Oh, I See. “You” Doesn’t Include Women.

Tom Humphrey has talked with Campfield further about his strange beliefs about straight people and HIV. I would just like to point you to this section:

Campfield said Friday that his point in the radio show is valid in that, within the United States, heterosexual encounters almost never result in AIDs “unless you’re having sex with someone from Africa or an IV drug user.”

“The odds of men catching it from women are very, very, very low,” he said.

To quote myself when I was providing a statistic Rachel helped me with this morning, “In the United States, heterosexual transmission accounts for how 65 percent of white women and 74 percent of black women acquired the infection. “

I can’t help but wonder if this is Campfield’s mistake or Humphrey’s. But seriously. The only way heterosexual encounters “almost never result” in HIV/AIDS is if women don’t count.

And, frankly, though Humphrey is not the only one to do this, he’s drawing my ire because I’m linking to him, this is something that can easily be fact-checked. It is a provable matter of fact. Do straight people having sex “almost never” get HIV/AIDS unless they’re fucking Africans or IV drug users? Any reporter can do five seconds of internet research or call the health department. It’s not a matter of “some experts say” and “other experts say.” There isn’t unsettled territory.

So, why can’t reporters report the facts? This is a matter of people’s health. Don’t they have the right to know the truth?

The Great American Novel

People, I honestly don’t know how any writer in the United States who didn’t start writing before reading Life on the Mississippi dares put words to page after reading it. It may not be the “great American novel” but I honestly don’t think there’s a more perfect book about the United States. At least, he’d have to really fuck up the last 150 pages here for me to feel otherwise.

I’m just at the point where he admits to being born in the South (and has been making fun of Southern male authors for being too prone to flowerly language when women are nearby), but I must say that I’ve always thought of Twain as a Midwestern writer. And nothing about the section in which he says he was born in the South makes me feel otherwise, because the national pastime of the Midwest after not telling each other things and then being mad or hurt when we don’t know them and having potlucks in our church basements is indeed wondering what the hell is up with Southerners. If you could combine all those things–a bunch of passive aggressive Midwesterners eating casseroles while talking hilarious smack about their Southern cousins (or the Southern cousins of their friends)–you’d have the quintessential Midwestern experience.

Twain doesn’t mention eating casseroles, but I think we have to assume he was. Ha ha ha.

I’ve been trying to decide what it is about him that makes me lump him more into “Midwestern” than “Southern.” But I don’t know if those are legitimate differences or just based on stereotypes I have. I think Midwestern literature is more prone to a skeptical eye toward organized religion (even as people are predominately religious) because of a mistrust of it being a kind of busybodying, whereas I think Southern literature is soaked in religion and religious belief. I wasn’t surprised when Twain’s brother just showed up out of nowhere to die off. That seems right to me, that a Midwesterner would just assume that we’d all know he had a family and not be alarmed by a brother magically appearing. Whereas, in Southern writing, family relationships are central. Even the way he’s nostalgic strikes me as different from Southern writers, since he’s so keen to be clear that the times and places he misses had their problems back in the past.

But I don’t know. I feel like I have a good idea what constitutes Southern literature, but it’s hard for me to put my finger on what I think Midwestern literature would be.

But, he had a brother named Orion. Granted, I don’t know how it was pronounced. Oh-rye-un, fine. The Clemenses could be Southern. Ore-eee-un and there’s no doubting that they’re Midwestern.

Setting the Record “Straight” on How Heterosexual People Can Prevent HIV/AIDS

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that it’s pretty much the same things gay and bisexual people can do.

I find it a little annoying that the government is all “just don’t have sex with that many people, okay?” since there are enough non-sexual ways to contract HIV and rape is common enough that concern trolling over slutty behavior just doesn’t seem that constructive to me. After all, if you have sex with 50,000 people who don’t have HIV, you’re never going to get it from sexual contact. But if you have sex only once with one person who is also a virgin but got it from being stabbed with an infected needle when he reached into a garbage can to rescue a kitten, you are at great risk. Plus, not everyone can control who fucks them or how, sadly.

