunk. We could collide with another plane, or a mountain. However, although it is annoying and time consuming, I willingly take off my shoes and my jacket, produce my quart sized bag full of 3 oz bottles of shampoo and toothpaste, so the TSA can scan them for anything dangerous. I do this because it eases my mind a bit to know that if I do die, it will be the result of chance, an accident, and not the result of someone’s intentional desire to kill someone else. And to me, that threat at 30,000 feet is much greater than sitting in a bus, or walking around the mall. And so, therefore, I’d be willing to undergo a full body x-ray scan to ensure that the guy behind me doesn’t have a plastic chemical bomb strapped to his wedding tackle.

Now, I hear there are other devices that can achieve what the full body scan does without generating a “naked picture” of the passenger. Fine, use those. I’m willing to undergo that as well because it is obvious that a metal detector won’t catch a chemical laced pair of britches and a plastic syringe full of liquid tucked in the folds of a pair of baggy pants.

To me, it would seem that such measures would be welcomed by flyers if it meant an airline could further ensure the safety of its already stressed, anxious, nervous, frustrated and tired passengers that hey, no one on this plane will try to blow up their jock strap to kill you.

New York's Not My Home

2009-12-29T06:51:00.000-06:00

Everyone I know wonders why I hate travel so much. Travel is one of those things that’s supposed to be good for writers, right? Michael Ondaatje once said “You have to travel to find your home,” or maybe it was the late Robin Blaser (I don’t feel like doing the research on that right now). Writers should travel every chance they get then, right? They should be vagabonds for art. Nomads of the word.

Whatever.

The other piece of writing advice I always heard, but didn’t take seriously until 1997, was to write every day - to develop a routine. Another anecdote I am unable to confirm at the moment was about some French writer only being able to write while in the bathtub and holding his wife’s hand.

I bet he never travelled much. Or maybe he did, at the behest of his wife so that she could get something done instead of sitting next to a bathtub for hours at a time.

Anyway. You see my problem. How do I maintain a routine writing schedule, a ritual, if I’m on the road? Every time I travel, it’s a struggle to find time and space to write. Hotels are expensive and usually want you out by noon. Friends and family are free, but usually aren’t prepared for the fussiness of a writer (or at least, this writer). There’s usually not a desk, or an adequately flat surface except the kitchen table, which, of course, has many uses. I’m not saying that the family and friends need to prepare an office for me, but a flat space that can be single tasked for a little while would be greatly appreciated. See? Fussy.

There’s another writing nugget from Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

It’s hard to be regular and orderly when sleeping in strange places, and having to be a gracious guest.

I’m sure there are writers who can do it. Bully for them, but I’m not one of them. Put me in a situation where I get over stimulated - lots of noise, lots of people, things to see, things to do, and subtly encourage or demand that I be “engaged” then, eventually, I’ll snap. It’s like over tightening a wind-up toy. I’ll either whirl around for a while at a furious, confused pace, or I’ll break and freeze up. I need a lot of time alone, especially after a big event - maybe a day or two - to just sit and read, or listen to music, or stare at the walls.

During my time in New York, I didn’t get enough of that down time. By the end of the week, I was a wreck and I’m surprised I didn’t come back home sick.

And, I’m still not fully back into my routine.

Indeed.

2009-12-28T22:00:00.001-06:00

see more Lol Celebs

Stop it. Now.

2009-12-28T21:46:00.001-06:00

see more deMotivational Posters

In the Land of Old Man Potter

2009-12-18T19:05:00.000-06:00

Once a year, we get the Christmas spirit. We feel generous. We plunge into department stores to buy gifts for our families, and maybe we drop something in that red Salvation Army bucket for the poor. Maybe we buy an extra toy and drop it in the Toys for Tots box. Because, you know, it's that time of year when we think about the less fortunate and it makes us feel good that we've been generous.

But what this generosity really happens to be is pandering. It's pandering because this Christian charity, this spirit of giving and showing concern for the less fortunate is expected of us during this time of year, and if we do this little bit, once a year, we can continue to believe that we are good, caring, "Christian" people. Deep down, however, in our subconscious we know that once the holidays end, we'll go right back to thinking only of ourselves most of the time. We’ll go right back to gutting and destroying government and community programs that actually help the poor get out of poverty, so they don’t have to rely on our sporadic generosity.

We’ll defund a program that helps unwed mothers on welfare break the cycle of dependence and abuse because the program just might include information about the morning after pill or abortion.

We'll gut education spending, so that poor districts continue to fail their desperate and deserving students, abandoning those students to a choice between menial jobs, or crime.

We'll shut the poor out of the health care system and only treat them when they are at their most desperate, most vulnerable, and then send creditors after them for whatever they have left. Or, worse yet, we’ll shut people off from healthcare so thoroughly that they die of something preventable and treatable.

We'll cancel rehab programs and just throw drug addicts in jail instead where their addiction continues, or worsens.

Right now in this country we have a patchwork of private, nonprofit, and religious organizations that try to fill the gaps left by inadequate, gutted, and kneecapped government programs. These local community organizations rely on donations, fundraising drives, volunteers, and grants from larger private foundations, or the occasional sympathetic multimillionaire to meet their operating costs and the obligations they’ve made to the “less fortunate.” Eleven months of the year they struggle to keep the lights on at their various locations and then suddenly are flush in December - when we’re feeling guilty about our eleven months of selfishness and our brand new Xbox.

