Array-ne From the AP:The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a University of Washington professor it says was detained by city of Snohomish police for taking photographs of power lines as part of an art project.
link
- TPCRIS MAZZA, director of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, published her ninth novel, Waterbaby (Soft Skull Press), this fall. A Southern California native, her first novel, How to Leave a Country, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, judged by Studs Terkel and Grace Paley. She has lived outside Chicago since 1993.KAT MEADS’s most recent novel is The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan Benedict Roberts Duncan (Chiasmus Press). And yet it distresses me when doctors and CPAs write crime novels in their “spare time” KM: So you’re not entirely anti-label.CM: Already, as a novelist, I’ve been labeled and accepted a label. I could easily say: “I’m not a postmodern writer, and all the real postmodern writers will agree with me that I’m not.” or “I wrote a novel with a historical component,” or “This novel has a feminist sensibility.” KM: At 27, you won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for your first novel in manuscript, later published as How to Leave a Country. What did (or didn’t) that award do for your career?CM: It didn’t do what the award was designed to do: discover an unpublished novelist and introduce his/her work to the world and NY publishers. “Award-winning novel takes eight years to find a publisher.” KM: By any standard, you’re prolific: eight novels and another forthcoming, four short story collections, a collection of personal essays. To think, this is the best I’ve done, while I’m writing, whether it’s true or not, certainly is preferable to, wow, I used to be better than this. CM: I almost always feel that I must be lazy, that I have no discipline, because I don’t often work on a novel past noon. time in the morning—preparing stories or excerpts to be sent out, researching lit mags, or answering interview questions like this, which I am doing at 9:30 in the morning when I should be working on the end of a novel-nearing-completion. KM: Dog training and novel writing—any similarities? Can you imagine that applied to writing a novel? and the novel develops from there. KM: That comment is going to open you up to charges of Mazza is her character and her character is Mazza. we do experience aren’t often related to each other nor as meaningful as what we find in novels. By the way, that helicopter image had nothing to do with my past—probably the reason it’s the only novel that germinated out of a picture. KM: Why are your short stories short stories and your novels novels? I’ve never started a story that ended up a novel, nor started a novel that ended up a story. Two years ago I wrote five stories to join five much older stories and create a complete collection. But I didn’t feel any difficulty turning the ideas into stories instead of novels. Perhaps the real answer is that some of my stories have played with formal qualities—like a story I created out of a timeline, or stories that used imbedded boxed text, or two columns, or a faux playscript. That kind of thing—called a gimmick by those who are irked by it—really can’t be sustained through a whole novel. (Don’t they all?)KM: But you published many of those essays, individually, in the San Diego Reader before they became a collection.CM: The features editor of the San Diego Reader was one of those editors who could evoke work out of a reluctant writer. She started asking questions: what did my parents do, how did they meet, what did our family do for recreation, what were my hobbies as I got older, and in answering her, I realized that as unspectacular as I’d thought my life had been (compared to the child-abuse, incest, addiction memoirs that were coming out then) there was something I could write about. CM: The only thing that makes a novel successfully commercial, as opposed to being designated non-commercial, is a substantial print run, a publicity campaign that lets the general reader know the book exists, and the availability of the book in a majority of bookstores at an easy-to-find location. I understand that some of my novels don’t conform to standards of traditional realism, but that doesn’t mean the experiences they depict can’t be vicariously experienced by the reader as realistic. KM: For example?CM: For example to develop a female character who’s weak, who is the source of her own weakness, and instead of having her overcome and end up “victorious” Doing something with her new awareness is up to her outside the covers of the book. Getting bought (and hopefully read) is what makes a book commercial.KM: For your new novel, Waterbaby, you have a new editor (Richard Nash) and publisher (Soft Skull). archival research to discover whether or not a 19th century family legend is true instead invents, and lives vicariously, an extended story she constructs starting from the legend. She’s a character disabled by a past that she feels has impaired her life, when it’s only her obsession with that past that hurts her. KM: Any other plot secrets you’d care to divulge, pre-publication?CM: There’s stuff involving the main character’s semi-estrangement from her immediate family, her history as a young competitive swimmer, a love affair she abandoned because of her interfering, bi-polar brother. KM: So when the Critic on the Shoulder sneers: What’s a California native doing writing a novel about Maine? I’ve handled the Maine novel the same way I handled the Wyoming novel, by having the main character not be a native of the novel’s setting—a stranger-in-a-strange-land. But I realize the same is going to be true of Maine natives who don’t want yet another novel about the romantic life of Maine lighthouse keeper, or the mystery of a lighthouse ghost legend. I knew the shipwrecked baby, Seaborn, wasn’t on the genealogical list, but that didn’t mean that my great-great grandfather hadn’t, in fact, rescued her. That one came from a potboiler novel, published around 1900, that had all the elements of the story of the shipwrecked baby, plus the Swedish heiress twist. The writer-historian used the existence of the novel to prove that the story originated in a novel, and therefore was all false. But couldn’t a local novelist have heard elements of the story and facts about the characters and used this legend to write a novel? This started my imagination running as to what her life had been, after the death of her twin, and she became the principal person whose life my character co-opted, imagined, fabricated, and lived vicariously.KM: So you got to play, as a novelist, with a “19th century voice”?CM: Pseudo 19th century voice. So I knew I couldn’t write a novel that starred an abducted victim or a pimp.
