Girl in a Cage

Crom! I'm a Banned PC!

Another thought on the subject of banned books week:  the people who don't want anyone to read certain books are mostly crackpots, but they are right about one thing:  books are absolutely a threat to their way of life.  If you've built your worldview around a narrow interpretation of the Bible (or Holy Book of your choice) and around a very narrow, prescriptive code of right and wrong, well, most fiction is, fi it's any good at all, a threat to that worldview.  Which is one of the things I like about it.

I skip most TV commercials with the aid of the DVR, but even I can't escape Microsoft's "I'm a PC" campaign.  What a disastrous misstep this is for Microsoft.  A company with like 80% market share shouldn't even be acknowledging the ads of a relatively small competitor like Apple. And if they are going to acknowledge the existence of their gnat-like competitor, they certainly shouldn't play on the competitor's turf.  "I've been reduced to a stereotype," the John Hodgman look-alike complains, thus making this giant corporation look like a whiny little bitch.    Also, the deadly-serious, we-are-the-world flavor of the ads makes it clear that Microsoft doesn't get that the Apple ads are supposed to be funny. It reminds me of authors who respond at length to nasty reviews--your response shows that you were stung by the review; you're taking it seriously, and so should everyone else.  Or, to give another example, the Jam's "The Modern World," where Paul Weller claims not to give a damn (or "two fucks" , depending on what version you hear) about your review--well, if you really didn't care, you wouldn't write a song bragging about how you don't care, now would you?  

Bought the Conan video game for PS3.  It's gotten mostly mediocre reviews, but for me, a casual gamer and Conan fan, it's cheesy nirvana.  Learn special moves to decapitate opponents, or possibly just reach into their chest and pull their hearts out!  At the end of each level, one of the stats that's recorded is how many limbs you've hacked off.  Come on!  What's not to love!  Yeah, you get the occasional opportunity to free a bare-breasted maiden who says something like "Crush me with your love!", and that's cheesy, but it's a Conan game, people!  It's supposed to be cheesy!   Game on!

A Handbook for Would-Be Book Challengers

Yes, it's that time of year again:  National Banned Books Week, during which libraries celebrate books whose very presence on their shelves has been challenged.

Once again, none of my books have made the list.  I do my best to be at least slightly offensive in every book, and I could sure use the publicity attendant on a challenge to one of my titles.  (Because then the very act of purchasing my book feels like an act of rebellion against the forces of censorship!  You can't possibly position yourself any better!)

So here, quickly, is a guide to my books, and how you, the reading public, can challenge them:

It Takes a Worried Man:  Rampant profanity and horniness.  For the Southern U.S.:  Refers to Confederate war heroes as "anti-American traitors"  (Which, you know, they were, but I know there are states that like to gloss over this point.)

Losing My Faculties:  Rampant profanity.

Donorboy:  Depicts a child raised by lesbians as essentially well-adjusted; she goes nuts after their death, and living with her biological father is not the "normal" situation.  Also rampant profanity as well as teen smoking and drinking.

Long Way Back:  Depicts Catholic Church as having aided and abetted child rape (accurate, but there are certainly people who'd like to gloss over this point); character likens prayer to "licking the boot that kicked me"; rampant profanity; depiction of homosexuals as people.   Implicit suggestion that rock and roll is preferable to organized religion.

Dear Catastrophe Waitress:  Rampant Profanity.  Hot, hot sex.  Unitarians depicted as people.  Suggestion that not everyone who uses cocaine is inherently evil.  Drug use, domestic violence, alcohol abuse. Steamin' hot sex.

How Ya Like Me Now:  Teens teased due to their ethnicity; inherently insensitive to beautiful rainbow of cultural diversity; seriously, any child of any race or ethnic background could be scarred emotionally by this one.  Suggestion that 15-year-old boys are horny.

Forever Changes:  Teen Drinking.  Teen sex mentioned.   Mathematics seen as comfort to the dying and possible key to the mysteries of life and death; religion not mentioned.  

