Packing for carry-on...

Like anyone who has done a fair amount of traveling, I have a weird relationship with luggage and how much stuff I carry on a given trip. The first time I went to China, well, to begin with, I didn't know I would be traveling to China. Instead I was going to Switzerland for three months, to live and work in the sort of Swiss equivalent to Walmart.

I started out with way too much crap. I really had no idea what I was doing. I was twenty years old; I'd just had wisdom tooth surgery and was doped up on codeine, and I was going to a foreign country to work when I barely could speak the language — German, which in point of fact the locals didn't really speak. Swiss German is a whole other deal. But I digress..

I had a hundred dollars in my pocket. That was it. I had this wacky backpack, back in the days before internal frame backpacks had been invented, it had this "hi-tech" polymer frame that was supposed to be way cool and which also broke almost immediately. Hell, it was cheap. I had a sleeping bag (not hi-tech, the thing was HUGE) and a cassette recorder that I'd bought with baby-sitting money in elementary school. This was before iPods, people. This was before Walkman. This was 1979.

I flew to Zurich. I somehow found a youth hostel. I honestly don't remember how. It wasn't like I made reservations or anything like that. I just kind of blundered my way to it. I took some kind of light rail to get there, and I had to walk a lot, and all I remember is that I had so much crap that I could barely carry it, I had some weird flimsy light orange day-pack that had the tape-recorder and a bunch of other stuff, and it was not designed to carry heavy things over any kind of distance, and I remember thinking, I am not going to make it, this is really painful, why do I have all this shit?

Regarding the youth hostel, what I remember is meeting some nice Europeans who had really great pot. I believe it was from Africa, or so they said. We smoked together and I got so stoned that my heart started racing, and I honestly thought that I might die. I remember sitting in the bathroom with my book, and I wish I could remember what that book was. I don't think it was Ursula LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" (I read that later), and I don't think it was Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook." It was something weird and intense and profound, or maybe it just seemed that way because this pot was so strong I was practically hallucinating. I just sat there in the white tile restroom, trying to read my book, hoping I wasn't going to have a heart attack in this alien environment, with a hundred dollars in my pocket - well, less by that point. It's another one of those things that when I think about, I realize how different the world is now. No autotellers. No credit cards. Just a hundred bucks cash down to sixty or so.

I had to get to Basel, Switzerland, where my job was. I wasn't exactly clear on how I was going to get there, but one thing I'd already decided - I was not going to carry all that fucking crap all that way.

The sleeping bag was the first thing to go. I gave it to the nice Europeans who'd gotten me high.

Working in Basel was a whole experience I don't think about that much because of what happened after - going to China as a part of the first wave of Americans to live and work there since the 1949 Revolution. Basel is interesting in its own right, though, and one of these days I'm going to get back there, give the place its due.

The reason I went to Basel, and then to China, was my high school friend Paul. My whole relationship with Paul is one of those things that is so complicated I can't get into it here and yet is ultimately so simple that I could reduce it to a few sentences.

Because he's dead, and I'm not. So I get to write the history.

What I can say here is that the two of us were a dozen miles apart in Switzerland, during that summer of 1979. He worked at the groovy Goethe-influenced theater that didn't pay much money, and I worked at Swiss Walmart, because I had to make money in order to support myself. This seems to have been an essential dynamic in our relationship.

His parents were members of the US/China Peoples' Friendship Association, and they traveled to China as a part of a teacher's tour in 1978. While they were there, they heard that the Peoples' Republic of China wanted to hire Americans to teach English, for the first time since the Revolution. On a near whim they applied. They got the jobs. And on a near whim of my own, I agreed to go there with Paul to visit them.

It was all very complicated. We had to get special visas. I was Paul's "fiancee." We traveled from Switzerland to Rome to Thailand, and then to Hong Kong.

From Hong Kong, we took a fancy special train to Guangzhou. What I remember about Guangzhou is that the taxi drivers only turned on their lights at intersections. They also honked their horns every time they came to an intersection. I also had one of the most amazing meals I've ever had in my life there. Which was ironic in a way, because at that time in China, not many restaurants had survived the Cultural Revolution, and I would later have a lot of very bad food. Except in Sichuan. But again, I digress.

I could tell you about the train ride from Guangzhou to Beijing. I could tell you about how we argued to be allowed to ride hard sleepers, which were cheaper than soft sleepers. It wasn't done at the time. Foreigners were segregated - and charged extra - whenever possible. Somehow we managed it. Hard sleepers are arranged like this: lower, middle and upper berths, open compartments, one set of hard pallets facing the other. It was a 36 hour train ride to Beijing, and we were such a rarity that all during the journey, passengers would file past our pallets, like they were in line for the best ride at Disneyland, eager to have a look at the mysterious foreigners who had somehow materialized among them.

What I noticed was, there were an awful lot of very tall Chinese men on this train, dressed like everyone else in PLA-green Mao suits. It turned out we shared the train with the Chinese national basketball team.

What was supposed to be a three week stay in Beijing turned into half a year. A lot of stuff happened during that time. We both taught a term of Conversational English, for one. That's the biggest thing and the easiest to summarize, but it was far from the only thing.

Beijing during this period was not an easy place to be. Not like now, with Starbucks on every other corner, and cell phones and the internet. And more than that - now you can have Chinese friends. You can go to peoples' houses, and nobody cares. There are bars and restaurants and stores. Whatever negatives you can cite about the Chinese government these days - and you can certainly cite a string of them - you can lead a normal life in Beijing.

It wasn't like that then. It's hard to understand if you didn't experience it. You were constantly monitored. Constantly spied upon. Everything you did was fraught with a terrible significance.

Once more, I digress.

After our five months in Beijing, Paul and I ended up traveling for a month. We did this mostly on our own, which simply was not done in China at that time - February 1980.

What I remember was how cold we were, much of the time. There wasn't central heating back then. Most buildings were warmed by coal, if that. I remember being in Xian, wandering the medieval streets, and finding a vendor selling sweet potatoes cooked in an oil can. We didn't want to eat the sweet potatoes, we just wanted to carry them, because they were warm. Hey, I'm a Southern California native. We don't DO cold. It was quite an adjustment.

I mention all this only because, we'd heard at some point in our journey of a place in the southwest called Kunming, "The City Where it is Always Spring." The longer we traveled, the better it sounded. Hell ya. Get me to this place where it is always spring.

We got there. The journey involved a crazy Swede who wore short denim shorts while the two of us were fucking freezing in our pants and long underwear, whose Chinese was good enough to connive us into a Chinese dormitory hotel at a time when this was simply Not Done if you were foreigners. We conned our way into a local bathhouse too.

Kunming was warm. I had a great meal there, a bowl of noodles that cost maybe 40 cents tops, one of my favorite meals the whole time I was in China. Plus it was Spring Festival, Chinese New Year. February 1980, and the first time (I think) since the Cultural Revolution that people were allowed to celebrate in traditional ways. There was a tiny dragon parade. Lots of firecrackers. And a total solar eclipse. That was pretty amazing. We sat out in a rice paddy and watched the eclipse, with two other foreign teachers, a couple, who were having their own personal China meltdown (it happened a lot back then, because it was hard to be there, and you were spied upon, and nothing worked right, and at times it felt like everyone was trying to fuck with you and make your life hard), and the woman, I forget her name, practically had a nervous breakdown on the spot because of all the firecrackers going off, and Paul, meanwhile, had a horrible case of the runs and had to keep running off to some outhouse hut in the rice paddy to relieve himself.

But we saw a total solar eclipse. And it was cool.

The day before that, Paul and I had been at the Stone Forest. At the time, this was a natural wonder in a rural area, populated by what the Chinese government likes to call "Ethnic minorities." We both thought it was a pretty spectacular place. The rock formations - "typical karst structures," according to the signage, whatever that meant - gray stone pillars thrusting out of red earth, emerald green grass, so many of them that it really did look like they'd grown there, strange stone shoots in a fertile field.

We both loved it there. We returned that evening to the guesthouse, where the other guests were Hong Kong students, and we were entertained by "ethnic minority dancers." And then we all had to sing. By this point in our China stay, Paul and I were familiar with this obligation, and when asked to provide an example of "American Folk Music," we sang "Rocky Raccoon", sitting around the fire ring with the "ethnic minority" performers and the Hong Kong students.

It was my birthday.

So...some thirty years later...I am heading back to China for a month. I've been back to China plenty of times since that first trip, but this one is different. I'm going to be traveling for most of the trip, for one. So I've had to think very carefully about what I'm packing, and how I will carry it.

For another, I'm going back to Kunming for the first time. And I'm going to the Stone Forest.

My friend Paul, a year or so before he died, when we were still speaking to each other, said to me, "If I die, you know what I would like? I would like my ashes spread at the Stone Forest."

And I said, "Sure. Okay. Yeah. I'll do that."

After Paul died, I went to his memorial. In spite of the fact that I was furious at him, that at the end he'd hated me. I went because we'd shared too much for me not to have gone. And besides, I was the winner here, wasn't I? I was still alive.

It's odd that I can't remember exactly how this happened, or maybe not. I've always had a pretty bad memory for events (as opposed to my eerily excellent memory for factoids, foreign languages and songs). I can't remember what sort of memorial there was for Paul. I can't remember anything about it. I can remember the commemoration some of his best friends, including me, gave him. We'd all been so close to him and so hurt by him. We got together in one friend's apartment, and we lit candles and said our angry pieces, about how we'd loved this person and how angry we were at him. I think we drank a lot of tequila.

