Last week, I was having Korean BBQ for lunch with some friends from work. We started talking about superpowers, and whatever happens to the people with extremely minor powers. Like, say, the ability to instantly eliminate smells from your clothes and hair, so that you wouldn’t come back from lunch smelling like spicy pork for the rest of the day.

Or, I said, like a waitress who could tap a customer on the shoulder and remove the effects of drunkenness?

Yeah! my friends said. How come nobody tells stories about those people?

Oh, have I got a book for you! I said.

At Viable Paradise, I was privileged enough to see an early draft of Mur Lafferty’s Playing For Keeps, and right away it was clear that this manuscript was a winner. If you can’t wait for the release date in August, you can still get the whole book for free, in PDF or podcast form. As for Mur — I couldn’t be prouder of you and all the hard work you’ve put in to make this happen. You rock.

In tangentially related news: all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ is one of the truly great gastronomic experiences, but having Korean BBQ twice in the span of seven days is… inadvisable.

Jennifer Pelland, talented short story writer, tireless chauffeur for various snot-nosed VPXers, and all around Good Egg, finds herself freshly irritated by the literary vs. genre divide:

I emailed a literary review journal based at my alma mater to see if they’d make an exception to the “we don’t review genre fiction” rule for an alum, and was told that no, they only reviewed “literary” fiction.

I meant to chime in with some hopefully soothing words, “Don’t worry, ‘literary’ as that journal defines it is really a genre,” aka the Key Lime Pie Theory of Literary Fiction. But one of Jen’s commenters, apintrix, already had an interesting take on that:

[Pierre] Bourdieu’s theory, in a nutshell, is that part of what has defined the discourse of “literature” or the literary since C19, as well as “high art” more generally, is a resistance to commercial or market pressures– the genius aesthetic, basically. The more your art is separated from the market, the more “pure” and “literary” it is. There’s something to that idea, I think, beyond it being “just another genre”; particularly because one of the central oppositions in the “literary field” is precisely between literary and genre fictions, which Bourdieu might say are “genre” because they cater to particular markets, and are explicitly heteronomous between the field of actual capital and cultural capital.

(The name “Pierre Bourdieu” rang a bell. As it turns out, David Brooks mentions him in Bobos in Paradise, which I’m embarrassed to admit I even read, let alone found amusing in parts, so let’s please just pretend I didn’t say any of that. Good? Good.)

Anyway, as apintrix observes, it’s interesting that “… ‘genre’ fiction appropriates the language of the market and of industry — authors ‘working hard’, being ‘productive’, all this stuff — while in literary fiction you’re more liable to see language like ‘inspiration’ or ‘transcendence’.” That does seem like a fundamental difference, not to mention a fairly new idea. Our ancient literary predecessors were certainly concerned with winning popular acclaim and economic success. If this has changed, I suppose the only fair thing to do is to blame Rousseau.

Ultimately, I think this is related to the argument sketched out in James Miller’s Is Bad Writing Necessary?, which discusses the tension between deliberately opaque writers like Theodor Adorno and deliberately transparent writers like George Orwell. To the Opaques, the fact that the Transparents have more popular acclaim and influence outside the academy “fuels their suspicion that plain talk is politically perfidious — reinforcing, rather than radically challenging, the cultural status quo.”

As quoted in Miller’s original article, Katha Pollitt has a scathing response:

When intellectuals on the left write in a way that excludes “all but the initiated few,” [Pollitt] remarked, what almost inevitably results is “a pseudo-politics, in which everything is claimed in the name of revolution and democracy and equality and anti-authoritarianism, and nothing is risked, nothing, except maybe a bit of harmless cross-dressing, is even expected to happen outside the classroom.”

The parallels between Literary Fiction and Opaque Non-fiction are striking. To what Pollitt said, I can only add that if I were The Man, Evil Overlord and Oppressor of all that is Radical and True, I could think of no better allies than those who exhort their colleagues to remain safe in a self-constructed academic ghetto. After all, shooting radical writers is messy and counterproductive. The optimal strategy is to convince them to endlessly chase their own tails.