Come on now, people!  Work with me here!  I've laid the groundwork--now all you have to do is fire off a slightly unhinged letter to your local librarian!  Get crackin'!

Traffic

So apparently Boston, where I live, is the sixth most sustainable city in the US.  Whatever that means.  I was too lazy to find out what criteria they used. 

Here's my own personal index, though:  there's now traffic on the  bike path I take to work.  I've ridden on this path for years, and there were entire decades when you'd be lucky to see one or two other cyclists on the entire 3-mile length.  The other day, however, I was one of nine cyclists stopped at a traffic light on the path.  Nine. Now, yeah, there were way more than 9 cars waiting at the light as we crossed, but still, it feels like progress that there's now a lot more traffic on the bike path than there used to be. 

(The bike path is in disgraceful shape, by the way.  Roots breaking up the asphalt and creating hazardous bumps, traffic lights and dangerous road crossings throughout, and the Mass Ave to Back Bay corridor really doesn't seem to be designed for bikes at all.  Perhaps the increased use on the bike path will inspire the city to build some more bike paths!  And perhaps, as Wayne and Garth said, monkeys will fly out of my butt! Could happen!)

Meanwhile, I'm reading Tom Vanderbilt's book Traffic.  I hate to say a book is important, because then it sounds like it's some kind of good-for-you chore you should try to plow through.  This is a fun, readable  book about how and why we drive that might actually be incredibly important.  It's certainly convinced me that talking on a cell phone while I drive is moronic behavior I need to stop immediately.

Giving the Devil (worshipper) His Due

Last week was a tough week. One of my wife's former students was shot dead at age 17. One of the students in my program was shot dead at 24.

So there I was, sitting at work, feeling like crap. I felt really sad and scared for the students I work with, and the gloom in the air was bringing up all my own latent gloom about people I've lost. (And fall is always tough for me anyway, as this time 5 years ago, I was watching my best friend turn yellow and die.) (I don't mean she was cowardly--I mean she literally turned yellow. When your liver stops working, you get an excess of a substance in your blood that sounds for all the world like "Billy Rubin" that turns you yellow and poisons you. We used to joke about how she was being killed by some little Jewish kid.)

Anyway, what could possibly make me feel better? What could give me enough of a lift from despair to get me through the day? Well, it turns out the strange answer was a little symphonic black metal, courtesy of Norwegian band Dimmu Borgir! (Note--link may be Not Safe For Work, depending on how your workplace feels about images of bare-breasted, goat-headed angel/demon thingies and sounds that could have come from a Spooky Sounds for Halloween CD!).

I've dissed black metal before, kind a of a lot, and so I thought it was only fair to say that this week, reveling in darkness seemed to be the only thing that allowed me to face the day and be supportive for people who needed me.  So thanks, you crazy Norwegian Satanists, you!

Here's an unintentionally comedic Dimmu Borgir video that loks like KISS wandered into Monty Python and the Holy Grail, just in case you need a little shot o' that black metal goodness. (I couldn't embed the video for some reason--trying not to ascribe that to supernatural forces...)

Post-Modern Cliff's Notes

A lot of people on Goodreads are adding David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest to their "to read" shelves.

I'm sorry the guy is dead--by all accounts he was a great teacher, and I really liked his nonfiction writing.

But Inifnite Jest really really sucks.  I'll get into why in a bit, but in the meantime, I thought I'd give you some talking points, so that if it comes up, you can pretend to have read it.  This will be far less painful than actually finishing the book or even than buying it and never finishing it, which is what most people do.

So.  Our book begins with a kid whose name I forgot, some kind of tennis prodigy, but he's in some kind of catatonic state.  We then flash back and follow him (his dad has made, or possibly just discovered, some kind of film that makes people insane or something) through his prep-school, tennis playing days.  There's some game that he and his buddies play where they pretend the tennis court is a map of the world, and they throw tennis balls at each other or something.  The description of this game goes on forever. There's also some kind of tension with his parents.  Or maybe the dad's dead and the movie killed him. I can't really remember

We also follow a guy named Gately, a recovering addict who works at a halfway house. Also, there's some other guy who's a  junkie. I think he's also a cross-dresser, but I can't quite remember.  There may be a couple of other plots as well, but these are the main ones.

