We are people. People eat. And even though we go to the grocery store all the time, I never really stop to look at how many different foods exist (acknowledging, of course, that so much of it is the same: modified corn). That is, until my aunt and I took a pit stop at Safeway last night. While browsing through gefilte fish, she inspired me to start What does it taste like Wednesday. No, it isn’t about the flavor of the actual week day, but instead the opportunity to embrace delicious, odd, never- before-tasted-in-my-life “cuisine.” Two rules: 1) I can’t have eaten or remember ever eating the item. 2) No purchases over $5.

Her first foray was into something called “DONA MARIA, NOPALITOS TENDER CACTUS”:

After duking it out with can openers, oven mitts and finally a corkscrew, I popped open the yellow lid to smell vinegar and what I think would be okay to describe here as tangy. What does it taste like? Like a light kick to the back of my throat leaving a lingering spice–like the tequila of edible plants. A crossbreed between a pickle and a hot pepper in the texture and shape of the green bean and length of a worm… And like many things in life, once you get through the spikes, it isn’t so bad.

Great pics, too!

Q. My library shelves are full. I need to make some difficult decisions to make space for new arrivals. Is there any reason to keep my CMOS 14th and 15th editions?

A. What a question. If you had more children, would you give away your firstborn? Find a board and build another shelf.

via Chicago Style Q&A: New Questions and Answers.

The Elements of Style by Sarah Hafner

I just heard that the intensely talented writer Sarah Hafner died last weekend. Some readers may know her through the chapbook of her stories that I published back in the 1990s, Some Girls. Others may know her work from her fabulous novel, the hilarious The Elements of Style.

Space Alien quilt by Sarah Hafner

Still others may have known Sarah in a completely different, but still amazingly creative, capacity. Sarah was a fine designer, and developed a number of quilt designs over the years. I’m lucky enough to own one of her space alien quilts.

Sarah is survived by her husband John, who sent this email to Sarah’s friends:

It is with the greatest sadness that I must tell you my beloved wife, Sarah Hafner, passed away unexpectedly on Saturday, December 4, 2010. She died at Franklin Baystate Medical Center, where she was treated for a rare and sudden intestinal illness. Sarah and I spent more than 14 years of a vibrant life together and had a love filled marriage.

Sarah was a much more interesting person than I could ever be. I simply held up high the pedestal where she could shine.

I hope that you will stop by or call me, from time to time, in this now duller place, and raise a memory high to this star. To remember this bright, artistic, talented, passionately honest, and loving wife of mine, to enjoy her works of creativity and wide range of interests.

Sarah’s body will be cremated this week. We will be sitting shiva–the traditional Jewish week of mourning–each day between the hours of 5 and 7pm, starting this Friday, December 10th and continuing through December 16th.

I only met Sarah once, at a trade show in San Francisco where she was hawking her quilts. Still, we worked together for several years, first on her stories, then again trying to find a publisher for Elements of Style.

I miss her very much.

An Arts and Crafts wallpaper image by way of illustration of the blooming of the green building industry.

As we’ve reported in the past, the “green” building industry (new, retrofit, and prefab) is booming. Here’s a round up of reports about the ongoingess of it all, news-hooked on a report from McGraw-Hill Construction.

Despite a deep economic recession, the U.S. green building market has expanded dramatically since 2008 and is projected to double its size by 2015, says a new report by McGraw-Hill Construction.

The report comes as the private U.S. Green Building Council holds its annual Greenbuild conference this week in Chicago, which has attracted tens of thousands of attendees from more than 100 countries and more than 900 companies exhibiting their green products.

via Report: Green building market booms in weak economy – Green House – USATODAY.com.

The report, “Green Outlook 2011: Green Trends Driving Growth,” found that green building represented 25 percent of all new construction activity in 2010 and that the value of green building construction starts was up 50 percent from 2008 to 2010 — from $42 billion to $55 billion-$71 billion.