So I gotta say, being an executive sounds pretty awesome. If you do a mediocre job, you make a lot of money. If you do a really really bad job, you make a lot of money, and they have to pay you a lot more money to leave. And don’t even think about trying to hire cheaper, more efficient executives from overseas, that’ll never work. You see, each American executive is hired by a closed circle of other American executives is a unique and special snowflake whose copious talents are accurately priced in the marketplace!

How do we peons break into this club? I think the fairest way would be trial-by-combat. Close your eyes and imagine this scene: hundreds of your co-workers surrounding you, beating drums, chanting, “Two engineers enter! One engineer leaves! Two engineers enter! One engineer leaves!” You raise the severed head of your opponent high before them. Feel the frenzied chants wash over you! The still-warm blood flows down your forearm! “ENGINEERS!” you roar. “I am your NEW CTO! Bow down before me, and give me your private keys!!”

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll ever be an executive. But if I was, I would dispense the following directives:

• Mur Lafferty’s Playing For Keeps podcast novel is drawing to a close. If you haven’t gotten a chance to read it, now would be a good time. I had the great fortune to read Playing For Keeps way back when it was in draft form, and it knocked my socks off. Oh yeah, that’s right, I knew Mur Lafferty before it was cool! Before she sold out! Before she married Courtney Love! Back when it wasn’t about the millions of dollars and the hookers and the blow … it was about something BEAUTIFUL, man! …

  Whoa, where was I? Ah, yes. Playing For Keeps. Good stuff. Go download and listen. It’s pledge week on NPR, for crying out loud, there’s nothing on the radio at all. You have no excuse.

• Bart Patton, aka the Avocado Desperado, is on fire today. Literally on fire! After you finish dousing him with CO2, check out his guidelines for pen names. You’ll be glad you did.
• Confidential to Dave: Go ahead, eat the donut. Advanced technology from the mid-21st century will save you.

  And if it doesn’t, that probably means there was some sort of apocalyptic economic collapse due to global warming or biological warfare or a limited exchange of nuclear weapons. If any of those occur, at least you had the donut. See?

These weekend I have not one, not two, but five parties to go to:

• A housewarming party.
• A housewarming barbecue.
• A party to celebrate the engagement of some friends.
• A reunion for alumni of my previous company.
• A book release party.

Lest you think I’m just saying this to brag about my fabulously full social life, please rest assured that this weekend is a fluke. I’m looking at my calendar right now, and every weekend is clear from now till September. Sometimes distributions are clumpy. I really wish they weren’t, though — I think I’ll need a weekend to decompress from my weekend.

The book release party, by the way, is for an anthology edited by my former teacher Ellen Sussman. The title is Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave. I predict it will sell about a million kajillion copies.

NOTE: Careful and regular readers of this journal might have discerned that I tend to lean towards SF rather than mainstream fiction. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine at this party. If an SF type shakes hands with a mainstream type, it’s not like this produces a catastrophic matter/anti-matter explosion that generates photons with a characteristic energy of — Sorry! Sorry, got a bit carried away there. Anyway, who knows, maybe one of these writers managed to sneak in some rocket ships or dinosaurs or something. In fact, my friend Shelly implies that at least one of the stories might contain aliens with zit-producing rayguns. Sounds like an excellent start!

UPDATE: Well, the weekend is over — I even skipped one of the parties, and I am still exhausted. How did people back in the Studio 54 era manage all that?

Oh, that’s right. Lots and lots of cocaine.

In honor of Blog Like It’s the End of the World Day, here is my “Hats of War” story from Viable Paradise X. This story doesn’t quite match the strictures of Blog Like It’s the End of the World Day — it’s not about my day today, it doesn’t actually have zombies — but eh, close enough.

