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Friday, May 16, 2008

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Austrian edition

A 39-year-old man who was ashamed after running his finances into the ground killed his wife, daughter, parents and father-in-law in three different cities before driving back to Vienna where the killing spree began, leading to this headline: Austrian man 'exhausted, relieved' after killing spree, police say. (I read the lede out loud to Cris, who quipped "'Best workout I've ever had,' he added.")

It's no longer surprising that the most over-the-top psychopaths are from Austria, is it? After that guy who kept his daughter a sex slave in the basement for 27 years, a mere killing spree seems like par for the course.

Ashley Dupre, the hooker in the Elliot Spitzer affair, tried to sneak back into New York Thursday but the New York Post was all over her. All she did was arrive in a bus at Port Authority and catch a cab to the Flatiron District, but they've got video and a photo gallery. You'd think they would have somebody making a cast of the impression her butt made in the taxi's backseat.

An American art expert who worked for a Thai museum was being held on charges relating to an antiquities smuggling ring when she died in federal custody in Seattle.

A woman who lives in the L.A. suburb of Huntington Beach was under investigation to determine whether she intentionally sicced her dog on the mail carrier, who turned out to be a winner of eight Olympic medals. Unfortunately the medals were for swimming and they were not near the beach, so the former Olympian merely locked herself in her mail truck and called 911.

Two Pennsylvania men who tried to steal power lines right off the poles were electrocuted, but unfortunately not killed. And elsewhere in the same state, a couple discovered an extra $280,000 in their bank account, so they spent it. Now the bank wants it back.

Labels: Bad Behavior

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Credibility

I have a few closing remarks on the third (1965) New York Film Festival. Thirteen symposiums took place as part of the festival. Now I know what Pauline Kael lost at the movies: the taste for cinema. Hollis Alpert spent much time trying to persuade us that his reviews are really too intelligent, that cinema does not deserve the intelligence he is giving it...

A curious thing: Although I haven't seen any of them at any of the avant-garde and underground film screenings, all critics participating at the symposiums kept stressing their deep concern with the young and new cinema.

-- Village Voice film critic Jonas Mekas,
writing in the Village Voice, 23 September 1965

That's one of my idols, Jonas Mekas, as collected in the invaluable anthology of his Village Voice columns from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Movie Journal. Another critic writes here about coming upon Mekas' book. I mentioned it here in 2005. An early Voice column is here.

technorati: film criticism, Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas

Labels: film criticism, zeitgeist

Women bathing

Check out a new blog by a friend of mine, Whores of Bath, in which they review bath products and also take "fantasy baths" with celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Robert Downey, Jr.

technorati: bath products, bloggers

Labels: bloggers

Friday, May 09, 2008

British band "shoots" video by performing for surveillance cameras

This is so awesome! Instead of shooting a video the old-fashioned way, a British band performed in front of their city's ubiquitous surveillance cameras, requested the footage from cops and private companies using the British equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act request, then edited the footage to produce the finished product. Courtesy BoingBoing.

The finished video, viewable at that link, shows the band performing in crosswalks, taxicabs, public plazas, and the entrance ramp to a parking garage.

technorati: surveillance, music

Labels: films, rock and roll, surveillance, zeitgeist

Dept. of It Could Be A Story In The Onion

I was agog at this headline:

Platonic ideal of a cheese sandwich realised in Britain

No, it's not from The Onion, it's an actual news story about a real reaction to an actual sandwich. A food critic went to London and:

The food across all levels is fantastic in London. There has been an enormous change. But the one highlight I remember the most is this cheese sandwich. I was walking through Borough market with my 15-year-old son Nick and we bought one from the stall.

I was knocked out by it. It was so delicious that we had to have another one. It meant I was more full than I should have been for lunch but it was worth it. It was so good.

The £3 toasted cheese and onion sandwich was "the creation of Bill Oglethorpe, an expert in cheese who works for the specialist suppliers Neal's Yard Dairy." So, not just something thrown together by some slob. Still a good story. But the headline makes it sublime.

Labels: travel

It's really very relaxing

Please buy my chaise longue.

See Daisetta before it vanishes

A sinkhole started two days ago in tiny Daisetta, Tx, halfway between Houston and Beaumont (map). By this morning it had swallowed an area the size of about a city block -- and the whole town is only about ten blocks wide and long, judging from the map. Now why doesn't that happen to the Houston suburb where I went to high school?

