Kathryn Cramer

Anticipation/Worldcon travel advice: Exit 31 on the Northway, the Elizabethtown/Westport exit

For those driving to the Montreal WorldCon up 87 (aka the Northway), I suggest you make time for a stop over at exit 31, the Westport-Elizabethtown exit. Both Westport and Elizabethtown are 4 miles off the Northway. Also, if you are taking Amtrak to the WorldCon, Westport has an Amtrack station. An over-night stop-over should not be hard to arrange. (The Westport Hotel is next door to the train station.)

David Hartwell and I are in process of opening a bookstore at 10 Champlain Avenue in Westport, which will be open by chance and appointment. To make arrangements to view our stock, call me at on my cell phone at 914-837-7623; the house number is 518-962-2346, but we lack an answering machine on that line. (Admit it: you have been harboring the secret desire to shop David Hartwell's book collection, right?) Come see our futuristic new location!

Caption: "yes, let's found a bookstore in the middle of an economic downturn!"

I have prepared an elaborate travel information site about Westport with complete lodging and dining information in the sidebars. Westport is a great place. I can't say enough good about it.

The Inn on the Library Lawn has a book store, and even has rooms named for some of your favorite authors. Stay in the Peter Beagle room:

. . . or the J.R.R. Tolkien Room

. . . or if you dare, in the Edgar Allen Poe room!

There are many other fine places to stay in Westport, listed on my other site www.WestportonLakeChamplain.com.

I also highly recommend the B&B Stoneleigh in Elizabethtown, a great old stone mansion converted to a B&B. Serious bibliophiles might want to make an adavnce arrangement to visit L. W. Currey's which is walking distance from Stoneleigh. (Currey's is not an open shop, but he has a truly amazing stock of science fiction & fantasy, so call first to make an appointment. David Hartwell's high-end books are offered for sale via L.W. Currey.)

Do stop at exit 31 if you have the time.

PS: If you're heading for the WorldCon by boat, we also have a very nice marina here in Westport!

Life in Westport, NY

blue cat watches the sun rise

Don't think of pink elephants

Interesting passage from the NYT article Why the Imp in Your Brain Gets Out by Benedict Carey which discusses Daniel M. Wegner's paper published in Science this week, How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion. Carey writes:

Efforts to be politically correct can be particularly treacherous. In one study, researchers at Northwestern and Lehigh Universities had 73 students read a vignette about a fictional peer, Donald, a black male. The students saw a picture of him and read a narrative about his visit to a mall with a friend.

In the crowded parking lot, Donald would not park in a handicap space, even though he was driving his grandmother’s car, which had a pass, but he did butt in front of another driver to snag a nonhandicap space. He snubbed a person collecting money for a heart fund, while his friend contributed some change. And so on. The story purposely portrayed the protagonist in an ambiguous way.

The researchers had about half the students try to suppress bad stereotypes of black males as they read and, later, judged Donald’s character on measures like honesty, hostility and laziness. These students rated Donald as significantly more hostile — but also more honest — than did students who were not trying to suppress stereotypes.

In short, the attempt to banish biased thoughts worked, to some extent. But the study also provided “a strong demonstration that stereotype suppression leads stereotypes to become hyperaccessible,” the authors concluded.

Dawn 7/6/09, Westport, NY

Peter's Bass

Peter's painted turtle

"I saw then that I had not thoroughly domesticated my automobile."

From ADVENTURES OF A SUBURBANITE by Ellis Parker Butler (1911):

The caption reads: "I saw then that I had not thoroughly domesticated my automobile."

Today's painting

selfportrait as a ghostly photographer

Elizabeth makes a fairy bike helmet

The twin suns rose over the lake . . .

(Sunrise shot through double pane glass.)

A response to Christopher Elliott's "Should kids be banned from first class?"

As the opening to an article entitled, "Should kids be banned from first class?" Christopher Elliott (writing for Tribune Media Services) begins by explaining that drugging his toddler worked out badly the time he and his wife got a first class upgrade.

