"It's Shawn Vandor's Blog Wow!"

Barbara Lynn playing music in the kitchen

2010-02-02T18:39:00.001-05:00

The News

2010-01-28T17:31:00.007-05:00

New Books...

2009-12-16T16:56:00.011-05:00

I'm pleased to announce that my new book Fire At the End of the Rainbow, a collection of short autobiographical stories, essays and fantasies is now available from amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Fire-End-Rainbow-Shawn-Vandor/dp/0984331220/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261000763&sr=1-1

and from Sand Paper Press:

http://www.sandpaperpress.net/

Also available: Poetry by Stuart Krimko The Sweetness of Herbert and Arlo Haskell Joker. The three of us will be reading in Key West, New York and Los Angeles at the beginning of the new year. Will keep you posted on dates.

2007 Virginia Bill Prohibiting Donor Anonymity Fails 6-1

2009-12-02T12:36:00.005-05:00

An interesting Washington Post article about the only state bill to attempt to outlaw donor anonymity (the comments in caps are mine):

RICHMOND -- A Republican lawmaker is sponsoring General Assembly legislation that would make Virginia the first state to prohibit anonymous sperm donations.

Delegate Robert G. Marshall, a Christian conservative from Prince William County, is sponsoring the House bill.

Mr. Marshall also is the General Assembly's foremost author of legislation to curb abortion and regulate birth-control methods. He said he filed the bill to protect donor-conceived children and that he feels for those who don't know the identity of their father.

Mr. Marshall said he recently saw a child wearing a T-shirt with the words: "My dad's name is Donor," then thought, "That's pathetic."

Australia and a few European countries [U.K., NORWAY, SWEDEN AND AUSTRIA] have banned anonymous sperm donations. In each country, donations have dwindled and the cost of fertility services has increased.[THIS IS ARGUABLE. SEE MY POST: http://itsshawnvandorsblogwow.blogspot.com/2009/05/should-there-be-state-or-federal.html FOR LINKS TO ARTICLES DISPROVING THIS POINT IN THE U.K. AND SWEDISH MARKETS].

Opponents warn about the same result in Virginia.

Katrina Clark grew up knowing only that her father was tall, blond and a third-year college student somewhere in Northern Virginia when he donated sperm.

Miss Clark, now 18 and a Gallaudet University student, is trying to persuade lawmakers to support legislation banning anonymous sperm and egg donations, so others won't grow up with the same questions she had.

"I just felt like something had been stripped away from me," she said.

Mr. Marshall's bill also would require women donating eggs to sign a disclosure detailing all known risks involved, whether from ovulation-stimulation drugs or harvesting the egg. Virginia law already requires that patients be told about the success rates and donor health before being treated.

More than 15,000 successful egg donations in the United States in 2004 resulted in about 6,000 births, according to the latest data available. Sperm donations and births resulting from them are much more numerous and much more difficult to track. No trade groups, medical associations or government agencies track either the donations or the number of births attributed to donor sperm.

The industry wasn't fully commercialized until the 1970s, and laws regulating it focus on testing, storing and administering the donations. Only recently has the discussion turned to the ethical repercussions.

Miss Clark's mother, Janie Price, of Newport News, was 30 and single but didn't want to wait any longer for a child when in 1988 she opted for artificial insemination.

"I talked myself into believing that if I loved her enough, it would be OK," she said. "What I didn't consider is that one's genetic component is very much a part of her identity. Why else would we spend so much money as adults researching our genealogy?"

Miss Clark said she grew up not thinking she was any different from her friends. That changed when she was 15 and saw a show about a woman who died of a genetic heart disease that she had no idea she was at risk of developing because she had been adopted.

"That's when it really hit me for the first time that something was missing," she said.

Miss Clark said she started the search for her father because she wanted answers about her medical past, not because she wanted a father figure.

She was one of the few lucky ones, finding her father on an online message board weeks later. After a few weeks of telephone and e-mail conversations, a DNA test confirmed what they already knew: It was 99.9902 percent positive that he was her father.

Most sperm banks across the country now give donors the option of allowing their identities to be revealed to offspring once they turn 18.

William Jaeger, director of Fairfax Cyrobank, said that only 29 of the bank's 265 donors have agreed to have their identities revealed, which shows the chilling effect a mandatory-identity requirement would have on the industry.

"Legislation of this type would really create a hardship for families who need donor sperm to conceive a child," Mr. Jaeger said.

He also said sperm supplies have decreased so much in Britain since it passed such a law in April that some clinics have closed and others must import sperm.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine also opposes the legislation, saying it would increase the cost for families to get help conceiving.

"It is [now] relatively inexpensive to conceive through insemination of donor sperm," said Dr. Robert Brzyski, chairman of the ethics committee for the group, in Birmingham, Ala. "If donors become scarce because the anonymity is removed, then the cost of that will increase."

Sperm Banks Can Be Sued Under Product Liability Laws

2009-12-01T19:46:00.006-05:00

In April, 2009, a New York Federal judge ruled that sperm banks can be sued under product liability laws for failing to detect a sperm donor's genetic defect. The case clears the way for a 13 year-old retarded girl from PA. to sue New York-based IDANT[1] for using sperm with a mutation known as “Fragile X”[2] which caused her to be born mentally retarded.

So, if human sperm is officially a product, what does that make the child born via donor insemination? In the future, will parents be able to return their children to the cryo bank if the child fails to meet their specifications, like, if the child’s not blonde enough or not proficient enough with the violin? When is that going to start happening?

In the absence of any significant federal or state regulation of the Cryo banking industry the threat of product liability lawsuit is a very good thing. But, consider this: this isn’t exactly like a consumer being sold a faulty product, who is injured and then seeks a claim; this is the faulty product itself suing the company that made it (in this case, a her). I don’t think this has happened before. Ever. Imagine a single Toyota Prius suing Toyota for assembling its breaks incorrectly!

[1] Owned by the DAXOR CORPORATION. You’ve really got to see their website: http://www.idant.com/ All it needs is some ‘80s David Cronenberg-esque analogue synthesizer and they're all set. No but seriously. Who would buy human semen from a company called IDANT who proudly proclaims: owned by the DAXOR CORPORATION? Also, DAXOR agents are now hunting me.

[2] No, I’m not making this up.

Food and Drug Administration Regulates Sale of Semen

2009-12-01T18:58:00.005-05:00

In 2005, the FDA began regulating the sale of semen within the United States (though regulating might be too strong a word - they basically institutionalized practices that had already become the norm within the cryo banking community). Cryo banks that don't comply with FDA regulations don't risk being shut down but are not allowed to say they're FDA approved, which in the highly competitive sperm-banking business, might mean losing a leg-up to a competitor.

This is relevant to all things donor insemination, of course, because as mild as the FDA's regulations might be, it's one of the few regulatory gestures made by the Federal government towards the medically assisted reproductive industry. For the most part, Federal and state governments have wanted to steer clear of any kind of regulation, intentionally leaving the details of the baby-making business in the (no doubt, benevolent) hands of the free market.

Here's the FDA's statement:

Human cells or tissue intended for implantation, transplantation, infusion, or transfer into a human recipient is regulated as a human cell, tissue, and cellular and tissue-based product or HCT/P. The Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) regulates HCT/Ps under 21 CFR Parts 1270 and 1271. Examples of such tissues are bone, skin, corneas, ligaments, tendons, dura mater, heart valves, hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells derived from peripheral and cord blood, oocytes and semen. CBER does not regulate the transplantation of vascularized human organ transplants such as kidney, liver, heart, lung or pancreas. The Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA) oversees the transplantation of vascularized human organs.

Parts 1270 and 1271 require tissue establishments to screen and test donors, to prepare and follow written procedures for the prevention of the spread of communicable disease, and to maintain records. FDA has published three final rules to broaden the scope of products subject to regulation and to include more comprehensive requirements to prevent the introduction, transmission and spread of communicable disease. One final rule requires firms to register and list their HCT/Ps with FDA. The second rule requires tissue establishments to evaluate donors, through screening and testing, to reduce the transmission of infectious diseases through tissue transplantation. The third final rule establishes current good tissue practices for HCT/Ps. FDA's revised regulations are contained in Part 1271 and apply to tissues recovered after May 25, 2005. The new requirements are intended to improve protection of the public health while minimizing regulatory burden.

Fertile Markets

2009-12-01T18:47:00.005-05:00

Here's a fun little precis I found online when I googled: international human semen trade. This guy really knocked himself out with all the double-entendres. Wouldn't you? Enjoy:

Not all trade barriers concern steel, corn and coffee. Major human semen exporters like the United States say they are having a hard time penetrating Mexico's sperm market. Human semen trade is an estimated US$100 million industry worldwide, but Mexico is abstaining from entering the market and using its own internal resources. Mexico has not banned the imports outright; however, strict federal standards and restrictions keep foreign semen out of the country. The Fertility Institutes, a semen supplier with offices in both the United States and Mexico, has been unable to swap semen across the border among its clinics. "Not because of a lack of need or desire, but because of the inability to meet all requirements of both countries, as well as FedEx and other international shippers," says Fertility Institutes' Jeffrey Steinberg. Meanwhile, strong demand in Canada for human semen on recent years--which sells for about the same price as cattle semen in the open market--eased border restrictions for sperm imports from the United States. Leading U.S. semen trader Xytex has shipped its U.S. genes to Canada and several countries in Europe since 1983, but the company says getting across its southern border poses a much bigger challenge. "It's virtually impossible," says Holly Fowler, spokesperson for Xytex. Foreign exporters trying to ship their specimen into Mexico apparently must overcome the country's main barrier to entry into the sperm market: national pride.

...

2009-11-16T18:39:00.006-05:00

Republican National Convention 2008

2009-10-21T03:10:00.006-04:00

You know, it's interesting: You can't find much RNC '08 on youtube which is really too bad. I mean, obviously, youtube is a left-leaning website and thus, for the most part, filled with left-leaning videos (most of which are retarded and beside the point...like cable television itself, yet even still more esoteric). Wouldn't it be great if youtube had more videos illustrating the opposition's point of view? Like, isn't that what good debate is all about? Trying to learn your opponent's arguments as well as your own?

I don't mind admitting to you that (for this very reason) I watched nearly every minute of this past RNC '08 convention, held in Minneapolis, MN. It was stunning, for many reasons, the least of which was that, from above, the convention center looked like what you've always heard hell looks like: a giant dark pit, with fiery red floor, bunch of half-broken people mindlessly wandering around. I don't know who was in charge of designing the '08 RNC but whoever hired them really had no idea what they were doing. Whoever that person is should have a glass of water poured over their head every night for the rest of their life.

Check out the enormous digital American flag. That's weird. That makes no sense. I tried to imagine who would think that's cool. I thought of myself when I was 12. And even then I might have thought that t was stupid. The live in-house progressive jazz band was amazing, so much so that they were hard to describe. They were uncanny, the way the guy in the bear suit, leaning over and sort-of fellating the butler in The Shining was uncanny. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any footage on youtube. That was probably THE MOST sterile music I have ever heard - and I like sterile music! It's weird and totally amazing in a non-human/post-human kind of way. (Where's Pitchfork when you actually need them?)

And, of course, the most amazing moment of the RNC 2008 was at the very beginning when an honor guard marches through the half-empty coliseum and the whole room stands in silence, their hands over their hearts, when a solemn voice comes on over the intercom (think mid-twentieth Eastern European internment camp) and commanded everyone to turn around and freeze for one full minute while a super-fancy camera overhead takes everyone's picture. Everyone turns around with their hat/hand over their heart and holds their pose for an entire minute while the camera takes their picture. Have you ever seen several thousand people in a coliseum freeze and hold completely still for a full sixty seconds? It's creepy. It's a lot like observing a ritual in the most old-school pagan kind of way. All political (and athletic) events are ritualistic (obviously), but most of the successful, modern events successfully (I think; and, really, this could be an entirely different post) somehow successfully mask their own Ritualness...the '08 RNC should go down in history as one of THE MOST POORLY disguised political rituals EVER. And that sucks. For all of us. If we're going to be a two-party system we have to act like it. We need both the D's and R's to really want it, and know how to want it. Do you get the feeling we have a third party slowly galloping our way? God, I hope they're smart.

Well, anyway, I did find this clip from the RNC '08. Enjoy:

Also: Doesn't this look more like a scene out of a new David Lynch film rather than a contemporary conservative political rally?

Incidentally, I had lunch with a political columnist from the New York Observer a few months ago who was at the RNC, and was standing on the floor when Sarah Palin gave her introductory speech and he thought she killed. He said he was there with his editor and they both thought that it was all over for Obama. It's funny: I watched the RNC on a live internet stream and I thought it looked cheap and poorly orchestrated and I thought, almost immediately, that Obama was definitely going to take it. Televised orchestration's a big deal. You've got to have a candidate that looks good, who plays well on-screen. But, I know you know that. Well, the Republicans had an off year. They were due.

Execution of Saddam Hussein-GRAPHIC CONTENT

2009-10-13T02:01:00.012-04:00

I think this is an important video. It's footage of Saddam Hussein's execution as seen from an illicit cell phone camera. WARNING: This footage is not for everyone.

I've never seen a man taken to his death before. George Orwell's The Hanging has long been not only one of my favorite pieces of writing but was one of the first texts that made me want to write. I'll be honest with you: I gained respect for Saddam Hussein, as a man, after I saw this video. Politics aside, I thought he died with pride; he didn't let the room-full of masked executioners rattle him. When they chant "Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!" He sneers back, "Moktada? Please. That charlatan?" When they fill the room with chants, he prays out loud for himself, focused, complete.

Now contrast the first unofficial footage with the official staged version:

There's no live sound, just some douche-bag guy talking over it, reporting from his little edge of nowhere. He assures us that they won't actually show the execution - they'll just show you the part leading up to the execution...with an idiot talking over it.