Anyway, don’t miss Campfield in the comments of Meador’s post passing off twenty-five year old information as definitive. I don’t know about you, but I use 1988 as my guide for everything. That’s why I’m afraid of the Soviet Union and think the Taliban are our friends.

An Evening with My History Boyfriend, Mark Twain

As I said on Twitter, in black and white, Twain’s hair looks disheveled and old-man-y. In color, it looks like bedhead.

Anyway, the back end of the book is apparently just Twain snarking on everything, including the Atheneaum in Columbia. I love his description of the mule race and wish we could have one here in town. Or, shoot, Columbia, once you forgive him for making mean comments about the Atheneaum, you could have mule races I would attend.

Yes, Those Monkey-Screwing Airline Pilots. I Hate Those Guys.

What we can learn from this Metro Pulse post.

1. Stacey Campfield has some strange ideas about what airline pilots get up to in their free time.

2. While I don’t believe you should fuck Stacey Campfield just out of general principle, you should for sure now not fuck Stacey Campfield, because he doesn’t understand how sexually transmitted diseases are transmitted. And he is a grown up. With internet access. And he doesn’t think straight people can get AIDS. And he’s an elected official. In charge of making the laws that govern us. People, he’s MY AGE!!!!

3. He’s not ashamed to be out in public spouting his monkey-fucking airline pilot giving gay people AIDS which heterosexual people cannot get from heterosexual sex conspiracy theories.

My mind continues to be boggled by this nincompoop.

I Now Kind of Get Why People Live in Giant Houses

I wanted to spend the evening with my new history boyfriend, Mark Twain, but the Butcher wanted to watch TV, so I got sucked into watching TV with the Butcher. Which is a fine way to spend an evening, don’t get me wrong. I love trying to guess in the first five minutes what the plot will be.

But I dreamed about Mark Twain all night. In my sleep. Which I had! Solid and uninterrupted.

I don’t want to get too excited because lord knows I thought this cold was going away last Friday and here it is almost Friday again, but I slept through the night.

It’s the small victories, people.

Anyway, if we lived in a mansion, I’d have just gone into the library and read Mark Twain.

Of course then I’d be complaining that the Butcher and I never spend time together.

So, there you go. Nothing makes me happy, except the possibility of finally not being sick.

Metro Pulse! I Love You!

I have just been enjoying the crap out of Knoxville’s Metro Pulse lately. Check out this story about Karen Dalton, which manages to talk about Dalton in historical context, compare her with other artists, and give you a hint of what makes her special (and limits her legacy) as an artist without the normal “Oh, there’s this girl. She’s wacky/strange/beautiful and her singing is surprising/heartfelt/eccentric. Did I tell you all about her hair/eyes/bedroom yet?” crap.

Well, This Is Sad

Richard Floyd and David Fowler are confused about why their violent, vile bigoted rhetoric is being met with hostility. Fowler actually says, “The unfortunate thing in our culture is that we’re getting to the point where oftentimes we can’t say anything without it becoming uncivil and getting off the merits of the discussion.”

Fowler, everything you say is uncivil and little of it has any merit.

It’s high time everyone just treated you like this was so, rather than playing nice hoping that you’d treat them nicely in return.

Honestly, it’s Floyd and Fowler who make you realize just how revolutionary something like “Treat others as you’d like to be treated” is. These dumb jackasses are literally braying in alarm that they’re actually being treated how they treat everyone else.

Did they think that Jesus just issued that dictate for fun?

Hint: No.

It’s basically a law of human nature that people will treat you how they see you can be treated. And one of the ways they learn how you think you can be treated is to see how you treat others. Run around talking shit about everyone you think you’re better than and eventually the people who think they’re better than you are going to talk some shit about you.

 

Crouching Mama, Hidden Daddy

Those of you who were around yesterday may remember that I linked to the past, which is creepy. Well, our very own Beth found such a creepy picture of her own ancestors. The hidden parent is pretty well hidden at first. But once you spot the fingers, it doesn’t take long to make out the top of a head and a shoe.