I think I'll begin by saying that I don't think I've ever actually ridden first class on a plane, though I was once given a business class upgrade on a flight to Japan. The larger seat was uncomfortable as it seemed to be constructed for a large man, rather than someone of my proportions.

Elliott's article contains such amazing passages as:

One of the most persuasive arguments for limiting first class to adults is that the premium cabin is essentially an adult product. Which is to say, it's difficult for a youngster to appreciate a wine list or a gourmet meal. It's just no place for kids. Plus, it's pricey -- even if you're using miles to upgrade.

Flying these days is such an ordeal that I avoid it whenever possible. On a recent trip to California, it couldn't be avoided since we were traveling coast to coast. My first question when my husband booked the tickets was "They're going to feed us, right?" He replied that the tickets seemed to suggest they were giving us dinner. After many delays, the plane finally left the gate and the kids and I instantly fell asleep and missed the food service. Afterwards, my husband told me that we were lucky; that the food had been some awful plastic cheese enchilada thing that he regretted having eaten. 

When we finally made it to our hotel at 3AM (6AM NY time), my 6 year-old daughter said "But we haven't had dinner yet." I said, "Go to sleep. It's almost breakfast time."

It seems to me that the issue is not whether children who fly are worthy of "a gourmet meal," but rather that they are entitled (like to rest of us) to eat and to be provided with edible food. Also, all passengers behave better when fed adequately on a regular schedule.

Airlines may market first class tickets as a luxury product, but 21st century flying on commerical flights is not luxurious. Eliot partakes of this marketing kool aid:

Like a five-star restaurant or a luxury resort, the first-class cabin is not particularly welcoming to young fliers. Or, for that matter, their parents.

Elliot, you're being had! First of all, the rich have children, too, and five-star restaurants and luxury resorts can be quite welcoming indeed to families with children. But more importantly, the privilege you are being sold when you buy into a first class ticket is a ride that only slightly less resembles a ride in a greyhound bus -- PLUS it comes with a really hefty sense of entitlement, something which costs the airline nothing.

Flying these days is a pretty degrading experience no matter how much you paid for your ticket. Some people pay for an upgraded ticket in order to be less degraded. Scapegoating children and their parents for the need for this extra expense seems to me foolish.

(Image swiped from the Retired Greyhound Trust.)

Good morning.

Portrait of David G. Hartwell

Recent adventures

Passing by the Lake Placid Horse Show:

Finding a luna moth in Keene, NY:

Stopping by a farm stand in Wadhams, NY:

Checking out the scene at Jim's Pretty Good Books in Whallonsburg.

My new hat

Cynthia Burack: "A Note about Politics"

I picked up Cynthia Burack's Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups (Cornell University Press, 2004) on our book shopping trip to Maryland a month or so ago when we collected a debt I was owed in books.

I have just started reading it this morning while snapping occasional shots of this morning's Lake Champlain sunrise -- it's a cloudy day, so the good shots only happen every couple of minutes.

The book's introduction begins with "A Note about Politics," which is a cool little piece all by itself.

No less a political observer than Henry Adams remarked in the early twentieth century that politics can be understood as the "systematic organization of hatreds."¹ In face, hatreds are not always terribly well organized, but Adams's comment nonetheless captures a key reality of political life. Group hatred is "like a sturdy weed: you can weed several times a day and, in the morning, there it is again."² Groups matter in part because of the vast harm those motivated by group identifications can do.

. . . Feminists tend to stress the coalitional political and social justice opportunities created by groups, while mainstream political thinkers tend to stress violent, dangerous, and unstable aspects of groups. All are right, of course: in group relations people can exhibit both extraordinary forms of cooperation and seemingly irrational forms of contentiousness. (p. 1)

1. Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, vol. 1 (New York: Time, 1964), 6.
2. Andrei Codrescu, The Devil Never Sleeps, and Other Essays (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 129.

