A day or so ago, I was reading one of these news stories about a church group holding a Harry Potter book burning. In all the stories I’ve read about this phenomenon, I’ve never come across a statement by someone who’s against Harry Potter who’s actually read the book. I guess this shouldn’t be too surprising — anyone possessing the intellectual capacity to read a children’s book is probably smart enough to know that banning and burning books is a bad idea. Still, I find this lack of curiosity startling. For the second time this month I was inspired to write a poem. (Which is strange, since I haven’t written any other poetry since probably about third grade.) Anyway, here it is:

Burning Harry Potter
by David Kirtley

Never have the flames blazed hotter
Than when we burned Harry Potter
We dragged him out from Privet Lane
And bound him up with cuffs and chains
He flailed and wept and cried, “I’m just a kid.”
We said, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
Tied to the stake there he turned red
From tip of toe to bolt-scarred head
He blackened, charred, and then was dead
And we rejoiced, our children saved
From witchcraft, never would they rave
Again of Hogwarts, Dumbledore, or Quidditch
The witch was dead. Ding-dong. Good riddance.
No more talk of places where the magic dreamt-of creatures go
Or whatever Harry told of. We never asked. We didn’t want to know.
 

So last night I went to a documentary and panel discussion on cosmetic surgery in America. Unfortunately, somebody went and alerted the football team to the fact that the college has lecture halls, and a sizable contingent of them showed up, sat in the back, and joked loudly and catcalled throughout the whole panel. I was sitting close to the front, and I could still barely hear the panelists, who had microphones. I felt really embarrassed for USC. Apparently the fact that these guys are all headed off for the NFL has given them the sadly mistaken impression that they’re not just a bunch of hosers. I would have gone over there are kicked their asses, except that they outweighed me by a collective 150,000 pounds. Finally one girl in the audience went off on them, which succeeded in shutting them up for about three minutes. Anyway, I was pissed enough that I’m now boycotting SC football games. Not that I would ever go anyway.

Then I had a run-in with an overzealous gate security officer. It was late, and I had popped over to Subway for a sandwich, then tried to return to the parking garage. The guy at the gate stopped me and asked, “What building are you headed to?” I wasn’t headed to any building. I was just planning to sit out by the fountain (the only safe outdoor area within 30 miles) and eat my sandwich before heading home. I said, probably foolishly, “Oh, I’m just hanging out.” He frowned and said suspiciously, “I don’t know about this ‘hanging out.'” I said, “Is that a problem? I’m a student.” “Oh no, no problem,” he said, in a tone implying that there was a problem and that I probably had a dead body in my trunk, “as long as let me take down your license plate.” I was like, “Okay, whatever.” He made a big production of taking down my license plate. Gosh, I hope he doesn’t run my plates and find out that I’m wanted for a notorious spree of hangings-out on campuses all over the country. Then he was like, “Just make sure you’re gone by 6:00 a.m., or I’m going to be pissed.” (My permit doesn’t allow me to park on campus from 6:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.) I was like, “Yeah, whatever.” What a tool. I guess from now on instead of “Hanging out” I’ll be “Going to the library.”

Today I went to a lecture by Jane Goodall. Of course Goodall is one of the most famous scientists alive, but in my own peculiar cosmology what really makes her a big star is that she was referenced in a Far Side cartoon. See this page (under References in Popular Culture) for the whole story. She talked about how her fascination with animals and Africa was sparked by two fictional characters, Dr. Doolittle and Tarzan. She talked about how her erudite professors at Cambridge critized her writings as unprofessional and unscientific for ascribing such traits as “feelings” and “personalities” to mere chimpanzees. She says she knew they were wrong for one simple reason — she’d grown up with a dog. In fact, recent analysis has revealed that chimps are more similar to humans than anyone thought — we share about 99% of the same DNA. We are more similar to chimps than rats are to mice. Goodall described an incident where a startled chimp toppled into the moat surrounding his enclosure and seemed certain to drown. A bystander leapt into the water and rescued the chimp, against the orders of the keepers and at enormous risk to his own life. When asked why he’d done it, he replied, “I looked into his eyes and saw there an expression I recognized utterly, this look of, ‘Please somebody help me.'”