What the fuck? Did they just sit around being all “Well, we don’t have tv. What can we do to entertain ourselves? Let’s creep the fuck out of the future!” and, seriously, why are we not sitting around thinking of ways to creep out the future?

One Last Bit about Twain and Napoleon

He’s full of shit, right? He must have known all along that Napoleon was gone–a town that took up that much mental space for him on a river that took up that much mental space for him.

But the thing I find incredible is that, while Life on the Mississippi is supposed to be an autobiography of sorts, he’s doing novel-type shit with the book.

I mean, all along the way he has repeatedly mentioned Napoleon, repeatedly mentioned how people easily reroute the river in ways that dick other people over, and repeatedly developed these themes of loss and change. So, no, he doesn’t have to spell out what happened to Napoleon (though it’s possible his initial readers would have been more familiar with it than I was), but he tells you, over and over, before he tells you that the town is gone.

It’s a remarkable bit of writing, carried out over the course of almost three hundred pages. I’m curious about what’s going to happen in the back half of the book.

I am just enjoying the shit out of it. Possibly more than I’ve enjoyed a book in a long time.

Ill-Fated Napoleon, Arkansas

Holy shit. So here is how Napoleon, Arkansas was lost. Napoleon stood at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Arkansas rivers. Before the Mississippi reached the Arkansas, it took a drunken turn toward Beulah, Mississippi, and spooned the fat curve of its belly along her main street. Where the river’s belly swung back west to meet up with the Arkansas is where Napoleon sat.

There was a war. And the Confederates sat out in the Beulah bend, just east of Napoleon, firing their artillery at the union forces on the north side of the bend, waiting for them to skirt past Beulah, and then firing the same guns at them again on the south side. In March of 1863, Lieutenant Commander Thomas O. Selfridge of the Union Army had his men dig a channel in the soft earth, using the force of the river to aid in its creation. The Mississippi’s beer belly became Lake Beulah and the river, when it was done stretching to its full size in the new channel, ran right up to the front steps of Napoleon and a flood in 1874 wiped Napoleon off the maps.

I’m honestly surprised no mischief makers have tried this just north of Tiptonville, though I suppose these days that would get you sent to prison for a good long time.

But still, the amount of rerouting of the river done by folks who aren’t the Corps is a real eye-opener to me.

More Granju Stuff

I should be shocked to learn this, but honestly, I am not. I mean, I’m surprised to learn she was under indictment, but on the other hand, it explains why she didn’t call the authorities when she should have. She weighed going to prison against a kid’s life and Henry lost.

But I am not shocked that there is even more evidence that this whole “investigation” was hinky. When a kid ends up dead after being at the house of most people, those people get hassled. The fact that there was so little hassle has never sat well with me. This is just more evidence of how strange the absence of hassle is.

And I sincerely hope the TBI is investigating, since the social circles of relatively comfortable white people who all abuse the same kinds of drugs in Knoxville has got to be pretty small. I think one answer the whole state deserves is whether Henry’s death was “investigated” how it was in order to shield the judge or other high-ranking Knoxvillians from discovery.

If it’s just a shitty investigation, fine. That sucks for Henry’s family, but fine.

But folks, I just don’t feel like this is incompetence, you know?

Oh! Harcourt Makes a Move

Amazon has a publishing arm, a legitimate publishing arm, which has been in the news for handing out wonderfully high royalties and for the animosity traditional bookstores have expressed toward Amazon’s publishing venture.

You could publish with Amazon, but you weren’t going to find your book in Barnes & Noble.

Except that now Amazon has signed a deal with Harcourt for distribution. Amazon’s books will appear to be Harcourt books. Now, bookstores could just refuse to carry Harcourt books, but that’s a little harder to accomplish than just cutting off Amazon. So, it appears for now that a work-around had been found.

I’m curious to see how the industry responds to this.

The Past Was so Creepy

But well-upholstered.

