250

So how do we all like the slightly plainified blog layout? Does it make it less conspicuous to read at work (even with the nutty graphics)? I am not sure about renaming the blog at this point, but certainly in no danger of running out of righteous indignation any time soon.

My first writing conference - a one-day conference on a Saturday - is now only two weeks away, which means perhaps I should do a little research on what to expect and how to pitch to an agent (since I have two pitches scheduled, though I'm not sure when they will be or who the agents are yet). I have ten minutes with each of the agents and if they are not interested, I hope to use some of that time to find out WHY. Clearly, in a verbal pitch, it cannot be my writing. So what is it that makes them uninterested in the work (or think they cannot sell it) and what if anything can I do fix that impression?

I sent out one query this month (the version I revised after I was cut from the Amazon contest). I deliberately chose an agent who wanted ONLY the query letter as a little experiment (to make sure it wasn't the synopsis or the first pages that determined my fate). I was rejected after ten days. A sample size of one is too small to judge, but I think I will hold off on additional querying until after the conference, in case I learn something valuable. You know, it would be one thing if I kept being rejected on the basis of my writing, but that doesn't seem to be what is happening. So I don't want to squander agents, so to speak, until I have a better idea of the problem.

I am getting ready to query the same agent for the third time. Am I being ridiculous? The agent, part of a well-known agency with a well-known agency blog, says she is looking for commercial and literary fiction and also really likes sciency stuff. Seems like a damned good match to me. So I queried her in December and heard nothing back. The website says to requery if I haven't heard in 6-8 weeks, so I requeried in late March. Well, here we are, nearly to June, and once again no response. I guess I figure: 1) I'm following their rules by requerying, and 2) what's the worst that can happen? a rude rejection? that'd still be better than nothing.

I have been chugging away on my WIP the past couple of weeks, and ended yesterday with nearly 18,000 words. Since I estimate total length of this work will be in the 50,000-60,000 word range, I'm coming along pretty well with a draft. It's an entirely different beast than my first project, but it's been fun. Not nearly so heavy or difficult.

Who the heck knows?

By the way, this is my 250th post. Who the hell knew when I started this thing two and a half years ago that I'd ever go this long or have this many posts? Not me, that's for sure.

This Week's Truism

This week's truism is that no good deed goes unpunished. That's really all I can say about that.

In not entirely unrelated news, mixing a shot of Captain Morgans into a Budweiser actually makes a pretty fucking good boilermaker. It's kind of cream soda-y. It's not the same as using Jack, but in its own way it's pretty good.

Next Monday is the first federal holiday since President's Day, 15 weeks ago. That is cruel, my friends. Cruel. Seriously, we need long weekends at least once a month. And none of this "Wednesday off" bullshit (I'm looking at you, Veteran's Day). Make it a Monday or make it a Friday.

Remember how I mused last week about how Google's little foray into the world of 1980s video games probably cost money in terms of lost productivity? Some jerks actually tried to figure out how much it cost, but calculated it in a way that - as the post I link to points out - is pretty silly for all but the most regimented industrial processes (and even then). If every second can be accounted for, maybe companies should just eliminate bathrooms and tell everyone to piss in a cup, because that would save time too.

I have railed before that Body Mass Index is a completely stupid way of assessing people's health. Even at my current significantly reduced weight, I am still slightly "overweight" according to BMI, which is just a ratio of height to weight and doesn't account for how much of that weight is muscle vs. fat or a myriad of other important factors. Now here is new information attesting to the uselessness of BMI - especially for people under 40. Again, this isn't surprising. BMI was never intended to be applied to individuals in any meaningful way. I just can't believe - in this day and age - we can't do better.

And here's another interesting post about how unimportant money is to happiness. I find this kind of research (people call it "happiness studies") super interesting but it frustrates me in the same way a lot of economics does. The studies seem to equate money with stuff. Of course that makes sense on one level, but another cliche that is also a truism is that time is money (and if you don't believe me, check out my first link again!).

If you told me I'd just won several million dollars I'd be a lot less excited about buying a car or a house than I would be at the prospect of controlling more of my own time. What I would do with that time wouldn't necessarily be very expensive (writing? low budget scientific research?) but it would be my choice. It's hard to believe that freedom wouldn't improve happiness, at least for some people.

Oh, and lastly:

Can I get a dizz-amn!?!

Maybe I like her so much because she kinda reminds me of this other hottie:


Though the skin tone is obviously different. On a purely physical basis, I think Esther wins. But Arwen's got that ethereal thing going on, not to mention those ears. It's a tough choice: queen of Persia or immortal Elven princess. Lucky for me they're fictional characters and I'm a married man.

Or is that lucky for them? Ha-ha.