Why is it we're not allowed to see: Men's Genitalia, Sex, Birth and Death? Why? Someone tell me. I give up.

Jimmy Scott

2009-10-10T14:44:00.005-04:00

A friend of mine showed this to me. Enjoy.

Recent String of Events (in no particular order...)

2009-10-10T02:24:00.028-04:00

Someone decapitated long-dead, frozen, baseball great Ted Williams. And then used his head as a soccer ball. Ladies and gentleman: The future of cryogenic freezing! Where your frozen cadaver can be mutilated for sport!

NASA fired a missile at the moon. And nothing happened. Yet. I don't think we're going to know much about this one for a while. Like maybe after you and I and all of our children are gone.

I stubbed my foot on the couch and broke my toe. Not only did I break my toe, I tore the joint. And now I'm wearing a boot (and it's really not as bad as I thought it would be).

Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize this morning and I almost feel sorry for him. He's trapped in between the almost completely unrealistic positive and negative expectations that people have of him. I can't imagine this is easy for him (not that it's supposed to be). And now the Europeans just piled a Nobel on top of everything else. That just might have been one of the most unwanted Nobel Peace Prize's in history. (But...I think he might deserve it, after all.)

I read The Grapes of Wrath for the first time. I know you don't need me to tell you this but...it's a pretty good book. Not bad. Nope. Not at all. Not one tiny bit. The part about the machine-tractors replacing man on God's green field? That's not shit you ever forget. That's Biblical.

There was (what I like to call) the Free-Speech Five-Step:

1) Serena Williams lost her cool (and the match) in the semi-finals to (eventual champion)Kim Clijsters at the recent U.S. Open when she verbally abused a short, fat Asian line judge. No one talked about this as a racial "incident" but I think Serena thought it was (at least at first) and before she knew it she was over the edge.

2) Kanye West steals the microphone from what's-her-face at the MTV music awards while she's accepting an award. Awesome. Even the fact that what he did is stupid isn't interesting. But that fact is. Subsequently, Barack Obama is heard, off-the-record, calling Kanye a "jackass" for what amounted to a really excellent, unintended, social mores moment from a sitting president who is (socially) far cooler than the rapper. Think about that. That kind of moment doesn't happen too often.

3) Joe Wilson's hateful shout of "You lie!" to the president was disgusting. That's one of the most blatently shameful things I've seen in this country in a long time. I believe it was an assassination attempt. I think it means, "Back the fuck up, BITCH!X!X! or next time I won't just be throwing words." Hateful stuff. Make no mistake. Also: look at the faces of the two men next to Wilson. Do you trust those guys? They want to see Obama go down in flames - literally.

4) Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame acceptance speech was stunning. Flat out. I thought it was awesome. Painful and gross and weird and embarrassing...but awesome. It was just so honest. How many living legends (that's what he is) just come right out and say what they've been thinking throughout the years in one extended public speech? I think there's something kind of remarkable about it. He was like: "This is what I did to you people. And now I'm telling you about it." I bet he loved it. Probably felt like a fifty point game to him. There are millions of Michael Jordans but only one Michael Jordan. Here's the first part of the speech:

5) And Muammar al-Gaddafi's lengthy speech at the U.N. (By the way, has anyone's name ever been spelled so many different ways?) Behold, the King of Africa:

You can tell it's going to be a long morning by the way he sifts through his papers in the opening. I have to say: I watched about 45 minutes of this thing, and I didn't mind it so much. I find the disposition of contemporary dictators entirely compelling. For instance, I thought Saddam Hussein came off as completely brave and border-line heroic the way he faced down his masked executioners - he had far more composure than, I think, most Liberal Democratic leaders would. Imagine what Gaddafi would be like if he was ever put on trial at the Hague! He'd make Milosevich's pathetic, irrational, child-like defense look like a Supreme Court hearing.

Conan O' Brian fell down and hit his head.

David Letterman executed a flawless public apology by calling "sex" sex and came out even stonger.

I administered a stool test to myself and almost threw-up. (No photograph.)

I watched The Wizard of Oz twice. It's as good as The Grapes of Wrath. They're both primal contemporary American myths. It's genuinely creepy when the Witch writes Surrender in black swirling smoke lines in the sky. Also: So this is where David Lynch got so many of his ideas!

Roman Polanski was re-arrested for child rape and various high-end Hollywood

celebrities immediately made complete asses of themselves. Justice may be imperfect, justice may be fickle - say whatever you want to say about it - but don't try to say this guy is somehow above the law because of his artistic genius. That's so gross it's obscene. (I think Bitter Moon was one of the best movies of the nineties and Chinatown is an official classic but I still think he should serve his time.) Also: if you still think he's being treated unfairly read the Grand Jury Testimony for the explicit details of how he drugged and raped a child. Best of luck defending him after that. (Also: I just realized, in '70s, Polanski, looks like Rob Blagojevich.)

And last but not least: All hail William T. Vollmann! Ladies and gentleman, we have a real artist in our presence. Remember when that Nobel Judge said a few years ago that an American writer would never win now because American writers are so self-centered,

disinterested, etc? He's obviously not paying attention. I read Riding Towards Everywhere (a road adventure/national memoir), then Poor People (part repudiation of James Agee's And Now Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, part moral examination of the concepts of wealth and poverty (but I mean, really, aren't they inseparable?) I'm currently reading through IMPERIAL. It's a huge, mad, slow book but it's totally worth it. The end of part one when he imagines what IMPERIAL would be like if written by Flaubert or Steinbeck or an American border guard is absurdly hilarious. What other contemporary American writer even comes close to this guy's imagination/output/scholarly attention to detail? Give him the Nobel!

John Steinbeck's Nobel Acceptance Speech

2009-10-01T19:52:00.005-04:00

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1962/steinbeck-speech.html

Donor Insemination Offspring Literature

2009-09-16T13:05:00.010-04:00

1) Consumer/Mom Literature: Written mostly for and by women concerning the options available for DI as well as first-hand accounts from women who have experienced it. This is, by far, the largest sub-genre and the easiest material to come by, readily available at your local Barnes and Noble. As you might imagine these books are almost 100% in favor of all RTs and their area of concern is not so much whether or not these practices are ethical but rather focus on what the best methods, techniques and approaches for getting pregnant, and how best to manage the future child in the absence of a father and how to break the news to the future child that they are donor offspring. Much to this sub-genre's credit, the authors seem to be almost unanimously against keeping the DI procedure secret from the child. While many of these books do give ample historical context to DI (some even go so far as to discuss the eugenic implications of the procedure) these books are, for the most part, like any other consumer literature – they are buyer's guides that treat the mother-to-be like a consumer and the child-to-be like a product to be appropriately priced and researched before purchased. Frankly, I found many of these books to be quite alienating. But there are a few that I thought were fairly comprehensive in their perspective:

On Our Own, Melissa Ludtke

Single Mothers By Choice, Jane Mattes

Having Your Baby By Donor Insemination, Elizabeth Noble

2) Medical/Bioethical Literature: Mostly written by and for doctors and/or academics concerning the ethical decisions and ramifications of DI within the larger context of RTs. Besides the fact that these books are harder to come by, more expensive and more difficult to understand than the aforementioned Consumer-Mom literature[1] these books are concerned with the way DI and other RTs contrast with what we as a culture have long considered to be normal and how best to deal with the schism between the new normal and old normal.[2]

For instance, Brent Waters, in his book Reproductive Technologies asks the million dollar question: If medicine is now displacing marriage as the principle institution ordering procreation – how do we begin to understand the ethical framework from which modern medicine arose? To answer this very difficult, very relevant question, Waters says:

…contemporary medicine is practiced against the backdrop of a Western philosophical crisis. With the collapse of Christendom and the Enlightenment’s failure to fill the void, Western societies lack consensus on a normative practice of medicine. Thus an ‘anonymous perspective of reason’ is needed in which no religious or moral orthodoxy is imposed or privileged. A secular framework of moral deliberation encompassing a pluralistic world is required, necessitating a neutral mode of public moral discourse. The role of the moral philosopher in general, and the bioethicist in particular, is not to judge the truth of conflicting claims but to develop credible options among a diverse population. They map the terrain of contending values, identifying procedures for resolving conflict…Although a secular bioethic must acknowledge a wide spectrum of moral convictions, freedom is the dominant value….

Freedom. Never has the word flapped so lonely in the wind. Freedom of choice. Freedom to be oneself. Freedom from the other. But if everyone is free in their own realm of biotechnological decision-making what happens to community, neighborhood, belonging, togetherness? Now that men and women no longer need each other for reproduction what does a man see when he looks at a woman? What does a woman see when she looks at a man? What do we think about when we think about ourselves?

I got really into this subgenre. I couldn’t stop. These books are academic, slow going and, really, kind of far out. I found that reading several of these books in a row is like huffing glue: brief high-highs interspersed with fat black patches of nothing. Let me just say: these books are interesting (theoretically) but I wouldn’t want to live in a world ruled by scientists or bioethicists. Remember the technocratic dystopia described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? Well, you know where I’m going with this.

Good stuff:

Ethics of New Reproductive Technologies, Jonathan Glover

The Future of Human Reproduction, ed. John Harris and Soren Holm

The Artificial Family, donors R. Snowden and G.D. Mitchell[3]

A Question of Life: The Warnock Report, Mary Warnock

Reproductive Technology: Towards a theology of Procreative Stewardship, Ethics of New Reproductive Technologies, Brent Waters

3) Philosophical Literature: Most of the philosophical literature here does not refer to DI by name but rather to the nature of human reproduction in the age of science and, in particular, how this effects being, conciousness, one's existential perspective and whether or not such an existential perspective even still exists. This is yet an even smaller sub-genre than the previous two, depending on what philosophical texts you want to drag into the conversation. One book from thus sub-genre stood out from all the rest: Jurgen Habermas's The Future of Human Nature, published in 2003, in which he examines the difference between the “grown” and the “made.” He asks, “…whether the instrumentalization of human nature [the made][4] changes the ethical self-understanding of the species in such a way that we may no longer see ourselves as ethically free and morally equal beings guided by norms and reasons.”

In other words, by “making” new human beings via technology we are essentially giving birth to a new existential or extra-existential or even non-existential perspective, a people for whom we "naturally" conceived humans can't possibly apply our "normative" ethical framework. It would be like critiquing a film based on television standards.

By the way, whenever the subject comes up in conversation, I tell people I am a “product” of donor insemination. Several of my friends have commented that this is a rather cold or unfeeling self-description but I do believe it’s apt.

Useful references:

The Human Condition, Hannah Artendt

Secrets, Sissela Bok

The Future of Human Nature, Jurgen Habermas

The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger

The Republic, Plato

4) The Literature of Eugenics: It turns out that Francis Galton and the history of Eugenics is the story within the story, as it were, concerning DI.[5] I believe this story gives adequate context to the questions and practical applications facing DI today. Needless to say, I was surprised by what I found and I’m guessing you will be too.

Did you know, in the early 20th Century, the United States had a comprehensive sterilization program in 26 states in which the “ lower tenth” - those determined to be stupid, poor, ugly - were legally forced into sterilization in an effort to improve the race? Did you know, in the early 20th Century, the U.S. and U.K. eugenics programs were far more advanced than their Nazi counterparts and were in fact the models upon which Nazi Germany based their eugenics program? Did you know that American, British and Nazi German scientists worked hand-in-hand in cooperative eugenics programs, both here and in Germany, and were forced to separate only after the United States entered the war in 1941? Did you know that it was only at the end of World War II, when word of the Nazi concentration camps (a direct result of their eugenics program) spread around the world, that all the western nations closed the doors on their own eugenics programs, afraid of being associated with the Holocaust? And did you know that, at the end of World War II, the West's eugenics programs were not, in fact, "closed" but were merely transformed into what we now call genetics?[6]

Yeah, I didn’t either. It might be the great untold story of the 20^th century.

War Against the Weak, Edwin Black

Better For All the World, Harry Bruinius

The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea, Elof Axel Carlson

Essays in Eugenics, Francis Galton

5) DI Offspring Literature: Besides a handful of articles and blog posts[7], would you believe there’s almost nothing whatsoever written from the perspective of a man or woman created by DI? Nothing. I'm sure the secrecy and shame that has long surrounded the practice has something to do with it. I heard about a young woman, a product of DI, who, several years ago, supposedly wrote a memoir in the ‘90s condemning the practice. She was taken on Larry King Live and hailed by Pat Robertson and other Religious Righters as evidence that donor insemination and all other RTs are unholy, unnatural, etc. But, after much research, I was unable to find this young woman’s name, her book, or her supposed appearance on Larry King.

[1] Think of the difference between Variety and People magazine: one caters to the industry insider and one caters to the consumer.

[2] When they say normal they typically mean Christian; many of these books inevitably (and understandably) talk about Man’s relationship to God and whether or not Man is supplanting God’s infinite wisdom and procreative decisions with Science.

[3] Incidentally, the only book I came across written by a donor.

[4] The brackets are mine.

[5] For my dollar anyway.

[6] All of this and much much more can be found at Edwin Black’s mind-boggling War Against the Weak.

[7] The most comprehensive blog is PCVAI (People Conceived Via Artificial Insemination) at yahoo, but you have to be a donor offspring to gain access.

The Walking Dead

2009-09-14T13:40:00.025-04:00

The Walking Dead is a really great comic book that's about to be made into an ongoing serial on AMC.

I haven't read comic books in years. When I was a kid I used to collect them religiously. There are currently boxes upon boxes of comic books stacked in my mother's garage, each comic book individually wrapped in plastic with cardboard backing. Most of the Marvel and DC comics from my childhood are essentially worthless. When my friends and I were collecting we thought that our comics would someday be worth as much as the comics from the '40s, '50s and '60s, which is to say, a lot. But, thanks to mass-mass production that will probably never be the case.