I am guilty. I worry more about paying my rent, my bills, buying groceries, and having time to write than whether I have done enough throughout the year to help the less fortunate. I feel it every day when I drive home from work and see the same homeless man with his rolled up sleeping bag clutched to his chest, walking towards the shelter. I felt it when I read the news article in the Wichita Eagle a while back that The Lord’s Diner was withdrawing its plans for another community kitchen because of neighborhood resistance. I wonder how many of those neighborhood resisters are feeling good about themselves for dropping a dollar in the Salvation Army bucket?

And that illustrates another problem with the patchwork, private sector system of charity that we have. It’s completely conditional upon the generosity of the community in which that organization is placed. They depend upon our erratic generosity.

We are failing, as a nation, at being our brothers’ keepers. We are failing to care for the least among us. Does our charity in December erase our lack of charity the rest of the year? Does it balance our decisions to limit people’s access to education, to health care, to food, and to the simple dignity of not having to beg for the things they need to live? Can we call ourselves a good and generous people because we occasionally drop a dollar in a bucket in December, while the rest of the year we vote to cut the budgets for education, for health and human services, for welfare, for food stamps, for housing and urban development, all so some would be Mr. Potter can keep 90% of his giant annual income instead of 85% of it?

I don’t think so.

Worst Ever Holiday Traveler

2009-12-14T06:15:00.000-06:00

This time next week, I’ll be waking up in Jersey City after flying to New York. I’ll spend a week visiting my sister and a few friends. The people around me here keep asking if I’m excited about the trip.

My answer is always no. This throws them off their game something fierce. The expected response is “Yes, I’m thrilled. I’m on the verge of wetting my pants I’m so excited.” Or something like that.

Sure, I’m looking forward to seeing my little sister. I’m looking forward to seeing a few old friends who also live there. And I’m particularly looking forward to meeting a new friend I’ve only ever talked to online. These things are the positives. Everything else is a negative for me.

Here’s my list of negatives:

1) crowed airplanes.
2) Christmas.
3) airports
4) over worked pilots
5) falling out of the sky
6) landing badly or in pieces.
7) Layovers
8) stressed airline employees
9) stressed passengers
10) annoying passengers
11) sightseeing
12) uncertain living arrangements

There’s a piece of advice I picked up from another writer, it may have been something Michael Ondaatje said once: “You have to travel to find your home.”

Great. Then I suppose I’ll never really find the place that feels most like home because I don’t like to travel that much. And believe me, it’s not because I’m refusing to admit I feel at home where I am. I’ve never felt at home in Wichita. Manhattan, KS, maybe, was the closest. Boulder was a close second except that I could never get a date in Boulder. I think they all thought I looked like an uptight Republican, or a closeted homosexual (what’s the difference?).

Anyway, whatever. F*ck it.

RE-POST: AN OPEN LETTER TO TOM HANKS (Revised)

2009-12-08T06:23:00.000-06:00

Dear Mr. Hanks,

        Please stop making movies out of Dan Brown’s books. Just. Stop. Please.

        The books that man types are torture enough. Please stop encouraging him to write more by turning them into movies.

        If you are planning to rush out and buy a copy of the next Dan Brown waste of good trees, I must ask you to please reconsider. If you’ve received a complimentary copy of the book, I ask that you please, please put it down right now. Even if you aren’t finished, please, just put it down. Donate it to a local homeless shelter, or give it directly to a homeless person so that he might have kindling to make a fire.

        There are plenty of books out there, a number much more well written than anything Dan Brown could pull off (see “The Evolution of Shadows” for instance).

        So, please, please stop. I know it is too late to stop the juggernaut that has been created around Angels and Demons - at least unless there is a giant, all consuming fire that will destroy all the copies of that movie now currently on their way to theaters - but it’s not too late to refrain from making a third one now on their way to stores.

        I hear that Sony has already begun work on the movie of “The Lost Symbol.” Plenty of movies die in development hell, you know. Please, let the “The Lost Symbol” die in development. Kill it quietly behind the discarded set for Joss Whedon’s “Wonder Woman” that should have starred Morena Baccarin. No one will miss it.

        Sincerely,

        Quinn.

(Original here)

The Ignobility of the Human Species

2009-11-25T19:45:00.000-06:00

In my previous post I made a comment about the ignobility of the human species. It’s probably not terribly profound, but I did manage to dwell on it for most of a day after writing it. Here’s where I went.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there is this brief speech by Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—

And then, in the Bible there’s Genesis 1:28 that a lot of people take to mean that we humans were given this world and everything on it to do as we please.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

In those two passages I find the essential delusion of the human species. It’s been the fundamental flaw in all sorts of philosophies from Karl Marx to Ayn Rand. There’s this belief that the fundamental nature of humanity is one of nobility, or goodness, and that our darkness, our willingness to lie, cheat, steal, and kill is an aberration, or caused by outside manipulation (the Devil). This belief in humanity’s innate goodness is the blind spot in nearly all of our philosophies.