Have a great long weekend!

On Monumental Propaganda by Vladimir Voinovich

This might be my last book review post for a couple of weeks. I had a backlog of things to review after my vacation, and Monumental Propaganda is the last of it. Though this book actually isn't from my vacation - I started it beforehand, didn't bring it with me, and only finished it the other day. At less than 400 pages, that's something on the order of seven weeks. Obviously, I found it a slow read.

The author is a satirist, but I must either not be familiar enough with Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history, or simply used to another (perhaps less subtle) form of satire. While I sometimes felt shades of Vonnegut in this book, I hesitate to make a strong comparison.

The book has two protagonists, really. The first is Aglaya Stepanova Revkina, a true believer in Stalin who seems out of place from the day he dies. The other is a statue of Stalin himself, which I at least expected throughout the book would come to life (it is not a spoiler to tell you that it did not). We follow Aglaya through her bewilderment with Khrushchev, her contentment with Brezhnev, her shocked disbelief in glasnost and her disgust - as an old woman - with post-Soviet life and her participation in a pro-Communist rally (probably during Yeltsin's time) marching with a banner of Stalin. Meanwhile, the fortunes of a variety of other characters rise and fall around her.

"don't know how? give a call to my uncle joe...."

The point of the book is clearly to illustrate the absurdity of many of the cultural changes by holding one thing - this character - basically constant. And since this is a satire, it works to a large degree. One is not supposed to relate particularly well to an ardent Stalinist like Aglaya, and one does not. I did find it a little peculiar that she had been so steadfastly loyal through all the changes (in Russia, in the party, in the leadership) during Stalin's decades in power, yet had so much trouble adapting to the changes once Stalin was dead. One would think a true communist would put party first regardless of who was at the head of it. One would also think that anyone who prospered under Stalin would have their survival skills honed to a razor-sharp edge; instead she comes across as naive.

My feelings on the book were so-so. I think I learned something, and the story held my attention despite being a slow read. I have found an earlier, more famous work by this author (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin) and put it on my wishlist. I will probably buy and read it.

That being said, nothing about the book made a particularly strong impression on me (or at least not one that hadn't been made more strongly by other things I have read). I feel like Aglaya should have been a more interesting character, that the book would have been more compelling had the plot played out over a shorter period of time, with more distinctive and less archetypical characters, and made a more concise point about Soviet history and Communist ideology.

Completely And Utterly Random

Seriously. These days even I have absolutely no clue what I'm going to find on this blog. My last post had a picture of a mummy stressed out by Metro delays (fun fact: I had about three times my normal hits on Friday because "corpse on a train" was evidently a very popular search that day). The post before that had a picture of baby Hitler. I'm not even going to mention Pee Wee Herman or Paul and Storm's classic "If James Taylor Was On Fire." Folks, I am doing my very best to give you all some real quality here.

Has anyone calculated the cost in productivity of Google sticking a working version of Pac-Man on their main search page? I am sure it's in the millions (but maybe not, since everyone was already wasting their day looking for info on the dead guy on the Metro). Now that's power. I never particularly liked or, for that matter, understood Pac-Man. And since - like half the world - my homepage is the Google search page, I find myself very irritated when it starts playing on its own. I don't like the motion and I want to stop it. Normally clicking "home" is the best way to stop anything, but not this time. It's a real mind-bender.


How come nobody told me that clementines are the perfect fruit? So sweet, so easy to peel, so delicious, so not-messy-like-most-other-citrus. And now that I've finally figured it out, significantly lowering my risk of scurvy, the store stops stocking them. Fruits with seasons are so 20th century.

What's the word for all the people Facebook suggests you friend who you know - at least kinda sorta - but aren't comfortable requesting? I mean, maybe no one word can sum them all up. Linkedin is a lot cleaner - either you know someone professionally or you don't. (Not that I didn't do a significant portion of my Linkedin requesting while intoxicated. I'm shy - what can I say?) I'm happily linked-in with several people I actively dislike because it doesn't matter. Facebook seems like a different beast.

Alright, call me crazy, but I watched One Night With The King, a movie about the Biblical story of Esther, on hulu the other night and I actually enjoyed it. They managed to make Gimli the Dwarf look like an old Jew.

I'm grumpy but oddly lovable.

Me too.

Haman looked like Jonathan Coulton's demented genocidal cousin.

Hmmm, I think I want to write songs about zombies, and robots, and mad scientists, and Tom Cruise, and Benoit Mandelbrot, and...

Hmmm, I think I want to kill all the Jews in the Persian Empire.

And who is this hottie?

Dizz-amn! Hell yeah I'll convert to Judaism.

Meanwhile, King Xerxes looks like some kind of displaced Jesus...