Whatever the memorial was that Paul's dad held (Paul's mother had died some years before, which is another story), at the end of it, Paul's dad said to me, "Paul told me that he wanted some of his ashes to be spread at the Stone Forest. He said you promised him you would."

So.

I've had these ashes in a wooden box for years. Sitting on the top shelf of my bookcase. I've had to make a list of the things I need to remember to take on this trip, and somewhere in the middle is scrawled, "Paul's ashes!"

Don't forget the ashes, you know? That would be lame.

I climbed up on my library ladder and retrieved the box an hour or so ago. It's the first time I've looked at it in years. A carved wooden box, one of those cheap carved boxes from India with the flimsy hinges held together by a penny nail.

The cremains themselves are in a Baggy. Ziplock, thankfully.

They look like cigar ash combined with burnt-down barbecue coals. I know this because at one point, right after Paul died, when I first was given the ashes, I was so angry at him, and so gleeful, so joyous that I'd survived, I opened the box, I opened the Baggy, and I put my fingers inside, felt the residue, the unexpected grittiness of it.

I'm alive, and you're not.

That was years ago.

Anyway, I'm going back to Kunming now. It's time. It's my birthday.

It's going to be very cold, and still, I don't want to carry too much. I've had to learn that lesson, over and over. I'm going to be on and off airplanes, in and out of trains, and I'm not going to be staying in any one place for too long. So, I've tried to pack carefully. Only what I can carry. Only what I need.

But I have to take Paul's ashes. I promised I would.

It's not like I have room for the carved wooden box. So I put the Baggy in another Baggy. I mean, the last thing I want is for the ashes to spill inside my luggage. That would be, well, messy, and weird. But what do you do with a Baggy full of cremains? I don't want to put them in my toiletries kit. I'm already living dangerously by not putting my 3 ounce bottles and under of liquids into the proper 2 gallon ziplock bag (for whatever reason, I have not been stopped for lack of this for my last six trips through LAX). Do I, I don't know, stuff them inside a sock? Put them in a ceremonial envelope? Isn't that asking for trouble? Are there some kind of laws governing the transportation of human remains across international borders? Do I even want to know?

So, after double-bagging the cremains, I've just tucked them in the main compartment of my suitcase, beneath a pair of socks. I'm trying to practice my explanation in Chinese, should someone ask me about them. "Wode lao pengyoude gugede" uh...something something. The word for "ashes" that I can look up involves burnt trees, and I'm not sure if that translates.

But if nothing else, I've got everything down to two small bags. Down to what I can carry.

Friday Cat Blogging!

Detente?

Good news...

...for my writer buddy Elizabeth Loupas and her wonderful book, The Second Duchess. Rather than my spilling the beans here, why don't you check out her post?

"Everything for me, nothing for you"

I'm pretty sure that's the mantra of the robber barons who've been looting this country for the past near 30 years...

I'll post something fun and writer-y later, I promise.

If I don't have a job, how am I supposed to shop?

For years, we've been hearing about how Americans are spendthrifts, don't save enough, buy too much crap.

Turns out if we don't shop, the terrorists win.

Americans are hunkering down and saving more. For a recession-battered economy, it couldn't be happening at a worse time.

Economists call it the "paradox of thrift." What's good for individuals — spending less, saving more — is bad for the economy when everyone does it.

On Friday, the government reported Americans' savings rate, as a percentage of after-tax incomes, rose to 2.9 percent in the last three months of 2008. That's up sharply from 1.2 percent in the third quarter and less than 1 percent a year ago.

Like a teeter-totter, when the savings rate rises, spending falls. The latter accounts for about 70 percent of economic activity. When consumers refuse to spend, companies cut back, layoffs rise, people pinch pennies even more and the recession deepens.

The downward spiral has hammered the retail and manufacturing industries.

I have a kind of wacky idea. Why don't we try rebuilding our economy on sound fundamentals, like, you know, working on our crumbling infrastructure, mass transit, energy grid, stuff like that? And invest in jobs, so that people have the money to buy things?

Just a thought.

More than a meal...

Tonight, Billy, one of my best friends in the world, took me to Kampachi, our favorite sushi restaurant. Billy has been going to Kampachi for more than thirty years; I've entered into my second decade of attendance.

There are so many things I love about Kampachi. It's absolutely authentic, no compromises, Japanese cuisine. It's delicious. And delightful. The owner and staff enjoy teaching us about the food and its traditions as much as we enjoy eating it. I've had transcendent meals there, made all the more so by the cultural experience, the embedded meanings of the ingredients, how this type of fish should be eaten, what food is proper for the season.

We had a typically wonderful meal tonight, full of exquisite flavors, things we'd never tried before, and of course, great conversation, between ourselves, with Mr. Kido, the chef and owner, with his wife, some Chinese customers who came in right before closing. It's never just about eating. It's about all the things that are supposed to go with meals, once you get beyond subsistence.

It's late, I'm tired, and I can't do justice to the place or the experience, so I thought I would repost something I wrote nearly four years ago, about the time we went to Kampachi for fugu.....

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Billy has been taking me to Kampachi for more than a dozen years. Kampachi is the best sushi bar I've ever been to: very traditional, very Japanese, with a master chef who appreciates customers with adventurous tastes. Billy, who has been going to Kampachi since the 1980s, often says that no matter how many times he's been there, every visit brings at least one dish he's never tried before. Which given Billy's experience with and understanding of sushi, is really saying something. At Kampachi, they call Billy "Sushi Ken" - not because they don't know his name, but because "Ken" means "master" (or something along those lines). Billy's knowledge of sushi (and just about every other major cuisine you could name) is encyclopedic. He and the master chef discuss ingredients, philosophies of Japanese food, its presentation, the aesthetics and culture. So going to Kampachi is more than a gustatory experience - it's an intellectual one as well (you can read Billy's review of Kamapchi here).

But oh, the food...so many different, tantalizing flavors, textures, subtle combinations. As much as we enjoy talking during these long, drawn-out meals, there will come a point - several - heck, at least one for just about every dish - where we're reduced to happy sighs and embarrassingly orgasmic moans. Damn, the food is good.

The other night, while sitting at the sushi bar, someone - I forget who - commented on a handwritten sign in Japanese posted on the wall. "That says, 'fire,'" I pipe up. "And that one's...wind." One of the chefs has studied some Chinese, so towards the end of the evening, when I've had a couple sakes, we generally exchange a few words.

"It's for fugu," the chef explains.

"You can get fugu?" Billy asks, more than casually interested.

"Yes. From Japan. Just order four days in advance."

Now, I've heard of fugu. It's a blowfish of some sort, considered a delicacy (and a very expensive one) in Japan. Partially because it's very poisonous, and has to be prepared just right in order to ensure repeat business from your clientele. Who, if the fugu isn't prepared just right, can drop dead on the spot from respiratory paralysis.

By the time I've returned from the restroom, Billy has determined that a special fugu dinner is just what's needed as a belated celebration of my birthday.

The next Wednesday, Billy, Pete (an old research buddy and my original link to Billy - the two of them are childhood friends) and my sister, Dana, meet at Kampachi for our arranged fugu dinner.

I'd very much been looking forward to the dinner. But for some reason I'd been reluctant to make too many jokes about death by fugu in the preceding email exchanges. Because, of course, that wasn't going to happen. Was it? I mean, this is one of the best sushi chefs in greater Los Angeles. Surely there was nothing to worry about. Probably the whole danger aspect was exaggerated anyway.

Still, I avoided telling anyone exactly what the dinner was about. Just, because, well, you know...

The day of the dinner, I did a little research. The preparation of fugu is tightly regulated, I was happy to discover. Chefs are rigorously trained. Hardly anyone is poisoned by fugu these days, even if the amount of toxin in the liver is enough to kill thirty grown men; the poisonings that do occur tend to happen in outlying areas of Japan, with chefs who aren't properly certified. So what if the Lonely Planet website quoted a line from a Japanese poem: "Last night he and I ate fugu; today I helped carry his coffin." That was from, like, ages ago. And that crack about fugu being the dining equivalent of bungee-jumping...kind of a cheap shot, really.

In truth, I am not a bungee-jumping person. I tend to be cautious and analytical. And a great spinner of worst-case scenarios. God, how embarrasing would it be if I died from fugu poisoning?

We sat in the tatami room, Billy, Pete, Dana and I, drinking hot sake and waiting for our fugu. By now we were cracking jokes. Fugu dinners are highly ritualized (for a more positive account than Lonely Planet's, go here, and for additional interesting information, here). Fugu sashimi comes on a huge platter, sliced thin to the point of translucence. Special scallions from Japan, tiny green reeds, are rolled up in the fugu, which is dipped in ponzu sauce. You can add a kind of daikon relish and more scallions if you'd like.

But when the fugu platter came, we all kind of stared at it for a while.

"I'm not going first," I announced.

Billy, true to form, took the first bite.

And when he didn't die, we all plunged in, quickly putting aside any thoughts of danger or mortality. It seemed the most normal, delightful thing in the world, to be sitting in that tatami room, drinking sake and eating fugu with good friends.

Fugu has a delicate flavor and a slightly rubbery texture. The first bite, I thought I felt that tingling of the lips and tongue that marks the residual toxin and is so prized by afficionados, but I can't be certain. "Do you think it's so prized because it can kill you?" I ask Billy, thinking of a Japanese proverb I'd read earlier in the day: "Those who eat fugu soup are stupid. But those who don't eat fugu soup are also stupid."

