UnNatural History

2009-12-10T14:07:00.000-08:00

Geology in the News

When a geologist tells you to get out of the way, do it. This stunning landslide footage shows a roadcrew working to clear debris from a previous slide. They got out of the way when state geologist Vanessa Bateman warned them that they were in danger.

As Geographile points out, learning geology can save your life. So can feminism. What if the roadcrew had refused to listen to a female expert?

Very Top Five: Very Top Five... Ways to name a chemical element

2009-12-08T10:29:00.000-08:00

Fun with Science

Very Top Five: Very Top Five... Ways to name a chemical element.

This fun article goes well with the deliciously different Periodic Table of Cupcakes. Note the snide reference to an element named after Stanford University. There isn't one. Berkeley has four.

2009-11-30T07:27:00.001-08:00

Great Moments in Science

The Royal Society, entering its 350th anniversary year, is celebrating with a new website of 60 groundbreaking science articles. (Naturally, they published them all in the first place.) The first few articles may seem ridiculously obvious to the modern reader; the fact that dogs need air to breathe comes as no shock to us. But then, we've had the benefit of 350 years of science, instead of more than a thousand years of appealing to theology or ancient philosophers for explanations of the natural world.

The Royal Society was formed in 1660, just after the accession of Charles II. He became the society's official patron, and his backing offered them powerful protection. In those days the scientific method of experimentation was not widely accepted. Instead, physicians and scientists appealed to authority. If Aristotle said something, it must be true, even if it was demonstrably false. His claim that males have more teeth than females could have been readily disproven merely by looking into a few mouths.

But opening a mouth requires an open mind, and the few people possessing those found them dangerous. Only a few years earlier Galileo had been tried by the Inquisition for spreading the heretical idea that the earth was not the center of the solar system. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He was lucky not to suffer the fate of Giordano Bruno, a scientist who was burned at the stake in 1600 for heresy.

Over the decades and centuries, the Royal Society published papers on every branch of science, from physics to medicine to astronomy. Some of the papers on the web site include Isaac Newton on the physics of white light, discussions of inoculation against smallpox, and an inquiry into whether the youthful Mozart was a true prodigy or a short adult. (Prodigy.) Every article is represented by a red dot placed on a timeline that also shows other important events in western history. Mouse over the red dots to get a brief commentary and images. The silver dots show contemporary events.

The final article linked on the site has an ironic ring. It's James Lovelock's paper on fighting global warming--a scourge resulting from heedless use of advances in science. There is no question that scientists have been incredibly wrong at times; a glance into the history of medicine makes that instantly clear. Yet if there is hope for humanity, it lies in science and the willingness to keep thinking, testing, experimenting, finding new ways to do things.

It might conceivably be possible to care about science without revering the Royal Society, just as a baseball fan may not care about Cooperstown, but it's unlikely. I take my hat off to the men and women of the Royal Society and to the merry monarch, Charles II, who could so easily have driven it underground. May the Royal Society continue to flourish for centuries more.

2009-11-03T08:32:00.001-08:00

Redwood

You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from schoolteachers.
St. Bernard

How do you convey the essence of a redwood tree? No words, no pictures, can capture the experience of walking through a grove of them.

Redwoods lack the graceful stance of elms, the glorious color of sugar maples in autumn, the picturesquely twisted branches of oak trees. They don't even have the shapeliness of a blue spruce or a Douglas fir. In fact, they resemble extremely tall bottle-brushes.

Moreover, a hiker can see the whole only from a distance. Up close, you don't see much of the branches; they start above eye level. What you see is the reddish bark, the vast trunk, perhaps a few needles dipping low enough for your notice. They stand, calm and strong, alone or in great goosepens or in ranks on steep ridges. They carpet the woods with their shredding bark and their rusty, fragrant needles. But the simplicity of the great trunks has grace, and the fibrous bark -- the color of tea in sunlight -- has a subtle auburn glow.

And they are huge. The vast specimens in Muir Woods are among the greatest of the Coast Redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, which aren't even the most massive of the redwood family. The Giant Sequoia, Sequoiadendron gigantea, are thicker-trunked. But even a comparatively adolescent Coast Redwood tree can be magnificent long before it reaches its full growth of 350+ feet in height and as much as 26 feet in diameter. (Not circumference. Diameter.) They're big enough to camp out in when hollowed by fire or age. They grow taller than the Statue of Liberty on her pedestal. And they have a natural lifespan of as much as 2,000 years. Trees of 600 or 700 years old are common -- well, common in places where they haven't been clear-cut.

Walking among them is like walking in a great cathedral, or Stonehenge. They carry a sense of holiness, of calm contemplation. It's more than the effect of great size; I've been in buildings where humans were puny without feeling the upwelling of joy these forests give me.

Words can't do it. Pictures fail. But maybe this video will help. It shows the making of this large-scale photograph.

2009-10-28T21:05:00.001-07:00

BASEBALL: World Series, Game 1

6-1 Phillies! Robin Roberts, thou art avenged!

The Phillies made more runs in this game than they did against the Yankees in the whole four-game series in 1950. No game in that series was this kind of blowout -- all but one were decided by a single run. And although the Yankees swept that Series, it was, in the words of one Yankee, "closer than it looked." The games were tough, tense pitching duels.

A few of the Whiz Kids are still alive. Hall-of-Famer Robin Roberts is taking part in the festivities. Curt Simmons, who wasn't permitted to play in the 1950 Series, having been taken by the military, is also still around.

I'm glad some of the Whiz Kids survived to see this. It is very, very sweet.

2009-10-15T08:20:00.000-07:00

Science Fun, California Style

You can't accuse California scientists of making their work mysterious and inaccessible. They're much more likely to throw open the doors for a science party. Last week we had Impact Night, an all-night bash at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View to watch the LCROSS satellite smash into the moon. This cross between a slumber party and the iPhone's midnight product release allowed as many as a thousand curious people to watch the impact on a vast outdoor screen. They also watched movies and listened to guest speakers.

Today at 10:15AM, science will strike again when millions of Californians participate in the Great California ShakeOut, the largest earthquake drill in history. (I'll be at the DMV. I wonder if I'll need to drop, cover, and hold on.) Many schools and museums will have special activities as well as participating in the drill.

On Saturday, October 17, we're celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Loma Prieta, the earthquake that struck during the World Series.San Francisco will hold "Where Were You in 89?" neighborhood block parties as well as resource fairs for disaster preparedness. You can also play Beat the Quake online.

All this frivolity over a serious subject—is it appropriate? People have died in quakes—at least 3000 in the great 1906 earthquake, 62 in Loma Prieta. We're all at risk. Yet in my opinion, staying aware without staying terrified is the best way to handle living in a seismically active zone. (Or anywhere else, really.) And the games, fairs, parties, and drills allow people to learn and stay aware while having some fun.

California. We dance on the edge of destruction.

2009-06-26T18:25:00.000-07:00

Ground Zero Theatre

Yes, that's actually what they call the small screening room (in a simulated bomb shelter) at the Atom Testing Museum in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. (Just blocks from the Strip on one side and the Clark County Library on the other. The library has a vast ongoing book sale that makes it one of the best used bookstores in Las Vegas.)

The museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian, is dedicated to the history of testing nuclear devices, from the days of the Manhattan Project up to the present. I thought the science was explained pretty well (Alan, the physicist, says it was adequate for lay people). I certainly will never forget the excerpt of Disney's Our Friend the Atom film. The excerpt skipped old Walt himself, but included a German scientist, hundreds of mousetraps armed with ping-pong balls, Atomic Energy as a Tom of Finland-style genie whom we can finally control, and a non-turning globe firmly focused on the Western hemisphere. Radioactivity was portrayed as a jitterbugging atom-headed creature in tie and tails, animated in every sense, leaping from one element to another. And there are rows of Geiger counters, inactive bomb cases, and vast drillheads to delight the techies.

The museum provides plenty of social context -- the Einstein letter, some newsreels, and a lot of snippets from television. The earlier ones I found utterly fascinating, because by God that was the world I was born into. There is a 1940s/1950s era office complete with--"Look, Alan, a *real* telephone!" And a non-electric typewriter, and various other objects that have faded into prehistory. The display of pop-culture atomic allusions was mostly amusing, but the cover of the old Life or Look magazine on the children of the atomic scientists was utterly chilling. Headline trumpeting that these kids have been through a score of nuclear tests. Mushroom cloud rising in the background; in the foreground, a dozen kids prone in their unnaturally clean play clothes. It didn't look like a test. It looked like a tidy massacre.

Nuclear testing is more than blowing up Bikini Atoll or the kind of underground nuclear testing that seems so routine today. They tested the relative effectiveness of aerial versus surface detonation. They tested the effects of radioactivity on various house materials. The museum even features a facsimile bomb shelter that was used in testing shelters, complete with its blond, blue-eyed mannequins: brave Dad on his feet looking about him in curiosity, seated Mom in a dark-blue wrap dress with her face turned toward Junior in his overalls. They didn't show that in fifteen years or so Junior would be a long-haired antiwar protester, Dad would be an alcoholic, and Mom would be coming out as a lesbian textile artist (after her time in the psychiatric hospital).

In addition to the testing itself, the museum gave a nod to the test sites: geology, history, and meaning to the indigenous peoples who found the arid land a sacred place of plenty. Looking at the tools they shaped, I had to ponder that they used the land with more love and more productivity than we did, and left it living for the next generation. Well, until we started exploding thermonuclear devices over, under, and on it. On the other hand, the Nevada Test Site is still used as a training ground for first responders from all over the US to learn to deal with radiation emergencies and hazardous waste.

We checked out the museum shop, looking for Ellen Klages' superb books on the kids at Los Alamos: The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace. No dice. So I stopped at the cash register to mention them. Although the cashier seemed indifferent, the bookstore manager overheard and came out to get details. She'd been looking for books that would help kids understand it all. With the help of the iPhone, Alan was even able to provide the ISBN numbers.

Then out again into the 109-degree heat and heavy traffic of Flamingo Road. On the next block we saw two women -- one in a bikini -- trying to cross against the light. Nobody stopped for them. Nobody even paused to look.

2009-03-24T23:55:00.000-07:00

Ada Lovelace Day: Florence Bascom, Geologist

Florence Bascom became fascinated with geology while taking a driving tour with her father (president of Williams College) and a geologist friend of his. An unremarkable genesis for an earth science career, except that the driving tour must have been done by horse and carriage: Florence was born in 1862.

To put this in perspective: In the United States, 1862 was the second year of the Civil War, and one of the bloodiest: Shiloh, the Seven Days, Antietam. The Gatling gun and the iron-clad ship were the big military innovations.

President Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. He also signed into law the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Acts, which provided for the first transcontinental railroad, thus shaping the American West.

It was the year of Lady Audley's Secret, Les Miserables, and Salammbo. Thoreau died at 44. Alice in Wonderland was written. Gustave Klimt was born (same day as Florence Bascom). The Albert Memorial and Westminster Bridge were opened. Princess Alice, Queen Victoria's daughter, married Prince Louis of Hesse. Her daughter would become the last Empress of Russia.

In this world, higher education for women was a rarity. Nevertheless, Florence Bascom earned a BA and then an MS from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She became the first woman to be granted a PhD from Johns Hopkins.* She had to attend lectures behind a screen; women are not yet admitted to the university.

Then she started teaching at Bryn Mawr College, establishing their world-class geology department and training many of the great female geologists of the early twentieth century. Bascom is quoted as frequently saying that she didn't want to be the only woman geologist. She did her best to make sure she was not.

Often, though, she was the only woman in the room or in the field. Her list of firsts is impressive:

* first woman geologist hired by the USGS
* first woman to present a scientific paper at the Geological Society of Washington
* first woman officer of the Geological Society of America

Florence Bascom isn't important just for being the first woman. She made major contributions to earth science. She invented techniques that used microscopic analysis in the study of oil-bearing rocks. She was a major pioneer in igneous petrology. Her analysis of the complex orogeny of the folded-and-faulted Appalachians is still the basis for understanding certain aspects of Pennsylvania geology.

Nor was she merely an armchair geologist; she emphasized the importance of fieldwork. She also strongly encouraged independent thinking in her students, which is how she and two of her former students became involved in the Wissahickon controversy, the first all-female scientific controversy. They conducted their disagreement with scholarly courtesy. (Yes, Florence was right, although recent discoveries have fine-tuned the picture.)

Even after being acknowledged as one of the top 100 geologists in the United States, she continued learning. In 1906 she visited Germany to study theories of petrology. What she learned there helped her understand the formation of the Appalachian Mountains.

After her death, this observation was found among her papers:

The fascination of any search after the truth lies not in the attainment...but in the pursuit, where all the powers of the mind and character are brought into play and are absorbed by the task. One feels oneself in contact with something that is infinite and one finds joy that is beyond expression in sounding the abyss of science and the secrets of the infinite mind.

*One other woman had earned a PhD, but the university did not actually grant the degree until 1926. Male chauvinism or incompetent paperwork? You decide.

2008-10-06T12:26:00.000-07:00

Closing My Eyes, Crossing My Fingers . . .

knocking on wood, praying, begging, pleasepleaseplease.

Phillies versus the Dodgers, best of seven, for the National League championship and a shot at winning the World Series.

(Sorry, Cubs fans. Some of my best friends are disappointed.)

2008-08-27T17:09:00.000-07:00

Goodbye, Dear Del

It's all over the Internet: Del Martin has died. She is survived by her widow, Phyllis Lyon. After half a century together, they were the first couple married in 2004, when San Francisco defied the state and started holding same-sex marriages. They were the first married this year, when the California Supreme Court struck down the barriers to same-sex marriage.

Four years ago, when their marriage was invalidated, Phyllis Lyon said:

Del is 83 years old and I am 79. After being together for more than 50 years, it is a terrible blow to have the rights and protections of marriage taken away from us. At our age, we do not have the luxury of time.

Thank God they had a few short months of legal recognition. But even that can be taken away, Don't let it happen. Honor Del's life and commitment by defeating the California marriage ban.

2008-08-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

Good Night, Sweet Pitcher

Dottie Wiltse Collins, one of the best pitchers in women's baseball and the moving force behind the alumnae organization of retired players from the women's leagues, died on August 12 at the age of 84.

A powerhouse pitcher who could throw overhand, underhand, and sidearm, she pitched two no-hitters within a seventeen-day stretch. Collins won more than 20 games each of her first four seasons as a pro. In her best year, 1945, her record was 29-10, with a 0.83 ERA and 293 strikeouts. She once pitched -- and won -- both halves of a doubleheader, and in 1948, she played until she was four months pregnant.

Her work to gather and preserve the history of women's baseball inspired the movie A League of Their Own. More important, the memorabilia she helped gather is enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, NY. Where she belongs.

2008-08-21T04:25:00.000-07:00

Sekrit Religious Messages Decoded
Sometimes you need an ex-Baptist to translate current political rhetoric. (Ex-Baptist, but still very much a Christian.)

“It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others,” he wrote.

I've seen various people bitterly complaining that McCain insulted D&D players and by extension all geeks. He did deliberately evoke a lot of nasty stereotypes, and he is already in disfavor with many of the computer-literate for his own unwillingness to deal with technology. From my POV, this is all to the good. By the time the campaign is over, I hope he will have alienated the gamers, the geeks, and every other human being so that he ends up with just one vote in his favor.

I've also seen plenty of people laughing -- with reason -- at the notion that D&D players are likely to be Obama supporters. The gamers I know range from hard-core libertarian ("any fourth-grader should be able to buy heroin with the money zie has earned") to a deeply conservative Iraq War vet to a red-diaper Marxist-Leninist. Many, many gamers are at least fiscally conservative, and a good many have served their country. There was even a games-for-GIs initiative a few years ago -- remember?

This is not surprising. One of the reasons I rarely game is that so many gaming scenarios are morally simplistic, good-versus-evil morality plays, in which the Bad Guys are readily identifiable by their appearance. (A good GM can make a huge difference. Also a great gaming system like Cat.)

But neither the insult to gamers nor the linking of Obama with D&D was gratuitous. Weird as it may seem, this throwaway line was designed to make Obama look like a minion of Satan -- very much like the Internet ads implying that he is the Anti-Christ. Even Tim LaHaye, senior author of the Left Behind series, saw the allusions, and he is no milk-and-water liberal by any stretch of the imagination.

I could give you examples from my own experience, but I'll let others speak for me.

Some quotations from Evangelical writings on RPGs:

RPGs encourage Satan worship:

The words demon, devil and hell appear a total of 225 times in eight pages of Deities and Demigods (pages 16-23), and encourages the worship of them as lesser gods (page 105).

The D&D universe is not Christian:

This problem is that the cosmology of D&D is fundamentally anti-Biblical. Many of the defenders of D&D make the common mistake of assuming that because there are roles in the game for "clerics," this makes the game alright. They make this mistake because they equate Roman Catholicism and its robed clerics for Christians. They do not understand that one can be a cleric (Muslim, Buddhist, etc.) and not be a Christian.... But any game which draws people away from a true understanding of Jesus, God, salvation and the cosmos IS soul-destroying in the truest possible sense of the word. That is incalculably worse. We only have our bodies a few scant years before they turn to dust. Our souls we will have forever, and what if they have been destroyed by playing D&D? They may well end up in the fiery blackness of hell.

It lures young people into the occult:

I myself became very interested in occult things due to the constant reference to it in AD & D, and I believe that over a period it would be very hard for a non-christian to resist the attraction of the descriptions of evil things in the AD & D rule books.

Satan is like a roaring lion, prowling around looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). How delighted he must be when someone starts becoming interested in him due to descriptions in the AD & D rules.

You become what you pretend to be:

The bible is the final authority on right and wrong, and if God declares in the Bible that prostitution, rape, stealing, mutilation, murder, human sacrifice, worshiping other gods, casting spells, using magic, and practicing necromancy are wrong, then should one pretend those things or become involved in a fantasy game in which one participates by imaginative role playing? NO!

Evangelicals take words and imagination more seriously than almost any other group I can think of. In gamer terms, many of them are rules lawyers, constantly obsessing over what exactly The Book says, but they honestly, profoundly believe that what's at stake is their immortal soul. And yours.

So, knowing that, it's easy to see that the linkage of Obama and RPGs is not innocent or accidental. It was a coded reference and a subtle character assassination.

There is a certain irony to the fact that this disingenuous little statement was made in defense of McCain's story that a North Vietnamese prison guard, secretly a Christian, connected with him by drawing a cross in the dirt with his toe. The world is full of secret messages.

2008-08-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

Visions of Iceland

Joe Decker's book, Saga: Visions of Iceland, is well worth buying. (Or getting as a birthday present, which is how I got my copy from Debbie..) The photographs are superb as always, and the printing is up to his demanding standards. Seen through Joe's eyes, the stark, dramatic scenery of Iceland becomes almost abstract.

Some images are subtle, nearly monochromatic studies in pure form or pattern, like Black Mud Swirls. The pure black volcanic sands are background and foil to incandescently verdant grass in Grass and Volcanic Alluvium. This high-contrast image with its expanses of deep black and subtle layering of light must have presented serious printing challenges, but it looks good on the page.

Others show sky and land bleakly glacier-colored, grey and blue; rainbows, waterfalls, quiet streams; sunsets as bright and ominous as new lava flows. Decker sees and conveys the beauty in small details and broad landscapes.

The book is hardbound with a dust jacket. Bonus: the author picture (taken by Josh Andrews) is a vivid and revealing portrait of Joe.

Joe Decker is an internationally known, award-winning nature photographer who just keeps getting better and better. Buy his work now, before the price goes to Ansel Adams levels. Yes, he is that good.

2008-08-15T07:17:00.000-07:00

Quote of the Day

What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of us ever have the courage to face: and that is the child you once were, long before formal education ever got its claws into you -- that impatient, all-demanding child who wants love and power and can't get enough of either and who goes on raging and weeping in your spirit till at last your eyes are closed and all the fools say, "Doesn't he look peaceful?" It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old.

Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

2008-08-01T06:49:00.000-07:00

Yosemite

Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.--Ansel Adams

For me, his words evoke that country even better than his photographs of it. The iconic images of Yosemite are great art: black-and-white studies in line and form: very fine photographs of an important landscape.

Powerful as they are, they can't evoke the sublimity of the place. I'm damned sure that I can't, either. That's why I've taken more than a month to even begin to fumble my way toward a post about Yosemite. We didn't go for a visit; we drove through the High Sierras on our way to Las Vegas.

Photos shrink the magnificence into a two-dimensional rectangle that can be held in the hand -- just another object humans can look at, which will disappear when they close their eyes. This distorts and reverses the proper relation of human to landscape. Yosemite -- all of the Sierras -- are overwhelming, enfolding. You can't close your eyes and make it go away. You can't control it or ignore it. When you are in that country, you are subject to all its laws, and no plea of ignorance or good intentions can save you. The mountains are implacable, indifferent, stark.

And yet my spirits rise the moment I go from flat land into hills, and in the Sierras I was giddy with it. (Yes, some of that may be due to thin air, but it starts immediately. I love mountains.)

Approaching Yosemite from the west, we climbed and climbed from the level, densely cultivated Central Valley. As the altitude increases, population decreases, and orchards give way to pines and fir trees. Even the greatest photo can't convey that Yosemite is not one image, a single view carefully shot so that the power lines and fast-food places don't show. Yosemite is wilderness embedded in wilderness. The mountain range runs for 400 miles north and south -- much of it wild, because the altitude is so high, the snow so deep in winter, the escarpment lethally steep. Yet it is within a few hours' drive of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

On the western edge of the park are a few hamlets and millions of conifers (lodgepole pines, incense cedar, Coast Douglas firs) on steep hillsides; inside, a few park buildings and a couple of roads open only a few months of the year. Even the tour buses cannot diminish the utter wildness of the place.

On the way to the park, I kept seeing warnings that it would cost money to get into Yosemite, but none of the signs indicated how much money. (It was $20 for a passenger car.) I'm used to parks being free. In California, many state parks charge an entrance fee of $5 or so, and still the state park system is crumbling. Yosemite is a national park, though, and none of the other ones I've been to (Valley Forge, Gettysburg) have charged admission fees.

We skipped the loop road that tours the Yosemite Valley and showcases the waterfalls, El Capitan, Half-Dome, and the other famous sites and sights. (To give an idea of the scale of the park: it covers 1200 square miles, about three-quarters the size of Rhode Island.) But the road to Tioga Pass is magnificent enough; the road itself, made of the local granite, sparkles like snow. And we kept stopping (Look, snow! Look, a river! Look, Olmstead Point!) and looking. And lamenting that we didn't have a weekend, a week, to give to this landscape.

From the overlook at Olmstead Point you can see through oceans of air down the valley to Half Dome. People who love flat land talk about the big sky, but mountains offer something better: the sensation of dwelling within the sky. Olmstead Point does not quite hang out over space, but it gives a view down the valley of sheer glacier-scoured mountainsides. There's also a cast-bronze scale model of the viewable area -- Half Dome and all -- so you can see and touch the shapes of the mountains.

I was having geology-geek orgasms all the way -- the local geology is utterly spectacular. Spotting moraines and glacial erratics in the High Sierras is disorienting for me; the glaciated places where I have lived are much lower and much more seriously ground down. And until now I've never seen glaciers in action, carving their characteristic U-shaped valleys, scooping lakes at different levels in the mountains.

And glacial polish! In the east I'd seen it only as a little shine here and there. In the Sierras, vast shields of granite are polished almost to a gravestone gloss. With their joints, they look almost fake, almost like poured concrete, but it's real, all right. I spotted several intrusions -- dikes or sills -- where long ago, hot magma had forced its way into the granite. And more than one xenolith, a stone that had fallen into the granite when it was still a bath of hot magma and now hung suspended like fruit in a Jello mold. I was even lucky enough to see a xenolith that had been split by an intrusion -- one hell of an angular unconformity. Unfortunately, my picture of it didn't come out.

When the polished granite expanses are cracked, plants take root: small cushiony plants with brilliant fuchsia flowers, or tree seedlings. When the trees survive, they eventually split the boulder they took root in. I found this tough persistence of life extraordinarily moving; it's what my first Joe Decker picture shows. (Not incidentally, that photograph was taken in the Eastern Sierra.) A bristlecone pine not just clinging to life on the edge of the abyss, but beautiful in its twisted starkness and its determination to endure.

The High Sierras are an extreme environment, but there are places where bare granite gives way to something more hospitable. After the windswept grandeur of Olmstead Point comes Tuolumne Meadows, a tender, verdant landscape so welcoming it brought tears to my eyes. This level water meadow is lush with grass and bright with wildflowers.

We went out through the pass (at nearly 10,000 feet) and down into the rich world of the Owens Valley.

It's easy to see national parks as a kind of zoo designed to cage and display geological freaks. Despite its extremes, Yosemite isn't a freak. A magnificent landscape; a world of half a dozen ecosystems; a place of dry, tingling air fragrant with pine and fir. Magnificent, unique, but not alone: one part of a vast mountain range. The next valley over, Yosemite's twin, is Hetch Hetchy, which was dammed in 1923 to provide water and power for the San Francisco Bay Area. I drink the waters of the Tuolumne every day.

Watch a day pass in Yosemite with time-lapse video.

2008-07-21T06:42:00.001-07:00

ANNALS OF PTSD: One More Casualty

Joseph Dwyer was a hero who became famous for carrying a wounded child toward help, an act of courage documented in one of the most famous photographs to emerge from the Iraq War.

A medic from Long Island whose brothers were cops, he joined up after 9/11. He cared for the wounded on the battlefield as the army fought their way from the Euphrates to Baghdad. When medics are under fire, they don't shoot back. They're too busy putting pressure bandages on sucking chest wounds, or tying tourniquets on the remains of a limb, or strapping their wounded friends onto stretchers. He was decorated for his courage with a Combat Medical Badge for service under fire.

He came home safely from Iraq, but he couldn't get the war out of his head. The VA gave him medicine and inpatient treatment, but they weren't enough.

Imagine the endless nightmare of war superimposed on your normal life -- ordinary sounds threaten death, roadside litter becomes an improvised bomb. Imagine the heart-pounding terror every time someone knocks on your door. He lived in that hell for five years. Finally he died there.

Technically, the death was from a drug overdose. But when you're frightened sick all the time, unrelentingly, any drug that will give you surcease can be an unbearable temptation.

I hope he has found peace and rest now in a place without gunfire. I pray that his wife and daughter, his friends, his family, will all find consolation. But for those who live with this pain, there is very little consolation.

PTSD destroys lives, and it can spread to your partners and into the next generation. My father was a medic in the Korean War. I'm sure that some of what he did to me, some of the living nightmares i still fight, came from the battlefields of Korea.

In "Let the People Speak," Stephen Fry interviewed various (possibly fictional) members of the British public about the first Gulf War, which was then beginning:

"Let's get one thing straight," said a doctor from Long Melford. "Soldiers are made from flesh and bone and tissue that is, as Wilfred Owen said, 'so dear achieved.' It has taken them from 17 to 30 years to grow into what they are. In seconds it can be a tangle of blood and smashed material that can never be put right again."

