August 2004 Archives

LBJs

*A happy birthday to Thing Two, who turns eleven today. We'll celebrate tonight at the all-you-can-eat sushi place in Charlottesville, which is completely appropriate. For his third birthday, he asked to go to the Chinese restaurant in Orange because he wanted shrimp toast. This boy is a seafood connoisseur from way back...

*I spent the morning wrestling with the 70,000-odd words of the novel manuscript. It's not yet complete, but I think I've at least put all the pieces I've got into something resembling a narrative arc. Now all I have to do is read the damn thing and see which bits need building up and which bits need sanding down.

*With the appearance of a Sandwich Tern near the bridge between Harbor Island and St. Helena Island (S.C.), I've seen just over 150 species of birds during calendar year 2004. That's not quite half my life list, and there's still another four months to go, but it does provide me with some perspective on the totals logged by the obsessive birders in Mark Obmascik's The Big Year: over 700 species. Yow.

*Autumn has apparently begun, but not everyone got the memo. The tulip poplar next to our house has turned yellow and is hurling down leaves at a furious pace, and every sycamore in Virginia is already brown and missing the top half of its foliage. The weather, alas, has nothing autumnal about it. There's no crispness, so clarity to the blue in the sky, and not much breeze (which meant that yesterday I was assaulted by a couple hundred mosquitoes.) If the trees are turning, I think the least Mother Nature could do would be to provide some climatological pretext.

*I skimmed the GOP's 2004 platform online last night. (No, I didn't look directly at it, but I did view parts of it through smoked glass, like a solar eclipse.) By my count, this group of self-identified conservatives are calling for no fewer than four Constitutional Amendments: a "human life" amendment defining fetuses as people, a victims' rights amendment providing crime victims with unspecified rights, an anti-flag-burning amendment, and (O, Irony!) a balanced budget amendment. By contrast, the crazed radicals who assembled the Democratic platform called for no amendments at all, though they did specifically reject Bush's pet Federal Marriage Amendment and even went so far as to pledge support for Americans' rights under the First and Second Amendments. Have they no respect for our traditional values?!

*I won't bore everyone (yet) with a capsule review of my fantasy football preparations, but this year I'm doing something new: I'm running a fantasy league for my sons and seven other WFS faculty kids. All but one of them were actually able to come to our house Sunday to sit around our dining room table and draft players--by far the biggest group of adolescents I've ever had in the house at once. Because we have an odd number of participants, I'm also running a team (the Dodos) in order to provide them with an opponent every week. I tried hard to make things fair for them, though, by taking the last pick in each round of the draft. Most of the guys know relatively little about NFL football, but several made canny moves during our draft. (OK, there were a couple guys who drafted kickers way too early, but they're young and inexperienced.) And of course, as commissioner, I had to draft a team for our missing member (though he did provide me with a list of players he wanted). It took about three hours, but by the end of the afternoon, I'd put together two solid teams. Then, of course, I had to go online, because Sunday night was our annual draft for the Fantasy League of Gentlemen/Gentlewomen...

*I've now learned to play most of the songs from Buffy's "Once More, with Feeling" episode on either guitar or piano. They're really insanely catchy. We're also done watching Season 6 and are about halfway through Season 1 of Angel. I can't recall the last time I watched this much video...

*Everyone needs to rush out and rent/purchase the DVD of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. Right now. Chop chop. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wish major studios could be half as funny with fifty times the budget. Easily the best B movie since Roger Corman hung up his spikes.

7:02 PM

I've been out of town during most of the brouhaha surrounding the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. (Note to the anti-Kerry crowd: when naming political groups, remember that there is such a thing as protesting too much; the USSR's propaganda organ was called Pravda--"truth" in Russian.) At this point it looks as though the mainstream media has done a pretty good job of trashing the group's credibility, so I won't bother piling on.

No, what concerns me today is something I've realized only comparatively recently:

The Bush administration hates the military.

Given all the administration's flag-wrapping and carrier-landing, this may seem like a ridiculous assertion, and my own status as a life-long civilian may not make me the best analyst of military matters. Still, before you dismiss the idea, consider the evidence.