Last week I went to a lecture by Bruce Schneier, security expert and author of the new book Beyond Fear. He said that people often frame the security debate as one of safety versus liberty, but that this is a false opposition. Usually the best way to guarantee safety is liberty. He said that law enforcement has an irrational bias in favor of accreting power and data, but this doesn’t ever seem to make citizens safer. (“When you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack, adding more hay doesn’t help.”) He said that only three measures enacted since 9/11 have actually made air travel safer: 1) Reinforcing cockpit doors, 2) Putting air marshals on planes, and 3) Telling passengers to fight hijackers. He said that drawing up watch lists and requiring multiple IDs is a complete waste of time, because we don’t have a reliable list of the bad guys and we never will. He talked about debating someone from the TSA on the radio. The TSA guy said, “If someone’s sitting next to you on a plane, you want to know who they are.” Schneier’s retort is, “If someone’s sitting next to me on a plane, what I want to know is ‘Are they planning to blow up the plane?’ If they’re not planning to blow up the plane, then I don’t care who they are. And you know what? Even if they are planning to blow up the plane, I still don’t care who they are. I just want them to not blow up the plane.” He said that people in favor of increased surveillance and identification often ask him on the radio, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, what do you care what people know about you?” To this he replies, “What’s your salary?” The only response he ever gets is embarrassed stammering.

So last spring I paid the post office $1 to forward my mail to New York, where I spent the summer. They never forwarded a damn thing, and now I’m back at the same L.A. address. However, somehow they recently decided it would be fun to start forwarding only a randomly selected sample of my Netflix discs and nothing else. It took me a while to catch on, but then yesterday I headed over to the local Post Office to try to clear things up. I talked to three different employees who gave me three different sets of instructions. In somewhat Goldilocks-esque fashion, one set of instructions was obviously wrong, one set was probably wrong, and one set was possibly correct. I followed the possibly correct set of instructions. Fingers crossed.

Also at the post office was a painfully earnest student, obviously a freshman and obviously new to life in South Central L.A. (or maybe just to life in general). He went up to the window and loudly inquired, “CAN I BUY STAMPS HERE?” They explained to him that he could, hence the term “Post Office.” He said, “DO YOU HAVE ONES WITH BASEBALL PLAYERS?” They gave him a sheet of stamps with baseball players. He said, “DO YOU ACCEPT HUNDRED DOLLAR BILLS?” I cringed and glanced around the post office, which is home to a colorful assortment of characters, such as the homeless guy with two-inch long fingernails. It was all I could do not to grab the kid by the shoulders, shake him, and shout, “KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN! ARE YOU TRYING TO GET US ALL KILLED?”

Okay, so tonight I passed another pair of inside out jeans lying on the ground. Of course this happens all the time, but for some reason tonight I was inspired to extemporize this modest bit of prosody:

Inside Out Jeans Lying on the Ground
by David Kirtley

Inside out jeans, lying on the ground
I look in all directions, but there’s no one around
You’re not the first pair of inside out jeans to cross my path
And as with all the others, I can’t help but ask:
What on earth could possibly be the reason
For someone this damp parking lot with their inside out jeans to season?
If inside out jeans could speak, what stories would they tell?
I do not think they will speak to me
Was it the result of some well-orchestrated carnal scheme, or was it random
For someone this pair of inside out jeans to so wildly abandon?
The mind boggles, and I just really don’t see
Why these sorts of bacchanalian, couture-shedding jaunts never seem to happen to me
Only one thing to do! Drop trou, and skedaddle home
It just wouldn’t be right to leave this pair of inside out jeans lying inside out alone

Last night I drove over to the UCLA Hammer Museum to see Bret Easton Ellis read from his new novel, Lunar Park, a wildly embellished memoir. Seating was limited, so we got there a whole hour early, which I thought was being excessively cautious, but there were already thirty people ahead of us in line when we got there. Maybe a hundred or two more showed up. While Ellis was reading, someone’s cell phone kept ringing loudly. Ellis finally stopped and joked, “You know, I decided I didn’t really want to read this part anyway, so if you want to take that go ahead,” and flipped to the next chapter. During the Q&A, someone asked him about the ways in which music influences his writing. He said, “I tend to write characters that I don’t like, so I give them musical tastes that I don’t like either. The best example of this would be Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. You know, people always ask me, ‘Is it difficult for you to write these violent scenes of torture and dismemberment?’ but let me tell you, that’s nowhere near as traumatic for me as having to spend a week listening to Whitney Houston and Genesis and then writing about them.”

Last night I went to an “Introduction to Feminism” lecture given by a USC professor. One of her areas of interest is the ways in which dead women are portrayed in popular culture. According to her, the culture is full of images of women who are both sexy and lifeless. (She showed a poster for the new movie Black Dahlia as a recent example.) She said it’s very hard to find comparable images of sexy, lifeless men. Her point was that the preponderance of such images of women subconsciously encourages people to place too much value on the qualities that these images emphasize — physical beauty and passivity. Later, I mentioned this at grad student bar night, and one of the women there concurred, citing a recent fashion shoot in Cosmo (I think) in which models on a staircase were posed to look as if they’d all just fallen and broken their necks. I’d never really noticed this pattern before, but now I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

Tonight I went to see an appearance by one of the writers for The Simpsons. Pretty much everything he said was funny. I kind of wish I had it on tape. One line that sticks out in my mind is when he said, “People often ask me what I’d do if I couldn’t write comedy. I tell them that in that case I’d write for Jay Leno.” *zing*

If you received an obscene message today from my Myspace account, please ignore it. Here’s what happened.