This passage is particularly interesting to me in that I am coming to believe that one of the primary usages of the Web 2.0-style Internet is various forms of scapegoating, in which individuals or groups are named as the cause of the problems of and as a threat to other group.  I find the emerging situation very worrisome.

The story of a thylacine

In 2005, I took a photo of the thylacine on display at the Smithsonian and posted it on Flickr.

Flickr photos sometimes accrete slow conversations about the image. This morning, someone writing as Katster54 left the following interesting story:

You know why the Smithsonian thylacine has a pretty face? Because it is one of the three living thylacines shipped to the United States from Tasmania in 1902. Photographs of them alive in the National Zoo in Washington D.C. are on the internet. They were a mother and three children. The mother, in fact, was pregnant and delivered in her crate enroute from Tasmania to the United States. She was in bad shape when she arrived in Washington D.C. in May of 1902. The baby she delivered enroute only lived a few months. She lived until 1905 and I think the last one of this group had passed on by 1909. If you look at hers and her children's photograph when she lived at the National Zoo, you will see that she and her children had beautiful faces. 

Afternoon at the New York Botanical Garden

Tangent Online Relaunches. Hooray!

David Truesdale writes:

Welcome to the relaunch of Tangent Online. It's been quite awhile, hasn't it? But we're finally back, with a somewhat different look, new software fueling the enterprise, and a brand new web-hoster, Analog author Eric James Stone (whose newest story, "The Final Element," can be found in the April, 2009 issue). Eric is the person most responsible for Tangent Online even existing today. He stepped forward and offered to host the site, provided the new software, and has been more than patient with yours truly as I have learned how to use it (and which I am still learning the finer points of). Eric deserves your unqualified thanks for his selfless efforts in getting us up and running once more.

Painting a sign for the forthcoming Dragon Press store

Peter & Liz painting.

sitting by my rose bush looking out at the lake

A man with, um, identity issues

From the BBC: US man 'posed as his dead mother'

Thomas Prusik-Parkin, 49, is accused by prosecutors of regularly dressing up in a wig, dress and make-up in order to fool the authorities.

The alleged scam has been going on ever since Mr Prusik-Parkin's mother, Irene Prusik, died in 2003 at the age of 73.

He faces charges of theft, forgery and conspiracy.

"I held my mother when she was dying and breathed in her last breath, so I am my mother," Mr Prusik-Parkin said when he was arrested, according to police.

The man had gone so far as to go through a bankruptcy proceeding in court impersonating his dead mother and went to DMV in person and renewed her driver's license.

Reminds me of the famous line:

"Be Yourself; everyone else is already taken." 
— Oscar Wilde

The Daily News has an extremely strange transcript of court testimony by Mr. Prusik-Parkin at a foreclosure hearing:

"How is your mother's health currently?" the lawyer asked.

. . .

"Fair," Parkin replied. "She had taken a stroke a few years ago. ... She can't walk properly. She can't speak."

"How does it affect her speech?"

"'Bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh,' like that."

"Slurred or unintelligible?"

"To say the least."

"You speak with her, correct? You meet with her?"

"She doesn't reply directly, really."

"How do you communicate with her? How does she respond?"

"It's one-sided."

There are more weird details in The Daily News.

Peter at the beach in Encinitas, CA

Scenes from the Stokers last night

vampires!

Steve Jones, Dennis Etchison, & F. Paul Wilson

Stephen Woodworth

Ellen Datlow & Scott Edelman

Wrath James White

John Skipp

Hal Duncan continues the discussion of Fail crit

Notes from the Geek Show: The Absence of Abject.

Stoker weekend, day 1: a friendly pleasantly serious mellow vibe

The Horror Writer's Association Stoker Weekend started yesterday morning, and we are having a great time. People are very friendly and it has the kind of pleasantly serious mellow vibe of World Fantasy Cons and Necons I remember from about 20 years ago. There are about 250 attendees and the hotel space has areas for easy gathering both inside and out.

My Flickr photoset is HERE. Scott Edelman's photos are HERE.

