God & Bedford
Bedford, England, is a place to make you believe in God, but only
if He is very angry. Gazing across the panorama of desolate streets,
dead, claw-like trees,
and a sluggish black river that smells of sulphur, you can’t help but think,
“Yep, somehow, sometime, someone here really pissed God off.”
Don’t get me wrong; most of rural England is quite picturesque. Even in mid-winter, there are charming little villages. You can even spot the odd animal frolicking in fields, but as you approach Bedford, they look increasingly frightened. Then you arrive. At first, you might think there’s nothing wrong; any town could look like this, if the garbage collectors went on strike for a while. You have an odd, clenched feeling your gut, but that could be a bad hamburger. Bad hamburgers feel like they’re slowly sucking the marrow out of your bones, right? Sure.
It’s only when you’ve been here a while that the true horror of Bedford reveals itself: it’s unrelenting. You think, “All right, so people here look like extras from Dawn of the Dead, but that’s just because they choose not to care about personal grooming for some reason.” (I developed this theory after spotting a guy who looked like Kevin Spacey, if Kevin was drunk and out of shape and didn’t own a hairbrush.) Then you pass a guy afflicted by a plague of boils, and realize: No. It’s not a choice. It’s biblical.
I wrote about Bedford last time we visited, and since then it has managed to get worse. I didn’t think that was possible. I mean, once the entire town is made up of people either begging for money or actively stealing it, what’s left? Once the wail of emergency vehicle sirens is constant, do you really notice any more of them? But then I ran alongside the river Ouse, past what at first I thought was a rubbish dump but turned out to just be someone’s back yard, and a goose tried to mug me. I think it had a switchblade.
So it’s almost 2008. I’m very much looking forward to ‘08, because, writing-wise, 2007 blew. It started off well. It’s just that it then took a sharp turn into soul-destroying, heart-breaking stultification. I think this must be what happens when you start the year with a blog that says, “Man, I’ve got this writing thing nailed.” So: okay. Lesson learned, ha ha!
Yep, I’m feeling much better about 2008. I won’t have a book published, or a movie released. But I will write.
And, with luck, I will get out of Bedford without being stabbed.
It’s good to have goals.
Thank you for following along my web site, and reading my stuff, and caring, even if only a little. It means an enormous amount to me. Sorry for the hold-up, but give me a little time and I’ll have some books that are worthy of you.
New Fiction: How I Met My Daughter
I
wrote another short story! I know, it’s crazy. It’s like I’m just pumping
these things out. Anyway, it’s in stores now in Australia as part of
The Bulletin’s
Summer Reading Edition, in a super-cool layout complete
with creepy doll’s head pic. I tell you, there’s something about a
creepy doll’s head pic that just works with my
writing, you know? Maybe I can get them to print some in my
next novel.
If you’re not in Australia, this would be the time when you start to get annoyed. I mean, Australia was already pretty ace, but now it’s also got new Max Barry short stories with creepy doll’s head pics? That’s just too much. But I say would, because The Bulletin said I can post their spread here for your online enjoyment. Which is damn cool of them. So here it is:
This story is quite different to my usual groove, and I’m interested in what you think—whether you prefer this or Springtide, for example.
City of Vociferous Angels
I knew I was in Los Angeles when I saw the crazy guy on the sidewalk corner,
screaming abuse at a security guard. I mean, the 14-hour flight was a tip-off.
You don’t go through that and not notice. And US Customs was as cheery
and welcoming as always. (“Your daughter… we want her fingerprints.”) But
nothing says LA like a 50-year-old guy with thinning hair shrieking, “I hope
you feel good about yourself! I hope you feel like you’ve really achieved something
here!”
See, he wasn’t actually crazy. In most other parts of the world, somebody completely losing it in public means they have a serious mental illness. But I think this guy was just annoyed. He even looked a bit like Larry David. Yes, I was in LA.
People here are very friendly. Of course, I’m comparing it to the only other American city in which I’ve spent serious time, New York, so I would probably be impressed by anything other than open hostility. And I am in Santa Monica, which is one of the nicer parts of LA. But there is a good feeling. On the road, people give me plenty of room. Maybe this is because I’m not used to driving on the right side and tend to veer over to the left when not concentrating. But I like to think it’s politeness.
I’m here with Jen and Fin because we’re going to England, and it’s on the way. When you’re traveling from Melbourne to London, anywhere is on the way. It’s one of the properties of flying halfway around the world. We’re spending most of the next two months with Jen’s family in Bedford, the mucous membranes of England, and there are some movie things happening (in a possibly-kinda-let’s-see way), so here I am.
The first thing I did upon arrival was pick up a throat infection. Actually, I might have done that on the plane. Either way, it’s been a snotty few days. Now for the big question: Disneyland or Sea World?
P.S. US Customs doesn’t actually fingerprint children upon entry. I just said that because it feels like they might. I asked the Customs guy how old you had to be before they started fingerprinting you, and he said 13. So there you go: the United States is woefully unprepared for attacks from 12-year-olds. I hope you can sleep at night.
DEWmocracy: like democracy, but carbonated
You know how I do that thing where I take some earnest but
misguided piece of marketing and make it sound ridiculous?
Well, words fail:
So let’s see. The world is a war-torn, post-apocalyptic battleground, ruled by oppressive “corporate lords.” But one guy can “restore the soul of mankind” by designing the packaging for a soda.
Because that makes too much sense, there’s also an inexplicable ride with a native American guy in an elevator who seems to successfully encourage the hero to commit suicide. The hero skateboards everywhere for no reason except, I guess, that marketing people think cool people do that. Oh, and the movie is from Pepsi, for Mountain Dew, which you might have thought was a corporation, and thus a bad guy in this scenario, but… uh…
Anyway, the point is to entice you into playing the DEWmocracy online game, where you can team up with other players to “design the flavor, color, name, and graphics” of a drink. Mountain Dew will then launch a “recognizably similar” version of the most popular result in 2008.
Other online games promise battles with dragons or storm troopers, but only DEWmocracy lets you enter the heart-pounding virtual world of Mountain Dew’s marketing department. I assume that missions include “Unjam The Copy Machine,” “Get That Last Parking Space,” or “Battle of the PowerPoint Presentations,” with your character choosing a class like “Intern” or “Direct Sales Representative” and working his way up to the feared “Executive Vice-President.”
If this takes off, maybe the next thrilling virtual ride could take you into a bottling factory, where you spend eight hours a day inspecting caps for defects. One thing’s for sure: Mountain Dew has finally responded to all those people clamoring to work for it for no pay.
It turns out, though, that when it comes time to design your drink in DEWmocracy, all you can do is pick from a pre-selected range of options. This was getting suspicious: first they warned me evil corporations would try to stamp out my creativity, and here I was confronted with a corporation trying to reduce creativity to pick-a-box as part of a marketing effort. Aha! Clearly I was meant to reject DEWmocracy as an attempt to control the population, and go firebomb Pepsi’s offices. Yes?
Facebooked
I caved in and signed up to Facebook. I never had a problem avoiding
MySpace, because every MySpace I’ve ever seen was clearly designed
by a hyperventilating color-blind monkey. And the monkey had no idea
about HTML standards. But Facebook looked nice, so I went ahead
and created a profile.
I wasn’t sure I should be doing this, since I already have way too much unanswered e-mail. I don’t really need any new avenues for people to get disappointed when I don’t reply to them. But then I saw a Facebook group called “Max Barry is fricken awesome.” That was a big plus for me. There’s just something about a group of people telling me I’m fricken awesome that makes me think, “These guys are all right.”
At first my goal was simple: I would jump on this bandwagon and friend up anyone who asked. Facebook: put up my face, maybe sell some book. Made sense. But then I discovered it’s pretty cool to see what your friends are up to on Facebook. I felt like I was being social, but without any effort. That was nice. Maybe, I thought, I should keep this just for friends and family.
Then I realized my friends and family are boring. Day One, sure, it was crazy: Brit was pregnant, Dan had a new job, and that girl I liked in high school was now an architect. There was a lot to catch up on. But a few days later, Brit was still pregnant, Dan still had the new job, and the girl was still an architect. Where was the progression? The twists and turns? It was like a soap opera where nothing happened, and I received email notifications of every non-event.
The other problem was I had friend requests piling up. It became hard to know where to draw the line: did someone I’d only met once on book tour qualify as a friend? What about someone I’d only emailed? What if I’d never heard of them before, but they listed me in their profile as one of their favorite authors, and they were incredibly hot? Well, obviously that one was an easy decision. But the others: tough. On top of that, I accidentally friended one guy by clicking the wrong button, and another because I thought he was someone else. The walls had been breached.
So I decided to go friend whoring. My new policy would be: I’m anyone’s. I accepted every friend request I had, and searched out new ones. I know: I felt kind of dirty. But then I realized it was pretty nice to have a page of links to people who liked my books. Some of my actual so-called friends have never even bothered to crack the spine on one, and I still turn up to their kids’ birthday parties, the selfish bastards. The parents, I mean. The kids are lovely. What’s that about?
Maybe these people I’d never met were more deserving of social recognition than people I met face-to-face. They had read something of mine that mattered enough to them to affect their lives, or at least their Facebook profile. Wasn’t that something? Wasn’t that a connection—a meeting of minds? Yes, I decided; yes it was.