I know I’m not the first to point this out. The world is too old and there have been too many misanthropes before me for what I have to say here to be wholly original. But I’m going to say it anyway: humanity’s nature isn’t one of goodness, or nobility. Our base nature is just that, base. Ignoble. Animal. The need to survive and reproduce drives everything. We may bury it underneath a mound of supposedly civilized behavior, but it’s still there.

Our goodness, our moments of nobility are the aberrations, not our moments of violence and carnality. This is why evil seems to endure with ease, almost effortlessly, and why goodness, generosity, compassion, justice, take so much effort and why it ebbs and flows. We are animals bent on survival first, then we are humans bound by a social contract.

There are some misanthropes who will stop there, claim we humans are a parasite on the planet, a virus, a cancer. For me, that over simplifies it. Right now, yes, our carbon emissions, our vast sheets of concrete, our unsecured toxic waste, our industrial poisons in the water, our chemically altered and mutated food production are all conspiring to harm us and the planet.

Our current condition arises out of the arrogance of those quotes above. If we start from the basic assumption that we are noble, the epitome of the animal kingdom, commanded by God to subdue and dominate the planet, then our base nature becomes subsumed into something external: the devil, the Other. We can deny it, ignore it, and never see it in ourselves. And our noble acts, those moments when we rise above our base, selfish nature, quickly become twisted and cancerous. Self destructive. We form tribes and build nations, then use them to go to war. We imagine a God who loves us so much that he gave us this world, and then use that God to justify hating and fearing other people, and raping the land to fuel our cities. We build machines and use them to pollute the world. We split the atom, and use that power to build bombs.

Our power to mold and shape the world around us is, right now, the primary source of all of our problems, and it’s because we start from the wrong place. If we are blessed from the start then even our sins have an air of Godly approval. True destructive evil can then reside outside of us and make our base, selfish efforts to demonize other people and stop their “evil” seem noble, gallant.

Essentially, by believing ourselves to be noble rather than ignoble, we run about trying to fight the supposed “evil” of things outside of ourselves. If we start differently, if we start with the belief that we are ourselves ignoble, base, animal, we can direct our energy to making ourselves noble, we can work towards grace, towards compassion. But, of course, like everything, I’m sure there’s a blind spot in these thoughts.

Bad Books

2009-11-24T05:38:00.000-06:00

I come back to this again and again because, in my world, it matters. It’s my old hobby horse - dogmatic literature, and its gateway drug, Art for Art’s Sake (here’s what comes up on the blog when searching for Dogmatic literature).

Some people have heard me chatter on about these two types of bad literature and asked me if, aside from Mein Kampf, there were any other books that have caused great harm in the world. The question kind of irks me because I’ve given the definition so many times, and I’ve gone on and on about The Left Behind series (read the Slacktivists dismantling of the series here, he’s well into taking apart book two), that I’m surprised people aren’t able to pull from their own experiences a short list of books that meet the criteria.

So, let me review quickly: Art for Art’s Sake is a literature that claims to have no relevance to the real world. It is a literature that claims its only purpose is to entertain and that anything it does is only in the service of its self-contained game. The characters are flat, one dimensional cliches. Art for Art’s Sake can create in a reader a sense of detachment from the world, a disinterest. If the stories we consume aggressively assert that they don’t mean anything, readers can come to suspect that nothing means anything, that everything is, in fact, meaningless.

Into that empty void steps Dogmatic Literature. In this literature the author has a belief system that he or she believes cures our feeling of meaninglessness: it could be socialism, communism, fascism, environmentalism, evangelism, individualism, objectivism, racism, etc. This type of literature has slightly more realistic characters, characters that struggle with things, ask questions, express doubt. Characters in these books are made to display concerns that we can relate to, but, in the end, these characters have only a simple binary option: accept the belief system being pushed by the author and succeed, or deny the belief system being pushed and be destroyed. Gray areas are not to be tolerated in Dogmatic Literature.

Now for my short list of dogmatic Literature:

1) The Left Behind Series by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. Some people don’t take these books seriously because they are so horribly written, but in cases of Dogmatic Literature, the books only have to be written well enough that they can be read. This series has sold millions of copies of each book the world over and has served to disseminate the twisted, self-interested, violent version of Christianity that Tim LaHaye believes in.

2) The Turner Diaries by Andrew McDonald (pen name for William Luther Pierce) - it’s essentially violence porn for the Klan set. It’s about a violent race war in America that leads to a global conflict (including nuclear war) and the complete elimination of all Jews and non-whites. It’s the speculative fiction sequel to Mein Kampf.

3) The novels of Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged). Rand created the “Objectivist Movement” and pushed the idea of Ethical Egoism and despised altruism. Mutual selfishness would balance out the world, she thought , and that if everyone worried only about themselves then everyone would be OK. The real world fallacy of this idea bubbled to the surface just within the last few years. Alan Greenspan was once part of Rand’s inner circle of sycophants. One of the underpinnings of is economic philosophy was based on Rand’s idea of ethical egoism. He believed that the titans of industry, the CEO’s and bank presidents, would do their business in an ethical way because to do otherwise would reflect badly upon them and ruin their businesses. But, just like Rand proved later in her life by trying to orchestrate the lives of her sycophants, eventually the CEO’s began to throw out ethics in favor pure egoism.