First thing Friday morning, we checked out the pool.

We talked to Scott Edelman over breakfast, and then I hung out in the lobby meeting new people before opening ceremonies. 

At opening ceremonies the guests were introduced, including my husband, David Hartwell, F. Paul Wilson, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. 

Afterwards, it was time for a glass of wine (Ron Larsen bought me a really nice glass of white wine) and I drew Quinn Yarbro outon the subject of how she came to be a shuttle bus driver for the 1968 WorldCon. (She'd seen a call for volunteers in IF.)

At 2PM, I was on an anthology panel moderated by Ellen Datlow with Bill Breedlove, RJ Cavender, Chad Helder, Stephen Jones, and Vince A. Liaguno. I've known Ellen and Steve for 20 years, but the rest I think I'd never met. It was a wide-ranging interesting discussion of anthologies and anthologists, one of the better panels I've been on on this subject in a number of years.

After that we headed for the Gauntlet Press Party, where Richard Matheson (in a wheel chair) and his son Richard Christian Matheson were to be found.

At the party, I had a long intense conversation with Alan Rodgers and Amy Sterling Casil (whom I hadn't seen in ages).

We had a quiet family dinner of comfort food in the hotel restaurant (by this time we were all quite exhausted). Then we took a nap for an hour, because tehre was more to come.

The Gory Ghoul Bar was the event the kids had most been looking forward to. The kids and I put on our costumes and David put on a David outfit (it involved a purple shirt and an yellow tie). There was loud ebullient rock and roll of fluctuating key performed by mostly costumed authors and publishers. My kids danced a lot, and I danced too, mostly to help keep little girls from skinning their knees or colliding with something. 

F. Paul Wilson did a fine job of "I'm an All Right Guy" by Tom Snyder. Scott Edelman has posted the performance to YouTube. (My daughter Elizabeth is the dancer in the unicorn pegasus costume.)

Peter and I both won costume prizes. he won as Goriest Ghoul or most Horribly Horrible or something, and they made up a special category for me: Best Tim Burton movie refugee. I was wearing one of my mother's 1950s party dresses (carefully preserved by my grandmother, which I received as part of the settling of her estate in 2008) plus a black velvet hat.

I am looking forward to the Non-Fiction Horror panel this morning. So far, it seems a good time is being had by all.

A response to Hal Duncan's post "Ethics and Enthusiasm: Are We Calling This EthicsFail Yet?"

I wrote the following as a blog comment, but cannot get blogger to post properly, so I'm publishing my response to Duncan's "Ethics and Enthusiasm: Are We Calling This EthicsFail Yet?" here. Read Duncan's post first, before my response, posted below.

---

I love this piece, and upon printing it out and re-reading it carefully on paper, I find that I disagree with most of it. In some cases, first time around I had read you to be saying the exact opposite of what you seemed to be saying later when I read it again.

First of all, I think that media reviewing and book reviewing are really separate animals. Hollywood as an industry doesn't care what you have to say unless you have some capacity to get in the way of the making of money. (I was once the assistant to the literary division of an entertainment agency -- we were Elizabeth Taylor's and Michael Jackson's literary agents -- and I have never lost the cynicism engendered by the experience.) Reviewers can advise consumers or mediate the viewing experience of consumers, but except in rare exceptions are not participants in the game of media sf. (You can boo or cheer, but the Big Boys won't let you play the game. Some people turn to screen writing in hopes of being allowed to play; ever hear the one about the starlet who was so dumb that she slept with the writer? Sad, isn't it?)

Writing about print science fiction and fantasy is a very different enterprise: you can be and probably are part of the game of literature. And as such, you should consider your goals. I don't think that fucking good science fiction or blowing it up are particularly good goals.

One thing that has so far gone mostly unmentioned in the discussion of reviewing is that there are some of us who really like genre boundaries and think that they are aesthetically useful, and there are people who detest genre boundaries and wish they would go away and that people would stop talking about genre and let writers just write what they write. Having looked into the matter, I found that this does not cut along any predictable literary-political lines, and is pretty much an individual thing. I myself am one who likes them and finds them fascinating.

