Published September 30, 2002 | 
A Monster in the House
Thus the NY Times begins an article on the Monster in the House, AKA your friendly local writer, as presented by a panel of authors at the New Yorker Festival.
The issue is central: What kinds of loyalty does the writer owe friends and family? What sorts of consideration can a friend or relative reasonably expect when the writer turns shared experiences into prose? How much, if any, neglect, grouchiness, and bad behavior is justified by a writer’s genius and the demands of art? What does the family do when a writer’s work can be interpreted to reflect poorly on the family?
But turn it around for a minute. What does a writer’s family owe the writer? How much do they have a right to demand of time, attention, care, and energy when the writer is struggling to find enough time to create? When does respect for privacy become censorship?
There are plenty of stories of artists and writers who are total bastards, but there are also a lot of us who aren’t nasty enough to make space enough to write in.
These days, I’m trying to write while balancing a job, a family, and the very few community obligations I will accept. (And those are important to me: church, the women’s bookstore.) It’s damned hard, even if I hadn’t been spoiled by having once had all day to write.
I’ve come up with a few solutions — writing in the early morning before work, for example, which lets me devote my freshest energy to the writing and warms me up for the very different kind of writing I do on the job. I’ve also given up almost anything that could be a distraction. I don’t spend time in online forums, which used to be a central source of friendship and support. I don’t watch many movies any more. My cross-stitch and cooking are sorely neglected. I would give up sleep if I could.
I know I haven’t tackled any of these issues in depth, and I need to. I also want to explore the serious question of how to talk after divorce, but that will all have to wait. In the meantime, I’m doing my best to behave with respect toward both the family and the work.
Published September 30, 2002 | Types of Failure
1. Accident
2. Mistake
3. Weakness
4. Inability
5. Incorrect Method
6. Uselessness
7. Incompatibility
8. Embarrassment
9. Confusion
10. Redundancy
11. Obsolescence
12. Incoherence
13. Unrecognizability
14. Absurdity
15. Invisibility
16. Impermanence
17. Decay
18. Instability
19. Forgettability
20. Tardiness
21. Disappearance
22. Catastrophe
23. Uncertainty
24. Doubt
25. Fear
26. Distractability
This list is courtesy of the Institute of Failure, which is, so far as I know, not affiliated in any way with the Institute of Official Cheer.
Published September 26, 2002 | Fire Update
3100 acres
1600 firefighters
11 homes consumed
1 state of emergency
3 more days, probably, until it’s contained
Several hints that it started in a meth lab.
If you want to see the kind of country that’s burning, here are some photos of the Uvas Canyon Park, which is adjacent to the burning areas. It’s not on fire, but it’s now closed anyway, as a precaution, or because the air is too smoky.
Published September 25, 2002 | Chilly Weather
Tonight in Palo Alto I saw a middle-aged professorial gentleman wearing this typical California outfit:
Birkenstock sandals
ankle socks
khaki Bermuda shorts
heavy sheepskin jacket.
It was dark, and the temperature had dropped to all of 65.
As a rule, Californians put on a coat when the temperature drops below 72. However, they continue wearing shorts and sandals even when the thermometer is in the 50s. Don’t they have nerves in their knees?
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Published September 25, 2002 | California Burning
Even from forty-odd miles away, we could see the column of smoke rising and spreading as we drove home Monday night. A 200-acre fire. Last night the smoke was a deep bruise across the southern sky. By this morning, the wildfire had spread to 2100 acres. It’s well south of where I live, but I woke this morning with a scratchy throat from the traces of smoke in the air.
It’s the fire season; in this hot weather, and as dry as September always is, fires are an annual threat. In 1991 the great Oakland/Berkeley Hills fire destroyed 1500 acres and killed 25 people. That was more than a fire; given the unusual heat, a 65-mph wind, and the steep, narrow canyons where it started, a single ember from a smaller fire rapidly became a firestorm.
Everybody knows LA is a desert city. But as an Easterner, I never thought of Northern California as particularly dry. Its image is so much greener and softer than the prickly landscapes I think of as desert. I thought of San Francisco as a rainy, cool, foggy city. It is cool and foggy; it is also a semi-arid city that gets only 19.9 inches of rainfall in an average year, most of it concentrated in the winter months of November through February. The moisture from the fogs adds an effective five to ten inches of rainfall to that number, making it as lushly green as many Eastern landscapes.
San Jose gets about the same amount of rainfall as LA: 14.6 inches average in a year. (For the sake of comparison: that’s less than a third of Jackson’s annual 48 inches; sunny Philadelphia averages 40 inches more or less.) Lacking San Francisco’s nourishing fog, San Jose, like LA, is a semi-arid climate, teetering on the verge of desert. You can tell when it’s winter here, because the hills turn green — a profoundly disorienting experience for a lifelong Easterner.
And fires are a natural part of the ecology here. As beautiful as California is, as densely populated as some parts of it, it’s still untamed. We can kill off the grizzly bears and mountain lions, grind the redwoods into toothpicks, but we’re not masters here. The fires and earthquakes and debris flows are California’s reminders that what people build is temporary.