"It's because of the delicacy of the flavor," Billy replies. "Keep in mind that the ultimate expression of Japanese cuisine is a plain custard."

I think it's a little of both, an expression of the contrasts, the light and the dark, the attempt at balance, that are so much a part of Japanese culture. I think of another poem I'd read:

I cannot see her tonight.
I have to give her up
So I will eat fugu.

After the sashimi, the server - I hesitate to call her a waitress, she is something above that - brings us something that she isn't sure we'll like. Hot sake in big covered cups, in which soaks a fugu fin. It's absolutely delicious - a sort of cross between sake and a meaty broth. Next, we made soup: a huge clay pot of water on a gas burner, in which we spooned chunks of fugu, onions, tofu, greens and mushrooms. Simple, plain, unspiced and unornamented. It's ironic, the juxtaposition of this prized, gourmet ingredient and almost peasant fare.

All the while we talked, we toasted, we laughed. We celebrated our lives and our friendships. And I think perhaps this is part of the meaning of a fugu dinner. We're all of us living on the edge of dying. We can mourn, and sometimes we must. And we can celebrate. Also because we must.

And for dessert, we had toro.

Department of Way Too Meta...

You know, I really get annoyed when real life makes parody obsolete:

A fast-food giant has been trying to determine whether it's easier to place your drive-through order with someone around the world instead of around the corner.

Jack in the Box Inc. has been outsourcing order-taking for some Charlotte-area restaurants to a call center elsewhere, testing whether the idea could improve efficiency...

... the orders are routed to a Texas call center operated by Bronco Communications, and...some orders may be routed outside of the country...

...Customers in Charlotte have noticed heavy accents among order-takers only to find different workers at the drive-through window.

"I had noticed it (several months ago), but I just thought the person taking the order was somewhere else in the store where we couldn't see them," customer Elizabeth Banks said. "It never occurred to me they might be out of the country."

You'd think the jokes would write themselves, but things like this tend to overwhelm my synapses. Something along the lines of an updated Five Easy Pieces, maybe...

Random Sunday Musings...

I have to clean up my house, and there is no football. Damn. For whatever reason, I find that housecleaning and bone-crunching violence go well together. Thankfully I've found an "America's Next Top Model" marathon on Oxygen. ANTM works almost as well for housecleaning as football. Don't ask me why.

I'm 29K into the new book and at one of those, "uh oh. Now what?" places. I think what I have is pretty good; I kinda know where the book ends up in the final third, but this middle third...I'm clueless.

I get a lot of ideas when I'm walking, in the gym, and, yeah, especially in the shower. Apparently a lot of people find showering conducive to creative problem-solving.

(more in the New Yorker, registration required).

The problem is, figuring out this middle third is going to take a lot of showers, and we're having a drought here in California.

Other thoughts: when did weekends get to be...less interesting than weekdays? In part this is because, hey, I'm not working, so every day is kind of a weekend. Mostly, though, when you're waiting to find out about the status of...well, business stuff, this doesn't happen on weekends!

And did I mention, no football?

And finally...two things that do not go together...me on the Mini-Stair-Stepper and Ninja leg-climbing kitten. Last night I did the last three hundred steps with a small cat on my shoulder.

Not the change we need...

So, remember how I said that I expected an Obama administration to make significant investments in alternative energy and infrastructure but to not address economic inequality and the repairing of our tattered safety net? That my biggest concern about Obama was the neo-liberal bent of his economic policy?

Well, l guess I was right to be concerned, and a little too optimistic as well. It looks like that big infrastructure investment in Obama's stimulus package adds up to a whole bunch of not so much. Only 7% of the package directly involves infrastructure projects (you can boost the percentage up to 18% if you stretch the definition). 33% of the package, on the other hand, is, wait for it...

Tax cuts.

Moreover, according to Representative Peter Defazio, infrastructure funding in the package was gutted to allow for more tax cuts.

I strongly urge you watch Rachel Maddow's interview with Defazio, which clearly explains how infrastructure investment stimulates the economy in a way that tax cuts do not, and how the new administration is compromising with a discredited and greatly outnumbered Republican Congressional delegation. Among other things, Defazio points out that the infrastructure investment in Obama's proposal equals just one-fifteenth of what China has committed to spend in the same period and won't even come close to addressing our country's urgent needs.

This is just embarrassing.

Defazio hopes that by sounding the alarm, we can hold President Obama to his stated commitment to infrastructure investment and restore at least some of what was cut. He makes the point that the problem is in the Senate, not the House, and that the first and best Clinton Administration budget was passed without the vote of a single Republican Senator. Nowadays, I'm guessing there are a few Republican Senators who would be happy to come on board a bold proposal to rebuild and invest in America.

Politics may be the art of compromise, but starting from a compromised position will never result in anything bold.

President Obama arrives in office with the highest approval rating of any incoming President in decades. He was elected because people desperately want real change, not just hopey rhetoric. There's no reason not to be bold.

If not now, when?

Just because you're paranoid....

Doesn't mean they aren't out to get you...

Just one day after George W. Bush left office, an NSA whistleblower has revealed that the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program targeted U.S. journalists, and vacuumed in all domestic communications of Americans, including, faxes, phone calls and network traffic.

Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst, spoke on Wednesday to MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. Tice has acknowledged in the past being one of the anonymous sources that spoke with The New York Times for its 2005 story on the government's warrantless wiretapping program.

After that story was published, President Bush said in a statement that only people in the United States who were talking with terrorists overseas would have been targeted for surveillance.

But Tice says, in truth, the spying involved a dragnet of all communications, confirming what critics have long assumed.

"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications," he said. "Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications. ... They monitored all communications."

Video of the Countdown segment at the link...

(H/T to Evil Willow, who needs to get a blog so I can link to it!)

ChangeFest 2009!

Snork!

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Changefest '09 - Obama's Inaugural Speech

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Something to celebrate...

Never, ever, ever having to say "President George W. Bush" again, except as a historical reference.



(H/T shakespeare's sister)

Good-bye to All That...

Maybe our long national nightmare is over. I am not wildly optimistic, but I am pretty sure that the incoming Obama administration will be a huge improvement over the last eight years.

When I think of what has happened under Bush's watch, it seems like the culmination of a lifetime of paranoid worst-case scenarios. Okay, we weren't nuked by terrorists, and we haven't endured the death of millions by genetically altered Super Flu. But, you know, without reciting the litany... unnecessary war, economic ruin, legitimizing of torture, shredding of the Constitution, fiddling while the planet burns...

Oops. Hard to stop with that litany, I've recited it so many times.

One thing I probably won't be doing is watching the inaugural events. I'm still pissed about Rick Warren, but it's more than that. It's the marketing of it, the packaging, the constant hype - seriously, do we need any more reminders that this is "historic"?

But worse than that is this expectation that I'm supposed to feel something. "So-and-so is over the moon! We're going to celebrate!"

The unspoken criticism: "You don't feel it? What's wrong with you?"

I do feel something, mostly relief that no matter what happens, George Bush is gone, Dick Cheney is gone, Alberto Gonzales and Dick Addington, gone, Donald Rumsfeld, gone - well, he was already gone. But the morally bankrupt and intellectually suspect ideology they championed leaves with them. I hope it's buried in the dust heap of history and stays there, where it belongs.

But first we have to clean up the mess.

Is Obama up to it? We'd better hope that he is. My expectations are limited. I think we will have a more rational foreign policy and that America's global standing will improve. I think we will see significant investment in alternative energy and infrastructure - there's really no other choice. Economic collapse makes Keynesians of us all.

Significant health care reform? Not so much. Reigning in corporate malfeasance? Sorry, I don't think so. After all, letting Wall Street operate untrammeled has worked so well. Addressing economic inequality and repairing the tattered safety net? Probably not, and I'm worried about social security privatization - Obama has made far too many dog-whistles on this subject.

But look. If some good things happen, and nothing too terrible does, that's enough for me right now. I'm a fan of incremental improvements, which are generally preferable to revolutionary upheavals. Those tend to happen when things are really, truly bad, and they rarely work out very well.

The first thing to do when you're heading off a cliff is to stop going that way.

So, here's hoping.

Another flippin' meme...

Okay, THIS time I got tagged for, erm..."Six things that make me happy." I'm pretty sure it was Bryn Greenwood who did the deed, but it might have been Dana or Elizabeth. You should go read all three of their blogs anyway.

1. I'll start with cats. Because I have two sitting on my lap. And if I ignore them, they might get pissed off.
2. Good food, good wine, good companions. Oh, wait. I guess that's three.
3. Travel. Drop me someplace different, let me look around. I like traveling with friends - that is, if we're travel-compatible. You know what I mean. I'm easy, and I don't do well with people who, well, aren't. I also like traveling by myself. There's something about the solitude, the near-melancholy, that resonates with me in a way that, well, makes me happy. If I speak the language, it's even better.
4. Long walks. When I walk, I learn about a place in a way that's so detailed, so intimate - I'm connected. The opposite of the purposeful isolation of driving.
5. Writing. Even when I hate it.
6. Having control over my time. Living a creative life.

Tagged again...

And not once, but twice.