The passage I most seriously misread the first time through (I think it is your faux-marble background that is to blame) was this one:

Where Marxist or feminist or queer readings may be asking pertinent questions of the text, and on a very theoretical level, a Rationalist or Romanticist critique is actually compatibility assessment masquerading as ethical critique. The reader’s sense of what the book’s aims are clouded by a confused ethical/aesthetic notion of what they should be -- because, why the very purpose, the responsibility of fiction is to be enlightening/entertaining! -- there is little possibility of a valid evaluative critique, nor even a worthwhile critical review. The reader’s commitment to Rationalist or Romanticist aesthetics will most likely collapse the review to the lowest level as the ethical imperatives are translated into aesthetic prescriptivism.

I think you've got this exactly backwards: the various -isms, while they may raise "pertinent" questions (or impertinent ones, for that matter), are no less compatibility assessments. Science fiction has its own infield critical traditions into whose mysteries I was inducted prior to going to grad school, and I found that the outside -ism-oriented templates for evaluation were often misapplied when brought round to SF. For example, when I was in grad school, Cultural Studies was on the rise, and so finally it was supposed to be OK to talk about genre literature -- as long as you made no claims about it being any good. I think that SF's infield critical tradition has much to recommend it that you seem to be tossing in the nearest trash can.

Regarding Fail crit, Fail crit grew up in media fandom where, as I said, the Industry couldn't care less what they have to say unless they do damage. Because of this, declarations of "FAIL" imply the necessity of some form of punishment. As Claire Light explains:

. . . punishment is advocated at two places: often the remedial action is punishment of the original offender (as in asking a radio station to fire a racist DJ), and the action threatened if this remedy isn't taken up is usually a punishment as well (official complaint up the chain of command, formal boycott, or bad publicity, and the hanging of the "racist" label on the totality of the offenders.) The action is then picked up by the other bloggers and passed around.

Regardless of origins in theory, Fail crit seems to me an extreme example of compatibility assessment in which those judged incompatible are to be punished for their non-compliance.

I think you are misapplying the word template (as in template-matching). Template implies to me something like the Scott Meredith plot outline that SF novels were supposed to have, or the kind of criteria specified by romance publishers that romances were supposed to have. Genre and sub-genre are to me much more dynamic than that: genre is a conversation, genre is a cultural activity. Each new published work is a move in the game. Winning moves are those that advance the literature. When reading for an anthology, those winning moves are what I am looking for.

Returning to the subject of goals: if one's goal is to influence the literature, most of the things people think are influential mostly aren't. Declaring movements and writing manifestos almost never work. Nor does dourly seeking to destroy examples of heresy, which only makes a certain segment want to commit more heresy.

What works is publishing and praising the exemplary (even while disclosing its failings); explaining what is, for example, right about A. E. Van Vogt. I've been trying to remember who defined the novel as an extended work of prose with something wrong with it.* There is plenty wrong with A.E. Van Vogt's fiction. It's clunky, he throws in a new idea every 800 words, etc. And yet he is a writer -- like Hal Clement -- whose work is crucially important in the development of the SF aesthetic. What is right about Van Vogt turns out to be really important. What's wrong about him mostly isn't.

Make love to genre; don't just fuck it.

* Dave Langford provides the quote I was missing: “The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” — Randall Jarrell

What I've been reading today: Pinkwater, Knight, & Grey Gardens

Daniel Pinkwater's The Education of Robert Nifkin (1998) • Michael Muhammed Knight's Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey through Islamic America (2006) • Sarah & Rebekah Maysles's Grey Gardens (2009)

This is a really odd combination of books, but if you let books near each other, they establish a dialog, no matter how superficially dissimilar.