Anyway, The Walking Dead is a lot of fun. Conceptually, it's great. The dialogue is often tedious and the characterizations are sometimes one-dimensional (classic traits of comic book writing) but after a while you really get into the post-apocalyptic suffering of the characters; the pace with which the characters come and go is...strangely refreshing. Most serials seem loathe to kill off characters here or there - but to see a story line in which even the most central characters are (or could be) killed off, I find somehow entirely cathartic.

You've probably noticed that there's been a huge vampire resurgence going on for the past few years - Joss Whedon's Buffy and Alan Ball's True Blood are the most notable - but I'll take a good zombie movie/show/story any day of the week. The thing about zombie movies is that they're movies about us. I know I'm not the first to say this but zombie movies are the perfect contemporary social satire, you know, what with our mass consumer liberal democracy and all. The herd mentality. I think you know where I'm going with this. The horror of a good zombie movie is the horror of ourselves. It's a beautiful (and very funny) thing when done well.

And so to celebrate zombies, an impromptu top 4 zombie movie list (in reverse!):

4) Dawn of the Dead (original), George Romero: His best film.

3) Mean Girls, Mark Waters: This is the best zombie-movie-that's-not-a-zombie-movie I've ever seen. Brilliant!

2) 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle: Overall, this might be the best zombie movie (even though technically I think you could make the case this is a virus film and not a zombie film at all but...)...it's certainly the best movie movie of

any of them...

1) Dawn of the Dead (remake), Zack Snyder: The

first five minutes of this film are outrageously scary and

phenomenal...the most authentic representation of what the first few minutes of a zombie outbreak would really be like.

The Archimedean Point

2009-09-08T12:37:00.008-04:00

A definition lifted straight from Wikipedia:

"A hypothetical vantage point from which an observer can objectively perceive the subject of inquiry, with a view of totality. The ideal of 'removing oneself' from the object of study so that one can see it in relation to all other things, but remain independent of them."

From the Greek mathematician, Archimedes.

The Birth of American Donor Insemination: A Modern Techno-Myth

2009-09-07T03:17:00.024-04:00

In 1884, a merchant and his Quaker wife, unable to become pregnant, visited the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia where they met with Dr. William Pancoast. After a series of tests, Dr. Pancoast discovered the husband to be azoospermic, or sterile, while the wife was found to be perfectly fertile. Uncertain of how to treat the couple, the doctor consulted with his class of six medical students, one of whom suggested that they use the semen from the “best looking” man among them to inseminate the woman. Dr. Pancoast agreed and called the wife in once more for a final examination. He anesthetized the woman with chloroform and, with a rubber syringe, injected his student’s semen into her while his six students observed.

It was only after the birth of her son nine months later - the first ever reported human DI pregnancy in the United States - that Dr. Pancoast confessed to the merchant what he and his students had done. The husband, by most accounts, responded positively but asked that the doctor and his students keep the secret from his wife. They agreed, and she was never told.

Without realizing it Dr. Pancoast and his six anonymous medical students set a precedent that day in 1884 for the practice of DI that has continued until this day.[1] But what right do semen donors have to anonymity? In this case, does the donor’s right to anonymity outweigh the mother’s right to know with whose semen she has been inseminated? Does the donor’s right to anonymity also outweigh the unborn child’s right to know who his true father is?

I suspect the identity of the “true” biological father was kept secret for three reasons: 1) It was initially kept secret from both the husband and wife to protect Dr. Pancoast and his students from recriminations in case the merchant and/or his wife found their decision to inseminate her to be dishonorable or criminal; 2) The husband wanted to protect his wife from the potential shame of knowing she’d been inseminated, unknowingly, while passed out, by an anonymous man and; 3) Not wishing to lose face in his wife’s eyes the husband did not want his wife to know that he was incapable of impregnating her. In any case, the chief motivating factor in maintaining donor anonymity in this first ever use of human DI in the U.S. was - unambiguously – fear; each actor in the scenario was afraid that what they had done might be perceived as wrong and sought to protect themselves from wrongdoing by cloaking themselves in secrecy.

It is an important story and one of the most frequently told in the literature of DI. It’s almost become a kind of origination myth. Each author tells the story in a slightly different way, from a slightly different perspective, like the many apostles each representing Christ[2] in their own subjective voice. In the absence of any federal or state legislation since 1884, the decisions made by Dr. Pancoast and his six anonymous students have, remarkably, set the standards for a medical practice that has become increasingly common and even, in the past few decades, highly commodified.

What was the husband’s special relationship with the doctor that he was let in on the secret and his wife was not? And what about the six anonymous medical students? Who are they in this modern techno-myth? They are like the Council of Anonymous Masturbators standing in the background, bearing witness to this unique form of medicalized rape. They know whose semen it is. It is the “best looking” man’s semen and they are hiding his identity to prevent him from having to take any responsibility for the creation of new life, thus setting the stage for the practice of contemporary DI. The commemorative coin would show the bust of a featureless man and would read:

Celebrating 125 years of Donor Insemination!

Creating Life and Avoiding Responsibility!

Had the Quaker woman been told, on her way to the doctor’s office, that she was going to be drugged and impregnated with an unknown man’s semen with a rubber tube would she have consented? What right did Dr. Pancoast have to experiment on his patient?

As if to assuage its own guilt over grossly misusing that Quaker woman, the American Medical establishment convinced itself (and nearly everyone else) that donor insemination is a boon for women’s freedom. Thanks to Dr. William Pancoast and his six brilliant (and handsome) medical students (who shall remain dignified in their anonymity) women now enjoy a liberation and freedom of choice never before known in the history of the world. They are so free that they don’t even need men any more.

Dr. Pancoast, his six students and the Quaker woman’s husband kept their secret to themselves for the next 25 years. But, in 1909, the cat was, as they say, let out of the bag. Addison Davis Hard, one of Dr. Pancoast’s medical students (often speculated to be the “best looking”[3]) visited the donor offspring, then a twenty-five year old businessman living in Philadelphia, and revealed to that young man the story of his true conception.[4] Soon after, Hard published a letter in the American journal Medical World, in which he unveiled their collective secret to the world. An excerpt from Hard’s letter:[5]

From a nature point of view, the idea of artificial impregnation offers valuable advantages. The mating of human beings must, from the nature of things, be a matter of sentiment alone. Persons of the worst possible promise of good and healthy offspring are being lawfully united in marriage every day. Marriage is a proposition which is not submitted to good judgment or even common sense, as a rule…Artificial impregnation by carefully selected seed, alone will solve the problem. It may at first shock the sensibilities of the sentimental who consider that the source of the seed indicates the true father, but when the scientific fact becomes known that the origin of the spermatozoa which generates the ovum is of no more importance than the personality of the finger which pulls the trigger of a gun, then objections will lose their forcefulness and artificial impregnation become recognized as a race-uplifting procedure.

In the massive controversy that followed, the Jefferson Medical College, and all parties involved, took a considerable PR hit. Some claimed Addison Davis Hard was playing a joke. Some defended him, claiming that this procedure would in fact help limit unwanted pregnancy while others argued against AI as grotesque and absurd. But, most importantly, “The eugenicists were quickly on the scene and in the process divided the medical profession by their claims that the improvement of the genetic stock of America was now possible.”[6]

[1] The main difference today, of course, is that women know they’re being inseminated when they go to the doctor - but donor anonymity is still the norm.

[2] Of course, it’s worth mentioning that Jesus was the product of The Immaculate Conception. If a woman never has intercourse with a man but becomes pregnant via DI would she still be considered a virgin?

[3] Ladies and gentleman, America’s first semen donor!

[4] If Hard was, in fact, the donor father it’s interesting to note in this origination myth that it was the anonymous father who sought out the donor child – not the other way around. Clearly, no matter what anyone says, this is a two-way relationship. How many sperm donors are there who, having jerked off for money in college, found themselves, later in life, wondering - really wondering - where their children are, who their children are?

[5] Courtesy of Elizabeth Noble’s Having Your Baby By Donor Insemination.

[6] From R. Snowden and G.D. Mitchell’s The Artificial Family.

A Brief History of Donor Insemination

2009-09-05T00:33:00.012-04:00

1677 - Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch scientist from Delft, considered to be the father of microbiology, discovers sperm, along with his pupil Johan Hamm, with the use of a magnifying lens. They refer to the sperm as animalcules.

1779 – Italian biologist and physiologist Lazzaro Spallanzani is the first to perform artificial insemination, using a dog. He kept the two animals in separate rooms to avoid natural mating and when the female dog showed signs of being in heat he collected semen from the male dog next door injecting the semen into the female dog’s womb. She became pregnant, and sixty-two days later, three healthy puppies were born. Spallanzani also observed the effects of cooling and freezing human sperm, now a common storage technique.

1790 - John Hunter, British physiologist and surgeon, is the first to record a pregnancy and delivery of a child conceived by artificial insemination with a husband’s semen.

1838 - A Frenchman named Girault used a hollow tube to blow sperm into a vagina.

1865 - De Haut published a pamphlet on Artificial Insemination in France but discontinued his experimentation due to public disapproval.

1866 - American gynecologist J. Marion Sims reported fifty-five intrauterine injections performed on six women enjoying only a four per cent success rate. Sims, a controversial doctor, said to have performed unethical and sometimes brutal surgery on slave women, was later elected as President of the American Medical Association in 1875.

1866 - First reported successful artificial insemination (with husband’s semen) in the United States.

1883 – Francis Galton, first cousin of Charles Darwin, coins term eugenics, meaning good breeding.

1884 – World’s first case of human donor insemination, performed by Dr. William Pancoast Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. The procedure is kept secret until 1909.

1886 – Paolo Mantegazza, a well known Italian neurologist, physiologist and anthropologist makes world’s first proposal for a sperm bank.

1909 – Addison Davis Hard, one of Dr. William Pancoast’s students, publishes a letter in American Journal Medical World, disclosing the details of the 1884 DI procedure, setting off a debate among lawyers, philosophers, theologians and medical practitioners.

1914 - Giuseppe Amantea, an Italian physician and physiologist, devised first artificial vagina thought to have greatly advanced artificial insemination technology.

1938 – Twenty-four articles on human artificial insemination are written and published in the United States.

1938 - First cattle breeding organization in the United States to use artificial insemination begins operations in New Jersey.

1941 - It is estimated that 3700 human donor inseminations occur in the U.S.

1945 - A string of medical committees are established in the U.K. concerning the ethical and moral dimensions of human donor insemination. The first report in the British Medical Journal condemned Donor Insemination calling it a “criminal offense.”

1949 – Pope Pius the XII rejects donor insemination on moral grounds.

1960 - The Feversham Committee deems the practice of donor insemination undesirable.

1970 - The Peel Report comes out in favor of Donor Insemination.

1985 - The Warnock Report states: “The protection of the public, which we see as the primary objective of regulation, demands the existence of an authority independent of Government, heath authorities, or research institutions. The authority should be specifically charged with the responsibility to regulate and monitor practice in relation to those sensitive areas which raise fundamental ethical questions. We therefore recommend the establishment of a new statutory licensing authority to regulate both research and those infertility services which we have recommended should be subject to control.”

1980’s - In the United States it is estimated that up to 100,000 children are the product of D.I. each year, 20,000 a year in California alone.

1987 - It is estimated one million DI children are living in United States.

1988 – A study done by the Congressional Office of Technology - commissioned by then Senator Al Gore - reveals a surprising lack of testing among semen donors for sexually transmitted diseases. According to the study, as reported by The New York Times, “…more than half of the 1,558 physicians surveyed said they did not check prospective donors for the AIDS virus; nearly three-quarters did not test for syphilis, gonorrhea or hepatitis, and about half did not perform any tests for genetic defects.” Then what are they screening for? “What many doctors do instead of testing is require prospective donors to answer questions about their life style, such as ‘Are you homosexual?’ and ‘Are you sexually promiscuous?’ These doctors say that since a majority of donors are university or medical students, who are presumably knowledgeable about health matters, their answers can be trusted.” Do you get the feeling that there’s a lot of winking and nudging going on in the DI world? It is the most comprehensive U.S. survey of procreative industry to date.

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood

2009-08-03T11:12:00.006-04:00

You can read four of my short autobiographical stories at Thomas Beller's:

http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/

Just type my name into Search and presto! If you haven't seen the site it's definitely worth checking out.

The four stories You're Supposed to Make Mistakes, One Snort, Little Blue Bag and You Look Nice Tonight, That's All are included in my forthcoming collection of short autobiographical stories Fire At the End of the Rainbow to be released by Key West-based Sand Paper Press in December, 2009.

Authors I Have Met

2009-07-28T10:31:00.025-04:00

Let me just say, I'm limiting the Authors I have Met List to those who have achieved a certain popular or critical success. I'm excluding friends and authors who - though successful, published, etc. - haven't quite pierced that Nth, magical level of public imagination. This is a subjective line, obviously, and apologies in advance to all the writers I'm about to exclude. (Also, I'm using the word "met" liberally. Some of these "meetings" are no more than brief encounters, chance seatings at a table, etc. but, you know, so what?)

Okay, are you ready? (This is bound to be totally uncomfortable, maybe even regrettable...). Here goes. In alphabetical order:

Chinua Achebe: The one time I attended church at Bard I saw Chinua Achebe and his entire family in the congregation. They were fantastic: friendly, smiling, comfortable to be around. I liked him and his family instantly. Several months later, I was walking across campus early one morning. No one was out. I could see, in the distance, further down the trail, a man on a wheelchair. As we slowly approached one another, and as we got close enough so I could make out his face, I could see that the man in the wheelchair was none other than famed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. "Good morning," he said, smiling brightly at me. "Good morning," I replied. Let me just say this man has a remarkable smile, a truly benevolent smile - without a doubt the greatest and most endearing smile of any author I've ever met. Perhaps because of my positive (though brief) interactions with Achebe and his family, I decided in the summer of 2003 to read through Achebe's entire body of work. I made it through Things Fall Apart, A Man of the People, Home and Exile (essays) and Hope and Impedements (essays) before I met a woman and spent the rest of the summer not reading. Let me just say: for being an uber-canonized novel that practically every child on the planet is required to read, Things Fall Apart is the real deal. It's fantastic. And I still think about some of the essays in Hope and Impedements.