And they ended up destroying the world economy in the process of feeding their own unethical self-interests.

And there is the problem with Dogmatic literature - even the most noble intentions behind a philosophy - empower the workers, empower the individual, empower the state, empower the church, blah blah blah - will run up against the basic, ignobility of the human species.

That is why good literature is a wrestling match. Good literature wrestles with that gray, fluctuating, violent area where our ideals, our various belief systems, meet the naked, base, yearnings and fears of the human animal.

So Much Stupid, I don't know where to Start

2009-11-20T19:44:00.000-06:00

Do I start with the creepy, and sad, lines of 30, 40 and 50 year old moms standing in line, breathlessly panting and hyperventilating along with their teenage daughters, to see the new Twilight movie? Some of them have even taken to writing erotic fan fiction and dishing about what they’d do if they could get their hands on poor Robert Pattinson.

Someone should keep an eye on those girls (that’s right, “girls”) because one of them will be the next middle school teacher to boink a cute 14 year old student.

Oh, and don’t be surprised if we have a sudden rash of girls unwilling to leave their abusive boyfriends. Nothing like a little sexual repression and violence disguised as true love.

OR! do I go with Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort passing out doctored versions of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species with a 50 page introduction arguing that evolution is wrong because they believe Darwin was a racist, sexist proto-Nazi (he wasn’t any of those things). This from the same guy that was completely wrong about bananas (choose your version 1 (serious) 2(serious) 3 (funny).

OR! do I do I go with Sarah Palin? Listen, I didn’t think it was possible to find someone more idiotic than George W. - so, in that regard, Palin is impressive.

Hate Crimes Laws Are Not Special Protection

2009-11-15T09:57:00.001-06:00

As usual, I’m quite a few days - wait, no, weeks (hell, almost a month now) - behind on things. That’s the problem I have working a full-time job, and burying myself in writing fiction. I never seem to live in the real world - it’s either the world of ammonia plant procedures, or the invented world of my next novel. Occasionally, I scan the notebook I always carry with me and find notes on something I want to write about - this time, it happened to be a few notes on the Hate Crimes bill that passed last month.

Of course, here in Doo-Dah there were the inevitable letters to the editor, and comments on the newspaper site, about how this hate crimes bill passage was just about giving gay and transgendered people special government protection, and that it would put the kibosh on preachers speaking out against the sin of “Teh Gay.”

On the matter of silencing preachers speaking out against gay people, I have a two word rebuttal: Fred Phelps. In a post by the Slacktivist, he explains why this is the best rebuttal to this quasi-fear. But I’ll paraphrase it: essentially, Fred Phelps has been running about saying nasty things about gay people in highly inappropriate places like funerals, schools, memorial services, etc. Phelps’ actions have never landed him in jail and he remains free and his gums keep flapping. Arguing that the hate crimes bill is going to put a less aggressive preacher in jail only makes sense if that preacher plans on being worse than Fred Phelps - and the only way to get worse than Fred Phelps is to actually commit a hate crime, or encourage someone else to commit a hate crime. So, don’t worry homophobes, the hate crimes bill won’t be able to shut you up. You can still call gay people names and make up silly stories about their lifestyles without threat of jail time.

Now, on to the part of about this hate crime bill creating a special, protected class of people. People who make this argument also tend to argue that there are already laws out there against assault and battery and murder. Aren’t these laws good enough to protect gay people, and why do gay people need a something more? they ask.

Aside from the obvious suggestion that the people who make this argument must be planning to smack around a gay person that looks at their butt a little too long, these people really do miss the point of a hate crimes law and the difficulty in proving it. They seem to think that anyone who assaults or kills a gay person will automatically be slapped with a hate crime. Hogwash.

When it comes to killing someone, we make distinctions in a court of law. There are degrees of “homicide” as it were: First, Second and Third degree murder, manslaughter. And then we take into account the killer’s mental capacity, whether or not it was self-defense, or done to protect another person (cops who kill criminals that threaten the lives of others aren’t charged with anything). We even take into account whether or not the killing was an isolated incident or part of a wider plan, such as a terrorist plot - and this is where the Hate Crimes law fits in.

A prosecutor will have to prove that the accused person’s intent arose out of his hatred and fear of gay people. That’s the way our legal system works. If someone is the kind of turd-nugget that would beat someone up for stepping on his foot, that TN can’t be charged with a hate crime just because the victim is gay. Still is just regular old assault. But if some homophobe beats up a gay person because the victim is gay, well, that’s assault and a Hate Crime - but it’ll still have to be proven in court.

What it boils down to is this: intent. If a criminal’s intent is simply to steal or kill for some kind of personal gain then the victim’s sexual orientation, or even the victim’s race, won’t matter: the victim simply had something the attacker wants, a car, money, a pair of shoes, a huge life insurance policy, and the crime was done solely to obtain that item. If the attacker has the intent to punish, or terrorize, an individual because that person represents a certain class of people (gay, black, asian, jewish, whatever), and the obtaining of money, shoes, etc, is secondary, then that’s a hate crime. The intent isn’t about immediate personal gain, but about sending a message to a collection of people that they are not safe, that they are not respected or tolerated, and that their well-being are at risk unless they leave or change or “behave.”