First was by Alex Moore, YA author (go check out her excellent blog!). I am supposed to tell you seven things about myself. Longtime readers of this blog may remember that I had problems with six, so I'll refer you back to that for two of them. As I said then, people who know me, pretty much know any six or seven things I'd be willing to share in a public forum, so the following are a review:

1. I had a band for many years. I was the singer/songwriter/bass player.
2. I once got lost in Inner Mongolia while trying to buy boots.
3. Uh...
4. I have three cats. Wait, you probably knew that.
5. in 1979, a friend and I made mix tapes of Talking Heads, Bowie, the Pretenders, the Clash, the Beatles and the Residents and gave them to Chinese friends in Beijing. Even if they asked for copies of the Carpenters, we would put a Residents song at the end.

(See here for two more).

This explains a lot...

"The Book industry in a nutshell."



(H/T to Judi Fennell & Galley Cat)

If a democratic manifesto falls in a forest...

Richard of TPD posts an update to his original Charter '08 post, citing Xujun Eberlein's analysis of the response to Charter '08, both internally and internationally. Have a look.

Friday Cat Blogging!

It's been ages since I cat-blogged, but how's about this for cute?

Amazing things happen...

when you follow instructions. I went to Haloscan and they had a very easy set of directions to reinstall Haloscan with the new Blogger. I was almost tempted to stick with Blogger comments, but I have so many posts with Haloscan comments that I went back to it (with the older posts, comments are not visible until you click on the perma-link, but they are there). With the new template & haloscan, I'm not sure if you can now retrieve the Blogger comments, but them's the breaks.

Except, crap. It looks like my "followers" have disappeared (and doing the "followers" thing is why I updated to new Blogger to begin with). Why is this? Feh.

UPDATE: The folks at Haloscan are extremely responsive and are working to fix the bug. Props to them!

Fasten your seatbelts...

Whenever I've heard talk of how China will become the next hyperpower and rule us all, I've always been more than a little skeptical. Yes, China's economy and power on the world stage has grown exponentially in recent years; yes, China is an emerging superpower. But the dominant one?

I don't know if people making these predictions really have a handle on how complicated and difficult China's situation is internally. Just how many people there are to employ and house and feed, in a country without enough arable land to feed itself, where the environment has become so poisoned that it will take decades to repair the damage, if it can even be repaired. China still has no consistent rule of law, no social security system, and it has over a billion people. That makes labor costs low, to be sure, but it also makes for an inherently unstable situation. By the Chinese government's own reckoning, there were something like 87,000 "incidents" of social unrest in 2007 - riots over unemployment, over non-payment of wages, illegal land seizures, pollution. But as long as growth is high and most people are working, the balance, so far, can be maintained.

I've looked at the US/China relationship in recent years as partners in a sometimes unwilling dance: interdependent, their movements made in response to one another - two puppets tangled together with no puppeteer. China's financing of US debt enabled the US to maintain its consumption based economy - and US consumption is one of the main drivers of China's export economy.

So what happens when the music stops?

John Pomfret reports on how the global economic crisis has affected China, and the news so far is alarming:

An official Chinese magazine this week predicted a massive increase in protests because of the global economic downturn. It reported that 10 million people, originally from the countryside, have been fired from their jobs in factories mostly on China's eastern coast. Another 8 million people are officially registered as unemployed. Meantime, a record number of people will enter the workforce this year, including more than 6 million who have graduated from high school or college. 2009, the magazine said, will be the toughest year in China in recent memory.

The piece, published by Liaowang, a magazine owned by the state-run New China News Agency, detailed a "perfect storm" of economic problems in China's cities -- factory closures and the non-payment of salaries to millions of employees -- cascading into China's rural areas, sparking land disputes as millions of recently-fired factory workers flood home.This perfect storm, the piece said, would "inflict a new pressure on our country's social stability and harmony."

What's that mean in English? Well, the article provided a few statistics. Labor protests jumped 93.52 percent in the first 10 months of 2008 over same period in 2007. In one city alone, the capital Beijing no less, protests to demand the back payment of salaries (Chinese employers routinely rip off their workers to the tune of an estimated $4 billion a year nationwide) increased 300 percent and the people participating went up 900 percent in November when compared to the same month a year earlier.

It may be that ultimately, China will emerge from this crisis in better shape than, for example, the US. After all, they have not been busily hollowing out real productivity from their economy and substituting it with obscure financial transactions and military empire-building. At some point, it's possible that China's vast internal market can shoulder the consumption load to keep the country running. But in the meantime, the logistics of dealing with armies of the unemployed, of people who are already living on a thin edge of survival, is a formidable challenge.

We're in for a bumpy ride.

China's Charter '08

I wanted to post about this tonight but the Peking Duck beat me to it. I strongly suggest you check out Richard's comprehensive post and links for insights into what is shaping up to be a serious democratic challenge to China's one party state.

Here's a key graph from the Charter, and it pulls no punches:

"The political reality, which is plain for anyone to see, is that China has many laws but no rule of law; it has a constitution but no constitutional government. The ruling elite continues to cling to its authoritarian power and fights off any move toward political change."

What a shame...

And unfortunately, completely predictable...

"Beijing suffers the curse of the Olympic city:

Three months after the end of the games, new figures show the "Olympic Effect" has been short-lived and hotels are empty, industrial output has fallen and the streets are quiet.

Much of the pain is due to the worldwide financial crisis – and in some cases due to brave decisions by the government to keep polluting industries shut to spare the environment.

But even the biggest single symbol of the modern rise of China, the "Bird's Nest" National Stadium, stands forlorn, largely unused except for a shrinking number of tourists.

Attempts to attract the city's main football team to move to the ground have failed – it is simply too big for the club's crowds. Instead, it charges 50 yuan – around five pounds – per person to come and stand where Usain Bolt and others touched glory in the summer.

I attended the Olympics, and for all the controversies and negative aspects (the exile of Beijing's migrant workers & wholesale clearance of historic neighborhoods to name two), it was a spectacular event in many ways. I was particularly impressed by the quality of the athletic facilities - the Bird's Nest and Water Cube really are world-class (the fencing hall is really cool too). But there were always questions about how useful they would be once the Games were over.

On the plus side, Beijingers are enjoying a greater number of "blue sky days" - and if you've ever experienced Beijing's bad air days, you know this is no trivial accomplishment.

"The Sun King"

Fascinating article in the Times (UK) that illustrates the factionalism in the CCP that I've often cited. Prominent dissident Bao Tong, still under house arrest for his role in the "unfortunate events" of 1989, issued an online criticism of late Premier Deng Xiaoping. Far from being a reformer who opened up China to economic liberalization, Bao Tong characterizes Deng as a modern-day Louis XIV:

Bao says true economic reform died in 1989 when Deng turned against political liberalism and backed rule by a strong state. He argues that the party has merely transferred economic privilege to a corrupt bureaucratic elite. “The price we have paid for it today has been too steep: a cheap labour force, added to massive plunder of natural resources, poisoned air and polluted water,” Bao writes...

...Deng was not interested in economics, did not understand markets and never intended to liberalise, says Bao. His aim was to save the party’s power.

Bao Tong was a high-ranking official who knew Deng Xiaoping personally, making his critique particularly devastating. That Bao Tong has not been further punished for his criticisms suggests the reformist faction in the party is strong enough to protect him. As the Times article points out, "One comrade who worked alongside him, Wen Jiabao, is now the prime minister."

Huh...

Okay, I'm playing with the new Blogger layout feature - I had to update my blog from the "classic template." I think I have most of the features back, but I can't figure out how to enable Haloscan, so all the comments that were on Haloscan are no longer visible. Ideas, anyone?

Forgot one...

6. To improve my Mandarin, which sucks way more than it should. A month in China should help; after that, I've signed up for a conversation class at a local college.

Resolutions...

I'm not a huge maker of New Year's resolutions, but I generally do decide on a few. Of course, I don't write them down, so although I recall making some resolutions for 2008, I'm not sure what they were.

So, here's a couple in writing:

1. Finish draft of current WIP
2. Start new book - OR - finish Volume 3 of Overlong Unsellable Trilogy. Just because.
3. Keep exercising. More if possible. It's good for me.
4. Learn to cook a few more things (I have this cookbook for inspiration).
5. Figure out some way to sustain this more creative lifestyle.

That last one is the biggie, obviously. I have no clear idea how I'll accomplish it. Yet. I hope it comes to me.

I didn't put "sell my novel" because that part's out of my hands (and in better hands than mine). If the book does sell, I'll add "set up author website and promote my ass off" to the above list.

Anyone want to commit in writing to yours?

Evidence of my insanity...

Pingyao
Originally uploaded by Other Lisa

This is me in Pingyao a couple years ago, in the fleece-lined jacket mentioned in comments. You can see it gives me that wonderful "sausage" profile - I forget just how many layers I was wearing underneath. And it's going to be colder in Xinjiang...

WTF was I thinking?

So I'm doing my month long China odyssey in February. I know it's going to be cold. My first experience in China, I traveled for the month of February in 1980. And yeah, it was cold. Very cold. And lots of places didn't have heat. I was young and foolish. But i had Mongolian padded boots. I would have never gotten through a Beijing winter without them - and I'm not even going to talk about freakin' Shanxi. Oh my god, it was cold. Look, I'm from Southern California. We don't do that, water left outside turns cold, hard and shiny thing here. What I remember most vividly about Shanxi was wandering through the medieval streets of Xi'an, freezing my ass and everything else off, finding a street vendor who sold sweet potatoes from an oil can. My friend and I didn't even want to eat the sweet potatoes. We just wanted to hold them. Because they were hot, and we were so flippin' cold.

