Surreality Check

A Savage Writer's Journal

September 2003
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Last Month (August)

07 September 2003
Living in the Past

Like before I injured my back. That would be nice. I'm not sure that time-travel agencies would authorize something that frivolous, though.

Just a short note here to change the month over and get back on track. I've been spending far too much time on various controlled substances (by prescription; don't get your hopes up) of late to keep up with this journal. One does not muck around with FTP and Unix file permissions while one's brain is somewhere near Pluto.

In any event, I'm hoping to be more regular with this. That will mean, indirectly, that everything else is under control (most probably as in "controlled crash-landing," but I'm not that picky).

14 September 2003
It's Alive

But not kicking. Things are not under control. Here's hoping for better luck in the near future. At least the pinched nerve seems to have released; I'm just dealing with residual weakness today. I'd say residual grumpiness, too, but nobody would be able to tell the difference.

17 September 2003
Back to the Future

As happens every four or five years, an old-line science fiction writer of some reputation has recently lamented the complete failure of contemporary science fiction, resulting in loss of hope for the future and the souring of all milk in the refrigerator. (The latter might just as easily have been caused by failure to develop a renewable energy source resulting in brownouts—but that's just not at issue, is it?)

There is an interesting riposte to Spider Robinson's misguided screed by John Carter McKnight that also, sadly, misses part of the point. And here I part company with some of the major figures in the science fiction establishment, who mistakenly try to distinguish between "real" science fiction and "metaphoric" science fiction, usually denigrating the latter with the accusation that "it's just a metaphor for today, and it's not intended as 'real'" or something similar.

The answer to this last accusation is simple: So what? At some level of abstraction, all fiction is just a metaphor for "today," or "the human condition." That is what storytelling is about, whether one means campfire stories, literature, parables, raw entertainment, allegory, or anything else. All storytelling is "about" the "human condition," if only in that even when all of the characters are anthropomorphized animals (however thinly), the subtext comparing and contrasting those characters to the reader and the reader's contemporaries—no, I am not advocating reader-response theory, just indicating that this is always one subtext—concerns the "human condition." A story can certainly have more than one subject, more than one subtext, more than one valid interpretation.

Unfortunately, Mr. McKnight misses both this point and the necessary corollary. A story's setting is only the starting point for the story. Too often, it's the only one to which publishers give any attention; but that's another argument. A setting predicated upon an active space exploration program is neither inferior nor superior to any other; it is merely different. Setting is only an element; what matters is what the author does with it, how it is transformed, how it transforms the reader's understanding.

20 September 2003
The End of Summer

Tomorrow is the last day of summer for this year. My kids complained about having to go to school during summer. I told them that if it bothers them that much they can stay in school until 21 June next year. For some reason, they didn't buy it.

Actually, I dislike summer anyway. Too hot, too humid, and the grass grows too damned fast. The only good thing is the tomatoes; this year, though, they've been sort of balanced by the insects. Speaking of which, I'd better go harvest the mandragora in the garden (I have just enough hearing loss for this to be possible). Uhoh—now I'll have to forfeit my membership in People for the Ethical Treatment of Vegetables ("It's 3am. Do you know where your baby carrots are?").

The other thing that this means is that in about two weeks, I'll start getting more inquiries from authors who think they may have problems with agents, free-lance editors, and/or publishers. It's not just that "back to school" means "back to the slush pile" (on the inside) and "back to the Post Office" (on the outside) for the publishing industry. Maybe it's just that the bloodsucking parasites tend to get bolder as we get closer to Halloween.

Speaking of bloodsucking parasites, there's still no word from the Ninth Circuit on the appeal in Harlan's case. And no, the bloodsucking parasite is not the court, and certainly not my client.

28 September 2003
Bloodsucking Parasites

I should have learned by now not to refer to "bloodsucking parasites." A few minutes after I finished the last posting, I got a frantic call from another lawyer. The other lawyer was being sued by a former employer for allegedly unfairly competing with the former employer. The whole mess just validates the public's low regard for the legal profession.

Under the ethics rules that apply here, a lawyer who is leaving a law firm for another law firm is permitted to write a letter to current clients announcing the departure and where he/she will be going. Technically, that letter may not suggest to the clients that they may wish to follow the lawyer; in reality, such a violation would receive at most a verbal suggestion on the proper way to handle the issue in the future. Frankly, the ethics rule is wrong on this one; so long as the suggestion is low-key, does not comment on comparative qualifications, and does nothing more than note that it would be permissible to follow the lawyer to the new practice (whether solo or another firm), a suggestion that clients may wish to follow the lawyer to the new practice seems almost mandated by the Sixth Amendment and the case law interpreting the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel of choice. Holding otherwise implies that once one has chosen counsel, that one's choice may not change, and—worse—that a client is a business asset of a law practice. Whatever one may say about the politeness of suggesting that a client follow a lawyer to a new practice, the alternative is inconsistent with minimum standards of ethics, which must at a minimum respect the client's constitutional rights. The lawyer's letter probably went a little bit beyond what it should have, but at worst this was a minor matter (it was not a blatant criticism of the former employer's ability to represent the client).

In any event, things got much, much worse before I was contacted. The former employer filed a civil suit requesting a temporary restraining order and injunction preventing the lawyer from contacting any former client or current client of the former employer. We'll leave aside the frivolous nature of the actual filing, and note only that its propriety was based upon actions taken by the former employer (both individual lawyers and the partnership collectively) that facially violate several ethics rules, two of them of much greater gravity than the purported defective letter. To say the least, the judge—once appraised of factual matters that the meticulous could have inferred from documents filed (under the duty of candor owed by counsel, see Illinois Rule of Professional Conduct 3.1, the judge does not have such a responsibility)—was not amused after having granted the TRO. The form of the TRO also greatly exceeded the permissible scope for any TRO. This is just the easy-to-explain-without-implicating-privileged-communications stuff; suffice it to say that delving into the records makes things even uglier.

There's an old saw that there are only three lawyer jokes—the rest are all true. Here's another true one.

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