1) The Bushies have sent our troops into harm's way without sufficient numbers or preparation to finish the job at hand. Many of them are not regular army, but instead National Guard troops who ordinarily handle short-term emergencies such as natural disasters, rather than month after month of overseas deployment. An employer who values his workers doesn't skimp on training or try to run at full capacity without a full complement of personnel, nor does he rely on temps to do the work of career employees.

2) Except for the conspicuous attention paid to ex-NFL player Pat Tillman's death, the Bushes have made practically no public acknowledgment of the sacrifices our soldiers have made. No photos of the roughly 1000 coffins have appeared in the mainstream media, a policy that began before Bush took office, but one he could easily rescind. Worse, to me, is that so far as I know, Bush has yet to attend a single funeral for a soldier killed in Iraq. If he is writing their families, there hasn't been any mention of that, either.

3) According to today's Stars & Stripes, the Bush administration is trying to cut back the pay raise promised military personnel for 2004:

The director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., recently asked the Defense Department to lower the 2004 pay raise from its expected 3.7 percent to 2 percent.

This retraction does not suggest an overwhelming desire to give our men and women in uniform the best treatment possible.

4) There's the obvious fact that many of the high-ranking officials in the executive branch did not serve in the military themselves, or in the case of their boss, served in name only. Dick Cheney's comment that he "had other priorities" during the days of the Vietnam draft is not inherently a sign of disdain for the military itself, granted, but it's interesting when considered beside the administration's other dealings with the armed forces. A single man might legitimately say he "had other priorities" besides getting married... but when that man and other single men of similar experience set themselves up as marriage counselors, questions arise.

5) The most blatant signs of neo-con contempt for the military, however, have come during recent election campaigns. In 2000's primary season, Bush refused to condemn ads smearing Senator John McCain's military record, and claimed on Larry King Live that he wasn't responsible if one of his supporters (whom Bush stood beside at a Bush-financed campaign event) accused McCain of abandoning veterans. McCain is of course well-known as a Vietnam vet and former POW.

In 2002, Senator Max Cleland's unsuccessful re-election campaign made news because of ads run by his opponent, Saxby Chambliss, for whom Bush campaigned heavily (at least according to The New Republic). One ad claimed Cleland had "directly contradicted" his oath to "protect and defend" the nation. How? Cleland, a decorated veteran who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, had voted (along with 56 Senators, 11 of them Republicans) against a 1997 amendment to the Chemical Weapons Treaty. Another Chambliss ad showed footage of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and accused Cleland of not supporting Bush in the War on Terror--ostensibly putting him, in this with-us-or-against-us age, on the side of bin Laden and Saddam. Interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Chambliss said of the ad, "There was never any linkage in that ad between bin Laden, Hussein, and Cleland... There was linkage between bin Laden, Hussein, and a lack of a homeland security bill. There was linkage between Cleland and the lack of the homeland security bill." A feeble protest there, methinks.

And now it's John Kerry's turn. The merits of the SBVT's claims aside, their attacks on Kerry's military record are downright farcical given the record of the candidate they support. Was Kerry across the Cambodian border on Christmas of 1968? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure he was closer to the front on that day than Bush ever got. Moreover, the records of Kerry's service exist; they haven't mysteriously vanished. People who served with him remember him. Superiors and subordinates are on record praising him. And there aren't whole years of his life that are off-limits for examination and discussion. Bush still refuses to condemn the SBVT's ads directly, and two of his campaign workers, one a lawyer (Benjamin Ginsberg) and one a member of his veterans' affairs steering committee (retired USAF Col. Kenneth Cordier) were recently revealed to be working for the SBTV as well. Indeed, Cordier personally appeared in an SBTV commercial and was removed from the committee; Ginsberg resigned from the campaign.

To sum up: military service means nothing to the Bushies. Most of them certainly never experienced it for themselves, and they don't seem to appreciate it now. The only veterans they value are those who support their political goals; indeed, they go out of their way to attack the military service of any veteran who dares to disagree with them--even those decorated for bravery. Even those who serve in the United States Senate. Even those in their own party. They won't give today's soldiers, sailors and airmen what they need to bring peace to Iraq, and they won't see to it that our troops get the compensation they deserve, either. If you sacrifice your safety, your time, your family's presence, or even your life on behalf of your country, they won't acknowledge you, but if you sacrifice your credibility on their behalf, they at least won't impugn your patriotism.

