Well, I’m back in New York now. Been pretty busy.

Let’s see, I flew out of LAX on the 10th. As I was making my way toward the metal detectors and X-ray machines, the hallway divided in a somewhat confusing fashion. As the crowd kept going straight, the young woman in front of me turned and asked, “Were we supposed to go that way?” I laughed and said, “I was just following you.” It turned out we were on the same flight to Chicago, so we hung out by the gate and chatted. After deplaning, we met up again and grabbed some food. My flight was delayed and delayed, so we hung out talking for hours and learned significant chunks of each other’s life stories, which made the time pass much more pleasantly. She was on her way home to upstate New York after having spent a semester abroad in Australia, and, amusingly, she had the same name as a bestselling fantasy author. (No, not “Lois McMaster Bujold.”)

Then my cousin Brian and his fiancee Kelly visited for a few days. We went to the Katonah Museum of Art, which had an amazing exhibit called Over + Over: Passion for Process, consisting of art executed with an almost obsessive-compulsive level of detail or repetition, such as using a scalpel to cut away every part of a map of Austria while leaving all of the hundreds of roads intact. The KMoA is pretty small and out-of-the-way, and when we showed up the docent seemed shocked and ecstatic to have five people on a tour. We also went and saw a special screening of Brokeback Mountain that included a Q&A with the director, Ang Lee. The movie was outstanding. Ang Lee got a long standing ovation when he walked out on stage. His comments were inspiring, and also fascinating, particularly his discussion of portraying the strongly verbal culture of Sense & Sensibility versus the largely non-verbal culture of Brokeback Mountain. The audience included many members of the LGBT community, including the president of the Gay Rodeo Cowboys Association, and they expressed heartfelt gratitude that the film told their story with honesty and respect.

Then this weekend I went to a couple lunches and parties in Mahattan, and said hi to some of my NY friends, which was fun. It’s good seeing everyone again.

My science fiction story “Veil of Ignorance” just went up for sale on Fictionwise.com. This is my best story, according to the Slush God.

I’m quite proud of “Veil of Ignorance.” It employs a shifting first person viewpoint somewhat similar to the one used by Alfred Bester in “Fondly Fahrenheit.” This was an absolute bear to make work. In the three years since I wrote the first draft, I’ve reworked the story countless times to make the point of view trick more clear and consistent. This Fictionwise version includes a few polishes that didn’t appear in the version published in the All the Rage This Year anthology. Basically, going over the story again, I caught a few very, very subtle inconsistencies in the pov: 1) it’s established that the characters know what each other are thinking, but in one or two places they appear not to, and 2) in one spot the viewpoint switches to Dillon, but then a few lines later Dillon is referred to in the third person. Both fixed now.

Well, things are pretty much wrapped up around here. Classes are done, assignments are handed in, local friends have been dined, other friends have been driven to the airport, travel arrangements have been made. One Literary Society meeting, one MPW Reading Series, and I’m outta here.

I finally tested out my pepper spray. I really should have done this earlier, I guess, but I didn’t for two reasons. 1) It’s hard to find a good place to test it. The vendor said I’d get in trouble if I shot it off on campus, but obviously I didn’t want to let loose with it in my apartment, and outside my apartment is a very busy neighborhood, and I feel self-conscious, like, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’m just testing out my pepper spray on your property here.” The other reason, 2), is that everyone I’ve talked to who actually shot it has managed to accidentally debilitate themselves or a close friend for a period of hours ranging from 4 to 24, and I’ve been too busy for that. But now that everything’s wrapped up and I had nothing really to do for a day or so, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to accidentally injure myself with pepper spray.