Andre Aciman: I'm not going to be able to do the Andre Aciman story justice here but Andre was my Proust professor at Bard and it was a wonderful experience. I still haven't read his memoir Out of Egypt but I have a signed copy that he addressed to my grandmother that said (and I'm paraphrasing): "To Velva, Whose grandson, Shawn, will soon be a successful author." There's a scene in In Search of Lost Time where a published, known author of the day visits Marcel at his parent's home and signs a copy of one of his books to Proust's grandmother saying her grandson is going to be a great literary talent, etc., in an attempt to assuage her anxiety that Marcel was wasting his life away. I thought it was a sweet gesture by Andre and it meant a lot to my grandmother.

John Ashbery: I'd never met a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award winner before. But what are awards, anyway? More importantly, I'd never met an author while I was - at that precise moment - reading through their entire body of work. The summer before taking Ashbery's poetry workshop I read all of his books. Wakefulness had just come out and I was savoring every poem, reading each one three or four times. I loved them all. I was entranced. So, before John walked into our classroom that first morning, I was genuinely nervous. For what, I'm not so sure. When he appeared, ambling his way through the door - lumpy, crooked, feeble - I was struck by how human he seemed. I remember his big nose. I was struck with the physicality of the man which makes sense now, in hindsight...if you only know an author from their words, they becomes an ancillary character in the mind of the reader - a fantasy component of the work itself. When I finally got over the fact that John Ashbery was, actually, a real person I was able to enjoy his very sweet, humble, friendly countenance.

Jean Baudrillard: I didn't actually meet-meet Jean Baudrillard but I was seated next to him at a group dinner. He was a little man. This was only a few years before his death. It was in Switzerland at the European Graduate School (deserving of a post all its own). At the time, I was a big fan of his work. I'd been reading through many of his books: America, Simulacrum and Simulation, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, among others. He was the first and only post-structuralist French theorist I ever shared a conversation with and I have to say - I don't know if it's coincidence or what - but after I had dinner with him I never took French post-structuralist theory seriously again. Ever. Haven't read one word. The moral: Be careful which authors you meet. The meeting will alter you and it's impossible to know how.

Thomas Beller: A tall man, like myself. You know, having attended many literary parties and get-togethers I've discovered that A) Writers, editors and literary people, in general, are shorter than your average cross section of society and B) are likely to resent taller, larger people because of it. This was originally very suprising to me. In my naivete, many years ago, I believed that people dedicated to the Literary Cause, etc., would naturally be, oh, I don't know, intelligent, sophisticated, enlightened...Anyway, meeting Thomas Beller, author, editor of Open City, was a breath of fresh air. It was the first time in my life a writer/editor apporached me at a party BECAUSE of my height, happy to meet me, curious to know I was, what I was working on. I originally discovered Beller via David Berman's Actual Air, a (dare I say) seminal poetry collection that Open City published several years ago. I later read How To Be a Man Beller's incredibly likable collection of autobiographical essays.

Judith Butler: I can't tell you how much I enjoyed meeting Butler. I was taking a three day course with her at the abovementioned European Graduate School and I was genuinely impressed not just with her intellect but with her willingness and desire to connect with every person in the room. I just thought she had a really useful, multi-purpose intellect. She was funny, smart, down-to-earth one minute and almost entirely impossible to understand the next. I loved it! One night, she delivered a 45-minute lecture on Obituaries and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (there's no way I'll be able to recap it or do it justice here but, trust me, it was very interesting). At the end Butler was viciously and personally attacked by EGS's head, Wolfgang Schirmacher (deserving a post all his own), and Butler courageously defended herself, then grabbed her jacket and fled when she realized Schirmacher had gone off the deep end (I've never seen anything quite like it). All of us immediately left the building to accompany her as she walked down that long, dark Swiss mountain. We all went to a pub afterwards and drank beer after beer laughing about the incident. I've never seen the difference between the European and American philosophical traditions made so blatantly apparent. Much respect to Judith Butler.

David James Duncan: More than any other writer I've ever met or read (with the possible exception of - who else? - Ernest Hemingway) David James Duncan made me want to become a writer. He came to my high school during my junior year, read part of his, then, newly published novel The Brothers K, then sat-in during my English class, basically explaining to us what his day-to-day life was like as a writer and stay-at-home dad. I just thought: that's it. That's the life I want. He seemed like a really laid-back, thoughtful, cool guy. And not a bad writer at all. I read The Brothers K not long after I met him making it, not only the longest book I had ever read at the time(656 p.), but the first work of fiction that left me simultaneously empty AND full when I finished it, sobbing like a little baby.

Steve Erickson: My defining moment with Steve Erickson is when he described his experience as Rolling Stone political correspondent as this: “Jan Wenner wanted me to be Hunter S. Thompson.” And then he shrugged, like, What the fuck are you gonna do? This is not a man who seemed particularly interested in teaching a class-full of graduate students, most of whom would probably not go on to become actual practicing writers. I can’t say that I blame him. Also, I’ve never read anything he’s written – but his books do look good…

Thomas Frank: Author of What's the Matter With Kansas? an intelligent examination of how the republican party had managed to convince middle-American, blue collar, traditionally democratic-leaning voters to vote republican and, essentially against their own best interests. My friend Margaret had an interview scheduled with him for a magazine and - knowing that I'm a daffy political junky - invited me along for the ride. We saw him give a riveting reading at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, a reading that actually provoked thoughtful, earnest dialogue between, not just audience members and author, but between audience members (imagine that!) Afterwards, me, Margaret, Frank and an old friend of his got a drink down the street. This was in 2003 just before Bush's re-election. Frank was livid about the cable news talk-show's dismissal of he and his book and seemed genuinely distraught, not just by the overall political climate of the country, but by the mainstream press's unwillingness to listen to him. Six months later Bush defeated John Kerry (much to the liberal news media's suprise) and suddenly Thomas Frank was on all the cable shows and his book was being talked about as "prescient," etc. His literary fortune really took a positive turn thanks to Bush.

Steve Katz: One of my favorites. I met Steve at the University of Colorado at Boulder as an undergraduate and we immediately took to one another. It was in a meeting in his office when he told me I could/should become a writer. I was 19 and when he told me this it changed everything. I recently ran into Steve in Powell’s in Portland. I walked to the B section, looking to see if any of the new Thomas Bernhard re-issues had come out (they still haven’t) and there was a man standing right there in my spot looking through Bernhard. We stood side-by-side for a moment, wrestling for space, and then I looked over and saw that it was Steve. My mom and I went out to dinner with he and two of his grandchildren a few nights later at a real Chinese restaurant way out in deep north Portland. For those of you who don’t know: this is the guy who wrote The Exagerations of Peter Prince, one of the coolest, funniest “experimental” works of fiction I’ve ever read. Also, his smile rivals Achebe's.

Robert Kelly: You know, I’m surprised by how many authors I’ve made it through without a single negative or critical comment. Did you know Robert Kelly was once as large as a house? Literally. Yeah, I guess everyone knows that. Uhm…did you know he’s written about five hundred books? Yeah, everybody knows that too. Hmm…did you know he’s quite the ladies man…with teenage college girls? Um, yeah…I guess that’s common knowledge. Also, he speaks with a British accent even though he's from New York and hasn’t left the state once in the last 60 years. Hm. Alright, next!

Sam Lipsyte: Thomas Beller introduced me to Sam Lipsyte at a party as Sam

was on his way out. We didn’t really get a chance to talk or anything but he seemed pretty cool. His first book Venus Drive, a collection of stories put out by Open City, is very funny. Loved it. I'll never forget Black Sean.

Harry Mathews: The lone American member of the French Literary movement OULIPO. Several years ago, a couple good friends and I visited Harry and his wife at their beautiful home in Key West. We brought wine and cheese. As I was passing the cheese to Harry’s wife I dropped the cheese on the floor. I don’t know why this is important. Later that afternoon, my friend Arlo, who is pals with Harry, mentioned something about Willy Nelson and Harry Mathews (then about 75) said: “Who?” And Arlo said: “You know, the country western pop star, Willy Nelson – sang On The Road Again….” And Harry said: “Never heard of him.” To this day I can’t decide whether to be impressed or disturbed. Even if you are a wealthy, Harvard-alumn, globe-trotting literary experimentalist how do you not know who Willy Nelson is? Am I missing something here?

Mark Strand: I was kind of excited to meet Mark Strand. He came to read at Calarts and at the gathering afterwards his girlfriend at the time (the phenomenal Maureen X) introduced us. He’s almost as tall as me and handsome in a Clint Eastwood-meets-J.M. Coetzee sort of way. And also, Dark Harbor continues to be pretty great.

Ron Sukenick: I ended up working as Ron’s assistant in he and his wife’s Battery Park apartment many years after I was his student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He once tried to sleep with my girlfriend when - under the pretense that he wanted to meet her to offer a reviewing job with his journal The American Book Review. Ron eventually died from an extremely cruel and rare degenerative muscle disease called IBM and he told my girlfriend during their “meeting” that he would soon lose the ability to have sex and that this was his last opportunity to make love with a young, beautiful woman, etc. She told me she respectfully declined but, you know, who knows? When I found out I was very angry and I never respected him again as much as I originally did. I really looked up to him. But, I continued to work for him anyway, part-time, for the next several years. In the end, none of it mattered. I was deeply moved by his courage and daily optimism in the face of death and that horrible, debilitating disease. On a side note, Ron’s office overlooked the World Trade Center. Two weeks after 9/11 I was granted entry into the area - which had been sealed off to everyone except military personnel and homeowners - and I got to see, through Ron’s window, that smoldering, nightmarish, black pit. You know, it’s funny. I never once thought to take a picture. But I didn’t need to. I’ll never forget that.

Kurt Vonnegut: I’m usually anti-book signings (and anti-autograph collecting, in general) but when I saw in the paper that Kurt Vonnegut was coming to the Tattered Cover in Denver I had to go. I couldn’t not go. I mean, Kurt Vonnegut. I bought a copy of Cat’s Cradle, waited in line and, when I got to the front, said: “Good morning, Mr. Vonnegut.” I figured it’d be the only time in my life when I could actually say that. And I was right. He looked at me and then through me. It didn’t really seem like he wanted to be there. That or he’d had enough of 19-year old boys fawning over him. I can imagine that probably gets old. Like, two decades ago.

So, that’s it! A pretty improbable collection of authors, don’t you think? I mean, there’s no way this exact collection of writers has ever been brought together in one place before, right? Well, this was the easy part. Next up: A book connecting the work of all nineteen authors. I mean, I’m not going to write it. But you can.

Why Barack Obama is a Boon for the Foreign Policy Legacy of George W. Bush

2009-07-20T12:36:00.016-04:00

Let me double preface this thing before I get started:

I am not and never have been one of those liberals who thinks the Republican Party is Evil and Bad and always has been and always will be, etc. Not at all. I'm just as likely to bash the democrats for playing dumb party-politics (as Gertrude Stein never said: a politician's a politician's a politician...). That being said, I was not a fan of George W. Bush. His "leadership" as president seemed to be dispiriting to most people, most of the time. Not a good approach for a president of a liberal democracy, regardless of party.

It might be hard to believe but it's still possible for George W. Bush's presidential legacy to be considered, at least, a partial success and the rise of Barack Obama, I think, works neatly in his favor. Let me explain.

As of this writing (July '09) it's still possible that an American-backed democratically-elected Iraqi government will stabilize at some point in the next several years, and the U.S. will stumble into a massive economic windfall from their oil resources, more than paying for our two recent wars (actually, if you think about the Afghan and Iraqi invasions as entrepreneurial ventures, investments, I think they start to make a lot more sense).

So imagine if you will a U.S. friendly Afghanistan neighboring a U.S. friendly Iraq (a fairly big if, I know, but hang in there...). Add to that the recent unexpected victory of the "March 14 Coalition," the American-backed Lebanese Parliament, versus their Hezbollah/Tehran-backed opponents, in addition to Barack Obama's (for the most part) largely influential Cairo University speech AND the widespread moderate upheaval in the recent Iranian elections...it's not inconcievable that within the next five to ten years the middle-east will look significantly different than it did, say, in the fall of 2001. Even if American influence in the region is minimal and only lasts a generation or less it's still, I guess, better than nothing - not to mention the oil and geo-political advantage it gives us for that period of time (an advantage that would otherwise go to Iran or Russia or China or all three...).

George W. Bush's legacy has a much better chance of someday having (however briefly) a positive historical revival with Obama now in the White House than with McCain/Palin. Obama wields power in the most sophisticated (and powerful) of ways. He smiles a lot. He's wildly intelligent. Everyone wants to be his friend. So, on the one hand, we have this liberal, almost universally admired man in office who seems to represent all the most positive ideals the United States is said to offer while we continue to: occupy two foreign countries (including a Baghdad Embassy larger than the Vatican), strafe and bomb a third country (Pakistan) with CIA-operated drones, intimately influence the politics of the entire region. From the point of view of the United States, isn't that the best of both worlds? We get soft and hard power at the same time.

The President of the United States is not the ruler or owner of the country the way Kings used to be rulers of their countires. The President of the United States is (more or less) a temporary representative of the needs and wants of the United States at any given time. The president is a face, a personality which expresses those needs, both to its own subjects and to the rest of the world. But the State...the State remains the same. American power is still American power regardless of which party happens to be holding office. Doesn't it, on some level, benefit the State - in the big picture, over a long period of time - to be mixing up its representatives, to be alternating its personalities? When Obama won the election, didn't you think, on some level: We're the good guys again? Didn't it make it a tiny bit more palpable in your mind that we continue to occupy two countries, exert our influence throughout the Mid-East, etc? Admit it, I know you did. And I guarantee you untold millions of people around the world thought the same thing.