. . . "Are you in the business of comforting the enemy?"

"No, I'm in the business of repairing flesh. Just be sure. For God's sake be sure."

Minds can be smashed beyond all repairing, too. It took 26 years to make Joseph Dwyer into the kind of man who would rescue a wounded child under fire.

It took 91 days on the battlefield to destroy him.

2008-07-20T22:01:00.000-07:00

After 32 Years, Network Still Nails It

Network is probably the greatest rant movie ever made. (I can't think of another contender with so many great rants from so many different characters.) And this rant (newscaster Howard Beale's magnificent on-air breakdown) seems eerily on-target for life as it is today.

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.

[shouting] You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,
[shouting]

'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:

[screaming at the top of his lungs] "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

Not a Goddamned thing has changed except that we now have video games and the Internet.

2008-07-15T01:35:00.000-07:00

Officially Cheerful

Had a rough day? Stressed about the looming Apocalypse and your dwindling bank balance? You need James Lileks. You need The Institute of Official Cheer. It's got everything, all enhanced by elegantly phrased snarky commentary:

* Clothing ads from the 1973 Sears catalog! Go ahead and laugh. But dammit, we thought it was pretty. Except the plaid pants. And some of the hairstyles. And all that polyester. No, I didn't buy my clothes from Sears--that was too fancy. What Ma didn't make, we got from Eynon Drug.

* Elvis meets Liberace! And other all-too-memorable publicity shots.

* Sometimes meat likes to dress up and feel pretty. A sample of the joys of The Gallery of Regrettable Food -- actual food illustrations and photography from the Depression through the swinging 70s. There are a few recipes, but the focus is on the unappetizing pictures and Lileks's delicious commentary. Imagine the mind that could dream up hot dogs in aspic. No, don't. Not if you're eating. Or about to eat. Or ever want to eat again.

Most of the content in Lileks's books is no longer on the website, but truly they are worth buying. (I keep an eye out at used bookstores and library sales; so far I've picked up two, plus a book of essays.) He describes a loaf of mottled red meat sludge in aspic as "a core sample from a mass grave." He tells the hidden stories of the people in those illustrations. Truly, he is the MST3K of old advertisements -- and his wit is as sharp as his eye. (He also posts a lot of other useful and interesting material, including old photos of Fargo, ND, and Minneapolis.)

The effect of reading anything by Lileks is, first, laughter, tinged with horror. Then, as you read on, uncontrollable spasms of laughter. Then choking, screaming convulsions of something that might be laughter or agony, garnished by tears. Then full-fledged hysteria. It's absolutely guaranteed, and it's one of the best ways I know for dealing with a horrible day.

Why yes, I had a . . . regrettable day. Any day in which one's automobile, freshly emerged from the shelter of a warranty period, demands repairs that will cost almost a month's rent (which, incidentally, has just been raised again), that day cries out for Official Cheer.

(It worked, too.)

2008-07-08T04:15:00.000-07:00

IN MEMORIAM: Thomas M. Disch

He wrote beautiful prose. He wrote beautiful poetry. The rage and pain and beauty of his work shone like supernovas at sunset. He was viciously original and sometimes just vicious.

He was notoriously hard to deal with -- his LJ demonstrates his prickliness and anger. Those may be characteristic of a man who never learned to defend himself against the world or his own deep pain. (No, that's not just something I say of the honored dead. I have loved, do love, a few people like that.)

He killed himself on Independence Day -- surely a comment and a message to us. And his magnanimous, lyrical descriptions of life after death in The Businessman give me hope. Perhaps he has found his way toward that heaven where suicides learn to cope with life.

2008-06-25T09:20:00.000-07:00

Remembering History

On June 25, 1876, the Sioux and Cheyenne (under the leadership of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse) defeated the Seventh Cavalry (under George Armstrong Custer) at the battle of the Little Bighorn. Custer's detachment was wiped out. The other squadrons, under Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen, suffered serious losses and fled.

Custer died because he made overwhelmingly bad decisions. He underestimated the number of his enemy. He planned his strategy without knowing what kind of ground he would need to cover. He thoroughly lived up to his standing at the very bottom of the West Point Class of 1861.

But the war for the Black Hills -- sacred ground to the Sioux and Cheyenne, a source of gold for the whites -- was not over. Within a year, the Indians were defeated, and their lands were taken away. It is particularly outrageous that one of their mountains was later carved into the likeness of four dead presidents.

Today is a day to ponder the racism, arrogance, and stupidity of some American leaders, civil and military. To remember that, instead of being the good guys, the US government can act with evil, and that they do so on behalf of every American of any race, creed, language, gender, and political opinion. To mourn for the soldiers who died on both sides, not forgetting the humanity of our enemies or our own troops. And to resolve never again to allow this kind of shameful behavior to stain the history of this nation.

Lakota Account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn

White Scout's Account of the Battle.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. If you haven't yet read this well-researched, meticulously documented book, read it. After nearly forty years, its narrative has not lost its power to shock or to move.

Little Big Man. Dustin Hoffman as a 101-year-old white man raised by Indians. This underrated movie intersperses hilarious satire with utterly shattering scenes of the white war against the Indians. Arthur Penn directed just three years after his landmark Bonnie and Clyde. Features Chief Dan George, Faye Dunaway, and Richard Mulligan (later a star of Soap). Mulligan's turn as Custer is worth the price of the DVD.

2008-06-16T02:52:00.000-07:00

Better Than Bloomsday

Legal same-sex marriage starts today in California.

A very happy wedding season to all who can finally marry their partners, and may you live to see your marriage recognized and respected everywhere in the world.

2008-05-21T04:56:00.000-07:00

As Nanny Ogg Would Say, Tempers Fuggit

I went to Office Depot today, looking for a replacement stylus for my Palm. It's not new -- I replaced my old M100 a year or so ago, choosing a low-end, monochrome model fine for my basic PDA uses -- ebooks and backgammon, with occasional calendaring.

I wandered through the aisles, wondering where the PDA displays were. Not with computers, not with calendars, not with software or cameras or cables. The clerk had never heard of a Palm, a handheld, or a PDA, much less a stylus.

After some fruitless paging, I eventually found an older employee who told me they no longer carried any PDAs or accessories.

They're outdated.

2008-05-19T23:55:00.001-07:00

May We Have the Envelope, Please?

The National Trust’s 2008 list of Most Endangered Places is out. This annual rite gathers historians, naturalists, and architects in nail-biting suspense. What monuments to our heritage are closest to being razed, paved, or mutilated? Which historical sites, architectural treasures, cultural resources, and natural landscapes should we visit now, before they vanish forever?

Among this year's lucky winners I found the spectacularly elegant Boyd's Theater in Center City Philadelphia. It's an eighty-year old movie queen, the architectural equivalent of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. It was the first of the great Art Deco theaters, and it is the last movie palace in Philadelphia.

The Boyd used to be the SamEric, which closed in 2002, and I have very fond memories of its spacious auditorium and fine acoustics. The Boyd was convenient--a block from Rittenhouse Square, close to bookstores, restaurants, and transit. Nearby was a small State Store where, one sultry night, my date and I picked up a flask of Old Granddad to smuggle into the theater. The film was noir, the stars were Nicholson and Lange, and between the bourbon-fortified fountain Cokes and the Art Deco ambiance, the movie looked wonderful. No big-screen TV can do what the Boyd did so well.

Another old friend made the list. The entire California state park system.

The state park system is falling apart. There's no money for maintenance, and hasn't been for years. I was appalled when I first went to a California park and was charged an admission fee, but taxes won't cover operating costs. And this is a tragedy.

California is one of the richest states by any measure and one of the top economies in the world. It hosts the insanely lucrative high tech and entertainment industries as well as its vast and productive agricultural sector. From wine to lettuce, carrots to cotton, California produces more. Think Wisconsin is the dairy state? Think again. We're number one. And there are plenty of other industries -- fishing, manufacturing, lumber, tourism. The real estate is some of the most expensive in the world. And, at least in Silicon Valley, you can meet millionaires and billionaires any time you go to Fry's computer store.

The parks preserve wild lands, protect redwoods, open history to visitors. They save the smaller patches of the great historic redwoods and joshua trees and offer sanctuary to birds from egrets to condors. Once you've seen the bleakly indifferent peaks of the Sierras, the passes deep in snow, the brutally sheer mountainsides, you gain a new comprehension of the courage and fortitude of the people who crossed them in wooden wagons -- or who died on the frozen heights above the lushly blooming valleys.

The parks provide recreation and education and green space. In the state that boasts Big Sur, Death Valley, Yosemite, and the Avenue of the Giants, the state parks shelter the smaller local spaces where people can picnic, camp, hike, watch birds and wildlife, or frolic with their dogs. One of the things that makes the crowding of the East Bay endurable to me is the presence of parks, acres of countryside I can visit easily and always see on the horizon. They keep our spirits going.

This state can afford to preserve and share its magnificent natural resources and historic heritage. If California is punished by God with a disaster, it won't be for recognizing love and commitment between same-sex partners. It will be for allowing greed to destroy our endowment of history, landscape, and human potential.

Link to list from Still a Ways Away.

2008-05-15T11:55:00.000-07:00

Four Years and Several Months Ago . . .

Gavin Newsom celebrated Valentine's Day by opening marriage to same-sex couples. My friend RJ and I joined dozens of other volunteers to help celebrate marriages in San Francisco City Hall. People were coming in from all over. I get teary-eyed just at the memory -- the joy was palpable, and shared among so many people.

Now what we did then has been upheld by the California Supreme Court. We now have marriage equality -- if we can fight off the various attacks on it.

A deep, deep joy.

2008-05-04T11:32:00.000-07:00

Small Rewards

I always want to know where the roads go. Saturday I found one of surpassing beauty -- a winding country road, flawlessly cambered and almost empty, snaking over hills. It ran through chaparral, grassland, oak hills, even a redwood forest damp and sheltered enough for ferns -- a rare sight here. Every turn brought a new prospect: hills, valleys, woods, the Bay glittering in the sun, a reservoir mirroring the sky.

Except for bicyclers, the road was almost deserted on a Saturday afternoon. I bet it's even better on a weekday afternoon, when the bike-riders are off at work. A place to stretch my reflexes and my eyes, to dawdle or zip as the mood dictates.

Best of all, this road is not forty miles away, across the bay and up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It runs from Hayward to Oakland. You might know it as A Street or Redwood Road. I've driven sections of it a thousand times but never, before, beyond the high school, where one turns off to go to the Episcopal church.

That road felt like an extraordinary gift from the universe. Or maybe part of God's Frequent Seeker Rewards Program.

For most of the time I've lived in the East Bay, I haven't had time or energy to go exploring. Particularly when I was making the vicious commute to Palo Alto, the last thing I wanted to do on weekends was drive anywhere.

The life I was living prevented me from doing the things I loved and wanted -- the big things, like writing fiction, and the little things, like exploring country roads. And the things I substituted for what I really needed were both insufficient and expensive.

And it's not a question of leisure versus work. I am working now -- working damned hard, in fact -- but under conditions that are much more conducive to my being able to function day to day. I'm cooking and eating a variety of foods, I'm able to give more energy and love to my partners, I'm doing better with life maintenance chores, and I am even unpacking boxes and sorting possessions. Someday I may no longer be living in an apartment that looks like I moved in an hour ago.

Clearly this is something I need to consider when I look for the next job. It's almost a tautology -- when you're living the right life, you'll get the things you need, because by definition the right life is the one that feeds and nurtures you. But why is it so damned hard to remember that?

By "getting the things you need" I don't mean that you'll become a lottery winner or be protected from all loss and grief. I am not one of those prosperity Christians who thinks that prayer exists to beef up your bank account. Mine will undoubtedly shrink, in fact, and that's OK.

Maybe it's easier to see it the other way around: a job that twists your soul, a marriage that gradually erodes your sense of selfhood, a life where you have to deny who you are and who you love are bound to make you miserable. They will have compensations, of course, otherwise you wouldn't stay long enough for it to become a problem. But they have high costs, and they swallow the energy you could be using for something more productive.

The rewards of the right life (or miseries of the wrong kind) are not in the nature of arbitrary reinforcement from a Skinnerian deity with a sadistic sense of humor. They're much closer to the laws of physics. Defy gravity at your peril, and don't blame the mirror when the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.

I was talking about this with Michele when I was struck with a another aspect of the issue. The work to build the right life may hurt like hell. It may even seem worse than the familiar wretchedness of the wrong one. But it pays off -- and that positive payoff is something I consistently forget to include in my cost-benefit analysis.

There are excellent reasons for that quirk of psychology. But it's useful to remember that it isn't usually true any more. Asking for what I want, trying to get what I need, making changes -- these do involve some frustration and pain, but these days when I do them, I also actually get what I want without having to pay a cost too high to endure. This is what I have to convince my protective back-brain, which doesn't want me to throw away whatever I have now in hopes of a better future. It learned too early, too thoroughly, that asking for change brought things much worse than whatever I was enduring.

I have a huge chunk of work to do in therapy about reconnecting with my body, and I have been seriously considering not doing it. What's the point? It's going to take years of work and a lot of misery, and I'm 48. Why bother? By the time it's done I'll be old and close to death. The alternative to doing it will probably be shortening my life by some unknowable number of years. And I was very close to saying that an earlier death was preferable to fighting this war.

But maybe, if I do it, I'll get rewards I never even thought of. I didn't quit my job to write so that I could find beautiful back roads or eat a better diet. Those were bonuses. I bet there will be bonuses to the bodywork, too -- things I cannot imagine now.

Worth trying.

Another Frequent Seeker Reward: free MP3 of Dirty Town, the new Steve Winwood single. I've been waiting for a good new Steve Winwood album. This looks like I've got my wish. The verses may not be not great songwriting, but the choruses and riffs are catchy, urgent, compelling.

Winwood's voice is deeper, maybe a little hoarser, than his voice when he was the fourteen-year-old lead singer of the Spencer Davis Group. His keyboard line starts like a lonely blues song but breaks into a rock anthem -- and nobody writes better rock anthem than Winwood at his best.

Eric Clapton's godlike guitar sounds more like the passionate, protesting wail of the Cream years than the magisterial resignation of some of his recent work. Which is not to say all of his recent work has been rockless -- have you heard the Cream reunion album? Blew me away. They are still damned good -- better than anybody else -- even if Ginger Baker looks as kippered as Keith Richards.

Definitely worth the download. Amazon has an MP3 downloader, but it only works with Mac OS 10.4 and up, and I'm still running 10.3.9 on the laptop. Nevertheless, I had no trouble downloading the song.

2008-04-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

While the Jury Is Out

The Hans Reiser murder trial has almost all the classic elements of a great criminal proceeding: a prominent defendant, the mysterious vanishing of a lovely young woman, a pair of orphans, bizarre friends and relatives, kinky sex, hints of espionage and international crime, a bitter divorce, charges of embezzlement, and an unusual mental health defense.

All that's missing is any trace of Nina Reiser, 31, beyond a few bloodstains.

But the Reiser trial is also peculiarly Silicon Valley, given its mix of money, high tech, Craigslist, BDSM, playful transvestism, Burning Man, the Berkeley Bowl, and Asperger's Syndrome. The trial is getting gavel-to-gavel coverage, not just in such local papers as the Chronicle, but also in Wired. Their case timeline is helpful in trying to follow the story.

A former Alameda County public defender, Jay Gaskill, is also blogging it, and his blog is absolutely invaluable for the clarity and special knowledge he exhibits.

The lady vanishes

On September 3, 2005, Nina Reiser took her kids grocery shopping at the Berkeley Bowl. Then she dropped the kids with her estranged husband, who was living at his mother's house at the time. (His mother, a 64-year-old artist, was away at Burning Man.) They were in the midst of a genuinely nasty divorce.

Nina Reiser hasn't been seen since. That night she missed a date with her boyfriend, whom she had met on Craigslist; they had been thinking of moving in together, or even getting married.

On September 5, Hans Reiser went to pick up his kids at school, although it wasn't his day to do so, hours before he supposedly became aware that Nina was missing. Oh, and his small car disappeared for weeks; when it reappeared, the passenger seat was missing and the floor was awash in water. He had hosed it out -- just as he had hosed down his mother's driveway just after the disappearance. He claims he was living in the car, although his mother had to rent another one for him to drive.

September 9 her minivan was found a few miles away, still full of groceries. Billboards appeared in Oakland, then all over the East Bay, including my neighborhood.

Suspicion

Within weeks Hans Reiser was fighting for custody of his children. The Oakland police were watching him -- hell, I'd watch anybody whose spouse had disappeared and who had reacted by living full-time in a sports car, especially if they were taking professional-level evasion measures against surveillance. (The 1988 Honda CRX Si was a two-seat hatchback sports car. Not exactly like moving into a Land Rover.)

His father offered a reason for the anti-surveillance measures: he testified that, a week after Nina disappeared, he told his son to be careful of the Russian mafia and the "techno-geek S&M crowd."

On October 10, 2006, Hans Reiser was arrested for murder. He claims Nina Reiser framed him for her murder: that she simply went home to Russia (where their children are now living with their mother's family), leaving him high and dry. Along with $4500 in her bank account, $2000 in her apartment, and a mini-van full of groceries she never unloaded. Not to mention that Nina had just accepted a job offer to help Russian immigrants with their health concerns.

Hans Reiser, a prominent Linux guru, developed the ReiserFS filesystem. He has explained all his strange behavior after his wife's disappearance as the result of Asperger's Syndrome. In Silicon Valley, Aspies rule. Many of the stars of the high-tech industry are far from neurotypical.

(Speaking as a member of the techno-geek S&M crowd, I suspect this area may be one of the few where Hans Reiser could get a fair trial. His repeated courtroom outbursts, rambling monotone delivery, and paranoid behavior after the disappearance don't look good, but people here do understand that computer geeks are often a little strange in their behavior. Very few of them commit murder.)

Into the Labyrinth

Nina Reiser, trained as an OB/GYN in her native Russia, is often referred to as a mail-order bride. She did apparently have her name in a Russian dating catalog. However, according to one source, she was the translator accompanying another Russian woman to an arranged date with Hans Reiser.

They married in 1999; she was five months pregnant. Even in Silicon Valley, the Reisers' wedding was unconventional. It featured a belly dancer and a Minotaur leading the pair through a stone labyrinth -- not exactly auspicious symbolism, since the Minotaur fed on human sacrifices.

Friend, lover, adviser, and more

The maid of honor was a male truck driver in drag: Sean Sturgeon, founder of the Lake Merritt Socrates Cafe, and Hans Reiser's close friend and financial adviser. Later, Sturgeon became Nina's lover. Nina broke up with him because she didn't enjoy BDSM.

In addition to his sidelines in amateur philosophy, truck driving, wedding attendance, BDSM, adultery, and financial advice, Sean Sturgeon claims to be a serial killer with 8 or 9 notches on his belt, although he says he didn't kill Nina. Nobody seems to have arrested him.

The war between the Reisers

The marriage produced two children, whose rearing and education were the focus of enormous conflict between the Reisers. The emails Nina sent seem reasonable; they were produced in court.

Reiser continued traveling to Russia on business, being gone months at a time. When he was home, he wanted to teach his children -- especially his 5-year-old son -- how to survive. His idea was to play violent videogames like Battlefield Vietnam with young Rory. In that game, napalm explosions envelop villages in fire, bodies are hurled through the air, and, when shot, characters collapse to the ground and choke on their own blood, realistic sound effects included.

Rory started drawing violent pictures that worried his mother and teacher. According to the teacher, Rory had become hostile; he said to her, "I don't need to listen to you, you’re a woman. Women shouldn't have rights in this country." And Nina became afraid that her son was getting PTSD from the violent films and videogames.

Means, motives, opportunity

During the vicious divorce and the murder trial, the prosecution characterized Nina Reiser as a loving mother who would never abandon her children. The defense has accused her of being a terrible mother, of having connections with the Russian Mafia and the KGB, of making up diseases for her son to get attention for herself, and of embezzling funds from her husband's company. How much this is the usual blame-the-victim tactic and how much is true, God knows.

Could Hans Reiser be violent? At one point he pushed Nina violently enough that she got a restraining order. And an experienced Oakland cop, now retired, advised her to get a gun.

The money is an issue: Hans Reiser claims Nina was embezzling, but he also owes or owed her large sums in child support. The company Namesys was in some financial trouble, and Hans had publicly complained that Nina and the kids were a financial burden.

The high-tech angle continues into other evidence. Reiser pulled a couple of hard drives from his computer and entrusted them to his lawyer. Nothing of interest was found on them when the police tech expert examined them.

Much more to the point, when the minivan was located, Nina's cell phone was inside with its battery removed -- a way to make sure that it couldn't be tracked. Hans Reiser's cell phone was either turned off or had its battery removed for several days around the time of the murder.

The jury has been two days. At this point, the sketch artists are sketching each other.

If he did it

This case is heartbreaking, because I do think Hans killed Nina, but I believe he did it in defense of his children -- or rather, in defense of the child he had once been.

Hans Reiser was a boy genius who dropped out of school after eighth grade because, as he said in an interview before the disappearance, I . . . couldn't handle junior high school and the insistence on sitting in neat rows. He was admitted to the University of California at Berkeley when he was just 15.

Like a lot of geeks, Reiser had a miserable time being teased and bullied in school. Reiser said, "All of my life people have been doing things like... in grade school, kids would pick on me, they would chase me. And I had a talk with my parents, it takes two to tango and you should use words like this, you should run away." As an adult, he became a Judo black belt.

Is it any wonder that he insisted that his boy watch bloody movies and play violent videogames? He wanted to prepare his son for life -- to protect him from bullies.

Hans Reiser's emails are full of concern for the children, but not in an day-to-day fashion of providing shoes or meals; he was worrying about their future. He scorned the local Montessori school, saying Ordinary people cannot educate genius children. It does not work. And he was obsessed with getting them into the highest status, wealthiest social circles.

When his attorney brought up the children, who are now in the custody of their grandmother in Russia,
Reiser broke down and began weeping, saying his children were "really important to me" and deploring that Nina had accused him of causing his son to have traumatic stress disorder because of violent computer games.

Nina seems to have been a warm, loving mother; a charming and beautiful woman; a person of intelligence and heart. Despite the smear campaign, she comes across as a decent human being. But to the eye of someone like Hans, her desire to protect her children from early exposure to violence must have seemed like the ultimate cruelty. In his mind, she was sentencing them to the kind of misery he had gone through. Only his toughening-up technique could help them.

I think he killed her in a sudden rage, strapped her to the car seat, and dumped it somewhere in the mountains or even in a reservoir. I think the sour-milk smell he was obsessed with washing out of his car was really the smell of her dead body. Sour milk stinks, yes, but it's also the ultimate symbol of bad mothering, and that in Hans's eyes was Nina's crime. Probably there was a smell only he could detect -- the stench of his own guilt.

ETA Convicted of first-degree murder. "I've always been a good father to my children," Reiser said as he was being led out.

2008-04-27T03:08:00.000-07:00

Eviction Wars

In Pacific Heights a charming young couple buys a house in San Francisco and rents part of it to the tenant from hell. The opposite story seems to be happening South of Market, where a charming young couple bought an occupied building and tried to evict all the tenants. One, a disabled man, got a year's extension -- rental laws in SF generally favor the tenant. And according to the San Francisco prosecutor's office, the landlords did everything they could to get rid of the guy.

Now, over the years I've had some bad landlords -- ones who refused to do essential repairs, sexually harassed me, stole my possessions, and repeatedly walked in on me with no notice -- not even a knock. One sold the house from under me and gave me ten days' notice to move. On the day I moved in to a different place, I called to report that the ceiling was pouring water, which was three inches deep on the floor. She replied, "What do you expect me to do about it?"

None of my stories come close to the prosecution case against this couple. In addition to using the usual tactics (noise, utilities shutoffs, nasty notes), they are accused of falsely reporting to police that a homeless man was living in the building; the cops came in with guns drawn, but the landlady admitted she knew the tenant. They allegedly had a contractor cut a large hole in his floor and then remove walls from underneath his apartment, making it uninhabitable. The newspaper reported that some of these allegations are upheld by independent witnesses.

The landlords got a restraining order after they received threatening emails in the tenant's name. The prosecution alleges that the landlords forged the emails and even sent nasty emails to his lawyers in his name.

There are several ways to view this. Possibly the landlords are greedy, entitled, and ruthless. Possibly the tenant is amazingly clever at framing them to look like monsters. But I can see ways it could happen without actual certifiable insanity or even more than everyday evil.

I've bought and sold three houses, and I have rented, and I have shared space with housemates and family -- and they're all potentially volatile situations. We're talking huge freaking amounts of money, personal territory, and all the emotional and psychological complexes people have around their home. It's guaranteed to be a real mess.

Scenario:

The Landlords buy the place (apparently stretching their finances to do so) intending to move in themselves, maybe selling some share as tenants-in-common. They'll fix it up, sell the Palo Alto place, and live happily ever after.

Given Ms. Landlord's real estate expertise, they think they can easily get Mr. Tenant and all the other tenants out.

Then Mr. Tenant digs in his heels and gets an extension. Maybe there has been some argument. Everybody feels angry, and there gets to be some personal feeling in this.

The Landlords have ongoing money pressures -- they're paying two mortgages, they're stuck with this guy, and they're feeling aggrieved. They get angry and resort to childish tactics. Maybe they have entitlement issues. Maybe they're really scared and angry about the money. This guy has no right to be in their space!

The nastier they get, the more Mr. Tenant digs in his heels. He's got migraines anyway and is cranky from the pain. All their assaults are not going to make him feel any better or any more able to find a place quickly. Or any more interested in helping them find any easy solution.

Ms. Landlord may feel a lot of pressure because this was her idea -- she thought they could do the deal, and now they're stuck paying a lot of money on a totally unusable property. It's theirs, and they're caught. Mr. Landlord is pissed, too. Maybe he blames her, or she feels like he does, and she passes on the anger and blame to Mr. Tenant.

So they try harder and harder to get him out -- Mr. Landlord with high-tech, Ms. Landlord with direct solutions like, you know, arson or calling the cops.

And they all end up in court. At least nobody's dead -- New York City had at least one murder over a disputed eviction.

I'll be watching for the results of this trial.

2008-04-26T14:33:00.000-07:00

Why I Live in the Bay Area, Part 73

A conga line danced in Union Square. "The red lights were challenging," said Carnivale king Everett Harper. "But we're a polite and politically-correct conga line, and we don't jaywalk. Besides the red lights give you time to move in place and focus your energy."

A mountain lion is roaming near homes in Hayward.

We have all kinds of wild life here.

2008-03-26T22:59:00.001-07:00

Here Begins the New Life

The Night Prayer, from the New Zealand Prayer Book:

Lord, it is night.
The night is for stillness.
Let us be still in the presence of God.