This time, I'm trying to plan the whole thing in advance, because I'm figuring my usual travel planning method (stay up super late the night before I go and throw a bunch of crap in a bag) isn't a good strategy for a month-long trip involving a lot of train travel, cold and roughing it. And did I mention cold?

See, I'm planning on visiting a good friend of mine in Yili, Xinjiang. I've always wanted to go to Xinjiang. The Silk Road, and all that. I'm going to go to Kunming (a sort of pilgrimage to my past - I turned 21 there) and then I figured I'd take a train up to visit my friend, maybe stop in Kaifeng and places like that, just...because.

Okay, I just checked the average February temperature in Urumqi (closest marker to Yili). Um...it maybe gets up to 17 degrees. 17?! That's the name of a magazine, not a temperature!

So, I just ordered a pair of Sorel boots. Because my feet have gotten bigger, and I can't wear my lovely Mongolian padded boots any more. Dammit.

There's a whole story behind the Mongolian padded boots, but I'm too tired to post it now. And if anyone has any suggestions re: cold weather gear, please do let me know!

"Officials should shovel pig manure"

One of the few remaining bright spots left in the pathetic shell of a once great paper is the LA Times' China reporting. Which is not to say this area hasn't been greatly diminished; one of my favorites, Ching-Ching Ni has apparently left China - her stories, focusing on the lives of "ordinary" Chinese will be greatly missed.

Rather than go into a full-on rant here about how much I loathe Sam Zell and what he's done to a paper that I subscribed to for over 20 years (it's late, and I've got writing to do), I'll just say that I'm surprised any good reporting goes on there at this point, and that Mark Magnier's latest feature on corruption in China is well-worth a look. Magnier's lengthy piece provides numerous examples of the systematic corruption that pervades all aspects of Chinese society:

Corruption is an everyday experience for millions of Chinese that taints not just schools, but relations in business, on farms and in factories, and potentially any contact citizens have with officialdom. Foshan appears no more corrupt than any other city in China, experts say. It is noteworthy only as an example of a pervasive problem that threatens China's stability and political system.

Senior Communist Party officials know that decades of remarkable economic progress are at risk if graft and bribery stretch the chasm between the haves and have-nots too wide. But they have limited room to maneuver. Any meaningful effort to crack down endangers the party's monopoly on power.

The system depends on legions of police, local party and government officials to enforce Beijing's policies and quash dissent. All too often, critics say, local officials regard their position as a license to steal.

Throughout the country, the prodigious rate of economic growth has created a gold rush mentality. Absent both the strictures and the social safety network of Mao Tse-tung's rigid system, millions of people are seeking ways to prosper -- legally or illegally.

Corruption accounts for an estimated 3% to 15% of a $7-trillion economy, and party membership can be an invitation to solicit bribes or cut illegal land deals. Membership hit 74 million at the end of 2007, a 10% jump from 2002, as moneymaking opportunities increasingly trumped ideology.

Nearly 5,000 officials at the county level or above were punished for corruption over the last year, state media reported Friday.

"Of course everyone hates corruption," said Qiao Zhanxiang, a Beijing lawyer who took on the Ministry of Railways for alleged price gouging and lost. "But everyone also wants to be a part of it."

The result is a growing divide between those who benefit from corruption and their victims. It is at the grass-roots level where this chasm is most harshly felt, among those abused by the system, like Liao and Chen, or others who have simply been left behind.

"Common Chinese people are in hell," said Ai Xiaoming, a documentary film producer and professor at Zhongshan University in the neighboring city of Guangzhou. "Hell is not some future. It's right now."

I had a revelation of sorts the other night, that a part of my pessimism about this being the "Chinese Century" came from my own idealism - that a country with as large a population as China, where so many of its citizens were impoverished and exploited had too many internal problems to overcome to become the globe's major superpower. My realization was that perhaps the Chinese leadership only cared about its citizens' well-being to the extent necessary to keep them from open rebellion. That its export economy and subsidization of American debt at the expense of spreading the wealth internally were a part of a larger, long-range plan, to buy up enough foreign assets to ensure control in the future. I still think that may be true. But I also think that this strategy has its own risks. It's riding the tiger, a race to secure wealth before society collapses from the weight of its own contradictions.

After the widespread and grandiose scale of the abuses in the American financial system that have nearly ruined our economy, it's hard to get too self-righteous about the problem of corruption in China. But there are some important differences. Most of us in America experience American corruption in the abstract, or at a step removed. A lot of us could point to things that have happened in our lives as a consequence of wide-spread corruption - we can't get loans, maybe we've even lost our jobs, in part because of a chain of events kicked off by criminal greed. The difference is that most of us don't experience the corruption directly. In China, peoples' daily lives are afflicted by corruption at every turn. They can't depend on the validity of common transactions that most of us take for granted. This is one of the factors that I consider when I read or hear pundits predict the Chinese century. China will never become the predominant global power until it creates a society where ordinary Chinese people can have real faith that the social contract exists for them and that basic promises between individuals, between institutions, will be kept.

(Here's another article with a pessimistic view - or maybe optimistic, in that it posits the global economic crisis will lead to the downfall of China's one-party system).

(H/T to China Law Blog)

Literature Map

Author Elizabeth Loupas (and be sure to check out her very cool new blog) posted about this nifty site, which helps to connect readers to authors they might like in a fun and effective manner. Check it out!

I think tools like this are a part of what's been missing in the new publishing universe - creative ways of marketing and connecting books to their audiences. I'm excited to see sites like this starting to fill that gap.

Bookmas!

The record of my participation in "Buy Books For Christmas!"


Books Bought:

For my mom, my stepdad, my stepmom, my sister (don't tell her), my sister's boyfriend (don't tell him), my niece, three friends (that I can think of. I might have forgotten someone).

Books Received:

No physical books so far, but a gift card for my favorite local bookstore, Small World Books,, and, um, while I was in Small World Books, I bought myself a few things...

Happy Holidays!

I am finishing up my Christmas shopping and already plunged into my traditional holiday socializing. So far we've had the musicians' party, the Venice party with enthusiastic if somewhat drunken Christmas caroling...still to come, the Feast of the 7 Fishes Christmas Eve party and then home Christmas Day with the folks, and New Year's Eve with Billy.

I am not a religious person but I dearly enjoy this time of year and these little rituals that give substance to my life.

Happy Holidays! Joyous Solstice! Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukah! And a prosperous, creative New Year!

Department of Questionable Headlines

From the Associated Press: "Bush says he didn't compromise soul to be popular"

So, how come, then?

Department of Inexplicable Crimes...

From the Tampa Tribune:

According to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, two men entered a man's home early Sunday and demanded his eggbeater. One suspect was holding a pistol while the other brandished a knife to the resident's neck.

Oh, and this final detail:

Police found the eggbeater in the man's left pocket.

I don't know, perhaps a compelling need for homemade eggnog?

Dump

For some reason, I wanted to visit the dump. I thought it might be a good location for my new novel in progress. I thought it might be interesting. Maybe I'm just one of those privileged Westerners engaging in poverty tourism. It's entirely possible.

Valeria has done some work at the dump, both as a volunteer and a performance artist. She graciously agreed to take me. But she couldn't get the necessary permit, even trying a few days in advance. The situation at the dump is complicated. It's scheduled to close, but delays in completing the new dump mean that the old one will remain open a little longer.

The dump is 28 years old. It began at a time when there were no real environmental regulations in Mexico, in a valley some distance from the town. Trash piled up in the valley until the valley filled; then the mountain rose above it. Gradually the town came as well. There are new apartments close to the dump, and a new university too.

We took a taxi out to the colonia that has grown up around the dump, stopping at a fruteria to buy a half a crate of oranges for the workers: the dump's employers and the recyclers who pay for the privilege of sorting through the garbage to scavenge things to sell. There is a hierarchy at the dump, with "bosses" controlling who gets what and for how much. "There was an old lady who used to be here," Valeria told me, "and she would wear a nice dress and gloves and look for perfume bottles." Some people live more or less on the dump, others around it, and they take their things to their scavenged shacks to sort and sell.

Since we didn't have official permission to visit, it would all be a matter of luck, Valeria explained. Or Valeria's charm, more accurately. The oranges didn't hurt either. I took some up to the workers spraying brown leachate out of green hoses into a pit. This is part of a system to filter the leachate and prevent it from leaking places it shouldn't (I wish I could describe the process more accurately, but my Spanish only goes so far). About five minutes after we arrived at the dusty gate, the manager arrived.

At first the manager didn't want to let us up there. He wanted to be assured that I wouldn't say anything bad about the dump. I promised I wouldn't, and that if he didn't want me to take photos, I would not.

He took us up in his pickup, on paths blocked at times with baby carriages and cracked tires, up to the top. The lower levels of the mountain have been covered with grass, which I believe is planted on top of a rubber membrane, again designed to seal off any contaminates from the dump. Once the manager determined that I was actually interested in how the dump worked, he explained it all to me. I understood most, but not all of what he had to say. What I did understand was his real passion and conscientiousness about his job, which was basically trying to retrofit a mountain of garbage so that the environment would be protected and the land eventually used for something else. But how? For years, the garbage had been sorted by hand; they have no real way of knowing what is buried there, how dangerous it might be. Methane gas accumulates; organic materials decompose into a viscous liquid that seeps wherever it can find a path.

The views from the top of the dump are pretty amazing. You can see the town, the marina, the new developments, the ocean. But the dump itself is what's really compelling.