The plots never intersect.  At the end, Gately is beaten up and  forcibly drugged.  We never find out how the kid got catatonic, we never find out if Gately's sobriety has been totally compromised, and what the junkie is doing there is not really clear.  (Whether this paragraph counts as a spoiler is, I suppose, a kind of interesting philosophical question.  Can you spoil an ending that doesn't exist?)

So since the whole book is a flashback that begins with the expectation that you're going to figure out what the hell happened, and you get caught up in plots that never resolve, by the time you reach the end of this doorstop, you find out that the Infinite Jest is on you, the reader.  Get it?!  You just spent a thousand pages on what amounts to a shaggy dog story!  Ha ha!

Here's what really annoys me about this:  the guy was a very talented writer, and he was able to create characters that you care about. (The fact that I can remember this much about a book I read ten years ago should be evidence of that.)  The book works on an emotional level until the end, when the whole thing is revealed to be an intellectual joke that can only be appreciated in a detached, intellectual way. This is, in effect, a big middle finger raised at the reader who allows him or herself to get lost in the book.

I got taken by this book, and I was pissed.    A lot of people in similar straits develop a kind of literary Stockholm Syndrome and begin identifying with and praising the book that held them captive and ultimately abused them.  The book makes you feel weak and stupid, and a lot of people internalize this and end up praising the superior strength and intelligence of the writer.

I suppose it's also possible that there are people who genuinely like this book.  I think these people want something from the reading experience that I fundamentally don't get.

Anyway, there are a lot of interesting, thought-provoking, challenging books out there that don't play their readers for suckers, and you could read three or four of them in the time it takes you to plow through Infinite Jest, so my advice is to read elsewhere, and if you want to read some David Foster Wallace, grab one of the essay collections.  

I'm so proud!

Although the initial list of books Sarah Palin wanted removed from her local library turned out to be a fraud, it does turn out that there were two or three specific titles she had in mind.

And one of them was Michael Wilhoite's picture book Daddy's Roommate!  This is a picture book told from the point of view of a boy whose parents have just divorced, and whose dad's boyfriend then moves in.

Michael and I went to the same church for years when he lived in Boston.  He's one of the nicest people around, and I'm totally thrilled for him that his work managed to irritate Sarah Palin.

I hope this news sells a lot of copies of Daddy's Roommate, and its sequel, Daddy's Wedding.  

Because, no matter how they dress it up, what people object to about these books is not that they are teaching children about homosexuality; what they object to is people knowing that there are different kinds of families.  Well, what they really object to is the very existence of different kinds of families, but the more books like this there are, the less people in non-traditional families will feel isolated and ashamed.  I think that's a good thing.

Private Grief

Today we'll have a lot of commemorations of the terrorist attacks of 7 years ago.  

I imagine that those people personally affected by the attacks probably have conflicting emotions on this day: on the one hand, it's probably difficult to see your grief splashed all over popular culture, exploited by cynical politicians, literary novelists, etc..  On the other hand, I imagine there's something reassuring about the fact that so many people are remembering and thinking about the day your life changed forever.  As a country, we send the family members and friends of the victims this message:  the death that you're mourning is important.  

Which leaves the rest of us whose lives were changed forever by the loss of someone important to us a bit out in the cold.  

So I just wanted to send a shout out to everybody whose life has been marked by a profound loss that doesn't fall on Septemeber 11th. Though your grief is private and probably won't go in the history books, it's no less important or real than anyone else's.  

And on the anniversary of your loss, you get up and go to work or school and everybody expects you to be normal, and you're in a fog and people wonder why you're in a bad mood and you probably don't even tell that many people because it's just too painful to get into it.   