The internet in my apartment wasn’t working this morning, so I walked over to campus and logged into Myspace using one of the terminals in the library lobby. A few hours later I came back and checked my email, and found a message from one of my friends asking, “Why did you leave the comment ‘Fagman’ on my page? And why did you change your profile name to ‘David Barr Kirtley — Fiction Homosexual’?” I was like, oh crap. I logged into Myspace to find that my profile had been vandalized and several obscene messages had been sent from my account. I realized that you really have to sign out of Myspace. Closing the window isn’t enough. (The next person to open a window and go to Myspace will be logged in as you.) I changed my password, fixed everything, and tried to do damage control.

Some time later, I went back to the terminal I was at this morning and found a gang of the local juvenile delinquent skater kids clustered around it … browsing Myspace. So I’m sure it was them. I talked to the people at the library, but they said that unless I had solid proof there was nothing they could do about it. Those gang kids all have rap sheets full of grand theft auto and attempted rape, so I guess it’s no surprise that nobody here seems all that motivated to bust them for electronic vandalism, but it still really sucks.

Anyway, the lesson for the day is: always make sure to sign out of Myspace when using a public computer.

And BTW, is there any way in Myspace to see whose pages you’ve recently commented on?

Interesting week. Monday night I was riding the tram and a girl sat down next to me holding a giant box of candy apples. I asked her what they were for. She explained that her sorority (Sigma Lambda Gamma, the national multicultural sorority) was selling them to raise money for breast cancer research, so I bought one. She also invited me to come along to their breast cancer awareness candlelight vigil, so I went to that Tuesday night.

On Friday I managed to find my way over to the Health Sciences campus to see an appearance by Oliver Sacks, author of the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and subject of the film Awakenings. Well over a hundred people came to see him, and the crowds were jammed along the back and side walls of the auditorium. He spoke about some of the strange intersections between psychology and music. People with debilitating conditions such as stuttering or even Parkinson’s often see their symptoms temporarily recede when they do something musical — sing, dance, play the piano, or even just think about music. One of the professors present testified to this — a few months ago she was in a car accident that involved massive head trauma, which rendered her unable to speak to several weeks. When this professor’s mother came to visit her in the hospital, the only way this professor was able to communicate was by singing an aria.

After that I drove over to a bar in Silver Lake to celebrate the birthday of one of my friends from grad school. While there, I met a teacher, who said, “Are you another writer?” I nodded. She said, “Everyone here is a writer. All anyone is talking about is writing. Can you talk about anything besides writing?” I was like, “Um … well, I just went to this lecture by Oliver Sacks. He wrote this famous book called The Man Who Mistook His … oh wait, I guess that kind of has to do with writing. Sorry.”

And speaking of writing, yesterday I went to the West Hollywood Book Fair, which was awesome. I went to panels on thrillers, vampires, and spec fic, ran into a bunch of people I knew, and met some really cool new people, including an SC student who’s working on a memoir about her days as a Vegas showgirl. (She’s already written three volumes, which makes me contemplate the prospect of being in your twenties and having a life that would take up three volumes. I think I’m probably good for a solid novella-length memoir. Or maybe novelette. Oh hell, short story.)

Last year I was talking to another one of my friends from grad school, who told me that one of her best friends had just published a first novel, a fantasy about dragons aboard Napoleanic-era ships. I mentioned it to The Slush God, who was sufficiently intrigued to hunt down an advance copy (and who gave it an enthusiastic review). The author’s name is Naomi Novik. If you haven’t heard of her, you will, because her fantasy series was just optioned by frickin’ Peter Jackson. Holy crap. My friend here was telling me that the negotiations have been in progress for six months, so Naomi has known about this bombshell but hasn’t been allowed to tell anyone, even her parents. Anyway, congratulations Naomi. That’s amazing.

At the reading series last week, one student read a piece that riffed on a recent New York Times article. This article claims that cleaning your living area is hazardous to your health. Neat people who wipe up everywhere usually just end up spreading bacteria all over the place. One study concluded that the lowest levels of bacteria are found in the residences of bachelors, who never wipe up (and tend to have huge piles of dishes in their sinks). I don’t know if this is true, but it sounds good to me. I anxiously await more scientific studies that will vindicate my other bad habits.

