Clip from Bill Maher’s New Film Religulous: “You Don’t Have to Pass an IQ Test to be in the Senate”

 

Here’s a conversation I had recently with a female relative of mine, who for her own good shall remain anonymous.

Anonymous Relative: David! Why haven’t you written a story about me? I’m always telling you to write a story and put me in it, and you never do it!
Me: No, I guess not.
AR: Well, why not?
Me: I don’t know. Do you think you’d make a good character?
AR: Yes!
Me: You know, good characters in fiction are usually complex and conflicted. Do you think that you’re complex and conflicted?
AR: Yes!
Me: Well, what kind of character would you be? I mean, say you had to describe yourself. Give me ten adjectives.
AR: I have ADD.
Me: Okay, that’s not really an adjective, but I’ll take it.
AR: Um, I’m flighty. I hate school. I always say exactly what I think.
Me: Okay, how about some positive qualities.
AR: Huh?
Me: I mean, what’s good about you? Everything you’ve listed so far is something negative.
AR: I said that I always say exactly what I think. That’s something good.
Me: Um … I guess it could be.
AR: And I’m a good friend.
Me: In what way are you a good friend?
AR: Well, like, if I want to say something bad about one of my friends, I wait until they’re not around, so they won’t get their feelings hurt.
Me: Wait, so you say bad things about your friends, but only behind their backs?
AR: Yeah … I also help people with their problems.
Me: Like what problems?
AR: Well, like I help my friend [redacted].
Me: And what are her problems?
AR: That she’s a total whore.
Me: Um … and how do you help her with that?
AR: I tell her to stop being such a whore.

“Heidi Dalibor was arrested after she failed to return the books Angels and Demons and White Oleander last year. “I said, what could they possibly do? They can’t arrest me for this… I was wrong,” Dalibor said. Full story Be afraid, Binkley. Be very afraid. Though come to think of it, I guess I’m sort of in favor of arresting anyone who reads a Dan Brown book.

Yesterday I picked up a copy of John Joseph Adams’ new anthology Seeds of Change (“Nine science fiction writers envision moments when our world could be reborn”), which includes original stories by Tobias S. Buckell, Ken MacLeod, Jay Lake, Blake Charlton, Jeremiah Tolbert, and others. I got a nod on the acknowledgments page, where JJA writes: “Many thanks to … The NYC Geek Posse — consisting of Christopher M. Cevasco, Douglas E. Cohen, David Barr Kirtley, Andrea Kail, and Rob Bland, among others (i.e., the NYCGP Auxiliary) — for giving me an excuse to come out of my editorial cave once in a while.” There’s also now a Seeds of Change website, which includes a nifty trailer by Jack Kincaid as well as free samples of the book’s contents.

A lot of time was spent at the Alpha workshop sharing funny internet videos. The best of these that I saw (thanks to Joshua Cole) was Brad Neely’s George Washington music video. This lyrical sampling should give you a fair idea of the tone of the song: Here comes George, in control. Women dug his snuff and his gallant stroll. Ate opponents’ brains and invented cocaine. He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming. You have been warned.

Early in the week we did a writing exercise in which we attempted to compose the worst possible first sentence. One of these entries, written in the purple prose of a bad romance novel, contained the phrase “marble Adonis,” which became a running joke at the workshop. (We also established, based on the popularity of various students’ contributions, that the ideal opening line for this group was: “Having a zombie penguin pound a stake through your forehead isn’t as much fun as it sounds.”) At the group reading at Barnes & Noble, I read my story “Red Road,” which seemed to go over extremely well. (The audience burst into spontaneous cheers during my dramatic rendition of Francis’ climactic soliloquy.) The story describes Francis thusly: “It was true what mice said — Francis, with his thick tawny fur and large, imposing ears, was the tallest and most handsome mouse in all of Kingsburrow.” Some students then got it into their heads that Francis was the mousely equivalent of a “marble Adonis,” and they started referring to him as the “marble Adonimouse,” which inspired Lara Donnelly’s illustration (below), which I think is my first-ever piece of a fan art.