My Second Attempt this Winter at Rejoining the Land of the Living

I really need it to either be cold or not cold. I think this cycling from one to the other is part of what accounts for me getting two Christmas colds in the same damn season. But I’m going to shower and go into work today and try to make a go of it. I am feeling much better. I’m not quite to the point of sitting around fretting about what’s going on at work (a sure sign I’m well enough to be there), but I’m not looking forward to spending another day trapped in the house with these animals.

I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle yesterday which I expected to like more than I did. I just had a hard time getting into the rhythm of the language of the book. I do think Mary Catherine is an incredible character, though.  And I think some of the subtler touches are incredibly done. I mean, they say almost nothing about the brother, but the threat the cousin plays to the sisters’ relationship and the fantasy Merricat has about her whole family doting on her, it’s just not hard to guess why he had to be dispatched.

I also am about halfway through Life on the Mississipppi, which I wish I were reading in a reading group with barge captains now. Hell, I might even be civil to an Army Corps of Engineer person, if he or she were in my Life on the Mississippi reading group. One factual thing that interested me was that Twain says it regularly happened where there’d be a curve in the river and jackass land owners would go out and cut a ditch from where the curve started to where it ended, thus changing the river in order to give their property riverfront and strand some previous river-front property owner in the middle of Missouri. This sounds similar to how W. told us they ended up with those problems down at the big dam in Louisiana.

Also, he keeps mentioning Napoleon, Arkansas, which I cannot find on any map. It supposedly used to be right across the way from Wellington, Mississippi, but I didn’t find any evidence for a Wellington, Mississippi in Bolivar County. I did find a Lake Whittington which is an old bend in the river now cut off from the river. But whereabouts along the river there opposite Bolivar county Napoleon might have been, I can’t say.

Twain did tell a cool little ghost story about a boat that didn’t realize that the bend in the river wasn’t the main river any more, but being in the middle of forming one of these horseshoe lakes, and so the boat went down the bend, got stuck there with no way out, and even still may be seen out in the middle of some dude’s field, trying to take a way the river doesn’t go any more.

Obviously, I’m enjoying the shit out of Twain.

Edited to add: It should go without saying that I laughed when I realized Rosedale was in Bolivar County, thus adding to the legend that everything in this blog can be brought back around to Robert Plant. Well, and thus probably Robert Johnson. But still.

The New Thing

I used to laugh at my parents and their friends when they would get together and compare weird things their bodies were doing. And then I realized that there’s a long time where you don’t really feel mentally any older than you did at, say, 28, but your body sure has carried on aging in the ensuing decade.

So, the new trick my body has learned as of yesterday is this. When I am struck with coughing fits, there is a 50/50 chance that I won’t just cough like a normal person, but instead, I will have a feeling like a thousand tiny claws running up my back and shoulders. It is painful.

I’ve been trying to think of how to explain it, in case I have to describe it to the doctor and what I think is going on is this. Imagine your hand is a muscle–your fingers the muscle fibers. Normally, when you flex your muscle, all those fibers contract at once, and you can successfully lift something or cough or sneeze or whatever. Now imagine that each of those fibers instead contracts at a slightly different moment than all the others around it, so that when one contracts, you can feel it pulling on its non-contracting neighbor until the neighbor is forced to contract and so on down the line, in a weird cascade of discomfort.

Even weirder is that yesterday I stubbed my toe on the dog’s bone and my whole shoulder just erupted into one of the aforementioned spasms.

So, that’s been weird, to say the least.

You Should Absolutely Not Have John Ragan over to Dinner

I read this post today and by the end of it, my all-consuming thought was that no, Johnson should NOT be inviting Representative Ragan over to dinner because, clearly, there is not much keeping Ragan from being a danger to himself or others. Holy shit. Look at this part of the letter he wrote her:

Given that you identified yourself as a college student in political science preparing for law school, I am sure your instructors have emphasized that logic, as a decision methodology, is a far superior all others. Therefore, let’s examine some issues you raised with logic. Additionally, please attempt not to “read anything into my remarks or questions” as being my positions or thoughts beyond that which I explicitly identify as such.