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Facebooked
Vote 1 Whoever Has The Ugliest Vice
I
just noticed that a strong candidate in the race for next President of the United States is
Fred Thompson. Fred played the District Attorney on Law & Order, and has
acted in movies and TV shows as a Senator, Director of the CIA, White House Chief of Staff, an admiral, and, indeed, the President.
Now, let me be clear: the US is the world’s leading light when it comes to freedom and democracy. Anybody who disagrees deserves the wiretappings, slur campaigns, arrest, and/or bombings they get. But come on: Fred Thompson? Isn’t that purely because people will think, “Yeah, he seems like he should be in a position of authority… for… some… reason.”
I have trouble with the whole idea of actors as politicians. We’re electing someone whose primary skill is pretending. Maybe it’s just me, but a guy who has spent most of his life honing the ability to lie convincingly; that makes me uncomfortable. Electing that guy seems to say, “Look, we don’t care what you get up to. Just make sure you look earnest about it.”
I understand a little. After all, we’ve all got to look at whoever gets elected for the next four years. They might as well be pretty. Then there are those international conferences, where the leaders of multiple countries get together to usher in new eras of co-operation and outsourcing. Sometimes they wear funny shirts. You can’t send some shy, weedy nerd to that. Well, you can. Australia does. But it’s embarrassing. You know if Arnold Schwarzenegger was President, he might be a policy disaster but America would look totally rocking in the APEC group photo. And while I’m not totally sure how these international agreements get formed, physicality has to be involved to some degree. I’m not saying they decide carbon emissions targets by sealing the doors, stripping to the waist, and grappling for supremacy. There’s no way Bush could have taken Schroeder. That man is huge. But maybe late in the day, when everyone’s tired, having Schwarzenegger plant his ham-sized fists on France’s desk could close the deal.
The ideal, then, must be job-sharing. You have a strong, good-looking President to shake hands at the UN, and a smart, ugly President to stay home and make the tough decisions. Americans have clearly figured this out already, and it explains Bush-Cheney. And why Kerry lost in 2004: he’s got a face like his pet hamster just died, while his running mate, Edwards, is too good-looking. You’d worry that Edwards would be at a tanning salon while Britain and France were sniggering at mean drawings of Kerry during his speech at G8. That ticket just didn’t make sense.
The more physically attractive the President, the uglier the Vice should be, to compensate. It’s the Conservation of Beauty principle.
Now Harrison Ford and Alan Greenspan: that would be a hot ticket. You wouldn’t even have to know their policies. You would just look at that coupling of Ford’s wild charisma with a guy as old as God and something inside you would click.
Barry vs Doctorow: The Ultimate Smackdown
Forbes is running
a special on “The Future,”
and a bunch of writers, including me, contributed fiction.
The deal was everyone’s story had to be based on this:
It’s the year 2027, and the world is undergoing a global financial crisis. The scene is an American workplace.
I was intrigued by the idea of going head-to-head against other writers. It sounded like a kind of writers’ cage match. I found myself thinking, “All right, Doctorow’s gonna lead with a world controlled by draconian IP law, he won’t be able to resist. But maybe I can counter with the entire American economy being purely about advertising. He’ll never see it coming.”
Possibly no other writers saw it this way. They may have just been concentrating on writing a good story. Suckers.
Anyway, my short story, Springtide, is up now. To read the others, including shorts by Cory Doctorow and Warren Ellis, visit the Forbes Future page and scroll down to “Fiction.”
Forbes has a 90-day exclusive on this piece but after that I’ll post it alongside my other short stories, with formatting that doesn’t suck so much.
In other news, you can now search this site. Little box on the left there. Thanks to Wyatt, who complained about this until I got off my butt and added it.
Rookie Mistakes #4: Horror Novelist Dismembers Girlfriend
Maybe you heard about
the arrest of Jose Luis Calva, who is described
as an “aspiring horror novelist.” Police found a draft of his manuscript
Cannibalistic Instincts, along with pieces of his girlfriend stashed in
various places around his apartment, including in the frypan. I know, I know, I had the same
reaction: it’s pretty unfair to call him “aspiring.” It sounds like that draft
was finished. And not just finished, but comprehensively researched.
Sure, some people say you’re not a novelist until
you’re published, but in this day of print-on-demand and internet
vanity presses, is that really a meaningful distinction? I say, if the
guy went to all the trouble of crafting a story arc, putting words
on the page day after day, and boiling his girlfriend’s flesh, he’s a
novelist. Give him that.
I’m sometimes asked how much research you should do when working on a novel, so let me say: this is probably too much. It wasn’t just the girlfriend, you see; there’s also a missing ex-girlfriend and a chopped-up prostitute. That seems excessive to me. One, I could understand. I mean, I wouldn’t support it. You let horror novelists start cutting up hookers, and the next thing you know Tom Clancy is commandeering nuclear submarines off the coast of Florida. Or, I guess, appointing ghost writers to do that for him. But the point is I can imagine a frustrated Jose at his keyboard, a half-finished sentence dangling from the screen, thinking: “How do you sever a femur with a railway spike?”
Three corpses, though, that’s getting carried away. I haven’t read Cannibalistic Instincts, but I bet it contains long, tedious passages where Jose was unable to resist info-dumping his hard-won knowledge onto the reader. That’s the problem when you get to body number three: your research overshadows the writing. At that point, Jose really needed to be cutting fewer limbs and more adverbs. Fleshing out his story, not his apartment. Also, having a supportive spouse or girlfriend can be really important, especially to a first-time writer, so I can’t help but think it was counter-productive to eat her.
But there’s something in this tale to make writers everywhere feel a little better about themselves, because no matter how bad your own work is, at least you wrote it without butchering anybody. That’s a plus in anybody’s language. The corner Jose has backed himself into is that even if his book is published, when people read it they’ll be thinking, “Yeah, it’s good… but is it three murdered innocents good?” It’s extra pressure he doesn’t need. I mention this because I’m sure there are unpublished horror writers out there thinking, “No wonder I can’t get an agent; all the other horror writers are out there sawing limbs.” Sure, that probably provides a certain amount of realism that could elevate your fiction to a more visceral plane. I mean, I’m just guessing. And it’s hard to ignore the fact that Hollywood bible Variety reported this story with the line, “How soon before someone gobbles up the film rights to this?” But still. Call me a purist, but I prefer to do things the old-fashioned way: dismember people in my head.
Super-awesome
Joe writes in to point out
DirecTV’s wonderfully creative interpretation
of the Do Not Call register:
DirecTV is defending automated sales calls to Do Not Call List subscribers as “informational,” and “not telemarketing.” The satellite TV provider recently called customers to say: “Because you are on our Do Not Call List, we can’t call you with all of our super-awesome special promotions.”
This sounds eminently reasonable to me. After all, the promotions were super-awesome. If they were only slightly awesome, I can understand why some people might not want to hear about them. But super-awesome promotions—if anything, it’d be wrong not to let people know about those. Faced with that dilemma, DirecTV’s only ethical choice was to have a computer dial people at home who had explicitly asked not to be bothered and play them an automated sales message.
DirecTV response is via their lawyer Rose Foley, who stresses that since the calls were “informational,” they “fall outside the scope of the Telemarketing Sales Rule and related federal and state laws and regulations governing telemarketing sales practices.” I have to say, I am looking forward to hearing Rose explain the precise informational nature of the phrase “super-awesome.” That’s going to be pure entertainment.
If I was running PR here, though, I think I would put Rose back in her cage and reach for the mea culpa. I’d issue a public apology and explain that the real problem is that here at DirecTV, we’re just so gosh darned excited about our specials, we sometimes forget that not everyone feels that way.
Because the only alternative is that DirecTV knew exactly what it was doing, having being previously fined $5.3 million for telemarketing to people on the Do Not Call list, and it weighed the likely punishment versus the potential sales benefit, valued the time and goodwill of people on the receiving end of these calls as zero cost, and decided it was worth breaking the law. Of course, in this far-fetched scenario, the only reasonable response by the FTC would be to correct this economic imbalance by fining the almighty bejeezus out of them. If $5.3 million doesn’t do the trick, it would have to see if ten or twenty million balances that equation. “Sorry, DirecTV,” the FTC would say. “But clearly regular penalties are insufficient. The only penalties left are… super-awesome!”
Book Club With Your Boss
An anonymous reader writes in with a Company-related conundrum:
I read this book and promptly gave it to some of my work colleagues—I’m sure you hear this all the time. I wanted to buy a case to keep under my desk to hand out to people who came in my office.
Now my manager and some others have read it and they want me to come to their book club to lead a discussion! If you have any ideas to lead me into this land of discussing this with upper management who just happen to be members of this book club please let me know. I need to keep my job!
Hmm. Tough one. Perhaps, “What I got out of this book was a deep, abiding relief that our company is nothing like this. That’s why I hand it out to people at work; everyone enjoys stories that have nothing to do with their own lives. It’s pure escapism!”
One of the interesting things about corporate workplaces is that they turn otherwise decent human beings into… well, management. They’re not like that because they’re petty, deceitful scumbags. I mean, obviously that helps. But it’s the environment that encourages those personality traits. This could be a cry for help from your boss, who in a flash of self-discovery has thought, “My God, what have I become?” Your job at this book club, then, is clearly to reassure him/her that it’s only the other managers who are like that, and gather information that will be politically useful at your next performance evaluation.