The report, according to Earth and Industry, says that

Not only are new homes in the U.S. getting smaller, they are getting greener….

green building represented 25 percent of all new construction activity in 2010 and that the value of green building construction starts was up 50 percent from 2008 to 2010 — from $42 billion to $55 billion-$71 billion.

And the growth spurt isn’t over. According to projections, by 2015, the size of the green building market is expected to grow to $135 billion.

In the press release obviously lurking behind both these reports is this widely reproduced quote:

“It’s an amazing area of opportunity at time when the construction market is extremely challenged,” said Harvey M. Bernstein, vice president, Global Thought Leadership and Business Development, McGraw-Hill Construction. “In today’s economy, firms that specialize in green or serve this market are seeing a tremendous advantage–and they’re doing good at the same time. Green building leads to healthier places for us to live and work in, lower energy and water use, and better profitability.”

This is great news, but green-washing and bubble-thinking also become more of a danger in the wake of reports like this that are produced by members of the industry. We can argue the epistemological validity of “objectivity” until we’re blue in the face but this is a simple case of journalistic common sense: follow the money that hired the researchers and writers of the report.

Philip Leigh has a really interesting piece about the future of publishing on MediaPost.

He writes that just as “the printing press transformed publishing, the true cultural significance of blogging — which is only incipient at present — will be a consequence of its production process. ”

When I was in comm school, we called that technological determinism and, after much debate, arrived at the conclusion that in fact cultural change is so complex than attributing change to any one cause is always going to result in fallacy and misdirection.

That said, there is certainly some great insight into Leigh’s analysis. The invention of the rotary press circa 1830 resulted in an explosion called the newspaper industry. (Which had previously been low-budget, low-circulation affairs that mainly announced ship movements.)

But we have to ask a question here: was the rotary press invented out of whole cloth or was it invented because there was a need for high-speed print-production capability?

via A Little History, and the Future of Publishing – Marketing, News, and Educational Communications.

Of course, you probably aren’t going to produce great literature in just a month. Infinite Jest and its ilk require more than just a month of writing. But the goal isn’t to produce a best-seller — it’s to jump-start your novel and get you past the fear of the time and effort involved. As the website says, “The only thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output … the kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks and write on the fly.”

To write a 50,000-word novel in a month — even a bad novel — takes a certain perseverance and dedication, as well as some careful planning. Here’s our guide to ensuring you fall into the group that actually finishes the project.

via Write a Novel in a Month – Wired How-To Wiki.

The Mysterious Lady + Cute Puppy – Much like some mystical apparition, she glides across the leafy ground and acknowledges you just enough to make you wonder if she actually did. Then a baby dog pokes his head from her carrier, and you wonder if she even knows it’s there. You start to say something, and just like that, she’s gone.

Generosity by Richard Powers

Richard Powers is a master of sleight-of-hand. He writes novels full of science but escapes being called a science fiction writer. In Generosity: An Enhancement, the latest novel by the MacArthur “genius” grant and National Book Award winner (for The Echo Maker), Powers feints and flourishes in order to — presto-magico — pull together two seemingly unrelated themes: genetic engineering and creative nonfiction.

In Powers’ hands, the relation between the two themes is laid bare: they both are concerned with the nature, manipulation, and enhancement of reality. In recent years, we’ve seen the formerly innocuous genre of memoir mutate into the high-stakes blockbuster industry of creative nonfiction. And woe unto he who fudges the truth in his memoir, who tells a lie, however small. What used to be par for the course in memoir is now a cardinal sin: remember James Frey and A Million Little Pieces?

A character in Generosity — the narrator, in fact — says, “Feelings are the new facts. Memoir is the new history. Tell-alls are the new news.” And novels, moreover, are a “kind of Stockholm syndrome – love letters to the urge that has abducted us.” “Creative nonfiction,” meanwhile, “comes down to this: science now holds routine press conferences.” PR hacks spin the message while pundits amplify the noise of their best-paying clients.

