We’ve had a problem at our Hosting service and lost three weeks of posts and comments. I will be hunting them up using google caches and wayback scenarios but I don’t know if I’ll be able to get everything. I’m particulary concerned that we recover all the zombie haiku from the comments of Rory’s zombie haiku post.

Otherwise, the very history of zombie literature and poetry may be affected leading to to a limbic imbalance.

Oh, well, at least our tech support guy, Jeremy, told us a good zombie joke that he saw over on bash.com.

Q: What do vegan zombies say?

A: Graaaaaaaaiiiiiinnnnnnnsssssss.

I’ve worked in industry for many years, and I have no doubt that these kinds of plans are being made. But it will only happen if we let it. If you are a reporter, or know a reporter, there’s a huge story here.

Also, I urge everyone to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and donate to the cause of net neutrality. They’ve been fighting the good fight against usurpation of the internet by monied interests since dinosaurs roamed the Earth (or thereabouts…). And while you’re at it, buy Cory Doctorow’s bestseller, LITTLE BROTHER, a can’t-put-it-down thrill ride that deals with these kinds of issues.

I have said before, and I truly believe, that equal access to the internet is not just a First Amendment issue, but also a Second Amendment issue. The founders intended to create a power balance between and among the different actors in our democracy. The power people hold over our government is not through handguns and assault rifles; it is through our ability to share information and join forces to hold the powerful accountable to us.

(cross posted from my Live Journal)

When I went to Clarion in 1981, I was already a published writer several times over. My first two books were in print; the galleys on the third arrived at MSU while I was at the workshop; and I had just turned in the fourth right before I left for Michigan. However, these books were all Regency romances, and I wanted to write science fiction and fantasy. I sort of expected people to sneer at me (I have a long history of believing that everyone else is cooler than I am and will sneer at me). So when we did introductions the first night–name, where we were from, any publishing experience, what we wanted to get out of the workshop–I sort of mumbled: “Hi, I’m Madeleine, I’m from Boston (as I was at the time), um, tiny little voice I’ve published two Regency romances…” Fulfilling my worst fears, there were some snickers from around the room.

Then Algis Budrys spoke up. If you never met AJ, he was a big man with a sharp, incisive, funny way of speaking, and one of the few humans I’ve ever met who literally had a twinkle in his eye. Many of his comments were prefaced by a huge, gusting sigh, and “Okay.” He had the intriguing vestige of an accent–he was Lithuanian–and a slow, deliberate way of speaking; when he was building up to say something funny you could see him trying to keep his smile under wraps. So AJ, one of the two instructors who were with us that night (the other one was Robin Scott Wilson) shifted in his chair, sighed and said, “Okay.” He looked around at assembled class. “This woman has just told you that she’s published two books. Any one else here published any books yet?” Silence. “Uh huh. So.” And that was that.

AJ was a clean, crisp, smart writer, and a sharp, perceptive critic. He was a funny, thoughtful, excellent teacher (his demonstration of the seven-beat plot had the entire class in giggles, and led to the liberation of a boy-mannequin from an East Lansing department store, and the subsequent gilding of its head, in order to create a “golden haired moppet” we could introduce into the classroom) and encouraged our writing with kindness and enthusiasm. I don’t know that he was always a happy man; caught unawares he had a slight tinge of melancholy about him. He plainly adored his wife Edna, who plainly adored him right back. AJ gave me confidence as a writer, he made me think, and I was always happy to see him in years since. More, he made science fiction a richer, more complex and more vibrant genre. He died yesterday, and whether you have ever heard of him before or not, chances are your world is poorer for it. Mine is.

Not Actually Doing It behavior is a constant theme in my life. I often ponder and perfectionize, rather than acting. I go through periods where I just soak up info and rest and am practically inert socially. I’m frequently abstracted and divorced from daily reality. I don’t answer e-mail or return phone calls or seek out companionship. This can go on for months. I call this my Hermit Phase. Until a few weeks ago, I was convinced that this was a serious personality flaw on my part.

