Surreality Check

On Names and Force

The Fabulous T is certainly entitled to her rant on the "wifebeater shirt". For anyone who doesn't buy her argument that naming has a powerful independent influence, may I commend you to Twain's Huckleberry Finn or a good history of the Holocaust? Or, closer to home, the epithets kike, nigger, spic, nip, chink, gook, Injun, slope, faggot, and other lovely reflections of the American character? (Which, contrary to the pretensions of some Europeans, is actually more tolerant than most. Consider Paki, frog, kraut, dago, poof, fairy, and welsher, all of which originated in Europe. That's just the English language.) And then, there's always The Merchant of Venice. Of course, these are all examples of negative names; whether glorifying something horrifying is different is left as an exercise for the reader.

There's also the question of force v. words. Some 19th-century British politician—it sounds like Disraeli, but isn't—said that "The pen is mightier than the sword. However, the sword speaks louder at any one moment." Which reminds me of Stephen Stills' comment while performing "Chicago" live in 1969: "Remember that Jesus Christ was the world's first nonviolent revolutionary." So, as Orson Scott Card wryly remarked (Speaker for the Dead), we killed him. But that didn't seem to have all that much effectiveness in suppressing his message.

I used to work in counterterrorism. Without words, without abstract motivations, without a thoroughly labelled external enemy, we don't have terrorism. There are a few criminals who act as mercenaries; but take away their ideological wars, and they're out of a job, and have to go back to robbing banks.

And just how does this relate to "wifebeater shirts"? Once upon a time, they were called "A-shirts" when they were white articles of men's underwear. Then they graduated to "tank tops", then "muscle shirts." It's all marketing bullshit—misuse of language for rather crass purposes. The one error in Tamela's rant is the underlying assumption that the people who initially promoted "wifebeater shirt" as a commodity name care about what they're implying—that their immediate commercial advantage is far more important than reinforcement of stereotypes and glorification of a particularly ugly form of violence.

Well, so much for my chances of ever getting a Madison Avenue advertising job.

Miscellaneous: According to "Editor Quits Over SMP's Recalled Bush Book, Is Hired by Talk", an article by Judy Quinn in PW, the editor primarily responsible for failing to background-check the author of the recently pulled biography of Junior (George Bush, the Texas governor and Presidential candidate) has been hired as editorial director of Tina Brown's Talk. This is entirely consistent with Brown's evisceration of The New Yorker's fact-checking while she was editor there. What a surprise. Said editor claims to have had no control at all over the book, while St. Martin's claims that he was pretty closely involved in the process. I don't know the editor at all; what I do know of St. Martin's leads me to believe that, within the limits of the inevitable spin control, they're telling the truth.

03 November 1999

Well, my web provider has run into serious problems with its upgrade and change of location. Just peachy. I've had updates ready to put up since Sunday, and I've had no access. I guess I get what I pay for, eh? (Actually, this doesn't appear to be Crosswinds' fault at all.)

The Deerings have continued (delayed) their trial until 18 January 2000, per a docket entry dated 22 October 1999. Gee, I'm sure surprised (read through the September and October pages to see my running commentary). This proves only that the appointed defense counsel has more operating brain cells than my former Commander-in-Chief out in California. Any idiot who allows his client to go to trial for major fraud—even if innocent—within three months of the indictment has committed malpractice and probably established sufficient "ineffective assistance of counsel" to require release under a habeas petition after the forthcoming conviction and denial of appeals.

I actually finished the first draft of a short story this afternoon. (Legal work has been slow this week.) Now to let it ferment for a few days on a dark hard drive. Sort of like home-brewing beer. Which leaves a similar stench all over the house . . .

05 November 1999

Well, I've got the kids thoroughly brainwashed. They both ask for "military haircuts" because they don't like the feeling of hair on their ears. That makes hair care (and avoiding lice) a lot easier. It's a day off from school today, so I'm taking them for haircuts (it's my turn this time).

Those of you going to Windycon next week will get a chance to meet me. Look for the lawyer. It should be pretty obvious—at least on Friday I'll be dressed for the part, as I'm meeting a client in downtown Chicago before the con. This will be the first trip of over 40 minutes that I've taken since the L5-S1 disk went to Disk Heaven. So, if I'm extra grumpy (like, how would you tell? I'm lawyer, not a gladhander, Jim!), it's only pain.

And don't try to figure out names. I'm registering (and paying) at the door.

By the way, there's a lovely portrait of my former law firm up on the web. I'm second from the left.

©1999 Rich MacNelly

They caught me on a bad day, though. I don't usually make the mistake of wearing a repp tie with a chalkstripe or pinstripe suit, particularly that three-piece shown here. (I did learn how to dress properly during that stint in protocol.) We're on our way to an argument in the Seventh Circuit for which I wrote the brief. We won, thrashing the second-biggest American law firm in the process. It's gratifying when the Chief Judge basically quotes your brief for the core holding.

The striking thing, though, is that the two associates (on the left) really are of that relative height, really did dress that way, and Rich really did carry an alligator-skin briefcase. The tall partner really is that tall, and that really was his favorite tie (an aqua foulard). The lead partner (far right) didn't wear a bow tie that often, but . . .