It is night after a long day.
What has been done has been done;
What has not been done has not been done.
Let it be.

The night is dark.
Let our fears of the darkness of the world and our own lives rest in you.

The night is quiet.
Let the quietness of your peace enfold us, all dear to us, all who have no peace.

The night heralds the dawn.
Let us look expectantly to a new day,
New joys, new possibilities.

in Your name we pray.
Amen.

More New Zealand prayers set to music.

I have left the job. Starting Monday, I will be a full-time writer for at least three precious months. For the moment, I am simply very tired.

2008-03-19T01:40:00.000-07:00

Ju$t a $imple Pre$ident

From a PBS interview:

GHARIB: Well, you’ve pressed OPEC to increase oil production –

BUSH: I did.

GHARIB: And they didn’t do it. Let’s say that OPEC did pump more oil. How much do you think that that would bring down oil prices, by $20, $30?

BUSH: You know, I don’t know. You’re going to have to ask the experts that. I’m just a simple president. But I really don’t know what it would do. I do know that the main problem is supply and demand and excess supply obviously would help.

Watch the video. And weep for your country.

2008-03-13T14:03:00.000-07:00

Match It for Pratchett

From the noble and determined Pat Cadigan:

Today, it was announced that Terry Pratchett has donated half a million pounds to Alzheimer's research. Hearing that, it occurred to me that if half a million of us all donated a pound to Alzheimer's research, we could match his donation and make it an even million.

So whaddaya say, guys? It's a pound. That's about 2 bucks US dollars, give or take a couple of (US) pennies. You can spare that much. Go here and make your donation. Tell them it's in honour of Terry Pratchett.

Let's do it!

f you don't live in the UK, you need to click the "don't know postal code" link.

You can also give in the US to the Alzheimer's Association.

The Canadian Alzheimers Association.

Terry's speech:

There's nearly as many of us as there are cancer sufferers, and it looks as if the number of people with the disease will double within a generation. And in most cases you will find alongside the sufferer you will find a spouse, suffering as much.

It's a shock and a shame, then, to find out that funding for research is three per cent of that which goes to find cancer cures. Perhaps that is why, for example, that I know three people who have successfully survived brain tumours but no-one who has beaten Alzheimer's...

I'd like a chance to die like my father did—of Cancer, at 86. (Remember, I'm speaking as a man with Alzheimer's, which strips away your living self a bit at a time). Before he went to spend his last two weeks in a hospice he was bustling around the house, fixing things. He talked to us right up to the last few days, knowing who we were and who he was. Right now, I envy him. And there are thousands like me, except that they don’t get heard.

So let’s shout something loud enough to hear.

2008-01-23T19:53:00.000-08:00

The Mathematics of Fraud

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

Not that any of this is a surprise; it's the strict tabulation of the minimum number that catches the imagination here.

What can you do with 935 false statements? With that number of deceptions, a family of two adults and three kids could each tell a different lie every day to skip an entire year of work or school, with enough falsehoods left over to excuse the family from church, synagogue, or circle for all but three weeks a year.[1]

But nobody could get away with that. The adults would lose their jobs, and the kids would be chased by truant officers. The Deity or Deities involved have their own ways of responding. Let's see what those 935 lies have actually bought.

Category	Total Number	Number per Lie	Notes
US soldiers killed	3,931	4	Four soldiers--enough to start a band, though most of these kids are a year or two older than the Beatles were. It's actually 4.2 something, but all numbers are rounded to the nearest whole number.
US soldiers wounded[2]	28,938	31	What does it mean to be wounded? Imagine it: 31 wounded soldiers, an entire classroom of healthy young men and women who will spend the rest of their lives dealing with the physical and emotional scars of this war.
Iraqi civilians killed	80,621	86	A smallish symphony orchestra might have 86 players. My annual family reunion usually draws that many -- five generations of preachers, nurses, housewives, writers, farmers, social workers, and truck-drivers. The country church I grew up in might be that crowded at Easter. Data is drawn from cross-checked media reports, hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures to produce a credible record of known deaths and incidents. I selected the lower number for my computation. Other estimates are far higher: A study published by the Lancet says the risk of death by violence for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the US-led invasion.[3]
Journalists killed	125	0.1336	The figure of 125 killed does not include the 49 journalism support workers killed or any of the abducted journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists . . . considers a journalist to be killed on duty if the person died as a result of a hostile action—such as reprisal for his or her work, or crossfire while carrying out a dangerous assignment. CPJ does not include journalists killed in accidents, such as car or plane crashes, unless the crash was caused by aggressive human action (for example, if a plane were shot down or a car crashed trying to avoid gunfire). Nor does CPJ include journalists who died of health ailments. Note that it takes approximately eight lies to kill a journalist.
Direct cost to US taxpayers	$488 billion	$521,925,133.69	These numbers are incomplete--just to the end of 2007; they do not begin to cover the ongoing medical and psychiatric needs of veterans, for example, or the cost of rebuilding Iraq, or the interest our grandchildren will be paying on this monstrous debt. They are also hard to grasp. For each lie, we could have built a new medical school, and still have had enough left over to put 1,918 kids through a year of Head Start. Or we could skip the med school and the education, and just buy 2,372 lucky families a new house at the national median home price of $220,000. For every lie.
Cost so far to taxpayers of Oakland, CA	$574.7 million	$614,652.41	Each lie would pay for 27,938 copies of Ruby K. Payne's excellent A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Or they could have put almost nine new cops on the streets for each lie.
Oakland children who could have been provided with health care	214,364	229	That's right--every lie could have given health care to 229 kids. Instead of killing 4 American soldiers, wounding 31, and killing 86 Iraqi civilians. How would you rather spend your tax dollars?

======

[1] Based on these assumptions: both adults working a 5-day work week, minus the US-average 13 days of vacation; a school year of 180 days; one religious service per week and a year of 52 weeks; the excuses for missing religious services apply to the whole family.

[2]What does wounded mean?

"I think maybe I just need a couple of days without getting blown up." Three articles plus interactive multimedia. But the pictures, distressing as they are, show just a little of what happens. A few smears of blood, an incision, an expression of dazed pain. They don't show shattered bones or gaping wounds. They don't need to.

Struggling Back From War's Once-Deadly Wounds

The survival rate among Americans hurt in Iraq is higher than in any previous war - seven to eight survivors for every death, compared with just two per death in World War II.

But that triumph is also an enduring hardship of the war. Survivors are coming home with grave injuries, often from roadside bombs, that will transform their lives: combinations of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision and hearing loss, disfigured faces, burns, amputations, mangled limbs, and psychological ills like depression and post-traumatic stress.

Wounded soldiers often economic casualties

Economic forecasts vary widely for the federal costs of caring for injured veterans returning from the Middle East, but they range as high as $700 billion for the VA. That would rival the cost of fighting the Iraq war. In recent years, the VA has repeatedly run out of money to treat sick veterans and had to ask for billions more before the next budget.

"I wouldn't be surprised if these costs per person are higher than any war previously," says Scott Wallsten, of the conservative think tank Progress and Freedom Foundation.

[3] I could not find a reliable estimate of the Iraqi wounded. The number must be immense.

What are they stealing from you with every lie?

2008-01-18T14:50:00.000-08:00

Honest, It's Not What It Looks Like

It isn't really a . . . .

Coochie, it's a couch. Best joke so far: "My boyfriend loves it, but he couldn't find the pillow!" (Heard from someone at work, who got it from a friend.)

Taxi, it's a baby bootie. From .

Cannoli. Or a tin of anchovies. Or whatever. It's an amazingly cool crocheted toy.

Piece of sushi, Maguro or ikura. It's candy.

Landscape, it's a lot of food amazingly arrayed. Go through the photos and check out the bread mountains, cumin-paved roads, and sunset ocean of rippling salmon with a beautiful pea-green boat.

Face, it's a house, a cheese grater, a mushroom, a sneaker sole.

Boring old web page, it's an extravaganza of optical illusions. Also, check out the nifty bridges.

2008-01-17T19:04:00.000-08:00

Technolust

Macworld Keynote Speech condensed by almost two orders of magnitude.

Best moment: watching the Air sliding from an ordinary manila envelope . . . I am in awe.

I remember the first laptop I fell in love with. I was a tech writer when the Gavilan, sometimes touted as the first laptop, was announced. God, how I lusted after that sleek, sexy machine! As the reviews said, It was just too much state-of-the-art stuff in one package.

A 9-pound, 5MHz laptop with 64K of RAM , no hard drive, a 300-baud modem, a 400 x 64 monochrome display screen (plus connections for a monochrome monitor!), and an optional four-pound printer. All for only $4,000.

So, no, the Air at $1799 doesn't look bad at all. On the other hand, I'm never in any rush these days to buy the latest technology. It will be faster, sleeker, and cheaper in 15 minutes.

2008-01-04T15:01:00.000-08:00

Storm Front

There are sandbags in our courtyard at work.

Although this may be helping keep the conference room dry, the water's ankle-deep in most places, and going to the bathroom means wading through the lake.

It doesn't rain often out here, but it makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in frequency. Some parts of the Bay Area have had eight inches of rain since the first storm hit yesterday -- and when the current storm blows itself out sometime tomorrow, a third will move in with more wind and rain. High winds knocked over a tractor-trailer on one bridge, after which the authorities wisely closed it until further notice. Streets are flooding, power is out, and the mountains are experiencing blizzard conditions -- winds over 100mph and blinding snow.

Snipped from the official report:

Winds in the coastal mountains either side of the Oregon-California border gusted over 150 mph during the morning. Winds gusted to just over 100 mph on the hill tops around Oakland and San Francisco, causing tree and power line damage. . . . Heavy rain totals in the coastal mountains north of San Francisco have reached 8 inches. Heavy rain is gradually shifting southward from northern California into central California and finally into Southern California. Rain totals will range from 2 to 5 inches in the valleys and along the coast to as much as 1 foot in the coastal mountains. Flash flooding is likely along the entire California coast and will not be confined to burn areas. . . . In the mountains of California, hourly snowfall rates could reach 6 to 8 inches. Snow accumulations between 2 feet (valley floors) and locally 12 feet (ridge tops) will bury the Sierra by the end of the weekend. White-out, blizzard conditions will make any travel through the Siskiyou and Sierra Mountains deadly. Damagingly strong wind gusts will continue over California especially in the vicinity of a strong cold front, ranging from between 50 and 70 mph at the lowest elevations to as high as between 150 and 200 mph at the ridge tops of the Sierra. Strong and damaging winds will also impact western Washington and most of Oregon, where winds could gust over 60 mph. Swells along the Washington, Oregon and northern California coasts will peak between 30 and 35 feet overnight and high surf warnings have been issued.

Note to non-Californians: this office building, like many out here, is designed as a series of suites, each opening onto an open central courtyard. The second floor has a walkway all the way around.

This floor plan is admirably adapted to the climate here, and it allows both privacy and shared public space. A company can rent one or many suites, so the space is flexible. Originally used for domestic architecture, this style is a descendant of the grand haciendas, which housed not just nuclear families but multiple generations of family and servants.

The adobe haciendas were and are beautiful buildings, cool, comfortable, elegant. This building, like many, borrowed the floor plan but skipped the Spanish Colonial architectural motifs: no red roof tiles, for example, or Moorish arches. And unfortunately, no drains in the paved courtyard, although we do have a redundant fountain.

Northeasterners visiting here often feel uneasy; these buildings strike them as too informal to be businesslike. Going outside to visit a colleague in a different suite (or the lunchroom, bathroom, conference room) seems undesirable and distracting. Part of the problem is probably climate-related. The open-courtyard design makes no sense whatsoever in any climate less benign than California's. My first thought on seeing those external corridors and staircases open to the sky is still "What happens when it snows?"

But I suspect that the issue is less practical than that. The hacienda- style floor plan is familiar to Easterners as the basic design of a Motel 6.

2007-11-27T22:41:00.000-08:00

Mapping Antarctica

Scientists have produced the most detailed map yet of Antarctica.

This was a vast project, and I have some idea of the issues involved in stitching together 2-dimensional images of curved, mountainous 3-D terrain -- especially when the photos are mostly white-on-white. (Imagine the glare and the reflections and the shadow problems.)

2007-11-17T09:16:00.000-08:00

When Baptists Have Bombs

A trunkful of napalm isn't evidence of terrorism if you're a white male ROTC member/religion major at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Pastorblog says, "It appears that this passionate young man was trying to protect the reputation and honor of Jerry Falwell." Nice to hear that a Hitler-obsessed kid is so, umm, thoughtful. Oh, and he does plan to apply to be reinstated to ROTC when his sentence is over.

"Mark David Uhl, 19, asked the court for leniency at Tuesday's sentencing, but that was rejected by U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon." Two years is apparently a tough sentence. When Baptists have bombs, they are sentenced to less time in jail than that spent by the legally innocent people herded into Guantanamo as "enemy combatants" and "terrorists."

What did he plan to do with five bombs packed with nails? Possibly, as Max Blumenthal reports,

kill the family of itinerant Calvinist provocateur Fred Phelps (famous for their "Fag Troops" rallies outside soldiers' funerals). The Phelpses planned to protest Falwell's funeral, a bizarre stunt designed to highlight Falwell's somehow insufficiently draconian attitude towards homosexuals.

Falwell's "leniency" may be that he never, as far as I know, publicly advocated that we should be executed like rabid dogs. Otherwise he and Fred Phelps pretty much agreed on the idea that us queers are hell-bound sinners whose evil has attracted God's judgment on the USA.

However, Fred Phelps may not have been the only one at risk. In court Agent R. A. Anderson of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms testified that:

Uhl had told his relatives he would set off the bombs in the parking lot of a Mormon church, use them to kill cows, "or something to that effect." . . . Uhl had once participated in an attack on his former high school in Northern Virginia. He and several friends made a tear-gas-like bomb using Tabasco sauce and a heater from a military Meals Ready to Eat ration. They planned to throw it from the roof at prom-goers as a prank, Anderson said Uhl had told him, but got scared and instead tossed it into a ventilation shaft.

Uhl boasted "He'd saved a lot of people from losing their virginity that night."

Clearly a true American hero.

Whatever Uhl's purpose with his bombs of napalm and nails, this country is supposed to be ruled by laws that apply to all. The law is not supposed to discriminate between explosives wielded by atheists, Muslims, Baptists, and anybody else. The gender and skin color of the defendant are not supposed to matter, either, though you know and I know that they make a difference long before a lawbreaker ever becomes a defendant.

I know this kid doesn't think of himself as a terrorist but as a hero defending the helpless. That scares me; I have a bit of a Joan of Arc complex myself. He was bullied, according to his parents. I can sympathize with that, too. And he was reared in a country, culture, and religion that gave him, on the one hand, enormous privilege and an image of masculinity that has to cause horrible damage to anyone trapped in it. Likewise, very little help with dealing with emotional or psychological problems, because real men don't have those, and neither do good Christians.

I wish I could wrap this up with a neat platitude or aperçu. What I have instead is sorrow and frustration at a problem that defies solution, and enough wisdom to know that napalm is not going to make anything better.

2007-11-12T20:39:00.000-08:00

The Call in the Night

This story has a happy ending. I don't want to scare you, although I was scared. Just to tell the story and talk about the feelings.

Late Friday night I got the phone call every adult dreads: Chest pains. Emergency room. No point in my coming; I may as well stay home and get some sleep if I could. Debbie would keep in touch. As soon as she knew anything, she'd let me know.

That's right: the one who might be having a heart attack wasn't my father, my grandfather, someone in the older generation or generations. It was my lover, born the same year I was born. Someone of my generation who is vigorous, healthy, muscular—a man in his prime. And this struck me profoundly.

When I was born, I had four grandparents and four great-grandparents living, as well as innumerable aunts and uncles two or three generations back. Now my great-grandparents are all dead. My 90-year-old grandmother, who has Alzheimers, is the only grandparent left. Many of my great-aunts and great-uncles are gone. My father has been dead for nine years. I know about losing the older generations, the people who have always been here.

I even know about people dying too young: a college friend of mine murdered on the street at 23, Diane in a car accident at 22, Antony at 40 of congestive heart failure. I know about the tearing grief of losing someone whom you've known almost from the moment of conception, who had been breathing air a bare ten minutes when you first saw her, whom you've followed through every landmark from the first smiles and words to the engagement parties. I know about losing friends to chance or violence or lingering ill-health.

Somehow, to have my strong and healthy lover in the emergency room—that felt like a different kind of fear, potentially a different kind of loss. Oh God, do I have to learn all the different kinds?

He didn't die Friday night. He didn't even have a heart attack. But someday he will die; someday Michele will die; someday my sisters will die. That thought aches.

The thought of my own death is actually a comfort most of the time. I cherish that ultimate liberty of slipping away from the pain and misery of my life. My family has extraordinary tenacity, and most of us live long past the time when death would come as a relief. So the pneumonia, the asthma and bronchitis, even the tumor the size of a cantaloupe haven't frightened me about the future; they've made me miserable in the present. It's probably arrogance on my part.

But thinking about losing my generation is completely different for me than thinking about my own eventual death. My death represents my freedom. The deaths of my sisters, of my beloved Michele, of Alan, of my friends—those are deaths to dread, losses irretrievable.

Losing them is unthinkable, but someday, unless I die first, it will happen. One by one they'll all die, and I will. I clung to Michele this weekend, held fast to Alan Sunday night.

I'm not going to mope over the deaths that may happen today or in forty years. I'm going to live as well and love as hard as I can, because we don't get much time. I'm going to be kind, too, because a little brightness makes a difference.

This morning when I went to pick up my mail, the owner wasn't there. Neither was her elderly father, a kind Black man who was always sunny and thoughtful, who remembered to ask after my mother because she sent me packages sometimes. The substitute clerk had tears in her eyes. Friday night after he came home from work, the old man lay down and died in his sleep. An easy death; peaceful; the death he would have chosen, working hard until the last. But still so sad the clerk and I were both in tears.

Life is fragile. Love hard. Play hard. Be kind.

This story has a happy ending.

For now.

2007-10-24T13:24:00.000-07:00

Bizarre Baby Accessories

Don't tell me we don't start gender socialization in the cradle.

Actually, this product speaks to both sides of the gender debate. Anyone who has changed enough diapers knows that little boys like to play Fountain. Not something little girls have the equipment to do. But would an equivalent product for girls feature cars, trucks, firemen, or -- God help us -- jungle camouflage? What kind of parent has a camo-themed nursery?

I don't know whether to applaud the cleverness, celebrate the brilliant marketing, or deplore the sexism and militarism.

In other words, this is the ultimate American product.

2007-10-13T03:12:00.000-07:00

Jacques de Molay, Thou Art Busted!

Seven hundred years ago, on Friday, October 13, 1307, Philip the Fair of France took decisive steps toward ending his debt problem. Instead of burning his credit cards, he burnt his creditors: the Templars. He had them arrested, tortured, tried, and burnt at the stake for immorality and heresy. Interestingly, the heresy accusation wasn't the sin of usury, although they charged interest. No, he accused them of sodomy. Some things don't change.

So today, if you read Umberto Eco, write a check, or watch The Da Vinci Code, think of the Templars.

And in more Templar news:

The Vatican, confessing to an archiving error, has released documents showing that Pope Clement originally found the Templars not guilty of heresy. I am annoyed at the misusage of "absolved" here; the Pope acquitted them. "Absolve" has a special religious meaning, which makes the usage here unnecessarily ambiguous.

A conference will be held by the Ecclesia Gnostica in Los Angeles in observance of the 700th anniversary of the day the Templars were arrested.

2007-09-22T23:21:00.000-07:00

Oh Please Oh Please

There comes a time when the urge to post overcomes the fear of jinxing the team.

We've won nine of the last ten games.

We're a game and a half back of the Mets for the division championship.

We're half a game behind the Padres for the wild-card slot.

In an insanely tight National League, we're showing toughness and tenacity, and we're winning, even if it takes extra innings to do it.

Oh God. It could happen. We could actually go all the way. And even if we don't, we've played a hell of a season.

But wouldn't it be perfect, wouldn't it be so totally Phillies, if we actually ended up with championship rings in the year that we also hit the landmark of ten thousand lost games?

2007-09-14T20:27:00.000-07:00

REVIEWS: Sarah Caudwell and the Murder Mystery

Eleven days ago, a friend of mine posted this quotation:

"You will be interested to hear, Hilary, that it had a most remarkable effect—even on Selena after a very modest quantity. She cast off all conventional restraints and devoted herself without shame to the pleasure of the moment."

I asked for particulars of this uncharacteristic conduct.

"She took from her handbag a paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice and sat on the sofa reading it, declining all offers of conversation."

- Sarah Caudwell, The Shortest Way to Hades

Clearly an author after my own heart.

I've already tracked down and read two of Caudwell's four novels, and I've ordered the other two. They are classic British whodunits: gently witty, mannered little mysteries. The amateur sleuth is Professor Hilary Tamar, an Oxford don of enormous erudition and indeterminate gender, and the sleuth's sidekicks are a group of young barristers. (A brief dictionary of British legal terms may be useful to those unfamiliar with the British terminology of solicitors, barristers, chambers, and clerks.

The Shortest Way To Hades (1985) is a murder mystery written in a voice reminiscent of Miss Manners. Instead of realism, it offers a delightful escape and some wicked intellectual pleasures, including dramatic irony. Although the characters lack depth, they are far from stock characters; most of them are, in their own polite way, quite subversive of stereotypes.

The Sibyl In Her Grave (2000) was published posthumously, and it's a far more accomplished, complex, and subtle book. Beneath the prim voice, there lies a warm acceptance of the varieties of human sexual behavior and a deep understanding of both friendship and love, including a particular variety of exploitive and destructive love. The dramatis personae include an elderly vicar, several financiers, a fortune-teller and her wretched drudge of a niece, a lovesick carpenter, and a physiotherapist specializing in pains of the lower back. There is also Aunt Regina, a retired interior decorator with a warm heart who occasionally hints at having had an adventurous life.

Especially given the artistry of her final novel, Ms. Caudwell's early death from cancer was a real loss. A classically educated barrister specializing in finance, she might seem like a stock character from the Golden Age of detective fiction, except that during those halcyon years her father was a prominent Communist journalist/soldier fighting in the Spanish Civil War and her mother was a nightclub singer in decadent Weimar Berlin. Just like Sally Bowles from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, for the very good reason that Jean Ross was the model for Sally Bowles—and thus for Liza Minnelli's character in Cabaret.

Jean Ross must have been a remarkable woman; she was also the inspiration for the classic song, "These Foolish Things.") But Jean Ross, the prototype for his fictional Sally Bowles, . . . turns out to be somewhat less vulnerable than portrayed by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Says Isherwood: "Sally wasn't a victim, wasn't proletarian, was a mere self-indulgent upper-middle-class foreign tourist who could escape from Berlin whenever she chose." Perhaps not the easiest mother for an intellectual daughter, but also possibly a pleasure to spend time with -- something like Aunt Regina, in fact.

Caudwell's father, Claud Cockburn, sired another daughter (by his first wife) and three sons (all radical journalists like Daddy). He may not have been present much during Sarah's upbringing, since his eldest son by his third wife is only two years younger than she is. But surely some of his talent was passed on to her; in addition to decades of radical left reporting, he wrote Beat the Devil, source of the John Huston/Humphrey Bogart movie, and several other novels.

(Note for Mitford-spotters: Esmond and Decca took shelter in his apartment when they eloped together.) [Note for everybody: I hope to hell there's a dropped line in that essay, because I do not want to think about "stuffy Lord Redesdale giving birth to all those sparky girls."]

Her half-siblings (and their descendants) apparently share the family wit and activism: Her half-sister Claudia Flanders, OBE, was an advocate for the disabled. Her half-brother Alexander Cockburn has written columns for the Nation and the Wall Street Journal. Andrew recently published a slender but scandal-packed biography of Donald Rumsfeld. And youngest half-brother Patrick has written a number of books, including what looks like a fascinating exploration of polio, which includes a class analysis of the disease.

Life in the shadow of such powerful parents and talented siblings can be difficult. I have no idea whether Sarah was the quiet child or the one all the rest admired (or both). What I do know is that she wrote at least one good light mystery novel and one superb mystery novel. Her complete bibliography also lists several short stories and two acrostic puzzles.

It's not enough.

2007-09-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

Scam Alert!

I got a juicy email this morning, promising me a chance at a good job:

Your online resume recently caught my attention, and I’d like to ask you to apply to fill one of the Public Relations Manager positions we currently have open. World Voice News is experiencing tremendous growth on a local, national and international level, and we’re looking for qualified candidates to help us meet our needs.

For this particular position, we’re looking for someone who has extremely strong written and verbal communication skills and two years of work experience. The ability to tailor a pitch to a particular media outlet is important, as is a strong knowledge of traditional and online resources for media contacts. Familiarity with network marketing and a bachelor’s degree in public relations are both preferred. If you do join the WVN PR team, you’ll be responsible for capturing media attention for the company and its clients, gaining positive exposure and enhancing visibility and credibility.

We offer a competitive compensation package, including an annual salary starting at $45,000 and ranging up to $60,000. Rapid advancement is possible for superior candidates. Our PR Managers are also eligible for medical, dental and optical insurance, paid vacation, tuition reimbursement and an expense account.

If you are interested in joining World Voice News as a PR Manager, please click on the link below and fill out the online application. If the link doesn’t work, copy and paste the address into your browser to go to the webpage.

http://REDACTED/careers.aspx?A=63135

I’ll contact you within one or two business days of receiving your online application. I look forward to discussing this position with you in more detail.

James Elkin
World Voice News

But the salary seemed wrong, I'd never heard of the business, and I am not a publicist. So I Googled and discovered that World Voice News is a phishing scam. Some victims have been blizzarded with spam, while others may have suffered much more serious losses.

Privacy experts and security officials at the job sites agreed that the three Web sites in question are "particularly clever" and "very slick." Internet Solutions, for example, requires users to create a password. Dixon said this was probably a ploy to collect access codes for online bank and e-commerce accounts. Most people use the same password for everything, security experts said, and criminals know that. . . . . The Instant Human Resources' Web site . . . required him to enter his name, address, phone number, and Social Security number and create a password.

Nasty stuff, whether you become a victim of identity theft or develop carpal-tunnel syndrome from deleting Viagra ads.

2007-09-09T01:49:00.000-07:00

Fire Season

September is often the hottest time of the year in Northern California. During the cool, foggy summer, every morning starts with a soft overcast known as the marine layer, which may take hours to burn off. Although the bright summer days are never spoiled by rain or drizzle, they tend to stay cool. But September has the same exuberant sunlight without the swaddling layer of cloud to limit its force. During day after day of brilliant blue skies, the temperature climbs into the 80s or 90s or higher, and playful winds may gust to 30 miles an hour. It's still not as bad as the East Coast, where such temperatures are often accompanied by dead calm, high humidity, and nights that never cool off.