Logically, homosexuality is defined by behavior, i.e., unless one engages in sexual activity with a member of the same sex, he, or she, is not a homosexual. (The term sexual orientation is a description of feelings.) Feelings do not control the behavior of a mentally healthy adult human being.

By way of emphasis, let’s examine a few questions: If a person “feels” so angry with another that he or she “feels” like killing the object of their anger, is that person “controlled” by that “feeling?” Alternatively, can the possessor of that “feeling” choose not to act on it? If that person fails to act on that “feeling,” is he or she still referred to as a “murder?”

Can a person feel so much lust toward another that he “feels” like committing rape? If such is a possibility, is that person “controlled” by that “feeling” or can he choose not to engage in that action? If that person fails to act on that “feeling,” is he still referred to as a “rapist?”

Can a slender person “feel” like overeating, but choose not to do so? Is that person still called “fatty?” Can someone “feel” like not going to work, but get up and go anyway? Is that person still called “lazy?” Can a nun “feel” like engaging in sexual relations, but choose to remain celibate? Is she called a “whore?” Can someone “feel” like committing adultery, but choose not to do so? Is that person still called an “adulterer?”

Can a parent feel so upset with the misbehavior of a child, that he or she “feels” like “beating” that child? Alternately, can a distraught parent choose to merely “discipline” a child with a lecture, a “time-out” or a “grounding” (dependent upon age) to reinforce a prohibition against poor, or dangerous, behavior.

The list of questions about “feelings” that do not control people could go on and on. However, the point is sufficiently made. Mentally healthy adult human beings are not “controlled” by their “feelings.”

Let me just say that I can see why he’d add the “Additionally, please attempt not to ‘read anything into my remarks or questions’ as being my positions or thoughts beyond that which I explicitly identify as such,” because dude has issues.

And let me also just say that this is one way in which I feel really bad for men. Most men don’t rape women or children. They don’t beat their loved ones or seriously entertain the idea of killing people. But the men who do seriously entertain these ideas–who sit around asking things like “but what if she was really drunk, then would it be okay?” or “but what if he said something that made me really mad, then could I hit him?”–as if identifying some circumstances in which any man might be backed into doing what the serious entertainers want too do all the time reaffirms for the serious entertainer of these vile ideas that they have wide-reaching community support, even when they don’t.

You see what I’m saying? With rape, this is really obvious how this dynamic works. A guy whose m.o. is to get women too drunk to fight him off and isolated so that he can do what he wants to those women without being stopped hears discussions about guys who are concerned about times when both people are really drunk and maybe the guy didn’t get an explicit yes, but she seemed into it, as being not about miscommunications between sex partners and a true hope that one’s partner is having a good time, but about reaffirming that all men will have sex with women without caring if the women want to have sex.

But you also see it in discussions about spanking (though theses become fraught enough quickly enough that you see it less than you used to), where people who are having a discussion about a swift swat to a kid’s backside made from a place of fear and panic are joined by someone who believes in blanket-training small infants or hitting children with plumbing equipment. To the people who physically punish their kids every day, talk of the time you just lost control and spanked your kid who tried to, say, kick you in the head in Kroger, it just sounds like they are doing what’s normal because you’re doing it sort of, too.

But I read Ragan’s letter and I think, you know, even if a nun were having sex with sixty guys, I wouldn’t call her a whore. I wouldn’t think to call her a whore. For me, there’s no hypothetical situation I’d recount where I’d call a nun a whore, even in the furtherance of “logic!”

It would also never occur to me that any man might look at a woman with lust and decide to rape her, because most men I know, even if they felt lust toward someone, would not enjoy having sex with someone who didn’t want to have sex with them. The fear and hatred, possibly sobbing, would be a turn-off.

Likewise with murder. Yes, I have, as everyone has, joked about wanting to kill so-and-so. But even feeling enraged at someone would never make me seriously consider killing someone. And, if it ever happened that I had to kill someone, I know I would find that momentously traumatic. I knew a woman once who was in a car accident, which was not her fault, and the other driver died. Not her fault. Couldn’t have done anything to prevent his death. And she still struggled tremendously from the guilt.

