Tod Goldberg

Good Things, Good People Part 365: Saving The World Edition

For those of you concerned about the end of days from a more, you know, scientific perspective, I urge you to head over to Shifting Baselines to read the work of my friend Josh Donlan (or, more accurately, because if I was a bad ass scientist, I'd want people to recognize, yo: Dr. Josh Donlan), who is dropping science like Galileo dropped the orange, as the Beastie Boys once said, and making it readable for the masses. So readable, in fact, that it was selected for inclusion in the Best American Science Writing 2008, which is a fantastic honor.

Here's a bit from his first post:

Over the past six years or so, I've spent a decent part of my energy thinking and writing about ecological history and its role in biodiversity conservation and society. That thinking and writing has included proposals that toy with the idea of bringing lions and elephants back to North America. Bring Back the Megafauna! a group of us proclaimed. To no surprise, our proclamation was met with gasps and groans (more about that later). When not pondering bringing the big stuff back, I spend much of my time restoring islands around the world by eradicating invasive species. How do I reconcile shooting 160,000 goats from a helicopter in the Galapagos Islands and treating horses in North America as a native species - as North America's prodigal son? History.

Reintroducing megafauna and killing things from helicopters tend to raise eyebrows (and occasionally piss people off). They also tend to be great topics to kick off discussions on stuff we often ignore, spiraling into wonderfully heated discussions with beers flying across the room.

Josh is an interesting and influential voice in the environmental field, one I first came in contact with when I was consulting for the Environmental Leadership Program, and what I can tell you is that if you're going to sit down and have a beer with a scientist, this is the guy you want to be drinking with. I suspect his blog will be the cyber equivalent of getting drunk at the Arbor Day farm in Nebraska and having him explain to you (or me, as the case might be) how bringing big game into the midwest would save the world...and have it actually make a lot of sense.

The Iron First Of Self Published Fucktards

It's always fun when Lee engages the fucktards (especially when I don't have the proper time or available words to do so myself this week), particularly the ones who trumpet self-publishing as the wave of the future. They are an indignant bunch without much humor, unlike the fan fiction people who are indignant but funny and know they are indignant, which I always appreciate.

The thing I always find most interesting about people who trumpet self-publishing as the wave of the future, the essence and truth, the way of the Lord (and by Lord, I mean that it's always just a matter of time before someone brings up John Grisham or Tolstoy or the Bible, the first self-published book and still the most successful), is that you never hear an author who isn't self-published agreeing with them. Me? I'm all about being pre-published...   

Update: Oh, oh, someone is throwing around libel now. I love it when people get indignant and start throwing out libel charges and such because they don't like someone's opinion about their business practice, like self-publishing really ugly books. SLAPP laws, people, SLAPP laws.  [People threaten to sue me a lot, that's all I'm saying...]

Judging A Book By Its Blog

If you've ever wondered if your blog could become a fantastically successful book, or if you've simply wondered which books that originated as blogs should be embraced and which should be avoided, I've done the proper research and have made a scholarly report on E!'s website. Here's a brief taste:

Avoid Books Based on Blogs by Formerly Cutting-Edge Filmmakers:  There was a time—we’ll call it the 1990s—when Kevin Smith was everyone’s favorite filmmaker. (By everyone, we mean the demographic that once went by Gen-X but now is referred to more commonly as the people over there in the Volvo.) Clerks was a slice of indie brilliance. Chasing Amy presaged our fascination with lesbians. Dogma made us question the very institution of religion. Then a funny thing happened. Kevin Smith’s films stopped being funny. And then, upon purchasing all of his DVDs, we found that, save for Chasing Amy, he never was funny and that we’d spent the whole of the 1990s really, really high.

Alas, Kevin Smith has continued to make movies, and they’ve continued to be an ill-favored thing, but his own. Now, based on his blog comes My Boring Ass Life: The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith. To be fair, Smith’s rants and raves are occasionally interesting and often scatologically funny, and his inside baseball on Hollywood is fun to read...but then there’s the other 400 pages.

Rule #11: Don't Piss Me Off

I believe it was in January that Brad Listi asked me to occasionally post on The Nervous Breakdown. I said yes. I don't know why I said yes because I'm so lazy, I can't even be bothered to post the stuff I post here on my MySpace blog, opting instead to have a little thing there that says, basically, I'm just too fucking lazy, go read my real blog. But anyway, I said yes. Eight months and 57 emailed promises later, I finally did. Here's some of the goodness, ready for the kids coming to school in the fall:

7. Here's a conversation I recently had with a student. I'd like to not have it ever again:

Student: I just wanted to let you know that I won't be turning in any pages of my novel to the class.

Me: Why?