But this idyllic weather carries an implicit threat. The woods and hillsides are parched after a hundred days without rain. The heat dries them still further. A campfire, a stray cigarette, a lightning strike in the mountains (where thunderstorms occur), or a hot engine parked on tall grass can make a forest or a hillside explode into flame.

"Explode" in the right word, too: the chaparral that covers so many hillsides is a dense thicket of chamise, toyon, manazanita, and scrub oak bushes, all waxy with combustible oils, and they burn like Molotov cocktails. Grass fires burn out quickly; chaparral fires at least offer space to fight the flames and only moderate amounts of fuel per square yard. Although forests catch fire relatively slowly, the enormous amounts of available fuel mean the fire can keep burning in the same space for a long time. Moreover, the fire itself changes the weather, creating patterns of airflow that feed and spread the flames. The result is a blaze that can consume tens of thousands of acres of forest—as well as the animals and people who live there.

The names are beautiful: Cherry. Grouse. Mariposa. Stevens. Fletcher. Bayne. Banner. Streets in an upscale development? The roster of a Montessori kindergarten? No, they're a few of this year's California wildfires.

Other fires sound like a series of bodice-rippers, a multigenerational saga of brooding men and passionate women: Moonlight Fire. Lazy Fire. Snow Fire. Italian Fire. White Fire. Honey Fire.

I don’t even want to think about what kind of books would be named after the Lick Fire, the Wallow Fire, the Tar Fire, the Seven Eleven Fire, or the Highway Fire.

Right now, the Bay Area is getting smoke from two great fires: the nearby Lick Fire south of San Jose and the Moonlight Fire, 200 miles away in the northeast Sierra.

The smoke rises and spreads. This week's sunsets have been ominously orange; the morning skies have been gray with smoke, the sun a brassy glow behind the haze. Asthmatics wheeze and clutch their aching chests, and people with allergies sneeze, cough, and wipe their burning, teary eyes.

The Lick Fire (named for the nearby Lick Observatory) is burning just a few miles from my old house in southernmost San Jose. Like the Uvas Canyon fire, which I blogged five years ago, it's a chaparral fire burning in low hills. These can generally be brought under control within a few weeks; the timber fires in the steep slopes and high valleys of the Sierra Nevada can rage for months.

The Moonlight Fire is a timber fire in the Sierra Nevada.

It started on Labor Day; during the week it has grown from 300 acres to more than 42,000 acres. A team of 2300 firefighters are bulldozing firelines, dropping fire retardants from planes (when the smoke clears enough to permit), and out on the steep slopes fighting the fire, which is chewing up forest and the logging debris--dried-out branches, bark, needles, and sawdust--known as slash.

At that, it's dwarfed by the Zaca fire, which burned from Independence Day until the day before Labor Day. It destroyed 240,207 acres—more than the size of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, DC, Scranton, and Manhattan combined. Oh, it also destroyed one outbuilding.

Many of these fires are wildland fires—and the acreage consumed is astonishing partly because California, home to one of every eight Americans, still has so much wildland left. But as California’s population grows and spreads, more people are moving into the red zone where wildland and cities meet. That puts more people and property in the way of fires.

The forest in the days after a fire looks devastated beyond hope of recovery. (Note the red fire extinguisher: that's a color photograph.) And if the fire burned too hot--if there was too much fuel accumulated, if it had been too many years since the previous fire--the soil can be sterilized completely. Then the result is hopeless devastation.

But fire plays an essential role in California’s ecosystems. (These days even Smoky Bear is in favor of "prescribed fires," which used to be called controlled burns.) A few years after a fire, a burned-over forest looks like a neglected graveyard. Acres of blackened stumps stand like rickety tombstones amid fountains of exuberant saplings. Without fire to clear the way and awaken seeds, no new growth could occur. Rebirth is the gift of fire.

2007-09-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

Katrina versus Dunkirk

It's not difficult to tell the difference between "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie" and "This was their finest hour."

Nor between the chaos, hunger, and scandals in the aftermath of Katrina, and the brilliant coordination of Naval ships, civilian craft (often sailed by Navy officers), and volunteer fishermen and yachtsmen who rescued hundreds of thousands of French and British soldiers in the evacuation of Dunkirk in June 1940. Or even, to give recent and American examples, the rescue efforts at the Oklahoma City bombing and the Minnesota bridge collapse -- in both places, locals on the spot rushed in and helped with no thought of danger or reward.

But it's useful to know that we won't have to contend with the Dunkirk spirit any longer. Not satisfied with gutting programs that would mobilize the Federal government in disasters, or heading them up with people whose qualifications go beyond laughable and into absurd, FEMA has now proposed a plan that would keep volunteers away from disasters.

To be fair, I can imagine situations in which volunteers could be counterproductive. But I know that even untrained volunteers can be of great help in cleaning up after a disaster. Moreover, the FEMA response has been consistently useless -- which is not surprising, really. This administration has made it 100% clear that they loathe any central government (except the kind that legislates private sexual behavior), so performing government functions well has to be the lowest possible priority for them.

But I would have thought that they would encourage volunteerism if only to spare the pockets of the taxpayers. Then I spotted the kicker: "Construction and demolition companies want to see a disaster ID card program succeed."

And who gets the contracts for cleanup? Everybody's favorite corporation, of course.

Halliburton.

2007-08-01T19:10:00.000-07:00

Broken Bridges

I heard about the latest disaster on the radio. Scary. But it looks like it won't be a huge death toll, thank God. Bridge disasters don't usually kill a lot of people, but the sudden failure of infrastructure feels like betrayal. The concrete drops, exposing the abyss. The lies on which we skim over the terrors of daily life have failed along with the girders, and the slow rebuilding of trust and trusses may take months.

This brings back bad memories for a lot of people: the Bay Bridge collapse in 1989 (earthquake), the wind-driven Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse (newsreel footage, complete with blasting music and announcer), and the recent Bay Bridge fire and collapse. And the Mianus River Bridge, and Schoharie, and all the mining disasters from Siberia to Centralia.

Tread carefully, friends.

2007-07-23T15:32:00.000-07:00

Above the Arctic Circle

Joe Decker is a nature photographer of extraordinary gifts. The range of his work is astonishing -- from precise yet delicate flower studies to almost abstract images of moving light on moving water, from dramatic high-contrast pictures to tone-on-tone images that could almost be silkscreen prints.

I love the grand, painterly vistas, but then I'm a sucker for mountainsides. Also for the light on the leaves.

His most recent work was shot in Greenland and Iceland, whose stark landscapes lend themselves well to his vision of abstract shapes in the natural world. An almost Mondrian panorama speckled with migrating birds. The rippled clouds and rippled hillside of a fjord. A glacier's ice ridges like pastel corduroy and the netted reflections of ocean on iceberg.

If you're in the area, come out and see these pictures. Wherever you live, buy some. I own a Joe Decker photograph, and the image is more beautiful every time I look at it.

Opening Reception for "Above the Arctic Circle", Friday, July 27, 6-8 pm

Opening reception. Pacific Art League, 668 Ramona, Palo Alto, California.

This is the reception for the first large-scale, major show I've done in well over a year, and will feature approximately 30 previously undisplayed works from my travels through Svalbard and East Greenland. If you can attend only one show of mine this year, make it this one.

2007-07-17T00:18:00.000-07:00

All the Way Home

I left work tonight after sunset and drove westward toward the Santa Cruz Mountains instead of east toward my apartment. It had been a long, rough day, but there was something I wanted even more than to get home and fall into bed.

As I crossed the San Andreas fault, I came into the country of lion-colored hills crowned with oaks. As twilight deepened, I drove north along 280, sometimes called the most beautiful freeway in the world. The mountains to the west were dark as slate, and the frothy dark clouds of the marine layer were surging over them. Above, in the clear sapphire sky, hung the crescent moon and the evening star.

I kept my windows open to the night air, fragrant with grass and leaves and earth, and I watched the long ridges, almost lightless, running between the highway and the sea.

If I drove up one of the steep, tortuous roads and into the mountains, I would find rolling meadows with clefts concealed by scrub. Then, as I went higher, higher, the Trappist dignity of the redwood groves. The towering sequoias always seem both aware of visitors and heedless of them. Their size and age give them a natural authority. Their presence is restful -- a day in the redwoods is a spiritual retreat.

But tonight I needed to get home, I couldn't drive the labyrinthine roads into the woods, or walk silently through the darkness. Just passing by, though, was enough, almost enough.

Sometimes my family back east asks how I can stand to live in the urban sprawl of the Silicon Valley megalopolis. But there's scarcely a spot here where you can't look up and see the wild hills.

Six years ago, I got on a plane with a suitcase, a laptop, and a yowling cat and flew 3000 miles to San Jose. Moving to the Bay Area made enormous changes to my life. Here I've found more new friends and love and natural beauty than I thought my heart could hold. And I found home.

2007-07-15T20:38:00.000-07:00

BASEBALL: Phillies Set a New Record

My boys have reached a landmark achievement in sports: A myriad lost games. Ten thousand failures.

A toast to the most futile professional sports franchise ever. Not just the most futile baseball team. No football team (US or European rules), no basketball team, no hockey team has set a record of such consistent failure. For more than a hundred years the Phillies have been losers.

Now, as the motivational speakers say, it doesn't matter how often you fail. What matters is how often you succeed!

Well, yeah, but baseball is a zero-sum game.

I'd like to point out that the boys are a game over .500, and although they lost the game today to the Cardinals, they creamed the Cardinals in the previous two games.

2007-07-03T17:36:00.000-07:00

Disgruntled Thought of the Day

Occam's Razor: Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

Sometimes summarized as "the simplest explanation is the best."

Occam's Other Razor: Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity.

Note: "Stupidity" here has nothing to do with IQ, everything to do with haste, distraction, innocent mistakes, cluelessness, poor planning, incompetence, and the many other ways people and organizations screw up.

This is a wise guide to life most of the time. Very few people go through life deciding to wreak havoc for the thrill of it. Mostly they just want to get through the day undamaged.

Occam's Razor Strop: When stupidity stops being an occasional accident and becomes corporate policy, cover your ass.

Stupidity, when indulged, can be even more destructive than willed evil. Evil is at least usually organized. Who the hell needs malice when you have poor planning, bad management, and ridiculous decisions? When these have become the trademark of an individual, company, or presidency, stupidity has reached critical mass. Try not to be there when it blows up.

2007-06-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

Animal Husbandry for Sociopaths

We've all heard about Mitt Romney's carefully planned strategy for taking his dog on a 12-hour highway drive in the punishing sun and heat of summertime.

Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.[snip]

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ''Dad!'' he yelled. ''Gross!'' A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.

I think we should jam old Mitt naked into a carrier in the same conditions and take the same roadtrip. With a camera to broadcast his distress.

Deliberately abusing animals does not, I repeat NOT, make you a cool, unemotional decision-maker. It makes you a vicious jerk, and it's good evidence that you're a sociopath. Mitt Romney joins Dr. James Dobson in my gallery of dangerous religious-right power-seekers.

What did Dobson do that was so dreadful? Let's just say he over-reacted when his dog didn't go to bed on command:

I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me "reason" with Mr. Freud.

What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!

He takes that approach to child-rearing, too, except he thinks that kids need to be treated with even greater severity than small dogs.

One proof of intelligent design is that Dobson and Romney, similar as they are, are nevertheless not cooperating on this election. As Amy Sullivan explains, Christian Fundamentalists regard Romney's Mormon faith as a dangerous cult. Long may their intolerance last.

2007-06-08T17:22:00.000-07:00

The Dying Gaul, Explained

2007-06-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

I Confess

I have fallen prey to the cat macro fad.

I've forgotten where I got this picture; caption and Photoshop all mine.

Since I got back from WisCon, I've been trying to catch up with work, sleep, life . . . all of which has left me wiped out enough that I spent several hours this weekend looking at cat macros.

Alan Bostick provided the caption. Lavendertook provided the cat and photo.

Lolbots.

Lolpresidents.

Lolpoker and Lolcasinos are for sale. Just in time for the WSOP!

Loltheorists.

Theolologians.

Philolsophers.

More philolsophers.

Lolgeeks.

Lolhistory. Including a LolSuffragist.

Lolgays. Not actually funny.

Lolcode.

And Laughing Squid with a few I missed.

The immorally funny self-macroing cats. Includes Craigslist personals!

And here's Jimmy Hoffa, Lolteamster.

2007-05-15T11:12:00.000-07:00

Good Night, Reverend Falwell

Isaiah, chapter 40

1 Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.
2 Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the LORD's hand double for all her sins.
3 ¶ The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
4 Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:
5 and the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.
6 ¶ The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:
7 the grass withereth, the flower fadeth; because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.
8 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
9 ¶ O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!
10 Behold, the Lord GOD will come with strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him: behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him.
11 He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.

2007-04-25T19:16:00.000-07:00

POLITICS: From Her Lips to God's Ear

Laura Bush made an announcement this morning on the Today Show: "No one suffers more than their President and I do."

No one? Not the kids whose parents have been killed, or the parents whose children have been killed or maimed? Not the double amputee vet shaking from nightmares in a rat-infested VA hospital room? Not the Iraqis whose homes, lives, and country have been crushed into bleeding fragments?

Remember, this is the draft-dodging frat boy who has taken more vacation days than Ronald Reagan -- who has, in fact, spent more than a year of his Presidency on vacation.

Has he even missed a meal?

Thanks to Alan Bostick of As I Please for the link.

2007-04-10T20:26:00.001-07:00

REVIEW: All the Songs of Heroes

Disclaimers: Unlike many of my readers, I did not know the late John Milo “Mike” Ford. I first encountered his work in Neil Gaiman’s blog and in his inimitable contributions to Making Light. If he ever posted to any of the Usenet groups I used to frequent, it’s so long ago that I don’t recall it.

When, several years ago, I picked up The Dragon Waiting, I didn’t even realize that the John M. Ford was the Mike Ford who was so often mentioned by my friends in fandom, nor that he was Elise’s “dear Mr. Ford.” The book looked interesting, and it was on the fiction shelves of Alan and Debbie—a sure guarantee of literary quality.

I devoured it—gulped it down, and read as much of his work as I could find in the succeeding weeks. It was subtle, brilliant, complex, and humane. I wished I could meet an author capable of writing such a dazzling novel in his mid-twenties. Our one chance was spoiled when he broke his foot just before he and Elise were to meet Alan and me in Las Vegas.

Literary criticism can be a touchy business, especially when the late author is widely known and loved. But criticism is the wrong word here; I’ll leave that to Derrida and nagging parents. Call it literary commentary. Worse, this commentary is not even a broad survey by an expert in the field or a definitive summing-up of a career. It’s a brief look at a single facet of a highly complex oeuvre. Death in the work of Mike Ford.

Mike Ford died young, and he spent four-fifths of his life dealing with chronic illness. From age 11 on, he had severe Type I diabetes. Eventually it wrecked his kidneys; a transplant gave him six extra years of life. Many of the people who knew and loved him say he lived a good ten years beyond what he expected, and they all credit his longterm partner Elise for saving his life. (alanbostick also says his writing was just the icing on the cake—that knowing him was even more rewarding than reading him.) Mike would have been fifty years old today.

I returned to Mike Ford’s work because I’ve been trying to whip up a certain rage at encroaching death. If I could feel it on his behalf, maybe I could learn to feel it for myself. Things did not work out that way. I found something infinitely more precious and joyful there.

WARNING: spoilers for The Dragon Waiting, How Much for Just the Planet?, Heat of Fusion and Other Stories

The Dragon Waiting, a subtle, brilliant alternate history, offers a plausible solution to the mystery of the Princes in the Tower. The divergences from history start with the existence of vampires. Instead of dying young, the Emperor Julian the Apostate became a vampire and survived long enough to bring back paganism, which resulted in a cascade of changes: Christianity is a minority religion, and Byzantium still rules most of Europe.

All vampire stories play with death. Ford’s play is both explicit and implicit.Explicitly, his vampires are individuals confronting the ugly realities: some gladly surrender their humanity and revel in bloodlust; others build relationships where occasional blood feeding is a gift for the family vampire, who otherwise subsists on animal blood alone; others confine themselves to animals and perhaps dying soldiers on a battlefield. One spends much of the book close to suicide; he keeps facing the terror of living (almost) forever. Incidentally, the vampire subplots are blessedly free from morbid romanticism; Ford’s chief vampire is an engineer.

The implicit playing with death is more subtle and almost lost in the conventions of alternate history. But Mike Ford not only works through the changes of history that his hypothetical situation entails, he also grants Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, a life that does not end on the scaffold—and the kind of lover he deserved. Rivers, a scholar and parfit gentle knight, may have been the only sympathetic Woodville. He was certainly the most literate of them.

The textual complexities of The Dragon Waiting are not an adequate preparation for How Much for Just the Planet? Nothing short of a PhD in popular culture and a large canister of nitrous oxide could possibly prepare the reader for this book. Try to imagine a Star Trek novel that starts with an inflatable rubber spaceship. Or one that combines the French farce of Georges Feydeau and the hometown nostalgia of Ray Bradbury. Or one that simultaneously riffs off Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, The Maltese Falcon, and half a dozen other cultural icons. Or one that finishes, as Dr. Strangelove was supposed to, with a cream-pie fight and the end of the world as we know it.

Now try to think of them all at once.

That’s the magnificently silly gift Mike Ford gave us in How Much for Just the Planet? I can’t compare it to any other Star Trek novel, because I’ve never read any other Star Trek novels. If they’re all this good, I have to catch up on some reading. But I doubt it. Very few writers of any genre are as skilled, inventive, playful, and profoundly humane as the author of this romp.

Also smart. He must have had a mind crammed with trivia and a library full of obscure and fascinating books and movies. Even as I laughed over allusions to “Peppermint Soda” and “Animal House,” I knew I must be missing a dozen allusions to every one I got—an experience positively Silverlockian. Clearly he was having fun: several well-known SF authors appear as characters, and he plays endlessly with the conventions of the genre.

How Much for Just the Planet? is a relatively early book, but its splendid foolery contains a key to the rest of the novelist and poet’s work. The settlers of a small, beautiful planet have made the place home, despite being there only one generation. Unfortunately, their planet has enormous dilithium reserves, which the Klingons and the Federation both need. And so our hero plots his roaring farce, recruits almost everyone else on the planet to participate in Plan C, and plays ringmaster to the comedy that greets the inevitable invasion of dilithium seekers.

He knew the life he loved couldn’t last. So he greeted the end of that life with a pie in the face.

The stories and poems in Heat of Fusion and Other Stories deal variously with death. In the title story, a scientist in a post-apocalyptic world is dying of radiation poisoning. The government urges him to write down his notes on the fusion experiments to create a new bomb, but he has arranged that any successful fusion will destroy the lab and everyone near it—including himself. His last words are “light. triumph”—an extraordinary greeting for death.

“Shelter from the Storm” returns to themes and tropes familiar from How Much for Just the Planet? A small planet, caught at a moment of vulnerability, must defend itself against attack by overwhelming forces. It’s classic hard SF, but it’s also a nuanced, tender love song to a home, a long life, a marriage, and a family Ford knew he would never live to have. The protagonist, Marshall Kinbote, is married to a calm and beautiful woman. “I would have been dead without Elise thirty years ago. Even if my body continued to breathe, I would have been dead.”

Knowing they cannot win in straightforward battle, Kinbote discovers that his daughter’s fiancé has been trained in a kind of guerrilla warfare: carefully targeted sabotage that so disrupts the plans of the attacking enemy that they must give up the attempt. The fiancé explains that he has been shaped into something like a werewolf—and warns the daughter that only someone who loves the werewolf can ultimately slay him.

“Dateline: Colonus” brings Oedipus to small-town America, where he and his daughters stop at a roadside café run by the Kindly Ones, Theseus is sheriff, and the self-blinded old man is able to end his life in peace, leaving great blessings for the place where he dies.

“Dark Sea,” one of the long poems in Heat of Fusion, sends an ancient Greek poet into space with modern Stellar-Namers and Readers of Earth. And in that poem, Ford states his lifelong theme clearly—though with characteristic doubleness. “All the songs of heroes are songs of Death.” All the songs sung by heroes, all the songs sung about heroes. “We sing because we die; the song goes on.”

Mike Ford was a hero. All his life he saw the dragon waiting, and he teased it, played with it, danced with it, told it stories, and pulled rabbits out of hats to entertain it. When he finally mounted it and rode away, he was kind enough to leave us some poems and stories to amuse us while we wait our turn.

2007-03-20T22:41:00.000-07:00

Women with PTSD: The New Sex Symbol?

Laurie and Debbie at Body Impolitic ask: Is PTSD Sexy? The context is the sexualized, Madonna/whore photographs accompanying a fine, thoughtful New York Times article on PTSD in women soldiers.

My answer to their question:

Of course women with PTSD are sexy.[1] They're damsels in distress. The classic damsel in distress is being held prisoner by a monster (usually male, but sometimes an older, sexually rapacious/repressive female), and the first thing the rescuer does is take the monster's place in her affections, then in her bed. Stockholm Syndrome in action.

Women with PTSD are scared, they're helpless, they're easy to comfort/victimize.And nobody will believe them if they say they didn't want sex, because they're already defined as crazy.

Yes, genuine nurturing and protective instincts can be expressed sexually -- by people of all genders and in all life situations. I've been known to grow rapidly attached to people in pain. I've sought and given comfort with my body. And I'm not even willing to say that all the times I did that were innocent and harmless.

I don't know what the right answer is. I do know that presenting people with PTSD as pin-ups is the wrong one.

[1] For the record: I have complex PTSD, which I have written about extensively.

2007-03-13T20:12:00.001-07:00

We Have a Winner!

Julie Phillips’s powerful biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr., has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography—a signal honor, and one thoroughly deserved.

I scrolled back through the winners, and it looks like this is the first SF-related book to win in any category. It’s possible some of the collections of criticism addressed SF, so I can’t be too dogmatic about that statement. Given the prestige of the National Book Critics Circle, I’m hoping this award is a portent of things to come.

2007-03-09T12:42:00.000-08:00

The Freedom of the Mind, The Cost of Alzheimers

"There is only one freedom of any importance: freedom of the mind." The late Iris Murdoch said that before she was attacked by Alzheimers disease.

I know another literate, liberal, original woman whose mind is slowly being destroyed by Alzheimers: Michele's mother Shelley. I was lucky enough to meet Shelley when she was fully herself, and she was extraordinarily kind to me in circumstances when kindness was the greatest possible gift. Now she is still kind, but confused and desperately confabulating to try to explain the inexplicable world she is lost in.

I mourn the loss of her brilliance and wit. I grieve for her husband and daughters, who are watching helplessly as she fades. And I will give what I can to help. For the sake of Shelley, who may well die before a cure. For the sake of the next generation, for those of us who may carry the genes that will take our minds long before our bodies surrender.

Five or ten or a hundred dollars--will I remember in a year what I did with that money? But it will make a difference to the Alzheimers Foundation. They'll use it to fund research, education, and support for Alzheimers victims and their families and caregivers.

You can help too.

2007-03-06T20:40:00.001-08:00

IN MEMORIAM: Jean Baudrillard (June 20, 1929 - March 6, 2007)

Quotes by the late Jean Baudrillard

Psychology
It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn’t like jam if it didn’t, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn’t like truth if it wasn’t sticky, if, from time to time, it didn’t ooze blood.

One of life’s primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn’t hide too well. You mustn’t be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself.

The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.

If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.

Depressed moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Information
Information...exhausts itself in the staging of meaning...[and leads] not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy.

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.

Post-modern life
We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

If everything on television is, without exception, part of a low-calorie (or even no-calorie) diet, then what good is it complaining about the adverts? By their worthlessness, they at least help to make the programmes around them seem of a higher level.

It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video game...All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us – and this itself is a superstition.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It’s the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

Love
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.

There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other’s heart.

Analogies

The surprises of thought are like those of love: they wear out. But here too you can carry on for a long time doing your conjugal duty.

Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.

Every woman is like a timezone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.

Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.

Politics and the US
The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

Paradox: all bombs are clean—their only pollution is the system of control and security they radiate when they are not detonated.

In order to function, capitalism needs to dominate nature, to domesticate sexuality, to rationalize language as a means of communication, to relegate ethnic groups, women, children and youth to genocide, ethnocide and racial discrimination.

Mistakes, scandals, and failures no longer signal catastrophe. The crucial thing is that they be made credible, and that the public be made aware of the efforts being expended in that direction. The “marketing” immunity of governments is similar to that of the major brands of washing powder.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

Language
Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Aphorisms
Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.

There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.

The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.

Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.

The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.

The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.

In days gone by, we were afraid of dying in dishonor or a state of sin. Nowadays, we are afraid of dying fools. Now the fact is that there is no Extreme Unction to absolve us of foolishness. We endure it here on earth as subjective eternity.

Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude.

Something in all men profoundly rejoices in seeing a car burn.

Selections from “War Porn”
Selections from
War Porn

The New World Order will be both consensual and televisual. That is indeed why the targeted bombings carefully avoided the Iraqi television antennae...The crucial stake, the decisive stake in this whole affair is the consensual reduction of Islam to the global order.

[On the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib] These scenes are the illustration of a power which, reaching its extreme point, no longer knows what to do with itself – a power henceforth without aim, without purpose, without a plausible enemy, and in total impunity. It is only capable of inflicting gratuitous humiliation and, as one knows, violence inflicted on others is after all only an expression of the violence inflicted on oneself. It only manages to humiliate itself, degrade itself and go back on its own word in a sort of unremitting perversity. The ignominy, the vileness is the ultimate symptom of a power that no longer knows what to do with itself.

These images are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. Nevertheless, America in itself is not on trial, and it is useless to charge the Americans: the infernal machine exploded in literally suicidal acts. In fact, the Americans have been overtaken by their own power. They do not have the means to control it. And now we are part of this power. The bad conscience of the entire West is crystallized in these images. The whole West is contained in the burst of the sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies; this is what they are full of: the excessiveness of a power designating itself as abject and pornographic.

This masquerade crowns the ignominy of the war – until this travesty, it was present in this most ferocious image (the most ferocious for America), because it was most ghostly and most “reversible”: the prisoner threatened with electrocution and, completely hooded, like a member of the Ku Klux Klan, crucified by its ilk. It is really America that has electrocuted itself.

2007-02-21T16:19:00.000-08:00

IN MEMORIAM: W. H. Auden

A hundred years ago today, one of my favorite poets was born: a splendid fat bugger who, once he became famous, wore carpet slippers everywhere—even with a tuxedo. He loved words and landscape, gave generously in support of the Catholic Worker, and reconverted to Anglicanism as an adult. His friends ranged from Dorothy Day to Christopher Isherwood to Gypsy Rose Lee. His essays and poems were formative for me, and I still love them.

In his own words in honor of another dead poet,

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Events for the Auden centenary

Let us lift a glass in honor of W.H. Auden, Christian and queer and poet.