Obviously my child is some kind of frickin’ genius
In
the morning, with Fin nestled between us in the bed, Jen
and I discussed plans for the day ahead. “You could go to the
B-E-A-C-H,” I suggested. It’s like with dogs: you don’t
want to get their hopes up.
“Beach?” Fin said.
Probably coincidence. And, I have to admit, the sequence of letters B-E-A-C-H does sound a bit like “beach.”
That night, Fin wanted to read “Farm.” This is a book with pictures of things you find on farms, labeled accordingly. It’s not much in the plot department, and forget about character development, but she likes it.
She pointed at the first letter of the title and said, “Green F.”
She’s just turned two. Sometimes I get frightened at her growing power. Today she can spell. Tomorrow she may shoot lasers from her eyes. The day after that, she may leave me.
Max Does a Workshop
And sorry to abuse your email inbox, but I’ve just signed on with
the good people at ChuckPalahniuk.net to run an online writing workshop
based around novel-writing. Places are limited, so if you want in,
clicky clicky:
Yes, they photoshopped me into a suit.
Sublime Fu*ks
Holy
crap! I thought I might get some great can designs,
because, well, not to boast, but my readers tend to be smart, talented,
and exceptionally good-looking. I’m sure you’ve noticed this.
But still: holy crap! I am getting some great designs here. It
is only a matter of time before Coke or Pepsi blatantly rip
these off and launch them as new products. And a special
mention to Lucia Suarez for coming up with the brilliant
“Kinetic Beverage.” You know in two years they’ll all be called that.
Here are a few of the best entries so far: James F, Nataliya Lalor, Emily Elizabeth Moser, Nathan Carnes, Lucia Suarez, Karan Juneja, Kyle Huberman [1] [2], Chris Hubbard, Andrew Roff, Lori B, Sean Marks, Rod McBride, Shane Smith, Petar.
![Kyle Huberman [1]](/images/misc/fukk/kyle1.png){kind=link}
![[2]](/images/misc/fukk/kyle2.png){kind=link}
Lots of people emailed me questions about how to enter, so let me answer some of those here: you should get your entry in this week. A web-friendly JPEG is ideal for submission, but hang on to your high-res original, which we’ll need if you win. And yes, the product’s name is “Fu*k,” asterisk and all.
Next week I’ll create a gallery of all entries, for the film producers to peruse. You’ll be able to do that, too. If you submitted a design but don’t want me to post it or put your name on it, please let me know.
Update: The Fu*k Gallery is now online.
Update 2: Congratulations Mat! Chosen as the best submission from an excellent bunch. When the cans get mocked up, I’ll post a pic. Thanks again to everyone who worked on a design.
Make Mine a Fukk
The Syrup film producers want to mock up some cans
of Fukk. I think they are hatching some kind of promotion. They asked if
I had a design in mind, and I said not really, but I bet if I mentioned it
on my web site, somebody would come up with something good.
So here we are. If you invent a graphic design the producers like, they’ll mail you some of the mocked-up cans, and I’ll send you an autographed book, and the next time we’re all in a limo with Natalie Portman and she says, “I don’t wanna go home! Where can we party?”, we’ll suggest your place. Although that last one has never happened yet, so I wouldn’t count on it. Still: cans and book.
Your design should:
- be for an energy drink called “Fu*k” (as opposed to a cola called Fukk; that’s changed in the script)
- be shaped appropriately to be used on a can
- probably have a black background
- be cool
I’m thinking you may not need to be particularly fancy on this one, because understated is cool. But whatever you think. If you want to enter, email me.
Your Future Career: Being Awesome
Let’s get this out of the way first: some parents tried to name their baby “@,” which is the name of a character in Syrup. I guess it’s a good month for real-life Syrup connections. Unfortunately the baby does not appear to be a blonde, slutty, backstabbing corporate villain, but still: I need to mention it because every newspaper in the world ran the story, and everyone who’s read Syrup (all seventeen of you, bless you) e-mailed me about it.
Going above and beyond, however, was Andrea, who also pointed me toward TatAD (“Bring your advertising to life!”), which is a company that brings together corporations who want to get their logos branded onto human skin and people who think that sounds like a pretty good idea:
Are you ready to start making some BIG BUCKS as a TatAD promoter? All you have to do is get our logo tattooed on you! Then get ready to cash in BIG TIME!
To its credit, TatAD takes the time to address the notion that getting yourself imprinted with a logo for money is some kind of sell-out:
You are already a walking billboard for your favorite companies simply by wearing their clothes or driving their cars or smoking their cigarettes.
You are a salesman for your favorite companies without a paycheck!
In fact… YOU PAY THEM!!!
Don’t look at it as the corporate world has initiated this, the people have, we had no potential sponsors when we began, only people who wanted to be sponsored.
When you look at it from that angle there is no corporate sell out, in fact it’s the other way around. We have the opportunity to get something in return for once.
It’s that simple, we’re all walking billboards anyway so why not get paid to do it
Now, I might quibble with TatAD that there is a difference between simply telling people about a product you like, and getting paid to be branded with logos. A few differences, actually. One of which is “credibility.” But that’s just details. What interested me most was TatAD’s supply and demand problem. Their forums are full of people people pleading to be tattooed, many being not too particular about with what, exactly. (My favorite: “Who wants my face?”) It’s clearly a buyers market: if you’re looking to imprint your logo on some flesh, you’ve got yards and yards to choose from.
So naturally you’d look for prime real estate: the young, the beautiful, the admired, and the desired—as opposed to, say, the guy who has “a few spaces left on my right forearm”. Sorry, dude, in advertising we call that clutter. It’s the same rules as celebrity endorsement: if you’re a sports star, Nike pays you to wear its products; if not, you pay Nike. But now the bar is much lower. You don’t need to be one of the best tennis players in the world; you can earn a little sponsorship money just by being kind of awesome.
Ideally you’re gorgeous, of course. That’s the kind of awesomeness that everyone understands. But I bet an admired DJ can make a few bucks from logo tattoos, no matter what he looks like. Or a college high jump star. Anyone who’s kind of awesome, even on a relatively small scale, I think can look forward to a bright future of ever-increasing options for turning their awesomeness into cash. A certain amount of shamelessness will be required, of course. But that’s a small price to pay for being able to make a career out of being awesome. After all, you were going to do that anyway.
Giant Beach Balls
I’ve been working on a Syrup screenplay for
a while now. Longer than I like to think about, really. Anyway, there’s
a bit I’m using from the book where our hero, Scat, is trying
to come up with a brilliant new idea for a Coke TV ad, and instead
has a bad one:
I have started to wonder about the beach: about variations on a giant inflatable beach ball. I am thinking about this ball rolling through a major American city, with people running and screaming.
It’s the kind of idea that is stupid yet oddly attractive. I have lots of those. So, apparently does Pepsi.
Now come on. That’s Scat’s stupid idea. The only difference is it’s Pepsi instead of Coke, and people having fun instead of being crushed to death. And that change, frankly, was disappointing. I really thought I was about to see some mayhem.
(Thanks to Jake for the heads-up. So to speak.)
The revolution will be televised in low-resolution
One thing that’s always bothered me about sci-fi movies is how bad
everybody’s communications technology is. Well, that and the costumes. Seriously,
if the future is Spandex, I take back what I said about never wanting to
die. But anyway, every brave new vision of the future you see,
the phone system has gone to hell. Alien, Star
Wars, Battlestar Galactica, you name it: people
are flying around, firing laser guns, and talking through intercoms that
make them sound like Stephen Hawking gargling. Even a simple video link
spits and fuzzes as if they’re tuning it through a coathanger. Will the future
really be filled with technological marvels that enhance every
area of our lives but this?
Now I realize: yes. We’re already on the way. I used to listen to music on CD, watch TV on a television, take photos with a camera, and talk to people on a phone with a cord. Now I have internet radio, MP3s, YouTube, VoIP and a cellphone. Even my home landline is a wireless thing that makes people sound as if they’re calling from inside an empty beer can. I don’t yet watch TV on my cellphone, but my phone company wants me to, even though the screen is one inch wide. I do take photos and videos on it, and that’s what I’ll have to look back on: a bunch of 8x6 pixel images and footage so jerky everyone seems to be having a seizure.
You know where this started? Vinyl. Oh yes, we laughed, when the purists said CDs didn’t sound as good. Well, maybe you didn’t, you weren’t born. But ask your Dad. Those long-haired freaks were right.
Free Money for Everyone
I was going to let this slide, because
calls
for schools to chase the corporate dollar are
nothing
new.
And I like to reserve my outrage for really odious new forms of
marketing. Not just
whacking ads on anything that moves,
but the truly insidious slime you don’t really notice until it’s
smiling you in the face. Like the
“charm
offensive” aimed at making the French more polite to tourists:
now that
gives me the heebie-jeebies. Polite French people? That’s just wrong.
I like my French arrogant. If I ever step off a French airplane and
hear, “Missing you already!,” I will take that as a sign of the
Apocalypse.
But to schools. This particular push for big business to step in to educate young minds comes from Professor Brian Caldwell, who calls the public funding model “outdated thinking”:
He says partnerships with business could be valuable for both parties, for example in areas of science and technology.
“With a company like Rolls Royce you’re getting not only cash support but you’re also getting the opportunity of having top engineers work side by side with your teachers and your students and who also can provide marvellous work experience so yes there is self interest but it’s a self interest that matches the public interest,” he said.