Quoth the mayor:

It's unreal -- the earth just wallered up.

But the best quote was from a Houston Chronicle story: locals are referring to the maw as "Sinkhole de Mayo."

technorati: Daisetta, sinkhole

Labels: depression

It's Bad Behavior Friday&trade! -- Mother's Day edition

The 83-year-old mother of French novelist Michel Houellebecq is interviewed in the Guardian today (courtesy Galleycat), calling her son -- a French version of Chuck Palahniuk and Dennis Cooper, if their work was merged, cleansed of male homosexual content, and made even more obsessed with death -- an "evil, stupid little bastard" adding that "this individual, who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all -- above all -- a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame."

See, that's what happens when your parents read your work. Never let your parents read your work! Or, at least, work as if they never will.

Speaking of mothers, searching on "Britney's mom" turns up this amazing video, which does not depict either Britney or her mom. I love how that guy catches the babies on the first bounce.

Forty-one states have laws allowing women to abandon their babies at fire stations or other government facilities without facing prosecution. Curiously, the time limit for doing so varies wildly, from 72 hours (many states) to 45 (Indiana, Kansas) or 90 days (New Mexico) to a whole year (North Dakota). For some reason, all the states with long deadlines are rural flyover states, though New Jersey, Connecticut and Maine give you a month.

technorati: mothers, flying baby, Michel Houellebecq

Labels: Bad Behavior, Houellebecq, mothers, writers

I'll be back again

I'm taking a long weekend to work on my India book, and following my usual pattern, I took a nap about 45 minutes after starting to work, then walked to a nearby cafe. The girl behind the counter couldn't have been more than 24, but she was playing an early Beatles album on the stereo, and I found it impossible to resist quietly chiming in on the harmony line of "I'll Be Back."

"That's a great album, isn't it?" the girl smiled.

"The best," I nodded. But then I couldn't remember what album it was on. ("A Hard Day's Night" is the answer. I was confused because "If I Fell" was playing when I walked into the cafe, followed by "I'll Be Back," and I couldn't figure out what album that might be. She must have had "A Hard Day's Night" on shuffle.) Anyway, it always does my heart good when I see kids in their 20s appreciating the Beatles; I want to give them a certificate of appreciation or something. Then I realize it would be as creepy as one of my parents' friends patting me on the head when I was 8 just because I liked "Sing Sing Sing."

technorati: Beatles, San Francisco cafes,

Labels: Bangalore novel project, San Francisco

Monday, May 05, 2008

If being on hold weren't bad enough

A company is marketing the "wasted time" you spend on hold, delivering advertisements to you instead of hold music. It's bad enough to hear happy-voice promotions for the company you're calling while you wait on hold; I pity the customer service people who wind up on the receiving end of callers' wrath after listening to some unrelated advertisement.

This goes on the list of signs of the apocalypse, along with advertisements on the floors of supermarkets, on little TV screens in hotel elevators, and in the corner of TV screens while you're trying to watch the ballgame.

technorati: advertising

Labels: advertising, commercials, marketing, signs of the apocalypse

Adventures in book publicity

Hey look, it's my friend Sara on the NPR home page, doing a "This I Believe" shot to promote her book Take This Bread.

I interviewed Sara in 2006 when she was completing the book; this interview with the SF Gate.com website is much better. Among other places, you can see her work on salon.com.

Her book caught the attention of the Episcopal church's presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who quoted it in a 2007 commencement address at an Episcopal seminary. Others who loved the book include Anne Lamott.

Sara's previous book was about the relationship between Web 1.0-era entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and the Al Gore campaign, but this piece she wrote in the New York Times in 1999 -- the same year she began going to church -- already reflects her questions about whose responsibility it is to make sure people are fed.

(By the way, this Sara Miles is a completely different one than the one with the autistic kid who's gone on the Snow White ride at Disney World 2084 times, and whom I blogged about yesterday without mentioning the mother's name.)

technorati: Sara Miles

Labels: books by friends, friends, Sara Miles, Take This Bread, writers

Sunday, May 04, 2008

What does a technical writer do?

A year or two ago I met a fellow writer who was interested when I told him that one can make a good living doing technical writing. He asked me for information, and I went home and found a job description, which I annotated with notes. I sent him the following long screed.

You should only read this if you are interested at all in what a technical writer does. I'm sure that does not include most of my regular readers, but someone looking online for the information might find it helpful.