07 November 1999

Not a very productive day. Sunday seldom is productive. I get worn out by the kids, and it was more so than normal this week—no school Friday due to parent-teacher conferences, so I had them an extra day. All of which triggered a nastier-than-usual migraine Saturday night. It's now Sunday night, and I'm just getting comfortable enough to sit up without grabbing the arms of my office chair to keep the room from spinning.

I just finished Scott Turow's most recent novel. His five novels set in "Kindle County" (which is mostly an alternate-history Chicago, but has a few features of Boston and Cambridge thrown in)—Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof, Pleading Guilty, The Laws of Our Fathers, and now Personal Injuries—are astonishingly well-written and intellectually complex for "commercial fiction." Kindle County itself is worth considerable study as an exercise in world-building that integrates gritty detail with cultural and historical awareness. And, unlike most political-legal thrillers (especially those of John Grisham and Richard North Patterson), Turow gets the law right and explains it in a way accessible to a non-lawyer, but nonetheless accurate.

Turow's work is also interesting for the variety of narrative viewpoints and methods Turow uses, with varying effectiveness. It's rather ironic that the first-person retrospective voices (all of Presumed Innocent and Pleading Guilty, and a significant part of Personal Injuries) are the voices that come across as the most "human." I find this ironic because Turow is, himself, a quite talented attorney. One element of big-city attorneys that I noticed in my time in big-city practice is that the truly successful litigators don't think of themselves in terms of humanity, or character, or personal relationships. There is an obsession with the minutiae of law and with winning that often overwhelms anything else. This comes across clearly in Turow's books—and yet his obsessed, flawed, fully warted lawyers also come across as real human beings in a way that big-firm litigators so seldom do. It's rather an interesting dichotomy, and certainly worth studying.

Last, but not least, there's the question of the infodump. Speculative fiction is notorious for infodumps, especially explanations that the characters themselves already know. ("Well, Bob, even though you've been my graduate student for three years now, I'd better explain how the Deus Ex Machine works, in excrutiating detail. Again.") Turow's use of first person is a particularly sly way to get around the problem; the narrator can get away with a lot more explanation, because she/he is talking directly to the reader. Even when not in first person, though, Turow's explanations—which are often extended and quite technical, for all their clarity—are nicely set off by real transitions and, most importantly, do not stop the action.

Recommended for serious study. The writerly stuff is all out in the open, and the world-building is first-rate.

Those of you who read this journal with any regularity should go back to the end of October. I did make an entry . . . but missed being able to upload it by about 15 minutes. Crosswinds is still having a lot of trouble with their system upgrade. When it has been up, performance has been considerably better. Now, if they can just get the ftp server running, too, you'll get to read this.

Now that's a bit surreal in itself. I'm writing along here, acting as if this is just another journal entry. And I have no idea at all of when it could reach a potential reader.

10 November 1999

An Armistice, Of Sorts

Tomorrow we celebrate the period of "peace" in the middle of the Second Thirty Years' War. What we call "World War I" and "World War II" weren't. World War I essentially discounted Asia, the Americas, Australasia, and most of Africa. World War II wasn't the second one.

In terms of how the two major-power wars this century affected the post-war balance of power, and it terms of how the populace fared during the conflict and afterwards, the period from 1914 through 1945 is actually quite similar to 1618 through 1648. Demagogery, shifting alliances of convenience, apparent conflicts between ideologies that were really conflicts about personal and economic power, complete realignment of nations and the postwar balance of power, new methods of conducting warfare, and a disquieting abundance of atrocities create eerie similarities.

And tomorrow, we celebrate something in the middle. It used to be called Armistice Day. Then it became Veterans' Day, on which the nation was to mourn its war dead and honor the survivors. Then came Vietnam. I will still not forgive the American Legion and VFW for their collective refusal to recognize Vietnam veterans for years afterward. It's not just the absence of a declaration of war—the Korean incident was the same. If those two organizations are what it means to be a veteran, I'm almost ashamed to be one myself.

Sorry if this seems morose; I've just always found the multiple ironies a bit overwhelming, particularly since a Veterans' Day in the 1980s was one of the days I was shot at (meaning to kill). Fortunately, marksmanship is not a priority anymore; volume of fire is.

Enough of this. I don't live in the past all the time, but "who controls the present controls the past; who controls the past controls the future." (One free subpoena to the first reader who emails me with the name of the speaker.)

It looks like Crosswinds is back from the dead and ready to party. The servers are much faster now; I hope y'all notice. I've recently posted a couple more reviews over on Savage Reviews, one of which is going to be considered unduly disrespectful to the recently departed. Sorry; it was scheduled about two months ago, when I got the review copy.

That's right. There is a schedule for these things. Sometimes I have to prioritize; oh, well.

As you may have noticed, my reviews are not always what the authors, editors, and publishers had hoped for. Unlike reviewers for a Certain Prominent Publishing Industry Publication, I am beholden to no publishing interest, I state why I have come to a general evaluation of worth, I review works as they are published (not in uncorrected galleys), and I sign my names to the reviews. So there.