2007-02-15T14:45:00.000-08:00

Pleasures

Some things I love, and what to do with/to/about them:

Independent bookstores: Buy some SF from Dream Haven Books, which was recently robbed and trashed by complete idiots.

The Bay Area: Celebrate Valentine’s Day with a pillow fight.

Life: Love things, and people, and places. Animals, too, they’re very important, and also trees, the sun and moon, the smell of good earth, and art in all its manifestations. Love them hard. Love them even when you want to strangle them or pitch them into the bin or set fire to them. Love them anyway.

Science: Badges Badges Badges! I’ve earned these: rejected by the New Yorker (But with an encouraging note from Roger Angell!); gladly will kick sexual harassers’ asses; and experienced with electrical shock, LEVEL II, In which the recipient has had experience with the electrical shocking of a human.

Gorgeous fat women: In Heather's Name - Love your body.

Baseball: Pitchers and catchers, report to spring training!

2007-02-08T16:41:00.002-08:00

Alternate History

After almost ten years of marriage, three kids, and a couple of moves, Diane is coming into her own. She and her husband Chris (not to be confused with her sister Chris) have built a good life, and they’re finally buying a house. I still can’t understand how churches can exist without a parsonage, but I’m old-fashioned that way.

The wedding was beautiful, of course, and so was Diane when she announced her first pregnancy only a year later. We were all worried about the medical issues of pregnancy. The newer allergy and asthma meds helped a lot; Diane’s asthma is of the dangerous kind, but she has it pretty well under control most of the time now.

So is her depression. She is still in therapy, but with a decent antidepressant and good emotional support from her family and friends, she’s doing a lot better. She talks with honesty and passion about the importance of getting psychological help for Christians with mental illnesses—“none of this bullshit about how good Christians don’t get depressed.” She had one bad spell of post-partum depression, but Chris (her sister) talked her into getting help fast. That was right after 9/11, which hit Diane hard: she spent the last weeks of her second pregnancy glued to the TV watching the disaster. Several of her church members were in the Pentagon; one was badly injured. And Diane still worries about the effect of the stress hormones and her depression on Elizabeth, a dark, quiet girl who looks a lot like her father.

Once the kids were in school and her younger siblings fairly well launched, Diane started writing seriously. She always wrote—she has a trunkful of old romance manuscripts scribbled while she rode the bus to school or waited in doctors’ offices—but now she has more time to devote to her work. Until her mid-twenties she concentrated on historical romances, but now she is working on grand family sagas: not just brooding men and passionate women, but the ways that families influence each other over the generations. She’s good and getting better. The most recent project is one based on her own family history, since she’s gotten very interested in genealogy. She’s been putting a lot of her faith in her books, but she’s considerably closer to Susan Howatch than to Grace Livingston Hill.

Although she writes under a pseudonym, the people in her church know she’s an author. Luckily, her husband Chris’s congregation is well-educated and liberal. There have been some stresses there—being a minister’s wife is not easy—but Diane’s charm and her musical talent have helped in her ministry. (And I admit it, her dogmatism and stubbornness have sometimes been an issue there.)

Of course she’s still singing. There was some talk a few years ago about her church’s praise band cutting a record, but it would be only for local distribution. I haven’t heard anything about that in a while.

She bought season tickets to the Orioles when she got her first book published. We also gave her a huge party. Every year after the World Series, she and I get on the phone and review the whole baseball season. It takes a few hours, but it’s a great tradition. She and I are planning to meet up this year at Cooperstown for Cal Ripken’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. She bubbles with all the old enthusiasm when she talks about the Orioles.

At 32 she’s still as skinny as a teenager. During her pregnancies she looked like a straw that had swallowed an olive. She started teaching her kids baseball and basketball when they were tiny. Now they play with their cousin Jessica and with all the other cousins. Maybe next year they’ll come to visit me in California.

This is not about grief. This is about loss.

Diane Michelle Thompson
July 10, 1974 – February 8, 1997

2007-02-05T06:22:00.002-08:00

Cahiers du Cinema, Eat Your Heart Out

Here's the list of Best Picture nominees from 1970 to 2005. Boldface indicates the the ones I've seen. Italics the ones I'm interested in seeing sometime.

Until the mid-1970s, I saw very few movies in a theatre. Too far (35 miles), too expensive. So most of the early ones I saw years after they were made, usually on TV or in a revival house.

1970
Patton. What can you say about a 60-year-old general who died?

Airport What an you say about Helen Hayes stowing away on an airplane that partly blows up? That it's a remarkably suspenseful popcorn movie. That the parody is even better. And don't call me Shirley.

Five Easy Pieces. I don't ever remember seeing the whole thing, though I have seen the toast scene, I shy away from Jack Nicholson movies because (A) he looks a lot like my father, and (B) he keeps playing my father (particularly in one Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the Shining)

Love Story When I was 11, I thought this was a great movie. I still like the color of Ryan O'Neal's blue shirt.

MASH Loved the TV show. The movie is superior in some ways -- Robert Duvall's Frank Burns, for example, is a far more complex and powerful figure than the silly Larry Linville ineffectual prick. However, the repeated sexual humiliations of Major Houlihan are genuinely nasty, nasty enough to make me lose sympathy for Hawkeye and Trapper John.

1971
The French Connection The first time I was ever aware of a great chase scene was when I saw this one on TV.

A Clockwork Orange. Have not ever seen it. Having seen Brazil and Closetland, I don't know if I need to.

Fiddler on the Roof. I know all the songs, I've read the original stories, but never saw the movie.

The Last Picture Show. Waiting until after I read the book.

Nicholas and Alexandra. I've read the book -- in fact, a number of books, including Robert Massie's fascinating followup volume, which traces the DNA identification of the bodies. Have never seen the film, but I might put it on my Netflix queue.

1972
The Godfather. I always refused to see this on grounds of violence. Sometime in t997 or 1998, I caught a glimpse of an early scene (Michael Corleone sitting at a desk) while flipping through cable channels. I did not move or breathe until the film was over. A work of genius.

Cabaret. Another work of genius, although I once saw a stage version that was even better at Villanova in the mid-1970s.

Deliverance. They always set these things in the south. But I wouldn't go canoeing with city boys through the Pennsylvania mountains where I grew up.

Sounder.Really lovely, and Cicely Tyson did a tremendous job.

The Emigrants. I never even heard of this one.

1973
The Sting Fabulous: tightly plotted, brilliant ensemble acting, witty dialogue. I watched it again recently on DVD, and it holds up. I first saw it on TV in about 1980.

American Graffiti Nostalgia for a kind of life I never lived and never cared about. I found it unbearably dull. The MAD Magazine parody reveals that the mysterious blonde in the convertible is... Ringo Starr.

The Exorcist. Thanks, but no thanks. The book was just dreadful.

A Touch of Class. I do like Glenda Jackson, but I never saw this.

Cries and Whispers. Extraordinary, subtle, powerful. Watched this in my Bergman class, where we saw two Swedish films a week in the big college auditorium. By the end of the semester I could understand spoken Swedish fairly well, as long as the topic was blood, death, berries, or chess games.

1974
The Godfather, Part II Naturally, I hunted this up as soon as I'd become entranced with the first one. Again, utterly brilliant. Do watch The Freshman when you're on a Godfather bender; Marlon Brando's performance was so good that the Godfather studio wanted to sue him for copyright infringement. It's sweet and funny and tender.

Chinatown Deeply disturbing, cynical, very fine film, I saw this in a late-night series of incredibly freaking depressing movies at a dollar theater when I was living in a rat-infested apartment in West Philly. (Between Mantua and Powelton Village, to be exact.)

The Conversation Gene Hackman could not be more different in this than he was in The French Connection. Exceedingly dark, paranoid film.

Lenny You know, every movie from this year is more depressing than the next. Nevertheless, Lenny is worth watching -- biting wit and the disintegration of a great performer. Dustin Hoffman is a genius.

The Towering Inferno Enjoyable tripe. Not too enjoyable when a real skyscraper went up in flames, and some newspapers showed pictures of people jumping to their deaths. After 9/11, I don't know if I could watch this.

1975
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Vicious, scary, anti-authoritarian, misogynistic, and not as good as the book. I freaked out completely when I saw it, and I doubt I will ever watch it again. Also, I do get tired of the Woman as Evil Enforcer stereotype. For a much more complex and interesting Kesey book, try Sometimes a Great Notion.

Barry Lyndon Just lovely. A slow, ravishingly pretty film that misses all the satiric humor of Thackeray's work.

Dog Day Afternoon. One of the few Pacino films I haven't seen.

Jaws. I saw this at Ocean City, NJ, when I was there for the annual YFC convention. (YFC is Youth for Christ; somewhere I have a trophy for being a champion Bible quizzer.) My companion took a water pistol and shot random people at the scariest moments. I'm surprised nobody died -- or killed him.

Nashville. Anoher great, complex Robert Altman movie. Lily Tomlin is particularly good.

1976
Rocky. A classic boxing movie: sweet, blue-collar tough, a bit sentimental. I've been known to watch it just for the Philadelphia scenery. (Ditto Trading Places.)

All the President's Men One of the best political thrillers ever made, and it's all true. Again, a sterling ensemble cast, flawless detailing of the newsroom, and the good guys win. That's guilty, guilty, guilty! Going to see this in a movie theater was my high school graduation gift.

Bound for Glory Strong, sad, beautiful. Great double feature with Alice's Restaurant.

Network I recently saw this again on DVD, and my God, it's good. Great performances in one of the most intelligent scripts ever produced: terrifyingly prescient and a great series of rants. However, I suspect Paddy Chayefsky is writhing in Purgatory now, watching Fox use this movie as a fucking business plan.

Taxi Driver Another film I saw in the midnight dollar movie series. A great DeNiro performance. He seems to be channeling my psychotic father. I never want to see this again, thanks.

1977
Annie Hall When I saw this with Walter, the summer it came out. I was under the impression that being into leather meant making purses and wallets. Still a favorite, and a film that speaks to me of a very specific time of my life. Don't miss Christopher Walken as Duane, Annie's brother. "I'm due back on Planet Earth."

The Goodbye Girl Moderately amusing.

Julia So we know now that this was plagiarized. Still a good movie.

Star Wars I went to see this to celebrate my 18th birthday. Fun at the time -- I loved Princess Leia, and I still cherish an affection for Carrie Fisher's acerbic tongue and spectacular breasts. Han Solo definitely did it for me, too. But the film, seen now, is too *directive*. Heavy-handed. But I cannot forget the freshness and delight of seeing it the first time.

The Turning Point Yeah, well, you can't have everything.

1978
The Deer Hunter. Some movies I know are going to be too triggering.

Coming Home. Not bad, really.

Heaven Can Wait This is still a favorite. A sweet, funny movie with sparkling dialogue and a great cast, including James Mason as Mr. Jordan, Buck Henry as the bumbling escort who removes Warren Beatty from his body too early, and Julie Christie luminous despite a dreadful perm. Dyan Cannon and Charles Grodin are perfect as the treacherous wife and secretary seeking to kill off her millionaire husband. I still quote lines from this one: "If he weren't going to be dead soon, he'd need years of psychiatric help."

Midnight Express Oh Christ. Certain scenes from this actually came up in therapy with me just yesterday. In 1978 I doubt that anyone used the word "triggering" to refer to the effects of PTSD. In fact, PTSD was still "shell shock." I was shell-shocked and thrown into very, very serious PTSD mode by this movie. Moreover, I hadn't seen enough movies at that point to know how devastating a violent film would be to me. (Many of the more violent films in this Oscar list I didn't see until later; even if I don't mention it, you can rest assured that movies like Taxi Driver had an overwhelming effect on me.)

An Unmarried Woman Asinine Michael Murphy dumps Jill Clayburgh, who promptly finds a great little apartment, a job at an art gallery, and love with Alan Bates. What's not fun about divorce?

1979
Kramer vs. Kramer I love Dustin Hoffman. He's an unswerving craftsman, an actor's actor, and I also find him hot. But yeesh! I generally refer to this as Kramer versus Whiner.

Apocalypse Now. Yeah, well. Great movie, spectacular nervous breakdown.

All That Jazz Far, far better than Cabaret, IMO. Dark, wry, witty, unsparing. Someday I want to have a New Year's Eve Bob Fosse festival: Cabaret, All That Jazz, Chicago... now that's the way to start the New Year!

Breaking Away. A pleasant bildungsroman, or possibly bicycleroman.

Norma Rae Sally Field does a powerhouse job in his based-on-a-true-story union movie. Unfortunately, the scriptwriters had to make her fall in love (and bed) with the New York labor organizer who radicalizes her. Not everybody thinks with her crotch. Still a wonderful movie.

1980
Ordinary People Brought the Pachelbel Canon back into favor. Based on the book from Doubleday -- the only book they published from the slushpile from 1945 until they said the hell with it and ceased accepting over-the-transom submissions. Oh, and there's a little family guilt and drama there.

Coal Miner's Daughter. I do want to see this one -- so far I've only seen fragments.

The Elephant Man I haven't even seen fragments of this.

Raging Bull So personally painful that I got up in the middle (during one of the arguments with his wife), went out, threw up, and then returned to watch the rest. Once was enough.

Tess Nastassia Kinski is compelling, although I'm not sure why Roman Polanski needed a 15-year-old to play the role. (Wanted? Well, that's different.) Gorgeous, mostly faithful to the book, including the terrifying scene toward the end.

1981
Chariots of Fire Nice popcorn film. The religious young man who wouldn't run on Sunday became a missionary and died in an internment camp in China during WWII.

Atlantic City Louis Malle made gorgeous movies, and I am a sucker for a pretty picture. Atmospheric and astonishing.

On Golden Pond My feelings about it when I first saw it were dismissive, although the stars are always watchable. I'm 25 years older now, and I might see it differently.

Raiders of the Lost Ark Endlessly watchable. This is a great *movie movie* and a real favorite.

Reds This is another kind of great movie. I was annoyed that the witnesses weren't identified -- I wanted to know who they are! I bet this has been remedied on DVD.

1982
Gandhi. Somehow I never managed to see this one.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial The beginning of the end for Steven Spielberg. Predictable, manipulative tripe.

Missing. I'd like to see it, although it would be difficult.

Tootsie One of the very best movies ever made. I can quote the whole thing.

The Verdict Good, tense, exciting newspaper movie.

1983
Terms of Endearment. You know, i never saw this. I don't care how often Shirley Maclaine dies. She's just going to come back again.

The Big Chill Oh my. Very good movie, although most people think it's a comedy. I think it's a tragedy. Kevin Costner played the corpse.

The Dresser. Wow -- very powerful, tight little film about a stage actor and his dresser. Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay in a tense, loving, painful professional marriage.

The Right Stuff Fun and exciting, but nowhere near as good as the book.

Tender Mercies This is what they call a "little" picture. No car chases, no naked love scenes, no flash-cut tenth-of-a-second scenes. Just a small story about a man trying to redeem himself. Robert Duvall subtly conveys a huge emotional range. Because of the ending, I may never be able to watch this again. But I loved this movie.

1984
Amadeus I saw this as a play on Broadway with Ian McKellen as Salieri and Simon Callow as Mozart. I would not have thought the film could equal it -- but it does different things, and Tom Hulce (AKA Pinto from Animal House) carries Mozart quite well. Someday I have to write a long review about this film. It is very dear to my heart.

The Killing Fields. By this time, I knew what not to watch, thanks.

A Passage to India Lovely and scenic. Nice costumes. Evokes a world where the mores are quite different, so the plot makes more sense to people who don't understand the cultural shifts between then and now. But I still prefer Forster's prose.

Places in the Heart Billy and I went to see this movie twice when we were engaged. If the material weren't handled so deftly, and by such fine actors, it would be over-the-top sentimental. But somehow it isn't -- or maybe I was seduced by the luminous cinematography or the story of the plucky widow desperate to save her farm. Look for John Malkovitch in a rare sympathetic and non-psychotic role. This may have been Danny Glover's first film role.

A Soldier's Story Race relations in the military -- strong, well-acted.

1985
Out of Africa A very pretty picture. It's more about Karen Blixen, however, than a film of her book. Sigh. The book Out of Africa is tremendously important to me, and it hasn't been filmed.

The Color Purple. I refuse to see this. Dammit, they were dykes, and the manipulative gutless bastard Spielberg censored that. I refuse to go see him turning complex, meaningful stories into Disneyfied puppet shows.

Kiss of the Spider Woman I'd like to see this. During my marriage, I never saw prison movies, as they were triggering to my husband.

Prizzi's Honor Damn, Anjelica Huston is good. Kathleen Turner and Jack Nicholson are suitably professional as hitpeople for the Mob. Now this is romance.

Witness When I saw this movie, I was living in Connecticut. Peter Weir (whom I'd loved since I first saw Picnic at Hanging Rock) saw my state so closely, so tenderly, that I could almost smell it. Great score. Great cast. Great moral lesson. This is a very, very fine movie.

1986
Platoon. Really, war stories are a problem for me.

Children of a Lesser God Not too bad, as I recall.

Hannah and Her Sisters A wonderful Woody Allen movie, one of my favorites of his.

The Mission Robert DeNiro and Jeremy Irons, adventurer and priest, in 18th-century South America. A richly textured tragedy dealing with slavery, religion, murder, and redemption. Powerful film with every word, every shot, every note of music in place.

A Room with a View More exquisitely respectful costume drama.

1987
The Last Emperor Exquisitely respectful costume drama set in China, for a change. It is a good movie, though.

Broadcast News Funny, tough-minded, sometimes painful. Holly Hunter is a news producer, Albert Brooks the acerbic reporter, and William Hurt the handsome, nice, but slow-witted anchorman. Watch for Joan Cusack delivering a tape at the last minute. There's a scene here that actually happened to me.

Fatal Attraction. No thanks. Anyone who fucks up Michael Douglass's life of whiny entitlement and white male het privilege is OK by me.

Hope and Glory "Thank you, Adolf!" London during the Blitz, as seen by schoolboys,

Moonstruck Another huge favorite. At the time, I thought Broadcast News would stick more in my mind, but the joys and woes of the Castorini family are still very close to my heart after all these years. Spectacular cast, with the 46-year-old Cher playing opposite 23-year-old Nicholas Cage. So many wonderful moments I can't tell them all -- from the elderly grandfather urging his dogs to howl at the moon to the miracle of the fiance's mother rising from her deathbed. ("She began to cook for everyone in the house. She ate a meal that could choke a pig.")

1988
Rain Man Not too bad. Dustin Hoffman doing his usual fully inhabited performance. Tom Cruise is an attractive placeholder.

The Accidental Tourist I should put this in my Netflix queue.

Dangerous Liaisons Costume drama, but not precisely respectful. John Malkovitch playing elegant evil. Ditto Glenn Close.

Mississippi Burning Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as FBI agents investigating the deaths of civil rights workers. Alan Parker presents the usual buddy cop dynamic between hotheaded Hackman and by-the-book Dafoe. What makes this film great is the imagery of dusty, hopeless towns, churches flaring like torches, defeated women, venomous-eyed killers, and frightened, determined Black families.

Working Girl Melanie Griffith makes me itch. So does the setup here, in which upper-class stereotype Sigourney Weaver shafts her working-class assistant who is trying to climb out of her limited background to become a corporate arbitrageur. (Arbitrageuse?) However, this film passes the Bechdel test. It has Joan Cusack as Melanie's gutsy friend. It has Harrison Ford behaving tenderly and incidentally taking his shirt off. The opening credits present a stirring and beautiful theme song over a swoopy aerial trip from Staten Island to the Financial District (encompassing a heart-breaking view of the Statute of Liberty and the late World Trade Center). So yeah, despite everything I like this movie a lot.

1989
Driving Miss Daisy Morgan Freeman as a magic Negro. The indomitable Jessica Tandy as an indomitable old lady trapped in Southern gentility. Dan Ackroyd as her son. Sentimental but powerful.

Born on the Fourth of July. No need to see it, thanks.

Dead Poets Society. My least favorite Peter Weir film until The Truman Show. I haven't watched it since I saw it in the theater. Gorgeously photographed in elegiac style.

Field of Dreams This is what Kevin Costner is good for. How can you not love this movie? It makes me cry. It has baseball. And last I heard, the cornfield where it was shot was still a shrine and tourist attraction.

My Left Foot I'd like to see this. Daniel Day-Lewis is quite an actor.

1990
Dances With Wolves As they say at Wiscon, there's an entire genre of "what these people need is a honky." Beautifully photographed, at least.

Awakenings Why in the name of God did they have to add a romance to this film? Read the book. Then read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

Ghost Gotta love the 1980s, when corporate raiders were the good guys. Contains possibly the most ridiculous love scene ever shown, assuming you've ever worked with clay. Nevertheless, it has some moving and some memorable moments, and Whoopie Goldberg rocks, as always. For a funnier, more insightful, far more heartrending view of grief, take a look at Anthony Minghella's Truly Madly Deeply, a British movie made the same year. The difference between Patrick Swayze and Alan Rickman is not just cosmetic, folks.

The Godfather, Part III I need a Godfather marathon. That's a DVD set I'd love to own.

Goodfellas Good, violent, honest mob picture.

1991
The Silence of the Lambs Reading the book was enough, although watching Anthony Hopkins do that voice on Inside the Actors Studio really makes me want to see it.

Beauty and the Beast A heroine who reads! A Disneyfication that enhances instead of destroys the story!

Bugsy Need to add this to my list of Las Vegas movies.

JFK My favorite line: "Do you mind if I smoke?" "Why would I mind?" Captures the 1960s in uncanny detail.

The Prince of Tides. Read the book.

1992
Unforgiven Powerful, disturbing, very well made western.

The Crying Game Haven't seen it, but I do know the secret.

A Few Good Men I've seen the trailers--isn't that enough?

Howards End Probably my favorite Merchant-Ivory film. As usual, the book is better, but here the rich visuals and elegiac pace suit the story. Vanessa Redgrave is extraordinary -- but my God, all the Redgraves are.

Scent of a Woman The other Al Pacino film I haven't seen.

1993
Schindler's List. I don't watch Spielberg movies even when they're about the Holocaust. Please note that this is a feel-good story about the Holocaust. The book is powerful and moving. I don't need to see the movie -- not even for Liam Neeson.

The Fugitive Great fun, with two appealing male leads and a suspenseful story.

In the Name of the Father. No prison movies during the marriage.

The Piano Strange, beautiful, painful, beautifully filmed.

The Remains of the Day I've read the book. I'd like to see two of my favorite actors in those claustrophobic roles.

1994
Forrest Gump I freaking hate this movie. When I first saw it, the tone seemed weirdly jumbled and inconsistent, and not because of the clever photoshopping. The events were telling a different story than the dialogue, the acting, and the reviews. Nobody seemed to notice the horror and tragedy and rage and satire. Then I read the book, which was much more consistent, disturbing, satirical, and gloomy. Ah, once again we make a feel-good tragedy.

Four Weddings and a Funeral This may be another feel-good tragedy. It's also a member of two other idiosyncratic groups: movies I like despite detesting one or both of the romantic leads, and movies I like despite the presence of Andie McDowell.

Let's face it, romantic leads are often dull or annoying. When Harry Met Sally has charming moments -- the old people talking about their marriages, for example, and the infamous deli scene -- and a superbly funny and subversive pair of second leads played by Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby. But Meg Ryan is one of the most consistently irritating big-screen presences, and Billy Crystal is somehow not at his best. The leads come off as shallow and boring, whereas the second leads are great fun.

Four Weddings and a Funeral has Hugh Grant fumbling through the male lead and Andie McDowell wooden and ladylike as a supposed sex-bomb American journalist. But it also has Simon Callow going over the top, Kristin Scott Thomas chic yet lonely, a secret gay couple, and a Deaf character actually played by a Deaf actor. I can put up with a lot for the sake of some of these attributes. Even Andie McDowell's wind-up doll line readings.

Andie McDowell was good in two movies that showcased her essential chill and weren't damaged by her inability to make her lines sound like natural dialogue. As the uptight gardener in Green Card, her defensive rigidity relaxed only when she was surrounded by plants. (That's a fabulous movie--why wasn't it nominated for Best Picture?) Moreover, her prissiness played beautifully opposite the Gerard Depardieu's sensual, earthy composer. She's pretty without being attractive; he's attractive without being pretty. Great combination.

She also did well in sex, lies, and videotape, where her character's defining characteristic is sexual frigidity. She's also surrounded by much better actors, including James Spader, whose sheer beauty is probably against the law, but who can also act and speak and move with naturalness.

Pulp Fiction Took me years to get around to this one; then I found that the violence was less triggering than I expected, because it was both impersonal and set in an appropriate moral universe. A redemption story of rare power.

Quiz Show I enjoyed this at the time, but I've felt no urge to see it again.

The Shawshank Redemption. Prison.

1995
Braveheart. Nice scenery.

Apollo 13. We watched the nonfiction series, and of course both of us vividly remembered the actual events.

Babe. Dunno why I haven't seen this -- I'd like to.

Il Postino. Ditto.

Sense and Sensibility. Ravishing. Almost (dare I say it?) better than the novel, because the youngest sister Margaret is a fully fleshed-out character. It's also nice to see Alan Rickman, for whom I've had a thing for years, in a sympathetic role.

1996
The English Patient. Need to get this on DVD. A magnificent motion picture. The book seemed unfilmable, but the movie translated it to the screen. Beautiful, painful, triumphant.

Fargo. The Coen Brothers take the archetype of the swag-bellied Southern sheriff and turn it upside down. So we get Marge Gundersen, a Minnesota sheriff in an advanced state of pregnancy, investigating a botched kidnapping. Bloody and bleak, it's still a very fine movie.

Jerry Maguire. I didn't get to see this at the time because I knew the financial themes would be distressing to my then-husband. (Yeah, I could have gone alone, but I didn't.)

Secrets & Lies Dunno why we didn't see this.

Shine. I didn't get to see this at the time because I knew the musical themes would be distressing to my then-husband. (He was a pianist accepted to Juillard; his parents refused to let him attend.) I think he was not in great shape that year, and I was avoiding anything that might be distressing. I spent a great deal of time protecting him.

1997
Titanic. In addition to a nifty computer reconstruction of the sinking, this movie has some spectacular imagery (the old couple lying in their cabin together, waiting for death as the water rises; the dead woman floating through the dining room; the custom dishes sliding off their shelves) and the single most trite, boring, obnoxious love story ever. It's also practically a cigarette ad. Kathy Bates is a lot more believable as Molly Brown than Debbie Reynolds was in The Unsinkable, etc. i was amused to see one image that also occurs in another film: when Kate Winslet is losing her virginity in a parked car below decks, all we see is her hand plastered against the rear window -- an image integral to the very different film Ghost Story.

As Good as It Gets. Jack Nicholson again. Also, he plays a crazy writer. Not giving the ex any fuel to use against me.

The Full Monty A lovely little movie. Subtitles help a lot, since I don't speak fluent Sheffield dialect.

Good Will Hunting. Way the hell oversimplified, but a good movie.