The Story of the Story: the “Hats of War” was a writing exercise dreamed up by instructor James D. MacDonald. We had to write a story to be included in an upcoming SF anthology, “The Hats of War”. MacDonald had been lecturing about writing using various props, including a white model house. Our stories would have to include that white house, plus a gag gift we had been given on our first day (in my case, a bag of little rubber bouncy balls). I’m pretty sure he made up the exercise on the spot. As for the clothes-based theme — particularly the reference to linen — I think I just had fabrics on my mind, because I had been chatting so much with Barbara and learning about spinning and wool and linen and related topics.

Also because of her I can make a pen out of a feather. How cool is that?

I ended up writing this story fragment very late at night. I had just finished reviewing a couple of other people’s pieces for next day’s breakout session, and was about to hit the sack, when one of my roommates (Bart or Chris) asked me, “hey, how’s your Hats of War story going?” Wait, people are actually turning in this crazy exercise? I guess I have a bad sense about when James MacDonald is joking.

And no, it doesn’t have a proper ending. Hey, what do you expect for a Draft Zero story? Given the genre, I think you can guess how things are going to turn out.

And now… The Hats of War! (Rated R for nudity and cartoonish gore.)

The Hats of War

It was a happier time, a more innocent time. We went about our business – worrying about the war, yes, worrying about the election, yes, worrying about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, genocide, the meltdown of the only biosphere we have… yes, we fretted about all this and more.

But we never expected the nanopants.

Lynn spotted the house first. It rose from the snowy landscape like a godsend. A beautiful 19th century white house. Our sanctuary. Snowdrifts piled against the garage, and no lights shone. I approached the door, shivering.

Pound-pound-pound. Nothing. Pound-pound-pound again.

I could see the door was barred and the edges well-caulked.

“Hello!” I called. “Is anybody there?”

Nothing.

I checked my shotgun ammo. Just four more shells in the bag, plus the one I had loaded. In the store we had ransacked, the shells had been in the corner, buried underneath an overturned rack of marble-sized rubber bouncy balls. I should have taken a few for good luck. No matter. I patted the shells. In this brave new world, you made your own luck.

I circled to the window. It was boarded up and well-sealed. I couldn’t wait any longer for an answer. I took aim at the window.

A muffled voice called out, “Who’s there?”

“It’s Mark and Lynn,” I called out. “Please, for God’s sakes, let us in!”

There was nothing.

“I have a bag of shotgun shells,” I lied. “And a few backpacks of canned food.”

The voice called out, “Are you wearing linen?”

Lynn tugged at my arm as she shivered. “Does he think we’re idiots?”

“Well,” I said, “I, uh,”

“Are you wearing fucking linen?!”

“No!” I called out. “Jesus Christ, is that a crime?”

“Strip!” called the voice.

“What?”

“STRIP!”

We pulled off our jackets, wriggled out of our jeans. What else could we have done?
There was a wrenching noise, and the door flew open, tearing away the caulk. A middle-aged man stood framed in the door wearing overalls, a modified double-barreled shotgun pointed at us. A timid-looking college-age kid with sandy hair stood behind him.

“Look, mister,” I said. “We ain’t looking for trouble. We just need shelter…”
In answer, the man raised his gun and fired two quick blasts.

Behind us, a pair of black slingback stilettos splintered into fragments.

“They’re right behind your ass, MOVE!” He began reloading.

I looked behind me, and God help me, I froze.

An array of Ann Taylor tees and knits had trailed us all the way to the fucking farmhouse. A floral print silk Georgette tunic. A black pleat long white shirt with finished cut-away neckline. The trail of garments went on and on, floating towards us in the winter moonlight. A whole department store’s worth.
How could we not have seen them?