I went to an undisclosed location and shot it. At first I thought it was broken, but it turns out you just have to press the button down really, really hard. That’s a good detail to work out in a non-life-threatening context. Anyway, I pressed the button and a spurt of translucent brownish liquid that looked strikingly like salad dressing shot about three feet. As the spray quickly lost forward momentum, a lot of it trickled onto my fingers. I examined my fingers. They were stained orange, but I didn’t really feel or smell anything, except maybe a vague stench of rancid salsa. At first I was like, “You’ve gotta be kidding me. Who is this going to scare off?” I had always imagined that firing pepper spray would be like shooting someone with a really, really powerful can of Raid, not like squirting them with salad dressing. Then my fingers started to burn. Not bad enough that I couldn’t ignore it, but enough to make me think I should wash them off real soon, which I did, thoroughly, with soap and water, but they kept burning. It was never any worse than a mild sunburn, but it didn’t go away. After a while I got distracted and forgot about it, but when I got ready for bed eight hours later I noticed that my fingers were still burning, and I had trouble getting to sleep. And that was just a little bit that I washed off immediately. I really wouldn’t want to know what it feels like to get the whole thing in your face, let alone your eyes. I apologized to the pepper spray for doubting its puissance.

In case anyone was wondering, I’ll be going home to New York for the holidays. I’ll be there Dec 10 – Jan 7.

Eugen M. Bacon, a writer living in Australia, has posted extremely positive Fictionwise recommendations for some of my stories.

One of the frat houses on my street has a teddy bear wearing a UCLA T-shirt hanging by a noose from the balcony. I guess the USC vs. UCLA football game must be this weekend.

Last night I was walking near my apartment after dark with my friend Erica when we spotted a guy headed toward us. Erica whispered, “That guy looks sketchy. Should we turn around?” The guy was close enough and walking fast enough that the only way we could really avoid him would be to turn and sprint in the opposite direction. That seemed a bit drastic to me, and besides, the guy seemed focused on a cell phone conversation. I shrugged and said, “I’ve got my pepper spray.” As we neared, the guy reached his free hand inside his jacket flap and held it there, pretty clearly suggesting that he had a gun. I was sure we were about to get mugged, but the guy passed us without incident. Still not sure what was going on there. Maybe he was just fucking with us. Or maybe he suspected we were going to jump him. I guess that’s a reasonable concern if you see two people spot you, stop to confer, then keep walking toward you.

Tonight I went to a free advance screening of Grandma’s Boy, a decidely sub-average comedy in the vein of The Waterboy or Mr. Deeds. It had a strikingly unpolished, straight-to-video feel, full of awkward silences, bad comic timing, and set-ups that didn’t pay off, but it did have a fair number of funny moments as well. Its portrayal of the video game industry was, sadly, fairly accurate.

Last night I went to a poetry reading event organized by fellow MPWer Lisa. I had spent Thanksgiving visiting relatives in Modesto, so making it to this event in time involved driving 8 hours and skipping 2 meals. I was envisioning about eight attendees crammed into a smoky basement (the invitations had talked about the importance of RSVPing due to “venue constrictions”), and I wanted to be there to show my support and fill out the audience. It turns out I needn’t have worried. The crowd was more like eighty than eight, and the place was the size of a cathedral. It was actually one of the most surreal venues I’ve ever seen. After much to-ing and fro-ing I finally located the address, but was sure I must have the wrong place. It was in the middle of nowhere up on North Broadway, and the modest frontage was dark, nondescript, and covered with swirls of grafitti. But stepping inside was like entering another world. I swear it was bigger inside than out, and contained a cavernous auditorium, a sprawling kitchen/lounge/art gallery, and an open-air courtyard with a wood-burning stove. There’s a picture here, but it doesn’t really capture the magical otherworldliness of first stepping inside. The crowd was very trendy and very L.A. (Leopard-fur coats and, as one of my friends put it, “a whole lotta F.M.B.’s.” (“F***-Me” Boots.) I was reminded strongly of the scene in The Player when Tim Robbins takes his lover to a surreal spa somewhere outside Hollywood. “Do places like this really exist?” she asks, and he replies, “Only in the movies.” After starving all day, I gorged on free wine, cheese, and crackers. The poetry was fantastic, and I ran into a surprising number of people I knew. All around a great evening.

Went to see a free advance screening of the new movie Just Friends. It was much funnier than I was expecting. When the hockey kid said, “I dub you sir suckster” (or whatever it was) I almost fell out of my seat I was laughing so hard. I even kind of liked the soundtrack, including “Eyes” by Rogue Wave.