Phew, that’s lucky. For a minute I was worried that the public interest in delivering quality education to children might not completely overlap with Rolls-Royce’s interest in stuffing great wads of cash into the pockets of its shareholders. Actually, I had thought that if we were brainstorming for large organizations with scads of money and an interest in public education, we might have thought of, you know, the frickin’ government. I mean, I don’t want to blow their cover, but government does occasionally provide services for the national good. Roads, bombing things, education; there’s a whole package.
What really bothers me here is the persistent idea that you can get money from companies for nothing:
Professor Caldwell doesn’t believe there is danger of too much interference, such as for example fast food companies influencing students’ diets.
Corporations are the most ruthlessly rational economic entities on the planet. They have to be, because if they aren’t, they die. They are subject to intense competitive pressure, and the evolutionary effect is that today’s corporate giants are the sharpest, most efficient wealth-generators in history. Anything they do, it’s because there’s a return.
I’m fine with that. But I’m not letting one loose in a school without asking: What does it get out of this? Or put another way: What are we selling?
Advertising is so pervasive is because everyone thinks it’s money for nothing: you put up some ads, you get paid, what’s the harm? The non-monetary side of the transaction can’t be measured. What’s the undivided attention of a twelve-year old worth? What’s the real cost of making our police dependent on ad revenue? What’s the final invoice on installing corporate patriotism in our kids?
I don’t know. But I bet it ends with smiling French people.
Killer phone
Regular site defacer Shahab writes:
We need Max’s comments about the iPhone launch!
I think if I was writing Jennifer Government today, it would be phones, not sneakers.
Max’s Spectacularly Unhelpful Book Review, or: My 7,000 Pages of Shame
Now what we’re going to do is ignore the whole “What the Fukk is happening
to Max’s new book?” question. Because it’s going to take some time
to resolve, and me posting regular updates on my blog is going to freak
everybody concerned right out, and for my own mental health I should
probably start thinking about something else.
But thanks to everyone who wrote in with kind words. That means a lot. I’m sure this book will be published. It’s a good book. You’ll like it. The question is not if, but when and how.
So instead of alternating between maniacal cackling and weeping into my sleeve, I will write you a book review. This review is not of books I’ve read. That would be Helpful, because I could tell you if they were any good. This is an Unhelpful review, because all I’m going to say is how these books got onto my bedside table, where they have sat, neglected, as centuries turned.
On top is “Maisy Likes Driving” by Lucy Cousins. Fin brought this in one morning and wanted to read it. So I have actually read this one. It’s about 6 pages long and has pictures of Maisy driving things, which she enjoys. I can recommend it if you’re into Maisy and like to know everything that happens in a book from the title and are aged two.
Next is “Unpolished Gem” by Alice Pung. I met Alice at a writers’ festival and everyone said her book was good. Alice herself is so polite and smart and cute that I want to take her aside and say, “Stop that. You’re making the rest of us look bad.”
“American Hoax” by Charles Firth. This I also picked up at the Sydney Writers Festival. Charles and I did a panel together, and afterward he bought my book and asked me to sign it, so I was forced to buy his, even though he was a complete tosspot. I say that because I know that’s the type of humor he’ll appreciate. Actually Charles I liked a lot, even though he’s not as polite and cute as Alice Pung. His book is a satire on… well, America, I guess. I haven’t read it.
“Phineas Poe” by Wil Christopher Baer. I keep seeing Baer’s name pop up in connection with mine on places like Amazon. If that was enough to get me to buy something, I’d own a copy of this, but Baer came recommended, so I bought this collection of three novels. Unfortunately I discovered that it’s so heavy I can’t read it in bed without breaking the bones in my wrist. I got about four pages in and needed a rest. I think I might relocate Phineas to the bathroom.
“The Contortionist’s Handbook” by Craig Clevenger. Actually, I have read this one. That shouldn’t be there. I liked it a lot, although not as much as “Dermaphoria.” This puts me firmly in the minority of Clevenger fans, though, so you shouldn’t trust what I say. See? Still Unhelpful.
“The Art of Funerary Violin” by Rohan Kriwaczek. My Aussie publisher, Scribe, gave this to me, telling me it was hilarious. I thought it was a novel, but on closer inspection it really does appear to be about funerary violins. And I’m really not sure how hilarious that can be.
“The Life of Pi” by Yann Martel. In LAX, about to board my flight to Melbourne after my 2007 American book tour, I had some leftover cash, and bought this because it’s meant to be good. I dunno, though. It looks very literary, and the problem with literary books is that if you don’t like them, you can’t even extract minor enjoyment out of the gratuitous sex and violence. You just have to sit there and wade through mind-numbing wave after wave of symbolism, eloquence, and character development. I hate that.
“Third Class Superhero” by Charles Yu. I think I got asked to give a quote for this. It’s a short story collection. I liked the first story, then got distracted and never finished it. They sent me a second copy, perhaps thinking the first had gotten lost, and this bumped it right up to the top of my pile, but unfortunately just before I left on tour, and returned with Life of Pi.
“Einstein Never Used Flash Cards” by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff. This was very kindly given to me at a 2006 reading I did in Mountain View, CA, in by a guy named Peter, who thought I needed some parenting advice. Now that I think about it, that’s kind of insulting. Anyway, I read a little, but then Jen stole it. I recently got it back, which is why it’s relatively close to the top of the pile.
“Heyday” by Kurt Anderson. The bookstore I read at in Phoenix, AZ, offered me a book for my trouble, and I chose this because I liked “Turn of the Century.” In retrospect, it was clearly the most expensive book in the store. I may not be invited back to Phoenix.
“Persuasion & Healing” by Jerome D. Frank and Julia B. Frank. I read half of this as research for my latest novel. It’s an overview of modern psychotherapy. It’s written by a father and daughter, which must have been interesting. Imagine arguments in that house.
“The Sleepers Almanac 2007.” A short-story collection. Apparently one of my stories will be published in this next year, so the publisher sent me this to help me figure out if that’s a good thing.
“Prodigal” by Marc D. Giller. A sequel to his very good first novel, “Hammerjack,” which arrived just before a particularly busy time and got hammered down in the pile before I could read it.
“The Cubicle Survival Guide” by James F. Thompson. I have no idea where this came from.
“Alien Sex in Silicon Valley” by Dave Alber. The author gave me this at a reading in 2006. I think he was self-publishing. I read the first chapter and quite liked it and then got distracted. This book is now so far down the list I will never reach it. If only I had stayed with it, I might have loved it, given a rave quote for the cover, and helped it become a national bestseller, thus changing Dave’s life forever. Although probably not, since I raved about Paul Neilan’s Apathy and Other Small Victories, and did that become a bestseller? Shockingly, no. That’s out in paperback now, by the way. If you respect me at all, you’ll go buy it.
“Raga Six” by Frank Laura. Frank is my media escort in San Francisco. He gave me this book in 2006 and I hadn’t gotten to it by the time I went back there a year later. I wasn’t sure which was worse: to admit this, or to say nothing and have him think I hated it. I went with saying nothing.
“Pendulum” by Nathan Provence. Pretty sure this is another self-published book given to me by an enterprising author who came up to me at a reading, although I’m not sure which year. By now it has been crushed for so long under the weight of other books that all its pages have fused together.
The one I’m actually reading is “The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil” by George Saunders. I’d never heard of this book or the author before, but I saw it in a bookstore last week and liked the first page. I started reading it because my wrists were aching from attempting Phineas Poe. That’s my system, you see: last in, first out. It makes no logical sense, but has the advantage of being easy. I use the same system for my email. Anyway, I’m really loving this book so far. It’s fantastic. So if you made it this far, there you go: that’s a little helpful.
By the way, in the course of writing this review, I moved the books to see what was on the bottom, and the pile fell on me. I nearly died.
The Response
I heard back from Bill, my editor, about my new book. It wasn’t good news.
It wasn’t bad news, either. It was kind of inexplicable news. I’m still trying to
digest it.
My fear, of course, has been that Bill would say, “Max, you know this book you’re so excited about… well, it’s not so great.” Every time this has threatened to overwhelm me the last couple of weeks, I shooed it away, because I knew in my heart that surely that could not be true: this was a great book, my best, even.
And it turns out that Bill does think it’s great. So too, apparently, do other people he’s shown it to. I pushed him on this, in case he was doing that thing where you say only nice things to the author because my God they’re temperamental, but no: I really think he considers it quality.
That’s the good news. The bad news is he can’t publish it.
It’s hard for me to explain why. It’s hard for me to understand why. I think it has a little to do with the nature of the story, and a lot to do with the nature of the publishing business. I can’t relate the details here without being immensely unprofessional, even for me, so that will have to do, sorry. But the situation is incredibly bizarre, like something out of one of my books. (One of the published ones, ha ha.)
Bill is a genius editor. When he says there’s a publishing problem, I completely believe him. I know he’s looking out for me and my career. He’s proven his skill and dedication over a couple of books.
There are options. I have to believe I can get this book out there somehow. Surely we’ll figure out something.
Surely.
This is a very weird feeling.
Buying Crap
You can buy paper made from elephant feces. It’s called
Poo Poo Paper.
