Yesterday I Witnessed a Pedestrian vs. Vehicle Accident

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Louisville

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I was sitting in standstill traffic on Oak, the street I live on, a narrow two-lane near downtown that has been around for hundreds of years. Traffic coming toward me was flowing smoothly, but my side was the one headed in the direction of the Interstate onramp, and a lot of people needed to get to the Interstate after the Derby Festival parade, I guess. I wasn’t in a hurry. Had my windows down, my radio up.

Out of the corner of my right eye I saw a young woman running toward the street. She was a fat girl. I say this not to make fun of her or shame her but to impress you even more with what happened next. She maybe stood 5 feet tall, and probably weighed about 300 pounds. She was heading directly toward the gap between me and the car in front of me at a full tilt.

Out of the corner of my left eye I saw a car coming toward us in the other lane doing about 60 miles an hour, which is crazy for that area, a combination of low-income residential and retail.

All of this happened way too fast for me to do or say anything.

The girl didn’t stop. The car didn’t stop.

She did manage to make it almost across the street, though. The hood of the car (it was a low-slung Mazda sportscar type dealie) caught her in the right thigh as she was almost out of its range. She did a complete head-over-heels flip in the air and landed on her hands and knees, right outside my open window. I looked at her. Then, like a Hong Kong movie protagonist, she said, “Son. Of. A. Bitch.” Stood up. And walked into the liquor store which had been her original destination, without even so much as a limp.

She was gone before I could think to say anything. It was the weirdest thing to see her flip over in the air like that.

The car, of course, didn’t stop.

Everybody else in traffic started getting out of their cars at this point and yelling, “Hey, is she all right?” to each other. Turned out there was a Sheriff’s deputy in one of the cars, so he turned his lights on and did a U-turn and pulled into the liquor store parking lot, presumably to check on her.

Life in Louisville.

UPDATED: Google Reader Replacement Feedly: After One Month

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by in technology, websites

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I’ve been using Feedly ever since I learned that Google Reader is going away.

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I love it, with one important caveat: I had to trim my subscriptions down to 12 in order to fit within a free account. I used to be subscribed to hundreds of feeds. This turned out to be a good thing for me, since many of my feeds were ancient. Some had burned out years ago; others no longer interested me; some I didn’t even remember subscribing to, and couldn’t imagine why I had done so. Having to look at each feed and wonder if I really wanted it, and only keep the ones I really did, has improved the quality of my overall daily trawl, weirdly. Less is more.

You can pay to have more than 12 feeds, but I’m not yet ready to do that yet. I’ve heard rumors of other potential Reader replacements, from big, reputable companies, that are launching soon. It seems wasteful to spend money on something that has always been free for me until I’ve at least tried those, especially the one Digg is promising to launch. That one’s going to be fee-based as well, but I’m sure I’ll be able to try it out for free, and my mama always told me that you better shop around. You know?

Note that until Google Reader goes away you can still use a free Feedly account to access your Reader feeds, if you take advantage of the integration feature. That might be a good way for you Reader fanatics to test the UI and see if it does what you need for it to do.

[UPDATE: Feedly contacted me on Twitter to let me know that they do not have a 12-feed limit on free accounts. I guess I hallucinated that part. I'm still happier with my pared-down feed subscriptions, though!]

Link-Blogging: Howard Chaykin on Carmine Infantino

03 Friday May 2013

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Howard Chaykin’s memories of the recently-passed comic artist and publisher Carmine Infantino are interesting because they are Chaykin’s, written in his inimitable, irascible voice, as much as they are interesting because they are about Carmine Infantino.

“Back then, when I was in my early 20s, the fact that the publisher of DC Comics disliked me simply because I was associated with his lifelong nemesis [Gil Kane] seemed like the end of the world. In the long run, it didn’t make a damned bit of difference, but I made a commitment to myself that I would never fall into the kind of distaste for my contemporaries to which Kane and Infantino’s generation was clearly prone. Needless to say, things didn’t quite work out that way: there are a number of my contemporaries that I hold in the same high disregard that those men shared amongst themselves, and I’m certainly loathed by quite a few of my colleagues in return.”

No shit! Ha!