Like many writers, I spend a lot of time daydreaming, so I’m often pretty oblivious to my surroundings. At the first couple meals in the cafeteria, I grabbed a few bananas to take back to my room to snack on. I then lost count of how many bananas I’d actually collected, and where exactly I’d deposited them, and I ended up with way too many bananas — to the extent that my room acquired the distinctively cloying odor of browning bananas, and I started joking that I was having nightmares in which I was being chased down and smothered by sinister ambulatory bananas. I kept snacking on my stash of bananas throughout the week. Toward the end of the workshop, one of the students, Devon Wong, asked me, “Hey, have you noticed any bananas appearing in your suite?” I replied, “Huh?” Devon said, “Because all week, as a joke, we’ve been planting bananas in your suite — on the counter, on the desk in your bedroom — every time you step out, and we’ve been waiting for you to say something, but you never have, so we weren’t sure whether you were psyching us out or whether you could have really not noticed.” I said, “No, I hadn’t noticed. But come on, I had a ton of bananas in there already, so it’s not like I would really notice a few more.” To which Devon replied, “Yeah, but we’ve planted a lot more than just a few. I put five in there, and other people have been doing it too.” I said, “Wow. No, I guess I’ve just been eating them all. But thanks for getting those for me.”

Devon also seems to have started up a not-entirely-serious fan club for me over on Facebook. This fan club describes itself as: “The official DBK fan group on facebook. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, especially not DBK. DBK is one of the newest and freshest voices in sf/f. His work combines madness, whimsy, heart, and often talking animals, and other things that talk when they really have no right at all to be talking. Members of this group know the exploits of King Francis, we worship at the altar of Cat, and those of us with our virginity intact fear dragons.”

Today was certainly better than yesterday, but also contained its share of headaches. The hotel room alarm clock didn’t go off, the automatic wake-up call never arrived, and the hotel’s ISP booted my laptop at around 5:00 a.m., killing the online alarm clock I had running. Fortunately I just happened to wake up in time, though really there turned out not to be any rush, since today’s flight was delayed too. I was also irritated to note that the food I carefully packed away has been fraternizing with the other contents of my luggage. Blurgh.

Anyway, I’m back in New York now.

Ah, the convenience of modern air travel. Today I attempted to fly from Pittsburgh to New York, but only made it as far as Philadelphia. My trip so far has included: 1 hour spent sitting on the runway prior to takeoff; upon discovering that my flight to New York had been cancelled, 1 hour spent waiting to talk to a gate agent, only to be told that I needed to be standing in a different line; 2 hours spent standing in the correct line, where I was given a new ticket and a piece of paper that was clearly designed to trick you into thinking that it’s a hotel voucher when in fact the airline is not giving you jack; 1 hour spent standing in line to check into the hotel — along with all the other suckers brandishing their worthless pseudo-vouchers.

More tomorrow!

Hellboy II was fun. I have only vague recollections of the first one, which I recall being surprisingly interesting but ultimately sort of a letdown. I was expecting this one to have awesome visuals but to not make much sense and to get annoying by the third act. And the visuals were indeed awesome, but I actually thought the script was pretty good. The elf prince stole the show for me. The movie did eventually devolve into formula and illogic, but the ending was briskly paced enough that I didn’t get too restless. Based on the credits, it looked as if the creator of the graphic novel worked on the movie, which is something I wish happened more often. (When I saw the trailer for Wanted, I thought: There’s no way in hell I’m watching this movie. Then it said, “Based on the graphic novel,” and I thought: Hmm. Well, maybe I’ll give it a chance — though I still haven’t. But it’s been really striking to me how much stronger the writing is in most modern graphic novels compared to most new original screenplays.)

I still vividly remember the weird sense of dislocation I experienced the first time I discovered that Dr. Seuss had been a political cartoonist during World War II and had drawn all these pictures of Hitler. In my head, Dr. Seuss and Hitler just occupied two completely separate planes, and it was really jarring to see the two combined. I had another moment like that again yesterday, when I opened up my latest issue of Hi-Fructose magazine and discovered that Dr. Seuss was really into … taxidermy? Apparently Dr. Seuss liked to create hunting trophy-style mounted heads of fanciful animals. These creations were stitched together from actual animal parts (that Seuss acquired from his father, a warden at a local zoo) and then painted to look like Dr. Seuss cartoons come to life (and then, subsequently, death). You can see some of these on the Dr. Seuss website.

My buddy Chris Cevasco, an author and also the editor of Paradox magazine, was just quoted in this L.A. Times article about historical novelist Karen Essex.

Essex’s historical novels join a field increasingly filled with female writers rehabilitating female characters, such as Ashley Crownover’s Wealtheow: Her Telling of Beowulf and Susan Fraser King’s Lady MacBeth, noted Christopher M. Cevasco, editor and publisher of the historical-fiction-focused Paradox magazine.

“Female figures in history have tended to be viewed as extremes, either the virtuous extreme or the dastardly extreme,” Cevasco said. “They almost tend not to be described as real people. I think Karen succeeds in making her characters come alive as women rather than as caricatures.”