I found this job description from a job posting someone sent me a couple years ago. It provides a pretty good summary of what a technical writer at a high-tech company does. I will annotate it with numbers like this (1) and give some more details.

Outline (1) and write (2) user guides (3) for our software products, with a focus on concise language and meeting audience needs (4). Write detailed software installation instructions (5), including hardware and software requirements (6) and impact analyses (7). Convert (8) user manuals to online help, editing content as needed (9) to meet the standards of this documentation model. Quickly (10) deliver shorter documents, such as knowledgebase articles (11) and compatibility fact sheets (12), to support internal clients (13) like the Technical Support and Sales departments. Edit and proofread material written by other Documentation team members. (14) Work with Analysis and Design team (15) to examine and understand new product features. Work with Education (16) & Services (17) in the development and production of training materials.

1. Some tech pubs managers want you to produce an outline of your manual before you write it. It can be a useful step to make sure you know what you're doing. Fortunately, the outlines of most software manuals are the same: (I.) How to install the software. (II.) How to configure the software, and how to configure your existing environment to work with it. (III.) How to use it. (IV.) Reference section.

2. Writing -- or "authoring" as people sometimes say -- is usually done in FrameMaker, though some companies use other tools. If you don't know FrameMaker going in, they'll ask if you have done complicated publishing stuff with other software, and this is where you'd mention your expertise in Quark Xpress or PageMaker or something. Writing means filling out the outline you wrote in (1).

3. User Guides. Depending on the size of the product, there are sometimes separate installation manuals, performance guides, troubleshooting guides, etc. etc. People who are just learning the tech writing trade are often given either Installation Guides or Release Notes to do before they let you dig into the other stuff. Release Notes are the "read Me" file that you're supposed to read before anything else. It often contains a lit of "known issues," i.e. bugs they couldn't fix before they ship the software.

4. Meeting audience needs is an important concept in technical writing. You always think about things from the perspective of the audience, i.e. the reader of the manual and the user of the product, and *not* from the perspective of the engineer who gave you the dope on how everything works. In fact, this is really the main thing a technical writer does: translate what the engineer said into something regular people can understand.

5. Installation instructions -- I talked about this already, but I wanted to mention that this sometimes means writing the same instructions several different ways, depending on how many "platforms" (or different combinations of hardware and software operating systems) the company says its software runs on. For example, installing the same software on a Windows system and a Unix system is almost always significantly different.

6. Requirements -- This also gets at the point I just made about platforms. Your manual might tell the customer "You must have installed the 1.5_11 JDK before installing this on your AIX system." See also no. 12 below.

7. Impact analysis -- I'm sort of guessing here -- This probably refers to the "cost," in terms of "overhead," of installing the software or various components of it. For example, let's say you installed Google Desktop on your laptop. You probably know that it uses a certain amount of processing overhead to index everything on your laptop's hard drive. Therefore it has an impact on the performance of your computer.

8. Most companies take a manual authored (there's that verb again) in FrameMaker and use another tool to convert it to another format for online help. The tool commonly used for this is something called Quadralay WebWorks, though there is another tool called RoboHelp that I've never used, but which you see a lot of companies using. The important concept here is "single sourcing," which means that the PDF of your manual and the HTML files of the online help come from the same source, your FrameMaker files. And you can see why this is important -- if you had the same thing documented in two places, that's one too many to try to keep in sync. So tech writing departments try to "single source" as much of their stuff as possible. On the other hand, this is sometimes more of an ideal than a practical goal.

9. Editing content as needed -- This might refer to copyediting, or it might refer to the fact that sometimes the automatic Frame-to-HTML conversion tool is not enough, and you need to tweak the HTML help files to make them look right.

10. Depending on how long it takes the engineers to develop a new product -- or a new version of an old product -- you might update a manual only once every 18 months. On the other hand, sometimes other departments want something lickety split, such as the two things mentioned next.

11. Knowledgebase articles. This is a generic term for "the technical information not found in a manual that is sometimes put online for everybody to read, and sometimes made available only internally, to help customers figure out how to do something." The reason a particular fact or procedure might be found in one of these articles and not in a regular manual is that these articles often document rather obscure behavior of the product that you don't want everyone who reads the manual to know about.

12. Compatibility fact sheets are the things, usually in several tables, that tell you that product A works with operating systems X, Y and Z, but only on Windows XP; and on systems X and Z if it's UNIX running a certain flavor of .... you get the idea. With large enterprise software products this gets very arcane and complex.