14 November 1999

Cat Scratch Fever

No, I was never a big Ted Nugent fan. The song was unavoidable on 70s radio, though. (That's 1970s, you impertinent child. In the 1870s, we still had to go to the music hall and listen to vaudeville.) But I came very close to witnessing a case of it over the weekend . . .

I just (a few hours ago) got back from Windycon in Chicago. My back was surprisingly cooperative; a couple of days of bedrest, and maybe the rest of me will be too. I had a choice of different panels to go hear on Saturday at 3:00pm. I went to a panel called "Breaking Into Anthologies," in which a couple of theme anthology editors and Martin H. Greenberg's assistant (of which more in a couple of days, after I digest things a little more) held forth on how they believed that one breaks into theme anthologies. Basically, the panel said that it's who you know and being in the right place with the right idea at the right time. Big surprise. (There were more details, though.)

But I was sitting on the far left side of the room, and heard a few voices raised in the room next door—where the other panel I had considered attending was meeting. Although I admit to having a Y chromosome (one does not father children without one, given current technology), I am nonetheless interested in "Do Female Writers Really Differ From Male Writers?" I had decided not to attend that panel out of respect for other conventiongoers who do not know the history of an academic-oriented speculative and utopian fiction mailing list that was nearly destroyed at its inception by two snarling Big Name Authors who insisted on dragging alleged slights and personal disagreements over the Tiptree Awards into the list. I politely scolded each of the two authors (via direct email, not the list) for dominating the list off-topic with poorly reasoned ad hominem attacks. (There are significant academic politics at issue here; some of those politics are why I left the Modern Language Association in disgust while a doctoral candidate.) One of the two authors took it reasonably well; the other did not. Guess which one showed up at WindyCon, and indicated an intent to attend and disrupt that panel?

Discretion being the better part of valor, I turned tail and went to the other panel. My gracious hosts, the proprietors of Eggplant Productions, indicated that it did indeed turn into a catfight. A nasty, name-calling, totally useless "feminazis v. macho-men" catfight—later described in painful detail in conversation with other congoers.

Which, after this longwinded introduction, leads to the title and the meat of this day's entry.

<SARCASM>
To the feminazis:

A Y chromosome is not a birth defect, and does not predispose an individual to instinctive totalitarian domination of others any more than does its absence. Failure to establish dialog only perpetuates any such domination. Grow up. Read the books. Discuss the question. Get some critical distance. Learn from other viewpoints.

To the macho-men:

The absence of a Y chromosome is not a birth defect, and does not predispose an individual to bitchiness and whininess any more than does its presence. Failure to establish a dialog only perpetuates bitchiness and whininess. Grow up. Read the books. Discuss the question. Get some critical distance. Learn from other viewpoints.

To everyone who is actually interested in discussing the question:

Throw the bastards out. A panel can be controversial without descending to the subtle dynamics of first-grade recess. Panel members can disagree—vehemently and loudly—without destroying the possibility for discourse and learning. Individuals who can't follow those rules should be invited out, during the panel if necessary. This is called "creating a learning environment."
</SARCASM>

The issues themselves aren't this simple. Unfortunately, the extreme behavior of some of the immature participants makes them look that way. In First Amendment law, we have an equivalent: the senseless argument between extremists like Andrea Dworkin (who deeply believes that pornography—however mild—is worse than genocide) and other extremists like Michael McConnell (who deeply believes that any opinion other than his own that the Constitution implicitly requires the government to impose fundamentalist Christianity is worse than genocide). It's no fun. Nobody really learns anything. The underlying situations don't improve.

So I missed a panel that I fully intended to attend absent a scheduling conflict. And I lost the opportunity to learn something.

Next time: a response to Myke Cole's rant, and perhaps some more on Windycon.

15 November 1999

This entry is divided, like Gaul, into three parts. The first is a response to something that Lisa Silverthorne said—pardon me, "whined" (her words) about. The second is a response to Myke Cole's rant. The third is a bit more on some of the other aspects of Windycon.

I

Lisa has made a couple of interesting points, one of which will be dealt with in part deux. But her most important point resonated with something that Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith mentioned at Windycon.

Whether she got the advice from them or not, she followed the KKR/DWS plan for becoming a selling professional writer: write a story a week, send them out, keep them moving, get better by practice, and sell by getting better. Keep it up for a year or so (seriously), and you'll start making regular professional sales.

Lisa seemed a little bit concerned (or at least that's how I interpret it) that she'd only managed to finish ten stories this year. At Windycon, KKR made the following analogy, then somewhat dismissed it (this is a paraphrase, so blame me for any inaccuracies):

Imagine being handed a violin for the first time and being thrown up on stage at Carnegie Hall in front of thousands of people for a solo concert. That's what expecting to sell your first story is like. You must practice first. But writers practice by writing lots of different stories, not by playing the same piece over and over again until you get it right, like a musician does.