Valeria told me that it had become a home for thousands of birds. She wasn't exaggerating. Flocks of buzzards, which I would expect, and white herons, which seem somewhat incongruous, come to the dump to feast on what's there. Things like: random cow parts: lips. Skulls. Hooves. Ears.

What there seems to be more of than anything are plastic bags. Plastic bags, faded by the sun, make up the slopes and summit of this mountain. The earth will not end in fire or ice or water. I am convinced we will all smother in plastic.

The surface of the mountain is spongy; it trembles when the bulldozers come close. I wish I could describe the smell. Rancid, sweet, rotting fruit, spoiled baby food, shit — none of that quite captures it.

The new dump will have all sorts of modern technology, the manager explained, and they are doing their best to cope with the problems that this one presents, but essentially, it is a matter of how do we bury our mistakes, when they are mistakes of this magnitude?

Meanwhile, the gleaners, the jovenes — all of the workers are jovenes, whether they are young, old, male or female, continue their labors: sorting through trash, through garbage, looking for things that they can sell. Cardboard. Bottles. Cans. Refrigerator parts. Copper wire. It's not much of a living; the price of recyclables has collapsed along with everything else in the current economic crisis.

Some day the dump will close, probably within the next few months. Maybe it will take longer. But the dump will be closed, sealed in rubber, covered over with grass. I'm not sure what happens to what's underneath. And I don't know if the birds will still come.

Mary Has Left the Building...

Mary Has Left the Building...
Originally uploaded by Other Lisa

Vallarta Christmas Processional...

Greetings from Vallarta!

I'm in Mexico right now, doing research for a book. No, really! But I should have time to put up a few posts, and maybe even some photos too.

In the meantime, research requires me to go down to the beach for a margarita.

Department of Obscure and Useless Skills

When it comes to baseball, I throw like the proverbial girl. Not like real girls; as I'm sure you're aware, there are some hard-throwing girls out there. But I've never been able to throw a baseball very well. No idea why. I feel like I'm putting all kinds of muscle into it and nothing much happens.

For some reason, however, the same thing does not apply to my throwing a football. I discovered this random and inexplicable skill several years ago, while at a barbecue and block party. My friends had a mini-football, and between guitar player Tony, athletic young teen son Joey and me, I could throw the thing the best. I mean, we are talking long, tight spirals here. It was weird.

When I was visiting my sis up in San Francisco, I took daily walks on Ocean Beach. On one clear day, there were three or four groups of people tossing a football around. I thought, hey, I want to toss a football around! I kept hoping one of them would fumble in my direction, but it didn't happen, and I am not the sort of person who would intrude on someone else's fun.

Today, I had to do some shopping at Target. I stopped in sporting goods to see if I could pick up a pair of 15 pound dumbbells. No luck. But there were shelves of footballs.

After some debate, I grabbed a Wilson Junior composite football, which is for ages 9 and up - I have really small hands. I tested it out in my backyard, gleefully throwing it into gates and bushes - and yeah, I can throw it pretty well. Though this is an utterly useless skill for a middle-aged woman, I might go back for the PeeWee model anyway.

Mumbai attacks

For amazing/appalling photos, go here.

UPDATE: This AP story provides the most comprehensive timeline of events that I've seen thus far.

The Winner!

Of the Bad Sex in Literary Fiction Award - Rachel Johnson! Take a bow, Rachel! Here's an excerpt from her first-place entry:

Almost screaming after five agonizingly pleasurable minutes, I make a grab, to put him, now angrily slapping against both our bellies, inside, but he holds both by arms down, and puts his tongue to my core, like a cat lapping up a dish of cream so as not to miss a single drop. I find myself gripping his ears and tugging at the locks curling over them, beside myself, and a strange animal noise escapes from me as the mounting, Wagnerian crescendo overtakes me. I really do hope at this point that all the Spodders are, as requested, attending the meeting about slug clearance or whatever it is.

According to the Literary Review,

"Johnson was singled out for her novel's slew of animal metaphors, including comparing her male protagonist's "light fingers" to "a moth caught inside a lampshade", and his tongue to "a cat lapping up a dish of cream so as not to miss a single drop". Literary Review deputy editor Tom Fleming was also disturbed by the heroine's "grab, to put him, now angrily slapping against both our bellies, inside".

Johnson, nothing if not a good sport, declared winning the award (a bottle of champagne and a plaster statue of a foot) was "an absolute honor."

John Updike received a lifetime achievement award for his numerous passages of bad sex. But heck, you're all winners, contestants!

You can find selections from the short list here.

The most wonderful time of the year II

Readers of this blog know that in spite of my lack of religious belief, my ingrained cynicism and general misanthropy, I actually enjoy the holiday season. I love getting together with friends and family to celebrate the festivities. I love those annual occasions that help mark the seasons and the passages of our lives...

Thanksgiving dinners...Christmas trees...the Bad Sex in Literary Fiction awards...

Oh, where to start with the cornucopia that is bad writing about sex in serious literature? I missed the 2007 contest, but here is a selection from 2006.

So what are the criteria for choosing the worst sex in serious literature?

Jonathan Beckman at the Literary Review said there had been "quite a lot of variation" in this year's shortlist in terms of how, exactly, the sex was bad. "There are some which take the sex far too seriously, like Coelho, and some which have a grating change of register, like Buchan, and others that are just slightly ridiculous," he said. "The Campbell seems quite Alastair Campbelly-bad, in the slightly tortuous logical path the passage takes … and also, we wouldn't pass up the chance to put Alastair Campbell on a bad sex shortlist."

I tend to root for the far too serious. Here's Paulo Coelho's nominated contribution:

in which the act of sex – on a public footpath – is described as "the moment when Eve was reabsorbed into Adam's body and the two halves became Creation".

"At last, she could no longer control the world around her," Coelho continues, "her five senses seemed to break free and she wasn't strong enough to hold on to them. As if struck by a sacred bolt of lightning, she unleashed them, and the world, the seagulls, the taste of salt, the hard earth, the smell of the sea, the clouds, all disappeared, and in their place appeared a vast gold light, which grew and grew until it touched the most distant star in the galaxy."

Yeah, it was good for me too.

Oh, and since I missed last year's awards, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the winner:

Last year's award was given posthumously to Norman Mailer for his final novel The Castle in the Forest, in which a male member is described as being "as soft as a coil of excrement". "It was the excrement that tipped the balance," admitted Philip Womack, assistant editor of the Literary Review, at the time.

(H/T to Judi Fennell)

The way to fly...

Why can't we have these now? Without the explosive hydrogen...

(h/t to Shanghai Slim)

China's documentary realism

I highly recommend this China Digital Times article on the not-quite-underground Chinese documentary scene. These filmmakers operate in a gray area that is increasingly a part of Chinese culture — unsanctioned by the government, at times out-and-out banned but still managing to circulate inside China thanks to video hosts like Youtube and the considerable Chinese black market for censored materials. In a weird twist, there are even award ceremonies for documentary festivals that feature banned films within China (and no, I don't get quite how this works either). Support from "common people" is also essential:

Commenting on the way independent Chinese documentaries have become an alternative livelihood for the people, the Beijing Broadcasting Institute professor Cui Weiping said to Duowei: “Many people help other people shoot films for advertisements, and most people engage in the advertising industry. Some people, after shooting a commercial for five months and earning 100,000 RMB in profit, will invest this money in documentaries.”

For the documentary filmmakers, the greatest problem isn’t making a living, but having their documentaries censored and unable to enter the market through normal distribution channels. Professor Hao Jian said to Duowei: “The making of independent documentaries in China isn’t a normal occupation and lacks normal commercial activity. Because feature movies are able to gain commercial value through the participation of film festivals, and at the same time documentary film makers are crammed in a run-down room of a rented building, filmmakers of feature films usually have better living conditions. The government’s criticism of independent documentaries is usually negative, and thus the government will not let them enter the market.”

At the moment, support for Chinese independent documentaries comes from the common people. Some celebrities and civil organizations have provided the funds to establish some documentary film festivals such as the Chinese Independent Film Festival in Nanjing, the Clouds South Documentary Festival, the Chinese Documentary Exchange Week at the Songzhuang Art Museum, the Beijing Independent Film Forum and Chinese Independent Documentary Film Festival. In the fall of 2006, Li Xianting set up the Li Xianting Fund at the Song manor to collect 34 independent Chinese documentaries. The top donor was Fang Lijun who gave 100,000 RMB.

You can find the work of one banned Chinese documentarian, Hu Jie, at the CDT link, and also here, where his hour-long documentary on a Cultural Revolution casualty, "When I am Gone," is available with English subtitles. I strongly recommend it. Part 1 is linked below...

I hate the expression, "You go, girl!" but...

Oh hell. You go, girl! :

A 16-year-old schoolgirl with a mean knuckleball has been selected as the first woman ever to play alongside the men in Japanese professional baseball.

Eri Yoshida was drafted for a new independent league that will launch in April, drawing attention for a side-armed knuckler that her future manager Yoshihiro Nakata said was a marvel...

...Yoshida, 155 centimetres (five feet) tall and weighing 52 kilograms (114 pounds), says she wants to follow in the footsteps of the great Boston Red Sox knuckleballer Tim Wakefield.

Fast Food Nation

The economy needs to pick up "so people can afford to get healthy," said Ronnie Adkins, 67, a retired policeman, as he sat one recent morning on the smoking porch of the Jolly Pirate Donuts shop on U.S. 60.