L.A. Confidential. Wow. Fast-paced, twisted, fascinating, and remarkably close to James Ellroy's dense noir book. Great movie.

1998
Shakespeare in Love. This is a favorite. I love William Shakespeare, I love Tom Stoppard, I loved the lively hen-cackling Elizabethan vigor of it, and I loved the gorgeous people and gorgeous costumes. Also, it's finally given Judi Dench her due as a powerful actress. And Shakespeare's hands were always ink-stained! I got all the lit-major jokes (I was the only person in the theater who cracked up when the vicious little kid said his name was John Webster). I would like someone to make a movie about John Donne with Joseph Fiennes playing the poet. There's actually a bit of resemblance, and my God he's good at playing writers. Incidentally, send some pennies to the National Portrait Gallery; they're trying to buy this treasure of a painting.

Elizabeth. Almost as historically inaccurate as Shakespeare in Love. They're both Tudor fanfic, but good movies. Cate Blanchett is amazing.

Life Is Beautiful. Not just prison, Nazi death camp. I think not.

Saving Private Ryan. I refuse to see this. Since it's Spielberg, I was readily able to predict the ending, and I really don't need the kind of extreme triggering I would endure if I watched the battle scenes.

The Thin Red Line. A war movie I might actually want to see, since it's by Terrence Mallick, who directed my favorite movie ever. (Days of Heaven, if you haven't been reading this journal for long.)

1999
American Beauty. I saw the trailers and dismissed this. It looked well-made (love Kevin Spacey) but shallow and silly. But the wise film connoisseur gave me a copy, and I found it ravishing. The surface shallowness gives way to a great deal of meaning, and the film is profoundly moving and beautiful.

The Sixth Sense. I walked out after 20 minutes, but not because the movie was bad. No, it was (A) incredibly powerful, and (B) very clear to me what the issue was. And I could not stand it. Way the hell triggering. I'd like to see it sometime on DVD, where I can control the viewing experience myself.

The Cider House Rules. Never got around to it.

The Green Mile. No, thanks.

The Insider. Never got around to this, either.

2000
Gladiator. Or this.

Chocolat. Lovely, although I prefer Alfred Molina when he's a touch more sympathetic.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Not my kink. I don't do martial arts movies. Yes, I know I'm missing an enormous cultural experience, but there is only so much time in the world.

Erin Brockovich. First movie I went to see by myself after I left my husband. I'm not a big Julia Roberts fan, but I love Albert Finney, and I enjoyed this movie a lot.

Traffic. I understand it's good. But is it worth seeing?

2001
A Beautiful Mind. Do you realize how much of my movie watching is affected by PTSD? There are some things it's just not wise for me to watch.

Gosford Park. Oh, lovely. Lovely. Even though I did work out whodunnit.

In the Bedroom. Somehow I missed this.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Magnificent. Heartbreaking. There are no words.

Moulin Rouge. An interesting experiment that didn't quite come off for me.

2002
Chicago. Fabulous, fabulous movie, and a good musical, too.

Gangs of New York. Unbearably bloody. Well-made, but yeesh.

The Hours. I started to watch this but it seemed far too self-consciously Lit'ry. Maybe I'll try it again some day. And what is up with the fake nose? Virginia Woolf was a beautiful woman.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers I think Andy Serkis should have won Best Actor for Gollum in this.

The Pianist. I spent two years researching Poland during World War II. I don't think I need to torture myself with this.

2003
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. This epic -- not three movies but one nine- or ten- or twelve-hour extravaganza -- is unparalleled. Deserved everything it won, and more. I am totally pissed that Sean Astin wasn't nominated. He carried Frodo -- and the film.

Lost in Translation. Subtle and lovely and strange.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. I think I want to read the book first.

Mystic River. Read the book -- Dennis Lehane can write. I don't think I could bear the movie.

Seabiscuit. I remember the old movie about this great-hearted horse.

2004
Million Dollar Baby. You have to be kidding me.

The Aviator. Definitely want to see this one.

Finding Neverland. Oh my. Johnny Depp channels Michael Jackson in Edwardian costume. Good movie.

Ray. This was well-made, moving, an astounding performance by Jamie Foxx. But I am still sad and angry that Malcom X -- an even better movie -- wasn't even nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay. It's only OK to be a Black man if you're handicapped, guilt-ridden, and good at entertaining white people.

Sideways. Must see this.

2005
Crash. Should I bother?

Brokeback Mountain I have this movie. I just need the strength to watch it. I read the story when it came out, and it broke my heart.

Capote. I have borrowed this movie and plan to see it this week.

Good Night, and Good Luck. Saw it at the Parkway; what a great film. David Strathairn (another longtime favorite) is finally getting his due.

Munich. Umm, no. I remember the kidnappings and the murders,

2006
I have not seen a single movie that's nominated for *any* Oscar this year.

2007-01-31T20:02:00.000-08:00

IN MEMORIAM: Don't Stop to Mourn--Organize!

Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

Damn, we lost another kickass Texas woman.

Some quotations from Molly Ivins:

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.

The Founders were right all along, but the results are a lot funnier than they intended.

Once you realize they're lying to you about race, everything else follows.

What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority.

I used to go on college campuses 25 years ago and announce I was a feminist, and people thought it meant I believed in free love and was available for a quick hop in the sack. ... Now I go on college campuses and say I'm a feminist, and half of them think it means I'm a lesbian. How'd we get from there to here without passing "Go"?

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.

What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols.

So here are all the liberals going into a giant snit just because George W. Bush appointed a veterinarian to head the women’s health section of the Food and Drug Administration. For Pete’s sake, you whiners, the only reason he chose the vet is because Michael Brown wasn’t available.

To take another notorious Texas law, if you own six or more dildos in this state, you are a felon, presumed to have intent to distribute. Whereas if you have five or fewer, you are merely a hobbyist.

There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack.

I personally hope the photo of me sitting on [Dubya's] lap at a Christmas party with him dressed as Santa has disappeared for all time.

It is not necessary to hate George W. Bush to think he’s a bad President. Grownups can do that, you know. You can decide someone’s policies are a miserable failure without lying awake at night consumed with hatred.

One function of the income gap is that the people at the top of the heap have a hard time even seeing those at the bottom. They practically need a telescope. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt probably didn't waste a lot of time thinking about the people who built their pyramids, either. OK, so it's not that bad yet -- but it's getting that bad.

I am not anti-gun. I'm pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We'd turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don't ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.

So now what we're looking at is one of those underwater struggles among various bureaucratic behemoths involved in some hideous internecine conflict of which we can see nothing except roiled water, as though several Loch Ness monsters were going at it deep out of sight.

The United States of America is still run by its citizens. The government works for us. Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world. We want and need to work with other nations. We want to find solutions other than killing people. Not in our name, not with our money, not with our children's blood.

The problem with those who choose received Authority over fact and logic is how they choose which part of Authority to obey. The Bible famously contradicts itself at many points (I have never understood why any Christian would choose the Old Testament over the New), and the Koran can be read as a wonderfully compassionate and humanistic document. Which suggests that the problem of fundamentalism lies not with authority, but with ourselves.

Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun. First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that.

I am one of those people who are out of touch with their emotions. I tend to treat my emotions like unpleasant relatives—a long-distance call once or twice or year is more than enough. If I got in touch with them, they might come to stay.

from her final column, January 11, 2007: We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there.

2007-01-31T04:02:00.000-08:00

An Open Letter

Dear Bunnicat,

You do not live here.

I say this to you every time I see you—usually at least once a day, when you’re inside my kitchen eating Gabriel’s food. The other night when you came strolling into the bedroom was the outside of enough. Gabriel thought so too. At least you took the hint when she started hissing.

You’re a big, soft, furry lump of feline. You don’t seem neglected or hungry. You smell like an intact Tom or a slightly diluted skunk. With your Himalayan markings and deep, plush fur, you’re probably someone’s pampered pet, just out to snag a little extra kibble. Your bobtail looks astonishingly like a rabbit’s tail; I can’t tell if you lost some of it in an accident or were born with a fluffy three-inch stub.

If you insist on using the cat door to visit my apartment, I expect you to follow protocol.

1. Leave Gabriel alone.
2. Do not spray in here or use the litterbox. Do your business outside.
3. Don’t eat more than half the food. Yes, I’m putting out extra. I’m a big old softy.
4. Remember that my lease is restrictive: I am not allowed to have more than one cat.
5. If you show up late for dinner, do not stand in the kitchen and howl in agony. Learn to shake the dry-food dispenser as Gabriel does or show up early enough to get canned food.
6. No fleas. I mean it.
7. Stay in the kitchen. Venturing into the carpeted areas is tacky, especially since (A) you shed like a snowstorm, and (B) you won’t let me touch you.
8. Go home occasionally. As I have said, you do not live here.

Oh, and you might stay still long enough for me to get a picture.

Thank you,
The Management

PS to Humans: Is it possible to have a cat door for my cat and still keep out bold neighborhood felines? How?

2007-01-28T02:58:00.000-08:00

REVIEW: "Monday Night in Westerbork"

Sixty-two years ago, on January 27, 1945, Russian troops entered Auschwitz-Birkenau. This year, I commemorated the liberation of the surviving Jewish prisoners by attending S. Bear Bergman’s one-person show, “Monday Night in Westerbork.”

Westerbork was a transit camp where the Nazis gathered Jews, homosexuals, dissidents, and other undesirables; every Tuesday that week’s chosen victims boarded a train for the death camps. For a few years, it was also the site of the finest cabaret in Europe—a sparkling Scheherezade of a cabaret where Jewish actors and performers sang, danced, and joked to keep death away for one more night, one more week.

Now, as Bear ruefully notes, the Holocaust is a downer—not the world’s easiest choice for an evening’s entertainment. Holocaust stories can become syrupy paeans to inhumanly perfect martyrs, shallow mockeries (like Hogan’s Heroes), or bleak and painful sources of nightmares. (At least the last option is truthful.)

Bergman avoids these pitfalls by balancing the tragedy with humor. The storytelling is all the more poignant for being restrained and salted with wry humor. The humor, as much as the tragedy, reinforces the humanity of those who went to their deaths in cattle cars more than sixty years ago. The hilarity—and “Monday night in Westerbork” is astonishingly funny—never trivializes the sufferings of the 11 million who were murdered by the Nazis.

Bear moves easily between the character of Max Ehrlich, one of the founders of the cabaret, and the present, where zie comments on growing up as a queer Jew, listening to stories of the Holocaust from those who had survived it, and on incidents that occurred on zir research trip to Europe. By weaving in the need for queer acceptance, Bergman has limited the market for the work, but made it infinitely more powerful for those willing to listen. Moreover, by speaking up for the queer and transgendered community, Bergman is doing the work of the righteous in reminding everyone of the humanity of those society pushes away, condemns, ignores, despises.

“Monday Night in Westerbork” is an astonishing play and an astonishing performance. It has heart, it has humor, it has genuine power—and it is ultimately an affirmation of life and joy. Go see it. Take your teenagers, and then talk to them about what it means to be different.

2006-12-30T03:21:00.000-08:00

Twisting Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

Dubya Says . . .

Before: "My name is Inigo Bushoya. You tried to kill my father. Prepare to die."

After: "Daddy, Daddy! Now you have to love me best!"

The execution of Saddam Hussein occurred on Eid ul-Adha, the culmination of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj. This holy day is
also known as the Feast of the Sacrifice, which commemorates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Choosing to execute Hussein on this date of all days in the calendar is comparable in foresightedness with the Romans executing that crazy rabble-rouser Yeshua bar Joseph at Passover. Just asking for trouble, and of a very specific kind: creating martyrs to inspire further rebellions and uprisings.[1]

We've done enormous damage in Iraq. The number of civilians killed by direct military action is over 50,000. We've lost just about 3,000 soldiers, with a minimum of seven times as many as that being wounded. (Some estimates of wounded American soldiers give the ration as 33 wounded for every 1 killed.)

There's evidence that the CIA helped the Baathist Party -- Saddam's party -- to reach power in a 1963 coup designed to protect our oil interests. That's an unjustified act of war.

There is no evidence, and I mean none, that the weapons of mass destruction ever existed or that Iraq helped the suicide bombers who wreaked such destruction on 9/11. That's another unjustified act of war.

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.

Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.

And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission accomplished" - who will be found guilty of this?

[1] Yes, I worship that rabble-rouser as God incarnate. Nevertheless, from a purely political point of view, Herod and Pilate made a poor decision.

2006-12-28T17:06:00.000-08:00

Driveby Moments, California Style

I wouldn't say that Northern Californians are blase, but they take certain kinds of geekiness for granted. Nobody looks twice at unusual people.

Like the handsomely dressed lawyer with the $400 briefcase waiting to cross the street to the courthouse who pressed the "Walk" button with a flawless karate kick.

Or the stocky gentleman in the Hayward BART station who was wearing a horned metal Viking helmet. Maybe because he was wearing iPod earphones beneath it.

2006-12-25T01:55:00.000-08:00

The Annual Christmas Poem

The Journey of the Magi

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death."

--T. S. Eliot

This Christmas, several friends of mine are mourning recent losses or awaiting the expected passing of friends or family. Christmas can be a cruel time for the grieving. But even in this midwinter gloom, when the journey seems pointless, when pain and despair tarnish the bright tinsel and tears silence the carols in the throat, there is the promise of the Christ Child. Not just a God reaching down from an infinite remove, but the Word embodied, sharing our pain, loving us from inside. The Divine, with us every step of the way.

There's an Episcopalian evening prayer I particularly love, and I pray it for you, my readers, tonight:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.

May the infinite compassion of Jesus enfold you in love and care this day and all the days of your life.

2006-12-24T02:20:00.000-08:00

I’ll Be Quaked for Christmas

Over the past few days, there have been half a dozen earthquakes on the same spot under the University of California at Berkeley. (Note to trivia buffs: in the Bay Area, “Berkeley” means the city; the university is referred to as “Cal.” The Berkeley campus is the flagship of the whole system.) The smallest tremors were barely perceptible microquakes—1.6 on the Richter scale. The biggest were in the 3.5 to 3.7 range—big enough to feel, small enough to do no damage.

Earthquakes this tiny happen all the time, but there’s something a touch disturbing about the repeated hammering on one spot. Seismologists dismiss worries that the cluster of temblors is a precursor to the big one.

“We think we have a small patch of the fault which is having a creep episode,” Oppenheimer said. “Does it mean a big one is coming? There's a slightly enhanced probability that this could be a foreshock, but it's a very low probability.”

I’m spending Christmas day a couple of miles from the epicenter. Given that some of the most devastating earthquakes have happened on religious holidays—the 1964 Alaska earthquake (magnitude 9.2, third largest earthquake ever recorded) on Good Friday; the 1906 San Francisco earthquake on Easter Sunday, the magnitude 9.3 2004 earthquake and tsunami on Boxing Day—I won’t be at all surprised if the Hayward Fault chooses Christmas as the day to cut loose.

Apparently Mother Earth gets overstressed by the holidays, just like the rest of us.

2006-12-18T15:38:00.000-08:00

Quote of the Day

Come to think of it I don't know that love has a point, which is what makes it so glorious. Sex has a point, in terms of relief and, sometimes, procreation, but love, like all art, as Oscar said, is quite useless. It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.

--Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

2006-12-06T16:34:00.000-08:00

Change a Child’s Life

Books have always been a refuge for me. In the most difficult times of my childhood, I could escape by immersing myself in books, which also taught me better ways to behave than I could have learned from my family. Most children who survive abusive childhoods have one adult who takes an interest; I had books. It’s not too much to say they saved my life.

If any kids need books and stories, it’s poor children—the ones who are least likely to have any available. No books at home. Not enough books at school. No nearby libraries.

For the almost 12 million children living below the poverty level in the United States today, growing up with books of their own is a dream rather than a reality. More than 60% of low-income families have no books at all at home for their children. Over 80% of programs serving children in need have no age-appropriate books or other print materials.

First Book gives poor children a book of their very own to love, read, and cherish. A book that may open the doors of learning. A book that can foster creativity. A book that says, “You matter.”

First Book has distributed more than 40 million new books to children from low-income families across the United States.

The results are remarkable: More than half of the children — 55% — reported having an increased interest in reading. Additionally, the number of young people demonstrating a "high interest in reading" nearly tripled (increasing from 23% to 61%) after receiving books from First Book.

Donate now. Free a child’s mind. Give the gift of imagination. Give books.

2006-11-29T15:13:00.000-08:00

At Last, Proof of My Complete and Utter Sanity

A survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. . . . found a correlation between the severity of a person’s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.

But before you go thinking all your conservative friends are psychotic, listen to Lohse’s explanation.

“Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader,” Lohse says. “If your world is very mixed up, there’s something very comforting about someone telling you, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’” . . .

Lohse says the trend isn’t unique to Bush: A 1977 study by Frumkin & Ibrahim found psychiatric patients preferred Nixon over McGovern in the 1972 election. . . .

For his part, Lohse is a self-described “Reagan revolution fanatic” but said that W. is just “beyond the pale.”

2006-11-01T10:39:00.000-08:00

Weird Crimes #117

While I was away for the weekend, someone broke into my truck and left me two light bulbs.

Well, “broke into” may not be quite fair. It was unlocked, as usual; there is no radio and nothing to steal, and it’s quite safe in my assigned spot in the covered parking area. In addition to leaving two small light bulbs (one amber and one clear), they moved an empty soda cup.

They also left the passenger-side door not quite latched—which would have annoyed me greatly, if the truck had a ceiling light, since the battery could well have been dead when I got home. But it doesn’t, and it wasn’t, and I am left wondering how and why they bothered with that door. I park quite close to the wall, and no normally sized human could have gotten in or out that way.

Have I been visited by the Light Bulb Fairy?

2006-10-21T23:24:00.000-07:00

In the Shadow of the Breakers

It’s easy to know when you’re in coal country. The highways slice right through the hills, exposing the telltale black beds of anthracite or bituminous coal. Most of the village houses are company-built: narrow row houses crammed together on streets as steep as the famous ones of San Francisco. The streets that run parallel to the ridge are broader, lined with trees, and flanked by bigger houses where supervisors and other professionals live. The bosses’ grand houses are always to the west—upwind of the engine house, pump house, and the “patch” where miners lived.

Patches were built in the shadow of the breakers, gaunt windowless buildings that have the look of prisons. In the breakers, twelve-year-olds sorted coal from lower-carbon rock. Next to the breakers grew a mountain of waste—known in Wales as a tip, in my part of Pennsylvania as a slag heap or culm bank. Although slag is not as clean-burning as coal, it can catch fire; I’ve lived near places where old slag heaps have been burning for decades.

Forty years ago today, the tip above the town of Aberfan, Wales, gave way. Tons of waste made slick with water (the tip was located on a spring) roared downhill, through a small farm, and into the school where the miners’ children were studying.

One hundred sixteen children died. Twenty-eight adults, five of them teachers, also died.

The women were already there, like stone they were, clawing at the filth – it was like a black river – some had no skin left on their hands. Miners are a tough breed, we don’t show our feelings, but some of the lads broke down.

Remember the children of Aberfan. I was seven when they died; most of the dead were between seven and ten years old. They died for corporate greed and government indifference; the mine at Aberfan had been nationalized, but the British National Coal Board was still less concerned with safety than with productivity.

According to the official report,

The Aberfan Disaster is a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude by many men charged with tasks for which they were totally unfitted, of failure to heed clear warnings, and of total lack of direction from above. Not villains but decent men, led astray by foolishness or by ignorance or by both in combination, are responsible for what happened at Aberfan.

In people who bear great responsibilities, ignorance and complacency and the refusal to listen can cause terrible tragedies—and, in my opinion, make them just as culpable as if they acted with willful malice.

ETA. Another miner died in an underground accident today. That makes 42 for the year. This one's in Tremont, Schuykill County, PA.

2006-10-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

Helping the Amish Community

The murder of the little Amish girls has caused me a great deal of grief and anger and helplessness. This morning, a friend let me know there was something practical I could do to help.

The Mennonite Disaster Service and Mennonite Central Committee are accepting donations to help the Amish community that suffered in the recent schoolhouse shooting. The survivors of the shooting will be amassing huge hospital bills and their families will require costly transportation to and from the hospitals for a long time.

One thing you may not know about Amish folk is that they generally eschew health insurance. Without doubt, this community will cover and support their wounded family members; this is what they do because they see it as an extension of their faith in Christ to live in community.

We have an opportunity to join the community and help in their healing. Take part if you can.

Donate here.(They accept Visa and Mastercard, and it's tax-deductible.)

I grew up near a Mennonite Church, and my sister Libby graduated from a Mennonite college. I can absolutely guarantee that the money will be used wisely. Moreover, the site is genuine.

Moreover, two funds have been set up by the Old Order Amish community to accept donations. One is the Nickel Mines Children's Fund. The other is the Roberts Family Fund, for the Children of the Roberts Family.

The Roberts Family is the family of the gunman.

I think that speaks volumes about what kind of people the Amish are.

Donations to both funds can be sent to:
Coatesville Savings Bank,
1082 Georgetown Road,
Paradise PA 17562

Gift cards, teddy bears and other material, non-cash donations, gifts or condolences should be taken or mailed to:
Georgetown United Methodist Church,
1070 Georgetown Road,
Paradise PA 17562

Amish Elders will pick up the items there and distribute them to the families.

The Amish have also suggested several other ways to help.

You may prefer to channel your giving through other charities or toward other causes. But if you have been looking for a way to help, these are some practical things you can do.

Amish

2006-09-29T10:43:00.000-07:00

Bill of Rights

I realize these are radical ideas, but they're worth considering. We'd have to get rid of Gitmo -- either charge those inmates and try them, or let them go. We certainly would have to toss the "detainee" bill. The one that permits torture. Or does torture cease to be cruel and unusual punishment when it's ratified 65 to 34?

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III

No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Amendment VII

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

It's too early to declare the end of the War on Terror.

Terror won this battle. But Liberty is going to win the war. I pledge my blood, tears, toil, and sweat to this. I'll write, speak, work to change this regime. If I have to go to jail, I will. Because this is not the way I want my country to behave.

2006-09-27T15:22:00.000-07:00

In Memoriam

Almost a year ago, I urged people to sign up as organ donors. That was the day my friend Stephanie was given new life.

Now many of us are mourning the death of poet and author Mike Ford, who got almost six extra years of life from his kidney transplant. His partner Elise has suggested something to do in memory of Mike (John M. Ford): sign your organ donor card!

I can't improve on what she's said. Not with these tears in my eyes.

2006-08-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

(In)Visible (Wo)Man

A few weeks ago, Julie Phillips published James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.

Last week I spotted Richard Ellmann scouting the MLA conference for penniless, amoral grad students who might be willing to swap a hit for a really good letter of recommendation.

Just kidding: he’s been dead for almost 20 years. Nevertheless, the premiere literary biographer of our day has a serious rival. His specialty was bringing difficult figures to luminous life on the page. Julie Phillips has done the same for a character who seems too far-fetched to be real: the blonde Chicago debutante who became a chicken farmer, the first white child to trek through the Congo who grew up to be a suicidally depressed devotee of Dexedrine, the Army major and CIA analyst who was also a gifted artist, the battered teenage bride who earned a PhD in psychology, the reclusive male SF writer who turned out to be a middle-aged housewife in McLean, VA.

It would be easy for a biographer to get lost among the many masks of Alice B. Sheldon, or to be dazzled into idolatry by her flashing surfaces. Or, most likely, to choose one mask, one surface, as the Real or True or Important one, relegating the others to obscurity. Phillips never makes this mistake: she deals fairly with all the faces she mentions, and she examines the interplay of masks, emotions, gender identity, sexuality, and behavior with genuine insight.

Alice Bradley’s parents were characters straight out of a 1920s film: dashing socialites who were also daring explorers. Her mother, Mary Hastings Bradley, was a superb raconteuse, expert markswoman, noted beauty, and very successful writer of both popular fiction and travel/adventure books. (I wonder if this book will bring her writing back into fashion.) Alice’s father was a prosperous lawyer and a naturalist.

Their expeditions took them through Africa and India, mostly on foot, and they brought their small daughter Alice along. Generally 6-year-old Alice was carried in a litter; she learned early to say, “Put me down!” in a number of local languages. Less excusably, Mary used her daughter as a central figure in two books about their safaris. (Alice in Jungleland and Alice in Elephantland, which young Alice herself illustrated.)

Alice’s experience of those early travels included helplessness in the face of constant danger (she alone of the party had no gun) and unspeakable terror at the death she saw all around her. In contrast, she was treated with wonder by the Africans, who had never seen a white child before, much less an adorable blonde Shirley Temple, and with patronizing affection by the various white dignitaries who entertained the explorers whenever they reached a city. (Yes, they packed plenty of evening clothes for these festivities. This was before the days of excess baggage charges.)

That disconnect between how Alice experienced the world and how others saw her role would have been difficult enough, but her parents subscribed to the Victorian ideal of presenting a tough and cheerful front in any adversity. Alice could not share or show her feelings, and it apparently never occurred to her parents that she might be frightened or disturbed.

Back in Chicago, Alice grew up to be a debutante so impatient with the process that she eloped five days after her presentation to society. She and her husband (an aspiring novelist) moved to Berkeley, where she worked seriously at painting until the marriage crashed and burned. After World War II started; she joined the WAACs, traveled, used her administrative talents, and became one of the first photointelligence analysts. She also met Huntington “Ting” Sheldon, a divorced father of three a dozen years older than herself, whom she married.

The couple spent four years raising chickens, then joined the CIA. Alice, now called Alli, was still restless. She became increasingly fascinated by visual psychology and after several years went back to school, earning a PhD with her research into the psychological appeal of novelty and familiarity. But teaching drained her, and research funds were hard to get. She’d hit another dead end.

Then she turned into a man.

James Tiptree, Jr., was born of a jar of Tiptree’s jam and Alli’s obsessive need for camouflage. Already a published writer (she’d had a story in the New Yorker, no less), now Alli was writing something light and playful: science fiction. She didn’t have to take it seriously, and she had a male identity that would allow her to simultaneously mask and reveal her real self.

Becoming Tip allowed her to say things women were not permitted to say—everything from potty humor to bleak, despairing visions of death. It gave her authority and camaraderie and respect, all in short supply for women in the 1960s. And it allowed her to express her long-burning, long-frustrated desire for women.

The masquerade went well beyond just publishing stories; she kept up lengthy and intimate correspondence with other SF writers and fans, all the while speaking as a man. Yet she told the truth in almost every other way—drew on her own biography, for example, to create Tiptree's life and interests. For most of ten years she managed to maintain the illusion.

Tiptree wrote a series of blistering short stories that won SF’s highest awards. He was lauded as a rare male feminist. But eventually the disguise became a burden. After creating a female alter ego (Raccoona Sheldon, a pleasantly dotty retired schoolteacher to whom she assigned a family-fettered life in Wisconsin), Alli was still dissatisfied.