The people who beat and killed Matthew Shepard committed a hate crime because they set out specifically to harm a gay person. So, unless this country’s apparently large population of bigots plan on doing something as horrendous and heinous and vile as killing Matthew Shepard, or the lynching of James Byrd, Jr , they can continue to be first rate assholes without fear of jail time or censorship.

Sad, but true.

Call Me Mean.

2009-11-13T05:45:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I was listening to a Barnes & Noble Meet the Writer’s podcast where Steve Bertrand was interviewing YA fantasy author James Dashner about his new book “The Maze Runner.” In their conversations Bertrand brought up a quote by Dashner where he said something about not being able to write a “lame-o detective novel about a murder in a social club.” to which Bertrand responds (and maybe SB was joking, I’m not entirely sure) “You’re never supposed to put down your other writers.”

Now, like I said, I’m not sure if Steve Bertrand wasn’t just making a joke. But I do sometimes feel like the idea that writers have to play nice with each other in public is hurting literature (of course, giving away our books for free is hurting literature even worse, but in a different area). I look to the writers I admire to warn me about the writers out there who aren’t worth my time. Steve Heller (and much later my editor, Fred Ramey) have saved me from further adventures with the books of TC Boyle, for example. I come to my own opinions, but what Steven and Fred did was reinforce my suspicions.

Bertrand is, of course, a bookseller. To be a good bookseller you do have to adopt the kind of mindset that says “every book is somebody’s favorite book” and it doesn’t always help your business to be vocally critical of writers and their books. This is why a somewhat “liberal” bookstore will host one of the *GSSCB’s like Mike Huckabee - and do it with a smile plastered to their faces.

But writers are a different breed. They have to be in order to do what they do. Does anyone remember the play/movie Biloxi Blues? Here’s an exchange from the movie version that has always stuck with me:

Eugene Morris Jerome: Why is it that we come from the same place but I can't understand you?
Arnold Epstein: You're a witness. You're always standing around watching what's happening, scribbling in your book what other people do. You have to get in the middle of it. You have to take sides. Make a contribution to the fight.
Eugene Morris Jerome: What fight?
Arnold Epstein: Any fight. One you believe in. Until you do you'll never be a writer Eugene.

I’ve always believed that a writer has to be engaged in something: they have to make a contribution to the fight they believe in. For some, it’s peace. For others it’s animal abuse.

For me, it’s the validity of literature in a nearly post-literary world. Maybe it’s because of the area where I grew up; or maybe I’m overly sensitive to the ridiculously self-destructive anti-intellectualism I see around me, and its accompanying idea that books, fiction in particular, are just entertainment or that they’re feminine, or for geeks. Either way, literature can’t be only entertainment. If it’s only entertainment then it can be marginalized, ignored, trivialized, sold for nothing.

This is the fight I believe in, and part of it involves calling out the hacks, the cheaters, and the dishonest writers who I think are damaging the reader’s minds and souls, deadening the reader’s empathy, and making the kind of world where unanalyzed self-interest and blind thrill-seeking take precedence over compassion and tolerance and self-awareness.

*Giant Screaming Shit-Covered Babies

Sometimes, You Just Have To Change The Diaper

2009-11-09T18:49:00.000-06:00

I once volunteered to babysit the son of a couple of dear friends so they could spend some time together without worrying about the baby. I forget how old he was a that time, but he was still in diapers and mobile. Not a terribly good combination for someone who had previously never changed a diaper before. But I marched right in to help out my friends, and hoped I’d be lucky enough that the baby wouldn’t make a mess while I was on duty.

I’ve never had good luck. About an hour into my duties, the baby made a doody. So, I made an effort to change the diaper. It was dismal. He wouldn’t stop squirming, wouldn’t stop giggling about it, and certainly wouldn’t listen to reason. There I was, a grown man with a moist towelette, trying to negotiate with an obstinate two-year-old with poop smeared all over his butt. A baby covered in shit doesn’t care that he’s covered in shit as long as the diaper is off.

Finally, I quit trying to reason with the poop-covered baby, picked him up, tucked him under my arm like he was a football, and I cleaned the crap off him despite the crying and struggling.

It was a valuable lesson I learned that day: sometimes, obstinate, unreasonable, screaming babies covered in poop should just be washed and re-diapered whether they like it or not. At that point, trying to treat them like dignified little human beings is uncalled for, if not outright impossible. Ignore their crying and simply do what’s best for them.

This is how I feel about every religious/social conservative, Faux News watching, Rush Limbaugh listening, Tea Bagger. They’re just a bunch of screaming, shit covered babies.

