Now for the Seedier Side of Second Life

This is actually Part 2 of 2. Read the earlier post first.

Murky Waters - The Law of Prohibited Fantasies

Closely related to the idea of whether an avatar has legal standing is whether an avatar can commit a crime. Corporations can commit crimes, although they're artificial entities, but you can't put a corporation in jail. You can, however, put a human in jail for things done in the virtual world by an avatar of his or her own creation. It's getting dicier now that European countries – Germany, in particular – are considering the prosecution of virtual ageplay on SL, even without the involvement of actual children. Such conduct would appear unlawful in Australia, too, but apparently not the US.

As everyone now knows, SL is being used to make connections for the real life trafficking of real life child pornography. Few are surprised. Linden is reportedly cooperating with authorities in Germany and at one poijnt said its new policy was to ban not only underage users but any depiction by adults of sexual acts involving avatars who look underage. Meanwhile Linden is on record stating that it knows it has no effective way to ban underage players without age verification. They're looking to sim owners to police their own. Let's see how that's working out.

In the wake of recent revelations, the Group Charter for the 900 member group "Hunter High Roleplay," which until recently anyone could join and led to the formation of a number of other underage role-playing subgroup, was revised to reads as follows: "Due to Roblin Lindens (sic) comments stating that any type of under 18 [role play] being punishable, and people like sljoe coming in and filming players at Hunter without consent for media purposes, I've closed Hunter for now. I cannot risk losing my account which is how I support my family. I'd consider reopening as a college in the future, but will avoid venues of a sexual nature while the moral police decide weather (sic) it is acceptable for consenting adults to act out common fantasys (sic). I'm sorry it has come to this."

Weeks after the controversy arose, all of the ageplay related groups remained searchable. During this period, we visited what appeared to be a sim that solicits age play. It was an accident. We meant to visit the SL Bar Association, founded by Benjamin Noble, an articulate avie who is a lawyer in real life and has his own SL law blog, VirtuallyBlind. He says he's usually at the in-world offices of the SLBA. We went there twice, but no one was home. No visitors even. We left a message, which went unanswered a bit too long. Bored, we started flying around.

Next door another sim was bursting with activity. We were curious. We wandered over. We found them in the groups list: "The City of Lost Angel's (sic)," billed as "A Dark Rolepaly\Combat\Sex Community." We read the info to see who's invited: "Vampires, werewolves, predators, crazies, homeless poeple, druggies, whores and gagsters, schoolgirls, street people...all are welcome."

Schoolgirls? As in Hunter High? Does this mean the group, which has many interrelated sims and this one alone listed over 1300 members, solicits ageplay? We were not members, but we found it easy to use our camera controls to slip into the bleak brick fortress and sit ourselves down somewhere inside a fortress which only appears impenetrable and hangs imposibly high in the sky. For a little while, until it seemed we were going to be eaten alive and quickly teleported home, we wandered through rivers of blood, walls of fire, and encountered just a few of the dozens of players inside the sim's darkly ritualistic setting. We were there only a few minutes, not long enough to navigate our way to anything probative, one way or the other.

Later, we pinged Founder Suzanna Soyinka and asked her some questions. You be the judge.

Me: In light of the new policies and legal issues concerning the depiction of minors in SL, do you think you will have a problem soliciting "schoolgirls" to join your City of Lost Angel's group? I mean, "girl" is a term reserved for underage characters, or those who act underaged, is it not?

Suzanna: I don't allow under age players. Pedophilia is my line in the sand. Anyone even appears to cross it I ban them.

Me: Of course. But what about players who "act" underage.

Suzanna: They don't. The rules are clear. We've had two child players in the entire history of [the City of Lost Angel's (sic)]... One moved on because we're not friendly to that kind of play. The other aged their avatar to something legal. People are well aware of my prejudice in the area.

Me: So... who do you intend to attract by using the term "schoolgirls"?

Suzanna: Dunno thats been there for 9 months, I'll happily take it out... I wrote that description nearly a year ago and hadn't even realized I'd put schoolgirls in there til you mentioned it.

Me: How many members do you have, adding up all your affiliated groups?

Suzanna: 8,213. That was last week's count (as of May 17).

Me: You have any more thoughts about recent scandals? Has it affected your groups at all? Police queries? Queries about the thresholds of legality of depicting things, even if everyone involved is of age. Also, problems with people sharing real world child porn pics thru contacts made on SL in age play areas. Leading to the recent outright ban.

Suzanna: Have there been recent scandals? ... Like I said, not an issue I care about really. If they're banning child porn traffickers I say more power to them... The Lindens know me very well. If something gets past me, they'll let me know. And I have 48 player staffers.

Me: Thanks for your time and for chatting.

My conclusion is, Linden is still not prohibiting groups from using language which would appear to solicit avies for age-related sex play. Are Soyinka's players engaging in it or not? Dunno. What's a "schoolgirl"? Is it possible that Soyinka, as successful as she is, is as naive as she seems?

Update from SLJoe, the avie fronting the real world journalist vilified by Hunter High, whose investigations led to the discovery of real world child pornography trafficking inside SL: "There's more to come. We're still investigating." Towards the end of May, he said we should look for more video disclosures on http://www.sljoe.com/, which was slated to go live on June 1. We've been checking back, but no relevant videos have appeared. Meanwhile, his site contains a disappointingly high number of spelling and punctuation errors. (What's up with all this bad spelling?) There's other stuff posted there, but not the promised goods.

Tales from Second Life

As some of you know, I have an avatar in Second Life. She has a writing job there, a store, and her own blog, called TheLemonPrincess. She also freelances for The Avastar. Sometimes she needs an outlet for her writing that isn't connected with her book store or her fiction and is too long or involved for The AvaStar, so she asks me to post it here, under my own name. Since it's about law, which I know a few things about, I've obliged. So here it is.

Do Avatars Have Standing?

In his 1974 book, environmentalist Christopher Stone asked, "Do Trees Have Standing?" He said reality is created mostly by the language we use to describe it. So if trees had legal standing, like people do, forests could sue to protect themselves from destruction. But trees -- like avatars -- are not reified. They can't sue. Yet at the same time, corporations hold the elevated legal status of "personhood," because our legal system grants such rights to them. It's good for commerce, and commerce is more sacred than religion.

(Really. Article I, Section 8, Clause 3, of the U.S. Constitution, known as the Commerce Clause, is in the first meaty bit of our national scripture and the part that deals with freedom of religion is tucked away in the amendments they passed four years later, when they decided to protect individuals from the inevitable nasty side of the government they created originally. Also, they started to think, how well will commerce profit the owners if the peons of the world aren't guaranteed odds decent enough to make them want to play the house's game? So they amended the constitution by sticking on The Bill of Rights in 1791, which contains the part that stops the goverment from messing with you if you want to practice your religion. It came afterwards.)

Human owners of entities like SL are shielded from responsibility from all sorts of things that the rest of us mere mortals have to answer to, because we live in a great country which favors commerce and you can't have it all gunked up by people who would be adverse to novelties they might later have to be personally responsible for, to the point that it creates economic paralysis. Enter the corporate veil. So where does that leave the lowly avatar? What does Drivel Pivets do when things don't quite turn out the way Second Life's autocratic owners represent? Virtually, nothing. He ceases to exist, and the bumbling man behind the curtain soldiers on.