I know this because I saw it mentioned in
DailyCandy,
which is “the ultimate insider’s guide to what’s hot, new, and
undiscovered.” At first I thought DailyCandy might be scraping
the bottom of the hot, new, and undiscovered barrel when they
reached for the Poo Poo paper, but then I read more and discovered
a profound insight into modern consumerism. Here:
Kid 1: Wow. Look at that elephant. He really thinks his sh*t don’t stink.
Kid 2: Actually, it doesn’t always smell bad. Just yesterday I was trying out my new Crayolas on paper made from elephant poop.
Kid 1: Cootie alert.
Kid 2: No, no. It’s totally clean.
Kid 1: Keep talking.
Kid 2: So these people collect the dung, dry it out, and wash it, leaving fibers from the grass, bamboo, and fruits the little guy’s ingested.
Kid 1: Grody. To the max.
Kid 2: I’m not done yet. Then they boil the fibers so they’re super clean, add banana tree and pineapple fibers to thicken the paper, and dry it in the sun. You’d never even know it was made from caca.
Kid 1: Okay. Kinda rad.
You see the genius. Regular non-hot, un-new, and already-discovered people might think that paper made from elephant crap is kind of disgusting. But for that very reason, ultimate insiders find it hot. The selling point is the repulsiveness.
I think marketers worldwide will find this a pleasing development. Until now, they’ve been hamstrung by the need to make their products useful, or at least non-awful. But if leading-edge shoppers are willing to buy the opposite—and not just willing; already eagerly seeking such products out—then the doors are wide open. For example:
Consumer 1: Hey look, shoes made of razor blades. They actually inflict injury on you while you walk. What a stupid idea.
Consumer 2: Actually, some of the hippest Hollywood celebs are wearing these now.
Consumer 1: Keep talking.
Consumer 2: According to Variety magazine, there’s nothing hotter than leaving a little trail of blood spots from your mangled feet. The pain is what makes it outrageous.
Consumer 1: Okay. Kinda rad.
Incidentally, I noticed the slogan on the Poo Poo Paper web site: “WE TAKE THE ‘OO’ OUT OF POO!”. Following that is: “TM”. Someone actually came up with that phrase, then thought: “Gee, that’s some gold right there. I’d better officially register that before anyone steals it.”
Festive
On the weekend I went to the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Many years ago,
before I was published, I went to one of these big festivals and hated it,
because it was full of self-congratulating blowhards trying to crawl up
each other’s butts. But now that I’m one of those butt-crawling blowhards,
it was awesome.
I did three panels and got to meet lots of other Aussie writers, which I hadn’t done earlier because until recently I was completely unknown here. Now I’m exactly the right amount of known: enough to get invited, but not so much that I qualify as a commercial sell-out whom everybody bitches about. It was a perfection distraction for a guy waiting to find out if his publisher likes his new novel. (Not that I’m, you know, completely freaking out or anything.)
On my second night I pulled a muscle in my leg. I was asleep at the time. I dreamed that a tiny, blue, jelly-like alien invaded my kitchen and tried to kill me. I stabbed it with a fork and it squealed and staggered around, then it tried to make a run for it so I kicked it as hard as I could against the cupboards. This is where I think I injured myself. Then the alien looked up at me and said, “Mom-my.” I was so shocked I woke up. I think this must be a side-effect of having an active imagination, or doing a lot of drugs before bed.
For my last panel, “Laugh Out Loud,”, I opened with a bit where I pretended someone close to me had just died, then revealed it was just a character in a story I was working on. This probably would have been funnier if moments earlier the host hadn’t paid tribute to Anna Politkovskaya, who attended the Festival last year, and was assassinated for political reasons five months later. If I was a little more professional, I would have junked my opening right there. But I’m not, so I didn’t. Fortunately not too many people seemed to think I was making funny at Anna. And you know, I’m told she enjoyed a laugh.
I read a couple of blogs from this site, which went down very well. It was also terrific to be on stage with my old high school buddy, Wil Anderson; I felt like I was back in 1990, only with no hair.
On the plane ride home I noticed they’re still advising us to brace our heads against the seat in front of us in an emergency. This made sense ten years ago, but now that location is a small, solid screen. If I’m preparing for impact, do I really want to carefully position my face against a rectangle of glass and metal? To me, that really confirms that the whole procedure is there purely to give you something to occupy yourself with other than running around screaming and clawing at flight attendants.
I got home to discover Fin had grown up. I swear, I was away three days, and she learned a hundred new words, got attitude, and her face changed. I am not 100% certain my wife didn’t replace her with a similar-looking child.
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Festive
Max Craps On About Writing: Originality
I mentioned
earlier
that I’m planning to talk a little about writing this year.
Today I carry that threat through.
To those of you who couldn’t care less about this topic: my God, can you put aside your own selfish interests for five seconds? No, wait, I mean: sorry. But there are people out there interested in this. I know because whenever I post about it, I get emails of weeping gratitude. That’s hard to resist.
So to originality. I raise this because I think it’s reasonably common for unpublished (and underpublished) writers to think: “Man, the only way to make it as an author is to churn out predictable, formulaic crap. Nobody’s interested in publishing really original books.” Well, when I say this is a common attitude, I mean I used to hold it, and I assume everybody is like me. There I was in 1998, collecting rejection letters for Syrup, and the underlying message seemed to be that it wasn’t mainstream enough. And I couldn’t describe my own book; I couldn’t find the pithy couple of sentences that people seemed to want, that would make them say, “That sounds interesting,” instead of their eyes glazing over with confusion. I needed something like: “Terrorists hijack a submarine and ex-Special Forces agent Jack Fyre is the only man who can stop it.”
It’s tempting to believe that formulaic crap sells because there seems to be so much of it. But I now think you can look at a shelf full of Grisham novels or whatever and assume they’re all the same until you read them. Then you find some common elements, for sure, but much less than you thought. There is formula out there, but not much of it.
I reacted to my Syrup rejections by writing a standard, genre thriller. It was terrible. And I learned that you never improve anything by making it less original. It’s the opposite: the worst thing writing can be is not new.
I’m convinced this isn’t just me. I think everybody wants newness. Editors, agents, readers: we all want new plots, new ideas, new ways of looking at the world. Nobody wants to get twenty pages into a book and know where it’s going, or even feel too much like they’ve seen all this before. Even within a genre’s iron-clad conventions, we want twists, surprises, and reinventions.
Young writers in particular can sometimes try to crawl inside a pre-conceived box labeled “novel” or “screenplay,” and end up with something far less interesting than if they’d forged their own path. I’m not saying you want to hit the other extreme, and pursue a lone, bizarre vision with no regard for how it reads. But you must nurture the things that make your story and your writing unique—that make you unique, since writing is letting people crawl around inside your head. Billions of people can write a sentence. Why should I bother reading yours, unless they’re different?
The Exceptionals Goes to Manhattan
Now I don’t want to go on and on about this new book. Well, I do. I really do.
But I realize that’s of limited interest when you can’t actually read it, and
probably won’t be able to for at least a year. And maybe it’s of limited interest
even then. Although why are you bothering to read my blogs? That’s
just weird, man.
Anyway. The fact is, the most exciting thing I did this week was email it to my agent. From there it will go to Bill, my editor. Bill hasn’t read it yet, so I will wait with thoughts like these: “He’s going to love it. It’s by far my best book. Maybe he’ll hate it. It’s probably all wrong for my demographic and the market has changed and he’ll ask if I’ve written anything else lately. Oh, shit. I’ve wasted a year.”
Now I know from responses to a recent blog that some of you find the idea of my career heading anywhere but upward laughable. Or at least you were kind of enough to pretend that. But you have to keep in mind, I’ve been dumped by a publisher once. If you had heard nothing but positive things right up until the moment they showed you the door, you’d have paranoia issues, too.
So even though I love this book, love it, I know that until I hear back from Bill I will fret. I will regret posting this blog, for making the humiliation when it gets rejected so much more public.
But today: damn. I just sent my best book to my publisher. I’m ecstatic.
Fear the Beautiful
A while ago I watched The Biggest Loser. This is a TV show
in which fat, unhappy people turn themselves into thin, self-satisfied assholes.
Well, some of the contestants are assholes to begin with. They either stay the same,
or turn into different kinds of assholes. The nice ones, though, it’s like
watching Annakin Skywalker become Darth Vader: by the end they look
cooler, but will destroy planets to get what they want.
Why is this? I suppose skinny people might be innately more evil than fat ones. But I don’t know. I mean, Mother Theresa. Or maybe it’s that attractive people are more evil. That sounds about right. (Again, Mother Theresa.) I’ve always been suspicious of very good-looking people. I think they should be microchipped and tracked, so we can keep an eye on what they’re up to. I would feel a lot better if I knew beautiful people were being monitored to make sure they weren’t skipping lines, getting out of speeding tickets, and having impromptu sex with flight attendants. If I can’t do those things, nobody should be allowed to.
But I can’t blame the Biggest Loser people for becoming pricks. If I abruptly became a lot hotter, I’d develop a huge ego and poorly-concealed contempt for my fellow man, too. I mean, even more so than now. That’s just the natural consequence of being able to look at yourself in the mirror and think, “Wow… I’m amazing.”