I know people who are scared of Chaykin because they’re afraid of his sharp tongue. You should hear him on the subject of the much-beloved-by-everyone-else Will Eisner. To hear that he imagined he, Howard Chaykin, would try to spread love and togetherness throughout the industry is especially delightful, knowing his reputation as a trouble-maker. None of us end up becoming who we thought we wanted to be.

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I should mention that Chaykin’s refusal to suck up to the Common Gods of Comics is one of the reasons he is a hero of mine. That, and the amazing, seminal, artform-redefining work he has done throughout his career (I ignore the crappy work he has done throughout his career, as best I can). Please don’t hurt me Mr. Chaykin!

James Salter as a Black Crowe

02 Thursday May 2013

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allthatis You know how The Black Crowes get played on “classic rock” nostalgia radio, along with the Allman Brothers and The Eagles, while Nirvana gets played on “Generation X” nostalgia radio, even though they both “hit” at the same time? In art, chronology isn’t always the defining factor of a generation. Some artists belong in generations past; others point to the future.

Despite the fact that he is very, very old indeed, James Salter, for example, belongs in a generation that is even older than he is. Let’s call him the last distant peer-wannabe of Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, that crowd. He comes from the age of the Big, Brawling Man-Writer Who Took on the World and Won. The last of Hemingway’s literary children.

I do not mean this as a compliment, necessarily. I also don’t like the Black Crowes very much.

Question for Writers and Readers of Online Serials

02 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in books, business, Snake-Boy Loves Sky Prince, websites, writing

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So I’m slowly (slowly!) getting ready to start serializing Snake-Boy Loves Sky Prince on the web again. The last time I did such a thing, I tried to “wing it” and write the story as I went, with no real sense of where the plot was going. This works for a lot of writers, I believe, but it did not work for me. Maybe I’ll write a post one day about what happened to my mind when it was subject to feedback from an audience every single day while I was in the middle of writing a book. I was lucky to have any audience at all, of course, I don’t mean to imply otherwise. But they kind of took over, which hadn’t been my intent.

Anyway, I’ve decided to finish the thing before I start posting it. I’m getting there. Don’t rush me! Ha! I’m getting there.

Meanwhile, I’ve been looking at these fiction “communities” and wondering if it would be better to serialize the book there, where there’s already a large audience.

On the plus side: sites like figment.com and wattpad.com have a reasonably large base of readers already, who are specifically looking to read fiction. Not all of them will end up reading mine, of course, but some of them will, and in the world of online content, “some” is an excellent start.

On the negative side: I lose the opportunity to own my brand (not my work — none of the sites I’m thinking of posting on claim to own your work). Having your own website has always been the best way to ensure that you are in control of the way your work is presented. Posting your work on a big aggregation site has sometimes been perceived as less-than-professional.

That said, I’m tending toward the fiction hosts. The “owning your own brand” thing made a lot more sense in the days when the goal was to make a living solely by running a content-oriented website. If your website is going to make money all by itself, then you want all that money to land in your own pocket. Right? That’s not the business model anymore. My business model is to serialize SBLSP in order to build up an audience, then maybe sell books in the future. If a labor of love like this one can be said to have a “business model” at all.

I’m still not convinced, though.

So I’m asking you: are these sites worthwhile? Have any of you used them? Have any of you used other sites like these, that I haven’t heard of? If I do decide to go this route, which of the sites would you recommend? Or should I just continue to post work on a site I control?

Bought a Chromebook today.

29 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in technology

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So I got a Chromebook (the $250 Samsung one),to replace my stolen MacBook Pro (the $2500 one). With all the problems that my Windows computers have had over the years, I just couldn’t bring myself to get a Windows laptop (never going back! never!), and I can’t afford even a MacBook Air right now. I wanted something lightweight, quick to boot, and unvirusable (insomuch as that last thing is even possible). I will mostly use it to work on my novel when I’m at coffeeshops, or look up stuff mentioned on the television when I’m in my living room.