Yesterday I drove down to Huntington Beach to see George R. R. Martin at Barnes & Noble. There was a massive crowd there. (They said 260 people had bought books to be signed, and there were probably a lot more people — including me — who were just there to hear him speak.) GRRM was great, as always. He related hilarious anecdotes from earlier in his career (when not quite so many people showed up to see him), such as the time he gave a reading in a coffee shop and the only people in the audience moved out to the patio after he was introduced. There was also the time he had to sit and watch as hundreds of people streamed past him in order to have their Clifford the Big Red Dog books get stamped by a junior store employee in a dog costume. Fortunately, things have changed. He said he’d just gotten word that A Feast for Crows will be debuting at #1 on the NY Times bestseller list, a first for him. That got a big round of applause. He joked that taking five years to write AFFC was all part of his brilliant strategy to build up the series’s popularity so that AFFC would sell better.

I had managed to get a pretty good spot right behind him, so I decided to hang out there during the signing and take note of what sorts of things people said to him and how he handled them. One couple described how they’d saved AFFC to read on their honeymoon. One guy came up and was like, “I just wanted to say that you’ve been my favorite author for 30 years now. Ever since I read ‘A Song for Lya’ in Analog magazine.” They chatted a bit as GRRM signed all the guy’s books, and as the guy gathered up his pile, he said, “I hope you keep writing for another 30 years,” and GRRM joked, “It may take me another 30 years to finish this series.” One guy said something to GRRM about the “Brothers,” by which I figured he must mean the Brotherhood Without Banners, the GRRM fan club. I’ve met some of the BwBers at conventions, and had figured some members would probably show up to this event, but I hadn’t been organized enough beforehand to find out for sure. I wandered over to where the guy was hanging out with a large group of people and introduced myself. They were indeed the local BwBers, and they invited me to join them for dinner. One woman very nicely offered me a ride.

We were supposed to leave B&N, turn right, drive a few miles, and look for a Blockbuster on the right. The restaurant would be behind it. We drove down the strip without seeing a Blockbuster and got out into the darkened residential streets. We figured we must have missed it and turned around. We drove all the way back to B&N without seeing it. We decided maybe the directions had been confused and that we were supposed to turn left out of B&N. We tried that, but still saw no Blockbuster. I tried asking for directions at a few gas stations and liquor stores, but couldn’t find anyone who spoke English, let alone knew where Blockbuster was. Finally we found a pay phone, called information, and got an address for Blockbuster. It was back the other way, of course. We headed back, trying to read the numbered streetsigns, which was somewhat difficult in the pitch black darkness. As were doing this, going maybe 40 mph, a small woman wearing all black tried to cross right in front of our car (and not at an intersection). The driver slammed on the brakes and the car skidded twenty feet, tires screeching. I was sure the pedestrian would be killed, but somehow she managed to kind of leap out of the way at the last minute, missing the hood by less than a foot.

Adrenaline pumping, we finally located the address, and discovered the dark, abandoned husk of what had apparently once been a Blockbuster, though all the big glowing letters had been torn off. So we did finally locate the restaurant. We heard that even the guy who’d picked the restaurant had driven past it once. Anyway, after that everything was fine and dinner was a lot fun.

Last night I went to see a lecture by one of the Enron whistle-blower women, but, very confusingly, ended up at a debate on global warming instead. (Turns out the Enron whistle-blower woman is on Thursday, not Tuesday.) The two speakers both had impressive academic credentials (phDs in physics from, respectively, Stanford and Columbia), and so I was wondering how they managed to dig up an actual scientist who was going to deny global warming. It turns out they hadn’t. Both speakers heaped derision on anyone who denied global warming. It was one of those weird “debates” where the speakers agree with everything the other says. While this lack of red meat makes for a less-than-compelling debate, I guess it is representative of the “debate” among scientists about global warming.