What do you mean I'm pale for a Persian?

...unlike the eight-foot tall Terminator-esque creature who was the Xerxes from 300.

Greetings, Earthling.

Finally, let me say that placing pictures on blogger is a slow excruciating torture and takes for-fucking-ever so I hope you all appreciated the imagery in this post.

Have a nice day!

Corpse On A Train

Uh, no, not snakes on a plane. I said corpse on a train. As in: they found a dead guy on the Red Line the other day. Dead of natural causes, no less.

Now I know what you're thinking: a handsome sprightly young man, maybe something like the Lt. himself, left home for work one day and ran into some delays on the Red Line. Years passed, glaciers advanced and receded, mountains rose and fell, the sun expanded into a red dwarf star and began collapsing into a black hole, he was still only at Rhode Island Avenue, and he finally expired. No, that's not quite what happened. What happened was...well, we don't really know what happened actually.

What we do know is he entered the system around 10 A.M. and was found around 3 P.M. Several Metro employees were put on administrative leave in the wake of this event, evidently because they supposedly checked the train but failed to identify the human body. Some folks found this amusing/disturbing.

I failed to be moved. Metro has enough problems with serving its live customers. I don't worry about the dead ones. It'd be one thing if the guy was on the train for weeks, maggots swarming around his eye-sockets and adipose tissue sloughing off his decaying joints. But it was only a few hours. And administrative leave is evidently what they do to Metro employees who punch people in the face, text while driving, or sell crack from the bus driver's seat.

Of course, it all kind of depends on the circumstances. First, what position was the dead guy in? On the floor of the train, upside down, eyes open, visibly undergoing rigor mortis? Or seemingly asleep in a seat? (I fell asleep once, extremely drunk, on the Long Island Railroad. That was not a good night/next morning. I wasn't dead, but I wished I was.)

oh noes, not another switch malfunction at van ness?!?!1!

Second, did any customers try to tell Metro employees about the corpse? The Washington Post article indicates no, though it's all too easy to envision a customer pushing the emergency button in the car to report the dead body and something like the following conversation ensuing (and yes, Metro employees have been known to talk this way to customers):

Customer: Um, excuse me, I have an emergency to report.

Train Driver: What the fuck you want, motherfucker?

Customer: Um, there's a dead body in the train car.

Train Driver: Shut your ass up, shithead. That's the emergency button you pressed!

Customer: This seems like an emergency.

Train Driver: It's not an emergency if the son of a bitch's dead. Sit the fuck down or I'm off-loading this whole train, asswipe!

A subsequent report clarifies that the two employees were not placed on administrative leave; they were merely subjected to drug and alcohol testing, which evidently is "standard procedure after an incident of this magnitude." Um, this makes no more sense than putting them on administrative leave. Someone on your train dies of natural causes and you give the train driver a drug test? Yeah, great.

Let me end this bizarre story with a note of true sympathy for the poor dead guy, a defense contractor in his early 50s who was evidently up late on his last night on earth working on a project (which explains his late commute time that morning). What a way to spend your last hours. And then, insult to injury, to die on the Red Line. I hope it was peaceful and painless. R.I.P.

On The Castle In The Forest by Norman Mailer

At the level of the story, this fictionalized account of Adolf Hitler's childhood works very well. The characters, especially Hitler's father, are vividly drawn. The prose easily conveys the (misogynistic, somewhat brutal) values of the time and place in which the events occur. Readers will be disturbed at parts, tickled at others, amazed at many, and mostly wonder just how closely events adhere to the truth. (Mailer offers a short bibliography at the end of the book, which I think is odd, especially for a writer of his stature. It's also not especially helpful since he never talks about where his vision deviated from what is known.) If you are part of a book club, this novel could provide a very exciting discussion.

And yet, and yet...

This is a book about Hitler, for goodness sakes. The reader might be more invested, might have a more visceral reaction, than would be reasonable for purely made-up characters. It's an ambitious subject, but Mailer side-steps the really interesting issues through two big cop-outs.

don't you just want to pinch his cute little cheeks?

First, consider the narrator. The book starts out promisingly enough, as the narrator introduces himself as a high-level operative of Himmler's tasked with figuring out the Fuhrer's genealogy. By soon enough the narrator reveals he isn't really an SS man, or even a man at all. He is a servant of the Devil, and the Devil and his servants are perpetually at war with God and his servants to try to influence the course of human events. Their power is subtle, but it is there, mostly manifested through dreams, visions, thoughts (although outright possession is evidently possible). The narrator doesn't know just why the Devil has tasked him with keeping watch over the young Adolf, but he meddles in the Hitlers' (already pretty frigging screwed up) family affairs to try to keep things from veering too far in one direction or another.

