Lies, Damn Lies, and National Division

I’ve just been pondering a problem I’ve pondered before, and cannot see a solution to.

One thing I heard a fair bit of both before and after the election was a frustration at some people’s reasons not to vote for Kerry, because they were at odds with his platform. The idea being that someone who was dissatisfied with Bush but voting for him anyway because they were against gay marriage and turning tail in Iraq was dumb or ill-informed, because Kerry was also on record as being against those things.

The problem here is that we’ve come to a point where it’s very hard to reach across the political divide on issues, because the people on the other side just won’t believe you. In this case, I suspect a lot of the folks on the red side of the divide just didn’t believe that Kerry wasn’t lying through his teeth, all the while planning to surrender Baghdad to Zarqawi while raising taxes to all-time highs and making it legal to marry a box turtle.

It’s not a one-way divide, either. Let’s hypothesize, for the sake of argument, that the President had gone on national TV last week and said that in a second term he would allow most of the tax cuts to expire on schedule, replace Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, repeal the more egregious provisions of the PATRIOT Act, and leave gay marriage and other social issues to the states like a good conservative should.

Well, I’d think that was a hell of an improvement to his platform. But I wouldn’t have believed him. I don’t think many of the folks on the blue side of the divide would have. Not unless Rumsfeld and Ashcroft were on the street immediately, and even then it would seem awfully convenient.

I’m not sure how to wrestle with the credibility problem, but I think in a very real way it *is* the national division. We can’t start building consensus and compromise on issues when there’s that basic chasm of distrust to contend with.

Originally published on LiveJournal

The Company You Keep

I just finished working out my sample ballot for tomorrow. It’s pretty long; this is a proposition-heavy year even for California, and the propositions are of particularly poor quality. Even the ones I’m voting for I’m holding my nose a little bit.

The race I find most troubling, however, is my state assembly race, between Ira Ruskin and Steve Poizner. Ira Ruskin is a Democrat; I think I voted for him for City Council last year. I have no particular beef with him. But he’s run a campaign you could almost use as an example of how not to reach beyond your base. His home-stretch TV ad essentially says, “I’m an environmentalist because I was at the first Earth Day.” The whole campaign message boils down to, “I was a hippie, and I have the blessing of the Democratic machine.” I don’t usually have reflexive Gen-X reactions, but every time it comes on I find myself muttering, “Fucking boomers”.

Steve Poizner, on the other hand, is the kind of Republican the California GOP needs to find more of. He’s a pro-choice, pro-education fiscal conservative. I’m not totally thrilled with all his positions, but on the merits, I would feel compelled to give him a good hard look. Would, except for one important point.

I hate the Republican caucus of the California state legislature. I hate them a lot. They’re like the unscrupulous wing of the national GOP, without the moral and practical responsibility that comes from knowing you might someday have to run the joint. Every year, they dig in their heels and hold up the budget (to the extent that they have in the past refused to vote for any budget which included tax hikes while simultaneously refusing to suggest spending cuts. In some ways, thank God for Governor Schwarzenegger*; he seems to at least be able to drag them kicking and screaming to the table). They are, I think, an important reason why this state’s government is such a mess.

I just can’t bring myself to vote in any way that might strengthen their hand. That makes me sort of sad; I’d prefer to think that I’d vote for a Republican of sufficiently sterling qualities (and I would, in an executive position like Controller or Secretary of State — in fact, I have, though it’s been a few years). But in a legislative position, it just ain’t gonna happen. So Poizner gets no love from me.

It makes me wonder what the hell is wrong with the Greens, that I only have one Green candidate on my ballot. If the Greens have a shot at state and local offices anywhere, it should be around here. If there were a Green in this race, I might have mixed it up a little.

*There’s a phrase I never expected to use.

Originally published on LiveJournal

The Bestiary of Stupid: The Clich

Last night I was on register, and my coworker was putting away a special order which was something like “The History and Origins of Cliches”. However, the left edge was partially covered by a note, and so my geek-soaked brain parsed it as “The History and Origins of Liches”. It made me think, however, that fantasy gaming needs yet another undead monster: the clich.

Whenever an evil wizard of great power dies at the hands of a young hero whose father and/or village he killed, or by falling from a great height into fire, or by otherwise getting his long-due comeuppance, a clich may be created. The new clich will rapidly set about its nefarious plot of world domination and/or sweet vengeance, cackling madly at every opportunity, killing henchmen who dare to question its harebrained schemes, and capturing heroes in order to reveal its secrets to them. A clich can only be killed permanently if a hero succumbs to temptation and accepts the clich’s offer of vast power in exchange for his submission: the cognitive dissonance will cause the clich to explode.

Originally published on LiveJournal

Aah! Hideous, hideous nature!

OK, I’m a little freaked right now.

About an hour ago, I’m going about my usual business, when I hear a loud clattering and thumping. It takes me a while to identify it — the closet where our water heater lives. I open it to take a peek — aah! A squirrel!

I close the door, so that I can open doors to the outside, close doors to other rooms, and get a broom. I open the closet again. No squirrel.