I froze, to my eternal shame, but Lynn didn’t. Lynn, shivering and naked, grabbed the shotgun out of my hands. She took aim and fired at the lead garment, a strappy little black dress. Her blast took a chunk out and twisted the tee around, but it kept coming. She reloaded, fired again. This one hit dead center. The dress fluttered to the ground and lay cold and dead in the snow.
The rest of the garments began to fly faster towards us.

Lynn looked back at me. “You can’t recaulk the door in time,” she said. She tossed me the shotgun. Stood up straight.

My brain unfroze as I realized what was happening. “No, Lynn!”

I love you, she mouthed. Then she turned and bounded into the horde of advancing apparel.

The clothes enfolded her, welcomed her. A gray herringbone skirt with back pleats wrapped itself around her middle. Lynn’s flesh instantly began to sizzle. The nanoparticles embedded in the skirt, originally designed to absorb and re-radiate summer heat more efficiently, discharged their stored energy into Lynn’s unprotected flesh. Lynn staggered. A gauzy scarf wrapped around her throat. A red Donna Vinci wide-brimmed High Fashion Hat settled over her head, her eyes. Blood began to ooze down as the hat contracted. Lynn sank to her knees in the snow.

I remember a strong hand yanking me in through the door. I must have been out only for a moment after that, because the next thing I knew, I was retching on the floor, still naked and shivering. I looked up, gasping like a landed fish, to see the younger man busy resealing the door with fresh caulk.

The older man had his shotgun slung over his shoulder. He put his hand on my arm. “She bought us time,” he said. “She died a good death.”

“No one,” I choked, “no one should have to die like that.”

“I know, son,” he said. “I know.”

Perhaps it is a sign of the impending Web 2.0 apocalypse, but “display sites” are reappearing. Why is an idea that failed in late 90s making a comeback?

We can clear up this mystery with a simple example. Let’s say you’re trying to cash in on the new bubble the modern way, by throwing together a website in a weekend and getting bought by Yahoo!, or hopefully (cue angelic music) Google. You have all the right ingredients: a ratio of three business guys for every one engineer, a cutesy logo and domain name, and a hotshot web dev who knows how to make rounded corners and everything. Now you just need a business plan related to “social networking” and “user-generated content”. But what do these mysterious user-creatures manufacture that you can piggyback off of? Video? Locked up already by YouTube. Photos? Pretty crowded. Music? Sound? Hmmm. Text? Wait — doesn’t everyone have a book inside them? Yes! Books it is! Fabulous. [clink beer glasses]

And thus it came to pass in Teh Dawn of the New Millenium that new display sites began springing up like, errr, things that spring up a lot. Amusingly, of the seven sites Victoria Strauss mentioned in her post early this year, two of them are already dead. Less amusingly, Strauss just highlighted a new site, Associated Content (“The People’s Media Company”). As Strauss puts it:

No doubt many people will simply click “I agree” rather than slog through the whole of this dense, small-print document–but that’s never a good idea. If you read down far enough, you find the following clause (bolding is mine):

A. User Content. By submitting any User Content through or to the AC Network, including on any User Tools or User Pages, but excluding any User Content you submit on AC Blogs, you hereby irrevocably grant to AC, its affiliates and distributors, a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and fully sub-licensable license, to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, create derivative works from, transfer, transmit and distribute on the AC Network, in connection with promotion or elsewhere, such User Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate the User Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed. Notwithstanding the foregoing, when you submit a text, video, images , AC may modify the format, content and display of such User Content. The foregoing grants shall include the right to exploit any proprietary rights in such User Content, including but not limited to rights under copyright, trademark, service mark or patent laws under any relevant jurisdiction. With respect to User Content you Post for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of AC Blogs, You grant AC the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such User Content on the AC Network or on any media. You agree that the foregoing grant of rights by you to AC and its affiliates is provided without any the entitlement of payment of fees or consideration.