From a long-term historical perspective (or in other words, in the overall life-span of the country called America) does it really matter if one president was deeply unpopular and the one that came after him was beloved? I'm not so sure it matters. But I think it definitely matters what actions the nation takes at home and abroad, on offense and defense. I'm willing to take George W. Bush and his administration at their word when they said they didn't care if their actions were popular or not. I'm willing to believe Bush when he said History would be his judge. I think, compared to the popular political imagination, this seems like a cynical approach to government but will it prove harmful in a deep and lasting way? It very well might not.

In which case we can look forward to a Time or New Yorker article (if either magazine still exists in print form) in approximately 8-12 years titled: Is it Time to Rethink George W. Bush's Legacy?

Goodbye, Michael Jackson...Hello, Miko Brando!!!

2009-07-18T23:31:00.007-04:00

Though we've recently lost pop-sensation Michael Jackson, we have gained a new celebrity: Miko Brando. Every time I turned on the TV last week Miko Brando was on Larry King Live wearing a different colored Hawaiian shirt. I'm sort of as stunned by Miko Brando's existence as I was by Michael Jackson's death. Actually, that's not true. When my friend M called to tell me Michael Jackson died I thought, "Oh, yeah, well, that kind of makes sense." Not that I wanted Michael to die or was pleased to hear of his death but it just kind of made sense from an objective/biographical stand-point (I mean, this is a guy whose public persona had gotten so out-of-control and unpredictable that he, really, could have done anything and it would have finally seemed somewhat normal in the overall narrative of "Michael Jackson").

But, nothing could have prepared me for the emergence of Miko Brando. My first thought was: "What? This guy looks like a Pacific Islander who just returned to port from a twenty year bender at sea (and who was maybe raised by a coconut)." But, that being said, he seems like a really sweet guy. Listening to him talk about his intimate, decades-long relationship with Michael, I started thinking about the world of celebrity children who are members of the world's uber-elite thanks to their parent's immense wealth, connections etc. I mean, what has Miko Brando's life been like? I could be totally wrong but I imagined him losing his virginity at age 9 (to neighbor/family-friend Liza Minelli), drug-addiction at age 10, a garage-full of multi-colored Lamborghinis at age 11, man-slaughter charges (acquitted) involving aforementioned Lamborghinis, thanksgiving dinners with Liberace, hot air balloon day-trips with Eddie Muprhy, etc. He's so rich he can go on live feeds of CNN unshaven/wearing super-expensive beach-comber/drop-out/drug addict clothing and then, not only did no one question his character, etc., but he was the main character witness guy!!! This obviously speaks to Michael Jackson's day-to-day life and just how kooky it got. Actually, I can't think of one person who took to the airwaves to speak a word about the passing of Michael Jackson who wasn't just entirely unreal and/or entirely improbable. I mean, when Charlie Rose called Quincy Jones at his home in Brussels (!?!) he sounded as if he were on his 80,000th martini/xanax/marijuana cocktail, thank you very much.

Digression: If we start counting several weeks prior to Michael Jackson there have been a string of celebrity deaths unseen in my 33 years, completely obliterating the long-held urban myth that celebrities die in 3's. Let's make a list: David Carradine, Ed Macmahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Pina Bausch, pitchman Billy Mayes (just two days after his appearance on Conan), Steve McNair, boxer Arturo Gatti (not a household name, I know), and just yesterday
Walter Cronkite. I have a theory: This is the new norm. We've reached a particular population density which includes a rapidly growing celebrity-to-non-celebrity ratio in which it will now become normal for a "famous" person to die every day. And soon, several celebrities will be dying each hour and then, not long after that, there will be dozens of celebrity deaths per minute making it perfectly reasonable to start up a 24-hour Celebrity Obituary Cable channel complete with up-to-the-minute scrolling celebrity deaths at the bottom of the screen, a channel (and accompanying website) dedicated entirely to looking back on all those wondrous highlights that made that person's life special (actually, this seems like a perfectly reasonable cable channel). UPDATE: As if to prove my point, these celebrities have passed away since I first wrote this post: Robert McNamara, Frank McCourt, Merce Cunningham, Budd Schulberg, John Hughes, Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

In any case, I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more of Miko Brando in the near future. At the very least, he should release a line of Miko Brando Hawaiian shirts (I'm good for like a half-a-dozen). But perhaps the most significant shift that occured because of Michael Jackson's death and the rise of Miko Brando is that not one person has mentioned father Marlon - and may never again. Someday, kids will be saying: "Have you seen Apocolypse Now? I heard Miko Brando's dad was in that."

Man Killing Minotaur

2009-06-05T10:52:00.005-04:00

Look, I don't want to toot my own horn or anything but ***HONK***HONK*** since this is my blog and all I just want to alert you to a pretty cool story I wrote several years ago Man Killing Minotaur that was published by our friends over at the excellent failbetter.com and subsequently nominated for a Pushcart Prize (which I'm convinced I lost out to Andre Aciman and/or Colm Toibin - but what can you do?).

Enjoy!

Confessions of a Car Buyer

2009-06-01T17:11:00.014-04:00

I bought a new car about eight months ago. My last car, a Chevy Trailblazer, had passed the 100k mile marker and was breaking down about once a month, requiring me to call a tow-truck, requiring me to have work done on it (about $500-$1000 a month). It was time.

To make a long story short: Buying a new car is often a horrible experience for everyone. But buying a new car is especially horrible if you're six-foot-eight. You see, as it turns out, most new cars are not designed with six-foot-eight human beings in mind. Why? I have no idea. Is it a cost-cutting issue? Is it a lack of awareness? Are there not enough tall people designing automobiles?

Allow me to take you on the abridged journey of my recent car-buying experience, in the approximate order in which I sat in and/or test drove them:

1. Toyota Yaris, 2-door: Tiny little thing. I really like these cars. They remind me of the French Renault Twingo, one of my all-time favorites. I actually sort of fit in this car. As it turns out, the size of an automobile has NOTHING to do with how much leg room it has in the driver's seat. It's hard for some people to wrap their heads around this (especially car salesmen, oddly). The problem with this car is you would die if someone hit you with their shopping cart. Safety first! No go with the Yaris.

2. Toyota Prius: 9-months ago this seemed like the no-brainer new car to buy. I put my name on a waiting list at the local dealer and waited. When it finally arrived I went to drive it and found that the gear shift thingy juts out exactly where my knee cap goes. Not comfortable. In fact, I found myself sitting in a really tense, awkward position in the hopes of not pushing my knee completely into this sharp piece of plastic. If I bought the car, I imagined myself, after several years, of having a deformed body, my gait having been entirely reordered due to this one ill-placed control stick. Thanks, Toyota, you fucking prick.

3. Honda Fit: Cool car. Also, kind of like a sarcophogous. I fit in the Fit but I felt genuinely claustrophobic. Not a good feeling driving off the lot.

4. Toyota Camry: Back to Toyota. I fit comfortably in the Camry with lots of room to spare. But the Camry's for old people and even old people know it. Still, a totally reasonable car. Nothing wrong with it. Except it's stupid and ugly and I don't live in Florida. Let me put it this way: If I had kidney problems, was a war vet, retired, and living in Florida with my third wife this would be my car. I don't know why but it's true.

5. Subaru Outback: Too small.

6. Subaru Forester: I bought this car. Then I turned around and sold it. For exactly what I payed for it. It's a long story. Let me just say: this is an awesome car. When I drove it to the beach with my girlfriend and mom the week after I bought it I could barely walk when I got out. My legs just fit in such a way that I lost all circulation to my feet when I drove this car. I know this sounds stupid but how do you think I felt?

7. Audi A3: Super cool car. I test drove this car about 70 times. I think the Audi people genuinely started to worry when they saw me coming. But finally it was a bit too small. Just a bit too tight. But close.

And then I sat in and drove about a dozen other cars: Ford Fusion (big enough, but ugly), used Mercedes, used BMWs, used Audis, second trip to the Honda Fit (still too tight), second trip to the Prius (still with the gear shift in my knee), Volkswagon Jetta Sportwagon (could have bought it...big, nice...), Mazda (all models way too small), the sporty 2-door Volvo...and about a dozen other cars. I can't remember them all anymore and frankly I don't want to. So, what did I buy?

Nth. Audi A4: Fits great. The Germans know how to make cars for tall people. Why? They're the fucking Teutons, that's why. It's the best car I've ever driven. It's way more than I wanted to spend but.... I'm not complaining. But what the fuck, car makers? What, like it's so fucking hard to design a simple, moderately priced car that a tall fucking man can fit in? I'm sorry, it can't possibly be that hard.

By the way, if you didn't already know: Ergonomics is Social Control. Tell a friend.

I Am a Video Gamer

2009-06-01T16:56:00.004-04:00

The thing about video games is that they'll ruin your life.

When are we going to stop beating around the bush and just admit, as a culture, that video games are the superior media experience to films and literature? There's really no comparison any more. It should have been a dead give away when, a year or two ago, the video game industry's annual gross surpassed Hollywood's and (unless Hollywood really innovates) I don't see them overtaking video games as the primary media/entertainment outlet in the United States ever again.

We should throw Hollywood a retirement party. At this party, Hollywood will receive a plaque that says: "Thanks For Your Decades of Escapist Fantasy! What Would We Have Done Without You (Besides Read More And Become More Involved In Our Daily Lives)? Best of Luck In Retirement! By The Way, Do You Have That Ten Thousand Dollars You Owe Us? Sorry To Keep Asking!"

To be continued...

"Oh, God!"

2009-06-01T15:43:00.009-04:00

This is Part 1 of what I hope is an on-going series of film reviews. You know A.O. Scott's film picks at the nytimes.com?My reviews will be kind of like those where I review whatever random film I happened to have watched that week except I'm not going to record myself on video standing awkwardly in front of a wall or red velvet curtains looking like someone was about to walk in the room and decapitate me. By the way, has anyone followed A.O. Scott's physical trajectory over the past year and a half since he started doing those nytimes video shorts? When he started out he was super white and pasty with huge black bags beneath his eyes, wearing whatever wrinkled clothes happened to be lying nearest to him on the floor that morning. But within the past year someone must have stopped him in the hall at the New York Times offices and said something. I imagine the conversation went something like this:

NY Times Colleague: Hey, A.O....
A.O.: Hey, what's up?
NYTC: Hey man, awesome film review video.
A.O.: Oh, thanks man, that's really nice of you. You really liked it?
NYTC: (Pause) Yeah...it was...uh...
A.O.: What...is there something wrong?
NYTC: Uhm...no, it's just that...(looks around)...you look like shit.

Or something like that. Anyway, credit to A.O. for getting it together. Although, I have to say, I think A.O.'s shoddy appearance probably had more to do with the New York Times underestimation (and all of the newspaper business's underestimation for that matter) of people's desire/willingness to read/watch their news online. I don't think they had any idea that their little news videos would ever become a hundredth as huge as they are today. (Newspapers...we'll miss you...sort of).

Okay, back to the film review. For my first review...(drumroll)...I'd like to do "Oh, God!" Carl Reiner's 1977 film starring George Burns, John Denver and Terri Gar. Burns plays God and Denver plays the sweet supermarket manager whom he tries to convince to spread his word. Gar plays John Denver's wife who appears wearing a different super-tight pair of shorts or pants in every scene. I think this was her function in the film. They didn't even really pretend that Terri Gar was anything more than the smiling, blond tit and ass. She just was. And boy did she look great! You know, it occurred to me while I was watching this that Lisa Kudrow is basically her generation's Terri Gar - the goofy-yet-hot tall, skinny blond. (And then later that night I put on Lawrence of Arabia and thought about how Jude Law is his generation's Peter O' Toole and then I thought about how Hollywood basically operates on physical/character types which are repeated generation after generation, occasionally expanding into new types when the opportunity arises...I'm thinking, possibly, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a type-breaker, for instance....)

At the beginning of the film you think John Denver is horrible and that's why he never did any other films (besides the Muppets special) but he's actually pretty good. He's perfect for the role of a sweet, sincere everyman (who also happens to be your average non-believer...because obviously who isn't?) But the best part about this movie is the fact that it actually takes this scenario of God-returns-to-earth-to-spread-his-word-in-contemporary-America seriously. It would have been so easy to make a total farce out of this premise but they handled it really well. I was impressed.

Also, for some reason, the whole time I was watching the film I kept thinking it would be great to do a Japanese remake of it. I don't know why.

I give this movie three "YESSIR!"s. Wait, no, that's awkward. How about: I give this movie a big FAT LIP!?

No, here it is: I give "Oh, God!" a BIG SLAP ON THE NECK!!!

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

2009-05-31T20:37:00.011-04:00

Not only is this maybe the greatest pop song ever recorded but it's the greatest pop song ever performed with a backing band of hand puppets.

You know, this is a tricky song to get into for the first time if you weren't already into it. It's on the radio all the time. It's always on in the supermarket. It's as ubiquitous as any pop song from the last forty years. It's an easy song to not get too excited about. I didn't get into it until last year (my 32nd year!) and I don't even remember what did it. I think I was just sitting around with my girlfriend one night when she put her old record on and...!!! I had one of those inexplicable pop music moments that happen every so often, the kind of truly profound, existentially deep moments that pop music may have even created...and it was like I heard "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" for the first time, as if Elton John were just some unknown 22 year old living in Brooklyn and this was a track off his first album. Except way, way better than that. In every possible way. This song is stupid good.

