The Archive

4.Aug.05 Wow — is it August already? We're keeping busy with the course development. Both of mine look like they'll be a blast! And I'm squeezing in the occasional writing moment, tightening and touching up the new novel. I've had a few copies of Burn, the Revised Second Edition, and Machina requested for review, so with any luck the resulting reviews will help move a few more books. It is such a different market these days, for fiction. Master essayist Annie Dillard bemoaned the state of the publishing industry in her essay, "Notes for Young Writers," which was anthologized in In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction":

"Publication is not the gauge of excellence. This is harder to learn than anything about publishing, and very important. Formerly, if a manuscript was "good," it "merited" publication. This has not been true for at least twenty years, but the news hasn't filtered out to change the belief. People say, "Why, Faulkner couldn't get published today!" as if exaggerating. In fact, Faulkner certainly couldn't, and publishers don't deny it. The market for hardback fiction is rich married or widowed women over fifty (until you all start buying hardback books). The junior editors who choose new work are New York women in their twenties who are interested in what is chic in New York that week, and who have become experts in what older women will buy in hardcover. Eight books of nonfiction appear for every book of fiction. The chance of any manuscript coming into a publishing house and getting published is one in three thousand. (Agents send in most of these manuscripts. Most agents won't touch fiction.)"

Not heartening, but it does go a long way toward explaining the situation the industry is in today. Hang tough, fellow writers!

But this, alongside the gains in publishing technology, help explain why there are so many small press publishers out there now. I was floored when Salon opted to go Print On Demand for their titles. That was the first large-scale publication I'd ever heard of that chose the POD path. And some academic presses are going that direction, as well. A shame the widespread mentality is to pre-emptively ghettoize POD titles. But as I and Annie said, that's just the directin the publishing world has turned.

*Wow*! Orson Scott Card, of Ender's Game fame, is writing Marvel's Ultimate Iron Man title now! Between him and Brian Michael Bendis, some of the best speculative fiction going on in the world today is happening in comic books! That's a positive note on the industry that employs a couple of my grad writing cohorts, Ashley Jayne Nicolaus and Livia Ching.

27.July.05 Busy developing my courses for fall: Intro to Creative Nonfiction and, of course, Science Fiction. This one will be an updated, repurposed version of the course I co-developed and -taught at California College of the Arts last summer. The new course will be influenced by all sorts of things, but particularly by Brooks Landon's course, which I took as an undergrad at the University of Iowa; by syllabi from other SF courses I've reviewed; and by the things I've been reading in the meantime. I think this SF course will swing toward the broader umbrella of speculative fiction, so that I can include a Borges story or two, an excerpt from DeLillo's White Noise, and a few other goodies from Storming the Reality Studio. Simon Logan's short "Within us all" will pair nicely with Nine Inch Nails' "Mr. Self-Destruct." I'm looking for pairings like that.

I'm subbing around a new work of fiction called "The Good Life." I'm hoping to break into one of the big literary publications with this one.

16.July.05 Poor Robert Novak. Gotta say, I'd wondered why he's looked so frail, bitter, and crumpled over the past few weeks. Gets so a man can't commit treason and then cut a slimey back-room deal around here without the "liberal" media jumping all over him. Poor guy.

I've been watching CNN get more and more frightened of the neocon right over the past few years. When they run any coverage with bad news on Iraq, or on anything even vaguely non-neocon, they seem to follow an awfully large percentage of those reports with bubblehead "news." The Franciscan friar who's also a physician, but gives all of the money he earns to his church. Isn't that great? The guy doesn't need money or sex — he only needs Gawd! A spotlight feature on someone who proves that the fundie ultra-right was right all along, but the liberal media just wouldn't tell us about it. So much for the Fourth Estate.

CNN is so jittery right now they insult our intelligence by pairing coverage of the release of the new Harry Potter blockbuster with coverage of the neocon/fundamentalist ultra-right's fear of sorcery as "the Devil's work." By giving this sliverishly marginal reactionary faction coverage that's on-par with the release of a fantasy novel that has convinced millions of kids to read, CNN insults the intelligence of at least 98% of its viewership.