So, I have my sincere doubts about the kind of person who could even hypothetically envision that all that’s holding most people back from doing these things is that they don’t act on their feelings.

No, dude, honestly. Most people don’t have the urge to hurt other people.

It’s not to say that people don’t hurt other people. People are jackasses. But if you’re operating from a paradigm in which everyone is vile and depraved and it’s only “logic” or “reason” that prevents us from acting on it, I think you have both those things wrong. And I am a little afraid of you.

I’m also struck by again the lesbian loophole. Everything that he says is wrong with being gay is wrong with being a gay man. It’s as if lesbians don’t exist. But honestly, in all his descriptions, there are some really problematic things about female desire. I’m not sure he even realizes that it’s a thing.

Plus, since he doesn’t believe in homosexuality as a state of being, but only of acting–”Logically, homosexuality is defined by behavior, i.e., unless one engages in sexual activity with a member of the same sex, he, or she, is not a homosexual. “–it can’t be just gay men who have such high rates of AIDS and suicide and such. Following his own statement, there is no such thing as sexual orientation, just sexual action. So, Ragan’s defining certain behaviors and traits as more prevalent among “gay” men fails under his own logical framework, in which there are no such thing as inherently gay men. So, those behaviors and traits can’t be limited to the “imaginary” group of “gay” men, but must be assumed to be traits all men have.  But I notice Ragan isn’t volunteering to quit life and go down and sit at the police station where he can be constantly monitored just in case he ever loses control.

So, while he argues for a world view in which we are all just monsters tightly-reigned in, he seems pretty confident in his reigning-in abilities. I find that perplexing.

Honestly, this is one reason I wish my dad weren’t so homophobic. Because I’d like to have a better idea of how Middle America white guys born in the 40s were socialized. Was the pressure to get married so enormous for so much of your life that you literally never had to confront or consider whether you were sexually attracted to women, because, even if you weren’t, it didn’t change the trajectory of your life (unless it just completely obliterated your whole life)? So, if you couldn’t imagine moving away and losing all contact with and support from your family, you couldn’t imagine a deliberately non-married life?

I mean, I’m trying to understand what it means when someone argues that just feeling like you’re gay doesn’t mean anything unless you act on it.

Does it mean that, within their own understanding of their sexuality, they do what they were told to do, whether it’s what they want or not? I mean, I don’t think that everyone who has these ideas is secretly gay.

But I do wonder if they’re all married to the people they want to be married to, frankly.

I’m going on way too long–I’m drinking a lot of Diet Dr Pepper because it makes my throat feel better and it’s got me a little wired–but, when I look at Ragan’s letter, I do see a guy for whom gay marriage is a threat.

Because getting gay married means, at core, choosing to marry the person who you want to marry, even if the state refuses to recognize it, even if it breaks your families’ hearts.

It means putting your feelings ahead of logic and reason.

And I imagine, for a lot of people who set aside their feelings to do the “right” thing, the discomfort and jealousy from seeing people who took another way can feel like a threat.

It’s one thing to do the “right” thing, even at great sacrifice, if it’s recognized by society as being good. But when you are in the middle of your difficult, “right” thing that has caused you to make great sacrifices and society turns away from your performance and goes to celebrate with the folks who are throwing their lot in with foolish feelings like “love,” that’s got to burn.

What I’m saying is that I respect that it feels like a loss to you.

But it is not even in the same ballpark of loss as what Phillip Parker’s family, for instance, is going through this week.

You should have been able to marry who you wanted, or not marry at all. You deserved real, open love with a person who saw you as a partner, not a bully or a burden. You deserved to not have to contort yourself into someone who thinks his own gender makes him vile in order to fit your community.

And I am genuinely sorry that your own writing seems to show that you did not get that.

But not sorry enough to let you carry on without noting how fucked up it is.

Dreaming Indiana

On Friday, I was feeling better, but not great. Good enough to have a nice long talk with the Professor, but then I had to go to bed. So, since we were going to eat lunch with our parents for Dad’s birthday in Vincennes, I took Nyquil. Oh lord.