link
The Word Count Report left me stunned.A— has read 10 books and so has G—, both at approximately the same reading level. She has read 20 books, staying well off my Radar of Concern, but yet now I discover she has read only 9,000 words!The most shocking aspect to the data is the difference between the haves and the have nots. C— has read 204,876 words, M— has read 2,777. 100 times fewer words!Even assuming that C— learns a new word only once every five hundred, while M— might learn a new one once every fifty, C— will have picked up 400 new words, while M— has gained only 54.
link
-ne
What is so terrible about bio-fuels? Why should I be opposed to them? Bio-fuel advocates, after all, tell us they are a green solution to the global warming crisis brought on by our profligate use of fossil fuels by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. Honest research using full energy accounting has proven that to be blatantly untrue. An article entitled The Hidden Agenda behind the Bush Administration’s Bio-Fuel Plan by F. William Engdahl says, in fact, This year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a report concluding that using corn-based ethanol instead of gasoline will have no impact on greenhouse gas emissions, and would even expand fossil fuel use due to increased demand for fertilizer and irrigation to expand acreage of ethanol crops.[15] And in an article titled Biofuels: The Five Myths of the Agro-fuels Transition, Eric Holt-Giménez, a Traveling Professor with the International Honors Program (IHP) at Boston University, writes, Every ton of palm oil produced results in 33 tons of carbon dioxide emissions
link
In case your curious I added my modifications below:— origsrc/rxvt/src/rxvt.h 2004-01-29 16:54:19.000000000 -0700 src/rxvt/src/rxvt.h 2007-11-29 10:23:49.312500000 -0700@@ -588,6 588,7 @@Rs_cursorBlink,Rs_pointerBlank,Rs_pointerBlankDelay, Rs_pasteWithRightClick,NUM_RESOURCES} ;— origsrc/rxvt/src/xdefaults.c 2004-01-29 17:19:20.000000000 -0700 src/rxvt/src/xdefaults.c 2007-11-29 10:59:00.671875000 -0700@@ -95,6 95,7 @@ reverse video), BOOL(Rs_loginShell, loginShell, ls, Opt_loginShell, login shell), BOOL(Rs_jumpScroll, jumpScroll, j, Opt_jumpScroll, jump scrolling), BOOL(Rs_pasteWithRightClick, pasteWithRightClick, pwrc, Opt_pasteWithRightClick, Paste with right mouse click), #ifdef HAVE_SCROLLBARS BOOL(Rs_scrollBar, scrollBar, sb, Opt_scrollBar, scrollbar), BOOL(Rs_scrollBar_right, scrollBar_right, sr, Opt_scrollBar_right,— origsrc/rxvt/src/rxvtlib.h.in 2003-08-24 23:32:50.000000000 -0600 src/rxvt/src/rxvtlib.h.in 2007-11-30 15:10:51.093750000 -0700@@ -220,6 220,7 @@#define Opt_mouseWheelScrollPage (1LUbutton != h->MEvent.button) if (ev->button != h->MEvent.button) { h->MEvent.clicks = 0; } switch (ev->button) { case Button1:- if (h->MEvent.button == Button1 && } else { h->MEvent.clicks = 1; } else { rxvt_selection_extend(r, ev->x, ev->y, 1); } } else { rxvt_selection_request(r, ev->time, ev->x, ev->y); } } h->MEvent.time = ev->time; } switch (ev->button) { case Button1: if ((r->Options &
link
Read the rest of this entry »