I keep hearing about the importance of self-esteem, but I’m not convinced. I think we may be underestimating the value of crippling self-doubt and insecurity. If you go to the beach, you’ll see a hairy, fat man in his 50s strolling by in a thong, while nearby a 20-year-old with the body of a movie star tugs at her skirt to make sure it’s covering thighs she thinks are too large or pale or freckled or god knows what. I don’t think it’s coincidence that human beings are afflicted with chronic lack of confidence just as they begin to scale the peak of their physical attractiveness: I think that’s the only thing stopping young people from taking over the world. Imagine how horrendous it would be if that 20-year-old had the self-confidence of the 50-year-old. No, not because of the thong. The thong would be fine, obviously. The problem would be that once she realized how vastly superior she looked compared to the rest of us, she and her young, beautiful friends would round the rest of us up and lock us in labor camps, where they wouldn’t have to look at us.
And we would let them, because they’re beautiful.
Life As You Know It
I turned on my computer to be greeted with this email:
Are you available for a phone call?
Best,
Claire
Claire is the assistant to my agent, Luke, so I email back in the affirmative. I wonder what’s up: phone calls out of the blue are usually good news, like maybe something exciting happening with a film.
Claire replies:
I have some good news and some bad news… I’ll call you in a min.
-CD
Now, let me skip ahead and tell you that the bad news isn’t anything serious: they just have to subtract some money from my royalty check to pay US withholding tax. But in the five minutes before I find that out, I am convinced that either:
- Doubleday has decided to drop me as an author; or:
- Company has sold much more poorly than anyone let on and Doubleday has decided to drop me as an author.
This completely out-of-the-blue, oh-by-the-way-everybody-hates-you-and-your-career-is-over thing happened to me once before, in 2002, and suddenly I’m back there, staring into the abyss. The “good news” will turn out to be: “And that means we can start looking for an even better publisher!” Everyone will try to be positive but the inescapable truth will be: I’m history. I know this for a fact.
I love being able to write for my job. I love it. But boy, I could do without the occasional heart-stopping moments where I see my entire professional world fall apart. I really could.
P.S. Oh, and later I emailed Claire to ask what the good news was again. She probably did mention it in the phone call, but I didn’t notice because I was too busy planning my new career as an ice-cream salesman. She said it was that I had some royalties.
The Joy of Creation
So I’m almost finished the last pre-publisher draft of my new book, and
I’m watching the TV show Heroes. Where I live we’re about
three months behind the US. Well, a few weeks ago on Heroes
they introduced a minor character with a super power that’s very similar
to one of mine. Uh, I mean, similar to a particular talent that one of my
characters has. It’s not particularly original—it’s a form of mind control—but in
the show it’s described in an atypical way, the exact same
atypical way I’ve used.
Last episode, this character shot herself in the head. On the sofa, I said, “Yes!” It was a terrific moment.
Hopefully by the time my book comes out, nobody will remember her.
Danger: Linux Advocacy Ahead
Last week I helped my 17-year-old brother-in-law build his own
computer. Moo, as I shall call him, as I have since he was
four, is not particularly geeky. He is what they
call emo. And he lives in England, so all I could do was give
advice over the phone and hope I wasn’t about to hear, “Is
this bit meant to be smoking like… OH MY GOD IT’S—beep, beep, beep.”
But he put the whole thing together with no real dramas or explosions, which I was very impressed with. Then we got to what turned out to be the hard part: setting up Windows XP.
I haven’t used Windows much in the last three years. It’s possible that my mind has become clouded by the religion that is Linux. But I don’t think so. I think Windows has gotten crappier.
I seriously can’t believe how many hoops you have to jump through now to do even simple tasks, like upgrade Internet Explorer. (Before you are permitted to plug the gaping security holes in the 2001 version that comes on the CD, you must install some other software that’s of no benefit to you, which requires much clicking, restarting, and rebooting.) The Internet Chat program, Messenger, is so crammed full of ads and promotions that it’s hard to work out where the non-commercial content is. Programs crash. Installing drivers is click-and-hope. It won’t recognize your wireless network card because it wasn’t invented in 2001, and you can’t go on the internet for updates because it won’t recognize your wireless network card. Even if you could, you don’t have any security patches installed, and by the time you download them, your system will be infected with Sasser. Everything you install tries to change your home page, start by default, and fill your desktop with icons.
But what really bothers me is the feeling that you must constantly fight for control of your own computer, because your aims are apparently in conflict with those of Microsoft and half of everyone else who writes Windows software. They want your computer to report information about you, keep ongoing watch over what you’re doing in case you turn pirate (activation, registration, and validation?), show you ads, and lock you out of protected media. If you lose this battle, then six months later you find yourself with a computer so clogged with malware that the only way to make it usable again is to reinstall the operating system and begin the fight again.
Occasionally I see articles about whether Linux is ready to compete with Windows on the desktop. But it’s become obvious to me that Linux is already a better operating system. That’s purely on the merits—features, reliability, and ease of use—and even before you throw in the fact that Linux is free and has more accessible support.
So to me the question isn’t whether Linux is good enough any more. It’s down to the applications: whether Linux programs are available to do everything you want.
Today the latest version of Ubuntu was released. Ubuntu is the best home Linux distribution going around, so if you’ve thought about switching, it’s a good time. You can download a Live CD, which lets you try Linux out without actually installing it, but even better might be to consider which applications you could switch to. If you can find Linux versions that do everything you need, you’re good to go. If you can’t—and there are certain holes here that will rule Linux out for some people—then you might want to stay put. (It is possible to run most Windows applications on Linux with emulation, but it’s clunky. And dual-booting for anything except games gets tedious fast.)
P.S. Here is the last thing I wrote about Linux, in February 2005.
P.P.S. I understand that to many people, Linux users are fanatical freaks with no appreciation for the basic fact that the majority of the world doesn’t fall in love with computers but simply uses them to get things done. But that’s because they’re running Windows. If only they switched, the scales would fall from their eyes and they too would realize that they are eating delicious cherry pie while everyone around them chews on mud, saying, “It’s not too bad, once you get used to it.”
Oh, and the mud is evil.
Travel Diary: Days #11-13 (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Melbourne)
I wake to the aroma of banana loaf. I’ve made barely a dent
in Katrina’s goodies, and my hotel room smells as if
Momma’s been a-bakin’. It’s quite delightful. Hotels should
consider leaving out banana loaf instead of chocolates, I think.
Take two for Google. This time I seem to have the right day, and Ricky leads me through the campus to do my talk. And oh my God. The stories are true. It is the most wonderful place in the world. It’s like the company is saying, “Just come in, hang out, and I’ll give you everything you could possibly want. And if, you know, you have a minute free and want to do some work for us, that’d be cool, too.”
There are endless cafeterias; free, of course. Snack and drink machines everywhere. Massage chairs. A laundromat. A beach volleyball court. A wave pool. Grass, trees, open space. A full-scale model of SpaceShipOne. A T-Rex skeleton being attacked by a flock of pink flamingos. And geeks, geeks, as far as the eye can see: young, free, happy geeks. I want to weep for the years I spent at HP: why did I waste a single minute of my life there when this exists? If I didn’t already have my dream job, I swear I would throw myself on the Google doorstep and beg for employment.
Travel Diary: Days 9-10 (Phoenix, San Francisco)
I can’t sleep. Part of the problem is that when I lie down,
all the blood in my body rushes to my sinuses. Actually, maybe
that’s rushing phlegm. Yeah. It’s phlegm. The other part of the
problem is that back home, it’s Round 1 of the football season,
and my team is playing.
It would be stupid to get up, turn on my laptop, and check the scores online. The game won’t finish until 3am my time, so I won’t get to find out the result tonight anyway. But…
I get up, turn on my laptop, and check the scores online. It’s Richmond 44, Carlton 44. I also discover that there’s a streaming radio broadcast available. “Hmm…” I say.
At 3am, I’ve got the laptop in bed with me, piping out commentary. We lose. I turn it off and fall asleep.
Travel Diary: Day #8 (Austin, Phoenix)
On the plane from Austin to Phoenix, I finish my advance copy of
Rant, the
new Chuck Palahniuk novel. Somehow I have ended up reading incredibly
explicit books on every flight. I flew from Melbourne to LA with
Past
Mortem, by Ben Elton, and unexpectedly found
myself in the middle of the filthiest sex scene I’ve ever encountered.
Seriously, it was very educational. Only a Brit could
could produce a book that’s essentially a comedy of manners, but
with felching.
I was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a mother traveling with her
two young children, and had to tilt the book away from her during
these passages.
The danger then was that the man across the aisle would
think I was trying to show it to him. It was a delicate
balance.
Next up was Craig Clevenger’s Dermaphoria, and a sex scene involving a dripping tap. By the time I got to Palahniuk, I decided that if people didn’t want to know about olfactory cunnilingus, they shouldn’t be reading over my shoulder.
Travel Diary: Day #7 (Chicago, Austin)
I love my breakfasts. But when I’m at home, I don’t usually get to
them until late—11
or 12, if I’m writing. (Some writers drink. Some do drugs.
I find creativity via coffee on an empty stomach.) And I eat
cereal. Or oatmeal/porridge. Milk should always be somehow involved with
breakfast, I feel.
The hearty, American-style breakfast of egg and bacon and sausage and
hash browns is a little too much for me, especially early. If you
ask me, there’s something a little immoral about cooking anything before noon but toast.
This is why I’m having a little difficulty with the hordes of people in line for pizza at 8am at the airport. And “breakfast tacos!” You can’t just put the word “breakfast” in front of something as if that makes it okay! No! There are no breakfast pot roasts, are there? Breakfast buffalo burgers? Breakfast prime rib steak?