So far I’m loving the Chromebook. Superfast, super-lightweight (all solid state electronics, no hard drive), supercheap, and there are more web apps out there, to do more things, than I ever realized. Sumo Paint for Photoshoppy stuff (not nearly as good as Photoshop, of course, but not nearly as crappy as GIMP), Outliner of Giants for outlining — plus, of course, the old, more-famous standbys like Evernote and Kindle Cloud Reader. There are even several IDEs for developing PHP apps (and other kinds of apps) out there. One thing that concerned me about switching to a “dumb” device was losing the ability to be anything other than a consumer of computing services, and not a creator of them — coding is power. I’m glad to know that I don’t have to give that up.

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I’m not superthrilled with Google Drive (formerly known as Google Docs) for writing my novel in, mainly because of the poor organizational system. Every document you’ve ever written shows up on the left. I hate having to be reminded of the existence of stuff I wrote five years ago every time I work on my book. I’m betting I find an alternative. I’m waiting for them to turn my old Zoho Writer account back on right now, for example, (apparently they changed their codebase and didn’t migrate accounts unless you were using the service, or unless you come in years after using it and politely ask, which I have done). Or I could just use Evernote, couldn’t I?

I hope I continue to love this thing. I’ll keep you posted!

How Not to Promote Your Book

27 Saturday Apr 2013

Posted by in books, business, rant, writing

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There are a lot of self-publishing writers who are really, really, really bad at promotion.

I’m saying this because I just looked at my Goodreads inbox for the first time in months. I was just going to repost my Meg Wolitzer review over there (might as well find readers where they are), but I got distracted by the fact that I had 74 “emails” in my Goodreads inbox! Oh boy! Reader responses! Old friends who have found me! Something cool, surely!

But no.

The majority were very literally nothing but a link to a self-published book — and when I say literally, I mean literally. Open the email, and find link, period. No salutation, no explanation of why the author thinks that this would be of interest to me in particular, hardly even any indication (other than the fact that the url goes to a bookseller’s website) that this is a book, or that the book in question was authored by the person sending the email. No, that would be too difficult. Too time-consuming! All these people are sending is just a raw, naked http:// link. That’s the majority. I shit you not.

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The rest are form letters, from people who at least took the time to copy/paste. “Hello JOEY MANLEY nice to meet you here on GOODREADS, please allow me to introduce myself,” with, yes, a link to a self-published book following that salutation. No indication that they have any idea who they’re talking to. No reference to anything about me. No attempt to make a real human connection, just a transparently pathetic attempt to fake same.

Here’s a tip: if you are a writer, do not use the same “online outreach” strategies to promote your book that penis enlargement companies use to promote their sugar pills! Your potential readers are out there, and approaching them one at a time is surely one way to find them, but you have to seem like an actual human being trying to make an actual human connection. No, strike that. You have to be an actual human being trying to make an actual human connection. This is work. But it works.

Book Review: “The Wife” by Meg Wolitzer

27 Saturday Apr 2013

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Amazon recommended “The Interestings” by Meg Wolitzer to me, but $12.99 is too much to pay for an e-book, by my lights, unless it’s by an author whose work I already know. I’d never heard of Wolitzer (I had maybe heard of her mother, also a novelist, whose books may or may not have been on a vast recommended reading list handed out by the creative writing teacher I had as an undergraduate; I don’t remember — or maybe I saw them at a bookstore once or something).

I did click through to Meg Wolitzer’s other books, and found a few that were less than $4, including this one, “The Wife.” I happened to be in the “contemporary literary” notch of my rotation (it goes like this: contemporary literary, science fiction or fantasy, non-fiction, free Gutenberg classic, then back to contemporary literary), so I decided to give it a shot.

My contemporary lit reading was most intense in the late eighties. My touchstones: John Irving, Raymond Carver, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson. So you see that I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. “Catching up” means understanding the field at large, not just enjoying things I already know I am going to enjoy. Reading random writers whose work is critically acclaimed but whose names are unknown to me is one way to do that. Right? So.

thewife“The Wife” is about a successful, womanizing, Philip-Roth-like “big novel” writer, and his second wife, who had at one time wanted to be a writer, but gave it up to support his ambitions. The conflict comes out of the husband’s serial infidelity with college-age fangirls, and the wife’s professional resentment. The milieu is decidedly privileged: they meet at Smith College, where she’s a student and he’s a professor. They move to the Greenwich Village of the 50s, where they briefly live a “penniless” Bohemian lifestyle, hanging out with famous writers and roustabouts, until the husband’s career kicks into high gear. After that: dinner parties, academic functions, award banquets, and highballs. In the first few pages of Chapter One, the wife, now in her sixties, decides she wants to get a divorce, while sitting beside her husband in an airplane on their way to Finland, to pick up his biggest award yet. Most of the rest of the book is a flashback detailing their marriage history.