People who are so obstinately, aggressively, and willfully ignorant that they can look at a Hawaiian birth certificate and still be convinced Obama was born in Kenya - who can be on Medicare and carry protest signs demanding that the government stay out of their healthcare - who don’t want to pay taxes but want to be protected from criminals and terrorists by those public servants called cops, or bitch and moan about the poor quality of roads and highways, the slow response of the sand trucks on icy mornings, the long lines at the DMV, and then panic every time they’re told Social security will go bankrupt - are just not mentally mature enough to be part of the public debate. They are simply shit-covered babies who need to be cleaned up and put to bed for a nap while the grown-ups go have a serious conversation about how to fix the economy and provide for a secure national future where everyone has an equal chance to grown up healthy and educated regardless of their social class, racial background, sexual orientation, or - yes - conservative or liberal leanings.

But letting shit-covered, screaming babies like Limbaugh, Faux News, and Sarah Palin into the public debate when they have nothing constructive to contribute but fistfuls of flung poop, isn’t helping. It’s just making the mess worse.

Some people may argue that there are big shit-covered liberal babies out there - maybe, but I’ll bet you money that if you put the belligerent shit-covered conservative babies down for a nap, the liberal ones will quiet right down.

Because, let’s face it, I would not have ended up tucking that kid under my arm if he hadn’t first made a mess of himself and then refused to be cleaned up.

Just Sayin'

2009-11-07T13:57:00.001-06:00

see more Funny Graphs

Great Big To-Do List (But Short)

2009-11-05T06:32:00.000-06:00

Here it is, November, and The Evolution of Shadows has been loose in the world - officially - for about 18 days and I’m at the point now where I no longer know what to expect next.

I suppose that’s a good thing. It’s now time to move on to other things, especially since I finally sent the manuscript for my second novel off to my editor, Fred Ramey. My natural inclination is to be critical of myself (and of the mss), but I’m going to refrain because, well, that’s what’s expected of me.

Besides, there is plenty more to do.

1) Get the next issue of The Project for a New Mythology ready. My idea for binding it this time is, well, complicated. That means I’ve got to get a mock-up put together to make sure it’s feasible and can be done quickly with a small staff of volunteers (probably just me). Most of the issue will be essays this time, but I do have some poetry and prose submissions that have trickled in that I may include.

2) Resurrect my third novel that was unfairly abandoned because of a person who shall remain nameless, and the sudden relocation from Boulder to Wichita. This is going to be a task. The project was already about 300 pages - and really, really, complicated. I called it my Kitchen-sink-conspiracy-theory book because it was all about the conspiracy of kitchen sinks . . . ((pause) - See, I’m not funny). Anyway . . . . because there’s so much going on in it, I’ve decided that I’m going to use it as an excuse to try a new writing program. I’ve been scoping them out for years. They all offer outline functions, character tracking and charting functions, whiteboard functions - basically all the stuff I used to keep in an assortment of college ruled composition books (which are often bloody hard to find, by the way). I love Moleskine’s but they’re just too expensive to use for this kind of work - especially with the sloppy way I take notes and jot down ideas. I’m not even sure the program I’ve decided to go with (Copywrite) will actually work completely with the way I write, so I’m augmenting it with a few other things: namely a note organizing program called Notes and another called Personal Brain. And, of course, there’s always MacJournal that works as my catch-all. We’ll see how it goes. The first step is to get the existing 300 pages, plus all my notes into these programs. It doesn’t sound very fun, but the story is so complex and I’ve been away from it for so long, there’s really no choice.

See, short - but big.

Are Schools Killing Creativity?

2009-11-04T19:45:00.001-06:00

Tragically, Not Glenn Beck

2009-11-03T22:58:00.001-06:00

Presented with minimal comment.

Victim In Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck

J Quinn Malott on the Kansas CW

2009-11-03T20:58:00.000-06:00

That's Not Funny

2009-10-27T21:13:00.000-05:00

There was recently a long review of my book done by an occasional commenter here on the blog. Scaea wrestled with some things and it was a positive review overall. It was actually kind of like being back in a writing workshop; the criticism was useful.

The only part I can solidly take issue with is the bit about humor. It’s not that I disagree with the suggestion of using humor, nor any of the assertions concerning humor’s abilities to sneak past people’s defenses.

It’s that I suck at it.

I’m good with funny anecdotes delivered in person, but that’s just because I can be very animated and rely heavily on anger-comedy and self-deprecation (think George Carlin or Lewis Black with a bit of Woody Allen - except I’m nowhere near as funny as any of those guys). Plus, in person, I don’t use humor to get past other people’s defenses, I use it as a defense. That doesn’t translate well to the written page.

So far, if there’s been humor in my fiction, it’s been accidental, which is the worst kind. That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried. I’ve tried to write humor. I used to be a big fan of Tom Robbins and tried, for a while, to imitate his style, but it was horribly unsuccessful. I’ve even tried writing a play or two that was intended to be a comedy. It sucked.

Essentially, it’s a tremendous difficulty to try to be funny on the page, and an effort that’s 98% doomed. I simply don’t imagine that way - if that makes sense.

Let's Talk About Disgust Part III

2009-10-27T17:56:00.000-05:00

In an opinion piece that appeared Tuesday in the Wichita Eagle, written by Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post Writers Group (should tell you something right there), yet another person tried to make the case that the 30 Republicans who voted against Senator Franken’s amendment to a recent defense bill did “the right thing.”

She buried her argument amid mounds of posturing against rape and even came out against companies trying to use binding, private arbitration to resolve criminal accusations against employees, but her ultimate argument is nonetheless specious.