Student: Because I know I'm going to sell it and I don't want them to tear it apart.

Me: If you know you're going to sell your novel, why would you think people would tear it apart?

Student: Jealousy, probably. They'll see that I'm going to make a lot of money from it and will then want to tear it apart.

Me: So, are you only going to turn in work that sucks?

Student:  I don't know. But I just want you to read my novel.

Me: What if I say things that tear it apart, what then?

Student: Well, I just have so much confidence in it. I know it will sell. So that probably wouldn't matter, either.

Me: So let me ask you this. If everyone did what you did and only turned in work that they didn't think the could sell, what would happen? We'd just read shit all quarter long? All of literature would become James Patterson novels?

Student: I guess I see your point.

Me: What's your novel about, exactly?

Student: There's an alien race that lives on the bottom of the ocean and the only person that can sense them is 10 year old girl.

Me: How does she sense them?

Student: I don't know yet. I haven't written that part.

8. No acting surprised when I Google you, read your blog and grade you accordingly.

You can read the rest here. And check back in, oh, another nine months or so. I'm sure my fat Jew ass will have been moved again by then.

Fake Liar Cheat

Sometimes I wonder how people end up deciding I might be an appropriate person to write about a subject. For instance, when John McNally approached me about being in When I Was A Loser, I had a moment of thought that went like this: Why would he think I was a loser? Fuck that guy. How dare he. My shit was tight. My next thoughts went like this: Well, wait. Maybe John recognizes in me a certain frailty. A sadness. A depth and nuance that can only come from being ridiculed at some point. Maybe John is just trying to help me.

So, today, when one of the editors at Jewcy asked me to write something regarding this article in the Chronicle Of Higher Education (which I usually read anyway...it's an afternoon ritual for me: The Chron, a cup of tea, a quick look at the waiver wire in my fantasy league, a dash of MILF porn) on being well-read and/or lying about your erudition, I couldn't help but wonder, Why me?

And then I remembered, oh yeah, I often lie about books I've read (or, I guess, haven't read). Here's just a snippet, you can read the rest over at the Daily Shvitz.

When you write books for a living (and teach others how to write books for the health benefits, discount tickets to college football games and the built-in opportunity to hand sell dozens of copies of your back list each quarter), there is often a presumption that you are also wildly well read, as if each new novel that arrives at the front table of Borders is first vetted by you for possible use in interesting dinner conversation, extemporaneous workshop quoting and damning insults hurled at other literate folks. The problem here is two-fold, at least as it relates to me:

1. It is often difficult to actually read all of the “important” books, both new and old, because it turns out that “important” also can mean “so boring you find yourself with an anti-diuretic erection from fooling your body into thinking you’re actually in a deep, deep sleep.”

2. Time, as in: There’s just not enough time on Earth for me to read the new Salman Rushdie book, whenever it’s released, and, really, anything by Jay McInerney, either.

Lennard J. Davis, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education (and with a general disdain for the French, which is something I think we should see more of in all discourse in academic journals), is by varying degrees apoplectic over people like me and, it seems, sort of envious of the ability to simply not read books you don’t want to read.

The University of Paris literature professor Pierre Bayard's best seller How to Talk About Books That You Haven't Read is flying off the shelves in France. Not only does Bayard tell readers how to fake literary orgasm, but he admits to giving lectures on books he hasn't bothered to read. I'm sure Bayard's book will be met with outrage from many academics on this side of the Atlantic who lack the French national penchant for public display and intellectual pretension. Obviously, there is something seriously reprehensible about Bayard's know-nothing chutzpah (or whatever the French word for that is). Our goal as teachers is to teach what we know, not what we don't. But, outrage aside, perhaps it's time to admit that not reading has its virtues as well as its vices.”

My solution to this creeping problem has always been to simply lie and say I’ve read everything.

Which One Creates The Scene Where The 5 People You Meet In Heaven Got Something For That Ass, Yo

My friend Andrew Kiraly, who not so long ago released the design notes for the Richard Ford Existence Period Rollercoaster, reveals Mitch Albom's writing process today over at Yankee Pot Roast:

Ctrl-A: Generates random touching anecdote told by lovable old mensch in the cluttered storeroom of his candy shop on 34th and Kasser that illustrates the importance of living in the moment

Ctrl-E: Generates random heartwarming anecdote told by eccentric, terminally ill aunt at family reunion in Flint, Michigan, that narrator was originally reluctant to attend, but is now glad he did, because he’s been reminded of the simple power of human love

Ctrl-F: Generates death of random relative, an event by which narrator is forced to reassess his superficial values

Ctrl-V: Pastes sentence: “And that’s when everything changed forever.”

Alt-V: Pastes sentence: “He would never be the same again.”