In a lot of ways, this is the “Wide Sargasso Sea” version of the kind of novels the husband undoubtedly writes, the feminist counter-narrative: what about that faithful, loyal (or crazy, bitter) wife (or ex-wife) who’s always there, off to the side, locked in the figurative attic, in any given Roth or Updike or Cheever book about a successful middle-aged-crazy man? Here’s what’s about her.

If Wolitzer wanted to sell us on the idea that female writers are not taken as seriously as male writers (which she does appear to want to do), then setting it in the 50s is kind of self-defeating. To discover that a Roth manque lives in a delusional world of male privilege is not surprising. Much more interesting if the husband and wife had been from our generation — how would a Jonathan Franzen or a Michael Chabon look to us from his wife’s (or ex-wife’s) perspective? I don’t mean to pick on those guys in particular. I’m just saying. As it is, we get to dismiss the sexism, if we are of a mind to: “Look at those silly ‘Madmen of literature’ from the middle of last century, ignoring the talented women in their midst. I’m glad that gender equality in the book world has been solved!” Which — I don’t think I even need to say this to you, but I will — it has not. Not even close. Yes, we have our Toni Morrisons and our Margaret Atwoods, just like the 50s had its Lillian Hellmans and Mary McCarthys, but for the most part the books women write get ignored, or praised faintly, dismissed as meditations on gender.

Which is kind of what I’ve done here, for example.

Despite all that, I didn’t mind reading it. I liked it okay. I doubt that I’ll read a lot more by Meg Wolitzer, but maybe.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Data

22 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in health, personal

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I’ve been using the pharmacy at my grocery store. When paying, they want to scan my rewards card — not because I’ll get a discount, but for “gas points” (this grocery store chain also has gas stations). I don’t think saving a couple of cents on a fill-up is worth giving up privacy around my prescription history. Do you? The thing is, the first few times, I just handed my card to them, unthinking. Actual hospitals and doctor’s offices have to follow very strict laws when it comes to releasing any information at all about a patient’s medical conditions and/or the treatments they have provided. Grocery stores, as far as I know, are not subject to those laws.

I’ve heard horror stories about grocery store rewards cards already, in fact. People in divorce cases whose access to their children was taken away because they were proven, via their grocery store rewards card records, to smoke cigarettes, or drink beer, or whatever. I don’t know if I believe these stories, but I also don’t know if I don’t.

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It’s possibly all academic. The privacy cat may have already left the bag, in my case. I’ve been more open than most people about stuff. I mentioned on Facebook that I have psoriasis, and now I’m getting ads for some high-grade pharmaceutical to treat it (and weaken my own immune system and maybe kill me). I mentioned that my house had recently been broken into, and ads for LifeLock and ADT started sprouting out all over the place — not just on Facebook, but on most of the websites I visit. This post itself is an example of me living my life in public. That’s what I’ve done for years. I was an early adopter, you might say, of the social media lifestyle.

So maybe I should just hand that Kroger card over when I pick up my prescriptions. They’ve already got me trapped anyway in their web of data. I guess I should just relax and enjoy it. Right?

Somebody Stole All My Apple Products, and I’m Like Blah

20 Saturday Apr 2013

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Last week a burglar stole all my Apple products — except for my Apple TV! Ha! — while I was sleeping upstairs. If you’d have told me this was going to happen about a month ago, I’d have told you that life without my MacBook Pro, iPhone 5, and (especially!) my retina iPad would not have been worth living. Post break-in, looking hard at the $1000 deductible on my insurance policy, I’ve decided to economize, and maybe leave Apple behind, at least for some of the replacements. Maybe, post Steve Jobs, the Reality Distortion Field is slowly releasing its hold on me.