The auditorium was packed, but only because all first year English composition students were required to attend, despite the fact that the topic has no apparent connection to English composition. When I was an undergrad, my school used similar nefarious tactics (in the guise of the “wellness” credit) to compel attendance for guest speakers. I think this a bad idea, but whatever, nobody asked me. What you end up with is an unruly mob of students who take out their displeasure on the guests by ostentatiously ignoring them — students shift in their seats, do reading for class, write papers, or carry on loud running conversations with their neighbors. It’s actually even worse nowadays, since everyone has lightweight wireless laptops. I was sitting in the back, and so looked out over a sea of glowing monitors. Everyone whose screen I could see was browsing Facebook, using Instant Messenger, or playing computer solitaire. Sometimes you could barely hear the speakers over the clatter of keyboards.

A few weeks ago I signed up for a free “Narnia screening” at USC. I took this to mean I’d be watching the actual film, but then a few days ago I read the fine print and realized that they were just showing a 10 minute trailer, as well as some featurettes, all of which can be seen here. The trailer they showed was longer than the one available online, being the special “college only” version, but it’s mostly the same footage (and, annoyingly, it had the word “college” printed in white block text in the lower left-hand corner throughout). There was a surprisingly large turnout. Actually, it’s not so surprising considering that 80% of the crowd seemed to think they were there to watch the actual movie.

The organizers raffled off free shirts, wool caps, and — tauntingly — tickets to the actual advance screening. Some people were chosen randomly and some won by answering trivia questions. I was sure I’d be a strong competitor in the trivia contest, having recently read a biography of Lewis and a book about the Inklings, and imagining that they’d ask softball questions like, “What’s the lion’s name?” But the first question: “Who illustrated the original The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?” As you can imagine, dead silence greeted that one. Next was, “Name all the books in the Narnia series.” One guy very impressively rattled them off. If you’d given me a full minute, I could probably have come up with all the others, but I never would have remembered The Silver Chair. Then we had, “In what city was C.S. Lewis born?” More silence. I didn’t win anything, but I did manage to score one of the wool knit caps that they were just handing out to people who asked afterward. It’s actually pretty cool — it’s black with a red lion rampant on the front and on the back it says, “Aslan is on the move.”

Last night for my Academy Series class we watched The Sea Inside and heard from the producer. I actually enjoyed the movie a lot more than I was expecting to. This afternoon I’ll be going to a luncheon to hear a lecture by the woman who adapted Memoirs of a Geisha to the screen.

Last night I also went and saw Heather Mills McCartney (Paul McCartney’s wife) talk about her work on land mines and animal rights. She was like, “I’m about to show you hidden-camera footage of cats and dogs in China being skinned alive for their fur. I’m sorry to have to show you this, but words can’t convey it. I think you really have to show people what’s happening in order to motivate them to change it. Just watch as much as you can, then turn away when it gets to be too much.” From the audience there was sort of a collective, “Um….” then the film was rolling. I’ve never been afraid I might vomit in the aisle of the theater before, but I guess there’s a first time for everything. I guess it’s too slow and expensive to actually kill the cats and dogs, so they literally just put a collar on them, tie them to a pole, and start cutting their fur off with a knife. This happens to about 2 million cats and dogs in China each year. The fur is then dyed to look like fox or mink or whatever, or even fake fur, mislabeled as such, and then used to make coats or jacket linings sold in the U.S. and Europe. It was incredibly revolting.

A Feast for Crows comes out tomorrow. I finished re-reading A Storm of Swords this afternoon, so I’m all set to go. A Feast for Crows is already available for download in PDF format from Amazon.com, but through a massive application of willpower I’m restraining myself from downloading it, and holding out instead for the Audible.com version to be released. In the best of all possible worlds, it would be posted at the stroke of midnight, but I’m afraid it probably won’t go online until sometime tomorrow morning, after I’ve already gone to bed. (If I can go to bed.) After waiting three years, it’s hard not to have built up inflated expectations, but I’m doing my best to moderate them. After all, I remember really disliking some things about the first three books the first time I read them, though upon repeated readings the things that initially bothered me mostly don’t anymore. It’s been said that a great work of literature is one that can be read repeatedly with increasing pleasure. By that standard, A Song of Ice and Fire definitely qualifies. Each time I read through it, I’m blown away by how many connections there are that I never noticed before.