This is an incredibly frustrating plot device. Mailer uses his narrator to wax philosophical on good and evil, to draw analogies to novel-writing, to inject humor, and even to take a lengthy digression to talk about another assignment at the coronation of the last Czar (and with the angels protecting the Russian monarch, I wonder if this isn't way too simplistic a view of history).

A lot of reviewers seem to have enjoyed this voice. I found it tedious, verbose, and irrelevant. By injecting supernatural influences, Mailer reduces the responsibility of the humans involved. The humans seem to have free will, but the angels and devils try to steer it - this is a very traditionally Christian view, I think, but it's not very satisfying if you're a modern person and would like to understand better what made Hitler Hitler.

The second frustration is along the same lines. Himmler is interested in Hitler's ancestry for two reasons: 1) to dispel lingering rumors of Jewish blood, and 2) to understand whether he is the product of incest. I give little away in revealing that - in this book - Hitler's parents are father and daughter. Once again, individual responsibility is reduced as Adolf becomes a genetic anomaly. We are disgusted by the set-up, but do we really need that disgust to loathe Hitler?

but wasn't even Hitler innocent when he was born?

The problem here is that everything is mish-mashed together. We've got the angels and demons. We've got a lot of Freudian musing (though I disagree pretty strongly with a lot of what is in this article). We've also got a real fixation on the base: on Hitler's mother changing his diaper, on Hitler's father's various sexual exploits, on what various people think about while masturbating. Is all this supposed to show us who is truly evil? And how can anyone be evil when we are all pawns in some great supernatural game? And, ultimately, if it's all about God and the Devil, who much cares about whether and when people here on earth die? This life is the blink of an eye compared to the afterlife; one might argue that Hitler simply helped shepherd a whole lot of people off to Heaven sooner than they would have gone already.

It is worth reading this book and - as I said at the beginning - one could see lots of fruitful discussions coming from it. But I certainly do not walk away with any better a sense of why Hitler became Hitler, or whether his childhood experiences really had all that much to do with it (the book ends when he is about 15). No one would care about the story or most of the characters if we didn't all know what was ultimately coming.

Mailer, who died shortly after this book was published, is old enough to have lived through Hitler (he served in the Pacific during World War II, though evidently never saw combat). Yet his approach seems more suited to medieval times than to modern history.

Kind Of Sad

On Saturday I spent time going through some old boxes in an attempt to begin culling. No particular reason for doing it now, but the stuff is taking up almost the entirety of one of our closets and I've been promising my wife I'd get to it for a while. In the back of my mind, I think I'd like to be rid of as much excess as possible before we move again.

Most of what is in those boxes are the books and scientific papers I accumulated as a grad student. I was a fanatic for digging up old literature. I roamed around the campus: the main library, the science library, the medical library, all the little specialized libraries in our decentralized system...gathering up papers and photocopying them, reading them, then entering them into my Procite database and filing them by author.

I accumulated several thousand papers by the time I graduated, filling two file cabinets and spanning a range of topics that extended well beyond my dissertation. There was nothing I liked better than trying to master the literature on a particular topic, going through the bibliographies of papers until they started circling back around on one another and new sources were exhausted. Doing so often spurred deeper questions that led to more searching, in a cycle that I used to think of as a staircase, with flat plateaus punctuated with vertical rises. This, truly, was what made being a graduate student intellectually amazing.

"I've got a stack of books to return..."

When I finished graduate school, I boxed up the papers and shipped them (by Fedex, with money I didn't really have) across the country for my postdoc. There I was given barely enough space to unpack them, which - I came to realize - symbolized deeper attitudes not just about me and my status but, more importantly, about science in general and how it is done. Two years later I shipped them to D.C., and when my wife and I moved in together, I moved them out of the closet in my old apartment and into the closet in this one. As I've spent more time in D.C., the likelihood of my going back to academia has diminished to the point of being infinitesimal. I haven't even bothered looking at faculty jobs in years. It's well past time to let go.

But going through the papers made me sad. It was like disturbing the cobwebs in long-dormant parts of my mind. I vaguely remembered many of the papers, and remembered why I had them, what questions spurred me to track them down and read them. Those questions remain unanswered, those avenues of research unpursued, at least by me. It is remarkable, really, how widely human curiosity has spanned. Whatever your question, chances are someone else has tried to find the answer. And yet, we never run out of questions, because every answer suggests more.