So it’s no surprise that the genetic engineering – or genomics, as it’s now called – twine of the novel makes its public debut on a talk show. Or that from time to time the narrator in this (seemingly) third-person omniscient work of fiction obtrusively presents himself in the first person – but therein lies another aspect of Powers’ magical sleight-of-hand that the reader needs to witness for herself.

It’s also no surprise, perhaps, that the novel begins in that location so central to the decadence of the culture we find ourselves rollercoastering in, the creative writing workshop classroom. Russell Stone is a once-rising star of creative nonfiction who, via heartbreak and other disenchantments, has fallen to translating personal testimonies into Standard English for a Web site (everything has become “content” plugging in holes in the messaging machines) and teaching writing night classes at a Chicago art school.

In his workshop is a refugee from the Algerian revolution, that war that was so bitter it tore the country into a million little pieces and left Thassadit Amzwar the sole survivor in her family: “Ten years of organized bloodbath have reduced a country the size of western Europe to a walking corpse.” She should suffer from post-traumatic stress, depression, be suicidal and dark. But she’s happy, strangely upbeat; she’s so delightful that her jaded classmates (who range from a dressed-in-black Goth to a socially inept cyber-nerd) call her Miss Generosity: “Thassa has emerged from that land glowing like a blissed-out mystic.” She has a voice like a “mountain flute,” and her stories, written and otherwise, enchant her classmates and everyone she meets. WTF, Stone wonders, is up with that?

Powers allows — and is up-front with us in this aspect of the novel writer’s craft — one minor and one major coincidence in his story (this is hilarious because it’s a rule of thumb in every creative writing textbook, but saying so in a novel is akin to a magician explaining his sleight-of-hand via a slo-mo demonstration), and thus Miss Generosity is connected to Thomas Kurton, wizard of genomics and CEO of Truecyte. The plot of Generosity forms a double helix.

Kurton is working on programming (and patenting for Truecyte) the human genome. He’s hot on the trail of the happiness gene and, in Thassa Amzwar, he thinks he’s found it. Kurton runs tests on Amzwar, finds his magic bullet of a gene, and finally publishes the paper that tells the world that enhancement of the human personality is a matter of proper engineering:

“The script that has kept us in gloom and dread is about to be rewritten. Labs across the globe are closing in on those ridiculous genetic errors that cause life to suicide.”

The crowd, as they say, goes wild – and the shit hits the fan.

Powers’ magic is that in “enhancing” the truth of a story it becomes truer still, and creative nonfiction is no exception. How decadent, perhaps even pre-apocalyptic, that Oprah should have kicked James Frey’s ass for telling a white lie in his book. Frey’s enhancement did no harm, but he lied to Oprah. Powers has such literalism locked in his sights: the showdown between Thassa and the geneticist takes place on Oona, a dead ringer for the Oprah format, book club and all.

Thassa, it turns out, is really fairly normal. Genomics, and designs derived therefrom, aren’t the answer leading to a Prozac nation full of smiley-faced people-drones; it’s another kind of lying, enhancement, story telling. And fiction, creative non- or otherwise, is nothing without conflict. The cognitive engine of culture and all our creative endeavor is, perhaps sadly, certainly for better and for worse, conflict.

MacArthur grants aside, devoted readers have known since at least The Gold Bug Variations that Powers is, in fact, a genius. He’s one of the few writers working who has such a sure grasp of science, its ethical and political dimensions, and a fully realized literary voice. Generosity brings to the fore all Powers’ talents and passions in a refreshingly succinct and accessible read that is as amusing as it is thought-provoking.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Anyone who came into science fiction during the late 60s and 70s would have been aware of Joanna Russ. Even if you never read any of her relatively few novels or stories, you couldn’t avoid the name. Of the three great women writers who did so much to transform science fiction at this time, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and Russ, Russ was far and away the most controversial. So much so that it was known for her name to be greeted with boos at an sf convention, and believe me even in the conservative world of fandom that was unusual.