Ctrl-Alt-V: Pastes sentence: “But all endings are really beginnings.”

Pictures. 1000 Words. Etc.

Maud Newton has a fantastic little game going on her blog whereby the person who can correctly place the high school picture of a contributer to When I Was A Loser with a quote from their piece wins $10,000 and first class air travel to the Cayman Islands. Or, you know, a signed book. There's a photo of me up there and I'd like nothing more than one of my valued readers to win this exciting prize, so, for your enjoyment and help, are a few other pictures of my high school self that might help you correctly identify me in Maud's line-up:

I think of these pictures as representative of a period of my life called "being 15 & 16." In the first photo, I'm pictured with my oldest & dearest friend Todd Harris -- he's the one with the absurd blond wave over his eye, which, as I recall, caused him terrible headaches -- and three of our friends who, I think, were all related. The blond girl was Jenn. I had a terrible crush on her, but she ended up dating a guy who drove a Camaro and went by the name Satan. No joke. My doppelganger in the back is Donnie. I think Donnie might have been Jenn's cousin, but I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he grew up to be a hairdresser. He was very good with applying gel. The final girl is Regina. As I recall, both Todd and I "got on" Regina, the extent of which proved to be either holding hands or tongue kissing, but not much else. I'm not sure how she was related to these people, though I remember some relative of all of their's embezzled money from a Wells Fargo. Moving forward, the middle photo is of me in my prized Jag jacket. I don't know what I was so sad about, other than I looked like a character from Dark Crystal, or who took this photo, or what they were doing in my bedroom, but I do recall being quite somber, in general, in all photos taken that year. It was all part of my plan to be mistaken for a Pet Shop Boy. The final photo is of me, wearing a Bauhaus t-shirt, at Loon Lake, Washington (for the people here who actually read my books, that's the setting I fictionalized for Living Dead Girl), along with a snazzy pair of white Capezios and a fully done up Robert Smith hair-do. I recall the locals being rather mortified by me when we visited the local Dairy King (in Deer Park, WA they're so cool they have a Dairy King).

Christ. This is why I don't have kids. 

My Poppa Dave Would Have Done The Same Thing

Josh points out this fascinating story of armed robbers, tourists, and the strength of the American military...as in, don't underestimate that the old motherfucker you're attempting to gaffle might be, you know, a retired Navy SEAL or some shit.

An American tourist who watched as a U.S. military veteran in his 70s used his bare hands to kill an armed assailant in Costa Rica said she thought the attempted robbery was a joke — until the masked attacker held a gun to her head.

"I thought it was a skit. But then he pointed the gun at my head and grabbed me by the throat and I thought I was going to die," Clova Adams, 54, told The Associated Press by telephone Friday from the Carnival Liberty cruise ship.

The assault occurred during a ship stopover Wednesday in Limon, 80 miles east of San Jose, Costa Rica's capital.

Adams was with 12 American tourists who hired a driver to explore Costa Rica for a few hours. They were climbing out of the van to visit a Caribbean beach when three masked men ran toward them, she said. One held a gun to her head, while the other two pulled out knives.

Suddenly, one of the tourists, a U.S. military veteran trained in self defense, jumped out of the van and put the gunman in a headlock, according to Limon police chief Luis Hernandez.

Hernandez said the American, whom he refused to identify, struggled with the robber, breaking his collarbone and eventually killing him. Police identified the dead man as Warner Segura, 20. The other two assailants fled.

Afterward, the tourists drove Segura to a hospital, where he was declared dead. Sergio Lopez, a Red Cross auxiliary, examined Segura's body and said he died from asphyxiation.

Lopez also treated Adams for a panic attack.

"She was very nervous after the assault, but she had not been physically hurt," Lopez said.

The U.S. Embassy confirmed the account, but refused to release the name of the American who defended the group, citing his right to privacy.

Costa Rican officials interviewed the Americans, and said they wouldn't charge the U.S. tourist with any crime because he acted in self defense.

Wow, Lee Really IS Hated. Cool.

I noticed a bunch of hits here from a site I wasn't familiar with called Fandom Wank and discovered, much to my absolute glee, that my assumption that people actively hate Lee is an etched-in-granite truth. I spent a few minutes reading through their posts (having to do with the Lee vs. Cathy Young sword fight last week...and when I speak of sword fight, I mean it in the porn terminology) and have to admit three things:

1. Their hatred of Lee is pure. There's not much wavering here. There's very little "Yeah, but I did enjoy that episode of Seaquest he wrote where the dolphin provided a ton of sentient advice on world issues and the tuna industry." They basically want him to die.