But it aint all bad. Despite the fact that not long ago, the Second Life City of Neufreistadt deleted from its constitution a provision which would have established a judiciary, we were reminded that there are judiciaries in the real world and we already are subject to some pretty good law. Says avatar Navets Potato (pictured at right in his SL office): "I have been talking to a bunch of people about arbitration and court systems here in SL. I am not all that enthused by the in-SL court system, but like the arbitration idea lot. Or mediation." Navets Potato navigates both worlds, and his SL profile references his real world law firm. Meanwhile Potato confirms he's getting RL clients from contacts made in SL, to the tune of $7,000 US in two weeks, as one article reported.

Enter Pennsylvania lawyer and former SL resident Mark Bragg. Last year he sued Linden Research, Inc. and Philip Rosedale for confiscating his avatar's property when it closed his account for his clever if naughty method of auctioning of SL land. Until recently it was unresolved whether Bragg could sue Rosedale (aka Philip Linden), and whether fraud would trump the site's Terms of Service (TOS) agreement. His only bankable remedy depended on beating the arbitration clause. Pricey arbitration, not the customer-friendly kind (>$5,000 just to file!) and you had to go all the way to San Francisco to do it. "Economically pointless," said Bragg's lawyer, Jason Archinaco, as it would be for most consumers. His case awaited ruling on several issues before it could go forward.

In a March 27 filing, Bragg quoted Rosedale's recent reaffirmation of the notion that SL residents acquire genuine property rights, i.e., that they aren't just playing a game: "You know, people need to own their own things, and they need to be able to do with them what they like, and that's part of the basic appeal."

(BTW, difficulties deciphering what owners' rights actually are explains, in part, why the original sale of virtual Amsterdam in SL fell through. Reportedly buyers weren't familiar with key concepts -- such as having the vendors on the sim retain their rights.)

So is Linden Pied Pipering its users into a dangerous legal riptide? Yes. In an interview published on May 17, Rosedale said something new, and contradictory: "What we are really selling you is computation. We are selling you CPU core. If you buy a 16-acre piece of land, which is about four city blocks, what you are renting is one processor." A processor which can be taken down, or collapse, at any time. Apparently, this intellectual property thing is just an illusion. Not a reality.

Archinaco says this: "What they don't want you to know is they're moving to liquidity. With arbitration, they have confidentiality. They can keep quiet about moving away from land value." In other words, the eventuality of letting outsiders create their own land is like letting anyone print their own money. "People's so-called property rights evaporate but they can't just do that," opines Archinaco, who has no active SL avatar. "While the [Bragg] case stays open they're being nice to everyone."

Heroclitis presaged Linden Labs and Philip Rosedale when he said, "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." Greek philosophy doesn't go over that well with the courts. On May 30 the federal court in Pennsylvania ruled on two early motions by Linden in the Bragg case: first, that Philip Rosedale's (alleged) misleading statements mean he can be personally sued in Pennsylvania, i.e., the federal court has personal jurisdiction over him; and second, that Linden's TOS arbitration provision can't be enforced, based on all sorts of unfair, one-sided, adhesionary conditions. The case will now go forward. Here's the decision: http://lawy-ers.com/robreno_order.pdf.

So there. Thank you Mr. Bragg.

A Few Pics from my Cell Phone

Babu, our cat.
Chesapeake Bay Bridge Fells Point, Baltimore

I couldn't help it. They were just too good. Now I can clean up the SD card.

We Won!!!

Some of you may know that I have an avatar in the virtual reality game, Second Life (SL). Her name is Babu Writer, and here is a link to her blog, TheLemonPrincess. Babu and her creative partner, Flyw Jie, are working on a book bearing this title. Last weekend they (we) participated in SL's first-ever book fair. And guess what!

The Lemon Princess booth won $1000L for best booth display. For the next few weeks you can still visit it at The Book Publishing Village in Wallaby. During the fair there was real-life (RL) press coverage in some trade publications, and there was even a story on BBC4.

As a result of doing well at the Book Fair, on Sunday evening Babu Writer was invited to read some of her poetry at The Blue Angel, SL's hottest poetry venue, and she did. It was well received. Babu was tagged by a RL editor on the way out. Is something more real in the works? One hopes.

Thursday's Poetry Reading a Great Success

Wow, what a night. I have never seen a poetry audience so attentive. There were about 70 people at our event at the Creative Alliance Thursday night. The theater was set up like a club, tables set with votice candles up in front, and rows of seats in the back.

The poets had seats along the side of the stage. Chris introduced the first poet, each of us introduced the next one. Eleven of us read poems, Chris included. Everyone looked so hot, and every single one of us was terrific!

Upstairs in the gallery guests enjoyed our visual art pieces. They will be there until April 28, so come check them out!!

My visual piece is called "The Descent of Inanna, Goddess of Laundry." It's the tale of an Italian American "princess" who goes to her brother-in-law's funeral, runs into some gangsters, and winds up in jail. Of course it's all her husband's fault, so she sells him out. But she's a loyal member of the family, so she returns home after that to do her mother-in-law's laundry. Below the clothesline is an ironing board, sprayed gold, an old fashioned black iron, tied with a red satin ribbon, and a gold laundry basket, full of clothes. There are seven verses in the poem. I put each verse onto a tshirt transfer and ironed them onto white items of clothing. On the ironing board itself is a final shirt, explaining the original Sumerian myth. Hidden in the laundry basked is a small boom box, which plays Italian pop music.

Come to my Poetry Reading!

Some of you know I am in a poetry workshop with teacher Chris Stewart at the Creative Alliance (housed at the Patterson Theatre). We're having a visual poetry exhibit and reading on Thursday, April 12. (Don't panic, the readings are short, and all of the poems have been workshopped.) Please come! Bring friends!

Note: YOU MUST RSVP to the email addy or number below so that your name is on the attendee list. Also please let me know if you are coming. (You can post a comment below.)

OK, here's the official invite from Chris:

- - -

Please join us for an evening of poetry to celebrate National Poetry Month with the Write Here, Write Now workshops at Creative Alliance. Christine Stewart, CA artist in residence, and WHWN members Leo Horrigan, Michael Kelly, Rachel Lucke, Cliff Lynn, Eugenie Nable, Lisa Orenstein, Aimee Pohl, Kathy Spath, Shara Terjung, and Nicole Walton, present Visual Poems at a reception upstairs in the Amalie Rothschild gallery, followed by a reading of their work in the Patterson Theatre.

The event is April 12th. Gallery show/reception begins at 6 pm; the reading is at 7 pm. Please RSVP as space is limited. The event is free, but a $5 donation to cover costs is suggested (and appreciated!). Please include all the names of those in your party for the guest list.

RSVP to info@creativealliance.org or call: 410-276-1651.

Baltimore Burns!

Since my last post I've been busy with our annual Robert Burns supper. We held it last Saturday (January 27) for about 30 people, down from a high of 42. It was the twelfth annual supper held by the Baltimore Burns Club, which my husband, Simon Walton, founded with his friend Stephen Cullen. No piper this year, and no flutes or guitars either. But we had an emotional, almost operatic rendition of Ca The Yowes by my friend Tammy, and much admired recitings of the Burns poem, To A Mouse, in Scots, Hebrew and Spanish. Of course there were the other usual performances, some better than others, and books of poetry handed out to new recruits with Scottish roots.