Giving ultra-conservative fringe the spotlight gives the flakestream more implied credibility than they have ever enjoyed in this country. That scares me. Our "free" press in the U.S. is so cowed that they act as though it's a left-wing, radical notion that Karl Rove outed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA agent, even when they have Newsweek reporting it for them, and the e-mail to Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper from Rove in which Rove divulged the information on the screen, right in front of us all. Guys, it's right there! Just say so! There is no way for such evidence to be barked away on AM hate radio as some Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. Karl Rove outed an undercover agent because her husband found out that the Niger memo supposedly showing that Iraq was after nuclear (not nookyuhler) weapons material was false, and had the nerve to say so. That's what it looks like. And that may explain why the adminstration, top to bottom, is clamming up now, not even engaging in that treasured Reagan-era dodge, so-called plausible denial.

But back to CNN: It's OK to point out that there's an awful lot of substance to the ethical charges against Tom Delay; it is not OK to report only that "some Democrats think" that Delay has ethical problems. That ignores the substance of the report itself. That is journalistically irresponsible.

I was listening to Al Franken yesterday. He had a neocon guest caller announce proudly that "now that Iraq has conclusively been proven to have been behind the 9/11 attacks," he was very comfortable with the war. That's what we in the U.S. face: Proud boasting of nonsense used to justify an unjustifiable war in which well over 100,000 people have been killed. The 9/11 Commission Report said specifically that there was no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. And they were not the only source to research the so-called links between Hussein and al Quaeda and find little to nothing. Hussein and bin Laden hated each other. But listeners of right wing hate radio actually don't seem to mind believing the opposite of the truth on this now. Easier, I suppose, than to question an administration that's more conservative than they'd ever dreamed of getting. Presented with the evidence, they wave reality away, dismiss it as a product of the "liberal" media. Rush says otherwise, and why doubt him?

And Hey, Presto! The truth doesn't matter. Happy, even proud indifference to reality. What a sad decay.

13.July.05 I am happy to report that my ability to write made the relocation with me. I just turned out a draft of one of the best pieceof work I've ever done. Now to hone it and find a market for it.

6.July.05 So, Karl Rove was the source of the leak that outted undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame. Surprise. That's exactly what he was accused of doing to James Hatfield, author of Fortunate Son: Rove was the confidential source who leaked allegations of W's cocaine-use to Hatfield. Out of the blue, an earlier Hatfield felony conviction turned up on right-wing AM talk radio, and the conviction, not the coke, became the Big Story. Hatfield was discredited as a journalist by innuendo, and Rove successfully both revealed and covered up the coke story. And it's what many believe he did to Dan Rather: Presented an obvious forgery that contained the truth about W failing to report for duty, then let right-wing extremist radio attack the memo itself. And Hey, Presto! Bush's military record, or lack thereof, is no longer the issue - the memo is.

At least there's a chance he'll be indicted this time.

4.July.05 This is from Air America Radio:

"Shocker: Zogby Finds 42 Per Cent Favor Impeachment for Iraq Lies. Despite the lack of a unified anti-war movement, 43% of Americans have come to favor impeachment proceedings if it is found the President misled the country about the reasons for invading Iraq."

• See also http://downingstreetmemo.com/

This is an important poll, and an eye-opener for me. This administration has been caught red-handed and our newsmedia are barely covering it. And my fellow Americans have, by and large, not seemed to mind not getting the truth from either the administration or the so-called Fourth Estate. I'd begun to worry that it might take stormtroopers actually knocking down our doors to get people to notice this hurricane of corruption and give a damn.

Right now, I'm of the opinion that we, as Americans, deserve what we get for rubber-stamping Bush's undeclared, illegal sacking of Iraq by re-electing him. (Whatever your opinion of the election results, he was either re-elected, or he stole another election and Americans on the whole don't care enough to say or do anything about it.) Our popularity as a nation has fallen behind that of China, the paper tiger of a "coalition" — the second-largest source of troops are private contractors — that's standing with us is collapsing, and, frankly, people don't like us much for voting in a way that tells the rest of the world that everything the Bush administration has done is just fine by us.

But if the aforementioned Zogby poll is right, maybe my fellow Americans aren't in quite as deep a stupor as I'd thought; maybe, on this Independence Day, there's some hope that this campaign of international despotism can be brought to a close and the countries we've destroyed can be rebuilt.

29.June.05 Welcome to the redesign beta. Hotter than hell in Central PA, our new home. Two grad-school graduations and one 3,000-mile relocation later, this is where we've washed ashore, following professorships. I'll be teaching a course in science fiction and another in creative nonfiction!

One BIG difference between Oakland and here — here's hotter. A lot hotter.