It took me until we got until Vincennes to sober up. Honestly, I can’t believe that people do that recreationally. I couldn’t  tell if I was asleep or awake. I still felt like crap, but also so groggy.

It was terrible. And I feel worse today than I did on Friday.

I should have never taken the Nyquil.

I had some other stuff to say, but I can’t remember what.

In Vincennes, even the grass was icy.

The Great Battlefield of History

I wish I had an excuse to write about John Sevier every day, just because the resulting conversations have been so interesting. Sadly for John, I don’t have that much to say about him. But I did read this excellent post over at the Posterity Project about old John and I wanted especially to talk about this part:

I say all of this in light of a recent barrage of e-mails that I received over the weekend from one angry reader who took me to task over my blog series on John Sevier. Specifically, this person — an apparent descendant of John Sevier — accused me of being interested in making too much of the “bad things” that John Sevier did, questioned my “motive for doing so,” called me a liar, and accused me of using history to further a “particular ideological agenda.” This exchange actually reminded me of a story that I tweeted recently in which an archivist says about genealogy, “In some cases we’re enriching people’s family stories, and in other cases we’re kind of destroying family myths.”

This thought-provoking encounter actually gave me an opportunity to consider the larger issue of how history has been corrupted by politicians and well-meaning citizen activists who see their idyllic world crumbling all around them, and in an effort to understand what is happening to our nation, they reach into the past for answers from America’s heroes. In the process, they place these heroes on an unreachable pedestal where they are no longer considered human beings. To them, they are gods.

Now, I’m not a historian, obviously. But I do love history and the thing I love about history is that, yes, these were people just like us, who were motivated by the same things we are, who want the same things we do, and yet, they are so different, the contexts of their lives so utterly foreign to us. And the stories we tell about them as “true” do have a “particular ideological agenda” whether our agenda is to tell a story of people we can be proud of and look to for inspiration or whether it’s to tell a story of people who were complicated and who did things we don’t approve of.

That’s one of the things that really drives me about the whole Sue Allen project. Is there a story we can tell about these people that lets us appreciate them while acknowledging the ways they were wrong–that they wanted a future for themselves that not only wouldn’t have been good for them, it would have been terrible for all of us? That’s why, to me, the time travel is so crucial, even if it’s corny–to say “this is the future you envisioned, a boy raised in the way you think boys should be raised, to believe the things you think boys should believe is a danger to you.”

It’s why, when Sue and her sister are confronted by the proto-Klan and she calls forth the dead Confederates to line the road so that the girls can travel safely home, and everyone comes out to find if their loved ones are there, the ghosts are confused. They’ve been dead such a short time, and already women can move around so freely? Their children already call other men “father”? Nashville is already a place they don’t quite recognize.

I love history, but I think it’s important to realize that we would be a wonder and a disappointment to the people of the past and they are bound to be a wonder and a disappointment to us.

That’s what makes us all human.

Voodoo Village

It’s worth ten minutes of your time to watch this extraordinary video about Memphis’s so-called “Voodoo Village” which it turns out is actually St. Paul’s Holiness Temple and a giant folk art installation. The Harris family has been being harassed for years because, as Mr. Harris explains in the video, no one bothered to ask him what it was.

In all fairness, though, once you’re dealing with heavily Catholic and Masonic iconography along the Mississippi in a black community, it’s easy to understand how someone might make the leap to “My god, it must be voodoo,” especially since Mr. Harris’s grandfather was what folks might call a hoodoo man.

But the point is that it’s all not very easily quantifiable. And you need to take people’s words for their own experience. Just because you stand on the outside and say “Well, those are the ingredients for voodoo” doesn’t mean that they’re not also the ingredients for straight-up Christianity that just looks different than what you’re used to.

But damn, that’s some amazing stuff in there.

Snot Monster

I feel like, if you peeled off my skin from my head, you’d find that my skull was composed of 85% snot. Other than being stuffed up and wishing I could throw up, I feel fine, if a little groggy.