This year's theme was Robert Burns the Pirate. I designed the graphic (above, at right), and we ironed it onto black tshirts, which everyone received. I also gave the Immortal Memory Speech. It was my second year delivering this speech. If someone else had wanted to do it, I wouldn't have interfered. I meant my speech to be shorter, but it went on far too long yet again. It was about privateers, piracy, and plagiarism. The virtues of artistic theft, as well as the nasty side. I was heckled.

It doesn't matter who delivers the Immortal Memory--there is always heckling. Several people came up to me afterwards and asked for a copy of my remarks. So there.

No one remembers what time we finally toddled off to bed. We had six overnight guests. The party resumed in a more sedate fashion on Sunday. It was noon when we started moving again. We whipped up and consumed a huge pile of waffles. There were omelets made with leftover haggis and cheddar cheese. In the afternoon more guests from the night before arrived, to help move heavy tables and chairs back to the rooms (and floors) they came from, and to reassemble our living room. We also packed away the dishes and glassware and silver. For this latter crowd I reheated some of the previous night's boeuf bourguignon with barley risotto. In the evening, I mixed leftover strips of grilled chicken (we'd used only a fraction of that chicken in the cock-a-leekie soup) into a pound of ziti and a tipped it into a bowl of butter, oil, and chopped parsley that we'd forgotten to use the night before. I added hefty slivers of parmesan with a vegetable peeler, and served it all up with oily garlic toast made from stale bread.

Always feed the workers, that's our motto. Along with, never let leftovers go to waste.

On Burns night my ten-year-old daughter and her friends also got into the act. They wore kilts. They ate pizza. One of them helped her mother read To A Mouse in Hebrew. They stayed up all night. I vaguely remember going into my daughter's room around 3 am because they were complaining, loudly, that they had lost their internet connection in the midst of some game they were playing against each other. One team was on the floor using a laptop, another at my daughter' desktop PC. They seemed surprised that in the middle of the night they could find no one except each other to play against. They're into Webkinz.

Eight days later, there is still a huge pile of table linens in my laundry room. I've washed it all, but it's still waiting to be ironed, folded, and put away. That's because immediately after Burns night weekend, we had to print and send out invitations for a memorial to my mother that we're holding next weekend, put together auction baskets for my daughter's school's Winter Gala (held last night), arrange a trip to the Labyrinth Museum for my daughter's after-school girls' club, write and revise a magazine piece (it's not finished), improve a Powerpoint presentation about our vacation home in France, and plan a family trip to Williamsburg (using a timeshare week we had banked) around a cousin's wedding next June.

Meanwhile, we are still consuming leftover haggis. Recently, I used it to fill quesadillas. I was the only one who wanted to eat that. But I say, "Live on, fusion cuisine!"

p.s. Last month we also went to Gov. Martin O'Malley's inaugural ball. We were in a great spot when he came onstage with his band and played The Times They Are A Changin'. Ran into a bunch of old friends. Had a blast.

Story Published!

I've been busy! Working on a screenplay and writing a bunch of nonfiction essays for a workshop. So it's been a while since I've posted anything here. I promise to come back soon and post something more substantive than the reading list which follows. But I do have news. A flash fiction story of mine has been published by Vestal Review. Whoo hoo! Here's the link:

The Man from the Train

And here's a list of what I have been reading since I posted my summer reading list here on September 4, 2006 (in no particular order):

Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
Intimacy, by Hanif Kureishi
The Celtic Realms: The History and Culture of the Celtic Peoples from Pre-history to the Norman Invasion, by Myles Dillon and Nora Chadwick
The Handyman, by Carolyn See
The Woman I Left Behind, by Kim Jensen
Child of My Heart, by Alice McDermott
Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill
Lisey's Story, by Stephen King
The Memory-Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards
The Sea, by John Banville
Only Revolutions, by Mark Z. Danielewsky
Narrative Design, by Madison Smartt Bell
The Great Fire, by Shirley Hazzard
Incompleteness, by Rebecca Goldstein
New Monologues for Women, I and II, ed. by Tori Haring-Smith and Liz Engleman
Man's Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl

I gobbled up Reading Lolita in Tehran. It was more valuable than I thought it would be. As Nafisi tells the story of her secret meetings with a female students under an increasingly repressionist regime, the reader learns just how much one's sense of self can be threatened by living in such an environment. One must work hard to preserve the spirit, and one way is to expand oneself by studying and sharing great literature.

The preservation of spirit under difficult circumstances led me to Frankl, which I am still reading. Frankl is an important thinker, and I'd like to comment more thoughtfully at a later time.

Intimacy was a short one, and the title describes the narrator's relationship with the reader as much as it does the messy crisis of his character's life. Kureishi is one of those writers who accomplishes huge things with few words. You can see the insides and the outsides of his narrator all at once. John Banville does that well, too (see below).

The Celtic Realms was an impulse purchase. The history gets a bit tedious, but I am enjoying the parts about the female Celtic heroic figures and deities. Also it's fascinating to think how many of the customs we've inherited from the Celts appparently came from the early peoples who migrated westward out of ancient India. (I already have Antonia Fraser's Boadicea's Chariot on the shelf and hope to read it as a follow up.)

I think Carolyn See's books are a hoot. Quirky characters, unusual plots, fun and quick to read. I have another one in the wings. Every now and then I send her an email, and she writes back!

The Woman I Left Behind is written by a local author, Kim Jensen. I met her at the 2006 City Lit Festival in Mt. Vernon, where she did a reading and drew me into her seductive narrative. It was towards the end of the day, and did not have a check or enough cash left to buy her book. Later I ordered it on Amazon (they're pestering me to review it; perhaps I will). Jensen teaches at the Community College of Baltimore County. I was pleasantly surprised to find -- it has to be! -- Kathy Acker as a pivotal character in this novel! One day I will ask Jensen if I am right. I had only recently discovered The Essential Kathy Acker when I read Jensen's book. Suddenly it hit me. The Woman I Left Behind is as much about Acker is it is about the wife that the Palestinian emigre, Khalid, leaves behind when he finds Irene, the woman he really loves. Somehow Jenson reminds me a bit of Mary Gaitskill -- maybe because her characters hover on the fractal margin between connectedness and oblivion.

Mary Gaitskill's Veronica. Wow. This is the best novel I have read in ages. I would give my front teeth to write as well as that. What courage. Like fingernails scraping on a blackboard, and you can't stop listening. I want to write with the same sense of destructive abandon! I've scoured the internet and scooped up copies of everything else Gaitskill has published.

The Alice McDermott book was pure pleasure. I love the way she writes. Quirky story, magical even. Interesting parallel here with the story in Veronica, a quirky, erotic even, coming of age story revolving around a relationship between two female characters, one of whom is doomed and the other survives to tell the tale.