This morning I manned a table in front of Tommy Trojan to sign people up for the USC College Democrats. That was fun, and I met a slew of new people. My table was affiliated with a coalition of groups including the USC Women Students Association and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance that held a rally opposing California’s Proposition 73. The other groups had lots of stickers, and for me they selected a large pink one that read “This is What a Feminist Looks Like,” which generated much commentary and mirth from everyone I ran into from that point on.

Tonight for the first time I workshopped a scene from my play with my new professor, and he was very positive about it, so that was cool.

I also finally picked up some pepper spray today, so … yeah, it’s on now. Who wants some?

On Thursday I went to see director David Lynch talk about film and transcendental meditation (TM). They had some young guy hooked up to an EEG to show the dramatic effects that TM had on his brainwave patterns. Sadly, my EEG-reading skills are a bit rusty, and I couldn’t really tell the difference. I was actually more intrigued by the throwaway comment that closing your eyes frees your brain from having to process visual stimuli and therefore allows it to focus more brainpower on other tasks. Is that true? Lynch spoke about his dream of raising $7 billion to found a peacemaker academy, similar to a military academy except the exact opposite, that would graduate people who would go out into the world spreading TM and bliss. He admitted that $7 billion sounds like a lot, but really that’s only the cost of 3.5 B1 bombers. If we can find the money to spend on B1 bombers, is it so unreasonable to think that we could try spending that money promoting world peace instead? It’s a solid-sounding argument, but then again, compared to buying a B1 bomber, pretty much anything sounds like a deal. Lynch also fielded questions about film, and confirmed what I have long suspected about the weird homeless man / monster in Mulholland Drive — that it makes no sense. Lynch said, “Sometimes you just have a random idea for some weird shit and you just say ‘to hell with it’ and put it in your movie.” I’m paraphrasing, of course.

Tonight I went and saw musical satirist Ray Zimmerman, who’s sort of like a very political Weird Al Yankovich. I thought he was great. Listen to his hilarious song “T.M.I.” Unfortunately, I can’t find an audio version of my favorite song he played, “My Conservative Girlfriend.” (My conservative girlfriend / every Sunday we go Medicare slashin’ … My conservative girlfriend / Her white collar and her red neck are clashin’.) And speaking of funny songs, I finally found a copy of the Particle Board song online. (I have to live my life alone / ‘cuz if I ever bring a woman home / she’ll take one look at my place and any chance is blown. / I guess that I have to admit / a guy looks like he can’t commit / when a hex wrench can dismantle anything he owns.”) Check it out.

As my first semester of grad school draws toward its twilight and deadlines loom, I find I have less time to Livejournal, but I did want to share this sidebar about my grandfather that appeared in April 2005 issue of Budget Travel magazine.

More and more people seem to be using Myspace, so I went ahead and spiffified my profile there with some more images and more data about my predilections. Check it out. And while you’re at it, friend me.

My friend (from high school) Derek James has his first album on iTunes. (A search for “derek james stray” will bring it up.) You can listen to half the album for free on his website, but you need to go to iTunes to get some of the other songs, including my current favorite song, “Dust in the Wind.” (She’s like dust in the wind / see her once and then she’s gone again … She’s so hard to comprehend / convoluted messages she sends / so much time with her friends / does she know she’s fucking with my head?).

And in the “Awwww….” category, you can watch video of my cousin Zach showing off his new trick … walking.

I went to a lecture last night entitled “Creationism in Camouflage: The Intelligent Design Deception,” which was sponsored by the USC Objectivist (i.e. Ayn Rand) club. The speaker was pretty good. The funniest part was how he kept intentionally describing everything the Creationist movement has done in terms of Darwinian natural selection. (To wit, for a long time Creationism inhabited a comfortable ecological niche, but then increasing pressures from competing theories caused the weakest versions of Creationism — i.e. young earth Creationism — to die out, and eventually this pressure caused Creationism to adapt protective coloring — i.e. the surface appearance of scientific legitimacy — in order to survive in a hostile legal climate.) The only part where I disagreed with the speaker was at the end, where he simply stated, “The only coherent system of thought that can provide a robust rebuttal to Creationism is Objectivism,” without anything to back that up.