The Pinkwater has been in a glass-doored book case in our bedroom probably for a decade, and I picked it out last night to read to Peter. In this household, we regard Pinkwater as a a genius, and he even came to David's birthday party once here, a long time ago. The book is set in the 1950s, roughly contemporaneous with when Pinkwater went to high school. For Pinkwater's sake, I hope it's not too autobiographical, even if it does have that flavor. It is written in the form of a college admission essay in answer to the question "Characterize in essay form, your high-school experience. you may use additional sheets as needed." It starts out along the lines of Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and ends up in the literary territory of Lenanora Carrington's surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet. 

Nifkin's immigrant parents are casually unpleasant to him. His father's primary concern seems to be that if he is to smoke, he should smoke cigars, not cigarettes, and his mother is a terrible cook who is desperately concerned that he might be recruited by communists or maybe homosexuals:

"Just remember, those Reds are always looking for a simpleminded kid like you, without any friends. If anyone starts being nice to you, it's safe to assume they're trying to recruit you for the Party."

"Okay, Mom." (p. 69)

Nifkin's teachers at high school are amazing characatures: The gym teacher is a sadist. His homeroom teacher is most concerned with learning whether anyone at the school is distributing communist propaganda or pornography. His English teacher is a rabid anti-semite who is also terribly concerned about communism. The biology teacher talks nonsense to herself or perhaps to someone only she can see. And the history teacher is a bitter man who wants everyone to know he could be making three times as much in industry. Nifkin joins the ROTC to avoid the sadistic gym teacher. Sergeant Gunter, The ROTC teacher, is a communist who reads Karl Marx to the ROTC students and is eventually arrested. 

The book gets weirder from there: our hero ceases going to school after the arrest of Sergeant Gunter. He avoids being sent to reform school by getting his parents to send him to a strange private school in the ancestral mansion of a robber baron run by a pair of sweet older ladies and their beatnick friends.

David brought me home both Blue-Eyed Devil and Grey Gardens last night when he came back from NYC. I think he brought me the former because someone had characterized me as a "blue-eyed devil" in a recent blog post (for the record, my eyes are hazel, thank you) and the later because of my fascination with the psychological meaning of architecture.

The Guardian quote on the back of Blue-Eyed Devil characterizes Michael Muhammad Knight as "the Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature." Knight is a white guy in his 20s who converted to Islam as a teenager. The book is Knight's odyssey in search of the truth about W. D. Fard, founder of the Nation of Islam. From the NYT: 

The man who founded the Nation in 1930, W. D. Fard, spread the message that American blacks belonged to a lost Muslim tribe and were superior to the “white, blue-eyed devils” in their midst. Under Mr. Fard’s successor, Elijah Muhammad, the Nation flourished in the 1960s amid the civil rights struggle and the emergence of a black-separatist movement.

Knight, by his own account is the son of an abusive schizophrenic white-supremacist father. The description of his early childhood reads like something out of Joel Steinberg's trial for the murder of his adopted daughter. The author didn't speak until age four, several years after he and mother escaped from his father. Knight is mostly homeless, living in his car as he pursues the phantom of W. D. Fard who disappeared in 1933. He has many strange adventures and talks to many people with even stranger theories about Fard. 

As the book ends, Knight interviews Malcolm Shabazz in prison. Shabazz, grandson of Malcolm X, was diagnosed schizophrenic at age 12. While living with his grandmother, he set fire to the house, burning his grandmother so badly that she died after three weeks in critical condition. The final paragraph of Knight's book reads:

Malcolm Shabazz had quoted Ho Chi Minh as saying that when prison gates are opened, the real dragon flies out. And he told me that the race goes not to the swift but to those who can endure until the end. I think he's living his grandfather's life all over again. Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala. Some cry tears, and some cry blood. (p. 214)

I have not read all of the Knight book. I found it hard to take at times. On the one hand, I wanted to know what Knight found out on his search, and yet he so clearly and repeatedly brands himself as an unreliable narrator, that sometimes I found the crazy conversations he got into with narrators much more unreliable than himself hard to take. Also, because he is a white guy seeking encounters with black Muslims, he repeatedly opens himself to black racism. (Though usually, people try to be nice and tend to open conversations by trying to introduce him to the basics of Islam, assuming that he has walked into a mosque out of naive post 9/11 curiosity.) I'll read more later.