Here’s the important paragraph:

In fact, the reason some Republicans objected is that the amendment was overbroad and might not be enforceable. The latter possibility was raised by the Defense Department in a letter to senators, saying that the department or its contractors “may not be in a position to know about such things. Enforcement would be problematic.”

(Read more: http://www.kansas.com/opinion/story/1028561.html#ixzz0VBFpgeRV).

Problematic enforcement is no kind of reason to avoid doing the right thing - and the right thing to do was to vote for that amendment, as imperfect as it may have been, to send a very simple message: companies cannot bury their crimes in the arbitration graveyard because they don’t want the bad publicity and the possible economic hit they may take from a criminal or civil case.

Instead these 30 Republicans, Senators Brownback and Roberts included, sent a very clear signal to corporations that, despite the amendment’s passage, they stand willing protect the corporation’s economic interests over the rights of individual citizens, even if those individual citizens are gang raped.

It’s over the top to accuse Brownback and Roberts of being directly “pro-rape.” I’m sure they would be very much against the rape of their wives or daughters or sisters or mothers. And I’m sure they are adequately appalled by why happened to Jamie Leigh Jones. The problem is they are much more slavishly devoted to corporate patronization than they are appalled by rape. They’re willing to look the other way, ignore people’s suffering, as long as they get the political backing they lust after.

Brownback and Roberts aren’t pro-rape, they’re just callous and afraid of offending the lunatic fringe of America.

A Bad One

2009-10-27T06:39:00.000-05:00

This may be the hardest thing to explain, but all the positive reviews were making me uncomfortable. Now, there’s a bad one and I’m a bit relieved. Somebody hated it - now I have someone to fight with.

It’s not that I think the person was particularly correct about anything. But people do have their opinions and a bad review, like that one guy in the fiction workshop who doesn’t like anything, is a good leveling agent in that it keeps me from thinking I’m infallible. It’ll keep me from slacking off.

It is the darker version of what James Tate’s poem “Teaching the Ape To Write Poems” does for me. Reminds me that I am, after all, just a hairless ape with a keyboard (and so is the reviewer).

There was one earlier review that wasn’t exactly bad, but, to me, it wasn’t exactly good either. I’m not going to name names or rattle cages, but I will say that the writing in this lukewarm review was worse than the writing in my book.

Anyway. Take your pick. The bad review from Curled Up, or the good review from Publisher’s Weekly, or, better yet, the starred review from Library Journal.

Meh.

Let's Talk About Disgust Part II Why Sam Brownback, Pat Roberts and those who defend them are douchebags

2009-10-17T19:29:00.000-05:00

I posted a link to the Daily Show’s bit about 30 Republican senators voting against Al Franken’s “No Government contracts for Gang Rapists” amendment on Facebook.

An acquaintance tried to defend Brownback and Roberts and the rest of the gang of 30, stating that Franken’s amendment was nothing but political bullshit designed as a gift to trial lawyers. He then went on to state that Jamie Leigh Jones was not denied the ability to pursue criminal charges against the men who raped her, she was just barred from suing Halliburton and KBR.

At first, I thought about giving my acquaintance the benefit of the doubt. Apparently, this acquaintance didn’t know that much about the case. But then I realized no, there’s no reason to offer someone the benefit of the doubt when it comes to gang rape, false imprisonment, denial of medical treatment, and destruction of evidence.

So, just to make sure there is no confusion here about Franken’s amendment and the fact that it is in no way a “gift” to trial lawyers or a bunch of political bullshit, let’s review the case.

All statements will be paraphrased from the following sources:

Wikipedia page on Jamie Leigh Jones
ABC article
The Age article
Guardian UK article

Jamie was drugged into unconsciousness and then gang raped by seven KBR/Halliburton firefighters in the Iraqi Green Zone.

Jamie awoke the next day “naked and severely bruised, with lacerations to her vagina and anus, blood running down her leg, her breast implants ruptured, and her pectoral muscles torn – which would later require reconstructive surgery.”

A US Army doctor was brought in to examine her and a rape kit was completed.

The rape kit was handed over to KBR officials and Jamie was locked in a trailer under armed guards, denied food, water, and further medical treatment. The rape kit would conveniently be “lost” for the next two years.

She was told that if she reported it or tried to leave Iraq for medical treatment she would be out of a job with KBR both in Iraq and in Houston.

Jamie was able to convince one of her guards to let her use a cell phone. She contacted her father, who got in touch with Texas Representative Ted Poe (a Republican) who, in turn, contacted the State Department.

State Department officials in Iraq retrieved Jamie and brought her home to Texas.

Without the rape kit, and with Jamie only able to identify one of her attackers, criminal proceedings were unlikely. Also, KBR claimed they were protected from prosecution by CPA order 17. And, although a section of the US Code provides for jurisdiction by the DOJ, the DOJ has not yet filed any criminal charges and it does not appear that they will.

In May 2007, a State Dept. diplomat recovered the rape kit (which never should have been handed over to KBR in the first place), but the kit is missing the important notes and photographs taken by the Army doctor. Without the notes and photographs, criminal prosecution is next to impossible due to a lack of evidence.