But now I know better. I’m not bad, I’m just INFJ. We do those things.

A significant part of the work I did with clients when I was a counselor involved normalizing their behavior. They’d come in feeling damaged and inadequate, blaming themselves and thinking that no one else was like them or had reacted like them to the trials and opportunities that life commonly hands out to us all.

So, you have trouble sustaining long-term intimate relationships? Other people do, too! You hate your job? Everybody hates their job! Methamphetamines? It’s a goddam epidemic!

Once you get past those feelings of having unique and insoluble problems or defects that no one else has experienced, you can start looking at ways other people like you have found to cope, overcome, change, mitigate, or even accept them.

But it’s really, really, really difficult to accept your quirks and perceived failings, after a lifetime of internalizing that there’s something inexplicably wrong with you.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is based on Jungian theory, and is extremely popular these days in corporate settings. The idea is to fit people and teams together to match their inner needs and compatibilities. Which, uh, is a bunch of bullshit, as far as I’m concerned.

People love the test and feel that it describes them well. It’s enticing that it’s a no-shame no-blame test. It just tells you in what ways you’re wonderful and that you’re okay. It’s great at helping you to accept yourself and not feel weird.

There are areas that you might want to examine, of course….

The MBTI is a for-cost test, but there are a lot of copycat versions floating around out there on the InterWebs for free. A popular one is at HumanMetrics and another is at Similar Minds.

I get almost identical results from both, and a few others out there. Sometimes I show as having a razor-thin INTJ classification, by about 1%, rather than INFJ. I’m sorta okay about that. INTJs are pretty cool, too, though not as cool as INFJs.

The MBTI correlates, some, with the Big Five test, which supposedly accurately addresses the best, most current psychological theories. But I don’t like the Big Five so much, because it says I’m neurotic. And that the MBTI is flawed. To Hell with them evil Big Five people.

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Here’s a description of the major MBTI types from the actual MB people, and a matrix of their frequency within the population.

I love being an INFJ!

We’re creative, we have the most delicately calibrated bullshit detectors in this arm of the galaxy. We’re so damn thoughtful and insightful that we’re always right, even when the entire rest of the planet (excluding other INFJs, of course), think that we’re wrong. And, golly, we are soooo deep. Here is a detailed INFJ profile. It describes me perfectly.

Tom Selleck is an INFJ, for Ghod’s sake. What more could I ask for?

INFJ and INTJ are the rarest and most desirable types, of course. Each makes up about 1% to 3% of the population. People like me, who are practically both, are damn near unique.

Oops. No, wait, the point here was to not be weird. I meant to say — Boy, are we ever normal within our own types!

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. These types of tests are about on the same level as gypsy fortune-telling. You want to succeed, but sometimes you feel that you hold yourself back. You don’t act as responsibly as you know you should. People think that they know you, but if they knew how you really are, they’d kill you and eat your head.

But, honestly, I read through all the other type descriptions, and when I get more than one letter away from my typology, it quickly feels like a very bad fit. The list of kinds of jobs that INFJs hold could basically be transplanted as my resume.

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Most of us do have a flaw that we should work on – We’re much harsher with ourselves than with others. We’d be a lot better off if we could learn to be as gentle and forgiving of our own flaws as we are of those of the people we love.

I’m embracing my INFJ now. I’m okay with who I am, because Myers-Briggs told me I can be.

So, what’s your type?

Whatever it is, it’s okay with me. Us INFJs are famously tolerant people.

But I bet that everybody here is either an INFJ or an INTJ, because we like hanging out together so much and get along so well with each other.

See you guys later. I’m gonna go lay down now and read a book and not answer your comments.

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(Exculpatory note: An entry or so on the MBTI appeared on one of the poliblogs last week, but I’ve been working on this post for at least three weeks, so I’m not copycatting that. And, yes, I’ve backslid on the reading-the-poliblogs thing, but am not nearly as bad off as I was, and am struggling to get away from them again, before they ruffle my INFJness.)