Travel Diary: Day #6 (Madison, Chicago)
What happens to the soap? Every day I check into a new hotel and
unwrap at least one small, packaged, and apparently pristine
bar of soap. I use a tiny amount
before I leave. What happens to the
rest? I can’t believe they’re throwing all that out. I haven’t seen
any big soap collection trucks backing up to hotels, and that’s
what they’d need to haul away all the leftovers.
They must collect the used bars, mold
them into new ones somehow, and repackage them. So when I’m in the shower, I’m actually
rubbing myself with soap that has passed over hundreds, maybe even
thousands, of bodies before mine. Maybe the way to look at hotel soap
is as a hundred million invisible skin particles from everyone who
stayed there before you, compressed into a sweet-smelling bar.
Feeling more connected to humanity, I head down for some breakfast. There’s a TV running FOX News, and on screen people are agreeing that the only way to deal with Iran’s seizure of British soldiers is to “make them feel some pain.” Anything less, like diplomacy, would cause the UK to become “a laughing stock.” It’s amazing how similar all this is to the last time I was here, and the time before that, and that. The names of the countries change (Iraq, Iran), and the precise issue everyone’s agitated about, but the solution is always the same: send in the military. And I understand that mindset. But I don’t understand how they can still be talking as if it’s February 2003.
Travel Diary: Day #5 (Milwaukee, Madison)
“I smell worms,” says Mary.
Mary is my media escort for the day. We’ve just stepped out of her car at FOX-6, ahead of my first TV interview in eight years, and Mary can smell worms.
“Ewww,” she says. I look down and see that what I initially took for sticks strewn across the sidewalk are indeed long worms: dozens of them, hundreds. We have to pick our way carefully toward the studio doors, and wipe our shoes of any collateral damage when we get there. On the one hand, it seems a little disgusting to be leaving a bunch of worms on the doorstep of FOX. On the other, it feels a little appropriate.
I still can’t actually smell them, though. That’s got to be some kind of super power: the ability to smell worms.
Travel Diary: Day #4 (Denver, Milwaukee)
It’s here. The scratchiness in the throat. The sweating.
There are a million multiplying bio-agents in my head and they’re
all manufacturing phlegm.
I get up in the middle of the night to gargle antiseptic mouthwash and discover that this stuff is much stronger than back home. I think it actually dissolves my teeth a little. But I’m prepared to take a little friendly fire. This throat needs to be liberated.
The key to getting out of a hotel room on time is to corral all your gear into one small area and not let it escape. It tries, of course. When you’re not looking, your shoes sneak under the desk and your wallet climbs onto the bedside table. Then when you’re chasing them down, your underpants run giggling into the bathroom. You have to be vigilant.
Travel Diary: Day #3 (Los Angeles, Denver)
I wake at 7am and don’t feel like heaving. This is a big improvement
over this stage of my last book tour. I’m pretty pleased with how I’ve
adapted to the 17-hour time difference so far. The only issue I have is
with my
appetite: it’s coming up on 24 hours since my last meal
and I’m not hungry yet. That’s just not right.
I pack up my stuff and leave my hotel, pausing only to try to check my reflection in the TV. Honestly, this thing is the size of a surfboard; I keep thinking it’s a mirror. I also swipe a hotel pen, because back home I’m running low, having by now lost most of the pens I stole from hotels on my 2006 tour.
I board my flight to Denver and settle in to my seat. The woman to my left dabs at her nose, and with dawning horror I realize: she has a cold. Over the next 90 minutes, she sneezes, hacks, coughs, and wipes, while I try to breathe through a pillow. I wish the check-in screen had mentioned that during seat selection. I would definitely have chosen the “non-virus bearing” area of the airplane. In fact, when choosing my seat I’d ideally like to see little pictures of who’s going to be seated where. That would be interesting. I would choose to sit near small but tired-looking people.
Travel Diary: Day #2 (Los Angeles)
Wow, I probably shouldn’t write blogs at 3AM. When I began typing
up yesterday’s post, I intended
to describe the rest of my day, which involved meeting
NationStates admins for dinner and enjoying some ice cream that was like
sex in a bowl, only creamier.
But it was the middle of the night (I’d woken and couldn’t find sleep
again),
and after typing for a while, I
started to feel like the only person on the planet. Then thinking
about Fin saying “Neena, neena” tipped me over the edge, and
it all abruptly ended in a very melancholic place.
On Sunday, however, I am reminded that I am actually incredibly privileged to be here, because today is my first reading. And before that, I get to do the LA thing: take meetings with movie people. First it’s the Syrup producers, to discuss the next draft, then Steve Pink, who’s writing the Company screenplay. Steve throws questions at me like, “Okay, my problem with Eve is this: in the third act does she redeem herself with Jones or should I have her sink deeper?” And I have absolutely no idea. I can’t even remember the book properly any more; I get confused between what’s in the final draft and what I threw out several years ago. I wish I could give Steve the kind of great story insights that only the original author can provide, but I’ve got nothing.
While being completely useless to Steve, I have breakfast, or lunch, or something. My body is still suspicious about what time it really is, and doesn’t want to commit to full-blooded meals: it wants to eat lots of small things, spaced about an hour apart. I order a bowl of oatmeal and an orange juice, which unexpectedly shatters my previous record for most overpriced book tour meal: it’s $53, excluding tip. Even the waitress is a little embarrassed, and this is Beverly Hills. It may be difficult to explain this one to my publisher.
Travel Diary: Day #1 (Melbourne, Los Angeles)
“Daddy!” Fin shrieks, and begins to run toward me across the airport
hall floor. There are a million people around but no-one between
her and me, and she runs/staggers/falls toward me with a huge grin
on her face. I crouch down and she leaps into my arms. Her little
fists bunch the material of my sweater, trapping it in her miniature iron
grip. It’s so good to hold her again. It’s so good to smell her.
I haven’t seen my daughter since she got bored in the check-in line, about an hour ago, and Jen took her off to play near the fire engine that moves if you put in a dollar.
My quest was to avoid seat 48G. I was booked on seat 48G, but I didn’t want it: thanks to SeatGuru.com I knew it was the row behind the babies in bassinets, two rows behind the toilets, had reduced leg room, and was in the middle section. Melbourne to LA is a fifteen hour flight; you want a good seat. The only way to change it, the travel agent told me, was to turn up early at check-in.
Which I did, to find that the line is already so long that it snakes through several other dimensions. Whenever I make some progress, an airline employee wanders through the line and calls passengers on flights ahead of mine to come to the front. This continues until finally I am one of those passengers who needs to be called to the front, which occurs exactly six places before I would have gotten there anyway. By that stage, I don’t want their help. It’s like ascending Mt. Everest and then with a hundred yards to go and the summit in sight, my Sherpa offers to carry me.
The woman at check-in can’t change my seat. She says, “If you want to do that, you have to get here early.”
So it’s time for goodbyes. I kiss my beautiful wife and daughter. Fin says, “Bye-bye.” Last time, 14 months ago, she couldn’t talk. She didn’t even have teeth. Nowadays she’s smart enough to come to the bottom of the stairs, rattle the stair-gate, and yell, “Daddy! Daddy!” until I appear. I don’t even want to think about how much I’m going to miss her.
Travel Diary 2: This Time It Has Chicago
So I’m going to do another travel diary. That was fun
last time, and what else
am I going to do in my downtime, dance around my hotel room
naked and get drunk from the mini-bar? I mean, apart from that?
This will mean an increase in the number of emails you’ll get from here (daily-ish instead of weekly-ish), if you’re subscribed that way. If that will bother you, you might want to change your preferences now. (Unfortunately, no, there is no “Un-hear that sentence about Max dancing naked” option.)
[ US Tour Details Here ] <— (note change of venue in Milwaukee)
My Friend’s Security Clearance
Yesterday I received a letter from the Australian Department of Defence. It is in fact from the Defence Security Authority section of the Department of Defence. I bet they have slogans like “Defending the Defenders,” or “Watching Your Back While You’re At The Front.” Or at least they should.
Anyway, they wrote to me because I have a friend who works there, and apparently he:
… is currently undergoing a security clearance process for access to extremely sensitive information. As part of the security clearance process, it is required that we contact nominated referees to ascertain the subject’s suitability to have access to this type of information.
Then there are a bunch of questions like this:
Are you aware of any matters of potential security concern with regards to the subject? (Unexplained changes in work patterns or performance; changes in personality; changes in their personal life)
Those are some pretty suggestive examples. So naturally I’m thinking of writing something like this:
Not at all! In fact, just the other day he said he’d never been happier, not since he met “the true believers.” I think that must be a club you have there at Defence. Anyway, he’s really been broadening his horizons—learning to speak Mandarin, for example, and always dropping into the Chinese Embassy, just to soak up some foreign culture! And I know he’s really looking forward to his next vacation; he said he really deserves it. Actually, what he said was, “Then everyone will get what they deserve.” Then he rubbed his hands together and cackled. I think he must be planning to get YOU guys presents, even though he’s going away! Hope I haven’t spoiled the surprise! Ha ha!
It’s a nice feeling, knowing that I can destroy a friend’s career with a few lines. I think it brings us closer together. I might ring him up and tell him that, and suggest that this would be an appropriate time to have me over for dinner, and spare no expense on the wine.