I'm not an audiophile and I don't think analogue is better than digital or anything like that but I do think one of the reasons why this song is so amazing is because it was recorded at a particular moment (1973) when analogue recording equipment was at its prime paired with one of the great 20th century pop stars also in his prime working with his longtime songwriter/collaborator Bernie Taupin, also in his prime. It's a rare and utterly pristine combination...you can listen to this song a hundred times in a row and not get tired of it. It's huge, it's majestic, it's interstellar.... That slow down-tempo just kills me. It's perfect! And the space in between the verses! And the drum fills! What!? I'm not even sure you could write and record a song this good today...I actually think this is like a once in a generation type pop song. I mean, look, not every generation sends astronauts to walk on the moon. So why would it be any different in pop music?

Bill Cosby's Sweaters

2009-05-31T20:11:00.009-04:00

You probably already know this but Bill Cosby's sweaters are actually portholes into other dimensions. Yeah. If you stare into one long enough you will be transported far, far away (depending on which sweater he's wearing, obviously - each sweater leads to a different intergalactic dimension). Although, as a side-note (I feel like its my psuedo-journalistic duty as a blogger to warn you): One time, while I was staring into one of Bill Cosby's sweaters, I was transported, not to another dimension, but to my mothers bathroom! Fortunately, she wasn't in it. But what if she was?

In any case, here's a Bill Cosby sweater moment:

Also, The Cosby Show is NOT a documentary so, Ron, you owe me five dollars.

Happy travels!

Literature With a Capital "L"

2009-05-31T16:35:00.026-04:00

About once a week during the late-eighties, while my mother was at the local mall (apparently intent on maxing out one credit card after another), she would drop me off at the local Powell's bookstore where I would spend three or four hours slowly perusing the bookstore aisles - reading a page here, a back cover there - familiarizing myself with the work of hundreds of different authors. This was back in those blissfully naive days before I had a concept of Literature with a capital "L," before I'd ever heard of the Literary canon, before I had any name recognition for such classic authors as Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald et. al. Quite honestly, this was at a point in my life when I thought Louis L'amour was the most important living author (don't tell anyone I said that - unless you're talking to Louis L'amour).

In those pre-Literary days I was particularly drawn to the work of (in no particular order): Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County), Herge (Tintin), Patrick F. McManus (outdoor humorist, author of such books as The Grasshopper Trap and They Shoot Canoes Don't They?), Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (co-authors of The Dragonlance Chrinicles), and Jeffery Archer (British author and former Conservative member of Parliament whose book As the Crow Flies was, at 800 pages, the longest novel I'd ever read - though, actually, come to think of it, it might still be the longest novel I've ever read...). But you know what? All of these book are really good. I would happily re-read any of them. They may not be thought of as Literary or whatever (I mean, Tintin, obviously has cultural cache) but who cares? They're awesome.

But, anyway, there was one author, one series, in particular, that I was drawn to above all others as I trolled through those Powell's bookstore aisles: Gar Wilson's Phoenix Force. (Actually, as it turns out, Gar Wilson doesn't exist, but was rather a pseudonym for a collection of authors: Robert Hoskins, Dan Marlowe, Thomas Ramirez, Paul Glen Neuman, Dan Streib, and Mike Linaker.) With titles like, "Korean Killground," "No Rules, No Referees," and, "The Fury Bombs," and covers that depicted crouched men firing small arms into the distance, what was there not to like?

Check it out:

These books are basically the literary equivalent of a 1980s Chuck Norris movie. Think Delta Force and Invasion U.S.A. (still probably two of the most violent movies I think I've ever seen, by the way). Phoenix Force was this small, elite, anti-terrorist unit that traveled around the world covertly killing bad guys, drug lords, hijackers, terrorists, etc. I half-thought these books would have made a comeback during the Bush-Cheney years but even given the post-9/11 political environment the Phoenix Force books (I hesitate to even call them novels) were still too ridiculous to bring up as reference points. But, when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I loved them. I read like forty of them, one after the other, like a middle-aged divorcee cruising through a stack of romance novels, just sitting around waiting for Bronchial cancer to kick in.

The reality is, more than the writing, I was really drawn to the covers. It was at that point in my life when I'd spend all my time day-dreaming about gun fights, violence, explosions, hand-to-hand combat, torture, you name it. I was that little boy (but aren't most little boys like that?) and these covers were exactly what I wanted.

But everything changed when my mom sent me to a private school in eighth grade where books like Phoenix Force were, shall we say, totally looked down on. At school I started reading books like Catcher In the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Night. And I hated these books. I thought they were SO boring. Sure, there are prostitutes in Catcher..., a cold-blooded hanging in Mockingbird..., a shocking murder in Mice..., and Nazis in Night, but when you're used to your protagonist mowing down a roomful of masked Colombian drug-lords with an Uzi (in the first scene), the reading experience just isn't the same.

Seriously, though...if you were a 13 year old boy which book would you rather read?

It took me a couple years to get into capital "L" Literature. It wasn't until my sophomore year in high school when we read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Sun Also Rises (and then a year or two later when we read Death of a Salesman and Denis Johnson's Jesus Son) when I started tuning into "serious" literature. I have to credit my sophomore English teacher for turning me towards Literature and away from supermarket reading (this is the same English teacher, by the way, who one day told me that Jeffrey Archer was vacation reading for old women and who, incidentally, was charged with statutory rape years later, causing him to flee to his native Ireland, never having cleared his name...but I digress). I wonder what would have happened if I kept reading those violent action/adventure books and was never introduced to "real" writing? Would I still be a writer today? What kind of writer would I be? Would I be dead? Would I have joined the armed forces?

The Great Pacific Northwest

2009-05-31T13:59:00.006-04:00

I really enjoyed this recent piece in the New York Review of Books, a dual review of Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy and Jon Raymond's collection of short stories Livability:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22470

Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy is, of course, the recent indie film shot and based in and around Portland, Oregon and Raymond is an author (and co-screenwriter of the film) whose short story the film was based on.

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest I always felt divorced from culture. And when I say culture I mean great artists, great works of art. When I was younger I was all-too-aware that Oregon could claim no Nietzsche's, no Michelangelo's, no Proust's, no Mark Twain's, no Hemingway's as one of its own. It seemed to me that no one of cultural import ever came from the northwest and I think, for a time, I grew up suffering from a kind of regional/cultural inferiority complex.

Needless to say, I don't feel this way anymore. As Jonathan Raban points out in his NYRB article the pacific northwest is simply new to the cultural scene. Compared to the northeast, the northwest is still a teenager. Compared to Europe, we're barely out of the womb.

Great piece!

America's Bedtime Story

2009-05-31T12:46:00.013-04:00

I'm glad Jay Leno is finally leaving The Tonight Show.

That was a long seventeen years. People talk about George W. Bush's eight years in office as being bad for the country; that's obvious. But no one really talks about Leno's seventeen years on the Tonight Show and its negative effects. Leno's Tonight Show (compared to Carson's) was a cultural lowest common denominator. The jokes were almost always bad, the level of discourse almost always low. Leno's a stand-up routine guy, not an interviewer. I can't think of one celebrity interview he did that was at all compelling. Not one.

If The Tonight Show is in fact "America's bedtime story" which I think you could make a compelling argument for (although probably now less than ever) you want someone highly qualified to fill the post. I mean, we're talking about viewing audiences of 10-15 million people a night. That's a far larger audience than most politicians ever get, let alone on a nightly basis. And if you think about those kinds of numbers over a 15-20 year period, it's not so crazy to suggest that the man chosen to be The Tonight Show host must inevitably, on some level (however small and/or subconscious) effect the mood of the general TV-watching American public. Which makes the pick of Letterman over Leno to replace Carson all the more baffling and unfortunate.

Leno had his farewell show with his final guest (and successor) Conan O' Brien this past Friday night:

After watching Leno's last show I had to youtube Carson's final show just to do a one-on-one comparison (not fair to Leno, I know, but...):

I still remember Johnny Carson's last show like it was yesterday. I cried. It's hard to believe that was 1992, hard to believe that Carson's Tonight Show overlapped with the '90s. He was the best.

Here's Carson's final T.V. appearance, a surprise guest appearance on Letterman's new CBS show (how cool is this?):

And for fun, take a look at this, one generation prior:

Rather than trying to recap Carson's career and legacy, here's his NYT obituary (incidentally, the longest obit I've ever seen - an obit that will, I believe, only be surpassed in length by Bob Dylan's, that is, assuming the NYT outlives Dylan which, as of today, is not at all a sure thing, but I digress...):

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/arts/television/24john.html?pagewanted=all&position=

There was a really interesting piece on Conan in last week's NYT magazine http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24Conan-t.html that tries to explain the process by which a Tonight Show host is chosen. I can't say I understand it. It seems comparable to the electoral college: highly political, involving numerous trips to the midwest, lots of hand-shaking, hot dog-eating. The article suggests this is why Leno was chosen over Letterman as Carson's replacement: Leno was more amenable to playing ball re: Late night politics whereas Letterman preferred to stay at home (I'd say things worked out okay for Letterman).

(On side note: What's Craig Kilborn's story? Where did he come from and (more importantly) where did he go? What happened? I thought he was pretty funny in a highly contemptuous, tall-guy sort of way. I thought for a minute there that he was seriously in the late night mix...Anyone? What happened to Kilborn?)

Anyway, will Conan return The Tonight Show to its pan-American Carson-era glory days? Will Andy Richter rejoin the show? Are we preparing to enter a 30-year Conan O'Brien Era? Will I be 63 when Conan passes the torch to the next late night host? Will TV even exist in 30 years? Will anyone besides my girlfriend or mother read what I'm writing right now? I have no idea. But what I do know is that it should be interesting to see how Conan adjusts his game for the earlier, larger Tonight Show audience and how this effects the new Conan vs. Letterman scheduling match-up. Should be good.

Richard Ford and the Aquarian Writer

2009-05-25T22:36:00.012-04:00

Several years ago my friend Stuart decided to read Richard Ford's The Sportswriter on a whim. His whim was that he and Ford share the same birthday, February 16th (my birthday happens to be the next day). Stuart (himself a writer) thought that he might enjoy the writing since he a Ford are both Aquarians. Anyway, Stuart loved the book, thought it was hilarious, and immediately read through Ford's trilogy The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land telling me whenever possible that I should read them too, that I would love them. He was right. I was never able to get into John Updike's Rabbit series or even Philip Roth's Zuckerman series. I tried. I love the idea of a literary serial with a single protagonist whom you grow with, watch change. But, honest to god, I never found Updike's prose captivating in any way. Am I missing something? And Roth...well...I don't know. I should be into Philip Roth. I mean, on paper, it would just seem to make sense: Dark, humorous Jewish author seeks same in reader. Portnoy's Complaint is hilarious no doubt but that's the only novel of his I could finish. You know, I think it's one thing to spend an hour an a half with a neurotic Woody Allen character or a half hour with Larry David, but to spend, what, a dozen hours or more with one of Roth's characters who tend to be a hundred times less likable or accessible than the former? No thanks.

In any case, it was a great relief to find in Ford's Frank Bascombe a serial character that I could really get into. I wonder though - how much does the fact that Ford and I are both Aquarians have to do with me liking/sympathizing his writing? Has anyone ever done an astrological literary study? I can't imagine a study like that would ever be taken too seriously in the academy but who cares? This is a blog, not the University.

Here's a completely unofficial list of Aquarian authors listed in order of birth with a note next to each re: whether I've read them and if I liked them (this is what passes for a scientific study here at Down Around The Sun:

James Joyce, Feb. 2: Vastly overrated. I mean, I understand his historical significance, his innovations within Modern Literature, etc. but I never, never, NEVER think to myself, "Gosh, I really feel like reading some James Joyce right now." Never. And I honestly think that should be relavent criteria for whether or not an author's work is good or attractive rather than just historically significant.

Gertrude Stein, Feb. 3: Now here's a modern experimentalist I can get behind. She's fantastic. There should be more of Gertrude Stein's work plastered around public spaces: on buses, park benches, sky writing, on the ceiling at the dentist's office, you name it, name it, you name it, name it, don't name it, you name it, don't name it, you name it.

J.M. Coetzee, Feb. 5: The best Aquarian writer, in my opinion. Several years ago on my previous stint living in Portland I was single, I was teaching and I had a really stripped down life. I spent my evenings lying in bed doing one of three things: Looking through L.L. Bean catalogs, watching all of David Cronenberg's films and reading all of J.M. Coetzee's books (this is an unbelievably fantastic threesome by the way, I strongly recommend it to the twenty-something bachelor on the verge of depression). Anywho, is there a better contemporary writer than Coetzee? I don't think there is. In my mind he's the Michael Jordan of his generation. He took the torch of "best writer of his generation" from Beckett (whom he wrote his doctoral thesis on) and expanded on Beckett's reductionist vocabulary in the most compelling, intelligent way. His stretch of work from '99-'07: Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, and Diary of a Bad Year is, I think, unparalleled by any contemporary writer. In fact, can you think of a writer with a better eight year stretch of four novels? When I first read Disgrace I thought it was the best, most engaging novel I'd read since Lolita for the first time. But when I read Elizabeth Costello for the second (and then a third time) I realized that's his best book, and maybe the best novel written in my lifetime (it deserves a post of its own). All I have to say is: what will he do next?

Charles Dickens, Feb. 7: Never read him.

Jules Verne, Feb. 8: Ditto.

Abraham Lincoln, Feb 12: Not a literary author, obviously, but one of the most important writers in the American canon (of course, who knows how much of his speeches and proclaimations were written by Lincoln himself and how much was written by speechwriters, associates, etc. but for the sake of argument...).

Charles Darwin, Feb 12: Terribel writer. So terribel I'm going to leave in the mispelling of the word "terribel". When is someone going to prove Darwin wrong? It's only a matter of time. I'm really looking forward to it. Marilynne Robinson's essay "Darwinism" from her collection The Death of Adam is a good start. It's a difficult piece but it carves out a space in which an intelligent, "scientific" thinker can oppose Darwin without being thought of as merely a "creationist". I guarantee you, the second Darwin's theories become obsolete no one's ever going to take him seriously again. Ever. He's like that college boyfriend/girlfriend you were with for a couple years who you were convinced you were going to spend the rest of your life with, but then one day woke up and realized you don't even have that much in common.