On Tuesday, I had lunch at my favorite Tex-Mex restaurant in the world, which happens to be located five minutes from my house. My favorite barbecue joint is maybe another minute beyond that. There’s a terrific pizza-and-burger joint nearby as well. Manchaca, Texas is a near-paradise in this regard. And we just got a deli, so I’ll have to check that out. If it’s any good, I may never leave this ZIP code again.

In the booth next to mine at the Tex-Mex joint, two gentlemen were having an animated conversation in Russian. One of them sounded pissed-off about something, but I could be wrong about that. Anyone speaking Russian always sounds a little pissed-off to me. (Ditto if they’re speaking German.) (Or English.)

I had never heard anyone in Manchaca conversing in Russian before. Our two most common languages around here are Spanish and GoodOlBoy. So as I was leaving, I thought about pausing beside the two gentlemen and welcoming them to Central Texas, since they obviously weren’t from around here. But at the moment when I might have done that, one of them was gesturing with a crushed quesadilla. So I kept walking.

Now, if I had actually stopped and spoken with them, what would I have said after welcoming them to this small chunk of the world?

Well, I might have asked the same question the restaurant host had asked as he’d seated me. He’d seen that I was carrying the new issue of Rolling Stone – with B.B. King, Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen, Carlos Santana, Buddy Guy, and a few others on the cover — and he’d asked me:

“You know what happened yesterday, right?”

Oh, yeah. I knew. So he and I commiserated over it for a few minutes.

And later, as I left the restaurant, I found myself profoundly satisfied to live where I live.

It ain’t perfect, and there are too many born-again churches and Bush/Cheney bumper stickers for my personal taste. But on the other hand –

It’s a place with tremendous brisket and chimichangas. It’s a place that now has at least three conversational languages (four, if you count Baptist). It’s a place where the veterinarian knows the names of all your dogs, both living and passed-on, and buys your books to boot. It’s a place where harp legend James Cotton sometimes shows up at the local bar just to jam with whoever’s playing that night. It’s a place where black buzzards stand guard on cell-phone towers, protecting the community from the Evil Dead. It’s a place where the volunteer fire department serves breakfast five days a week.

It’s a place where we’re glad there was a Bo Diddley.

You know what happened Monday, right?

And if you answered “Yes” to that question, here’s another one to answer just for yourself:

“Who Do You Love?”

Then he’d be beholden to us,  to all of us,  rather than some conglomeration of corporations. Wouldn’t that be just an interesting change in the way things have been working for awhile in this country?

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I just now started my program for that, with a $25 contribution. It only took about three minutes.

I figure this will put me in line for the ambassadorship to Denmark when he wins.

Or maybe even Iceland. I bet them hot Icelandic rave babes loves them ambassadors with motorcycles.

You might say that Alexander Courage was something like the Fifth Beatle of Star Trek. Or at least his theme music for the original Star Trek was. Even when Sarcasm Girl was very very tiny and the first few notes of the theme (glockenspiel, flute and oboe, the Spouse says) would come on (and this was for Next Generation, which would then go off into its own theme music), the kid would bounce up and down and say “Mama, mama! Captain! Space! Final frontier!” The eight note brass fanfare that was used to introduce scenes on the original series has that same effect: immediately you’re there, with the cheesy special effects, the scenery chewing–and also, the hope that mankind could get its shit together and go out into the universe to make friends with strange new civilizations.*

A lot of that had to do with Courage’s theme, which was both swaggering and yearning, very much rooted in that time in our history when Americans had been asked to consider what we could do for our country (or species). Courage, who died last week, had a long career in film and TV, and Star Trek was only a tiny part of it. But it’s the part that will always be, for some of us, the soundtrack of space exploration and mankind boldly trying to use its power for good.

*Or at least check out their women.