But I do wonder about this system. If I take this form at face value, the method the Department of Defence uses to identify potential spies is to get them to name a few friends who are willing to say they’re on the level. It seems to me that if you’re going to all the trouble of infiltrating a hostile government and working your way into a position of significance over a period of several years, you can probably arrange that. I mean, I’m no expert on international espionage. But that would seem like one of the basics to me.
Maybe Defence is right, though. It would be pretty stressful, maintaining an ice-cool facade at work all day. Maybe after a a hard day’s pretending to not revile capitalism, you might want to hit a few bars with friends in your “THE REVOLUTION IS COMING” T-shirt. Everyone needs to blow off steam sometime. If it were me, I’d always be having conversations like this:
Them: “… which is why our country’s economy is so strong.”
Me: “Yes, exactly.” (mutters) “For now.”
Them: “What?”
Me: “Nothing.”
Them: “It sounded like you muttered “for now” under your breath.”
Me: “That was gas.”
Them: “Oh. Okay.”
Me: (mutters) “Fool.”
Them: “What?”
Max in America 2007
One thing I’m looking forward to is discovering what wacky new
security schemes US Customs has come up with since I last visited. In
2006 they’d added fingerprinting and
digital mug shots. This time I’m thinking maybe they’ll swab
my mouth or get me to sing the Pledge of Allegiance. Or maybe they
have followed this route to its logical conclusion and now herd foreign
visitors straight from the airport to prisons, where any of us not
intending to commit terrorist atrocities can
fill out applications to be released.
Wow, that was pretty cynical, even for me. I’m not sure if that struck the appropriately witty, feel-good note I want to promote a book tour. But anyway. I have dates! And here they are:
- Los Angeles, CA
Sunday March 25th, 2007 - Denver, CO
Monday March 26th, 2007 - Milwaukee, WI
Tuesday March 27th, 2007 - Madison, WI
Wednesday March 28th, 2007 - Chicago, IL
Thursday March 29th, 2007 - Austin, TX
Friday March 30th, 2007 - Phoenix, AZ
Saturday March 31st, 2007 - Danville, CA
Monday April 2nd, 2007
As usual, I expect any outrage over ill-considered dates, places, etc, to be directed at my publisher. Remember, they’re the ones organizing this stuff. I’m just turning up and cleaning out the mini-bars.
walkthrough reqd pls thx
My
daughter has started to want things. Until now she has only
needed things. Here is the difference:
Scenario A: Fin Needs Something
Fin: “Mmmrrraaaaaa.”
Me: “It must be lunch time. Let’s get you some food.”
Scenario B: Fin Wants Something
Fin: “Book? Book?”
Me: “No book, it’s time for lunch.”
Fin: “Book? Book? Book?”
Me: “No, honey.”
Fin: “Book? Book? Book? Book? Book? Book? Book? Book?”
For a while now I have thought of raising Fin like a video game. You start off with fairly simple tasks to accomplish, to help you get a hang of the basic controls. Thereafter you encounter obstacles of steadily increasing difficulty.
The only real difference is that if you fail a level, you don’t get to go back and try it again. Instead, all of that level’s monsters follow you to the next one. Oh, and you get no power-ups.
Here are the levels I think I’ve completed so far:
Level 1: Don’t Drop Me
Level 2: Keep Me Warm But Not Too Warm
Level 3: Guess Why I’m Crying
Level 4: I Did A Poo In My Pants
Level 5: Food
Level 6: Try To Make Me Sleep
Level 7: Guess What I Just Put In My Mouth
Level 8: I Have Noticed That You Do What I Want When I Cry
Level 9: Biting Is Fun
Level 10: Am I Sick?
Level 11: I Can Reach Your Valuables
Level 12: But I Don’t Want To Wear Pants
Level 13: I Can Climb On Things To Reach Your Valuables
Level 14: No
Level 15: My Education Depends On You Signing Me Up To A Good School’s Waiting List A Year Ago
Some future levels I’m expecting:
- Why Don’t I Have A Penis?
- But Mom Said I Could
- I Want A Pony
- All The Other Girls Have Pierced Belly Buttons
- Boys Are Cute
- I Should Look Like The Girls In The Magazines
- My Boyfriend Has A Car
Then of course there are the optional bonus levels, such as I’ve Decided To Go Backpacking Through Thailand, and Dad This Is My Life Partner Susan.
I think I need to read some more strategy guides before then. I believe they are called “parenting books.”
My Brilliant Publicity Schedule
It’s a big couple of months for my books. Here’s what they’re up to:
USA & Canada
The paperback is out March 13, and I tour two weeks later. The early word is that I’m headed to Los Angeles, Denver, Milwaukee, Madison, Chicago, Austin, Phoenix, and San Francisco. So the result of that polite discussion seems to be that Phoenix beat out Dallas, Milwaukee supplanted Boston, and LA and Madison combined to defeat Ann Arbor. I’m not saying that necessarily reflects on the inherent worth of those places. But you could certainly read it that way.
The dates and places should be confirmed shortly, and I’ll post ‘em here.
Also in the US & Canada, an audio version of Syrup has been released. I wonder if that’s some kind of record, a publisher coming out with an audio version nearly eight years after the book. No, probably not. In fact it wouldn’t even be close. I don’t know why I brought that up.
Australia & New Zealand
I’ve spent most of the last year moaning about my publishing troubles in Australia. Because it really grates on me that in my home country I am near-completely unknown, while in the US I am near-completely unknown, but not quite so much. This has nothing to do with wanting recognition for my artistic achievements, you understand. It’s about impressing chicks. But now I have a publisher, Scribe, and they’ve been crazy busy organizing publicity ahead of the March 5th publication. Seriously, you want your publisher to be enthusiastic, but this is almost beyond that. Just today, they’ve sent me… let me check… eleven emails. I have conversations with them that go like this:
Scribe: “Wow. Company. It’s such a great book.”
Me: “Thanks.”
Scribe: “I mean, seriously. I own ten copies. Not for publicity purposes. For myself.”
Me: “Oh, that’s… keen.”
Scribe: “Sometimes at night, I take off all my clothes and rub myself with the pages.”Well it wouldn’t surprise me. Anyway, the result is I’m doing a lot of Aussie media and book readings and festivals. Here’s what I have details for so far: the Como Writers Festival in Melbourne on the 17th and 18th of February, a Sydney book reading hosted by supercool comedian Wil Anderson on Friday March 16, the Sydney Writers Festival in May, and the Melbourne Writers Festival in August.
The Netherlands
The Dutch Company paperback is out in March, and the publisher has produced this incredibly slick Zephyr Holdings website. It’s got desktop wallpapers and email-your-friends cartoons and everything. I have no idea what they’re about, because they’re in Dutch. But I bet they’re frickin’ hilarious.
Unfortunately I suspect that this means Company needs to sell about a million copies or Uniboek will collapse under the weight of its outlandish web design expenditure. But fingers crossed.
They also seem to be re-publishing Jennifer Government under the title Logoland, and synchronizing the cover with Company’s. I love synchronized covers. They make me feel collectible.
United Kingdom
Still bugger all. Sorry.
Sloth: the new discipline
For 2007 I have resolved to make every single blog about writing.
Okay, no, not really. That would be boring as all get-out. But I
am still a little giddy from my
staggeringly disaster-free latest
effort, so I might do a few more than usual. I mean, it’s not
like anyone’s forced to read them, right? If you’re here for the
cutesy Finlay pics, you can
skip on by, can’t you? Right. And where possible
I will try to relate them to non-writing areas, in order to avoid
disappearing up my own butt.
So. To discipline. I have come to suspect that discipline is a myth. These elite athletes who train at four in the morning until their toes bleed; the child violinists who stay locked in their rooms practicing while all their friends are out doing fun stuff like drugs and unprotected sex; we’re supposed to think they’re disciplined. We’re meant to shake our heads in admiration and say, “Wow, she really earned it.” But I reckon what they’ve actually been doing is having a good time and calling it work.
I’ve reached this conclusion because I have no discipline, and I assume my character flaws are shared by the rest of the world. (The good parts are just me.) I work from home. There’s nobody stopping me spending my days browsing girls-with-glasses-having-mudfights.com instead of writing novels. The fact that I do manage to squeeze out a new book now and again is often interpreted as evidence that I must have great discipline. But I write books because I love it. That’s not discipline, is it? Isn’t that just being fortunate enough to get paid for recreation?
When I first decided to give full-time writing a shot—before I was published, by the way, which should tell you how very stupid I was—I was extremely disciplined. I had daily word targets. I graphed my progress. If I fell behind, I would berate myself about wasting precious time. And I did write many words. But I didn’t enjoy it much, and my output fell off, and the book I was writing turned out to be a steaming pile of crap, which I never finished.
I bet the same thing happens if you’re trying to become a professional violinist, or swimmer, or even something more mundane like trying to get into shape. Unless you enjoy the process and take pleasure from practicing, you give up.
Hmm. When I started this blog, I thought it was going to be kind of inspirational. You know, about how there’s not that much separating us normal people from world-class achievers. But now I think about it, you can also read it as a depressing indictment on how people are pathetic they can’t achieve anything unless they get lots of little rewards along the way.
Well, either way.
Note: I didn’t really mean to skip a whole month of blogs there. Sorry about that. I did get a ton of writing done, though, and played with my daughter. So, really, can you complain? I mean, and still sleep at night?