Then came the dreaded Q&A session. The host began with a very strongly worded injunction that the questions should actually be questions and not diatribes. The audience was stunned into momentary silence, aghast at the thought of actually having to ask a question rather than deliver a furious stream of verbal diarrhea, but their reticence didn’t last long. I spent most of the subsequent proceedings thinking about all my teachers over the years who always said, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” and wondering if they ever attended events like this, and if so, how they could keep saying that with a straight face. Seriously, it made me embarrassed to be at a major university, and I thought that many of these students should have their acceptance letters retroactively revoked. What part of “ask a question” don’t these people understand? “You’re wrong!” is not a question, and “You’re still wrong!” is not a “follow-up” question. And seriously, it’s cool that you talk to dead people and all, but a) you don’t, and b) that has nothing to do with the debate over Intelligent Design.

The speaker did make one other point that I thought was kind of clever. Intelligent Design argues that humans are too complex to have come into being without a creator. God is obviously more complex than a human being, so their own argument seems to require that God also could not have come into being without a creator. It’s one of those arguments that is never going to convince anybody of anything, but at least it made me chuckle, so that’s something.

Went to see Clive Barker at Dark Delicacies last night. Like the other event I went to at Dark Delicacies, this “signing” turned out to be literally just that — a signing. No reading. No Q&A. It was kind of fun just seeing Barker in the flesh, as it were, but otherwise it was pretty much a complete waste of time. (And given L.A. traffic, getting there and back took about two hours.) I don’t understand why anyone would purposely set up or attend an author event that didn’t include a reading and Q&A. If I knew ahead of time that the event was going to just consist of people arriving, standing in line, having their books signed, buying them, and leaving, I wouldn’t even bother to show up if Shakespeare was making a personal appearance. Though I guess some people get more excited than I do about having books signed. I think I had a book signed once and was like, “That was nice, I guess,” and haven’t bothered since.

Afterward, I stopped by a Subway and ordered a seafood & crab. The girl was like, “We don’t have any. Sorry.” As a hardcore seafood & crab partisan, I know that they often run out, particularly late at night, but this was like the third time in a row this had happened to me. An awful suspicion seized me. I scanned the menu in vain. I asked, “Are you just out, or do you not sell it anymore?” She said, “We don’t sell it anymore. At any Subway.” I asked, “Why not?” and she said, “Not enough people were buying it.” Having bought approximately 12 billion seafood & crab sandwiches since 1996, I said, “Well, I did my part,” and she laughed. She said, “Yeah, we had certain people who came in and all they ever ordered was seafood & crab. Since we stopped selling it, they’ve never come back.” I am likely to be one of those people. The taste of my substitute Italian BMT was bitter in my mouth. What a tragedy. I have no words for this, so I must turn to a bugger more eloquent than I, W.H. Auden.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

…

Seafood & Crab, 2005, R.I.P.

Last night I went to an event at the La Luz de Jesus gallery in Hollywood sponsored by the local chapter of Horror Writers of America. (Thanks to saycestsay for the tip!) They had horror readings, horror movies, and horror art. I thought the readings were great, especially a darkly ironic piece from the point of view of Santa Claus’s son, which depicts Santa as an abusive father who wants his son to take over the family business. The horror art was impressive too. There was a great painting entitled “Ghost Ship” of a skeletal pirate crew. I would have bought it, but unfortunately I don’t have $10,000 to spare right now. The most disturbing piece was some sort of holograph where depending on how you looked at it, you saw either a peaceful office scene or an airplane crashing through into the office. I met a bunch of cool new people too, including one of the stars of Return of the Living Dead.

The gallery connects to a shop called Wacko, which sells books, records, action figures, bric-a-brac, and novelty items of all varieties, all with sort of a goth/counterculture/Hawaiian theme. (Yes, Hawaiian. Don’t ask me.) It is probably the second strangest store I’ve ever entered. (The strangest is Comme de Garcons in Chelsea, Manhattan. It edges out Wacko only because it’s not trying to be strange, merely trendy, but it still comes across as positively creepy and extraterrestrial.) They even carried action figures of some of my favorite writers, such as Shakespeare (Hamlet), Edgar Allen Poe (“The Raven”), and Jenna Jameson (How to Make Love Like a Porn Star).