Yesterday I went to the Writers Faire at UCLA with Abby and learned some interesting tips about breaking into film & TV. We also stopped by a novelty store that had amusing T-shirts such as “I’m on the Carne Asada Diet” or “You Looked Better on Myspace” or “I’m the guy you’re going to settle for anyway, so why not go home with me now?” Through a massive application of willpower, I restrained myself from buying any cool toy swords or extraordinarily-realistic Japanese-made firearm replicas. Tonight I went to the inaugural meeting of the Free Culture club at USC, which featured a riveting appearance by Cory Doctorow. (Props to The Slush God for keeping my apprised of that.) It’s great having Cory at USC. He’s even bringing Bruce Sterling to speak in a few weeks.

Last night was awesome. I attended the student reading series, and read the first two scenes of my new story, “Save Me Plz.” The audience laughed a lot and seemed really engaged. Afterward, one guy asked if he could read the whole thing, so I gave him my reading copy. After that a bunch of us went to hang out at another student’s apartment, and then he asked if I would read them the rest of the story. I went back to my apartment, printed out another copy, returned to the party, and read my story. After that, just about everyone asked if I could get them a copy so they could read it again. It was a lot of fun. Writing fiction is so often solitary, it’s nice (and all too rare) when you can turn it into a party.

Since I’m a student at USC, I often encounter people who presume that I give a rat’s ass about — and am in fact somehow knowledgable about — college football. I met one just now. I was walking past the trophy hall, and a middle-aged guy stopped me. He explained that he and some friends had driven hours to get there, but had found the building locked. (Imagine the tragedy of not being able to get in to see O.J. Simpson’s Heismann.) The guy asked me who could open the building. I had no idea. He asked where the coach’s offices are. I got nothing. He asked where the team practices. Nope. Nada. Fortunately he stopped questioning me before I was forced to admit that I don’t even know the quarterback’s name, let alone where he likes to hang out.

Yesterday I was at the post office mailing a package, and the lady behind the counter asked if I minded getting my change all in singles. I said no problem. She handed me a sheaf of fifteen one-dollar bills and added, “Be careful with that. Your girlfriend sees that, she’s going to think you’re off to the strip club,” so I said, “Well, maybe I am.” Sadly it’s a moot point, as I have no girlfriend. (Unless you count Audrey.)

Last night was my program’s fancy Fall Festival of Writers, which was fun. I met a bunch of new people, caught up with a bunch of people I knew, and generally tried to recoup as much of my tuition costs as possible on the free wine. I actually met someone who used to live in my hometown, which doesn’t happen very often. (Katonah, anyone?) I also heard reports that USC students were being assaulted by baseball bat-wielding muggers outside the 29 Cafe Wednesday night, and one student was sent to the hospital with a busted kneecap. (And guess where I spent all of Wednesday night?)

Tonight is the student reading series, and I got roped into reading something. I still have to decide what. I think we only get about ten minutes each.

If you’re still in the market for the October issue of Realms of Fantasy, they’re selling them over at Clarkesworld Books. I ordered a few extra copies, and they arrived just fine.

I went to an undergraduate institution (Colby) that had banned fraternities and sororities. Now I live just around the corner from a whole street full of frat houses and sorority houses. It’s kind of interesting (and often irritating). One thing that’s really striking is the degree of conformity, especially among the girls. The other day I was walking past a girl standing at the corner. An SUV pulled up, the window rolled down, and a girl in the truck said (in a perky, squeaky voice), “Hi!” to the one on the corner. The one on the corner responded, “Hi!” and hesitated. The girl in the truck was skinny and tanned and wore a white tanktop and had chemically bleached and straightened hair and wore huge bug-eye sunglasses. I thought to myself, “There is no possible way that the girl on the corner can recognize the one in the car. There are 2,000 girls living on this street who are indistinguishable from this one from this angle.” Perhaps sensing this, the girl in the car piped, “It’s Kristy!” and the girl on the corner answered, “I know!” But I think she was lying. Or maybe she recognized the vehicle. (Sorority vehicles don’t display much variation either — mostly SUVs, mostly white — but moreso than the girls themselves.) Or maybe it’s like penguins and they can all just recognize each other through pheremones or something.

The new (2007) edition of Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market includes a piece by The Slush God entitled “Boot Camps for Writers” in which I am quoted. Check it out.

So last night I was talking about the demotion of Pluto from planet status, and one guy said it was a shame since “Pluto” is actually a pretty cool name for a planet. I pointed out that this is doubly a shame considering that not all planets have cool names. Yeah, I think you know what planet I’m talking about. In case you missed it, there’s a planet right here in our very own solar system that has the worst planet name ever. (Unless somebody named a planet “Ursphincter” and I never heard about it.) So here’s my proposal: Let’s take the cool planet name “Pluto” and apply it to that other planet. Everybody wins. Remember, when this happens, you heard it here first.