Also, reading the parts about his childhood and adolescence, I found Knight's and Nifkin's fathers running together in my head, as though these were somehow accounts of the same person, told from different angles. (Pinkwater's book begins, "My father was a son-of-a-bitch from Eastern Europe.")

And so: Grey Gardens. This book is a lavishly produced coffee-table book published by Free News Projects and priced at $45.00. It comes with an audio CD. It is about archetypal crazy cat-ladies, beautiful socialites turned recluses, retreating into mansion and trust  funds. Somewhere in there one of the Edies claims that the most cats she's ever had was 300, and that she took excellent care of them all. 

This book, which is connected to the 1974 documentary of the same name and to an HBO movie starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lang concerns two women, mother and daughter: Edie Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith Ewing Beale, Jr., the aunt and cousin respectively of Jackie Kennedy. 

They lived in a sea-side mansion in the Hamptons, purchased in the 20s, which fell into disrepair and got filled up with ancestral possessions and other things. When in the 1970s the health department held raids, Jackie Kennedy, and her sister Lee Radizwill put up the money to save the house from further decay. The documentary about the two women and their house was released in 1976 and is an example of cinema vérité.

The book is interesting, but I suspect it would mean more if I had seen one or more of the movies. While it does contain a lot of information, the imagery of the book corresponds to meanings I find elusive, which probably relate to the original film.

As someone married to a collector personality-type in a house he spent several decades stuffing with possessions before I came along, I cringe at the mention of attics filled with old paintings and valuable antiques given over to a pack of 30 raccoons (fed on Wonderbread and honey). 

While I am willing to entertain the idea that these are fascinating women whom have recognized the emptiness of their upper-class heritage, I think that if I'd visited them, I would have found their irresponsibility in taking care of what they had in the house inexcusable. I have seen vast economically untenable mansions in the Adirondacks suffering this sort of fate, and already know how horrified I am at people who can't be bothered to replace a broken window pane in a room with a hand-painted mural on the wall (now scaled by mildew). 

Do I want to be drawn into the pathology of their story? 

In the Pinkwater novel, women like this who run an eccentric school save Robert Nifkin from the harsh realities of high school. Are benevolent eccentric old women with mansions and trust funds a fantasy of liberation? Or are they prisoners of what was given them for being beautiful in the right place at the right time? And who is more psychologically healthy? The Edies? Or Michael Knight? Or do damaged narrators like Knight deserve the Robert Nifkin solution: to be taken in by beautiful reclusive ex-socialites who take in strays and have plenty of rooms to spare? I suspect that Knight is not looking for that kind of salvation.

Epilogue: Grey Gardens was bought in 1979 by journalist Sally Quinn and former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.

Cat photos I found in my camera

Ambrose being cute. I'm guessing Peter borrowed my camera took this photo series before I got up Saturday morning.

Unpacked books in our store space in Westport, NY

Further thoughts on Cioma Schönhaus's The Forger and other books, plus some thoughts on Internet re-socialization

This weekend, preparing to drive upstate to work on our bookstore-to-be, I brought along Joanna Russ's What Are We Fighting For? along to read. I arrived in Westport, NY at the stroke of midnight, and read until about 1AM, and then finished the first chapter in the morning. It was great to hear Joanna's voice again: she is one of those writers whose speaking voice I can hear clearly in her written prose, and I found that reunion quite delightful. Her analysis of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance is something I wish I'd read a few years before she published it back when I was assigned the book in a Sociology of Literature class in grad school. I found a lot to object to about the Radway book at the time, and having back-up from Joanna Russ would have been great.  