Just by posting on the site, you’re granting Associated Content the right to exploit your work in any way imaginable–and possibly to make money from that exploitation–without any compensation or consideration to you. Of course, the chances that Associated Content will actually exercise this right for any given piece of content are probably fairly slim. Also, since it’s a non-exclusive grant, you aren’t prevented from selling, re-posting, or adapting your work yourself. You may, therefore, consider it worth the risk.

Strauss goes on to say:

(This kind of language, by the way, is not unusual on the Internet. For instance, you’ll find something similar–though not as encompassing–in Yahoo’s Terms of Service (see Clause 9), and also in the User Agreement of Triond.com (see Clause 5), another content site. As katya l. points out in the Comments section of this post, just about any online service will require you to grant certain basic rights, otherwise they won’t be able to transmit content over the Internet without violating copyright laws. However, what Associated Content is asking its content providers to agree to goes some way beyond that basic license.)

Actually it’s much worse than that. Here are the terms of service for Yahoo! Groups (and most other Yahoo! sites that enable user to post text):

Yahoo! does not claim ownership of Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Service. However, with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service, you grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s), as applicable:

With respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purposes of providing and promoting the specific Yahoo! Group to which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service. …

What about the good folks up the road in Mountain View? Here are the terms of service for Google Groups Beta:

Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, Posted or displayed by you on or through the Service. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, Post or display on or through the Service and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, Posting or displaying Content on or through the Service, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt and publish such Content on the Service solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting the Service or any other Google Services. This license terminates when such Content is deleted from the Service. Google reserves the right to syndicate Content submitted, Posted or displayed by you on or through the Service and use that Content in connection with other services offered by Google.

Both Yahoo! and Google assert affirmatively that they do not own your stuff, that the “worldwide, royalty-free license” is scoped to “displaying, distributing, and promoting the ‘Service'”, and that the license terminates when you delete your content. None of this scoping is present in the Associated Content terms of service. They own your book and or their buddies can do whatever they like with it. Forever.

What makes this particularly odious is that on a site where people are putting up their books, you would expect a lot more protection than the boilerplate Yahoo! and Google Terms of Service, not less. I wonder how far you’ll get taking your work to a publisher and telling them, “Well, see, I’ve already granted these other guys the right to sorta kinda do whatever they like with my stuff… but you should totally buy it anyway!” I’m guessing that your average publisher would get a little tetchy to hear you say something like that. Now my guess could be wrong, since after all, I know very little about how the publishing industry actually works. Then again, neither do the employees and backers of these next-gen content sites, which is something that prospective users of these sites should perhaps keep in mind.

Brad DeLong uncovers this passage:

I thought we had finished with the subject of your wanting to become a writer when you passed through New York last April. You asked for what you called “an uncle’s meddling advice,” and we spent an afternoon talking about your chances of commercial or critical success (nil and next to none), about the number of readers that constitutes the American audience for literature (not enough to fill the seats at Yankee Stadium), and about the Q ratings awarded to authors by the celebrity market (equivalent to those assigned to trick dogs and retired generals). You didn’t disagree with the drift of the conversation, and I thought it was understood that you would apply to business school.

To which Brad remarks:

The graders of the PSAT/NMSQT say that the tone of the parenthetical comments is best characterized as “wry.” We in this house agree–unanimously–that “surly” is a better characterization. They are not dryly humorous with a touch of irony. They are, rather, sullenly ill-humored.

I think this is exactly right. First, as one of Brad’s commenters clarifies for us, “Wry involves an attempt at weak humor, surly is a brooding, passive-aggressive, sullen low-level frustrated anger expressed as reluctance and sloth.” I think this fits the uncle’s tone to a T.

Second, there’s the particular issue the uncle is whining about, which on the scale of “things that are tapped out” falls just behind “complaining about how kids these days are so disrespectful to their elders.” The uncle is surrounded by illiterates, and only he, the nephew, and possibly fifteen thousand like-minded readers in the Upper West Side are daring to keep the flame of culture alive. As we cretinous Internet kids like to say these days, “Oh noes!” It’s hard to appreciate someone’s allegedly wry humor when you’re rolling your eyes at them instead.