Well, not quite, but darned close. A professional musician engages in three different kinds of practice: scales, technique, and interpretation. Most amateur musicians never make it past the first two, and seldom past the first one without private lessons. The story (or chapter for novelists)-a-week plan is doing scales. (Grammar, spelling, and punctuation are at an even lower level—perhaps learning how to hold and tune the instrument correctly.) It's fundamental, it's critical, it's unavoidable. But it's not the only kind of practice for writers. As one becomes a professional, however, one does a lot fewer scales—and often only to warm up for more serious practice or for performance. But one practices just as much, although perhaps not in a way recognizeable to nonmusicians. Disclosure: I was considered a "talented amateur with professional potential" at one point, and seriously considered accepting offers to attend Peabody or Eastman to study conducting. I know whereof I speak, at least for "classical" music.

I think that's what Lisa is describing, and feels guilty about. She doesn't have to practice scales to be competent with them any more, and the change in the "practice routine" makes her somewhat uncomfortable. Of course it does. Artists don't get much feedback on their practice—only on their results. That absence of feedback can be horrifyingly isolating. But it doesn't mean that you're any less of a writer for turning out fewer stories that are selling better. It indicates a mastery of certain basic techniques.

Where so many writers ultimately fail, though, is in thinking that "once I'm selling, I'm good enough." The method of learning shifts. Repetition, work ethic, and incremental improvements are no longer enough. Which means that "a story a week" is no longer enough, either. However, since writers are so individual, it's darned hard to prescribe what is.

So, Lisa, be proud of yourself for mastering the scales. Work on the technique (and every professional musician does so every day), and start including more "interpretation" in your practice schedule. When you're selling virtually everything you write, you'll know you've mastered as much of the technique as you need to, and you can concentrate on interpretation. But you'll still need to practice technique, and you'll still need to warm up with some scales.

Go to a major orchestra concert and arrive an hour or so before concert time. Sit down in the audience, and listen, and watch. You'll hear scales; you'll hear fragments of pieces to solidify technique; and, when the concert begins, you'll hear only interpretation. That's what it takes to be a true professional. And only you will know when you're there in writing. Not Kris Rusch, not Gardner Dozois, not Harlan Ellison, not John Clute. Only you.

Because, unlike a professional musician, a writer isn't working to a score, unless (perhaps) you're Miles Davis. Nobody else sees your scales, your tuneups, and so on—unless you're showing your plot outlines, scribbled character notes, and research to people and asking for their opinions before you begin to actually write the story.

II

I'm afraid that Myke Cole may have missed the point of the "rules"/"guidelines" for writing fiction. Those rules are intended to guide the process of writing the first draft, not polishing of the final result. At some point or another, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" probably did look exactly like something from a WD fiction course—typical linear hook structure, simple vocabulary, linear plot. It may have been while Irving was "drafting" the story in his head before writing it down the first time. (Only if you're Mozart or Beethoven can you get away with first drafts—and, even then, those works will not be your best.)

This actually leads off onto another tangent, for another time: The damage caused to writers by "writing gurus" who wouldn't know a literary distinction if it crawled up their legs and bit them in the gonads. For example, "plot" is not what WD (and too damned many writing "professionals" and creative writing teachers who have insufficient training in the literary classics) call it. You can't call a chicken a cow and then accurately help people milk the damned "cow." And so on. This is doublespeak of the worst kind. Some time, I'll spill my acid, but it'll be filled with footnotes, and probably in some academic journal somewhere, under my Clark Kent identity.

But, returning to Myke's point, the first draft (or, for some writers, detailed outline) of the story will almost certainly follow "the rules." So few wannabe writers ever get that far that it's worth pounding on the table a little. Remember about "practicing scales"? In the end, though, the rewriting, rethinking, and redrafting process that follows the "first draft" may well bend the story completely out of its original shape. That's when one gets to "break the rules". Just as the public doesn't sit in on Itzhak Perlman's daily practice sessions, the public doesn't see first drafts. Thus, it "looks like" one can blithely ignore the rules. Not a chance. Even atonal musicians and abstract artists had to obtain some grounding in "traditional" technique, even if in a way that we would not recognize, before "experimenting." And, like in any scientific field, the vast majority of experiments are either failures (which teach some kinds of things) or confirmation of the results of other experiments (which teach other kinds of things).

III

More Windycon

A few random observations. Please recall that my last convention of any kind was the American Bar Association a couple years ago; my last "literary" convention was an MLA convention in the mid-1980s; and my last "speculative fiction" convention was GenCon III, in . . . well, I'll leave well enough alone.