It was making connections between seemingly disparate threads of inquiry, rather than some unbelievably original thinking, that I thought would provide me with my greatest insights and achievements as a researcher. This isn't something casually approached from the outside: you (or I, at least) have to be immersed to make those connections. Seeing the papers reminded me what it was like to be immersed, and how much things have changed in a way I never would have anticipated. Even back in grad school, no one else seemed to gather and accumulate in the particular way I did. Which isn't to brag, just to say my style of approaching problems was different. And I wasn't building my library for show - it was to be a foundation of my entire career. Or so I intended.


I am not naive enough to believe that - even had I stayed and prospered in academia - I would have had time to follow all those untrodden paths. I knew and still know many harried and unhappy assistant professors. And it was partly the relentless drive to specialize that drove me away from the university. (It was also a desire to be more relevant - that push and pull I talked about here.) Grad school was a special time and when it ended, it was over regardless of what came next. Short of becoming independently wealthy and being able to do as I please, that existence has forever ceased to be an option. But the systematic asking of questions and iterative gathering up of knowledge to answer them is part of the core of my being, part of how I approach everything. It was simply writ large in my personal library.

I went through several boxes and was only able to part with about half the material. I have more boxes to go through and will tackle a little each week. I know it has to happen sooner or later but I'm taking it slowly, slowly.

I don't miss all that much about university life, really. But quality time in the library, spent going wherever my curiosity takes me...yes, that I miss.

Double Down On This

needs a scale bar

Behold the new Kentucky Fried Chick...um, I mean, KFC "Double Down." Hailed as a new low in fast food, initial reviews certainly indicate that eating - or, as one review so appetizingly put it - "ingesting" it is an unpleasant experience with unpleasant after-effects (no word yet on whether those effects include glow-in-the-dark urine).

I've not tried it and have no plans to. I only indulge in fast food very rarely, and am not the least bit tempted by this processed monstrosity (Sausage McMuffins and Five Guys Burgers are my fast-food weaknesses).

But a sandwich without bread is an interesting idea, especially in a nation where everyone eats too much carbs. I also think a lot of the discussion about nutrition - especially fast-food nutrition, or lack thereof - is unbalanced. It's all "OMG - this sandwich has 800 calories!1!" But...well, that sort of arm-waving doesn't really tell you much. All food has calories. More calories does not necessarily mean a worse food.

Let's be real conservative and focus on a 2,000 calorie a day diet. Recommended daily intake under that diet includes 65 grams of fat and 2300 mg sodium. (Just to stress the conservative nature of this, said diet also recommends only 50 grams of protein, which is low low low if you are trying to build muscle.)

The problem with the Double Down is that the proportions are all off. At 590 calories, it's about 30% of your daily calories, which isn't terrible. But it also gives you 34 g of fat (more than 50%) and 1070 mg of sodium (also around 50%). This isn't unique to the Double Down; indeed, these proportions fit comfortably with those for other (both beef and chicken) fast food from KFC and many other chains. (And check out your frozen foods aisle, including organic brands, for some comparable proportions.)

Another important measure is the percentage of calories from fat. There are weight-lifting types out there who will tell you that most of your food should have, at maximum, 10% of calories from fat. (This, btw, is a very stringent criterion, especially if you also demand your foods be protein-rich, and to do this you have to: a) be serious about body-building, and b) not like food much.) I couldn't find this ratio for the Double Down but - to give you some idea - more than 50% of a Big Mac's calories come from fat.

Why am I bothering to go through this exercise? Two reasons, and neither is that I recommend you go out and eat...er, "ingest" this thing (though Sierra, you might want to recommend that your nemesis do so).

First, calories and fat alone rarely tell you all that much about the nutritional quality of a food. You need to have these ratios.

Second, there is a quality I'll call "fillingness" that is ignored in simple statements of amazement that a sandwich can have 600, 800, or 1,000 calories (and at least for my male readers - you probably need 2,500 calories or more just to maintain, so if lunch is 800-1,000 calories, you're right on track). NPR reports they found the Double Down pretty filling, probably because the bread was replaced with meat (doesn't this sound Atkins-y?). If that extra fillingness stops you from ordering fries, or causes you to eat a small dinner, you're even further ahead of the game.

Of course it all depends on what else you have to eat that day. If your lunch is a Double Down, and your dinner looks like the below, you're fine for the day. Of course, you probably do not want to eat this way on a consistent basis.


No readers, you will probably never catch the Lt. eating a Double Down (or at KFC at all if I can help it). But that is more about my visceral disgust toward cheesy, microwaved, processed fast foods prepared by grouchy underpaid teenagers using animals no doubt raised in utterly horrendous conditions than any fear of instant obesity or coronary.

Everything in moderation.