So yesterday evening SJSU held a reading and book signing for the incomparably awesome Neil Gaiman. I went to the SJSU website, and discovered the tickets were being sold through Ticketmaster.

Uh-oh.

$15.00 to buy the ticket and hold it at will-call. $5.00 for the Ticketmaster service charge. Then, after you’ve entered your name and email address, another $4.80 “processing fee”. Screw that.^[1],[2]

If SJSU can’t figure out how to sell $15.00 tickets without charging another 66% in fees, I guess it’s not really my concern. But perhaps they should take note: this could help explain why there were still tickets available on Thursday afternoon. Or maybe Neil Gaiman just isn’t very popular with the kids these days?

1. The contrast between the fees of Ticketmaster and the fees of other online companies that actually ship physical products are especially striking. Monopolies are awesome.

2. Although I do like the time-pressure aspect. They’re holding the ticket for 2:00 minutes! The clock is ticking… can our hero create a new user account in time? Cut the red wire — no, the blue!

I have a spider in my rearview mirror.

This not a metaphorical spider in a symbolic mirror; I’m talking about a garden-variety California orb-weaver. I’ve only seen it once, but it lives in the gap between the rearview mirror’s glass and housing. Every night it comes out, spins a little web between the mirror and the window, and retreats back to its lair. Every morning I destroy the web.

Occasionally, I try to root out the spider with a twig, but I can’t seem to get at it. I could probably flush it out with a blast of water from the hose. But I haven’t bothered yet, because what really fascinates me about the spider is its tenacity, its single-mindedness. It doesn’t get discouraged. It doesn’t move its home to a more promising location. It seems to have no ability to process this particular input and react accordingly. The spider and I, we have a failure to communicate.

Fundamentally, I think this is why arachnids and insects are so creepy. Sam raised this idea a while back. If you’re hiking and you step near a snake, it will rear up and hiss at you to warn you off. You scared it, it’s trying to scare you. Message sent, message received. Reptiles, mammals, birds… there’s something comforting about how you can communicate with these creatures, at least at some very basic level. The Brotherhood of the Vertebrates.

But arthropods are alien creatures. Little unfathomable machines. Is it going to bite me? Scuttle away? Ignore me? What is the spider thinking when it fastens those eight beady little eyes on me?

Well, actually I got back from Viable Paradise late last night. Still unpacking, figuratively and literally.

At one of the late night get-togethers, Mur went around with her well–worn microphone and asked us what we had learned at VP X. I think I said something about plotting, which was the best I could come up with after N glasses of wine. That answer is at best incomplete, so let me try again:

• Well okay, I did a great deal about plotting, mostly from sitting down with Jim Patrick Kelly for 45 minutes. The man is a mad genius.

• I also learned how to make and use quill pens (or more properly, simply “pens”). And I learned the basics of how to spin yarn, but not how to knit. Next time for sure, Nikki…

• I learned that if you’re writing fantasy, you need to get medieval on your characters’ asses. If you write a novel about an imaginary Crusader state, you cannot afford to have prose that reeks of “bloodless modernism.” The big question is, how to write about pre-modern people and politics in a manner that doesn’t totally repulse an enlightened 21st century reader? Food for thought. In the meantime, I will be reading Icelandic sagas and pondering what is best in life.

• Most important of all, I learned that SF is a fundamentally social genre. There is a huge ecosystem of SF readers and writers out there, and you need to be a part of that community to make any headway. Thank you to my amazing classmates and instructors for finally managing to drive this concept through my thick skull after all these years.

I’ll probably be talking about Viable Paradise and other SFnal things for some time to come. But overall, Viable Paradise was an amazing and possibly life-changing experience. I miss my classmates already, and no doubt I will be leaning on them heavily in the future…