• The teenagers seemed around 90% Goths. (I wonder if they'll ever have a "white wedding"? Or whether, like Billy Idol, they'll be too busy dancing with themselves?) Now, being a dirty old man by profession, I must admit that some of the young ladies (I have two stunning vampires, one blonde, one brunette, in mind) looked quite attractive as Goths. But the majority seemed to celebrate a sad ugliness, a rejection of conventional notions of "beauty" that is rather disturbing. (He says, given his own poor self-image.)
• I'm shuddering at the thought of WorldCon (WindyCon 2000) at the downtown Hyatt Regency. Letting this crowd loose on State Street and Michigan Avenue may be too much even in Chicago.
• The panels were remarkably sparsely attended. Several of the most likely to be of value to either fans or writers were half-empty. I do not know whether this was the audiences, the rather incoherent scheduling system, the panelists, or some combination of the above. That said, a number were quite interesting.
• I continue to be amazed by the self-conciousness of fans at adopting "mundane" identities that deny their fandom. That may be because I had too much practice being someone else for extended periods of time while in the intelligence community, with a far higher price than embarassment for slipups. Or it may be just that I'm less interested in the opinions of people who rely upon stereotypes than most. (And we can see just how far that attitude has gotten me.)
• Panelists need to concentrate a lot more on "why" than on "what." As a particular example, the "I Need an Agent" panel did only 25% of the job, despite the best intentions of the panelists. It was an important 25%, but everyone was so circumspect that it was left contextless. Dammit, sometimes you must name names to enable communication. One panelist mentioned that there's a non-New York "literary agent" whose clients don't even make it into the slush pile. The documentation is out there; those of us who work the legal side know (to within two or three possibilities) exactly who was being referred to. In at least one case, there's a criminal fraud conviction! So why not ground the examples in context, and thereby explain the "why"? The bullshit that "it's a small world, and your enemy today may be the person with life and death control over your career tomorrow" is precisely that. You can live that kind of paranoia if you'd like, but the only thing it communicates is paranoia, not self-awareness, self-empowerment, or self-reliance.
• Finally, please, organizers, put a 25-word description of what the panel is supposed to cover into the program book. A title like "Mining the Classics" is completely useless. It was an interesting panel (on speculative fiction films), but the title implies something completely different.

16 November 1999

Science Fiction Double Feature

I'm afraid I respectfully disagree with something that I heard repeatedly at Windycon, from both editors and established authors. In five different panels and several hallway conversations, I heard the assertion that it's easier to "break in" now than it was in the 1970s/1980s/early 1990s. With due respect to those editors and authors, their perspective is quite warped. In the late 1990s, the field is more than ever a case of networking first, story second.

• At novel length, the continued expansion of media fiction and the Interminable Fantasy Series^tm; continued industry consolidation; and the gradual, but accelerating, trend to agented-only submissions have substantially reduced the chances of a first novelist who isn't just doing pastiches getting a reading. The steadily lengthening response times (and self-defeating "no simsubs" policies) are also creating another, slightly more insidious problem: That the author who wrote manuscript X no longer "exists." Some get discouraged and simply stop writing; others learn the wrong lessons from the delay; still others go through significant life changes (minor things like children) and can no longer give a requested revision the attention it deserves.
• At short-story length, there are quite a few more markets—if one includes electronic publishing (an issue on which the SFWA is dragging its feet as much as it can, largely, unfortunately, due to legitimate questions of measurement). In terms of short-fiction markets open to writers without prior speculative fiction credits, there are about 10% fewer pages now in an average month than in 1992, including both periodicals and anthologies.
• In between, it is now essentially impossible for anyone without prior fiction credits to publish a novelette or novella in a professional publication. In 1997 and 1998, I counted two such stories. I haven't seen any in 1999 yet. However, we repeatedly hear respected critics and authors claiming that the novelette and novella are the "perfect length" for speculative fiction.
• Nonprint markets have essentially disappeared. Much of this is the various studios' own damned fault, stemming from the Buchwald incident a few years back. The studios do not feel that they can stand the legal consequences of looking at unsolicited, unagented work. They have more than earned a reputation for piracy and corrupt payment practices.
• Legitimate agents who will take writers without a bird (sale) in the hand are fast disappearing.

I found it relatively easy to break in to "mainstream" fiction back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (Admittedly, there wasn't much payment in it; there never has been. Mainstream short fiction only paid "professional rates" in story collections, Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, Granta, and The New Yorker.) What speculative fiction has always lacked is the small press that retains professional cachet—Salmagundi, The Yale Review, TriQuarterly, and so on. Speculative fiction looks down its collective nose on the small press, and refuses to accord "professional" status to some of its longest-standing markets. It can't afford to, but does nonetheless. Some of those publications have significantly higher standards than some "pro" markets I could name. (You may wish to look back at my rant on "professionalism". Or not.) The late, lamented Crank! is an excellent example. It paid enough per word, but never achieved enough circulation to count.

I'm not entirely certain what all this means, other than that the glib "it's easier to break in now" is not really defensible.

A final comment on Windycon, then back to the legal facts of life: What major convention has no scheduled Rocky Horror Picture Show party or screening? That might have given all the Goths something to do beyond looking tragically morose . . . Gawd, I hate Anne Rice.

18 November 1999

Don't you just hate those days you spend running around like a chicken with your head cut off after a trip out of town? Well, yesterday was it for me. And that was just three days away.

I did manage to keep caught up on my email, but not much else. The Infernal Revenue Service has (again) proven that it can't read its own outgoing mail; I got a tax notice addressed to me, for the wrong social security number, based on a business I didn't even know existed. I don't sell farm equipment, have never sold farm equipment, and never will sell farm equipment. The closest I'll get is running around like a chicken with my head cut off. That took about 45 minutes on the phone. Then there was the parallel notice from the Illinois tax authorities. These were both for tax year 1996 (yeah, just a couple months before the statute of limitations expires).

And that was the easy part.