For example, I’ve already replaced my iPad ($399 $499) with a Kindle Paperwhite ($119), which I love, love, love. I’ve had an iPad of every iteration except one since the week they came out. I used to use it a lot when I was a busy entrepreneur in NYC. I used it for stuff like games and note-taking, but never for very long. I’d pick up a game, play it about 1/10th of the way through, then stop. Note-taking was something I always intended to do — I’d pull it out, attach the keyboard, type a few things, blah, then never look at the notes.

Lately all I do with it is read Kindle books, and the Paperwhite handles that task in a much more efficient and pleasant manner. The only thing that I can’t do that I might want to do is read my Comixology comics, which I still was doing from time to time (rarely) but lately I’ve been gravitating back to print (trades and hardcovers) for comics reading anyway.

Meanwhile, the Paperwhite’s reading experience is so much better than the iPad’s for prose books, I’m actually making fast progress through China Mieville’s The Scar, a massive misfire by one of my favorite authors, which I hadn’t been able to choke down for the past four months of trying to read it on my iPad. Flawed but brilliant book plus flawed reading experience made for very slow going.

The MacBook Pro is a different situation. I don’t really need a laptop anymore, since I’m not commuting or jumping across town to meetings or whatever, and I hardly ever work at coffeeshops now. So I was thinking I’d get a desktop instead, to replace the crappy one I’ve got now (more on that in a second). While I’d love to have one of those gorgeous iMacs, there’s Windows computers that I can buy for less than a road-trip or a pair of concert tickets. I don’t use Photoshop or Premiere or the Flash authoring environment anymore at all. Mostly I just use the web. I don’t even need Office: the desktop I have right now (which the dude did not steal) has been running Ubuntu Linux for over a year and a half, not because I’m a fan of Linux, or some kind of super-technical wizbang, but because the Windows installation on it was so corrupted with whatever (I think a Java vulnerability allowed for backdoors to be installed) that it took an hour and a half to boot.

Um. Which is a point about Windows computers. The iMac I bought my mom in 2007 is still running strong. Maybe I will get an iMac after all.

The only thing I need a new computer for is printing and scanning, neither of which the Ubuntu machine does (or, at least, neither of which the Ubuntu machine does with my particular printer/scanner). That’s all I was using the MacBook Pro for, there at the end. I do a lot of low-level scanning (legal documents, tax stuff), so something will have to be done about the loss of the laptop, but maybe I’ll just get a cheap Windows box, put Ubuntu on a partition for daily computing, and keep the Windows partition unused except when I absolutely need to scan or print something, so that it will be less likely to get corrupted or sickened with viruses. Maybe? Or maybe I’ll just buy a new scanner/printer that works with Ubuntu. Hey!

The printing/scanning functionality of this machine is also why I can’t really see myself getting a Chromebook, but it’s not the only reason.

But, but, but. iMacs are about $800 cheaper than the replacement cost of the MacBook Pro that was stolen, which almost covers the deductible. Hm. Decisions. I dunno yet.

The only Apple product I actually still can’t imagine living without is my iPhone 5. I’ll be replacing that, thank you very much. Right now I’m using an old iPhone 4 that I found in my kitchen drawers. It won’t do. Nor will Android. There’s no conversation to be had about this one. The only problem is that I didn’t buy the Apple replacement insurance, and I didn’t buy the AT&T replacement insurance either, so my homeowner’s insurance adjuster will have to swallow the fact that we’re going to have to buy one of these babies without a contract in order to replace it (I just got that iPhone 5 a month and a half ago when I signed a new contract!), and they’re expensive without a contract. To say the least. I spoke to him about this and he didn’t raise any objections, but we’ll see if he tries to balk.

Meanwhile, if you see a black iPad 3 (the so-called “new iPad” that they don’t sell anymore) with a white button (the screen had been replaced), a 2007 MacBook Pro with a huge dent in the side where I dropped it on the steps at SPX 2008, or an iPhone with … well, the iPhone wasn’t distinctive at all, being new … anyway. Let me know. I doubt you will. I think I know who has them but I can’t say anything about that right now. But let me know anyway.

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