Fascinating, disturbing profile of the unhealthiest city in the US, Huntington, W. Virginia.

Nearly half the adults in Huntington's five-county metropolitan area are obese — an astounding percentage, far bigger than the national average in a country with a well-known weight problem.
Huntington leads in a half-dozen other illness measures, too, including heart disease and diabetes. It's even tops in the percentage of elderly people who have lost all their teeth (half of them have).

The article cites a complex set of factors responsible for the situation: an economy once built around manual labor (for example, coal mining) that has largely lost its industrial base and suffers from a 19% poverty rate, eating habits that have not changed since those days of high-calorie burning work, an over-reliance on fast food, a population convinced that they can't afford to eat more healthfully. And fast food companies take advantage:

Fast food has become a staple, with many residents convinced they can't afford to buy healthier foods, said Keri Kennedy, manager of the state health department's Office of Healthy Lifestyles.

Kennedy said she had just seen a commercial that presented "The KFC $10 Challenge." The fried-chicken chain placed a family in a grocery store and challenged them to put together a dinner for $10 or less that was comparable to KFC's seven-piece, $9.99 value meal.

"This is what we're up against," said Kennedy, noting it's an extremely persuasive ad for a low-income family that is accustomed to fried foods. "I don't know what you do to counter that."

Add in a cultural attitude that does not value exercise or understand the health benefits (I'm guessing that has something to do with a past built on hard physical labor - why would you look at exercise positively when a measure of success was finding a job where you didn't have to do it?), and you have a population having heart attacks in their thirties.

The causes of obesity and its attendant health problems go far beyond laziness and lack of discipline. This article helps lay out some of the very complicated and intractable issues behind our nation's health crisis. It's about culture; it's about how society is structured, the built environment in which we live and work. And it's about a country that doesn't provide preventive health care or even basic healthcare necessity for tens of millions of its citizens.

Decisions, decisions...

After a lot of hemming and hawing which caused me to miss out on the best flight options, I found a pretty good second best itinerary to Beijing for next year. I'll depart shortly after New Year's - Chinese - sorry, I traveled during that holiday in 1980 and learned my lesson - and will return after the first week in March. This ought to give me enough time to do work on my Mandarin chops and do some serious traveling as well. I'm already planning on going to Kunming - I haven't been there since the total eclipse of the sun in 1980, and I have to make that pilgrimage for a number of reasons - and I have a friend who is a Dean at a college in Yili, Xinjiang. I mean, Xinjiang - how cool is that?

There's a bunch of other places I'd like to see that I've never visited...Lijiang, Kaifeng, Yantai, Qingdao...and old favorites I'd love to visit again (I really do heart Chengdu).

Given that I'm flying in and out of Beijing, am already committed to Kunming and will make a serious effort to go to Yili, does anyone have any suggestions?

Branding with Chinese Characteristics

Via Kaiser Kuo comes this hilarious example...

Green renewal

Okay, I'm pretty much a tree-hugger. I heart polar bears and light rail and all that. The election brought us a lot of good news on the environmental front, not the least of which is that we'll have a new administration in Washington that actually cares about things like global warming. Meanwhile, here in California, we passed the high-speed rail initiative and Measure R in Los Angeles (which will fund a variety of transportation projects, including light rail). And as a bonus, the Governator reversed his earlier stance and now proposes a 9.9% tax on every barrel of oil pumped out of the ground in California.

Beyond the warm-fuzzies of tree-hugging and polar bears (I would not recommend hugging the polar bears though), there are compelling reasons why we should move to a Green economy - and not just to, you know, save the planet from the deleterious effects of global climate change.

Reason #1 - it's good for the economy, and we really need to rebuild our economy.

Here's what Al Gore had to say in Sunday's New York Times:

Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis.

Economists across the spectrum... agree that large and rapid investments in a jobs-intensive infrastructure initiative is the best way to revive our economy in a quick and sustainable way. Many also agree that our economy will fall behind if we continue spending hundreds of billions of dollars on foreign oil every year. Moreover, national security experts in both parties agree that we face a dangerous strategic vulnerability if the world suddenly loses access to Middle Eastern oil...

...Here’s what we can do — now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

Gore goes on to outline a five-part plan "to repower America with a commitment to producing 100 percent of our electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years. It is a plan that would simultaneously move us toward solutions to the climate crisis and the economic crisis — and create millions of new jobs that cannot be outsourced."

In case that sounds a bit too idealistic and grandiose, here's an example of how a small slice of Green economy is helping to resurrect a Midwestern Rust Belt town:

Like his uncle, his grandfather and many of their neighbors, Arie Versendaal spent decades working at the Maytag factory here, turning coils of steel into washing machines.

When the plant closed last year, taking 1,800 jobs out of this town of 16,000 people, it seemed a familiar story of American industrial decline: another company town brought to its knees by the vagaries of global trade.

Except that Mr. Versendaal has a new factory job, at a plant here that makes blades for turbines that turn wind into electricity. Across the road, in the old Maytag factory, another company is building concrete towers to support the massive turbines. Together, the two plants are expected to employ nearly 700 people by early next year.

“Life’s not over,” Mr. Versendaal says. “For 35 years, I pounded my body to the ground. Now, I feel like I’m doing something beneficial for mankind and the United States. We’ve got to get used to depending on ourselves instead of something else, and wind is free. The wind is blowing out there for anybody to use.”

From the faded steel enclaves of Pennsylvania to the reeling auto towns of Michigan and Ohio, state and local governments are aggressively courting manufacturing companies that supply wind energy farms, solar electricity plants and factories that turn crops into diesel fuel.

This courtship has less to do with the loftiest aims of renewable energy proponents — curbing greenhouse gas emissions and lessening American dependence on foreign oil — and more to do with paychecks. In the face of rising unemployment, renewable energy has become a crucial source of good jobs, particularly for laid-off Rust Belt workers...

...No one believes that renewable energy can fully replace what has been lost on the American factory floor, where people with no college education have traditionally been able to finance middle-class lives. Many at Maytag earned $20 an hour in addition to health benefits. Mr. Versendaal now earns about $13 an hour.

Still, it’s a beginning in a sector of the economy that has been marked by wrenching endings, potentially a second chance for factory workers accustomed to layoffs and diminished aspirations.

All this adds up to a reason for optimism, even to a cynic like me.

But less of this...

From the WaPo's Sleuth blog:

Ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) apparently has rebuffed a bold bid by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) to take over health care policy in the Senate when the new Congress convenes in January.

Sources tell the Sleuth Clinton had approached Kennedy, who chairs the Senate health committee, and Democratic leaders about creating a new special health care subcommittee, one she would chair.

Her hope was to draft the legislation that would fulfill her presidential campaign promise - and President-elect Barack Obama's - for a sweeping health care overhaul plan.

But sources say Kennedy is cool to the idea. So is his top health care aide, Michael Myers, Kennedy's staff director on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee.

Myers tells the trade publication InsideHealthPolicy that Kennedy will continue handling health care policy at the full committee level. Asked if that meant Clinton would not be tapped to head a new health subcommittee as rumored, Myers said that was correct.

Enough already. Ted Kennedy is obviously in no condition to spearhead the battle for universal healthcare. This is a subject about which Hillary Clinton is passionate, informed and engaged. She's had years of experience dealing with both the big picture and the minutia. Her healthcare proposal was widely regarded by progressives as superior to Obama's. Why not put her to work?

A significant portion if not a clear majority of Obama appointees look to be Clinton Administration veterans. And yet the woman who got over 18 million votes in the Democratic primaries, who campaigned her butt off for Obama and down-ticket Dems across the country, seems to be excluded from meaningful participation in an area where she is greatly needed.

Yes, I get that there are seniority issues. I get that there was a lot of bad blood in the primaries between the Clinton and Obama camps. But unity is a two-way street, and this sort of continued dissing has got to stop.

More like this, please!

Those who know me in RL know that I am a good liberal who has had some serious issues with Barack Obama. For the purposes of this post, I'll mention only his opacity in terms of policy. Mantras of "Hope" and "Change" don't resonate with me; tell me what you are going to do.

Things like this:

Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition.

In some instances, Obama would be quickly delivering on promises he made during his two-year campaign, while in others he would be embracing Clinton-era policies upended by President Bush during his eight years in office.

"The kind of regulations they are looking at" are those imposed by Bush for "overtly political" reasons, in pursuit of what Democrats say was a partisan Republican agenda, said Dan Mendelson, a former associate administrator for health in the Clinton administration's Office of Management and Budget. The list of executive orders targeted by Obama's team could well get longer in the coming days, as Bush's appointees rush to enact a number of last-minute policies in an effort to extend his legacy.

A spokeswoman said yesterday that no plans for regulatory changes had been finalized. "Before he makes any decisions on potential executive or legislative actions, he will be conferring with congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, as well as interested groups," Obama transition spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said. "Any decisions would need to be discussed with his Cabinet nominees, none of whom have been selected yet."

Still, the preelection transition team, comprising mainly lawyers, has positioned the incoming president to move fast on high-priority items without waiting for Congress.

Obama himself has signaled, for example, that he intends to reverse Bush's controversial limit on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, a decision that scientists say has restrained research into some of the most promising avenues for defeating a wide array of diseases, such as Parkinson's.

All this would be change I can believe in.

Buy a Book, Dammit!