So, I watch with amusement as president of Brash Entertainment quits after spectacularly poor sales of its video game titles. They only had two. One of them, Alvin and the Chipmunks, didn’t do horrible. It sold a quarter million units but its only other title sold only 16,000 units.

That game was Jumper: Griffin’s Story which wasn’t, I’m afraid, very good. In fact, looking at all the Xbox 360 games ever made, it ranks 380 out of 381. That’s right, the second worst Xbox 360 game ever made.

So, why am I amused?

Any money I got from this was up front.

and

Despite the fact that they used dialog right out of my book of the same name and, of course, this game is based on the movie which is based on my books Jumper and Reflex, there is not a single attribution to me or the books in the game and associated materials.

Second worst game in Xbox 360 history. I’m happy my name isn’t on it.

I once wrote a book called The Stone War, about New York City, which is (as you know, Bob) my hometown, and about which I am a little crazy. Not the least of the fun I had writing the book was doing the research. If you tell people you’re writing a book they’ll tell you all sorts of things. They’ll let you in places you’d otherwise have no chance of entering (even if you don’t speak the language! I charmed myself into Malmaison outside Paris on a day when the museum wasn’t open because I said, in my execrable French, that I was a novelist doing research). Research is like wandering in a city you don’t know, finding yourself in alleys and back streets, wondering how the hell you get back to the main square, and yet unwilling to turn around because there might be something cool around the next corner.

And this, my friends, is how I came upon Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Waterhouse was a British sculptor and naturalist who became a popularizer of dinosaurs in Victorian England and then the US. His dinosaurs–complete with period-appropriate frills and decorative ogees and such, are wonderful. I was immediately fascinated. The problem was that I saw Hawkins’s name and the information that interested me about him in an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History–but it was a traveling exhibit, and after it left, and I wanted to get confirmation of my memory and some more information, if could find nothing. It was as if I’d imagined the whole thing. Now, why, without prompting, would I imagine pieces of smashed up dinosaur under Central Park?

Following his success with the Crystal Palace Exhibition, Hawkins came to New York City with the intent of recreating on one side of the Atlantic what had been so successful on the other. In the years following the Civil War, he set up a studio on what is now the site of the American Museum of Natural History on the upper West Side of Manhattan, and began to assemble a new menagerie of sculptured dinosaurs. The plan was to set them up in a “Paleozoic Museum” in Central Park, which was then being landscaped under the direction of Frederick Law Olmstead, an ex-engineer officer in the Union army.

However, in 1871, before either the park or the dinosaurs were finished, New York City politics intervened. The corrupt Tammany Hall-Boss Tweed machine took control of city politics, and Hawkins and his dinosaurs were out. Those models that had been made were broken up and buried in the south end of the park, and Hawkins left New York a greatly embittered man. Although Central Park has been modified in the years since its inception, including the construction of the 8th Ave subway line which runs up the west side of the park, the remains of Hawkins’ dinosaurs have never been found. They still rest somewhere under the sod of Central Park, probably not far from Umpire Rock and the Heckscher ballfields.

In the far off days when I was doing all this research, the internet was not the very cool and sometimes useful tool it now is; much of what you found, doing web-based research, was stuff put up by, um, enthusiasts with more enthusiasm than strict regard for the truth (for further elaboration on this point, find a copy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s excellent “What Woo-Woo Means to Me” in Making Book) . I combed through all the books I could find, went to the Museum of the City of New-York (always include the hyphen; they get finicky about it) and the AMNH itself. Nothin’. I really began to think I’d hallucinated it.And then one day at the St. Agnes branch of the NYPL, while Sarcasm Girl was looking at books, I found a kids’ picture book which had the whole damned story in it. And while that might seem like a slender reed on which to place my faith, at least it proved that I hadn’t dreamed it all up.