Paris Hilton, Feb. 17: Has she written a book yet? I don't know. I just wanted to advertise the fact she and I have the same birthday and I happen to think that's f*cking awesome.

Michael Jordan, Feb. 17: Yes, I share the same birthday with Paris Hilton and Michael Jordan. Can anyone beat that?

Virginia Woolf, Jan. 25: I like Virginia Woolf. I like how kooky she was. Her suicide is kind of undeniably hardcore. I like her novels. I think A Room of One's Own, in particular, is an elegant statement that, I think, will continue to speak to readers for a long, long time to come.

How's that for a scientific study? Not bad, right? Who have I missed? Help me with the list.

To end on Richard Ford...here's a great piece he wrote for the New York Times for their Writers on Writing series in which he describes his writing process and the importance of not writing:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/110899ford-writing.html

Yes

2009-05-25T20:05:00.001-04:00

The Brothers Solomon

2009-05-25T18:15:00.008-04:00

I feel pretty comfortable saying this is the best stupid comedy I've ever seen. Also, it's the best film ever made about Donor Insemination (and I think I might be the first person to ever say that).

The trailer doesn't do it justice. This is a special movie. It's very dark, very smart and super well-shot. Starring Will Arnett and Will Forte (with Kristin Wiig), written by Will Forte, directed by Bob Odenkirk.

Monopoly of Power

2009-05-25T16:59:00.006-04:00

I can think of six highly violent incidences that occurred on U.S. soil in my lifetime. It's hard to forget any of these, not just because of how violent and out-of-the-ordinary each one was, but because of the immense television coverage surrounding each.

In chronological order (with related wikipedia links):

1. Ruby Ridge, 1992: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge

2. WTC bombing, Feb. 26th 1993: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTC_bombing

3. Waco, TX Feb. 28th, 1993: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege

4. OKC bombing, 1995: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKC_bombing
(and the subsequent lethal injection of Timothy McVeigh: http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Execution_of_Timothy_McVeigh)

5. North Hollywood Shootout, 1997: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout

And of course:

6. Sept. 11th, 2001: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

That's a nine year span of extremely violent attacks/confrontations on U.S. soil. Excluding the 9/11 attacks, of course, I wonder if that's a fairly "normal" amount of domestic violence. Like, for instance, what were the nine years like from 1983-1992? I cant think of the U.S. invasions of Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989), the TWA hijacking of flight 847 (1985) and Pan Am Flight 103 (1988) exploding over Scotland but none of those events took place on American soil and the hijacking and bombing only peripherally involved Americans.

I can't really think of any comparable domestic acts of violence of that scale in the 1980's but I'm sure there has to be some. Am I totally blanking out here? Can you think of any? (I just remembered the Reagan assassination attempt in 1981: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_assassination). And if 1992-2001 was, in fact, an abnormally violent nine year span, I wonder if any economists have looked to see if there's a correlation between violent outbursts such as these and economic downturns like the one we're currently experiencing? Like, maybe, historically, every time there's an extremely violent ten year period it's followed within several years by some kind of recession. I don't know. Just a thought.

In any case, I always found these moments of violence extremely interesting. How could you not? I've come to think of them as little glimpses into our, at bottom, barbaric nature and how civilization and our civilized tendencies have largely, and successfully, contained (or repressed, depending on how you look at it) those tendencies. And, I wonder: if you live in a relatively peaceful society does that mean your society is A) peaceful by nature and thus not prone to violent outbursts or does it mean your society is B) the MOST violent and therefore the most successful at repressing and containing its own outburst of violence? I would have to say the U.S. is more B than A (though I bet the reality is all cultures are a mix of both).

What do you think?

L.L. Bean or The Aesthetics of the Afterlife

2009-05-24T14:55:00.013-04:00

I happen to think L.L. Bean makes the best catalogs. I could never quite figure out why until recently. Their photos look like stills from a Sci-Fi/Utopian/Afterlife movie, like a cross-between Total Recall, eXistenZ, and The Island...in other words, L.L. Bean's look is contemporary Christian afterlife. Whatever it is, I find it strangely captivating. For one thing, their choice of models is blatantly more wholesome and down-to-earth than say a J. Crew or (obviously) an Ambercrombie & Fitch catalog; not to mention the fact that it's strangely exhilarating to see beautiful women dressed in such blatantly non-sexualized clothing. Considering the culture is inundated with images of women in lascivious clothing bent in the most revealing positions, I find this look...fresh. I'm not saying I like it or that I prefer it, I just mean to say that it's a less common look at this point.

Have a seat...forever.

Grizzly Adams

2009-05-24T00:23:00.007-04:00

This is the best boring TV show ever. I used to watch the re-runs on Sunday afternoons in the mid-eighties. I'd lie on the couch, a blanket pulled up over my legs. I don't remember ever making it through an episode without falling asleep. That's kind of incredible when you think about it. This show had a 100% narcotic effect on me.

Check out the intro, complete with back story and John Denver-esque folk theme song:

Anyway, I'm all for a film adaptation of this show. If I'm a studio producer, I'm green-lighting this project last year. I'd maybe want Spike Jonze to direct. I'd cast Russell Crowe as the lead. I think. Or is he too old for the part? I guess it depends on how you want to play it. He'd be the slightly older lead option. If you wanted to go younger you could go with...oh, I know...SETH ROGAN!!! That's totally it. You get Seth Rogan to play this benevolent outcast, surround him with the best in CGI forest animals, Sir Anthony Hopkins as the weird old Mountain Coot, write in some saucy love interest (like, you could have a young Hollywood starlette (played by...why not?...Lindsay Lohan) who's had enough of the rat race and runs away from it all but, of course, is followed by her evil agent, her drug dealer, her eighteen suitors...) and BANG! You've got yourself a really bizarre movie.

Are you with me?

The Hitler/Chaplin Mustache

2009-05-24T00:08:00.009-04:00

How many years before this mustache comes back into style (and I mean really back into style, like we're talking en vogue, fashionable...)?

I say we still could be fifty-plus years away. I'm serous. I may not see this mustache en vogue in my lifetime. Or...do you think it could it creep up and suddenly become the international haute-couture mustache of choice in the next five years? Discuss.

Nice Gait!

2009-05-23T23:54:00.003-04:00

I have a theory.

When an attractive woman walks by and a man turns around to check her out from behind I don't think he's so much looking at her ass so much as he's checking out her gait. That's right. He's determining how sturdy and even and dependable her carriage is for - you guessed it - child bearing. (Wow! I totally just took it there.)

For those of you still reading...this is exactly what slave-owners did when sizing up a slave and determining whether he or she was worthy of purchase. Same goes for horses and work animals. I mean, I understand no guy thinks, "I'm going to check out her gait," or, "Nice carriage," but I just mean to say that there is a primitive, deep-seated biological imperative behind turning to observe a woman after she's just passed by on the street. (Okay, I immediately concede that my girlfriend and most of my female friends won't ever take me seriously again but...I'm taking this one for the blog).

Second Greatest T.V. Theme Song Ever...

2009-05-23T23:46:00.007-04:00

(...the first being the theme from 60 Minutes, of course.)

Did I totally rip-off my blog name from this show? You bet I did.

Painting by Alex Grey

2009-05-23T23:35:00.009-04:00

What!?

Pythagorean Initiation Rites

2009-05-23T22:36:00.010-04:00

Catchy title, huh? Now that I've got your attention...

Pythagoras has got to be one of the most interesting people from history. And by "interesting" I mean completely crazy. A few months ago I was doing some research into the history of reincarnation - where it comes from, who believed/believes in it, etc. - and I found this great book, "To Think Like God, Pythagoras and Parmenides, The Origins of Philosophy" by Arnold Hermann:

http://www.amazon.com/Think-Like-God-Pythagoras-Parmenides/dp/1930972008/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243133108&sr=1-2

I found a passage about Pythagorean initiation rites that blew me away. The exclamation points in parenthesis are mine. Check it out:

"The examination began with a background check of the petitioner; inquiries were made into his personal life and the state of his relationships (!) with family, friends, and so forth. Then the person's behavior was scrutinized. Did he talk too much or laugh on the wrong occasions? How did he get along with other students? What, for example, made him happy or sad? Next followed a physical inspection, which included an evaluation of the shape and gait of the applicant's body(!), allegedly for assessing the state or habits of his soul. If a candidate passed these preliminaries, he graduated to the next phase, in which he was simply sent away for three years(!!) and utterly ignored. The idea was to test the person's resolve, that is, how strong was his desire to learn. However, unbeknownst to the aspirant, he remained under constant, if covert, observation (!!!) in an attempt to determine whether he craved status or recognition, instead of displaying scorn for such lowly impulses."

I love the image of a bunch of hooded pre-Christians tip-toeing through the forest spying on one another. This is totally a high-concept slapstick comedy waiting to be green-lighted. Somebody, get Ron Howard on the phone! (Did I just say that?)

But wait, there's more (again, the intrusive parenthetical remarks are mine):

"If a petitioner survived this phase, a greater trial still lay ahead: a five-year period of absolute silence (!!!) awaited those still determined to belong...A candidate who entered this phase had to turn over his belongings - money, properties, income (Scientology anyone?) - to the order, where it was held by trustees called (get this) "politicians," "economists," and, "legislators."(!!!!)...If the candidate survived the ordeal and was still found worthy to join, he was raised to the rank of esoteric and allowed to the inner circle. This meant that from that moment on, the associate was authorized to see the face of Pythagoras, who, so far, had only lectured from behind a curtain.(!!!!!!!)"

Wow. I don't know what to say. It's all so crazy and ridiculous and yet I feel like this describes exactly how elite American financial institutions conduct their hiring. Oh wait, America doesn't have any elite financial institutions anymore. Never mind.

In any case, the Pythagoreans kind of died out. I think their problem was that they believed anything that was at all pleasurable should be eliminated from life because they believed life itself was punishment for some atrocity committed in a previous existence. I don't totally get it but I love it. You can't make stuff like this up.

Didion On Cheney

2009-05-23T21:49:00.014-04:00

Given that our former Vice-President has recently been making a push for most visible, most vocal Republican leader (with a forthcoming HBO mini-series about him) this seems like a good time to remind everyone about Joan Didion's excellent October 5, 2006 portrait of Dick Cheney published in The New York Review of Books:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19376

It's the best portrait of Cheney's life and career that I've seen and what ultimately makes it so good is Didion's fairness. She doesn't take any cheap shots at him and refuses to demonize the man, instead approaching his life and rise in politics as the very classic American story it is.

Side note: I hate to sound morbid but...when I read this piece the first thought I had was, "God, that was really well done," followed by, "God, what's going to happen to American letters when Joan Didion dies?" I mean, who else comes even close to doing the kind of work that she's produced over the last several decades? Who are we left with? Harper's magazine? Frank Rich? Keith Olberman? As John McEnroe says, "You can not be serious!"

Didion's perspective strikes me as very unique and, finally, very reasonable, i.e. she never lets herself slip into that easy Liberal-Conservative divide where everything on one side is good and everything on the other side is bad that seems so frighteningly common today. She's the master of nuance, precisely the quality you want in your political writers. And, unfortunately, it's precisely the quality you can't teach. The woman has a gift for seeing all the angles.

Mt. Rushmore

2009-05-23T21:43:00.003-04:00

Ferdinand The Bull

2009-05-23T13:02:00.007-04:00

For those of who haven't seen Ferdinand the Bull recently (or for those of you who don't know the story) here's the famous 1938 Walt Disney short animation:

The Story of Ferdinand was written by Munro Leaf (great name) and illustrated by Robert Lawson, first published in 1936.

It's a classic story and still totally relevant today, about a good guy who doesn't care about fame or fortune and just wants to stay home and enjoy a little peace and quiet in the shade. Nothing wrong with that.

Best 20th Century Jewish Singer/Songwriters...

2009-05-22T23:58:00.013-04:00

If you put a gun to my head and made me put together the Mt. Rushmore of 20th Century Jewish singer/songwriters my list would have to go something like this:

(The first three are no-brainers, not necessarily in this order)

1. Bob Dylan

2. Neil Diamond

3. Leonard Cohen

But this is where it gets tricky. It's either Billy Joel or Paul Simon at #4. I know there are a lot of Paul Simon partisans out there and not a lot of Billy Joel supporters for whatever reason (or for a variety of reasons) but I've thought about this a lot in the past few years and I'm going to have to go with Billy Joel. Paul Simon's important, obviously, but Billy Joel's had a far greater effect on my experience and I just think he's cooler. They're both shockingly short, tiny men and they're two of the best songwriters of the 20th century. I love both of them and if I was forced at gunpoint to rewrite this list tomorrow it might come out different. But for right now there's two deal-breaking factors: If both Joel and Simon were playing in Portland at the same time on the same night and I had to choose between one or the other I would, without a doubt, choose Billy Joel. I'd rather hear "Only the Good Die Young" live than almost any Paul Simon song and (as anyone who knows me knows) I'm drawn to Billy Joel's almost complete absence of coolness and his complete (and entirely hypocritical) exclusion from the contemporary rock canon (which, frankly, says more about the post-'60's rock cannon than it does about Billy Joel any day of the week...but that's another conversation entirely).

So...

4. Billy Joel

And incidentally, the top three Jewish singer/songwriters of the 20th century also happen to be...the top three singer/songwriters of the 20th century (after #3 there's a big drop-off...sorry Billy).

And isn't it strange, on an entirely different note, that for everything people have to say positively or negatively about THE JEWISH PEOPLE as a whole and in the abstract that no one ever talks or thinks about the Jews as great bards...why is that? No, seriously, why is that?

Have You Seen This Woman?