13. Internal clients, such as the aforementioned Customer Service, and Technical Support and Sales, mentioned here, are also readers of your work.

14. Other team members. Large companies sometimes have whole teams of writers. I work on a team of eight people plus a manager, and we're documenting the products of one division of a company that sells literally hundreds of products. There are, I think, more than 300 tech writers in the company of 35,000 people.

15. By the Analysis and Design team I suppose they mean Engineering, or maybe the people who give the requirements to Engineering -- in other words, the people who decide what the customer wants in the next version of the product.

16. Education. Large companies, and even small ones, have training classes in their products, and sometimes the tech writers contribute to the training materials -- which are totally separate from the manuals they usually work on. Only in the smallest companies -- like the one I worked at for the last two years that had just fifteen people -- are the writers expected to also write the training courses.

17. Services. Companies have "professional services" departments full of people who go to customers and install and configure the products *for* them, because no matter how simple and clear you make your manuals, the product is often too complicated to install and make work the way the customer wants it to.

Whew. If you got this far without wanting to jab pencils into your eyes, you may have the aptitude to be a technical writer. The next question is, how to get the skills. Since it's hard to gain experience doing things like converting FrameMaker books to HTML help without already being a technical writer, the main way you could make yourself interesting to a manager who might give you a shot is to gain experience doing analogous things. For example, if you've ever done a newsletter for a nonprofit group, a school, a community center or whatever, that involves several important analogous skills, even if you weren't using FrameMaker. If you've ever taught someone how to do a fairly technical thing, that counts for something. Look for opportunities to do the equivalent of creating a technical how-to manual. For example, does the school near your house need a simple how-to guide for its staff on using the email system? If you can find *anything* like this to do, it gives you a writing sample, which is probably the single most important thing you can bring to someone who wants to interview you.

OK, enough already. Best of luck.

That's what I sent the poor fellow. It might have been enough to make him run screaming from the idea of ever being a technical writer. But somebody has to do it.

technorati: technical writing

Labels: technical writing

Austistic child takes Disney ride > 2000 times

An autistic child responds only to a certain ride at Disney World -- so his family moved to Orlando so he could go on the ride as much as possible. So far he's done it over 2000 times.

I don't know what's more horrifying about this story -- the living hell that his parents must be going through (even if they take turns accompanying the child, imagine having to do anything over a thousand times), or the fact that only an expensive, compelling commercial fiction can raise the child out of his own living hell.

I suppose there are worse things -- say, being a prisoner in Abu Gharib, perhaps... Hmm, that would be an interesting test. Take a guy from Abu Gharib and put him on that ride 2000 times and see how long it takes before he begs to be returned to prison.

Saturday, May 03, 2008

It's Bad Behavior Saturday™!

The first spam message was sent 30 years ago today.

A British comedian known for "his normal bitter and emasculated, pissed-up state" molested an unwilling audience member on stage.

Two odd stories from Colorado Springs:

Woman scalped by bus in freak accident
Real estate agent jailed after sending teens to take revenge on client

In New York Ashley Dupré, the bête noire of Elliott Spitzer, celebrated her Best Year Evar by partying at a New York nightspot. She "couldn't seem to make up her mind about wanting attention -- alternately hiding behind her hoodie and getting up on the back of her banquette and waving her arms."

A man jumped from a 14th floor room at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. According to the story, he was sharing the room with "an associate" -- yes, being forced to double up on a business trip would make you want to commit suicide.

Labels: Bad Behavior

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Shots in the dark

It happened again last night -- a series of shots a block or two away, coming from the direction of the public housing project. It's close enough to hear but not close enough to be able to call the cops and tell them exactly where it happened. We hear the shots, and then sometimes a car getting away fast. I go outside and down to the corner to make sure it didn't happen right close by; last night, there was no sign of anything, so I went inside. Then, after a few minutes, sirens. The next day, a story like this in the paper: S.F. Man Shot to Death Sitting In Car In the Mission. Feh.

Labels: Bad Behavior, zeitgeist

Urbanity

Lots of media coverage lately about city plans to create a new downtown, or maybe just an extension to the present downtown, in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. [map] The neighborhood has been many things, but most people who live in SF now think of it as a light-industrial zone with housing mixed in, with a leather queen zone along Folsom St. between 4th and 13th, and lots of new condos along Harrison and in what has recently been dubbed the South Beach district.