On The Drinker by Hans Fallada

Hans Fallada is a gem I discovered early last year thanks to this article in The New York Times. A German, writing during the Great Depression and under Nazi rule, he achieved some celebrity but ultimately lived a tragic life. His books were written in short bursts of creativity (usually over only several weeks), often when he was confined to one institution or another. And yet he managed to produce a diverse body of work, some of which is slowly being translated into English. His book Every Man Dies Alone is one of the greatest books I've read in years.

The Drinker is billed as semi-autobiographical. ("It's a biography of you," my wife once chortled.) Fallada wastes no time in beginning to tell the story of his protagonist's (a businessman named Erwin Sommer) descent - seemingly apropos of nothing - into alcoholism and ruin. I say apropos of nothing although it quickly becomes obvious that Sommer has long suffered from paranoia and an inferiority complex; alcohol is just the catalyst for destructive tendencies that had long been bottled up. Though told in the first person, one soon comes to realize that Sommer is somewhat unreliable, or at least completely self-serving, as a narrator.

drink me

Seen through the distorted lens of Sommer's perspective, the story unfolds in a way that forces the reader to struggle with ambiguity. His paranoia becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Nothing is clearly black and white. Sommer is not an evil man, but he loses all sense when drunk. His wife, who I found myself wanting to despise for accusing him of a crime, abandoning him to the world of the institution, and ultimately leaving him, is probably largely a good and competent woman (more competent than her husband, as he recognizes) driven to do what she did.

The book lacks a narrative arc - "narrative plunge" would be more like it. The institutions where Sommer winds up are horrible and useless (with class distinctions between Sommer and the other inmates an undercurrent throughout) but because we are seeing them from his viewpoint the reader has to wonder if they are quite as horrible and useless as they seem.

Only one thing is for sure: alcohol is absolute poison for Sommer, a fact he never quite comes to grips with.

The Drinker reads quickly (I read it in less than two days while on vacation) and if its unrelenting plunge into despair seems too much at first, almost a caricature, eventually the reader becomes invested in the story anyway. I recommend this book, though with a caveat: while it's a good book, if you're going to pick up one Fallada novel, pick up Every Man Dies Alone instead.

Some Random Observations And Questions

1. How many people does it take to go grocery shopping? My wife and I, religiously, do our weekly grocery shopping Saturday evenings. We don't always go to the same store, but one of the stores we frequent is the Giant in Wheaton. They have recently redesigned the store, in a way that crams more stuff (most of it useless seasonal crap, though they did expand their organic food section) into the same space, thus narrowing the aisles and forcing more unpleasant interactions between customers (many of whom seem to like to walk down the center of the aisles gawking like they are D.C. tourists, or at least the only people in the store).

The fine folks at Giant have put out little mini-carts and baskets you can drag to discourage everyone from using a full-sized cart, but it hasn't really helped. And part of why it hasn't helped, I recently noticed, is that because the people shopping come in huge groups. Seriously, folks, how many people does it take to do grocery shopping? Four grown men to buy three containers of Sunny Delight and one little pack of cookies (on line behind us)? Six teenaged girls to buy...um, a couple of bags of corn meal (wtf)? Can't someone wait in the car?

come on, you must have better things to do

Don't even get me started on the Wheaton Target. It's like the whole extended family - aged 2 to 92 - clogging up the aisles as one or two of them actually buy things. Stick fanny packs on them and transport them to Metro Center (and, well, since we're being honest, make them white) and it'd be every bit as annoying.

2. Why do all 50-something women on Facebook have the same favorite quote? Yes, the Lt. has finally decided resistance is futile and has been mucking around on Facebook (as himself, not as Lt. Cccyxx). It's been moderately amusing thus far. But I spent too much time yesterday trolling around randomly and - as those of you who use the site will know - they've been playing with the privacy settings and you can see more info on people than you could before. I found the profiles of three women in their fifties (a former high school teacher, some distant relative of my aunt, and...I can't remember who the third was) who had the same favorite quote: "Life is what you make it."

Profound, ladies. Or is that banal? Meaningless? Roll over Nietzsche and Wittgenstein? What happened to "dance like nobody's watching"...or is that for the younger set?

Isn't it odd that this quote is so popular with that particular demographic? I didn't see it in anyone else's profile.

Oh, STFU

Some of the other "bios" I have particularly enjoyed come from former high school classmates. For example, the nonsensical "I've never seen a book jump off a shelf and put out a fire" (from a fireman, obvs - and I've never seen a fire truck prevent measles or inside plumbing stop a terrorist - what's your point, dude?).

Then there is the grammatically-challenged and quite angry: "If you are going to do something! Do it right the first time!" For example, if you're going to write a sentence! Don't turn it into two sentences instead!

And, from a former kool kid (TM) and kind of bully: "Don't make desicions when your mad!!!!!!!" Need I actually write sic? I might add don't write a Facebook bio if you can't spell. Someone might like to suggest that he join this Facebook group. Or this one.