On the legal facts of life, a rather seemingly off-the-wall comment that will (I promise) link up with writing. The Supreme Court has decided to review the Fifth Circuit's decision in the high-school-football prayer case. (A cite would be meaningless, since it's just an order granting certiorari.) The Court took the unusual, but not unheard of, step of specifying the question for review: "Whether petitioner's policy permitting student-led, student-initiated prayer at football games violates the Establishment Clause."

This decision, perhaps more than any other this century, will demonstrate the disjunction between reality and the facts as presented in a court of law. In reality, none of these "student-initiated" prayers are really student-initiated. There is always heavy parental and/or congregational and/or community pressure, to which one or more students succumbs. (This is not to say that the students are doing so in bad faith [pun intended]; it is only to say that it's not really their idea.) However, because of the procedural posture of the case, the Court must assume that the students really do come up with the idea with no outside pressure or influence, independently conceive the plan to actually lead prayer before the opening whistle at Friday's football game, then follow through with the adult authorities (none of whom, naturally, are involved in either pressure to engage in the activity or in facilitating the decision process).

My concern is that, based on previous comments by four sitting Justices, we're about to see the overruling of the Lemon test for excessive government involvement in religious activities. While the test has its flaws, it's better than the alternatives.

Why does this matter to writers?

First, and perhaps most importantly, it would allow—even encourage—"student-led" book burnings. Don't kid yourself; they already happen, and they're just going to get more common. Even in university communities like the one I live in. As an aside, when I was in high school, I suffered through an attempt by certain parents to remove Fahrenheit 451 from both the junior-year curriculum and the school libraries, on the ground that it taught disrespect for authority. Apparently, the page with "irony" had been ripped out of the dictionary used by those who filed the challenge.

Second, take a look at government in Israel over the last couple of decades. That itself should be enough.

Third, think of all the story starters that this reveals. It provides a wonderful example of how governments actually make decisions and define the facts to serve personal and power-group interests, whatever the "facts" may actually be. This isn't just cynicism about the legal system; it's the way that governments that have not been overtly tyrannical have always operated. It leads into interesting questions such as:

• Assuming proper preparation, would mutton stew prepared from Dolly or her descendants be kosher? What does that say about possible future food supplies and production? And how would the government (whatever government you choose) respond? Remember, some agriculture departments (New York is the prime example) actually inspect and certify kosher food.
• Let's assume that the Rev. James L. White (Richard Pryor fans know who that is) gets his 13-year-old nephew, Nathanial Lee, to "volunteer" to become a religious-TV demagogue—and it works. TV ratings go through the roof, and donations through the bank. At this point, Nathanial decides to change his religion and continue with the broadcasts on behalf of his new religion (perhaps some even-more-extreme millenial cult, perhaps something weirder). Now what happens?

Fourth, "separate but equal."

Fifth, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and LeGuin's "The Diary of the Rose."

Have fun. And read the decision when it comes down, not just the inaccurate newspaper accounts. Supreme Court decisions come down in close to real time at Cornell's Legal Information Institute. The case is captioned (at the moment) Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, with a decision expected by the end of June 2000.

I get more story ideas than I can possibly ever use just from reading decisions and twisting them a little, and not just for law-oriented stories.

21 November 1999

Sigh. I'm not going to weigh in on the "fat" debate, except to note that when I graduated from college, I weighed about 50 pounds less than I do now—and I've lost 20 lbs in the last year (not entirely voluntarily, but that's a long story), and I'll always look like I have a beer gut due to a chronically englarged liver (the lingering effects of hepatitis C).

The only comment I'll make is that I'd like to strangle the asshole who claimed that "Sticks and stones may break my bones / But words will never hurt me." That macho shitheadism has so damaged American attitudes that . . . oh, never mind. See the entries for 02 November and 14 November.

OK, one more comment: I'm not into PC; I'm into intellectual honesty. Intellectual honesty, though, means having the integrity and courage to avoid needlessly inflammatory language. Sometimes inflammatory language is necessary. I'm a lawyer; I think I've developed some sense of when. This issue didn't call for it. Consider yourselves all spanked. No fetishism, please.

The publishing-law rumor mill has been working overtime in the last couple of weeks. I'm not all that good at predicting when news will "break," but I'd guess that there will be yet another major restructuring announcement by the end of the year—with considerable blood on the floor, lots of public posturing that bears no relationship to reality, and significant potential problems for both authors and readers. Now, which one of the three rumors will pan out, I do not know. If more than one comes true—well, let's not think about that.

As an exercise for the curious and those with nothing better to do, look at the following historical stock charts for 1966 through 1976, then do a little background reading on the various acquisitions and mergers involved in the individual issues:

• S&P 500
• Teledyne
• Levitz
• ITT
• US Steel (now known as USX)

So, all you insurance companies and pension funds that control so much of the stock in the publishing industry, don't say you weren't warned.

23 November 1999

Reading and Questions

This year has seen a lot of "100 best of the 20th century" lists. There's a disturbing similarity among most of them. Whether we mean the Random House lists (by book), the Writer's Digest list (by author), or the Talk list (by advertising revenue, one must presume), there is one factor in common. It's not a factor to be proud of.