Some people think more urban density is a good thing. I wouldn't mind having lots of six or eight story buildings, instead of the two or three story buildings that represent most of the older housing South of Market. (The area burned entirely in the 1906 fire, so all of them date from after that, though there are many examples of post-Victorian apartment flats on the side alleys.) I've always liked the eight or ten story apartment buildings you see around town, in the Mission for example -- like the ones near 25th and Valencia (such as the one on the left side of this photo). That would be a good kind of urban density. But I have the feeling that's not what they're planning.

technorati: San Francisco, urbanism, South of Market

Labels: San Francisco

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

End of the old garages

Since we moved into our house in 1995, there were some ramshackle garages on Harrison St., on the other side of the block. It was an ancient wooden building with a corrugated metal roof on which the feral cats of the block used to sun themselves.

Several months ago we got a notice from the Planning Dept. that someone was going to tear them down and put up a condo building. I almost forgot about it, but this morning I noticed a big claw machine tearing into the garages. I took a couple pictures from our back window, and more from Harrison St. in front of the site.

Out my office window

I got to move to a cube here by the window several weeks ago. This is my view -- the easternmost shoulder of Mount San Bruno, just across US 101.

The sliver of mountain visible in the picture is actually part of a state park that covers much of the mountain, so the view should stay this way.

It'd be nice to get rid of the billboard, though. It's been the exact same billboard for three years or so. I thought the company might have simply forgotten about it, but then a couple of months ago I saw it had been tagged up, and then then next day it had been restored. So clearly the software company that rents it is still paying the bills.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Birthday post

Yo, it's my birthday. I'm at work at my job as a technical writer for a big software company, just doing usual things. An ordinary Monday, really.

I had a super-duper birthday two years ago, and since we just had a 50th birthday party for Cris's sister we're not really up for another party. Tonight her sister is coming over, coincidentally, and we'll watch a documentary she worked on and eat some Thai food. And maybe the last of the cake from last weekend. That's all right.

A lot of times I look back on my birthday, but since it's pretty much a sure thing that, at age 52, I'm closer to dying than being born, it seems like less work to look ahead. This year I'm going to finish another draft --the final one, I hope -- of my novel about the American girl who goes to Bangalore to help open a customer service call center. And when I'm done with that, I'll try another shot at the book I wrote for Cleis Press last sumer and fall. I'm doing a reading on ~~May 16~~ May 17, of what I'm not yet sure, and I hope I'll do more readings later in the year. If I do all that, and manage to keep my job, I'll be more than satisfied.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

From my notes

Here are the notes I wrote today as I try to figure out how to rewrite my Bangalore novel. There's 150 pages of this stuff, going babck to November 2004 when I started the book.

I looked a little bit at my notes from late 2005, when I was trying to figure out what to do with the half a book I had written to that point. I realize now I have gone about this all wrong. I tried writing a novel off the top of my head, and while that got me a great start, it did not stand me in a good stead for the second two-thirds of the book. On the other hand, "Knock Yourself Out," which I already have a few thousand words for, does not have a good start, but a tortured, slow, feeling, which is the way I write when I'm doing nothing more than feeling my way. I supposedly know what KYO is all about, in terms of most of the plot and the theme. I started "Bangalored" (the fourth title the book has had, by the way, after "The Moony Trail of Starry Shine," "Dear Prudence," and "Mango Rain") with a notion, a flavor, a voice -- but no idea what the book was really about. I really must work to integrate the two.

On the third hand, I started "Make Nice" with much less of an idea of either. I just had the two characters of Bobby and Gene. But that was perhaps the best way to start, with a strong character who could simply live.

Perhaps that's the real lesson I have to learn from this experience -- start with characters, not a plot, a setting, a theme, or a feeling. Or if you start with those things, don't go any farther until you really know who the characters are.

Anyway, I have to make something of this damn thing, for the third or fourth time. (Actually the last completed draft was draft 6, for some reason.) I have to remind myself that I'm further along than I was a month ago -- even if I'm little farther along than I was three years ago, judging by the degree to which I really know the characters.

I'm going to try to start notes without looking at any previous notes. I know these have gotten repetitive this month, but I feel like I have to constantly refresh and reinforce my conception of the characters, their development, and how the plot reflects that. (In real life, people -- characters -- react to events. In novels, the author must secretly shape events to help the characters develop. But not too much, or it won't be believable.)