This is not merely a pattern of neglect. This is a pattern of contempt.

And contempt is certainly what I'm feeling just now.

1:13 PM

We're back from vacation!

FINAL ANNOWRIMO NUMBERS: 38,240 words, leaving me with a total of 74,500 completed for the first draft. Not the full 50k for the month, no, and not a finished draft just yet--but much, much closer than it was.

As for the vacation, let's just say it involved waaaaaaaaaay too much driving. Between my driving to NC, driving from town to town in NC, driving to the far end of South Carolina, driving to Savannah, and then driving back (with several stops en route), we put around 2000 miles on the new car. The car, which we've named Kirby, responded, I must say, with a sterling effort--it never got less than 26 mpg on a tank, and on the highway it did 30 mpg or better. Still, as vacations go, this one had a bit too much excitement--hurricanes, jellyfish stings, real estate tensions, you name it--and I do wish we'd gotten a little more time to relax.

On the plus side, I found a bunch of used books, used CDs and even a used DVD--a seven-dollar copy of Local Hero, one of my all-time favorite films. My book triumph was Peter Occhiogrosso's The Joy of Sects, which I'd coveted for a decade, and ha! one turned up in Chapel Hill. I also nabbed The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, the Who's Odds and Sods, the Beatles' Past Masters I, Steely Dan's Countdown to Ecstasy and Gaucho, and the Simpsons' Songs in the Key of Springfield.

I bought some new stuff, too: two volumes of Judd Winick's The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius, the new Lucifer and Ultimate X-Men
collections, the new issue of Ultimate Fantastic Four, and the first issue of the Joss Whedon-penned Astonishing X-Men.

And food. Lots of food.

Boy, it's good to be home.

4:25 AM

Still another Annowrimo update:

It stands at 35,440 words, and it will probably get a bit bigger next week, but since I've only got till Saturday the 14th to wrap it up, I don't know if 15,000 words can be considered a realistic possibility. On the plus side, I finally wrote the climax I'd been working toward for some time. Too bad I have to do all that beginning and ending and shit.

***

If you hang out with people like me (and I assume you must do it some of the time, or why the hell would you be reading this?) you're probably familiar with the Early Adoption phenomenon. The phrase usually gets associated with people who adopt technology immediately when it comes out. They were the first on their blocks to own computers, or cell phones, or CD players, to use three old examples; nowadays they'd probably be bragging about they've had iPods for 18 months.

We're not like that. Kelly and I are almost aggressively slow to get new electronic toys. We got our first computer roughly a decade after the famous Macintosh Super Bowl ad, and we wouldn't have bought it then--it was a present. The CD burner (which came with this computer) and the DVD player have both been in the house for less than six months, and our new car is our first ever to come equipped with a CD player. We're not really early adopters.

Not of technology, anyway.

But I'm sure you know the sort of early adoption we espouse--early adoption of culture. You know the guys who claim to have seen the band in some obscure club before anyone else had heard their hit single? That annoying woman in your book club who says she read Author X's first (less popular) book, which was much better than the well-publicized one you're discussing? Well, we'd be nicer about it than those people, but that's Kelly and me. We do take pride in the things we've discovered Before They Were Big, and I regret to say that we Inform You About It. Kelly was a stone fan of The X-Files from the first episode, as she'll be happy to tell you, and I'm always having to tell people--having to, mind you--that I was a fan of Jim Crace before he won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Being Dead. And it doesn't end there--Kelly is, even now, I'm sure, preparing to protest that she was the one who turned me onto Crace, thanks very much, which requires me to point out that without me, she wouldn't know enough about Neil Gaiman to even have a crush on him.