The listmakers want answers, not questions. And that's all they read for.

This is the only way that I can reconcile the anti-science prejudice of all three lists with what little there is of explanation. It's also the only way one can reconcile this nebulous idea of "influence" that has been put forth as a justification by all of the lists that I've reviewed. As WD said of Danielle Steel, "Critics may not like her, but can millions of fans be wrong?" I don't know about millions, but Hans Glück had both equivalent popular acclaim and much greater critical acceptance—yet he is now known only to musicologists looking for obscure material on which to write for academic journals read only by other academic musicologists.

Perhaps the problem is that it's premature to judge the entire century. We can probably judge the first half. But we're still immersed in the century itself. There may well be a small book out there, perhaps by a "failed" novelist who has turned to the essay, that will somehow explain the failure of "freedom" in the Balkans. It may well be published by a mid-sized house, to little initial notice except among the intelligentsia already concerned with the area. Rather like George Orwell's Animal Farm: A Fairy Story.

Once upon a time . . . an eminent science journal attempted to define the most-significant scientific advances of the first half of the twentieth century. The list was topped by the splitting of the atom, and dominated by advances in subatomic physics. Given 20-20 hindsight, and not to denigrate the achievements of the subatomic physicists, I don't think that's very defensible looking back from this end of the century. One must look slightly above the atomic level for the three most-significant scientific advances of the first half of the century:

• Alexander Fleming's discovery of the antibacterial effects of the penicillium molds—by accident
• The development of a coherent theory of solid-state electronics, which led to the digital computer, the transistor, and the laser
• Powered flight

These are more influential because they have been reduced to practice. Curiously, that allows us to continue to ask questions about them, rather than treat them as answers. It does not take a PhD in molecular biology to either explain how Penicillin works, or how it can create treatment-resistant "superbacteria." It does not take a VLSI designer to understand GIGO. It does not take an aeronautical engineer to realize the effect powered flight has on today's society. However, it takes a physicist or chemist to understand how nuclear fission has uniquely impacted today's society. ("Peaceful nuclear power," by itself, is not a unique impact. It's a black-box power source.)

Subatomic physics, particularly quantum and statistical mechanics (if I could only forget Hermetian and Bessel functions, I'd be much happier), answers a lot of questions. But it does not inherently ask more questions; it is relatively self-contained. Similarly, a truly influential work of literature (whether "fiction," "nonfiction," "poetry," or "drama") only provides more questions, not self-contained answers. Right now, we're much too close to the works to know whether they ask questions, or merely answer them.

Ask me in 25 years. Then, maybe, I'll be able to make an intelligent listing of the 20th century's 100 "best" books. The lists that I've seen thus far seem more calculated to impress the readership with the panelists' erudition than anything else.

25 November 1999

The 1999 Turkey Awards

It's almost a month until the end of the year, so these are tentative only. I've been doing this for almost twenty years, but this is the first year on-line. And so, without further ado . . .

• The Greasy Gravy Award goes, for the fourth year in the last seven, to Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp. First, the Times (London); then, the world! Every merger has been justified by "increasing shareholder value." The only shareholder who has shown a net profit is Rupert Murdoch. Not one of these purchases has been in the public interest. HarperCollins didn't need to buy Morrow/Avon, except if the only criterea for "shareholder value" are the immediate value of options on the CBOE and Murdoch's continuing political influence in Australia.
• The Red-Tide Oyster Stuffing Award goes jointly to my former neighbor William H. Gates III and Lawrence J. Ellison, who have demonstrated (again) that a healthy appreciation for one's self and refusal to take constructive criticism are all that it takes to get ahead in American business. Of course, monopoly power doesn't hurt.
• The Broken Wishbone Award goes to Writer's Digest, for its continued refusal to police its own advertising for fraud and continued refusal to accept that some people who think they should be published authors shouldn't.
• The Golden Gristle Award goes to Antonin Scalia, William H. Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas for their joint determination that a concept of "state's rights" popular with some in the late eighteenth century allows states to violate intellectual property rights (which are also guaranteed by the Constitution) with impunity under the doctrine of sovereign immunity.
• The Crabapple Pie Award goes to the Kansas Board of Education for deciding that it is critical to protect schoolchildren from the dangers of thinking for themselves with a de facto removal of evolution from the curriculum. Ironically, the Board left the AP English (profanity) and AP History (miscegenation) curricula alone as approved parts of the high school curriculum.
• The Brussels Sprout Award goes to Ken Starr for his careful stewardship of taxpayer dollars and the public interest. And the smut.
• The Dried-Out Breastmeat Award goes to George Lucas for chutzpah, slave-labor tactics that make Indonesian shoe factories look good, and providing "entertainment" so overtoughened that nobody can chew it, let alone digest it.
• And . . . drumroll, please . . . The Rancid Drumstick Award goes to Charles Deering, Dorothy Deering, Daniel Craig Deering, and William Paul Watson, for their dubious services to the literary community d/b/a Deering Literary Agency, Sovereign Publications, Appaloosa Press, and Daniel Craig Literary Agency, among others. Trial is, at this writing, scheduled for 18 January 2000 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.