Two of the dinosaurs were all but finished; the other four which had been comissioned were in various stages of construction. All of them were broken up, and the pieces sewn into the ground somewhere around 60th Street, on the east side. I used Mr. Hawkins’s dinosaurs–they have a good-sized role in the denouement of The Stone War. And on those occasions when I’m in the city and wandering through Central Park, I like to walk around at 60th and 5th Avenue near the Plaza Hotel and imagine Eloise leaving the building one day to be confronted by a life-size granite Iguanadon. It’s the sentimentalist in me.

Now, I was born long after the first Tintin comic was published. In fact, I believe my parents weren’t born yet (though they were about to be.) But Tintin was indomitable and I read his adventures in college, blessed with roommates who collected the English editions.

Tintin was indomitable. Per the official site, he (and his dog Snowy) made his first appearance in print 10 January 1929. Since that time over 230 million copies printed in over eighty languages have come out and, despite creator Herge’s death in 1983, the series is as popular as ever.

Steven Spielberg is doing a three movie adaptation and he’s chosen his Tintin. Thomas Sangster (Love Actually, Nanny McPhee, and The Last Legion) will play the intrepid (if hair-challenged) hero.

I can see it.

From Publishers Weekly online, May 12, 2008 (”Picador Works the Trade“): 

“One way the imprint is getting sales reps excited about older titles is through an initiative called “The Best Books You’ve Never Read.” The idea, Farrell said, grew out of a conversation with Augusten Burroughs. Burroughs, who is published by Picador, was talking with staffers at the house last year about some of the gems on the imprint’s backlist. He sang the praises of one title in particular, Blackburn by Bradley Denton. . . .  With that endorsement, Picador republished the book in April 2007, with a glowing cover quote from Burroughs, and the Best Books program was born. (Though Farrell said the title “wasn’t a blockbuster,” it sold well enough to entice Picador to continue the program.)“

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“wasn’t a blockbuster” ??

Dang.  My mother lied to me.

Again.

I usually dislike books labeled as “memoir” (though I occasionally read them), because I’ve always known they can’t be trusted.

In fact, when the whole Million-Little-Pieces debacle unfolded a few years ago, I was bemused by the “Shocked! Shocked!” reaction it provoked. Seriously, now: Were daytime-television bookclubbers really surprised to discover that “memoir” is French for “big fat self-serving lie”?

Besides, even if a memoirist endeavors to be as truthful as memory allows, he or she will still get something wrong. I myself, the earthly avatar of Honesty and Cub-Scoutiness, have discovered that I often just flat misremember things. Last year, for example, I wrote an essay for Eat Our Brains in which I described a childhood game that I said had no name, but that I would refer to as “Dizzy Idiots.” Then, a few months ago, my Baby Brother (who could now crush me ‘twixt his thumb and forefinger like an overripe grape) reminded me that the game I had described did have a name. It was called “Tornado.”

[Well, Baby Brother would have a better memory of that game than I would. He was the one who wound up in the Emergency Room because of it.]

So I tend to side with Sir Philip Sidney’s position in his Defence of Poesy, which I read as (in part) arguing that fiction has a better shot at avoiding lies than nonfiction, because it makes no pretense of being “true.” In other words, fiction, unlike memoir, is willing to stand right up and say “None of this happened. It’s all made-up. It’s a story.” This means a novel has a better shot at exposing real truths about human behavior than a memoir does . . . because the novelist, unlike the memoirist, is free of the self-serving urge to modify or leave out that which is seriously raw and/or damning (as opposed to that which is merely salacious).

And now, having said all that –

I am going to recommend a memoir.

[Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am vast; I contain Walt Whitman.]

Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, by Steve Martin, is a short, tightly-written book chronicling Mr. Martin’s rise from Disneyland-guidebook salesboy to the most successful stand-up comedian of all time. And that’s where it stops, in the early ‘80s, just as Mr. Martin’s stand-up career ends and his film acting career begins. It barely mentions his other post-standup careers as screenwriter, playwright, New Yorker humorist, and novelist.