It looks like the grating on a vent to the outside has fallen in, bringing a squirrel with it. And it looks like the squirrel has managed to fall down into the little space between the corner of the closet and the curve of the water heater, and it’s scrabbling around in there with no success.

I try to throw it a rope, but that just earns me some agitated chittering and growling. I didn’t know squirrels could growl.

I call Animal Control, because I don’t really know what to do about a trapped squirrel behind my water heater, other than that I can’t just leave it there. The nice lady at Animal Control tells me that the thing to do is not to poke at it, because squirrels freak out easily. Instead, I should just leave it be, and call them back in a couple hours if it can’t find its own way out. Meanwhile, the squirrel starts howling. I didn’t know squirrels could howl.

So now I’m holed up in my office, trying to give the squirrel some space to get its head together, which basically traps me in here because the closet is in the main thoroughfare of our house and I can’t go anywhere without walking by it. I’m a little freaked out. I hope it deals with this before I have to go to work, because I don’t know what to do in that case.

Originally published on LiveJournal

Equal Time

The “balance” thing in discussions about publishing and media is starting to drive me up a wall. At work, we pretty regularly get people complaining about how we stock more liberal books than conservative books, and therefore we must be biased. In the grand tradition of retail workers, because I can’t say to them what I want to, I will say it to you.

Look. There are just more liberal books than conservative books right now. I can’t say whether there’s a publisher-side conspiracy; personally, I think it’s because it’s easier to write an interesting book which is contrary to the establishment. Let’s face it, a book entitled Everything Is Fine doesn’t inspire you to pick it up, and the “Liberals! Liberals comin’ to get you!” screeds which made Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity famous just look stupid when the right controls two and a half branches of government.

Second, look around you. You’re in frickin’ Northern California. People are going to buy that big stack of Against All Enemies, or Bushworld, or What Went Wrong. I do not anticipate that Ann Coulter’s new book, How to Talk to A Liberal (If You Must), will be a brisk seller. (I can’t imagine what she would have to say beyond, “For some reason, calling liberals slanderous traitors seems to get the conversation off on the wrong foot. Those wacky chick pie wagons.”) Nevertheless, we’ll be carrying it. We just won’t have dozens and dozens of copies, because *they won’t sell, and we would lose money*. It’s that free enterprise thing; I thought you liked that.

On a related note, customers have started editorializing the display tables. We have one guy who likes to turn over the top copy of all the liberal books, and another who just covers them up with Unfit for Command. On the left, we apparently have a customer who enjoys moving the stack of Unfit for Command over to the Fiction table.

It’s for the best, I think, that crowbars are not typically considered part of excellent customer service.

Originally published on LiveJournal

Unfit for Command

It’s a little late, but I have some tidbits about the whole Unfit for Command foofarah that might be interesting. (A disclaimer: I am not a journalist, and my ability to back some of this up is limited. Anything prefaced with “I am told” is something that I have in fact been told, and have no reason to doubt, but cannot verify.)

I work in a bookstore, you see, and thus selling Unfit for Command, the book written by the head of Swift Boat Vets for Truth, is part of my job. Or it would be, if we could get some in. I wish we could, because then the conservatives might stop yelling at me.

Unfit for Command is published by Regnery Press, a publisher of conservative books of various stripes. (Its owner is also currently involved in setting up an online dating service for heterosexual white Christians, it seems, for fear that they will be outbred by all the dirt people. Perhaps that was needlessly inflammatory. But I digress.) Regnery, it appears, was totally unprepared for the major media blitz that ensued; I am told that they printed 30,000 copies, which is about what you would do for a first novel. Demand was way, way higher.

Ordinarily, one deals with such a situation by sending some portion of each customer’s order. This is not what Regnery did. Instead, I am told they filled some orders fully, but not others. No one in the Bay Area had it, except for Borders, and they ran out within a few days. Some have speculated that Regnery may have tried to focus their efforts on supplying swing states with the book, but I have no evidence on that.

At this point, the angry phone calls began. It appears that right-wing talk show hosts have been telling their listeners that “liberal bookstores” are suppressing the book; at least, that’s what the legions of customers calling with venom in their voice to demand the book said. We will leave aside the question of what sane bookstore would buy dozens of books and then not sell them.

By now, the surge is subsiding; most of the charges the book needed to make are out in the public sphere, I think, so the point is probably sort of moot. Somewhere in there, we got a handful of copies which we used to fill special orders; this helps a bit, in that it’s easier to mollify an enraged conservative by telling them “we’re sold out” than with “we don’t have it yet”.

Ironically, very few of the livid legion actually want to order the book; they just want to test the liberal conspiracy. We may wind up sitting on a pile of books when Regnery finally fills our order.

Originally published on LiveJournal

Book Review: Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Last night I finally slogged my way to the end of Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, one of the major tomes of Renaissance magical thought. It is a mighty slab of words, and the translation preserves that (possibly intentional) opacity that is typical of magical writers; it was a pretty long trek. I’ve been reading it for months.