Only Revolutions is the new hot trendy literary masterpiece, or so various critics were saying. I decided I had to have it. Went to B&N and paid retail. I found it unreadable. It gave me a headache. Give me a break. This is not literature, it's new age bullshit. The production values are good, though, and there are cute little tricks built into the book itself, which is supposedly an object d'art. I read bits of it from both ends, and the chronology stuff in the margins. I did the flip thing to see the page numbers rotate along the edge. This book does absolutely nothing for me. I can't believe I bought it -- what was I thinking? And ha! The New Yorker agrees with me.

Shirley Hazzard is a wonderful writer. Her characters are so well crafted, so well definined and so distinct from one another. And her sense of time and place, and pacing, and mood, and story. I confess I am not quite finished with The Great Fire but I am loving it. I am enjoying it so much I keep forgetting to read it as a writer. I also have Hazzard's earlier book, The Transit of Venus, and hope to read it soon.

I read Madison Smartt Bell's textbook cover to cover, including all of the tedious but essential footnotes. I hear it is possible to attend Bell's classes at Goucher as a non-degree student, but only at significant expense and loads of rigamarole. You get to sign up for him only after the degree students are accommodated, and his classes are always full. Oh well.

After finishing Bell's textbook I read the new Stephen King novel solely to analyze its structure. Perhaps my time would have been better spent reading something else.

I need a new craft book to read. I like to always have one on the go. I haven't read John Gardner's The Art of Fiction yet. I have an old paperback edition snarfed at a flea market. It probably deserves to be read next, but I ought to get a better copy. Or maybe Janet Burroway's text, Writing Fiction, should be next.

New Monologues for Women (I&II) collects short to longish pieces, and they are outrageous, some of them, and a pleasure to read. You have to recite these pieces out loud if you want the full effect. My friend Margo loaned these slim volumes to me, and she probably wants them back. She was careful to write her name with a big black Sharpie pen in the front of both of them as she was handing them to me.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter and The Sea were book club reads. I was not fond of the former, as I found the characters hopelessly one dimensional and unrealistic. It was decidedly unliterary, too formulaic. I could not believe the author graduated from a serious writing program. Although I have suspicions -- perhaps writing programs drain all the creativity and originality and courage out of you. The Sea was my choice, however, and I fell in love with Banville. A painterly writer, and this story with its three intermingling currents is well constructed. The book is brief, and the story is tidal, like the sea itself. A haunting masterpiece. It won the Booker prize but Banville said in one of his interviews that The Sea is not his best book! Eventually I will read one or more of his others, perhaps The Book of Evidence.

I'm fascinated with Kurt Gödel and have three books about him. I'm well into Rebecca Goldstein's book, Incompleteness, and up next is Janna Levin's novel (faction?) about Gödel and Alan Turing, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. I had long had in my library the third book, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-Winner, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Unhappily, I found it tough going and eventually quit the first two times I tried to read it. I guess I did not understand Gödel, but Goldstein explains him well, and her book is much easier to read. I've heard Janna Levin lecture on mathematical physics, and she's been interviewed a bunch of times on various podcasts that I have enjoyed. So after Goldstein, it'll be Levin, and then I'll go back and try Hofstadter again. Perhaps I will have better success.

I Stand Here iPodding - Part Three

What you needn't have and what you must--a favorites list.

There is one more program that is a must if you want to convert streaming media into mp3s for your iPod. Audacity is great for recording the audio from all kinds of streaming media. All you do is select "Stereo Mix" as your input source to take your computer's audio output and channel it back through as input. Then you can easily chop off the beginnings and the endings to get a clear track without unnecessary silence or jabber. Export the resulting project files to mp3 format and you are done! However, you are recording in real time, which means you don't want to be doing anything that could interfere with the media stream or compete with the sound you are trying to record. That means, for example, no web surfing or downloading of email while you record.

Now for my list of favorites:

Municipal and Other Public Libraries

The Library of Congress maintains an index of poets, novelists and other writers whose work is broadcast on the web.

The San Francisco Public Library has over 1200 downloadable audio books (free account needed) and the New York Public Library also permits download of audio material.

Universities

University webcasts are ubiquitous these days but here are some I favor:
The University of Pennsylvania's archive of literary webcasts, Penn's larger list of media links, and Penn's digital poetry archive.

UC Berkeley, mentioned in Part Two, has an archive of downloadable media in various formats. Also check out the webcast.berkeley Courses Schedule.

Similarly, MIT has OpenCourseWare and video lectures. There are Princeton event videos. There are Stanford free lectures. Purdue has complete lectures of select classes.

Columbia University's Fathom Archive offers access to a wide range of free content, including lectures, articles, interviews, exhibits and free seminars. You can also find some great lectures about literature here: http://ci.columbia.edu/ci/subjects/literature.html.

Stores and Publishers

Barnes & Noble's Meet the Writers Podcast features many hours of video and audio interviews. Also check out the Amazon Wire. The Tattered Cover, a splendid independent bookstore, features a podcast I mentioned previously, called Authors on Tour. As for publishers, there is The Penguin Podcast. Simon & Shuster's got one, too. Also check out the one by Canada's Raincoast Books.

TV, Radio, and Newspapers

Booknotes, on CSPAN, has 15 years of televised book interviews. NPR has a host of audio material relative to books. Also check out the wealth of downloadable material on writing, poetry and books from the BBC. ABC Radio National in Australia has a daily book show that's very good, The Book Show. Michael Silverblatt is a terrific literary interviewer, and there is a podcast of his KCRW show, Bookworm, here.

Another worthy archive features Don Swaim's conversations with prominent writers. His show, Book Beat, aired on CBS radio (AM stations) from 1982 to 1993. Short segments can be downloaded from the Dom Swain website, while full-length, unedited recordings can be downloaded from Ohio University's Wired for Books.

For an exhaustive list of public radio (and TV) stations that feature live web broadcasts and podcasts, including literature and drama programs, see Public Radio Fan.

As for newspapers, there's the New York Times' Books podcast, and from the UK, there's the Times Online Books Podcast.

Authors and Publicists

Bill Thompson maintains a growing list of author websites on his podcast's website here, and many of these authors post readings and interviews or links to them that can be downloaded. Publicists are getting in on the podcast act also. TriCom Publicity, Inc. has one featuring its clients, called Authors in Your Pocket, and it's an excellent model.

Foundations/Nonprofits/Journals

The Lannan Foundation podcasts are superb. Also check out Lannan.org for more downloadable audio, and video, too, including archived interviews conducted by Michael Silverblatt.

The Academy of American Poets hosts a podcast as well as an audio archive. You can find them both here.

Also check out Nextbook , which was established to be a gateway to Jewish literature, and features a podcast and lots of downloads.

Not many literary reviews publish podcasts. I mentioned PodLit previously, and now I've found The Chattahoochee Review podcast. The Chattahoochee Review is a literary quartly published by Georgia Perimeter College. Their podcast is a mixture of interviews, readings and lectures, of varying lengths. There are also audio downloads at The Paris Review, but no official podcast.

Additional Goodies

This isn't a podcast but I found it while looking for one at The Paris Review. Thanks to an NEA grant and other support, The Paris Review now has an archive called The DNA of literature, containing over 50 years of their "Writers at Work" interviews, and they are all available online, for free. What a tremendous resource.