Then her seriously ailing mother, now well into her nineties, died in Chicago. The obituaries made it easy to link the reclusive SF writer whose mother had been a writer/explorer with the lone listed survivor. Tip’s secret, Alli’s secret was out.

After that, writing became more and more difficult for Alli, although the weight of awards and being taken seriously had dragged at her for a while. As she and Ting grew older, frailer, her depressions continued. He had agreed to a suicide pact when they couldn’t go on. One night in May 1987 Alli decided it was time for them to go: he was blind, she was despairing, and the suicide note had been waiting for almost eight years.

She called friends to let them know her plans, but the police arrived before she could do anything. She must have been a hell of an actress, because she persuaded them to leave. Ting (apparently) went to sleep. She shot him in the head.

Then she called his son to tell him the news.

As the police scrambled to return, Alli wrapped a towel around her own head (she’d been bothered by the messiness of Ting’s death), lay down next to her husband, took his hand, and shot herself dead.

In the face of the rage, pain, and glory of her life, questions seem inadequate. The biography does an impressive job discussing the larger issues of gender and persona. Over the next few weeks, I’ll probably tackle some of the issues that strike me personally: the multiple pseudonyms, the writing issues, the fascination with pain, and the idea of suicide.

Alli Sheldon was the only other person I’ve heard of who kept suicide in mind as a guarantee against helplessness. If I am always free to kill myself, life’s suffering is consensual, optional. I can never be trapped. I may need to rethink that strategy, lest I end up eating a shotgun in 25 or 30 years.

Everyone should read this book. I don’t mean “all SF fans” or “all readers” or “all people who think about gender.” Everybody. This biography is that good.

2006-08-25T10:20:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Noer:

You don't need a woman. You need a RealDoll and a Roomba.

Best regards,

Lynn Alden Kendall

Tags: forbes, misogyny, male privilege, complete idiots

2006-08-21T17:05:00.000-07:00

Moving Gratitudes

My thanks to the following people who made my move such an interesting experience:

The Califamily, who loved me and stood by me throughout the long process of finding my own place, packing, and moving. This is especially generous and wonderful of them, since none of them actually wanted me to live somewhere else—but they love me enough to want what’s best for me, weird as it may be. All the birthday gifts they gave me were perfect for the new place, and that means more than I can say. You’re still my *real* family, no matter where I live. And I’ll be back to hang out, watch movies, and be human.

(Also to clean the studio. And definitely to get Gabriel.)

Furthermore, Sonja (with her customary hard work and planning ability) arranged and cleared the best path for the movers to use, and Michele made boxes and helped me pack. Both of them helped on a day when they could have been relaxing. Thank you.

Debbie gave me a couple of guys with strong arms, and Alan provided music to keep me packing. I am also very grateful to them for a hot shower, sleeping space, and Alan’s house gift of homemade challah, which fed me when I was hungry. You’re family, too, and you know it.

Gabriel, who endured the disruption to her cherished stability, and who knew exactly what it meant, too. My sweet kitty, you kept coming to me for petting and reassurance. And yes, I’m coming back for you.

Robert Gair, the man who invented the corrugated cardboard box.

The computer reservation system at U-Haul, which interpreted my request to pick up the truck Saturday night for a Sunday move as a desire to get a truck at 11:30 AM Saturday and return it at 5:30 PM Saturday.

The customer service representative at U-Haul, who politely apologized and corrected the error, so that now I was scheduled to pick up the truck the evening of August 18 and return it the evening of August 19.

My heroic new cell phone, which spent a lonely, sleepless weekend on guard in my cubicle at work, making sure that I would not be distracted by pesky phone messages from my friends, the movers, and the people at U-Haul who kept calling Saturday morning, August 19, because I hadn’t shown up to claim my truck.

My old cell phone, which nobly refrained from its trick of turning itself completely off every time I pick it up, despite doing heavy duty as my sole contact with the rest of the world.

The genuinely helpful U-Haul local staff, who got me a truck Sunday morning despite the mix-up in the reservations.

The guys with the strong arms who uncomplainingly hauled everything. They did an amazing job, and I am grateful.

My new landlord, who installed a desirable new carpet and sink cabinet, but (on my request) did not replace the beautiful wooden slab doors with white plastic faux-paneled ones.

The previous tenant, who left me an entire drawerful of Knorr and McCormick seasoning mixes, not one of which is Lynn-safe. Anybody want them? They’ll be Freecycled if nobody speaks up.

Freecycle, which will help me match the things I don’t need any more with some people who would love to have them. And which brought me, the morning of the move, a gorgeous oak sideboard and kitchen hutch to provide the essential storage not granted by the small, shallow kitchen cabinets which hang well above my reach.

God, who heard Her name taken repeatedly in vain without striking me dead. Please grant my prayer that I may not have to move again for a long, long time.

WSOP: The Last Woman Standing

2006-08-06T21:14:00.000-07:00

Our own Sabyl Cohen has outlasted more than 8600 other poker players to get to the money rounds of the World Series of Poker. Now on Day 5, she's one of 62 remaining players. All the rest are men.

Her chip stack has steadily built, sometimes plunged, but she's a damned fine player, and she keeps coming back. I'm rooting for her, and not just because no woman has yet won the WSOP main event. She's smart, she's nice, and she's from Oakland.

I keep tracking her progress on her LJ and on Pokerblog.com

Even if she busts out tonight, she'll be in for a sweet six-figure payoff. But I hope she goes all the way to that winner's bracelet and the $12 million that goes with it.

ETA: She's out: 56th place, $123K payout.

Sabyl, you did an amazing job.

2006-08-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

Not an April Fool's Joke

It's a Lammas Fool's joke, courtesy the Bullshit Broadcasting Confederation.

Mel Gibson Arrested on Terrorism Charges.

He's got the money, and he's got the anti-semitism. He's a nasty drunk. ABC has canceled a deal to do a Holocaust miniseries with his production company.

But he has, so far, not been arrested for terrorism.

Now don't you feel better?

2006-08-01T13:13:00.000-07:00

Sacred Image Alert!

This picture is ultimate proof of the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster! The face of the Saucemonster, the FSM’s incestuously intertwined Uncle-Bride-&-Poker-Buddy, has been revealed to the world.

No longer will we need to blush when other gods’ faces show up in cloud formations, ant farms, and mildew colonies. We have our Sacred Saucemonster, and a very fitting partner Zie is for the FSM.

All hail the Saucemonster!

FSM, pastafarianism, saucemonster

2006-07-30T11:47:00.000-07:00

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

That’s the line everyone remembers from “A Room of One's Own,” but it is very far from the whole story.

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

And that is what Woolfcamp is about. Bringing people together to think, talk, share: creating community by linking people who blog.

My first visit to Woolfcamp was a rescue mission; when my friend Debbie’s car wouldn’t start, Alan and I drove to Santa Cruz to get her. (It was a wonderful drive through the dark, over hilly roads.) Woolfcamp was over, but I had a chance to talk to some people, and I knew I wanted to participate more.

My second visit coincides with my purchase of a new truck. (New to me, at any rate.) One of the advantages of community is that people with complementary needs can connect. Liz,who is hosting today’s Woolfcamp, needed to sell her 1993 Mazda B2200. I needed an inexpensive vehicle, preferably a truck. We can meet each other’s needs. Moreover, while I was here looking at the truck, I glanced through Helene Cixous’s “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, which I hadn’t read since grad school. I instantly realized this was what I needed now:

Women must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their own bodies for the same reasons by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Women must put herself into the text as into the world and into history by her own movement.

I’m all in favor of both privacy and financial independence. having my own space, an autonomous life, and as much financial independence as I can achieve by working for it, as opposed to inherited wealth. But for me, that life must be sustained and supported by participation in community.

2006-07-27T15:36:00.000-07:00

Hallelujah, It’s the Vulgate Latin!

Yes, the Vale of Tears verse is in the psalm I quoted.

An ancient Irish manuscript found in a bog last week does not refer to "wiping out Israel", the National Museum of Ireland said on Thursday, after a flood of enquiries wondering at the timing of the discovery.

The National Museum of Ireland announced on Tuesday what it said was one of the most significant Irish discoveries in decades; an ancient Psalter or Book of Psalms, written around 800 AD. It said part of Psalm 83 was legible.

In modern versions of the Bible, Psalm 83 is a lament to God over other nations' attempts to wipe out Israel and many commentators wondered at the coincidence of such a discovery at a time of heightened tension in the Middle East.

"The above mention of Psalm 83 has led to misconceptions about the revealed wording and may be a source of concern for people who believe Psalm 83 deals with 'the wiping out of Israel'," the museum said in its clarification.

The confusion arose because the manuscript uses an old Latin translation of the Bible known at the Vulgate, which numbers the psalms differently from the later King James version, the 1611 English translation from which many modern texts derive.

"The Director of the National Museum of Ireland ... would like to highlight that the text visible on the manuscript does not refer to wiping out Israel but to the 'vale of tears'," the museum said.

The vale of tears is in Psalm 84 in the King James version.

"It is hoped that this clarification will serve comfort to anyone worried by earlier reports of the content of the text," the museum said.

2006-07-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

Backhoe Bibliomancy

Fortune-telling by randomly choosing a passage from a sacred text is an ancient practice. The classical Greeks used Homer; the Romans used Vergil’s Aeneid. Even Christians who would condemn astrology or Tarot have been known to flip open the Bible to get a coded message from the Divine.

Using heavy construction equipment to do so is, perhaps, overkill.

Recently an Irish backhoe operator spotted an ancient Book of Psalms in a peat bog. It was open to Psalm 83.

Given the apocalyptic mindset of certain world leaders and the current crisis in the Middle East, this is clearly a sign. But of what?

It all depends on the burning question of whether the book holds to the Catholic or Protestant numbering.

Psalms 83 in the Douai-Rheims version used by Roman Catholics is a lovely verse of praise for the protection of God.

83:2. How lovely are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!

83:3. my soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God.

83:4. For the sparrow hath found herself a house, and the turtle a nest for herself where she may lay her young ones: Thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my king and my God.

In the KJV, Psalm 83 is a rant against the enemies of Israel, imploring God to smite them.

83: 1: Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God.

2: For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head.

3: They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones.

4: They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.

5: For they have consulted together with one consent: they are confederate against thee: [snipped: list of enemies with a few pious wishes for their destruction]

13: O my God, make them like a wheel; as the stubble before the wind.

14: As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountains on fire;

15: So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm.

Unfortunately, according to the article, The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations' attempts to wipe out the name of Israel.

Now, the book-lover and medievalist in me rejoice at the rescue of another ancient book. The fortuneteller is reading it as a sign. And the person who hopes the Apocalypse won’t happen next week regrets that there are highly placed politicians who may well believe this is a signal to get the end times started with a nice nuclear Armageddon.

Incidentally, this coming Sunday would normally be International Bog Day, but for unstated reasons, the holiday has been canceled this year. Is that a sign too?

2006-07-18T21:53:00.000-07:00

Recent Reading and Viewing (A Random and Seriously Incomplete Sample)

A brief memorial quotation in honour of Miss Jane Austen, who died 189 years ago today:

“Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint.”

Excellent advice from a delightfully over-the-top character: the wicked Lady Susan.

Antarctica, Kim Stanley Robinson. To my shame and sorrow, this is the first book of his I’ve read, although for years I’ve heard praise of The Years of Rice and Salt from people whose literary opinions I generally share. But I didn’t get lured in until I heard a few lines of his latest volume read aloud. “Hey, he’s good!” So Debbie Notkin found this for me. A canny choice on her part, assuming she wanted to get me addicted immediately.

It’s a novel of politics, of ideas, of place, of class, of action and suspense, all at the same time. Yet the characters are believable, unique, richly textured: The woman who guides tourists through Antarctic treks, the disgruntled low-end laborer seeking a home and a sense of control over his life, the Chinese poet who sees and broadcasts the world for his people back home, the Congressional aide working on treaty and ecological issues for his wildcat boss.

As Debbie said, I’d know his characters if I passed them on the street. I would also *like* most of them; they’re generally intelligent, if a little too heterosexual for me. In his endless fascination with sexual dimorphism, Robinson can forget that both nature and sociobiology require a certain number of individuals to be non-breeders. Or, to cast it in social terms, he just doesn’t seem to see or imagine himself into the life of someone who’s gay. I can live with that, since he does a good job of speaking in the voices of a worker on the lowest rung of the economic ladder and of people much higher on the scale of power and prestige. Anybody who doesn’t automatically discount the working class as a bunch of ignorant and stupid louts gets extra points in my book.

Moreover, the prose style is ravishing: transparent in scenes where elaborate words would obscure the point, dense and shimmering in the grand descriptions of the glaciers. Robinson never loses sight of the story when he indulges his taste for wordplay, and the great architectural descriptions are essential for making readers *see* Antarctica in all its grandeur.

The sense of place, of identification with a place, is very powerful in this book, and it’s one of the reasons I so enjoyed it. I’ll be buying my own copy—and underlining a lot of passages. My own fascination with Antarctica goes back to childhood, when I read Admiral Richard Byrd’s monumental Alone. Frankly, four months of total solitude, with a record player and some books and enough food sounded like sheer heaven to me then. It still sounds good.

Forty Signs of Rain, Kim Stanley Robinson. This is good but also clearly the beginning of a trilogy, so there are a lot of strings left hanging. That’s OK. I wish it were far-future SF instead of slightly prescient weather forecasting, though. It’s all about global warming, and it has the usual cast of strong and intelligent straight characters of both genders. I was glad to see Senator Phil Chase, maverick California politician, back in this book. (He was a minor but important character in Antarctica.) I’d vote for him for president any day.

Although it’s a solid, well-written book, I’m glad it wasn’t the first of his that I read. It would never have grabbed me the way Antarctica did. I’d have read other books by the author, but I wouldn’t have felt *seized* by his vision.

Peter Straub, In the Night Room. I confess that in the first few chapters I thought Straub had lost his mind, and was reminded of this:

“Poor Hoffman! This going mad of a friend comes straight home to any man who feels his soul within him. For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who never felt, momentarily, what madness is, has but a mouthful of brains.”—Herman Melville, quoted as an epigraph to Daniel Hoffman’s monumental Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, AKA Poe to the Seventh Power.

But I have a great deal of faith in Straub’s authorial skill, and I kept reading through the chaos of the early chapters—a chaos necessary to the ultimate success of the book.

I am not, in fact, sure of how successful the book was. I figured out the essential trope quite rapidly, but the quality of the prose, the intensity and delicacy of feeling expressed, made the book memorable. I’ll be rereading it soon and will report again on my reactions.

Great quotation: “I love my God. I just wish he didn’t need it quite so much.”

OTOH, the book infuriated me in one very specific way. Tim Underhill, who has appeared before in various Straub books (Koko, The Throat (one of my talismanic books, infinitely rereadable), Lost Boy Lost Girl), is gay. He has never so much as kissed any male onstage, so to speak, in any of these books, although it’s clear he has a romantic/sexual relationship with his friend Vinh and had in his youth visited male prostitutes in Vietnam. But he is shown in an intensely erotic and detailed sex scene with a female here.

And that infuriates me. Marge Piercy has often done the same, particularly in the pioneering, often admirable Small Changes and the bitter, vindictive Summer People. I get tired of the privileging of heterosexuality in everything from romance to sex scenes. I don’t expect Straub to be writing slash, but it truly bothers me that (presumably to spare some readers) he can’t show his hero making love the way he has done for his entire adult life.

And thus we come to Possession (the movie) and Possession (the book).

warning: spoilers ahead
I’ve loved the book since I first read it back in the late 1980s. Tender, suspenseful, replete with wonderful scholarly jokes and references, a richly satisfying book on both the emotional and intellectual levels. Yes, it bothered me that it shortchanged all the lesbian relationships—the 19th-century love between Christabel LaMotte and Blanche Glover, the 20th-century occasional fuck-buddy relationship between Maud Bailey and the grand, larger-than-life American scholar Leonora Stern (who never shows up in the movie at all). The severed relationship with Blanche never gets enough explanation or its due moral and emotional weight.

And the movie just made that a thousand times more visible, valuing the fleeting four-week affair Christabel had with fellow poet Randolph Ash far more than the years of love with Blanche. I can’t fault the film for not saying what the book also didn’t say, but it was so obvious and so fucking painful for me that I couldn’t finish watching the movie. I started crying and couldn’t stop. I know what it is to fall in love with a straight woman, and it hurts like hell to lose a woman to a man. I am not in the mood for *any* artwork that unthinkingly glorifies Twue (Het) Wuv, even tragic, doomed, brief True Het Mating Instinct, over the ongoing love and passion and companionship of same-sex relationships.

Nevertheless, what I saw of the film looked good. Very different from the book, but also charming, witty, fun. Jennifer Ehle is an audacious and self-possessed Christabel with a lurking twinkle in her eyes; Gwynneth Paltrow is a believable Maud Bailey. Aaron Eckhart has his charms, but he couldn’t be less like the Roland Michell of the book. Jeremy Northam, on the other hand, makes a fine Victorian poet, passionate yet correct.

Zorba the Greek doesn’t discount same-sex relationships, though they are neither overtly sexual nor overtly romantic. People speak of it always as a warm, life-affirming film in which Basil, a rigid Englishman (played by the young Alan Bates, who was already a fine actor), gets warmed up by contact with an earthy Greek peasant Zorba (played con brio by Anthony Quinn). Well. Not really.

Alan Bostick’s one-word review: “Vile.”

My review: “Misogyny, irresponsibility, deceit, and denial masquerading as freedom and joy and love .”

warning: spoilers ahead for Zorba and Lonesome Dove

Zorba has an affair with an older Frenchwoman, a retired prostitute, whom he secretly despises. (He calls her an old bitch while she sleeps, and he goes off to fool around with a much younger whore.) His lies beguile her, but he can’t really love her; he treats her and speaks to her with too much open contempt. When she dies, the old village women come in and strip her home of everything, leaving her corpse lying alone in bed. She won’t even be buried because she isn’t Greek Orthodox. What happens to her body isn’t revealed. Maybe stray dogs ate her, a suitable ending for Jezebel.

Zorba also advises young Basil to sleep with the gorgeous young widow (Irene Pappas, looking luminous) who has made herself unpopular with the local peasants by refusing to marry one of the young village heroes. Eventually, Basil loosens up enough to do so.

I bet you can’t guess what happens next. Do they find love and friendship? Get married, have a baby, raise some goats and olives? Part in heartbreak with a tender self-sacrificing Casablanca-style scene? No. First the village hero drowns himself in despair. Then the widow, attempting to go to the funeral, is hunted down and murdered in a scene so viciously brutal it left me totally triggered. Zorba made a feeble attempt to save her. Basil just stood there.

Does this tragedy make him re-examine his life? Nope. He takes no responsibility. Zorba asks, “Why do young people have to die?” Well, I’ll tell you why this woman died. She slept with your friend. Against all the rules of that society, and he stood by and let her die, and you did too. But hey, at least he doesn’t have to worry about having to look her in the eye the next day!

The world was very different in 1964. Routine misogyny was omnipresent and invisible, like a specialized carbon monoxide lethal only to women. This movie is a fairy tale of sorts about a young man’s growth; most fairy tales don’t give full emotional and moral weight to the deaths of characters. And because the deaths of both women don’t affect the characters much, they’re readily forgotten by viewers. The friend who recommended the movie to me (who had last seen it 30-odd years ago) had completely forgotten the young widow’s desperate attempts to escape from the murderous villagers with their stones and knives, or her final agonizing moments.

Zorba’s brave laughter in the face of his own failures, his willingness to dance when things go wrong that cannot be fixed, is something I do admire—and in fact something I’m pretty good at. As my grandmother said at the funeral of her much-loved mother-in-law, “We can make a picnic out of anything.” But sometimes denial is dangerous to yourself and other people, and sometimes tragedies have to be faced and felt. But this film fits into a whole series of “don’t look back” movies that came out after World War II and Korea. It’s one way to deal with PTSD.

I prefer the approach of Gus McCrae, one of the two shadow-heroes of Lonesome Dove (another longtime favorite, which I just reread). He says, "The earth is nothing but a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight." Nevertheless, he doesn't scant or ignore real feeling, and his care of a captive who had been brutalized is both brave and tender.

When I say shadow-heroes, I mean that he and Woodrow Call, his partner in the Texas Rangers and on the cattle drive, are each other's shadows. I suspect that's also happening in Zorba the Greek.

Lonesome Dove is also a fairy tale, but so densely imagined, so beautifully populated with strong characters, history, animals, landscapes, that it works also as a novel. It plays out the ongoing rivalry between civilization and wilderness, the campfire and the hearth, the rough-and-tumble of male companionship and the pleasures and dangers of a life with women. One of the epigraphs says, "What we live, they dreamed. What they lived, we dream."

2006-06-28T20:40:00.000-07:00

Behold, Waters Rise up out of the North*

Eastern Pennsylvania, upstate New York, New Jersey, and Maryland are drowning under the weight of a storm that has dumped up to 13 inches of rain in the past four days. Despite a lull in the nearly week-long heavy rains, the Delaware, Schuylkill, and Susquehanna Rivers - and other rivers and streams already near or over their banks - were still rising and expected to crest between late tonight and Friday. The Delaware and the Schuylkill are the two rivers that meet in Philadelphia; the Delaware forms PA’s eastern border with New York and New Jersey, which are also hard hit.

These are all places I have lived; when I read about flooded neighborhoods, I know the people who live there, and I have driven the roads that are washed away. The hospital where I was born (and two of my sisters, and where my mother did her nurse’s training) is under water.

The Susquehanna River is flooding almost from the source to where it meets the sea. It rises at Cooperstown, meanders through New York, and dips into PA in Susquehanna County, where nearly the entire community of Hallstead is under water, including buildings and vehicles. My high school cafeteria is full of evacuees. There are a dozen places where floods have cut off country roads. In many places, it’s worse than the terrible Agnes flood in 1972.

In Honesdale, home of Highlights for Children, a small creek flooded, forming a lake ... downtown.

My God—200,000 evacuated from Wilkes-Barre, helicopters doing roof rescues in Bloomsburg and New Milford, water cascading over the floodwalls in Binghamton, evacuations in Vestal.Elsewhere in the Binghamton area, an entire house floated down the Susquehanna.

Residents of Tunkhannock, Wyoming County are stuck. There is no way in and no way out. The Tunkhannock Creek is at one of its highest levels in years. That creek’s source is in Jackson; it wanders along Rte. 92, often well below the road, sometimes right beside it. It rose high enough that the interstate was closed from there to the New York state border—more than 20 miles of freeway.

There are bridges out in a dozen places, mudslides on 81, a breached dam in Nanticoke, major roads—routes 6, 11, 29, 81—closed for flooding, minor roads inundated and undermined. Even Main Street in Forest City was flooded. The creek there is just not that big—usually.

The little creek where I learned to swim is up over Zaner’s Bridge, and there are floods along 487 from Bloomsburg to Benton. Dozens of other small roads are flooded, too.

Nearly 11 inches of rain has fallen in Sussex County, NJ, where I lived in the early years of my marriage. I’ll bet the Pequannock is well over its banks and flooding my former street; shore access for the Delaware from Milford, PA, to Delaware Water Gap is closed, since the river is ten feet over flood stage.

As far as I know. all my friends and family are safe, if somewhat soggy. But I still feel weirdly helpless. This is my countryside, and I'm not there to take care of it. Pure magical thinking, of course. But I miss my place.

*Jeremiah 47: 2

2006-06-21T15:30:00.000-07:00

Didn’t Schadenfreude Play for the Phillies? Yeah, He Was a Southpaw Knuckleballer

The Mets are at the top of the National League East, with the Phils in second place. (Nine and a half games back, but still.) And the Atlanta Braves are at the bottom of the division with a .435 winning percentage.

I gloat.

2006-05-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

Were You There?

In honor of May 25, some quotations from Terry Pratchett's Night Watch.

“Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes.”

“When there’s a kid on the way, well, suddenly a man sees it different. He thinks: my kid’s going to have to grow up in this mess. Time to clean it up. Time to make it a Better World.”

The cemetery of Small Gods was for the people who didn’t know what happened next. They didn’t know what they believed in or if there was life after death and, often, they didn’t know what hit them. They’d gone through life being amiably uncertain, until the ultimate certainty had claimed them at the last. Among the city’s bone orchards the cemetery was the equivalent of the drawer marked Misc, where people were interred in the glorious expectation of nothing very much.

Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.

Vimes had mixed memories of Captain Tilden. He had been a military man before being given this job as a kind of pension, and that was a bad thing in a senior copper. It meant he looked to Authority for orders and obeyed them, whereas Vimes found it better to look to Authority for orders and then filter those orders through a fine mesh of common sense, adding a generous scoop of creative misunderstanding and maybe even incipient deafness if circumstances demanded, because Authority rarely descended to street level.

“Well done,” said a voice somewhere behind him. “Consciousness to sarcasm in five seconds!” [Editor’s note: I would love an icon of this.]

When you got right down to the bottom of the ladder the rungs were very close together and, oh my, weren’t the women careful about them. In their own way, they were as haughty as any duchess. You might not have much, but you could have Standards. Clothes might be cheap and old but at least they could be scrubbed. There might be nothing behind the front door worth stealing but at least the doorstep could be clean enough to eat your dinner off, if you could’ve afforded dinner. And no one ever bought their clothes from the pawn shop. You’d hit bottom when you did that. No, you bought them from Mr Sun at the shonky shop, and you never asked where he got them from.

“Y’know,” he said, “it’s very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is.”

The safe had still been there when he made captain, and by then everyone knew the combination was 4-4-7-8 and that no one seemed to know how to change it. The only things worth keeping in it had been the tea and sugar and anything you particularly wanted Nobby to read.

“I comma square bracket recruit’s name square bracket comma do solemnly swear by square bracket recruit’s deity of choice square bracket to uphold the Laws and Ordinances of the city of Ankh-Morpork comma serve the public truft comma and defend the fubjects of His ftroke Her bracket delete whichever is inappropriate bracket Majefty bracket name of reigning monarch bracket without fear comma favour comma or thought of perfonal fafety semi-colon to purfue evildoers and protect the innocent comma laying down my life if necefsary in the caufe of said duty comma so help me bracket aforesaid deity bracket full stop Gods Save the King stroke Queen bracket delete whichever is inappropriate bracket full stop.” -- Ankh-Morpork Night Watch oath

And [Lord Winder] saw plots and spies everywhere throughout his waking hours, and had men root them out, and the thing about rooting out plots and spies everywhere is that, even if there are no real plots to begin with, there are plots and spies galore very soon.

They might be very bad at it but they were coppers, and coppers did not respond well to the Happy Families approach: “Hello, chaps, call me Christopher, my door is always open, I’m sure if we all pull together we shall get along splendidly like one big happy family.” They’d seen too many families to fall for that rubbish.

What was it Vetinari had said once? “Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces”?