(You see now, do you not, why I was so adored in high school?)

3. Finally, can I just say how happy I am that I rent and don't own? Currently 1/3 of the apartments in my building are either up for sale at prices lower than the current owners paid (and not selling) or occupied by renters while the owners rent somewhere else because they know if they sell they won't get enough to make it worth it. Meanwhile, they still have to pay their mortgages, condo fees, property taxes, and god forbid anything breaks.

Had I moved here ten years ago (when prices were doubling every couple of years) I would have been a huge schmo to rent. But prices were peaking when I arrived and they'vee stagnated or fallen every since. My wife and I have a great deal with our current place and since ultimately our plans are to move west, I feel like we're better saving more money instead of investing it in real estate that may or may not actually make us any money.

I've Registered For My First Writers Conference

The American Independent Writers 31st Annual Washington Writers Conference on Saturday, June 12. Anyone else in the D.C. area and planning to attend?

For sure, the highlight is that I get two 10-minute pitch sessions with agents (without those, I doubt I would have registered). I had to choose four agents off their list, and they will assign me to two. I googled each of them (well, the ones who were interested in fiction, at least) and actually had trouble narrowing it down (so put the rest who seemed reasonable on my to-query list). I actually had queried and been rejected by one of the agents on the list. Needless to say, she was not one of my choices.

There is also an optional breakfast with one agent per table, but it costs an extra $50 and I don't think the Metro (which opens at 7 a.m. on Saturdays) will get me there on time (looking at their website I see they don't list a time for the breakfast, which is incredibly unhelpful...and I don't care if that's gratuitious adverb usage). The conference is already a pretty pricey proposition (ah, I love spontaneous alliteration!), but given my oft-voiced lack of luck with querying so far, perhaps some in-person networking is what I need.

Yes, networking. Oh, I've gotten so much better at networking since I came to D.C. five years ago, but - being off the charts on introversion - I still find it quite awkward and nerve-racking. Yet I have got nothing to lose, and that's why there is no reason to be intimidated. No one knows me from a hole in the ground, and as long as I am friendly and professional and relaxed I am sure it will be fine.

not good for the Lt.'s already-beleaguered teeth and gums

Of course the ultimate goal is to meet some agents who want to see pages. But meeting some local writers - published and unpublished - would also be beneficial.

I can now go look at the mountains of blog posts on how to behave at a writers conference, how to approach agents, how to pitch, etc...and I probably will spend some time doing that. For the money I'm paying, you bet your ass I want to maximize the effectiveness of those two pitches, at least. But geez, it's not like this is the first time I've ever been to a conference or made a presentation.

I actually impressed myself last week when I went to a local book signing that I correctly anticipated would be sparsely attended. I marched right up to the author, grabbed one of her books for signing and purchase (even though it was chick lit and I looked wildly out-of-place), offered congratulations, asked her a question or two about her book and her background, and then told her about my own efforts so far. I had no agenda beyond that. And my goodness was she friendly and helpful - she told me all about her experiences for 10 minutes and gave me a couple of tips - and if we cross paths again (which is quite possible) she might even remember me.

So, onward and upward...or at least onward. I've revised my query once more and things are coming back to normal after the Amazon contest.

I Screwed Up

Was trying to get a post set for tomorrow, did it wrong, so it's in all your readers and on all your blogger dashboards even though it won't be on the blog until tomorrow morning. I wish they could give me a few seconds grace at least.

Anyway, by way of consolation, can I just point you to this and say:

Agree! Agree! Agree!!!

(I'm looking at you, John Wray. And you, Tobias Hill. And you too, Hilary Mantel...did you think I'd forget you? And Cormac McCarthy...you preemptively! All of yous!)

"When Cccyxx Is On Fire...

...please, nobody piss on him on to put him out, and maybe we won't have to deal with his pathetic drivel anymore!"

I have finally received my Publishers Weekly review from the Amazon contest. It was actually pretty good, especially when you consider that - as I put it on another blog - a lot of people got totally pwned (and check the link if you think I'm exaggerating). I don't feel that the reviewer was engaged in the story quite the way I would like, but it's not clear how to fix that.

Anyway, having the PW review, plus about a dozen other reviews of my work (mostly the first chapter) from the contest, made me think of the overdone book review praise that gets plastered on book covers. And that, in turn, made me think of the most overdone praise I know, which was all over Washington D.C.'s Metro system in an ad campaign for author David Baldacci.

"When Baldacci is on fire, nobody can touch him."