This isn't a podcast either but I want to mention it here anyway: LibraryThing. It's an online service that helps you catalog your books. You can access your own catalog from anywhere, even a web-enabled phone. LibraryThing connects people who own the same books, and comes up with suggested reading. You can have a free account and catalog your first 200 books for free. After that there is a modest fee. Just enter the book's ISBN or a keyword and up pops the rest of the indexing data. LibraryThing fills in the blanks from public sources like Amazon and the Library of Congress. Then just click on the book to add it to your catalog. You can even create notes -- such as links to relevant digital media. It's extremely cool. You'll find it a lot easier than using Excel or home library software -- and now you know what I was referring to when I said what you needn't have in the title of this piece.

Ruth's Chris

A Restaurant Review

Ruth's Chris has a new place outside Ocean City, Maryland. Store No 95 they call it. I am quite sure it is just as nice as Stores 1 through 94. The enterprise went public this year.

It looks like a deluxe paddock inside, or maybe a ski lodge, with a loft and an open floor plan. Let's go with paddock, because ski lodge implies there is a mountain outside, and this place does not have one. It is flat out there, flat as a pancake, except for the manufactured lumps that grace the golf course, a golf course that stretches as far as the eye can see, over the filled-in wetlands leading out to the Bay. Turning right from the highway on Maid at Arms Way (across from the Home Depot and the Wal Mart), the expanse reminds one of an enormous cat box, with ribbons of asphalt threaded through it. Or a landfill.

While we were waiting for our table at the restaurant an impossibly long stretch limo drove up, and it was black with decorative red and yellow flames air brushed down the side of it. Several people weaing laminated name tags got out and were escorted immediately to somewhere we could not see.

The restaurant is luxurious, and the people are so very nice!

Our waiter, for example, was very knowledgable about the menu. With the cheerful persuasive skills of a man who most likely sells time shares (to married couples only!) in rural Virginia during the day, he told us with great care about the enormous lumps of corn-fed beef that you could purchase, a la carte, along with large platters of a la carte mashed potatoes, potatoes which sit in about a half a pound of melted garlic butter. Mmmm. And you can start with their signature a la carte "chop" salad, which has a vertical structure and as far as we can tell, is comprised principally of mayonnaise, with a lovely chiffonade of french-fried onions on top.

On this occasion my father had a gift card worth $80 to spend, which bought us two of those luscious a la carte steaks, oh boy! We chose the petit filets, the smallest on the menu. We could have split one between us, actually. My daughter, who is ten years old, ordered the boned chicken, which was a whole poussin with all of the bones removed except for its cute little drumsticks, and it came wrapped around about ten ounces of melted Boursin "cheese." Our meat came out on plates we were told were five hundred degrees so don't touch them! To be fair our server then made a big deal about transferring my daughter's chicken to a cooler plate without even being asked to do so, but I suspect he was engaging in a bit of performance art at this point on behalf of his tip.

I should tell you that we went there under false pretenses. My father made the reservation under the name Jones, because he is 81 years old and is getting tired of having to spell S--------- every time he calls someone on the phone who wants to write down his name. This resulted in our being called Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Jones all evening, and my daughter kept asking things like, "Why do they keep calling us Jones?" or "Why do they have to call us anything?" or "Why didn't you just say Bob if you didn't want to spell S---------?" or "What are you going to do when the check comes and you are trying to pay the bill with a credit card with the name of this guy S--------- on it?"

The Mrs. Jones part was pretty funny though. I guess we made an interesting couple, Dad and me.

So my dad, who was getting a bit grumpy at all of the name business, said, "Why do they need to call you by name in the first place? It's not really a country club." It's a gated community without a real gate. It's called Glen Riddle, but it's not really a glen either. It's named after the guy who used to train those famous race horses. Actually his name was Sam Riddle, a textile millionaire, and he named the place Glen Riddle after the town he came from in Pennsylvania. Which in turn is a famous old name in Scotland that has something to do with winnowing wheat and rye. Indeed much of the physical structure of the once-great stable was used in the design of the restaurant. There are delightful touches like old stall doors that have been polished and turned into tables in the bar and grill.

If you buy one of the $600,000-plus houses constructed by the Centex Corporation on the Glen Riddle Fairway site, you can choose from two popular models, the Man O'War and the War Admiral. Don't worry if you can't qualify for a bank mortgage, because Centex provides that, too! And don't forget Centex's HomeTeam Pest Defense. Should undesirable vermin invade the homeland, these houses are designed with a built-in system to facilitate their extermination! Unfortunately we haven't met any of the people who live in these warring houses, nor are we likely ever to meet them, since we don't play golf. But at dinner they seemed nice. In fact, my daughter was so impressed with their grooming, she said at one point, "Mom, why do all of the women in here look like they come from soap operas?"

While waiting for our meal we noticed that an awful lot of the men wore tennis shoes and leather jackets and displayed beepers or cell phones on their waists while eating their supper. Truly we don’t belong to any real country clubs, and with a name like S--------- it was highly unlikely that my parents would ever have been invited to join any when I was a kid, but now I know what you are supposed to wear.

When the check came we were given a gargantuan plastic carry-on bag bearing the famous Ruth's Chris logo (in red, black and white) to transport home our enormous uneaten lumps of leftover red meat, which had been cooked to absolute perfection and the bits we were able to eat had practically melted in our mouths. Before being placed in the bag, they also had been carefully wrapped, separately, in generously-sized No. 6 black plastic clamshells.

When we got ready to leave, I noticed a young woman in the unheated entryway. She had long chestnut hair and long, muscular legs, which were bare, although it was about 38 degrees at that point. She was wearing one of those miniscule lacy black acetate slips, with a black push up bra underneath. The bra straps were just a bit shorter than the spaghetti straps on the dress. Focusing on her legs again, I noted this dress could not possibly have been any shorter. On her feet were enormous black platform shoes with heels higher than anything I had ever seen south of New Jersey. There is, in fact, a term they use for shoes that look like this in New Jersey, but we don’t use that kind of language on our beach down here. She was on her cell phone for a very long time, swinging her big red forelocks as she shifted from one foot to the other, like a gamine stuck at the gate. It looked like she was getting cold.

All in all, it was a great evening. We waved a cheerful goodbye to pretend soldier in the little house on our way out. For some reason, on the way home, driving through Berlin, Maryland with my father's handicap tags swinging to and fro from our rear view mirror, I found myself humming, "Tomorrow belongs to me!"

I Stand Here iPodding - Part Two

Put Streaming RealMedia on your iPod

Perhaps you thought you couldn't do it, but you can. Streaming media can be captured and converted into formats that are iPod (or other portable device) friendly. Let's start with RealMedia. There are many freeware and shareware programs out there which can capture and convert these files.

The one I use most often is Rawavrecorder. It's free, it's small, it's simple and it works. This program converts media with files ending in .ra, .ram and .rm. To find the actual file your RealPlayer is playing (the link on the web page may be to a pointer file), click on the file name that appears in your RealPlayer window. Copy the address it reveals. Paste it into the Rawavrecorder. While the file downloads and streams, the program converts it to a .wav file. When complete, drag this new file into your iTunes library and then convert it, or, use Windows Media Player or other music software to convert the .wav file into an .mp3. Easy -- except that the first step, the conversion into .wav, is done in real time. Meaning if you have a lot of shows you want to convert, you need to line them up and run them in batch as you sleep or while you are at work. Rawavrecorder lets you batch them. But if you do this in the background while you are seated at the computer you won't be able to listen to anything else.