But Born Standing Up doesn’t need to discuss Steve Martin the author, because he’s well represented by the book itself. Many would-be and already-are writers could learn a thing or two from studying Mr. Martin’s prose. It’s not one-hundred-percent perfect (what is?), but it’s consistently sharp and evocative – and every paragraph matters to the story being told. There’s no junk or padding, which may be why Born Standing Up is able to cover almost four decades in only 207 pages.

If Mr. Martin doesn’t have a well-worn copy of The Elements of Style somewhere in his office, then the ghosts of Strunk and White must have whispered to him in his dreams.

Plus, Born Standing Up is funny. No, it’s not the wild-and-crazy funny of Mr. Martin’s old standup act. But it’s witty-funny, poignant-funny, and grown-up funny.

Toward the end of one chapter, for example, Mr. Martin tells the story of how the director John Frankenheimer once stole his girlfriend – and how, twenty years later, Frankenheimer also tried to seduce his wife. The final sentence of the chapter reads: “Incidentally, Frankenheimer died a few years ago, but it was not I who killed him.”

At another point, after describing “interludes of monogamy” with various girlfriends, Mr. Martin anticipates a question and answers it thusly: “Were they beautiful? We were all beautiful. We were in our twenties.”

And as a final example, here’s Mr. Martin on the zeitgeist of the 1960s: “I didn’t yet know its name but found out later it was called Flower Power, and I was excited to learn that we were now living in the Age of Aquarius, an age when, at least astrologically, the world would be taken over by macramé.”

So was it just the strong, funny writing that enabled Born Standing Up to win me over when most memoirs leave me feeling grifted?

Well, that probably would have been enough. Strong, funny writing will make me forgive a lot.

But Born Standing Up has more going for it.

For one thing, I never had the sense that Mr. Martin was trying to convince me that everything he was saying was “true” or that this was the “whole story” about anything. So my bullshit detector never went off. My bullshit detector goes off a lot these days, WHEEPWHEEPWHEEP, resulting in a near-constant headache – so, boy, did I appreciate the fact that Born Standing Up gave me a break.

For another thing, Mr. Martin treats both himself and all other persons whose names appear in the book with respect. This isn’t to suggest that everyone in Born Standing Up comes off as a saint. Far from it. But there’s no salacity for salacity’s sake . . . and even the badly-behaved are described humanely and without insult.

Yet the book still manages to be fascinating and vivid despite its dearth of ugliness and dirt. (Imagine that!)

Finally, and (for me) most importantly:

About halfway through Born Standing Up, I realized that Mr. Martin was not writing a conventional “memoir.”

Rather, he was telling the story of how he (Steve Martin, a pretty average kid from first Waco and then Orange County) spent over thirty years creating an iconic and legendary fictional character (Steve Martin, the wild-and-crazy white-suited lunatic who was definitely not from Waco or Orange County).

In other words, Born Standing Up is the sharp, funny story of a born storyteller . . . learning how to tell his first really great story.

“True” or not –

Man, how could I not love that?

In a rare and wonderful moment of good sense, the California State Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry. I particularly like the fact that the decision shuts the door on the “but what will that do to “normal” marriage?” wheeze:

“The California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples,” Chief Justice Ronald George wrote in the majority opinion.

Allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry “will not deprive opposite-sex couples of any rights and will not alter the legal framework of the institution of marriage,” George said.

In addition, he said, the current state law, enacted in 1977 and reaffirmed by the voters in 2000, discriminates against same-sex couples on the basis of their sexual orientation - discrimination that the court, for the first time, put in the same legal category as racial or gender bias.

I can think of all sorts of reasons for not loving the person my child wants to marry (Rory enumerated some of them–I’m less concerned about issues of a motorcycle nature, and more concerned with whether the person says “I could care less” when she/he means “I couldn’t care less,”) but gender just isn’t one of them. Love is its own reason; everything else is plumbing.