So for all of you, which is most people, I just wanted to say hi, I know how you feel because I'm one of you, and I'm sorry.

Deez Truck Nuts

Out on the road today, I saw a plastic scrotum on a Cadillac.  Okay, it was yesterday.  But I really did see a plastic scrotum hanging from under the rear bumper of an early-90's Cadillac. 

My friend Katy told me these are called "truck nuts."  She seemed to remember that there had been efforts to ban these whimsical accessories in some states.  I was frankly agog that there are states where plastic testicles on trucks are common enough to make people want to ban them. 

If you do not happen to live in one of the states where truck nuts are popular, you can get a look at them here.  Just scroll down to the bottom of the page, to the window labeled, I shit you not, "Here is a few fine rigs sportin' our balls."

As a fan of free expression, I don't support the banning of truck balls, though I do have to say that I found the wrinkly sack hanging from the Cadillac bumper more gross than funny, and, on a fundamental level, I don't get why you'd want a plastic simulacrum of a scrotum that's lost its youthful elasticity to be anyone's first impression of you.

But I'm thinking there's a business opportunity here.  If you click over to bullsballs.com, they will charge you 26 bucks for a set of truck nuts.  Whereas if you send me ten bucks, I'll be happy to make you a bumper sticker that says, "My vehicle is compensating for my shortcomings in other areas."  Send the same message to the world for less than half the price!  What a bargain!  Think it over, truck nuts buyers!

Brilliantly Stupid

Caught last night's premiere of the new game show Hole in the Wall on (what else) Fox last night.  

The bar is set very high for new programming from the network that brought us Temptation Island and When Animals Attack! and I was frankly a bit concerned about whether Hole in the Wall could rise to that level of brilliant stupidity.

I needn't have worried. 

The show was simply awesome.  People in helmets and skintight body suits stand on the edge of a pool, and a wall with  holes in it, often in human shape, as though they were discarded props from a Looney Tunes cartoon comes whizzing toward them. If they make it through the hole, they get points. If not, they get knocked into the water.  Oh yeah, and sometimes they break the wall, too.

That's it. 

It really is as idiotic as it sounds, but it's also strangely compelling.

You just have to love a show that is so brazenly dumb.  And it's not really so mean or exploitative that you feel dirty after watching it (see Temptation Island, above.).  It's just really fun.

Not exactly appointment television, I'll grant you, but if you're looking for something to watch when it's on, there are definitely worse ways to kill a few minutes.

Go Indie

Since my novel Forever Changes came out last Tuesday, I've checked one Borders and one Barnes and Noble to see if they're stocking it.

Well, they do not appear to be stocking it.  Which bums me out, and which is especially tough to take given that both stores have Teen or Young Adult shelves groaning under the weight of teen vampire romances.  I'm not talking about Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series--I'm talking about her legion of imitators.  I mean, I swear, it seems like everybody with a pulse and a computer has a YA vampire love series out. 

Everybody, that is, except me. 

So, if you're hankering for a book about vampires in high school, you have about two hundred choices at your local chain bookstore.  If, however, you don't happen to be in the mood for adolescent blood sucking shenanigans, you'll be pretty much out of luck at those big-box behemoths.

Why not head over to your local independent bookstore instead, and pick up The Greatest Novel Ever Written (By Me), Forever Changes by Brendan Halpin? 

May I recommend one of these fine stores, each of which has hosted at least one reading with yours truly?

In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, you've got
Brookline Booksmith in Brookline.
Newtonville Books in Newton.
Village Books in Roslindale.
Jabberwocky Books in Newburyport
Baker Books in Darmouth.
Rhythm and Muse in Jamaica Plain

In Rhode Island:
Books on The Square in Providence

In Connecticut:
R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison.

In Ohio, the Heart of it All:
Joseph-Beth Books in Cincinnati.

In Illinois, Land of Lincoln Obama:
Barbara's Bookstore in Oak Park.