We're a little irritating in these areas, yes, but we're probably at our worst where music is concerned. My long years at WXYC and Record Bar helped me get exposed to a number of artists long before they'd made big impressions on the culture; granted, I also got exposed to many whom the culture continues to ignore, but we'll limit ourselves to the big names for the moment. I delight in telling all who'll listen that I saw U2 and R.E.M. in Chapel Hill before they were even headliners--U2 was opening for Todd Rundgren at Kenan Stadium (at a rainy festival show with about 2000 people in attendance), and R.E.M. were opening for the English Beat at Memorial Hall. (And no, I'm not one of the desperate liars who claims to have been at R.E.M.'s legendary first Chapel Hill gig; about five people were actually in attendance at the Station, and about a million and five say they were.) Kelly, meanwhile, takes credit for introducing the family (and most of our friends) to They Might Be Giants, whose "Ana Ng" she heard on the radio soon after their second album, Lincoln, came out. And yeah, we can be a little smug about it.

So it is only right and proper, in the karmic sense, that I step forward to point out something that we've come to very, very late: Joss Whedon's superb TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Admittedly, since our TV has done nothing but show videos and DVDs since we moved to the Broadcast Hole in 1999, it's hard for us to get into any sort of show that's currently on the air. But for all seven of its seasons on the air, we kept hearing from friends that Buffy was the sort of thing we'd eat up: smart, brash, funny, scary, innovative, even touching. Alas, we didn't have any way to pick up the first few seasons until some of our friends (Hi, Ginny! Hi, Flyboy! Hi, Derik!) started getting the episodes on DVD about two years ago and decided to give us their VHS tapes. So we popped 'em in the VCR, and...

Oh, man. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. Everything they'd told us and more. We watched Seasons 1-4, bought Season 5 for ourselves, and are now working our way through Season 6 on DVD.

Why bring this up now? Mainly because we just watched the musical episode, "Once More with Feeling," in which the cast members sing and dance their way through a 48-minute show with roughly 36 minutes of music in the best musical comedy tradition. I fully recognize that not all the cast members have professional singing voices, but lord, who cares? I am in utter awe of creator/writer/director Whedon, who wrote not only the script, but all the music and all the lyrics for this episode as well. Kelly was even more effusive: "Best. Episode. Ever," she opined.

The fact that this was done as a regular episode of a continuing series speaks volumes about television's potential as a medium; it can be breathtaking, and sometimes it is: Northern Exposure's brilliant Christmas show, "Seoul Mates," or The X-Files' hilarious post-modern "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" episode. We're late to the party, I know, but damn, this is too good not to celebrate, even if we open ourselves up to ridicule by admitting we're just now getting into shows from over two years ago.

...but then again, we were among the five people who actually saw and enjoyed the original theatrical film of Buffy back before anybody knew her name...

6:22 AM

Yet another Annowrimo update:

I'm just short of 31,000 words as of last night's session, which puts me a wee bit behind schedule; I should be at 33,340. Still there's no question that breaking the 30k mark feels pretty good. It also means that the total pile o'words on this novel is about 67k, which means I'm more than two-thirds of the way through, assuming my rough estimate of this book's length is semi-accurate.

I've got a couple of days left for some hardcore writing, but then I'm off southward for a couple of weeks. First I'm taking Number Two Son to his Classic Horror Movie-Making camp; since it's in Chapel Hill, I get to hang out in my hometown for a few days, which is kewl. Then Kelly's taking the train down to meet us and we're rolling down to visit the grandparents.

What concerns me is theat I've actually started feeling a certain degree of momentum. If the day is busy and I don't get to the computer, I start feeling a little antsy. Often this results in my hitting the keyboard at 11:30 p.m. and pounding out scenes until two or three in the morning. (Needless to say, this leaves me a little bleary in the morning.)

But it does suggest that I'm going to have to do some writing on the road, and that means saddling up the laptop. There was a time when I could write longhand, but I just can't do it anymore. For one thing, it's slow; I can type far faster than I can write with a pen. For another thing, it hurts. The tendons in my hands certainly ache after a long session of keyboarding, but that's nothing compared to the pain I feel in my right hand after I've been gripping a pen and scratching out (fewer) words in a notebook. Maybe it's because I write with only one hand, while I keyboard with two--the agony is concentrated.

In any case, we don't leave until Sunday, so I've got some time to get ahead. Can I do 20,000 more words in six days?

Um. Doubtful. I'm betting we'll be taking the laptop on a little trip...


8:51 PM