What in the fuck does that mean, anyway? It makes me think of this:


It certainly never tempted me to buy a Baldacci book. But it does tempt me to develop some cover quotes for my own novel, which - as we all know - will be published one day soon and will catapult me to fame and riches and the ability to tell anyone I don't like to go fuck themselves.

So here are some tidbits of the best (by which I of course mean the worst) things people have written about my novel (in quotes), strung together with some phrases of my own (not in quotes):

• Prepare to be engrossed in Lt. Cccyxx's brilliant first novel, with its mesmerizing "so-so prose," incredible "stalled" pace, and captivating "digressions to flesh out...characters," all building to the shocking climax that will have readers "wishing for a more conclusive ending."

• Cccyxx's hilarious "overuse [of] jokes" and "bothersome acronyms" produce a "somewhat confusing" work whose "literary merits are a little stunted!"

• "From the very first paragraph I was confused by all the characters and had a hard time determining the point of view!"

• Cccyxx's riveting "storyline unfolds too slowly" with "too many characters," several with the same first initial in their name (ye gods, no!), an "unclear POV", and an amazing "very slow pace" "cluttered with unnecessary words"!

• Just wow! I couldn't believe the "dizzying array of people," found the riveting "pace a bit awkward," and overall thoroughly enjoyed this modern literary masterpiece that "individuals interested in science...[might] find more captivating!"

You totes know you want to buy it!


in fairness to myself, there was a lot more positive than negative in all my reviews. but i couldn't resist going through this self-deprecating exercise.

On Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Having finished Unaccustomed Earth, I've now read all three of Jhumpa Lahiri's published works. Her other two, Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, I read last year and discussed briefly in this post under "best fiction". I largely stand by my opinions there.

Lahiri is a master of the short story, but seems to struggle a bit more in holding longer works together. Interpreter of Maladies was a collection of short stories that I was surprised to enjoy so much. The Namesake was a decent novel but had its flaws. With Unaccustomed Earth, it is as if she realizes this tension and is attempting to split the difference: the entire book is short stories, but several of them are interconnected with total length approximating a novella. But the trend remains: the free-standing short stories are stronger and the interconnected stories somewhat weaker.

Beyond the high quality of the writing, let me be very blunt about my overarching reaction to this book: the author seriously needs to ponder expanding the themes she explores a bit. Has she ever written one story without an Indian-American immigrant as a main character (not necessarily the main character, but a main character)? Or, for that matter, one story where the central tension is at work, not at home? Or where the Indian-American immigrants contrast their culture with some other immigrant culture? Or where the difference between Hindus and Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis, or different Indian socioeconomic levels are manifested in a foreign context? Or where the characters struggle with the changes going on in India, not just the differences between India and the West? They say to write what you know (advice that is not always worth following, in my opinion), and I respect that, and I know that her themes are interesting and worth exploring, but after three volumes I have gotten bored.

read Interpreter of Maladies instead

Lahiri's characters are highly-educated and driven. They own homes in Cambridge or Boston, they are professors or engineers, they send their children to prep schools, they regularly return to India for lengthy family visits, and they (or at least their children) enjoy the finer things. Sometimes it is not entirely clear why they stay in America after they earn their degrees. Some of them maintain Indian customs in a fashion that might strike Americans as odd, but we are not talking about the type of immigrants who come with absolutely nothing and must mop floors for 13 hours a day hoping to be able one day to rent a small apartment of their own. This contrast with what many think of as a more "typical" immigrant experience could be fertile ground for exploration.

There is, in many of her characters (especially the children who grow up in America), a desire to pull away from Indian culture. Yet the culture remains, first as pressure from parents and then as they grow as something they want to "come home" to. My wife pointed out that aspects of Indian culture (arranged marriages and whatnot) is what those who "fail" at achieving sufficient independence and happiness seem to return to. Is there no happy medium?

The interconnected stories in Unaccustomed Earth (collectively entitled "Hema and Kaushik") embody this best. The two characters are far more worldly and educated than your average umpteenth-generation white kid from the burbs, and yet....I must admit that it is difficult for me to fathom why these characters yearn both for cosmopolitan cultured lives their ancestors never had (not, it is important to add, for Americanized lives) and simultaneously for familiarity of childhood acquaintances and relatives. But a character who grows up broken away from Indian culture (not necessarily "to" anything in particular, just away), and who does not return, would never be in one of these stories.

I fear this review sounds too critical. I enjoy Lahiri's work, will probably buy whatever she comes out with next, and as a writer I learn by observing both her use of language and how she allows her characters to develop. A positive review of her work in The New York Times is here, and I largely agree with it.

Perhaps if I had spaced out my reading of her work I would have enjoyed this more. But despite her undeniable skill as a writer, I am tired of reading the same themes explored from every conceivable angle, and hope she will branch out in future work.