Joanna Russ is an incredibly important figure in the history of science fiction and the author of a couple of novels and several short stories that deserve to endure. This beautifully produced collection of essays is a fitting tribute to her, and even those who know Russ’s work well will learn from many of these essays. Even so, this is still only telling part of the story about an elusive and complex writer. We’d be better off if all her work were back in print, but until that happens this is a superb reminder of what a valuable and important writer she is.

The other review is by Cheryl Morgan who makes a point about book reviewing that is near and dear to my heart; snip:

it occurs to me that those people who complain that book reviews should always be neutral and objective, and not bring in the reviewers personal viewpoint in any way, are very like those people who claim that books that have no obvious character ethnicity (and are therefore default white) are good because they are “colorblind”. If you get criticized for standing out from the cultural norm it is probably because you have said something interesting and subversive.

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs 50th Anniversary Edition

You enter the moment of the “naked lunch” when you realize just what that is quivering at the end of your fork. We’ve been staring at that living, gelatinous mass for 50 years now – and we still don’t know what it is.

It’s a novel. It’s a poem. It’s (as one shrill Amazon reviewer has it) the ranting of a LIBERAL ATHEIST JUNKY. It’s (drug-induced or not, take your pick) stream-of-consciousness. It’s the first prose cut-up. It’s pornography. It’s the end (or beginning) of (post-)modernism. It’s The Bomb, it’s a how-to-be-a-writer manual. Here’s the definitive answer to all that: Yes, it is. Naked Lunch is all that and more.

Naked Lunch is one of the most written-about books of the twentieth century. It’s up there with Ulysses and The Wasteland for the title of “book most likely to generate a graduate thesis.” That’s because, like those other two, it’s an open text: you’re quite likely to find there precisely what you go looking for.

Everything, that is (as a different Amazon reviewer complained) except stuff about lunch and nudity: “doesn’t anybody like to eat in the nude?”

So what does this all add up to? It adds up to this: You should read Naked Lunch. It’s an essential part of who we are (as Burroughs wrote somewhere, a paranoid is someone who knows something of what’s going on; if you’re not paranoid, you’re not really alive). It’s part of your education (did you know that language was a virus from outer space? Quick: read this book), it’s part of your sexual being (“If I had my way we’d sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes”), it’s an essential document of the American Century (“In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom”).

And Naked Lunch is a hell of a lot of fun – if your idea of fun is being burned at the stake and reincarnated as a dope fiend on the run from an evil doctor trying to get you to shoot bug powder while simultaneously being gang-buggered by the security forces of Interzone.

Really. It’s that funny, that much fun. Here’s a sample – the Benway mentioned below is the self-same doctor who wants you to shoot bug powder (a note: we don’t do bug powder in this era of high-tech entomological toxins, but think roach poison and you’ve got the idea):

What’s with the serum?”

“I don’t know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man’s not to be trusted. Might do almost anything… Turn a massacre into a sex orgy…”

“Or a joke.”

“Precisely. Arty type… No principles…”

This fiftieth-anniversary edition is a beauty: cloth-bound, slip-cased, all purple and green in the style of the first Olympia edition (Paris, 1959) with a restored text “faithful to Burroughs’ original composition” (whatever that means; Burroughs didn’t “compose” Naked Lunch; Allen Ginsburg assembled the book by collating extracts from letters written to him by Burroughs; with Naked Lunch, there are only ever variorum editions), and an “insightful afterword” by critic David Ulin. Forget the marketing hype and the DVD-like “extras”: at the price, this hardcover book is a great value. If I recall correctly (and I doubt that I do), Burroughs said something along those lines: Cheat your landlord (if you must), but don’t shortchange the Muse.

So don’t shortchange yourself. Read Naked Lunch, learn to write like a maniac, god-eating atheist dope-shooting creative genius, and then start a blog: let us know what you really think.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010