2009-05-22T12:04:00.006-04:00

My mom recently confided in my girlfriend that she was concerned for me as a child because, she thought, I had a crush on Angela Landsbury. First of all, Mom, I did not have a crush on Angela Landsbury and even if I did, so what? Her character on the show, Jessica Fletcher, is probably one of, if not, the most underrated private eye in the modern cannon. Here's a still of J.F. in action to prove it:

Come on, you can't tell me that's not awesome: A murder mystery serial about a murder mystery serial writer who solves actual murder mysteries. Thank you! A meta-narrative of the first order without any critical theory to totally ruin your day.

I used to watch Murder She Wrote every Sunday night immediately following 60 Minutes in what was in hindsight one of the great back-to-back television programming coups in history. First, you've got the classic 60 Minutes team of Morley Safer, Ed Bradley (who, incidentally, did a great piece on Michael Jordan which I recommend to everyone, that you can see here:

And here:

...a great reminder to anyone who might have forgotten how intelligent and special Jordan was or if you were actually in danger of believing Kobe Bryant is in the same class as him, but I digress).

Back to the 60 Minutes line-up: Mike Wallace (Chris Wallace's more level-headed father. On a side-side-note: How often does this happen when you have a father-son duo where the father is far cooler and more down to earth than his son? What has to happen for a son to become more stodgy and hard to be around than his dad? I wonder...). And of course the legendary (and still working) Andy Rooney. My theory why 60 Minutes is/was so successful (beside the fact that the show is staffed with intelligent people who perpetually find really compelling stories that the show's producers aren't compelled to turn into sensationalized fluff) is the really minimal, program design. It's brilliant. That black background with the large ticking clock (the best television theme song, hands down). Decade after decade it's relevant. It's never tacky or outdated. It's like a Beckett play. It's Time.

So after your dose of top-notch television journalism, you take a quick bathroom break (or in my case a five minute phone call from my grandparents) and then it's straight into Murder She Wrote and then bed time. Boom-boom-and-boom. Thank you very much.

Point of View

2009-05-22T11:59:00.007-04:00

"That jewel of Earth was just hung up in the blackness of space."

-Charles M. Duke Jr., Astronaut, describing the view from the moon

Imagine what it's like to see Earth from afar, as an object in the distance. It's one thing to see the photographs which are amazing enough but to actually be there and feel its presence in the distance must be another thing entirely. I think this still must be THE perspective of the contemporary experience, as of 2009. The Human Genome Project is obviously incredible but it's not as breathtaking, it doesn't have quite the same dramatic effect.

Several years ago while I was in grad school in Los Angeles I got really into reading Astronaut's personal accounts of what it was like to leave the planet and to see it from afar. First of all, I was surprised by how little information there seems to be available for public consumption. I mean, I'm sure there are hundreds of hours of audio with these guys that they did with NASA and the military relaying their experiences of space but there's surprisingly few books and the interviews that are available mostly focus on their material experience: What was it like going to the bathroom in zero gravity? What was it like eating in zero gravity? What was it like changing your clothes in zero gravity, etc.

I was more curious about the astronaut's (for lack of a better word) spiritual experience. I mean, no human, no life form (as far as we know) had EVER left the planet, after all. You'd think there'd be the possibility of some real full-fledged Awe and Wonder mixed in with these men's experiences.

As it turns out there was.

To be cont...

Charles Duke is only one of twelve men to have walked on the surface of the moon.

Duke walking on the moon April, 1972.

The Rise And Fall of The Guy Who Played Barry Lyndon

2009-05-21T16:04:00.010-04:00

Ryan O'Neal's has got to be one of the more tragic stories floating around Hollywood these days. I only think of it because Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon is one of my favorite films and I was just talking about it with a friend yesterday. I mean, O'Neal was once one of the elite, A-list actors who could do anything, anytime and who has since let his career go entirely and who has , apparently, in the past few years, taken to snorting crystal meth with his son.

I think you know where I'm going with this.

O'Neal's rise and fall mirrors Lyndon's own rise and fall. Do you think Ryan O'Neal ever sits down, alone, on some random weekday morning and throws on Barry Lyndon for a quick viewing? Or maybe the better question is: How many times has Ryan O'Neal watched Barry Lyndon in the last 34 years? The answer's either somewhere around 1,500 or zero. It's got to be one or the other. But maybe an even better question is: Did Kubrick cast Ryan O'Neal in the first place because he recognized in O'Neal that very same hubris that took Barry Lyndon to such high heights and, finally, to such low lows? (Actually, I think we know the answer to that.) OR...did playing the role of Barry Lyndon send Ryan O'Neal further down the path of tragedy that he may have not gone down had he instead taken a different role?

Tangent: Casting is entirely underrated. There should be an Oscar for Best Casting even though I know this would never happen because there are too many people and too many factors that go into deciding who gets to play what role. But, actually...who cares? There should totally be an Oscar for Best Casting. It's the single most underrated task when putting a film together. It's easily just as important as having a good writer, good director, etc. Think about all the mediocre scripts or mediocre films that were saved by an awesome cast and vice versa.

Secret Society

2009-05-21T15:36:00.008-04:00

I don't know if this is true but I heard there's a secret society of sensitive men founded by Alan Alda, John Denver, Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog. Word is they control half the banks in South America and have a controlling interest in the NHL, Whole Foods and J.Crew, not to mention sympathetic operatives in the Knesset, the British Labour Party, and the U.S. Senate. Their worldwide membership is unknown but it's estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Supposedly they have their own Mt. Rushmore-style mountainside sculpture but that no non-members have ever seen it.

If you have any information about this organization or know someone who is a member please let me know. I don't want to get into details but it's urgent.

Prime Time

2009-05-21T14:45:00.007-04:00

Last night my girlfriend suggested I look at WolframAlpha:

It's a computational search engine and I have no idea how it works. None. Anyway, she suggested I type in my birthday which I did: February 17, 1976. Among other bits of information, the search turned up the fact that, as of last night, I had been alive for exactly thirty-three years, three months and three days, almost precisely one third of a century! What are the odds of that? No, seriously! Isn't that totally ridiculous?

And to add to that last night I had a dream that 1) I had cancer, 2) I tested positive for HIV and 3) I had to serve time in prison for an overdue speeding ticket - a true bad news triple-whammy (incidentally, when I got to prison in my dream it wasn't so bad - I spent all my time playing pick-up basketball with the other inmates and I had a really sweet cross-over, but I digress...).

So, of course, today I've been thinking about the significance of threes. Let's see...we've got the Holy Trinity - the father, the son and the holy ghost - one of many representations of the mind, body, spirit split. We've got past, present, future. The Greeks had the Three Fates, the Three Gorgons AND the Three Furies. We've got Heaven, Earth and Hell. We have the three stages of life: child, adult, elder. If you believe in reincarnation we can include: life, death, rebirth. We've got thought word, deed. We've got animal, vegetable and mineral. Hollywood likes to make their action series in trilogies. And David Berman's got that lyric about background singers always coming in 3's.

Anyway, the list goes on and on. I'm sure however long it is it's a multiple of three (yes, I just went there). The date when I'm exactly two-thirds of a century old? June, 23rd 2042. See you then!

Still Good

2009-05-21T12:21:00.003-04:00

Why are some lip-synched performances better than others?

I'm a Late Bloomer

2009-05-20T13:38:00.003-04:00

I'm not the biggest fan of Malcolm Gladwell but I don't mind him either. I read The Tipping Point and then Blink back-to-back a couple years ago and then immediately forgot everything. I'm holding Gladwell partly responsible. He wrote a piece on plagiarism a few years ago that I thought was great. I think he might be my generation's Marshall McLuhan; he's huge and seemingly omni-present now but in twenty-five years he'll only be taken seriously by a handful of marginalized academics and 19 year old undergrads. Still, I can think of a worse fate.

He recently wrote a piece for the New Yorker about late bloomer artists, people who develop their aesthetic slowly and over a much longer period of time and who thus come to success much later in life (think 50 and over), as opposed to the early bloomer "young genius" whose first work out of the gate captures the world's attention and immediately comes to define their career.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell

I've always thought about myself as a late bloomer. Even when I was in high school I could just tell that - whatever I ended up doing - I was going to take the slow road getting there. But I've always been at ease with this fact (well, except when I'm pulling my hair out in a maelstrom of self-hating anxiety). But, quite frankly, I don't think it's a choice. I came to puberty late, learned how to drive a car late, I lost my virginity late. I just assumed I was on the path to hitting most significant adulthood benchmarks later than the average.

Should There Be State/Federal Regulation of Medically Assisted Fertility Practices?

2009-05-20T13:04:00.008-04:00

I was asked to participate on a panel on OPB's Think Out Loud this past February (on my birthday, incidentally) to discuss whether or not there should be state or federal regulation of reproductive technologies. In short, my answer is an unequivocal "yes." The mother and her OHSU doctor on the program did not agree with me; PSU bioethicist Patricia Backlar did agree with me.

What do you think?

http://www.opb.org/thinkoutloud/shows/limiting-fertility/

After the program, the show's host April Baer called me to do a follow-up interview for the show's blog (I think she did this because I was given the least amount of air-time). Baer told me that after the program the guest mother and her doctor told her that what I had said about the numbers of UK and Swedish donors returning to "normal" levels within five years of federal laws compelling all donors to make their identity known was false. Baer wanted my response to that.

I sent her the two following articles legitimizing my claim:

The first link is to a 1995 medical abstract concerning Swedish donor numbers post-federal legislation outlawing donor anonymity:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8583002?dopt=Abstract

An excerpt from the abstract says:

"This data shows that there has been an increase in number of donors being recruited, suggesting that the possibility of future contact by genetic offspring has not had the negative impact on the availability of donors predicted."

And the second link is to a UK.gov 2007 article titled "Number of sperm donors up following anonymity law changes" which states, "Many commentators continue to claim that the change in the law to remove anonymity for sperm and egg donors would lead to an immediate and steep fall in the number of donors. These new figures show that the predicted drop in sperm donor numbers is a myth.":

http://www.hfea.gov.uk/en/1523.html

The problem with trusting American doctors on this subject is that they (perhaps understandably) don't want the federal government telling them how to conduct themselves (not to mention the fact that the medically-assisted fertility business is a multi-billion dollar a year industry). But the issues are far larger and more important than the American Medical Association's freedom from legislation. It is government's responsibility to protect its citizen's best interests from the, sometimes, depersonalized interests of industry.

I'm confident that minimal legislation can be passed here in the U.S. protecting both the future children's right to know their own genetic lineage (and thus themselves) while still providing the much needed fertility services to women like the mother who was on the show with me. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

We're Gonna Get Rebecca Back!

2009-05-20T12:52:00.002-04:00

This is one of the most inexplicable sequence of events I've ever seen on network television. Discuss.

David Foster Wallace

2009-05-20T11:43:00.006-04:00

I was deeply saddened several months ago when I heard the news that David Foster Wallace committed suicide. This is not something I ever imagined happening. In fact, I always assumed that I'd be reading new non-fiction from Wallace for the next 3 to 4 decades, assumed he'd be my generation's John Updike, responsible for a life-long freakish literary output, producing new work that I was forever attempting to measure up to, work that I would continue to learn from and build a dialogue with.

I was never a huge fan of his fiction. I never read Infinite Jest. I'm one of those people who felt much of his fiction was overwritten and finally not even really that pleasurable. But the non-fiction is phenomenal. It's like nothing I've ever read. The essays are super-funny, super-smart and I can't think of one where I wasn't disappointed that it had come to an end. I can't say that I'm disappointed exactly that Wallace decided to take his own life - that's not the right word and he obviously had his reasons - but his death is definitely a genuine cultural loss.

Wallace's suicide came mere weeks prior to the full scale economic meltdown on Wall Street and I can't help but think that his death was the "canary in the coal mine" of the coming socio-economic sea-change. What made much of his work so powerful was his ability to not only ask the Big Questions of his day but (perhaps more importantly) to be able to identify what those Big Questions are. It's easy to answer the previous generation's Big Questions but another thing entirely to be able to locate and enunciate the meaningful issues of the day.

Here's an excerpt from a Terry Gross NPR interview with Wallace in 1997 in which he talks about (among other things) the difficulty of representing true, heartfelt emotion in what has become a largely ironic and cynical culture:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94626723

And here's Wallace's famous 1996 smackdown of Mark Leyner on the Charlie Rose Show:

Wallace, Franzen and Leyner were called on to discuss the future of literature in the digital age and instead of a gentlemanly round-table we get Wallace body-checking Leyner, essentially ending Leyner's career. I mean, I wonder what Leyner's career would have looked like had he not been intellectually mauled on national television by one of his smarter, more ambitious, more highly regarded peers? Or maybe he would have petered out on his own? What was Franzen thinking? Do you think he saw what Wallace did to Leyner and decided to play it close to the chest with short answers, silence and awkward glances? We'll never know. It's one of the great minor literary mysteries of the 1990's. Personally, I think Leyner got a bit of a bad rap by Wallace in this video who, in hindsight, was kind of a jerk. In any case, whatever happened to the future of post-modern fiction?

This is George Winston!

2009-05-20T11:02:00.004-04:00

Is it just me or does this clip look like it could be a scene from an unmade David Cronenberg film?

I've been inadvertently listening to George Winston for, oh, 25 years or so. And I love it. I know a lot of people my age think he's cheesy but I don't. I think this might be what death sounds like - in a good way. Also, I like that many of my friend's 40 year old single mothers got really into George Winston in the '80's when his hit record December came out. I'm not sure what this means but I like it. There's something desperate yet comforting in his music, perfect for the middle-aged divorcee set - not to mention the fact that he kind of looks like a skeleton.

Also, how many years before Will Oldham approaches George Winston for a project? I'm guessing somewhere in the 5-10 year range. It's closer than you think. Also, did you know that John Fahey was the first to record George Winston? Fahey recorded Winston's Ballads and Blues 1972 for his Takoma records. True story.