2. They think I'm somewhat cooler, which is what people have been saying since January 10, 1971, when I popped out of my mother wearing a velour pantsuit (which, in 1971, was very cool) and smoking cloves (I've always assumed smoking cloves was cool, if only because the Goth kids I thought were cool after I'd stopped being Goth due to the heat of the desert and my desire to have sex with women who didn't look like the keyboard player from The Cure [who was a man], always smoked cloves).

3. They are fucking hysterical. I mean this. I laughed my ass off reading about their hatred of Lee, their dubious thoughts on me (they are particularly upset with my poor grammar and word choice and misogyny, which is basically what Wendy is upset with me about on a fairly regular basis, but someone liked "Simplify" which thrilled me, as that is, and always has been, my favorite story)  and then their rants on other topics happening in and around fandom. I spent about thirty minutes reading this website and I about pissed myself. I've actually bookmarked it.

So, having read this, I thought it might be helpful if I made it easier for these folks to delineate their hate of Lee from their possible like of me. With that in mind, here are ten awful things about Lee that should help swing all the "we think Tod is decent" posters into the "we think Tod is the king of rock, there is none higher" camp.

1. Lee was paid to write dialog for Arsenio Hall.

2. When I was a child, Lee routinely made me smell his armpits, which, let me tell you, had the power of Nagasaki and the matted hair of Bob Marley's slowly rotting corpse.

3. In a decidedly fanish turn, Lee's 18th birthday was M*A*S*H themed. I was forced to stay in my bedroom the entire time listening to the Grease soundtrack and slowly masturbating to that line in Greased Lightening about "getting tit" and photos of Stockard Channing.  As I was 9, this was a real slow process.

4. Once, Lee drove off from a rest stop outside of Harris Ranch on the 5 without waiting for me to get out of the bathroom. He did come back, eventually, but not until I'd hitchhiked hundreds of miles, was turned into a lot lizard by my drug addict mother and, eventually, wrote it all out in my novel Sarah.

5. He made my sister Linda and I sell his book at a Starlog convention while he went and schmoozed with the cast of V.

6. He once beat me with a chair and told me to behave like the good little bitch I am. Okay, that's not true. But he did once tickle me until I peed.

7. Once, when I was a frat boy, my frat brothers mistook him for my father, which was only possible because of his propensity to wear v-neck sweaters and chinos.

8. When Dave Navarro guest starred on Martial Law, he didn't fucking call me ahead of time.

9. Same episode. Rick Springfield. RICK SPRINGFIELD! No call.

10. His battles with fan fiction writers are so absolutely absurd that I get sucked in just to say funny and mildly offensive things to cover for my own deep psychological need to be loved and admired and valued for my ability to say things that end with comments about 16-sided dice, capes and "I have a genetic responsibility to do this, so..."

Update: I asked the folks at Fandom Wank to write a little something involving me, Carmen Elektra, Dave Navarro and a Dagget from the original BSG...and the people, they have responded. The first slice of me with the aforementioned appears courtesy of one Cleolinda. The second from Ebbrowning. Both are after the jump and both are as hot as sex with a divorced couple and a midget in a crusty old Dagget suit always can be.

Update to the update: Another exceptionally hot -- possibly criminal-in-developing-third-world-nations and countries where Pandas are protected -- story involving all of the above noted people/animatronic characters has been posted by puipui and is below, too. Maybe grab some lotion and an oven mitt, people.

A Preview Of Michael Silverblatt In Conversation With Steve Erickson

Mark notes today that Black Clock will be holding an event at Redcat this Thursday night, with appearances by all sorts of interesting people, including Susan Straight & Aimee Bender, and featuring Black Clock editor Steve Erickson in conversation with Michael Silverblatt. I've been fortunate enough to receive an advance transcript of this conversation. Here's just a taste:

Silverblatt: Steven, in your transcendent and imaginative and dystopian and virile and languorous novel Our Ecstatic Days you touch on a Los Angeles that is not so much disintegrating as it is changing, morphing, turning, spinning right round, baby, right round, like a record baby, right round round round, and I found myself both sickened and aroused, as if your words had become like the 405, a freeway of thought and image and congestion, to the point that while reading your novel, Our Ecstatic Days, I found myself craving the low hum of my childhood vaporizer, the way it would ease my congestion, would relieve the pressure, would fill the air with a kind of moisture, not unlike the growing lake at the center of your novel, Our Ecstatic Days, but also not unlike what Rilke said when he noted that perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave, and yet the same as what Tina Turner once noted regarding the deepness of the river and the highness of the mountain, though, candidly, I prefer the version by Dolly Parton, whose breasts remind me of the curling narrative of your novel, Our Ecstatic Days, in that they both begin and end in shocking tumult. Yes?

Erickson: This is actually a private party, Michael.