The Pacific Sun just ran my essay on going animal tracking with the Marin County Tracking Club. Excerpt:
You haven’t lived until you see a group of adults eagerly waiting their turn to smell animal poop.
Oh yeah. I went there. Want more? Read it here.
My short story “End of the Line” is in the 2010 issue of So to Speak. Published by George Mason University, So to Speak is a feminist journal of language of art. “End of the Line” is about an old woman, Mrs. Dumas, who accidentally takes the wrong bus and gets lost in the city she has lived in all her life. Here is the beginning of the story:
Mrs. Dumas stood in front of her bedroom mirror admiring her red velour pants and green sweatshirt. Why, she wondered, would anyone want to wear those dreary blacks and grays? She hadn’t worn those colors since Harry Jr. left home, not even at Harry Sr.’s funeral. Bright colors just made everything better.
The cat rubbed against her leg, leaving orange-marbled hairs on the red velour.
“Liebster,” she said, scrubbing the cat with her fingers. Then she looked again. “Oh! You’re not Liebster, are you?” She adjusted her glasses. “Bunchkin?”
“Meow,” said Bunchkin.
If you get a chance, order a copy and take a look!
“Pie Man,” a piece of microfiction that I wrote, is in the current issue of Rumble Magazine. Check it out:
The rest of the Tiger Woods Issue.
ETA: This is not about Kyle and me. This is a fictional piece about fictional people.
Happy Halloween! Take a look at my most recent article for the Pacific Sun about the last public hanging in Marin County. It resulted in a near-riot as a bloodthirsty crowd watched the hanging of a Chinese man. Sample:
On the first day of September, 1893, Lee Doon was condemned to die for killing a white man. Doon, who was Chinese, was the cook for San Rafael resident Tiernan Berry, who also hired an Englishman named William Shenton to paint his house. At the end of the first day of painting, Shenton called Doon out of the kitchen and ordered him to clean up his paint buckets and ladders, apparently believing it was the Chinese servant’s job to pick up after him. Doon refused. The next day, Shenton repeated his order and when Doon again refused, an argument broke out, during which “the painter became verbally abusive to Lee Doon,” according to an article by the Marin County Historical Society.
Doon claimed that Shenton attacked him and began beating and kicking him, according to the Supreme Court decision on the case. Either way, things got so heated that Doon rushed into the house, grabbed a pistol and shot at Shenton four times, hitting him once in the back. He was seriously wounded and died not long afterward. Doon was arrested, underwent a trial and was sentenced to death by hanging at the Marin County Courthouse located at Fourth and A streets in San Rafael.
More here.
I have an article in the Pacific Sun this week. It’s about how the town of Tiburon is looking at putting cameras on the roads going into town to scan the license plates of all its visitors.
The fortress of Tiburon may be putting a new guard at the gate. An electronic one.
The affluent municipality of almost 9,000 people is considering putting cameras on the two roads going into town to scan the license plates of all its visitors. Police think that the cameras will help them track down criminals. Since most crime in Tiburon is committed by people who live outside of town, if something happens, the police could quickly get a record of the cars that have passed through around the time the crime occurred and narrow it down to the likely culprit.
If the town council passes the measure, Tiburon would likely become the first town to record the license plates of every visitor. The measure is stirring up controversy from those who feel the idea of a camera tracking everyone’s movements is too close to Big Brother from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
“It’s totalitarian,” says security expert Bruce Schneier. “It sounds like something the Soviet Union would try to do. It’s the surveillance of everybody. It’s not ‘follow that car,’ it’s follow every car. The East Germans tried to do this same thing, but it eventually failed. Technology makes it easy.”
I have another book review up at Popmatters. This time it is on The Mayor’s Tongue, a first novel by Nathaniel Rich. Excerpt:
This April is the one-year anniversary of debut novel The Mayor’s Tongue, which would make its author, Nathaniel Rich, 28 years old. Rich’s age and his considerable connections—his father is a New York Times columnist, his mother works in publishing, he’s an editor at The Paris Review—tend to come up when people discuss his novel. To some, its publication suggests favoritism or nepotism or ageism or other ugly “isms”.
But none of that really matters if Rich can write—and he can.
I have an article in The Writer about book trailers. Publishers are starting to make advertisements for books very much like movie trailers. I explored this phenomenon in the current issue of the magazine–check it out on newsstands if you want to know more.
My book review on A Reliable Wife, a first novel by Robert Goolrick, is up on PopMatters. A sample:
A Reliable Wife is the first novel by Robert Goolrick, whose previous memoir The End of the World as We Know It dealt with his abusive childhood. Set in 1907, the novel is about Ralph Truitt, a wealthy man in a small Wisconsin town who has put an ad in the newspaper for “a reliable wife.” But Catherine Land, the woman who gets off the train to marry him, is anything but. She carries with her a blue bottle of arsenic that she will use to murder Truitt and take all his money. Catherine wants “love and money” in this life, and while Truitt supplies the money, the love must be with her “useless and beautiful lover,” who she has left behind her in the big city.
The tone Goolrick establishes here is florid and descriptive with moments reminiscent of Jane Eyre, if that book were set in America and if Jane Eyre were an opium-smoking prostitute. Certainly the frozen landscape of rural Wisconsin works as well as the moors of England to portray isolation and severity. But this gothic landscape …
Cliffhanger! Read the rest here.
I have a couple of articles in this issue of the Pacific Sun. One is about Davidson Seamount, a giant underwater volcano that they are just now starting to explore. They have found amazing sea creatures down there. Excerpt:
In the waters off Monterey, 10,000 feet below the ocean surface, is the lost world of Davidson Seamount. Down there in the darkness, pink bubblegum coral stands 8 feet tall. Spiny pink-and-white crabs scuttle across rocks. Sock tunicates bob in the current, tethered to the ground by only a string. It’s a place so pristine and full of potential that it was recently made part of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which spans from Marin County all the way down to Hearst Castle.
I also wrote about the living roof on the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park for the same issue.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Voicetrax, a voice-over training school in Sausalito and wrote about my experience for the Pacific Sun:
As with most people, I don’t like hearing the sound of my voice. Even though I know that my voice sounds different in my head than it does to other people, hearing it played back to me is always a little unsettling. So, standing in a recording booth behind a microphone, about to record a mock voice-over audition at Voicetrax, a voice acting school in Sausalito, is a tad uncomfortable for me. It doesn’t help that outside the booth, a room full of advanced students is listening to my every word.
I’m supposed to read a monologue where tap water tries to convince the listener that it is better, cheaper and fresher than bottled water. Through a window in the booth, I can see Samantha Paris, owner of Voicetrax, sitting behind recording equipment. A successful actress who was the voice of Roxy in the 1980s cartoon show Jem and the Holograms, Paris is a compact and bright-eyed woman in her late 40s.
Through a speaker, she tells me to practice reading the monologue before we record it. The mic goes off and it’s suddenly quiet in the booth. I look down at the script in front of me. “Hi, it’s me, Water,” I mumble, trying to summon high school drama class to my mind.