At the end, my feelings are mixed. I wish I’d picked up more of the classics at some point in my education; I kept wanting more background in Aristotle and Pliny. Certainly I have a better sense of what magic was about at the dawn of rationalism now. I know the humors better, and I finally know the difference between a cherub and a domination. The astrology was a little past me at points, and a lot of the angelology would have been way more comprehensible if I knew some Hebrew. On the other hand, Three Books also has the most accessible introduction to Kabbalah I’ve read yet.

Basically, I learned a lot, but I’m not sure it was worth the massive investment of time. And I certainly wish I’d finished it before I started working on GURPS Magic.

Originally published on LiveJournal

Evading the gatekeepers, figuring out your own shit

I maintain the Writing & Publishing section at work, and as I was straightening up the many, many books on becoming a successful writer, I noticed a shift in my own attitude toward that process.

There was a time when I was very concerned with the mechanics of “breaking in” — how many syllables should the first sentence of your query letter be, and so on. This was, I think, a reflection of my own conviction that I was a good writer, that the market was self-evidently full of books written by people whose skills were inferior to mine, and therefore the whole enchilada of becoming a successful writer was figuring out how to persuade the gatekeepers to recognize these facts.

Any number of things have happened to alter my perspective. Among them is the lesson that there is a mighty gulf between being able to write a good book and writing a good book. (To say nothing of the gulf between being able to conceive a good book and being able to write it.) I think, also, that it’s easy for a young writer to overemphasize talent, that being most of what one has at the beginning of a career. It’s been eye-opening to realize that an uninspired wordsmith who delivers solid product in substantial and reliable quantities is in fact a better writer than the tortured genius who dribbles out a few hundred words when Venus is in trine. Craft is important. Work ethic is important. And talent develops over time. But most important, I think, has been the simple process of getting familiar with my own capacities and my own shortcomings. In wrestling with them, the idea of surmounting them becomes real, and it gives my writing life a concrete future beyond “And then I’m gonna write some stuff”.

I still believe I’m a good writer, and the market is indeed full of books written by people whose skills are inferior to mine. But I don’t want to be one of them. And, having realized that, I believe that when I get where I want to be for any given form, I’ll be able to sell my work on its merits, regardless of whether my query is appropriately dactylic.

Originally published on LiveJournal

Book Review: The Disinformation Book of Lists

I like The Disinformation Company. I like Russ Kick. They do a lot of cool work distributing strange and wonderful information that more people should know, and they do it with style. Alas, I think this set me up to want more from the Disinformation Book of Lists than it could deliver.

To be fair, I would have loved this book with a deep and abiding passion ten years ago. It’s possible that I have simply lost my hardcore edge. But I think it’s more than the Book of Lists is … well, the best way I’ve been able to put it is that it’s conventionally subversive. Lists of heroin brand names, smart drugs, and incidents of homosexuality in animals are interesting, but not exactly mind-blowing. It’s nice to know that Sherlock Holmes was a coke fiend, but my world is not rocked. Nor is it really a shock to learn that characters in the Bible do horrible things.

There are a few lists in the book that are more powerful. I think these are the ones that take advantage of the power of the list format by showing the reader patterns of things that they might have otherwise dismissed as a freak accident. Most people have heard about a nuclear test that dumped radioactive dust on a nearby Nevada town; it’s harder to accept the story as a regrettable mistake when you’re presented with a dozen separate incidents. The same principle works with botched executions and prisoners exonerated after years behind bars. It does not add any power to the aforementioned list of heroin brand names.

I think the book works best, however, as a source of cocktail party conversation. The right type of person can draw a lot of fodder from all the ways people have died at Disneyland. I certainly have.

Originally published on LiveJournal

Another week in the book mines

Yesterday at work I had an experience that I simultaneously hope is my future and hope is never my future.

An author came by to sign his book. This is a part of the book-tour thing I didn’t know about; authors go to bookstores not to read or meet people, but just to sit down, sign the store’s stock of their book, and then leave.

I also didn’t know that the publishers have relationships with freelance professional minders in every metropolitan area: folks who know the area, know its bookstores, and shepherd authors between all the bookstores they’re supposed to visit. That sounds like a really neat job.

Anyway, this author comes in to sign his book. I have heard nothing of this. Neither has my assistant manager. But hey, signed books; it’s all good. I go to find his latest book on the shelves.

We have two copies.

They try to play it off as a good thing, because it means it’s selling, right? I don’t tell them that according to the database, we only ever had three. Fortunately, his previous book just came out in paperback, which is really where the money is in mysteries, and I manage to dig up a dozen copies of that. Still, it was a little awkward.

Later in the shift, I reached a watershed moment in my retail career. I am now a purveyor of filth; a smutmonger; a corruptor of the public virtue. I sold my first porno magazine yesterday. Playgirl, to be precise. The customer was very particular about the magazine being in the plastic (which makes a certain amount of sense, I guess), and was very eager to get any back issues we had. Unfortunately, our adult backstock is meager.

It delighted me that I got to put it in a brown paper bag.

Originally published on LiveJournal