Jamie and her family and lawyers, unable to pursue a criminal case, chose the civil courts as a path to justice. However, KBR states that the terms of Jamie’s employment contract require that she enter into private arbitration with KBR.

KBR has won over 80% of its arbitration cases, including sexual assault cases similar to Jamie’s. Also, under the terms of this private arbitration, there would be no public record, no criminal charges, and no recourse if arbitration were to go against Jamie. In other words, Jamie’s brutal victimization would have an 80% chance of going completely unpunished.

Finally, in September 2009, the 5th circuit court of appeals decided that Jamie’s case should be tried in open court.

Also in September, Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts, the senators from Kansas, voted in favor of stripping government funds to ACORN because a few gullible employees were caught in a sting operation by two “Conservative activists” posing as a pimp and a hooker looking for way to beat government taxes. Although some unwise ACORN employees did attempt to answer the poseur’s questions, no actual crime was committed and a number of ACORN employees didn’t fall for it and some even contacted police - but ACORN still lost its government contract to help with the next US Census.

Just last week, Senator Al Franken added an amendment to a defense spending bill that would deny government contracts to companies, like KBR, that have placed clauses in their employment contracts requiring that employees working overseas go through arbitration instead of seeking criminal or civil proceedings in all complaints against the company.

Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts voted against Franken’s amendment because they must believe it’s OK to give government money (our tax dollars) to companies that have employees who gang rape a female employee, lock her up behind armed guards, deny her medical treatment, threaten her with the loss of her job, destroy evidence, and and then try to avoid any public accountability for those criminal acts.

To say that voting against Franken’s amendment is standing up to political bullshit, or preventing the enrichment of trial lawyers, is simply morally reprehensible. The ACORN vote established the principle that it’s OK to strip a government contract from a group for giving hypothetical answers to hypothetical questions from a fake pimp. But for 30 Republicans, Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts being two of them, it’s just political theatre the strip a government contract from a group that committed a real crime and then tried to cover up that crime.

Fake crime = no government cheese for you.

Real crime = Here’s billions of dollars for you, and we’ll turn a blind eye the next time some of your employees decide to drug, gang rape, and imprison one of your own employees.

Franken’s amendment is indirect justice. Franken’s amendment is good politics, proposed for the right reasons - to ensure that Americans working abroad, can’t have their right to seek justice for crimes committed against them heard in open court.

Corporations are not more important than people. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts need to learn that.

Pat Roberts needs to be voted out of office, and Sam Brownback should not be elected the Governor of Kansas.

Let's Talk About Disgust.

2009-10-17T10:45:00.000-05:00

Let’s talk about disgust. In fact, let’s talk about naked, blatant, disregard for human beings and sick, pandering to corporations.

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang raped by her Haliburton/KBR co-workers. Then locked in a shipping container, and denied treatment, and outside contact until someone assigned to guard her took mercy and loaned her a cell phone. She was told that a clause in her contract prohibited her from filing charges against Haliburton/KBR.

Sen. Al Franken proposed an amendment to a recent defense bill that would deny government contracts to companies that have clauses in their contracts that bar employees from filing criminal charges in cases like Jamie’s.

Both Kansas Senators voted AGAINST this amendment. Sen. Sam Brownback and Sen. Pat Roberts.

Brownback and Roberts took the side of the rapists.

Link to a video and more links, including the original news piece.

Volume 4 2009-2010 Issue of The Project For a New Mythology

2009-10-15T05:49:00.000-05:00

I’ve been busy this year. However, I have a plan.

Volume 4 will be a “themed” issue. I have a few pointed questions I’d like to ask a few selected writers - past contributors, new friends, etc. I’ll be forming the questions over the next couple of days and then this weekend - I hope - I’ll send out emails with the questions and instructions to the selected writers.

Then we’ll see who responds.

Sounds like fun doesn’t it?

All the received responses will go into the issue, contributors will receive copies (I’m debating the actual number of copies since this will be another hand-bound issue - with some complexity), and I’ll sell copies through the PFANM websites and Watermark Books. Selected responses will be published in a condensed version online.

That’s the plan, anyway. I’ll also be sending out emails and facebook notices asking for volunteers to help with production. I hope to have the issue out by the end of January 2010.

Oh Blog.

2009-10-13T06:47:00.000-05:00

I haven’t forgotten you. Nothing to say these days. Been busy.

Trying to plan 2009 issue of PFANM.

Trying to finish revising By The Still, Still Water.

Working, working, working.

I’ll have something soon.

Reading Tonight.

2009-10-08T06:14:00.000-05:00

Just a few hours away now.

If you happen to be in the Wichita, KS area around 7pm tonight, come on by Watermark Books and listen to me read from my first novel “The Evolution of Shadows.” Then ask me questions and have your book signed by me. After that, if we’re still friends, come join me at The Anchor for drinks. I’ll be on the non-smoking side.

7-8 pm (or so) Watermark Books & Cafe, 4701 E. Douglas (the Lincoln Heights Village shopping center on the south west corner of the intersection).

The Anchor 8pm or so until whenever-ish, 1109 E. Douglas.

See you there?