Unfortunately, what people destroy is permanent.
Published September 25, 2002 | Wisdom from Steve Lopez
Thoughts on the coming war from one of the few people left who has any common sense:
The biggest threat to our security in the new world isn’t Saddam’s potential to build a nuclear weapon in the next six or seven years. It’s some fanatic slipping into this country in the next six or seven minutes, while we’re all waving flags and singing hymns. If you were a terrorist who wanted to strike in the U.S., wouldn’t you prefer that we were distracted in Iraq?
It’s not a stretch to imagine an American future with dirty bombs blowing up our harbors. It’s not beyond the pale to imagine suicide bombers at sporting events and nerve gas attacks in subway stations.
And yet there has been precious little discussion about whether an attack on Iraq lowers or raises those risks.
. . . .
If we’re going to war to prevent a nuclear holocaust, shouldn’t we at least all know how to pronounce it? It ain’t nukular, George. Trust me on this.
Steve Lopez, in case you don’t know, is one of the best journalists in the USA. He’s shrewd, funny, and filled with moral outrage.
From 1985 on to the late 1990s, he was an award-winning columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. As a Bay Area native, he chronicled the shenanigans of Philadelphia politicians, citizens, and the Parking Authority with zeal, passion, and an outrageous sense of humor. His columns are collected in Land of Giants, which is worth buying, if only for the nostalgic look at Philadelphia in the days when City Council had a quorum in jail.
Then there are the stories about the second MOVE crisis — the one in which the city burned down an entire block of Osage Avenue, which led to the deaths of eleven people, including all but one of the children the city was claiming to protect. Steve Lopez, as I recall, had just started writing for the Inquirer a few days earlier. A hell of an introduction to the City of Brotherly Love.
Nevertheless, he developed an affection for the city and even its old-style corrupt ward heelers. This is apparent in his second novel, The Sunday Macaroni Club. He also wrote Third and Indiana, an impassioned novel about the destruction of young lives and old neighborhoods by streetcorner drug culture. Reading it broke my heart.
These days he writes for the LA Times. He’s a good journalist because he’s a stubborn, tough reporter who writes incisively. He’s a great one because after all these years he still cares.
Published September 21, 2002 | That’s a Spicy Meatball!
Tony came over this afternoon, bearing a chili joke he found online. Being the virtuous person I am, I websearched until I found the original. Bruce Cameron is a professional writer, and I refuse to circulate his work unattributed — even if he didn’t originate the line about Sno-Cones that I especially liked.
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Published September 20, 2002 | Fathers and Daughters
Something in yesterday’s Neil Gaiman blog tore at my heart and left me feeling bereft:
I finished reading “The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death” to Maddy last night, and tonight Maddy volunteered to read to me instead. We lay on the bed and she read me “Second Grade Gorilla” by Daniel Pinkwater. Which was rather wonderful, until sleep caught up with me, and she stopped reading and tiptoed away.
The image of a loving father who reads to his daughter every night — yes, that’s moving, and it’s one of the things I like about Neil Gaiman: he really seems to be a caring, devoted, observant parent. Since I first came to care about his writing through his blog, I don’t have the graphic-novel image of Gaiman as a dangerous Goth god or leather-jacketed fallen angel. What I saw was someone who wrote horror, who explored the dark, without having to pretend he was a warped reflection of Lovecraft.
(Weird but true: Lovecraft patterned his persona on Poe, who was imitating Lord Byron, who was playing the role of a dramatic villain bred of Milton’s Satan and the Mad Monk of Gothic fiction, but was also considerably different in person than on the page, by all accounts. So a modern-day imitation Lovecraft would be a fourth-string copy.)
But that isn’t what gave me a pang in this. It’s the idea of a daughter feeling safe with her father in her room — even on her bed, next to her. A daughter who feels safe reading to her father. I can’t even imagine it, not for myself. The word father conjures up such horror, loathing, fear, and sorrow in me that I can scarcely summon words for it.
Yet I looked all those years for substitute fathers, ideal images combining what was best in my own father and the qualities I wished for in a parent. There’s a reason Abraham Lincoln became my hero.
In some ways the homicidal clarity of my relationship with my father made things easier for me. I could readily separate Men as a group from Daddy — something that can be much more difficult with an ambivalent relationship. And I found good male role models in books and history. But something this tender, this kind of gentle affection and unthinking trust — that reminds me of how very different things were for me, and that’s bound to hurt.
Published September 20, 2002 | So What Do You Two Find to Talk About?
What Bill Bryson does for travel, this guy does for romance. That is, he distills the experience into a series of bizarre encounters that leave me drowning in tears of mirth.
Or, to put it succinctly: he’s written thousands of very funny words on all the things he fights about with his girlfriend.
Lord, give us peace in our time.
Published September 19, 2002 | God Help America
From today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.