Via Nathan Bransford comes this excellent post by Moonrat (now added to my blogroll - "editorialass") about why October is the unkindest month of all in book publishing. It has to do with the unique (some would say "bizarre") returns policy:

The crux of the problem is that book publishing is a returnable industry. That means that say Big Chain Store (BCS) agrees to stock a book that my company publishes. They buy 100 copies at, say, $1 a piece (to be easy). They give me $100; I send them the books. Two months later, they didn't sell any, so they send them back. I have to give them $100.

Keep in mind a couple of things about this system that don't work in the publisher's favor:
1) Shipping costs. Books are heavy.
2) Production fees incurred by the publisher (because, unfortunately, we can't return the books to the printer).
3) Inflation. Haha.

Moonrat suggests that those of us who love books fight back...and buy more books. Buy 'em for your friends and family!

Well, it's not like I need much (any?) encouragement; I'd come home with three new books in my shopping rucksack yesterday before even reading this post. But here's a follow-up suggestion: why not make October "Buy More Books!" month? It's too late for this year, but beginning next year, we could all make it a point to do our holiday shopping early.

Buy a book. The publishing industry you save may be your own.

No On Proposition 8!

Efforts are already underway in California to repeal the unjust, anti-equality, anti-family and homophobic Proposition 8, which would ban same sex marriage through an amendment to the state constitution.

Proposition 8 may have won, but the fight is not over. Legal challenges have already been filed, and we have an Attorney General, Jerry Brown, who has been great on this issue.

Here are a few things you can do right now:

If you are a registered California voter, go here and sign the petition. It's already over 250,000 signatures (H/T to Dana for finding this)

You can also sign the Courage Campaign's pledge. You do not have to be a California voter to sign.

Finally, here is the No On Proposition 8 homepage. They are still accepting donations, and I'm guessing they will remain a focal point for any organized effort to fight this.

Please show your support of equality for everyone. Reject the idea that "separate but equal" is somehow acceptable in the 21st century.

I'm not someone who has been deeply involved in this issue, just a sideline supporter who knows many people directly affected by this and who is outraged by the injustice Proposition 8 represents. If you know of any other actions, please let me know about them, and I'll add them to this post.

For California Voters

Here is a progressive voter guide (pdf) covering the initiatives - a good compendium of sources.

Check this out...

People who haven't been to China tend to have a lot of mistaken ideas about what it's like. This is not surprising. Popular stereotypes generally fix on outdated images - rice paddies, Little Red Books.

Even if you've been there, even if you've lived there, you can still not get it. I'm not sure that I do. China is a complicated place, and it's naive to think that you can somehow get a handle on The Truth about a country, any country. Even your own.

Regardless, here is a fascinating photo essay about disaffected young people in Changsha, a provincial capital best known for its association with Mao Zedong. Mao wouldn't recognize his hometown from these images of punk bars and graffiti art and transgender performances. Though perhaps he would relate, somewhat, to their alienation.

Yay, Apple!

Okay, I've been a Mac partisan for a long time (yeah, I'm one of those), ever since I replaced my Amiga 2000. But this is the kind of thing I like to see, and I don't care if it's pandering or PR:

No on Prop 8
Apple is publicly opposing Proposition 8 and making a donation of $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.

I can't tell you how offended I am by Proposition 8. I was so thrilled when the California Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to prevent same sex couples from marrying. It's wrong to deny people equal protection under the law, to deny the sanctity of their relationships. One of the few times I wished I hadn't missed a political solicitation was when the "Yes on 8" people left a message on my voice mail asking for my support for their prejudiced, ignorant, hateful initiative. Oh, how I would have liked to have responded.

Good for Apple for taking a stand. I urge all of you in California to really protect the sanctity of marriage and vote against this horrible initiative. Donate to No on Proposition 8 if you can.

It's hard enough to find lasting love in this world. I don't understand a mindset that insists that millions of peoples' love is wrong and their relationships don't count.

Bad Blogger, no donut...

And I was doing so well...

I started this blog more than 3 1/2 years ago as a way to keep my writing chops up while I geared up for a new project. The blog has definitely had its ups and downs. I used to be a lot better at multi-tasking than I am now, and even with the sudden influx of unstructured time in my life ( some would call this "unemployment," but I prefer a more positive frame), I have a hard time splitting my attention (See this post for further insight into the sad state of my once formidable intelligence. Hey, really - I used to be smart!).

Anyway, I'd been getting back into the blogging swing of things, constantly finding articles that intrigued me that I wanted to share, and then I got immersed in rewriting an old screenplay, something I'd always thought had potential but could never quite make work. It was a fun thing to revisit. After all the agonizing over my last novel, the one which is out to publishers, working on something that was just sort of...fun...was, well...fun! Suddenly, I wasn't procrastinating till close to midnight before I'd sit down and make myself work. I was actually writing while the sun was out! I'd forgotten what that felt like.

Even though I've written after work for most of my life, the last few years doing this has felt really really hard. Just exhausting, and soul-killing. I know that sounds incredibly melodramatic. Writing novels isn't like, I dunno, working in a coal mine. But what I used to be able to do when I was younger, and hey, I was not a happy person when I was younger, I was bitter and angry and depressed, but I did my work, dammit...

Now I'm happier but I don't have the energy, I guess. Or I'm not willing to drive myself to the point of misery to manufacture the energy.

So, anyway, here I am. I wake up when I feel like waking up, and the whole day stretches in front of me. Figuring out how to use this time has been a challenge. I've tried to set goals every day: small things, much of the time. Hang up that picture. Arrange new health insurance. Walk to the gym. Walk to Santa Monica and buy a bread knife. Stuff like that.

But telling myself, okay, you're a writer, here's your time - that's been an adjustment.

I'm working on a new novel. I started it a few months ago and am about 4 chapters in. I like the prose a lot. I have the setting and the characters and the basic situation. I don't really have a story, yet. It's the kind of thing that I need to research.

So, today. I got up. Checked my email. Tidied some ends on a free-lance project I've been doing. And got to work on my novel. I have three books to read for it. Read about 100 pages of one. Did a bunch of internet research, really valuable stuff. Started getting a better sense of how I could shape this story.

Thought to myself, this is a life I could have. This is a life that works for me.

Now if only someone would pay me for it...

All of which is a long, roundabout way of saying that I've been focused on other stuff, and the blogging kind of falls apart.

I'll try to do better.

Whither the People's Premier?

Go read this if you have any interest in rumors of power struggles within China's top leadership. The Australian cites a Hong Kong magazine's report that hard-liners within the CCP seek to oust popular Premier Wen Jiabao from his position:

Rivalries inside the party have broken out behind the facade of unity erected for the Olympic Games, said Kaifang (Open), the monthly magazine known for its political sources inside China and its publication of information banned in the media.

It said hardliners in the party's propaganda department and at the People's Daily newspaper had orchestrated a campaign of abuse directed at Mr Wen's supposed support for universal values such as democracy and human rights.

"China's ship of reform is on the rocks and risks sinking," Kaifang said in its analysis. "The party needs to find a scapegoat."

Last week, important land reforms were put on hold.

Mr Wen had also been passed over for the job of heading a prestigious committee, the magazine said. It listed several press attacks, which, as is often the case in Chinese politics, did not identify their victim but left no doubt among those in the know as to who it was.

The most prominent critic was Chen Kuiyuan, vice-chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a rubber-stamp body whose title sums up everything it is not.

"Some in China want to dance to the West's tune," Mr Chen wrote.

The People's Daily of September 10 printed a column headlined "How to see through the theory of so-called universal values".

Today, the Prime Minister is seen by many ordinary Chinese as a friendly face at the apex of power. He has been compared to the veteran revolutionary Zhou Enlai, who is claimed to have moderated the worst crimes of Maoism.

Suspicions about Mr Wen's authoritarian credentials date back to 1989 when he went into Tiananmen Square to meet demonstrators at the side of his boss Zhao Ziyang, the reformist general secretary of the Communist Party.

(you can view the famous photo of that incident here)

Wen cemented his popularity among "ordinary" Chinese by his prompt response to the disastrous Sichuan earthquake earlier this year, flying immediately to the scene, promising aid and offering comfort. Symbolic gestures, perhaps, but potent ones coming from a leadership that is not known for its accessibility to the public. If "social harmony" is the goal of Hu Jintao's administration, he might want to think about the impact of ousting Wen, one of the few political figures among the top leadership whom the laobaixing consider responsive to their needs.

It's just the way it is

With all the talk about racism and finally (though not nearly soon enough) misogyny prompted by this year's US Presidential campaign, a particular frustration for me has been the lack of recognition of sexist attitudes and behavior.

I think this is because racist discourse is generally (not always) pretty easy to spot. Richard at TPD provides this sterling example.

Sexism, on the other hand, often goes unacknowledged because we can't always agree on exactly what it is. Because, you know, men and women are just different.

Echidne of the Snakes has written a post that looks at some very basic realities for women and frames these as human rights issues in a way that really resonated for me. It's stuff I've tried to say but never managed to articulate so clearly. Go have a look.

(H/T to Lambert at Corrente)

UPDATE: do check out the discussion at Shakesville and Anglachel's post reacting to Echidne's piece. Obviously I'm not the only person for whom this resonated.

Paul Krugman Wins Economics Nobel Prize!

Okay, he actually won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Whatever. I can't think of a public figure in recent years more deserving of the honor, not just for his economics commentary, which has been right on target far more often than not, but for his political bravery at a time when expressing dissent against the White House was met with ridicule, scorn and even accusations of treason.

A virtual champagne toast to you, Mr. Krugman!

(h/t to JB)