... thinking ...

Perhaps one of the fulcrums is Doug's state of mind at the moment he arrives in Bangalore. He is carrying three, no four, loads of psychic baggage:
His history with Betsy and with Stella
His former career and fame as a journalist, and his career as a professor and how that career ended
His intentions to save his career and write a book about Bangalore and the depredations of globalization
His intentions to have a closer relationship with Stella as a way of somehow salvaging his self-regard as a man, having fucked up his relationships in general with women and having just fucked up his career as an academic
I think most of those have been clear up to now except the last one. I haven't understood what he wants, much less fleshed out notes on it, much less written it into the novel. That's why he seems so passive and listless and indeed unrelated to Stella.

Good! Let's unpack that, as theoreticians say. There are actually several parts to it -- his relationships with women, how they have affected his family, and how they have affected his career.

Q.
What are his relationships with women like as a young man?
A.
He is attractive and intelligent, and growing up in the 60s and 70s (he was 25 in 1977) he had lots of sex with lots of women. As a creature of his time, he only learned a little about feminist attitudes toward sex second-hand, i.e. from the women he was fucking or working with (often the same people); he learned how to continue to get sex in that period without really adopting any enlightened attitudes toward women and sex. When Stella was born (1978), he had a sentimental conversion to feminism, because he wanted her to be liberated, but he didn't really change what were by then pretty hidebound attitudes. Perhaps most importantly, when it came to settling down with Betsy as a family, he never even considered it. They weren't living together in the US when they were fucking and Betsy became pregnant; when Betsy returned to the US to give birth to Stella, he didn't come back with her. He stayed in Central America, only coming back to New York from time to time. Maybe he would see Betsy and Stella twice a year, at the most, though he did send child support with regularity. Thus they never married, never lived together in the US.
Q.
When it came time for Doug to return to the US (1984), did they consider living together as a family then?
A.
No, because he had a job offer at Cornell (which has a well-known journalism school) and Betsy was ensconced at a TV station in Chicago.
Q.
Was there ever a time when Doug "left" them?
A.
No. That doesn't mean Betsy didn't feel vaguely abandoned.
Q.
What were Betsy's attitudes?
A.
By becoming a war correspondent and then a TV reporter, she was rebelling against her family's Midwestern expectations; she bolstered her ambition with simple 70s feminist principles that a woman doesn't need a man, etc. But because she was a child of the Midwestern middle class, she had deep-seated feelings about family and home, and she finds reasons to resent Doug that fit into her feminist principles (he was childish, didn't take responsibility, was selfish) but which have their foundation in an unconscious feeling that he should be home with her and her child. She will only admit to feelings that fit in with the ideology, so Stella grows up sensing Betsy's resentment of Doug without understanding it.
Q.
What are Doug's attitudes toward Betsy and Stella?
A.
When Betsy gets pregnant, he really is selfish -- he assumes that anyone with sufficient ambition would not let a pregnancy stand in the way of her career and that she'll get an abortion and their relationship will be exactly the same as it was before she got pregnant. But when she decides she wants to bear the child, he shrugs: he thinks of it as her decision and something that no longer has anything to do with him. (I remember this clearly from the mid-70s, even though I was a bit younger. Since any decisions about what happens to a pregnancy were supposed, by the feminism of the day, to be entirely up to the woman, a man who gets a woman pregnant was absolved of responsibility -- an unintended consequence of feminism and one that has caused some refinement of the dictum "My body, my choice.")
Q.
But still, she is resentful.
A.
Yes, for reasons she doesn't quite understand: her unconscious belief, which she can't square with her ideological analysis, that the father of a child should be part of the child's family.
Q.
How does this affect Doug?
A.
He is annoyed at her expectations, however unconsciously she holds them. Because he understands exactly how she feels -- he knows, without admitting it to himself (much less ever discussing it with her) that she feels he should be close by and support her in some greater way than he ever does.
Q.
Don't they ever talk about it?
A.
No doubt they argue about it when Stella is a child, but they never resolve it.
Q.
So how does that affect the way Doug views Stella?
A.
It creates some guilt, and causes him to compensate for the way he treated Betsy by treating Stella extremely well. In fact, Stella gets a hundred times more time and attention from Doug than Betsy ever did, because Stella lives with Doug during the summers from 1985-1992 (she is ages 7-14, he is ages 34-41).
Q.
All right, what about his time as a professor (1985-2007, ages 34-56)? What are his attitudes toward women then?
A.
On campus, all the girls are feminists, except for the cheerleader types. And a good number of the faculty (though not so much in the J school -- I suppose I could check that, but it's not a fact I really need to know) are women. So when he starts at the university, he has to re-work his attitudes, at least on the surface. He becomes supportive of equality for women professionally. This is also reinforced by his having a daughter.
Q.
What about his sexual attitudes?
A.
These are also influenced by the campus attitude, which at that time is pretty unfettered. The girls, all embracing sexual freedom, are fucking right and left. Of course, it's also the time of the sex wars, the Take Back the Night marches, and the time when, if you were a real feminist, you'd be a lesbian (at least Until Graduation) and there's a lot of suspicion of men. Therefore, the students who fuck their professors fall into a few types, all very much minorities: the fucked-up ones who use sex to prove to themselves they're attractive, the cynical ones who consider it a quid pro quo to get grades, and the intelligent, independent but naive ones who use it to experiment with what they think are adult relationships. Stella herself fits into this category when she has an affair with a professor. So when we get right down to it, the students who fuck Doug are much like his own daughter.
Q.
That seems like something to examine much more closely.
A.
Yeah.... yikes. I had already had that idea but it was more an intuition, I never thought it through to quite that extent.