I use this program most with segments that are streamed in RealAudio from public radio websites, and with lectures or readings that appear as webcasts on univeristy sites.

Also, you can take RealVideo segments and Rawavrecorder will spit out just the audio. The only thing worse than talking heads on a big screen is talking heads on a 2½-inch one. So, okay, maybe I'll want to watch a video while waiting with a bunch of other women in pink gowns for my turn to be tortured on the mammography machine. But I'm more likely to be reading then. So usually what I'm interested in are programs I can listen to while doing some house or garden chore, or driving (using my car's aux jack). You don't want video then.

Still sound like too much trouble? Here is a sample of what's out there. It proves RealMedia content is worth finding, capturing and converting for your iPod:

Chicago Public Radio - Stories on Stage
A large archive of short stories, performed by actors from the Chicago area. Some old, some new. Featuring authors such as Lorrie Moore, Alan Gurganus, Bernard Malamud, Alice McDermott, and many more. Does having an actor read a writer's story change the experience of it? Yup. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. The series even includes, from 2005, a four-part reading of Jane Smiley's novella, The Age of Grief. Wow. How she draws the characters, how she explores and develops their joint lives! Compare the marriage depicted in Smiley's tale to that sketched out by Tobias Wolff, in Say Yes (scroll down). Granted, you can't do a whole lot in a 14-minute piece (I'm guessing it was under 2,000 words), but both of the characters and the relationship itself have cleverly executed arcs. All downloadable for free.

Exploratorium Webcast - Memory Lectures
Six lectures from San Francisco's Exploratorium. Lecturers include Lewis Hyde, Robert Sopolsky, Elizabeth Loftus, and others. If you are writing about a character's memory, particularly if that charater is very old or very young, or using memory in other ways as a creative writer, these are great resources. After listening to the Lewis Hyde lecture I went out and read a couple of his books, and also Frances Yates' the Art of Memory. I already had Robert Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir, and he was fascinating also. Especially when he talked about his relationship with his aged, memory-impaired father. Knowing the science of memory helps you shape an accurate literary narrative.

Book-TV on C-SPAN2
Many of these programs become webcasts after they appear on television. Like this one from September 3, 2006, in which Gay Talese, author of A Writer's Life, talks about the importance of listening to the stories of ordinary people, and encourages writers to write about them It's nice to see him in his beautiful suit, but you don't really need the video. He doesn't do impersonations, draw pictures, or dance. He just talks. Perfect for .mp3.

Lannan Foundation Archives
The Lannan Foundation has an archive of its Bookworm interviews and its Readings & Conversations going back to 1998. Although Lannon's Bookworm podcast, with host Michael Silberblatt, can be subscribed to on iTunes and downloaded directly to your iPod, Lannan has a great deal more to offer on its website, in RealMedia format. Like this Reading and Conversation with Rikki Ducornet from 2005. I adore the sensuality of her language. I went out and bought Ducornet's The Fan Maker's Inquisition after listening to her read from it.

Slate's meaningoflife.tv
Meaningoflife is sponsored by Slate, and hosted by Robert Wright, author of Three Scientists and Their Gods, The Moral Animal and Nonzero. He interviews the English-speaking world's leading thinkers. Karen Armstrong. Edward O. Wilson. Daniel Dennett. Steven Pinker. And on and on. He's a bit nudgey, particularly with Karen Armstrong, and sometimes he tries to impress his guests too much with his cleverness. But by and large the interviews are great.

BBC4's In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg
Melvyn Bragg converses with the leading thinkers of our time, investigates the history of ideas, and debates their application in modern life. Although the past year's program are available by podcast, shows prior to that are available only as RealMedia archived on BBC4's website. Here's a good one about the nature of the human imagination.

Berkeley Webcast Archives
Berkeley has great podcasts and webcasts, but, once again, a lot of the archival material is not available in .mp3. Such as this RealVideo clip from the Graduate School of Jounalism, in which Michael Pollan talks about his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, as well as "the narrative laundry line," participatory journalism, and how to pitch a story about "agriculture." The video is not essential… but Pollan is a charming, entertaining guy. He also has a nice smile.

So what do you do if you want to put the video on your iPod? Well… you Google around for a converter. Like the ones Boilsoft sells.

I Stand Here iPodding - Part One

Or, a Playlist for Writers Who Have to Do Laundry

I bought my first iPod a few months ago. Not long after, I visited the iTunes Music Store directory and navigated towards Podcasts→Arts→Literature. There I found many offerings whose quality ranged from bad to dreadful, but also a surprising number of worthwhile programs. Not all of the good ones were on iTunes, though. I found them all over the web.

Here are the best podcasts that are of specific use to writers. (On another day I'll list podcasts for literature lovers generally.)

I've supplied links to the relevant websites so you can decide for yourself how and what to download.

I usually start my writing day with Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. Don't you?

Then I may check for updates on these others:

The journal Creative Nonfiction offers a podcast, called PodLit. In this segment, CNF's founder and editor Lee Gutkind talks with Dinty W. Moore, founder and editor of Brevity, the journal of "extremely brief nonfiction." (I'm a Dinty fan, BTW. I have a piece featured in Brevity right now.) Gutkind has produced ten episodes so far. Some segments are lifted from writers' conferences, some are interviews, and some are creative nonfiction pieces read by actors.

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, author of Pen on Fire, hosts a weekly program on the writing craft and the business of writing. Writers on Writing can also be accessed from this blog and from the iTunes directory. Just yesterday, I listened to her interview of California writer Carolyn See, whose novel, There Will Never Be Another You, I just finished, and whose 2002 nonfiction book, Making a Literary Life, I read before that. (I've started corresponding with Ms. See, who is also the Friday book reviewer for the Washington Post, and she's delightful.)

The Writing Show is produced by Paula Berinstein ("Paula B"), author of a number of nonfiction books and a veteran researcher. Her show explores the craft of writing and sometimes she exposes her own foibles in a humorous way. She showcases the successes of those who have tried novel approaches to publishing. In fact, as soon as I finish writing this, I am going to find out how to make money on my blog. And then, I am going to listen to today's show, with Jean Tennant, which will tell me how to get published.

There's one from NPR, a podcast called On Words. It's culled from radio segments recorded by the late poet laureate John Ciardi. (A writer should be interested in etymology.)

Poets&Writers' podcast features readings and interviews, and the occasional group discussion. Don't miss it. Boy is this episode good: How to Publish Your Short Story: A Panel Discussion (2.01.06).

And then there are daily podcasts from The Poetry Foundation, featuring recordings of poems, interviews with poets, and poetry documentaries.

Finally, PEN American Center has a podcast. PEN is the world’s oldest international literary organization. Like other media hosts, PEN does not give you everything via the podcast. There's lots more audio to download, but you have to get it directly from the website.

Next time, I'll talk about audio and video formats that aren't iPod friendly, and what you can do about it. I'm no geek, mind you, but i have figured out a thing or two.

I've Submitted to Third Coast!