But nonetheless, the bell hooks style third-wave feminism in the same chapter seemed to me to make the chapter's argument a bit muddled. You can't really talk about romance readers in the same chapter as trying to decenter feminism from white upper-middle-class heterosexual feminists without leaving the impression that this generations' women who got married and had kids are simply reactionaries who have made some kind of terrible mistake. 

Perhaps this is the way you had to begin a feminist tract in the mid-90s, but I put the book aside for later reading. If Joanna were really present in that captivating narrative voice, I would have argued with her about this. But a book is only a book, and she published it 13 years ago. If I wanted to argue, I should have read it a while back.

And so emptying boxes into our store space and shelving the books, I came across Cioma Schönhaus's The Forger, which as I said in my previous post, I bought on a book buying trip on the way to Balticon. (I sold a domain name to an Internet bookseller, and part of my payment was in books, so we had to go to the store to collect.)

Structurally, The Forger, is a similar narrative to Bill Mason's Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief, which I read in April: Schönhaus lead the same kind of glamorous semi-underground adrenaline-soaked audacious lifestyle as Mason, leading -- after a while of audacity -- to major man-hunts and having to go seriously underground, except that Schönhaus's life of crime was aimed at saving the lives of Jews in Nazi Germany. (Reading these books back-to-back would be a somewhat uncomfortable experience.) The way each of them thrived was by assessing social expectations, and then confounding them. And in both books there is the issue of trust and betrayal, and how these men lived while being both socially gregarious and trusting almost no one. We give Schönhaus the moral high ground as a hero of the resistance, where as Mason is just an ex-criminal with an interesting tale to tell.

In addition to issues of pseudonymity, discussed previously, the other thing I found really fascinating about the book was the mismatch between the rapid re-socialization of the population taking place in Nazi-era Berlin, and people's disbelief and denial that this could possibly be happening; I commented upon a similar mis-match evident in Kazimierz Sakowicz's Ponary Diary 1941-1943: A bystander's Account of a Mass Murder. A key line from Sakowitcz:

Evidently, [Jewish mothers about to be thrown into mass graves with their children] expected that when the clothing was collected the children hidden in that way [under it] might be saved. Unfortunately. (p. 73)

The book I read just before coming up to Westport for the weekend was James Morrow's very well-researched novel The Last Witchfinder. Moment by moment, the re-socialization of the populace during witch hunts bears an eerie resemblance to the observed details in Holocaust accounts, which is, I guess, the phenomenon which Hannah Arendt referred to as "the banality of evil" in the context of Adolf Eichmann. But the focus on one man, Eichmann, does not give us access to the broader problem -- rapid re-socialization on a large scale that makes this more like a problem in epidemiology. Certainly, there are sociopaths in the word, but what causes epidemics of otherwise normal people who behave in a way one would expect of a sociopath?

A few years ago, I viewed the Internet as a vehicle for spreading compassion, spreading empathy, allowing the possibility that someone like me from her dining room could spontaneously arrive at ways to help individual people on the other side of the world who are in many ways nothing like me; that my son could draw a cheerful picture for a little boy in Pakistan who spent four hours buried in the rubble after an earthquake (and he did).

Lately, I have come to view the Internet as a vehicle for rapid re-socialization, much of it for the worse. I see a sudden Internet-induced lack of empathy, compassion, and even basic sympathy, in what I regard as a population of normal (by which I mean not sociopathic) people. I see mean-girl behavior in adult women that would get them sent to the Vice Principal's office under no-bullying policies if they were sixth grade girls at my son's school; I see violent ideation expressed publicly; I see demonization (sometimes literally); and I see this passing by without opposition from the communities within which these are expressed. 

I find this very worrisome. None of  the theories we have about how people behave in large numbers can adequately account for behavior on the Internet because the Internet is too new. A few years ago, I thought of the Internet as a potential solution to many things, and as a tool for spreading compassion across international and cultural boundaries. Now I begin to see it as the opposite: a tool used by others for the mass elimination of empathy, and as a problem rather than a solution.

Just where is it that we are going from here?