technorati: writing novels, notes, characters

Labels: Bangalore novel project, characterization, novel writing, writing techniques

With an internet like this, who needs family?

Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977.

-- writer J.R. Moehringer

And from a profile of Gay Talese in the LA Times' book blog comes this related factoid: The "first thing" he learned from his editor at the New York Times -- where, in the 1950s, telephones were "new technology" -- was "never use them" (the phones). Talese's anecdote is not elaborated, but I guess his old editor meant, never use the telephone when you can report in person.

Labels: Bad Behavior, family

Friday, April 25, 2008

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- kill yourself edition

In Japan, a 14-year-old girl committed suicide by inhaling hydrogen sulfide gas, losing style points by injuring and inconveniencing dozens of other people in the process. According to the story, "The incident reflects an increase in suicides committed by inhaling hydrogen sulfide, a trend that has been pushed by Web sites explaining how to create the poison gas." Suicide is a craze in Japan's vapid consumer society, where huge media giants and a hidebound sense of social embarrassment stifle freedom of expression, and an unforgiving culture of competition for education and jobs -- despite a plummeting birth rate -- crushes the souls of young and middle-aged people.

Of course, in the US, where we have actual problems, 120 Iraq or Afghan war vets commit suicide every week. (Courtesy Michelle Richmond.)

In Congo, they have different concerns: there are rampant rumors of penis theft. It pretty much works out to the same thing as a suicide craze, except nobody's died yet.

A 29-year-old Indian woman died giving birth outside a hospital that wouldn't admit her because she was from a low caste; the baby also died. The "chief minister" of the state of Uttar Pradesh has ordered the doctors who wouldn't aid her suspended. Somehow I don't think that's going to hurt them in the long run as much them touching her would have.

Police in Los Angeles are looking for a 24-year-old drifter who is accused of firebombing and killing a fortune teller in an "ongoing gypsy dispute" that began with a burglary.

A Maryland man testified in his trial on charges of stalking actress Uma Thurman. Somebody get that guy a copy of the uncut "Kill Bill" -- that's enough Uma for anybody. By the time he finishes watching that, he'll have his fill of "Kill Bill" thrill.

A San Francisco Bay Area chiropractor, accused of drugging and raping two women, surrendered to authorities today. How much of a moron is he?

He took photos of the sexual assault on his camera phone, police said, and went back to the Hold Cardroom and Bar to show the pictures to patrons there.

technorati: bad behavior, suicide, Uma Thurman, penis theft

Labels: Bad Behavior

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

It's Bad Behavior Wednesday™!

In a shameless bit of online theft, a Chinese publisher took interviews and illustrations from a comix fan's website and packaged them into a $100 coffee table book, even including a CD with digital copies of everything -- "They didn't even bother to change the filenames." And a famous romance author has been caught stealing as well.

In other news from Galleycat, Generation X is now feeling angst about not being the newest, hottest generation anymore. They're "caught between the boomers and the millennials." But the millenials don't have it so good: just look at this epic whine from a Harvard freshman.

technorati: whining, plagiarism, authors, Chinese publishing

Labels: Bad Behavior, publishing, writers