I've just submitted a short (2:30) audio piece, entitled, "School Mothers," to the 2006 Third Coast International Audio Festival. The festival is sponsored by Chicago Public Radio. They've accepted it and posted it on their website! To listen to it, follow this link and scroll down to #43: http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/99ways.asp.

Contest criteria appear at the top of the page. I've submitted my piece in time for it to be selected as one of the four whose producers will be invited to Chicago (all expenses paid) to attend the TCF Conference in October and present work there. If it's chosen, my piece would also be featured separately on the Third Coast Festival website.

I've never produced an audio piece before, so the sound is amateurish. My lovely friend Bill Kaplan kindly gave me some sound clips to use as background, so I could meet the contest criteria, and I mixed it up myself using a program called Audacity, my home PC, and a hand-me-down mike. But I'm really hoping it's the writing that counts.

Veils and Scape Goats

Alas, I have not yet read Azar Nafisi's book, Reading Lolita in Tehran. (See this earlier post.) It is still on the table that is next to the table that is next to the bed. Shame on me. At least it should be on proximal table, not the distal one.

I seemed to go on a bender after reading Lolita last spring, delving into both fiction and nonfiction about cultures headed for self-destruction and people who themselves self-destruct and then maybe resurrect themselves. As in the novels of Michel Houellebecq, which my husband and I read, one after the other, during spring break. As in Rick Moody's The Black Veil. (I didn't care that Dale Peck didn't like it.)

Of course, I had to read the original story, The Minister's Black Veil, by Nathanial Hawthorne, which Moody kindly includes in the back of his book. Despite not having read Nafisi's book, I was developing, apparently, some sort of veil fetish. Which wasn't helped by suddenly deciding to re-read Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, with its sexy blue-veiled Tuareg tribesman who carries Kit Moresby deep into the Sahara and ravishes her to the sound of camels braying (is that what they do?), next to piles of steaming camel dung.

And then I got all fixated on the Tuaregs, their matriarchal culture, which keeps the men but not the women veiled, and their written language, used only by the women, which resembles Phoenician, and is used by them to compose beautiful poetry, and on their legendary queen, Tin Hinan, whose remains were dug out of a cave in the southern Hoggar in the 1920s by Count Byron Kuhn de Prorok, who was looking for Atlantis. I read his dusty books. Discovered connections with Frenchman Pierre Benoit's novel, L'Atlantide, in which an adventurer is captured by the Tuaregs. Benoit also relies on legends about the lost kingdom of Atlantis. And I read of the controversy over Benoit's alleged theft of plot from a similar novel, H. Rider Haggard's She. I learned that Haggard's mythology "can also be seen as a precursor of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories."

Now we're having fun. Because Houellebecq wrote a book about Lovecraft. Co-winky-dink? No, no. There's a connection. In this translated extract from the book that appeared 4 June 2005 in The Guardian, Houellebecq writes:

From his journeys to the penumbral worlds of the unutterable, Lovecraft did not return to bring us good news. Perhaps, he confirmed, something is hiding behind the curtain of reality that at times allows itself to be perceived. Something truly vile, in fact.

(Emphasis supplied.) Veils again. I noted that Bowles' Moresby is herself a metaphor for a colonialist culture attracted to the sweet nothingness of self-destruction and that this culture, like Moresby, ignores myriad opportunities for retreat. Moresby effects her retreat by plunging forward, through the veil, into that sweet nothingness which her Turareg offers. And I wonder... perhaps this is the only way to proceed. Like Kali, the dark goddess of India, under whose command the world renews itself only by ghastly destruction. To keep the flame alive, must we as individuals continually propel ourselves straight forward into oblivion?

Does it turn out better if, as with the Tuaregs, and with Hawthorne's character, it is the men, rather than the women, who are veiled? I suspect not. It's the graven defining of otherness which gets folks into trouble, because of the misguided assumption that what we know of ourselves is as certain as the veils that we use to wall off the other. These veils achieve nothing but self deception.

Walling oneself off from the one who knows us most intimately is what Hanif Kureishi's flawed protagonist does in his novella, Intimacy. Somehow that book slipped into the reading pile ahead of Nafisi also. You see, walling himself off from someone who has intimate knowledge of him is what Humbert is trying to do in Lolita when he kills his rival, Quilty. But unlike the original scape goat ritual, which served to restore order in man's earliest troubled societies, Humbert's projection of his own flaws onto Quilty merely effectuates his own destruction. Otherwise he would have gotten away with his foul crimes against Lolita. It was Quilty -- the character who spent most of the novel veiling himself from Humbert -- who knew Humbert the best. And Humbert could not bear it.

So here's another lesson, courtesy of Kureishi and Nabokov: we erect veils between others and ourselves because we cannot bear to be known. Worse, we cannot bear to know ourselves.

Perhaps our preoccupation with this fellow Karr (getting back to the JonBenet thing) is just another version of Humbert's fixation on Quilty. It's the scapegoat reaction. But then, there's a whole nother reading list, about various Fall-guys, like Jesus, and Fall-women, like Eve, and before we know it we're back to Hawthorne, rereading The Scarlet Letter in the guest room, which is where we shelve the novels. And then onto a couple of the other books, like Rhawn Joseph's The Transmitter to God (see below), with, inter alia, its descriptions of the Catholic Church's sponsored torture and gender-cide of women in the 1400s. The amygdala. The limbic system. The reptile brain lurking inside us all, ready to connect us to murder and sex and fear and domination. And on, to the web to read more about mimetic desire. And on, to a couple of radio interviews with Rene Girard from last season, which you can still listen to online.

Along the way I also read The Call of Cthulhu, and some other Lovecraft stories. Hubby and I had a blast watching the movie Dagon, which is based on Lovecraft's tales. Lovecraft named his creature after the ancient Middle Eastern deity, Dagon. Dagon, once a god of grain, and before that a fish-god, is a sort of fall-guy, but he's also a projection of our own inner slithering god-demon. Our inner jailer. Our shadow selves.

All of these ideas are rolling around in Houellebecq's novels, whose characters are tormented up front and center by the worst aspects of their own makeup, and the worst aspects of their own culture. And yet there is some sweet precious thing lurking, just out of his characters' reach, beyond the curtain of Houellebecq's worst dystopias. The possibility of love. If only Houellebecq's character, Daniel, and Nabokov's Humbert, and Kureishi's Jay -- all middle-aged writers -- could go about it without fucking everything up.

Now it's time for a fresh look at the creature behind the veil. It's time for Nafisi.

Summer Reading List

We went last week to our timeshare at Massanutten, which is near Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. I did little writing, but lots of reading, playing with Tarot cards, and cooking (I brought a big carton of tomatoes to can that would not wait a week until we returned).

In no particular order, and because it's now Labor Day, here is a list of the books I read during the Summer of 2006 (sorry for not providing links):

Making a Literary Life, by Carolyn See
There Will Never Be Another You, by Carolyn See
Crescent, by Diana Abu-Jabar
The Pillowman (a play), by Martin McDonagh
Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdon, by Rachel Pollack
The Forest of Souls, by Rachel Pollack
The Transmitter to God, by Rhawn Joseph
Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy
The Message in the Bottle (essays), by Walker Percy
I'm Not the New Me, by Wendy McClure
Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes
The Hole in the Universe, by K.C. Cole
Dancing in the Flames, by Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson
Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker, ed. Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper
The Serpent and the Rainbow, by Wade Davis
A Round-Heeled Woman, by Jane Juska (bought it twice by accident, and her new book has just come in the mail)

My favorite part of our yearly trip to Virginia is not viewing the scenery along Skyline Drive, or hiking, but visiting the Green Valley Book Fair. We even pack a lunch and picnic outdoors. We return home with crates of books. We use collapsable wheeled carts so we don't have to suffer shopping baskets with metal handles that dig into your arms.