“And don’t you eyeball me. I’ve been eyeballed by experts, and you look as if you’re desperate for the privy.”

Sam: “Yeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people.”
Vimes: “Then why doesn’t anyone do anything about it?’
Sam: “‘cos they torture people.”

“You’re an interesting man, sergeant. You make enemies like a craftsman.”

There was the People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road (Truth! Justice! Freedom! Reasonably priced Love! And a Hard-Boiled Egg!)

He wondered if it was at all possible to give this idiot some lessons in basic politics. That was always the dream, wasn’t it? “I wish I’d known then what I know now”? But when you got older you found out that you now wasn’t you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.

We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything.

Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

He felt instinctively that if you were going to fondle a cat while discussing matters of intrigue, then it should be a long-haired white one. It shouldn’t be an elderly street tom with irregular bouts of flatulence.

“Winder is a madman, and that’s not good for business. His cronies are criminals, and that’s not good for business. A new Patrician will need new friends, far-sighted people who want to be part of a wonderful future. One that’s good for business. That’s how it goes. Meetings in rooms. A little diplomacy, a little give and take, a promise here, an understanding there. That’s how real revolutions happen. All that stuff in the streets is just froth...”

Madam: “The world does not deal well with those who don’t pick a side.”
Vimes: “I like the middle.”
Madam: “That gives you two enemies. I’m amazed that you can afford so many, on a sergeant’s pay.”

Coates: “What could you do, then? Arrest [Lord] Winder?”
Vimes: “Of course we can’t, but we ought to be able to. Maybe one day we will. If we can’t then the law isn’t the law, it’s just a way of keeping people down.”

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up.

“Death to the Fascist Oppressors, Present Company Excepted! There, is everyone happy now?”

“You’re an officer of the law, not a soldier of the government.”

“Coppers were always outnumbered, so being a copper only worked when people let it work. If they refocused and realized you were just another standard idiot with a pennyworth of metal for a badge, you could end up a smear on the pavement.

He wanted to add: you’re a cell of one, Reg. The real revolutionaries are silent men with poker-player faces and probably don’t know or care if you live or die. You’ve got the shirt and the haircut and the sash and you know all the songs, but you’re no urban guerrilla. You’re an urban dreamer. You turn over rubbish bins and scrawl on walls in the name of The People, who’d clip you round the ear if they found you doing it.

Of course, he’d be expelled from the Guild if caught wearing such clothing. He’d reasoned that this was much better than being expelled from the land of the upright and breathing. He’d rather not be cool than be cold.

When he was a boy he’d read books about great military campaigns, and visited the museums and looked with patriotic pride at the paintings of famous cavalry charges, last stands and glorious victories. It had come as rather a shock, when he later began to participate in some of these, to find that the painters had unaccountably left out the intestines.

It’s a real soldiers’ song: sentimental, with dirty bits.

People said things like “quite possibly we shall never know the truth” which meant, in Vimes’s personal lexicon, “I know, or think I know what the truth is, and hope like hell it doesn’t come out, because things are all smoothed over now.”

He wanted to go home. He wanted it so much that he trembled at the thought. But if the price of that was selling good men to the night, if the price was filling those graves, if the price was not fighting with every trick he knew... then it was too high.

It was regrettable how many rulers of the city had been inhumed by the men in black because they didn’t recognize a chance when they saw it, didn’t know when they’d gone too far, didn’t read the signs, didn’t know when to walk away after embezzling a moderate and acceptable amount of cash. They didn’t realize it when the machine had stopped, when the world was ripe for change, when it was time, in fact, to spend more time with their family in case they ended up spending it with their ancestors.

Vetinari: “‘You know, it has often crossed my mind that those men deserve a proper memorial of some sort.”
Vimes: “Oh yes? In one of the main squares, perhaps?”
Vetinari: “Yes, that would be a good idea.”
Vimes: “Perhaps a tableau in bronze? All seven of them raising the flag, perhaps?”
Vetinari: “Bronze, yes.”
Vimes: “Really? And some sort of inspiring slogan?”
Vetinari: “Yes, indeed. Something like, perhaps, ‘They Did The Job They Had To Do’?”
Vimes: “No. How dare you? How dare you! At this time! In this place! They did the job they didn’t have to do, and they died doing it, and you can’t give them anything. Do you understand? They fought for those who’d been abandoned, they fought for one another, and they were betrayed. Men like them always are. What good would a statue be? It’d just inspire new fools to believe they’re going to be heroes. They wouldn’t want that. Just let them be. For ever.”

2006-05-24T16:53:00.000-07:00

“You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.”

One of “America’s Twenty Worst Agents” has struck again.

Our story so far: Barbara Bauer was listed as one of twenty agents and agencies who have been the subject of the most complaints to Writer Beware. Sure, it’s a popularity contest, but this one has meaning. If someone has prompted that many complaints without ever selling a book, she has presumably done a fair bit of damage to a large number of writers. Not a competition most agents would want to win.

These agents and agencies generally offer big promises, charge big up-front fees, and then deliver little or nothing. They're the spiritual heirs of the Famous Writers School so entertainingly skewered by the late Jessica Mitford (author of the quotation that titles this entry). These predators feed on innocent people who dream of being published and have no idea how to go about it.

None of these agencies has a significant track record of sales to commercial (advance-paying) publishers, and most have virtually no documented and verified sales at all (book placements claimed by some of these agencies turn out to be "sales" to vanity publishers). All charge clients before a sale is made--whether directly, by levying fees such as reading or administrative fees, or indirectly, for editing or other adjunct services.

Naturally, writers picked up this list from the SFWA website and disseminated it, and Barbara Bauer started sending huffy cease-and-desist letters. She also tried to get Teresa Nielsen Hayden fired from her job as editor at Tor Books on the grounds that Teresa had reposted the list and posted about Bauer’s threats of taking legal action.

All this just encouraged more people to post the list. Also to make fun of her; there’s nothing more amusing than someone claiming righteous indignation over their unveiling as someone of dubious reputation.

As of today, Barbara Bauer has gone from a laughable would-be bully to temporarily successful Internet censor. According to the highly respected Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a top-flight New York editor and fearless crusader for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, Barbara Bauer has gotten the Absolute Write website taken down. This site, described by one reviewer as absolutely a fantastic resource for writers! (exclamation point in original), had posted the Twenty Worst Agents list So Barbara Bauer complained to the ISP responsible for hosting the site, who took it down.

It should be up again within a day or so, but it’s still a shame that a wonderful resource for writers can be whisked away by empty threats of legal action.

Technorati tag:
BarbaraBauer

2006-05-16T15:26:00.000-07:00

Travel Reservations

Dear New England:

I am sorry I am coming to visit, since you’re now getting the worst rains and flooding in seventy years. (Up to 17 inches of rain since last Friday? That’s impressive.) I had hoped Lynn’s Travel Curse was broken, since my last few trips east occurred without incident.

February 1993: My first visit to sunny southern California, where from 9 to 12 inches of rain fall in a couple of days and a mudslide closes Topanga Canyon 30 minutes after I drive through it. Debris flows and flooding are widespread, but not nearly so catastrophic as my appearance on Jeopardy!

Summer 1993: Disastrous floods inundate the Midwest when I attend the RWA Convention in St. Louis, a city even more humid than Philadelphia. While I am dressing for the awards banquet (where the table to which I am assigned turns out not to exist), I glance out the window and see a small tornado wandering down the street toward the river. According to NOAA, The 1993 midwest flood was one of the most significant and damaging natural disasters ever to hit the United States. Damages totaled $15 billion, 50 people died, hundreds of levees failed, and thousands of people were evacuated, some for months. The flood was unusual in the magnitude of the crests, the number of record crests, the large area impacted, and the length of the time the flood was an issue.

January 1996: A trip from Philadelphia to Albuquerque for a work conference is delayed by fog, lightning, rain, 60-mph winds, and freakishly warm temperatures that combine to melt the three feet of snow left by the great blizzard a few days before. My basement floods, my mother’s driveway is ripped out by torrents, and I arrive in Albuquerque 12 hours late to give my talk with the beginnings of laryngitis.

Christmas 2000: Arkansas suffers the worst natural disaster in its history when I come to spend Christmas with Michele’s family. Two inches of ice coated Little Rock and the surrounding areas. Half a million people were without power, many for more than a week. We were having Christmas dinner when we realized the ice storm was starting. Although we made a ~~brave yet unbelievably stupid~~ spirited attempt to drive back to the cabin where we were staying (where we had, of course, left our luggage, medicines, etc.), we were foiled by an inexperienced motorist who stopped driving halfway up a hill. We slid into a ditch and had to walk back a couple of miles through the freezing rain. Well, I say walk. We walked, fell, slid, skidded, and even rolled. Did I mention that none of us were really dressed for this activity? Or that there were three dogs, to which I am deathly allergic, at Michele’s father’s house? Or that his house was without electricity and therefore heat for the next several days? Or that, the airport closed for three days, delaying my flight home? Or that, when I did finally get home, I was flying into a huge Nor’easter that dumped large quantities of snow on my home state?

September 2001: I fly back to New York State to finish packing and moving to California. My original reservations to fly out of Logan Airport at 8AM on Tuesday, 9/11, are cancelled on the advice of my sensible older sister, who suggests I’ll need a few extra days in the east. (I don’t even need to link to this. If you do not know what happened that day, you can Google it.)

Perhaps now you see why I don’t travel much. But take heart, Massachusetts. By flooding now, you may be avoiding worse things later. Volcanoes, anyone?

Love,
Lynn

2006-05-01T16:21:00.000-07:00

Bring Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses

My recent book research has taken me back into the familiar and beloved culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England: day-long Sunday services and annual town meetings, schooners and clipper ships, towering elms and lilac bushes, and prim Federal houses with their fanlights and balanced facades. The combination of thrift, sobriety, hard work, personal modesty, and reverence for learning sounds austere, but there was also great joy and fun. I was especially tickled by the young ship’s captain who sometimes kept his logbook in verse.

These are my ancestors, and I love them. They went on to envision an ideal of democracy and equality that became a beacon to a world where education, justice, and opportunity had been the privilege of the wealthy and the well-connected. They founded a nation and a constitution that, despite flaws and bigotry, nevertheless became a model to the world.

They were also illegal immigrants. Not only that, they were illegal immigrants who were ignorant of the local language, in dire need of welfare services, and unable to survive without the support and help of the people who were there first. They destroyed the local economy, too. They even spread disease—sometimes by accident, on a few shameful occasions on purpose. Any of these accusations sound familiar?

Think about it: The Pequot Indians, rightful residents of the invaded territories, didn't want them in the first place and did their damnedest to eliminate the pesky immigrants, once they realized how destructive the invasion would be. The Pequots had to give food and job training to the helpless Pilgrims, who would have starved without that social support. Within a generation, the Pequot way of life was smashed.

That’s the other side of New England: the genocide against the natives who so kindly fed the starving Pilgrims and patiently taught the first white settlers how to plant and fertilize corn; the triangular trade in rum/molasses/slaves; the murderous religious persecutions and literal witch hunts where anyone who seemed different was sought out and destroyed; and the relentless, unquestioning self-righteousness that may be their worst legacy to the United States of 2006.

So which side are we on? Do we choose the idealism of the young colonies, the willingness to let everyone regardless of birth have a chance to work their own way with their own two hands? Or do we side with the prejudice and contempt that values inherited wealth and despises some people as three-fifths of a human being? I see our country, where my family has lived for four centuries, becoming more and more divided into the wealthy and the oppressed, where the rich exploit the workers with impunity and where government and corporations join forces to drain cash from the pockets of the hard-working majority.

What immigrants, legal or illegal, ask for is a chance to make a better life for themselves and their children. Like native-born American citizens, they need work, dignity, a chance at an education, and a little help adjusting. The pennies we spend on them will be repaid a millionfold by hard-working, loyal people. Unlike the vast sums we disburse to Halliburton and Enron, where billions sink without a trace into the pockets of corrupt and powerful rich men.

Maybe we need an infusion of people who still remember the ideals of America. Our current Administration certainly does not. Crowning a lifetime of incompetence cushioned by wealth and privilege, George W. Bush is now bent on gutting the Constitution he swore to uphold by claiming the president does not need to obey the laws. Who is the greater threat to the peace and security of the United States: a hard-working illegal immigrant picking lettuce to make ends meet, or a loose-cannon rich boy in the Oval Office with delusions that God put him there to enrich the wealthy, torture prisoners, trash the checks and balances of the three branches of government, and invade foreign countries?

I know which one scares me.

2006-04-18T10:57:00.000-07:00

The Easter Quake

The foreshock came at 5:12 AM on Easter Sunday. About 25 seconds later, the full earthquake struck. The rumbling and shaking lasted 45 seconds to a minute. Immense forces ripped the landscape apart; in some places the ground moved as much as 20 feet.

No, this didn’t happen two days ago. It happened one hundred years ago today, and for the past three weeks, Bay Area residents have been enjoying saturation coverage of the centennial of the Great Quake that struck at 5:12 AM April 18, 1906, and devastated the city. Curators, cartographers, even choreographers have all paid tribute. A dozen or so survivors of the quake have been repeatedly interviewed, and they’re an astonishing bunch: quick-witted, energetic, and feisty. Some are still working.

You can watch the quake propagate—the viewpoint is from the west, showing how the central rupture spread north and south along the San Andreas. You can look at pictures of San Francisco then and now. And Tim Walton, an experienced news cameraman for NBC, points out that the quake signaled the beginning of citizen photojournalism. (He and his wife Kathy, a sound tech who often works with him, are friends of mine. Together, they've covered everything from Columbine to the Michael Jackson trial; Tim has also spent several tours in Iraq while Kathy stayed home with their children.)

The USGS, probably my all-time favorite government agency, offers a stunning exhibit on the quake, with photographs of the devastation, plus maps, and clear discussions of the science of the earthquake.

The real threat to the San Francisco Bay region over the next 30 years comes not from a 1906-type earthquake, but from smaller (magnitude about 7) earthquakes occurring on the Hayward fault, the Peninsula segment of the San Andreas fault, or the Rodgers Creek fault.

There’s an irony to this; many of the earthquake survivors fled to the perceived safety of the East Bay, which is where the next big threat is located. There’s a 27% chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger quake on the Hayward by 2032. (There was a quake of that magnitude here in 1868; the ground moved three feet in some places.) You can see evidence that the fault is constantly moving.

Today it’s slowly creeping. Someday it will rupture, devastating the East Bay from San Pablo through Oakland and south to Fremont. Throughout the fault zone, the coastal plains near the bay are densely populated with homes and businesses, but in some places the hills are still grazing land for cattle. In other places, the hills are occupied by beautiful houses and at least one great university. Yes, Berkeley is on the Hayward fault. In fact, the fault runs between the goalposts of Berkeley’s football field. The East Bay is a ticking time bomb.

It’s also where I live.

Every single day I drive along the Hayward fault; it runs under Mission Street, which in my area is a strip of car dealerships, body shops, and transmission-repair places. I admit to slowing down whenever I pass the local expert on British luxury vehicles: I have to check out the classic 1930s Rolls-Royces, the Bentleys, and the Jaguar convertibles that are parked there, awaiting service. When the Hayward fault breaks, I hope it’s on a weekend, when those lovely cars are not directly in the line of destruction.

My workplace is constructed to withstand almost any quake, so despite its proximity to the fault I never worry about one when I’m here. We also have earthquake supplies: not just the usual ones mandated by law, but long-term survival supplies, because part of our job is disaster recovery.

My house is on bedrock, which should minimize shaking, and it’s at the peak of a hill with panoramic views. (On clear days we can see San Francisco and the Marin headlands beyond, plus the Bay and the Santa Cruz mountains on the other side) Specifically, it’s on the fault escarpment, the bluff that rose through the millennia as the Hayward fault broke and broke again. Yes, that’s right: I live perched like a ski-jumper above the most dangerous active local fault. Should it rupture again soon, I’ll have a front-row view of the devastation.

We who live on the fault are not helpless. Coming from a less seismically aware region of the country, I was astonished when I heard Californians matter-of-factly discussing the quake preparations they’d made. (Bolting bookcases to the wall, for example, or making sure the bed is not in falling distance of anything potentially lethal.)It’s possible to quakeproof your home. This won’t actually prevent any earthquakes, or even prevent your house from total destruction if the rupture happens in your front yard, but it’s useful advice. You can also learn to check for danger in a house you buy or rent.

Why stay? I was talking with Michele this morning. She pointed out, quite correctly, that the people who had fled the East Bay were jumping from the frying pan into the fire. “Didn’t anybody remember the 1868 quake?”

“That had been almost 40 years before, when there were a lot fewer people. Many people were new immigrants who didn’t know.”

“If I were looking for someplace safe, I’d have gone to South Dakota.”

“Where you have blizzards, tornadoes, heat waves, and droughts. And the Eastern seaboard is no better. There have been huge quakes in Boston and Charleston, and the Hudson River is on a fault. Someday New York City will get hit hard.”

She said, “I know—that’s why I picked South Dakota.”

“Why not Wyoming? There the biggest risk is that you’ll be beaten, set on fire, and tied to a fence to die.”

And that is one reason people stay here. It’s not just the spectacular climate. It sure as hell isn’t the real estate prices. Here at the edge of the continent, geeks and queers—both terms that have been reclaimed with pride—live in peace with people who would be average in Peoria. They’re used to us. We’re safe—as safe as we can ever be, anywhere.

So today, I celebrate the spirit of a city that survived the destruction of more than half its buildings. I celebrate the drive to rebuild more intelligently; every disaster has taught us more about how to live with our faults. I celebrate the San Francisco Bay Area. My home.

2006-04-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

“I'm Not Saying We Wouldn't Get Our Hair Mussed”

Recent snatch of telephone dialogue:

Lynn: You know why Bush wants to nuke Iran? Because he thinks saving Iran will be his legacy.

Alan: What, bankrupting the country and destroying our military isn’t enough?

Lynn: Not to mention pissing off the whole world. He’s managed to make everyone hate us.

If you would prefer that we not nuke Iran, MoveOn has an online petition. You can add your own notes to your Congresscritter. This is what I had to say:

This administration's idea of how to win friends and influence people is straight from the schoolyard bully, who resolves every dispute and assuages every frustration by beating up a smaller, weaker kid. The small-scale bully bloodies noses and makes a few kids' lives wretched, which is bad enough; bullying can leave scars for life.

Now extrapolate that effect to whole nations. Imagine the agonizing scars, physical and emotional, generations of Iranians would suffer if the United States, flaunting the flag of democracy, pre-emptively attacked them with nuclear weapons. Imagine the level of hatred and desperation they would feel. When people have nothing to lose and Paradise to gain, becoming a suicide bomber makes sense. Using a nuclear strike against Iran would make life in the US far more dangerous.

If you want to protect American lives, make Iran a friendly nation. Helping their economy and giving their young people hope for a better life on earth is likely to be a far more successful tactic than mass murder. Compare Germany after the Versailles treaty with Germany under the Marshall Plan. Which group was being punished by the international community? Which group lashed out at their own minorities and the rest of the world? Which group was peaceful, prosperous, free, and democratic?

We have become a rogue state under the leadership of an irresponsible president. Use your Congressional powers while you still have them. Now if ever is the time for checks and balances to halt the excesses of the loose-cannon executive branch. The Bush Administration is gutting the Constitution at home and promoting the Apocalypse abroad. Stop President Bush--or bear the guilt of thousands of deaths, now and in the future. Stop this bombing--and be proud to be an American again.

To quote General Buck Turgidson: “Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people, than with your image in the history books.”

2006-04-07T10:33:00.000-07:00

Books that Built My World

Some people are raised by wolves. I was raised by books. This list of essential books is incomplete, of course, but it's a good start; it goes up to about 1980. I’ve chosen books that were turning points—that led me into new worlds, clarified or altered my vision, changed the ways I thought and wrote, or spoke for me when I could not yet find my own words. Not just books I loved; you’ll find no Faulkner here, for example, nor Willa Cather.

The King James Bible. In the beginning was the KJV. I learned to read from it. No book has shaped me more profoundly than that one. I know all the arguments against it, scholarly and otherwise. But still my sense of the Divine is shaped by the stubborn grandeur and simplicity of its language.

Geography, a Little Golden Book. Call it 1963; I was 3 or 4. My mother bought me this 29-cent book at the grocery store. Its picture of an erupting volcano sparked my lifelong interest in geology.

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott. When I was about 6, my mother gave me this book, saying, “This is a book about four little girls just like you and your sisters.” (Yes, I was the second of the four, and I already wanted to be a writer.) It’s also both truthful and well-written. I can still see traces of Louisa in my writing style.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte. That pale, plain girl’s resolute integrity through abuse, hunger, and temptation was an early model for me. And her passion—her avowal of love to Rochester, her courage, her strong feelings for nature and other people—oh, these were an example and a role-model for me.

Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis. My sister Lisa gave it to me for my seventh birthday. The first Lewis I ever read, and the direct link to my reading such formative books as The Screwtape Letters, which is one of the great structural books of my life.

Poems for Young People, Edna St. Vincent Millay. A gift from my mother when I was about ten. Started my lifelong interest in Millay.

Modern British and American Poetry, ed. Louis Untermeyer. I found this book, scrounging around in the attic of a house we rented. I still have it. It opened so many doors for me. So many names—Pound, Graves, Sassoon, Chesterton—became familiar to me from that anthology, and when I saw them elsewhere I pounced on them.

Ammie, Come Home, Barbara Michaels. First read around Easter of 1968 at my paternal grandparents’ house in Chevy Chase, not far from where the book is set. They had the Reader’s Digest condensed version. (Most of the condensing was done by eliminating profanity.) This elegant, terrifying ghost story expressed one facet of the pain I was going through.

Moreover, the book introduced me to Barbara Michaels, who in turn sent me on to read Dorothy L. Sayers and Josephine Tey. I was and am deeply grateful that she referenced other books. So much of my reading was random; I chose books that looked interesting or authors mentioned by someone else I liked. I didn't have anyone to help me choose my reading. I scrambled and scrounged and searched for connections. Was there anybody else like me out there? Maybe the next book would hold a clue.

Collected Poems, Dylan Thomas. I picked this up in my school library in the spring of 1972. I drank it straight, and the effect was very much like chugging a bottle of straight whiskey.

The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden. A book of essays I discovered in my school library when I was 13 or so. Auden was as passionately, playfully addicted to categorization as I am, and I still enjoy his lucid perceptions on poetry, society, psychology.

“When It Changed,” Joanna Russ, in Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison. In the summer of 1973, I was about to turn 14 and about to get braces. After a preliminary examination at my orthodontist’s office in Scranton, I went across the street to a combination gun/junk store, which had a few books for sale on a back shelf. I’ve told the story in this space before—how I found the anthology and knelt there to read the whole story, tears pouring down my face. The book cost a quarter; I still have it. From then on, I read anything I could find by Joanna Russ; The Female Man in particular became a touchstone, a book I reread, annotated, quoted, absorbed—a book that structured my thinking.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. I didn’t read Austen until I was 16, and then I realized that being a great writer required only that you see clearly and speak honestly. I’m still working on them both.

The Great Shark Hunt, Hunter Thompson. Probably in my sophomore year of college (1977), I was taking the Greyhound back from visiting my family. The bus was crowded that day, and we got stuck behind two funerals and a wedding. But my seatmate was a Penn student reading this, and he kept laughing aloud—and soon he was reading bits of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” out loud to me. I loved—and love—Thompson’s outrage, his politics, his crazily inflated language rigorously tied to precise, telling detail.

Small Changes, Marge Piercy. Look, people who were living the way I was living! These days I grow easily frustrated with Piercy, who can be mean-spirited and predictable, but in 1979 there weren’t many books that reflected my kind of life.

Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen. She spoke of grief and exile when I was new to them both. I still reread this book in times of loss, and her short stories are always a delight to me. I marvel at the clarity of her prose.

Malafrena, Ursula K. Le Guin. I’d read Earthsea and felt cheated; the writing was good, but the world felt sexist to me. Somehow Malafrena worked for me, bringing together my lifelong fascinations with revolutions and with Eastern Europe (an unsurprising one, given where I grew up). I confess I fell in love with Itale Sorde. I went on to read all the rest of Le Guin, to find great power in her work, and to marry someone of Eastern European extraction, partly because he reminded me of Itale.

2006-04-03T15:40:00.000-07:00

Plaaaaaaaayyyyyy Ballllll!

And the Phillies lose 13-5, in their worst opening day since 1935.

It's going to be a long season.

2006-03-29T11:57:00.000-08:00

What Doth It Profit a Bloodsucking Film Company to Cheat Hardworking Writers While It Battens upon Their Creative Output? Too Bloody Much, If You Ask Me

One day in 1979 I picked up a copy of The Last Unicorn, and I fell in love with the book’s simplicity, humor, and beauty, the evocative language, and the haunting, hopeful story. It is, in my opinion, one of the greatest books of the twentieth century, a book to stand beside the best of Mark Twain or Italo Calvino, a classic that unfolds new meaning each time I read it.

That same year, a cartoon version was made. Because it fell so far short of the book, I’ve never been fond of it, but I know many people who were first introduced to the unicorn herself, Schmendrick the Magician, Molly Grue, and all the other rich and varied characters by that film. It has, in fact, been enormously popular for more than 25 years.

So why isn’t Peter Beagle getting the 5% of net profits his contract promised him?

Because it never turned a profit, according to the vast corporation that has bought the rights to the film.

Well, that’s just one of their excuses, but it’s an interesting and bizarre one. Basically, they want to continue getting rich by screwing over authors. They’re also not paying the 5% he’s due for merchandise rights. This FAQ explain the details, and it’s just sickening.

Mr. Beagle is fighting this in court—an expensive proposition, given that the suit must be filed in both England and the US. England doesn’t permit lawyers to work for contingency fees, and it will take a fortune to pay forensic accountants and contract specialists to sift through the years of lies and records. He needs financial help. But instead of just asking for contributions, he has written a sequel to help raise some money.

Even if you can’t buy a book, you can help.

Now, I don’t know Peter Beagle myself, although friends of mine know him. In this context, it doesn’t matter a damn that he’s a gentle human being supporting his hundred-year-old mother (which I understand to be the case). This case doesn’t hinge on his personal virtues, the length of his beard, or even the extraordinarily high literary quality of the original story. This is a question of contract rights. It’s pure and simple business. And yet he’s being cheated by people using creative accounting methods to line their own pockets from the fruit of his mind.

Peter Beagle is one of the very few great authors—a phrase I use with the utmost care—whose work found its audience in his lifetime. He has a right to be rewarded.

ETA For the record, the movie went into the black within a year or two, insofar as it's possible to determine. Movie companies routinely use creative accounting to make sure even the most wildly successful films don't officially profit. In this case, they're using a hugely inflated figure for advertising (more than $3 million over what the records show was actually spent), and then compounding the interest on it. They also assume that the movie made no movie for a decade or so. It's disgraceful.