Profiling charged on ‘nightmare’ flight
A doctor on Delta Flight 442 was detained by U.S. marshals.
By Thomas Ginsberg
Inquirer Staff Writer
The incident on Delta Flight 442 was scary enough last month: U.S. marshals seized an unruly passenger, then one aimed a pistol at other passengers for a half hour and shouted at them to stay seated.
The event, however, didn’t end there. Unknown to most passengers on the Atlanta-to-Philadelphia flight, the marshals upon landing also seized an Indian passenger from first class and silently whisked him away in handcuffs.
Far from being a terror suspect, the second detainee turned out to be a former U.S. Army major and military doctor from Lake Worth, Fla., where he has had a family practice for two decades. Both detainees later were released without charge, and the physician’s angry account of his ordeal offers a glimpse at the dark side of America’s war on terrorism.
Yesterday, suggesting that the line between security and civil-rights violations is blurring, the physician, Bob Rajcoomar, filed notice in U.S. District Court that he may sue the U.S. government for illegal detention and emotional distress. His wife had been left to wander the Philadelphia airport for three hours during his detention, never told of his whereabouts.
“This is blatant racial profiling,” Rajcoomar, a naturalized citizen since 1985, said by telephone from Florida. “They think they can pick up anybody, willy-nilly… . It’s not in keeping with traditions of the United States.”
David Steigman, a spokesmen for the newly created U.S. Transportation Safety Administration, which oversees the air marshals, gave few details about the detentions or the marshals’ actions and declined to discuss the potential lawsuit. Atlanta-based Delta did not comment on the legal action.
Rajcoomar, “to the best of our knowledge, had been observing too closely. When the aircraft landed, the airline declined to press charges” against either man, Steigman said.
Stefan Presser, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which filed the lawsuit notice, called the detention a civil-rights violation that should “send a wake-up call to Americans before it’s too late… . In our haste to protect ourselves, we are literally turning on each other.”
The dramatic hours on Aug. 31 aboard Delta Flight 442 started when a passenger from Philadelphia – described as waiflike and disturbed – caused alarm when he began looking at other passengers’ luggage.
Two U.S. air marshals rushed back from their first-class seats to investigate. The marshals were later identified by police as Shawn B. McCullers and Samuel Mumma, assigned to the regional Transportation Safety Administration office in Atlantic City, which declined to discuss the case.
“Air marshals issued a series of warnings to passengers to stay in their seats. The unruly gentleman didn’t stay in his seat, so they took action to restrain him,” Steigman said.
Rajcoomar, sitting in window seat 1-D, reading a book and sipping a beer, said he knew nothing until the marshals showed up and began pushing the unruly man into seat 1-C, adjacent to his.
Alarmed, Rajcoomar said he stood up and asked to be moved. A flight attendant told him to take one of the first-class seats vacated by the marshals.
“One [marshal] sat on the guy in the first seat; he was groaning, and the more he groaned, the more they twisted the handcuffs,” Rajcoomar said.
Then, in coach class, a woman rose to switch seats with her child, who was sitting in an aisle seat, according to Rajcoomar’s wife, Dorothy, who was sitting in coach class because the couple could not get seats together.
“That’s when they started hollering,” Dorothy Rajcoomar said of the marshals. One of them rushed to the divider between the first-class and coach sections and leveled his pistol at the coach-class passengers.
“He took control as if he was a terrorist himself,” said Bob Rajcoomar, who was then sitting in a first-class aisle seat directly in front of the marshal. “He says, ‘Nobody move, nobody look down the aisle, nobody take pictures or you will go to jail, nobody do anything.’ He basically hijacked everybody.”
One passenger, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge James Lineberger, said marshals “were yelling at passengers to keep their heads and hands out of the aisle… . I couldn’t believe they would do such a thing.”
Bob Rajcoomar said he, like every other passenger, was watching the marshal but never spoke to him.
About 30 minutes later, the plane landed and Philadelphia police officers came aboard to help take away the unruly man. Thinking the incident was over, passengers began standing up, Rajcoomar said.
“Then out of nowhere, hell broke loose,” Rajcoomar said. “One of these marshals came down to me and said, ‘Head down, hands over your head!’ They pushed my head down, told me to bend down… . I just couldn’t believe it. I was speechless, in shock.”
Unseen by his wife 30 rows back, Rajcoomar was whisked off the plane, taken to an airport police station, and locked in a cell he called so filthy “I wouldn’t even put my dog in it.”
During detention, Rajcoomar said, he was never asked anything except his name, address and Social Security number. He asked why he was being held.
“One of the marshals said something like, ‘We didn’t like the way you looked,’ ” Rajcoomar recalled. “They also said something like, ‘We didn’t like the way you looked at us.’ ”
Finally, after about three hours, Rajcoomar was released without explanation.
“It was like a nightmare,” Rajcoomar said. “The marshals were completely out of control… . If they had pulled the trigger, we’d all be dead. I don’t feel safe knowing they’re there, not with this kind of behavior.”