I learned recently that there is such a thing as "bookstore tourism." So we are not the only loonies out there who go from book sale to book sale and buy more books than we possibly can read.

At a conference recently someone asked me what sites I use to find the lowest prices for new and used books online. Here's my list:

Abebooks
Addall
Amazon
Buy.com
Daedalus (a new one's near me with coffee next door)
eBay - Books (often the cheapest for recent releases)
Half.com
Overstock.com
Powells (great website, why is the store so far away?!)
The Tattered Cover (this big independent bookseller successfully resisted gov't subpoena for customer records, yeah!)
Wonderbook (not far away - Frederick, MD - and it's huge. USA Today thinks it's one of the 10 best used bookstores in the country)

Notice I have not listed Barnes & Noble or Borders. I get emails from them all the time - and I read them. I do visit their stores. And even buy books there. But it's not where I go to find good used books or new ones cheap.

Then there's the download-it-for-free sites, e.g.:
World eBook Fair
Free Classic AudioBooks
Project Gutenberg

Of course every Baltimorian who loves to peruse stacks of used books in search of treasure needs to visit the annual Smith College Book Sale. We take our wheely carts there, too. And wear our comfortable shoes.

Meet Florabelle. Hi Florabelle!

American Dream

"JonBenet had been strangled to death with a garrote made from supplies found in the home, her skull fractured and her mouth duct-taped. Forensic evidence suggests she had been sexually assaulted." -- This headline struck me as a warning. The persistence of the JonBenet story is evidence that American culture is becoming increasingly self destructive. As suggested in Nabokov's Lolita, we Americans are on intimate terms with our jailer. We invite him in. Our convoluted desire is for the abnegation of self and we are in denial over it. We want someone else to blame, zip-free. It is even Kabalistic -- "From the forest itself comes the handle for the axe," sings Matisyahu, although his use is from the Tanya. Anyway, last year I finally read Lolita, and I also wanted to read Reading Lolita in Tehran. I was embarrassed not to have read either book yet, especially since Azar Nafisi teaches right here in Baltimore, at Hopkins.

What Am I Writing Now? Here's a Taste.

For a moment the only sound is that of steam squeaking as it escapes from the waffle iron. Then there is the click of its thermostat, and the light turns green. Steaming waffle quadrants improve a platter beside me. I shuttle between it and the gas cooktop, where sausage sizzles in a pan.

My parents are visiting. She sleeps upstairs; he sleeps down. They are both in his room now, and he is getting her dressed. The door is closed but I hear her protesting. She cries these words: "No!" "Don't!" "Whooaaah!" He is growling at her in a much deeper voice than the one he uses with the rest of us. I cannot make out his commands.

Suddenly the door opens and he comes through the small foyer and into our kitchen.

"There," he says, as though this first task of the day has completely exhausted him, and perhaps it has. He is flushed. He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. He has carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists, compressed nerves in both elbows and both ankles, and in his prescription shoes he walks like Frankenstein. Now there is also talk of a pacemaker. They say he needs a 24-hour monitor, but his small-town cardiologist has two broken ones so he couldn't get it fitted this week. Do they know she couldn't call 911, even if she recognized she needed to?

He approaches the counter near the growing pile of waffles. He pulls over the comics and sits to read them on our new red step stool with its padded seat and back. The stool I bought at Target. The stool I bought because it is identical to the one my parents had in their kitchen when I was growing up.

In the 1950s, I sat on a red stool identical to this one and my mother fed me mashed fruit with a spoon. In the '60s, when the seat got a burn hole in it, my father patched it with reddish epoxy. In those days he would also get brown melt holes down the fronts of the short-sleeve polyester shirts he wore to his job as an accountant. By the early '70s, the epoxy was partly ripped like a scab on a wound that had not quite healed. Around then, he quit smoking. By the time I finished college the stool was gone and all of his shirts were new.

Now he has a fat mechanical pencil in his hand and he is doing the Jumble. The pencil is fat because his hands work more like paws. Anyway he does not actually use the pencil. It is only for emergencies. His new trick is to do the Jumble completely in his head and then challenge me to do the same. Perhaps this is some baseline mental test for me, to see if I am headed down the same path as my mother, but more likely he is doing it just to prove he is still smarter than me. I do not try my hardest so he wins. This pleases him greatly.

"Did you save me some fruit?" His eyes loom large behind thick glasses.

"Yes. Be careful, it's hot over there." With my sausage tongs, I am pointing towards a bowl of fruit behind the waffle iron.

He pulls a plastic device from a shirt pocket and begins pulverizing my mother's morning pills. I lean over the cooktop and hand him a small spoon and a custard cup. He works quietly, using half of a banana. The resulting goo is grey, with nubs of blue and green sticking out.

"Has the green light come on yet, Dad?" He peeks inside the waffle iron.

"No, but it looks like they are nearly finished."

A few mornings later the house is empty except for my husband and me. I am sitting on the red stool, working the morning's Jumble with a pen. My husband comes in. I do not look up.

"Why have you suddenly taken up the Jumble?" I do not like his cheerful tone.

"Shut up."

I am stalling on the third word. I write down six letters alphabetically, forcing them into a circle. I tap the pen from one letter to another. Nothing is suggesting itself to me. At the edge of my vision my husband is looking for something on the counter where the waffle iron sits.

"We're out of bananas," he says, and lifts with his thumb and middle finger a half eaten one that is entertaining a halo of fruit flies.

"There are strawberries in the fridge."

He leans over my shoulder. The smell of dead banana wafts between us.

"Trough," he says.

"What?"

"T-r-o-u-g-h."

He heads for the trash can under the sink; I throw him a black look. A moment later, from behind the opened fridge, he speaks again:

"And the fourth word is…"

Roland Park in the News, Sort of

Roland Park Pictures is the producer of the Sundance Channel's new six-part documentary, "The Hill," which premieres tonight. The series examines the personal and professional lives of the staff of Congressman Robert Wexler (D., Fla.). The film company was founded by two women, Elizabeth Holder and Xan Parker, who went to The Bryn Mawr School, in Baltimore.

untitled poem

A work in progress:

I stepped inside the thing I thought I wrote and found it wasn’t there.
I stepped inside the thing I wrote and found ?
I stepped inside the thing I wrote and found a mirror
I stepped inside the thing I wrote and found my mother’s face
I stepped inside and looked in the mirror and I was not smiling
Why was I not smiling?

I stepped inside the thing I wrote and found my father, hanging a chandelier
I stepped inside and found it clunky
It had red lampshades
It hung too low over the table
I smiled and complimented him on his taste

I stepped inside the thing I wrote and found my mother wandering around, undescribed
In some new place
Lost in time and space
Lost in setting, in geography,
Like my father, without her