27 November 1999

I think I'll just wrap up the month's word count now. The next few days will be devoted almost entirely to galleys—one law review article and one nonfiction book. (Naturally, one doesn't get paid at all for the law review article, and the rest of the book's advance isn't due until publication.) And, of course, reading to the kids. It's the only way to get them to be still.

Legal writing: 17,500 words
Other nonfiction writing: 8,000 words (about 800 useable)
Fiction: 4,500 words

Too bad the fiction is split among three different works. I'm planning on a push on one of them in December. Since I'm a lawyer, there's no need to remind me what's paved with good intentions, since that's where I'm going in any event. And I don't count this on-line stuff. I'm not denigrating on-line work, but it's not really appropriate to count this daily journal as "productive" writing. Well, perhaps for future generations of abnormal psychology students, but I'll be in the ultimate resting place of lawyers by then: the Federal Reporter (2d and 3d Series).

Old litigators never die. They just lose their appeals.

As a wholly irreverant "spoiler," Kristine Katherine Rusch has acquired another pseudonym. In February 2000 (nominally), Zebra will publish Utterly Charming by "Kristine Grayson." (Some of the spellings might be slightly off, as I was very rapidly taking notes on three different conversations at WindyCon.) Ms. Rusch describes this as a fantasy novel with strong romantic elements. Yes, she is the author of The Fey series, in which the stripping of living flesh is virtually unremarkable.

Zebra? Who the hell is Zebra? A major romance imprint that thinks it's found something new here. Counterexample: Although—or perhaps because?—they're truly excreble, Patricia Kenneally Morrison's "Keltiad" novels from 1985 and thereafter wouldn't be out of place in a romance line.

So, perhaps, Dr. Frank N. Furter and friends can help out with a major media blitz:

Don't get strung out by the name I took
Don't judge a book by its cover
I'm not much for a man by the light of day
But by night, I'm one helluva lover

© 1975 Ode Records
slightly-bent revised lyric © 1999 John Savage
Victoria's Secret endorsement pending
it's not fine print unless it's confusing

I think the publicists would sprain a few lattisimi once they realized all of the cross-connections (puns intended) in that marketing suggestion. Particularly since WindyCon, where I heard about this, did not have any RHPS activities sponsored by the 'con.

28 November 1999

With all due respect, Myke—no, without too damned much respect—you completely missed the point of the whole NAW argument. Then you went and shot your argument in the foot with your own examples.

As I tried to make clear a few days ago (and in the related entries), words have power not for themselves, but in what they can cause other people to do. That is exactly how (to use Myke's own examples) Hitler got the Wehrmacht to believe that it could conquer a Europe with an economy approximately 725% of early 1930 Germany's. That is exactly how Martin Luther King, Jr., convinced the white establishment to take legal action against itself, and against its own immediate self-interest, in the name of (among other things) justice.

Words have direct power in only two places: the human mind and the narrative. It's somewhat ironic, in a loose grouping of speculative fiction writers, that our "magic systems" appear to be incompatible. Perhaps an analogy from chemistry might help. Absent an obvious ignition source, merely venting hydrogen gas into an oxygen-containing environment is not very dangerous. Unless, of course, one has some powdered platinum black (PtO) in the path of the gas—which catalyzes the fairly efficient combustion of hydrogen in oxygen, producing water, heat, light, and sound, without any other ignition source. That's what the right (or wrong, as the case may be) words do—they catalyze other reactions that would not occur in their absence. That's what happened here. Several parties used "wrong" (in the sense of "needlessly inflammatory") words, resulting in several explosions.

Several parties have continued to refuse to accept that they made mistakes, and continue to try to justify their previous statements. As the Brits would say, "sod off." I've been through the rituals of first-grade recess once. That was more than enough.

I am unilaterally closing the discussion here. I will not respond to email, journal entries, or anything else on this subject. I, for one, would like to get back to more-rewarding subjects. I'm perfectly capable of being inflammatory myself, but this is not the forum, and several people have been needlessly hurt. And that hurts my feelings.

Speaking, though, of needlessly inflammatory words, one can get quite a bit of amusement from the goings-on in Seattle right now over the WTO conference. I have yet to read a single public statement from anyone involved—governments, political action groups, labor unions, whatever—that acknowledges that the only real subject of the conferences is future allocations of political power. The money is nice, but it's only a means to an end. The labor union leaders don't really give a damn about their members (if they did, they wouldn't have senior-management salaries); they are concerned about a shrinking membership base, and thus their own grip on power. The environmental and human-rights organization leaders are often so far removed from reality that they do not see the power-allocation components.

The purpose of power is power.

"Emmanuel Goldstein," Principles of Collective Oligarchy

For the cynical, though, this is all highly amusing. Which, itself, says more about the cynical than they'd really like others to realize.

What is of greatest interest is the material that does not appear to be on the table for the Seattle Round:

• Harmonization of intellectual property law
• Transnational antitrust
• Derivative instruments
• Uniform asset valuation

But then, it takes an academic-type lawyer to even care about these. Why should writers care, though?

Why indeed? Sorry, this is the closest I can come to a cliffhanger. Pathetic, isn't it?

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