But I read something the other day about boogers. So apparently your body produces mucus and gross things that might otherwise make you sick get caught in the mucus where they die. Well, these scientists had a theory that kids eating boogers has an evolutionary advantage. Much like a vaccine made from a weakened version of whatever, the booger would be dried and crusted around some bad thing that your body needs to fight against.

So, kids eat their boogers and their body can build up an immunity!

Obviously, I don’t know if this is true and I can’t refind the link.

But I do wonder if I would have been better off this year to take up booger-eating on the off chance it would have helped me fight off these colds.

Excellent News!

Michael Silence is back! Though, honestly, judging by the hundreds of hits he’s sent me just this morning, I’m guessing you already knew that.

We Will Lose One of the Big Six

The talk of the publishing community this morning is this anonymous letter posted over at PandoDaily. I have been saying for years that it was inevitable that we would lose one of the Big Six publishers. In fact, I honestly thought it would happen before we lost Borders, given Borders’ ability to run itself like shit for years and still survive.

I don’t believe that Amazon is setting out to destroy commercial publishing as we know it. That’s just too facile, really. Amazon didn’t set out to destroy the bookstore, either. But frankly, it realized that there were a lot of people for whom going to the bookstore was not convenient and it made it very convenient for them to get books. I think the same thing is happening with publishing. There are a lot of people for whom getting a publisher is not convenient (and we can argue about what those reasons are, certainly) and Amazon has made it incredibly convenient for them. That’s not being out to destroy publishing. That’s recognizing a need and filling it.

The fact that big publishers don’t understand that–that they still expect the parts of publishing that have always functioned as a gentlemen’s club to continue to function as a gentlement’s club–is one of the reasons they’re in trouble.

There are two other things in this letter that tell you why big publishing is in trouble.

1. They don’t know what they’re up against, even though it’s very easy to find out. “So rather than getting a 30% of an ebook (with the other 70% being split between the publisher and author), they’ll be getting a 70% cut (with the other 30% going right to the author). Funny thing is that it’s actually better for authors.” Any author can self-publish with Kindle and, if they price their book at $9.99 or less, get 70%. The assumption that an Amazon publishing contract would strike the same deal a traditional publisher would strike is dangerously naive. If I can get 70% of all digital sales of A City of Ghosts, I would assume any contracted author would at least be getting 50/50 (since presumably Amazon is arguing that their promotion costs are such that it entitles them to a bigger chunk.)

I don’t know, but I would not be guessing that Amazon is doing business like me, if I were a traditional publisher, especially if I know my business model is failing. And yet, one cannot help but feel that, even as they say that their business model is failing, they still think anybody who publishes books would follow it.

2. They don’t see the value in a dependable mid-list. Which means, folks, that Vince McMahon’s business model is better than the publishing industry’s. Let that sink in. McMahon knows the value of cultivating talent and having a lot of talented folks who sit mid-card, building up a good storyline and a fan base while earning their push to superstar status.

Publishers like to pretend that we make our money from discovering unknown talents for small advances  and selling millions of their books. That’s a very small part of our business. The bestselling books are all written by celebs, by people with huge platforms, by fiction writers with a long history of bestselling books, or by people who do a proposal that’s on its surface brilliant. In short, there’s a bidding war among the publishers over the big books. We all know what the good books are–it all comes down to how much of an advance we’re willing to pay for them. The hotly fought-for books are the ones that sell. And while we might not make huge profit % on these, we make big profit $ on these. They keep the lights on by covering overhead. Better to cover our fixed costs by going all in on a few big books than trying to buy dozens of mid-list books.

How many big books can there be, though? You think Snooki is going to continue to churn out best-sellers. Publishing a book by Snooki keeps your lights on this year. It sets no foundation for how to keep your lights on next year.

And, as I have said a million times, the people who, in these times, most need publishers are the mid-list authors. It’s like music. New bands and authors can do a lot for themselves with the new technology available to them. Some can even make a living at it that never involves the corporate entertainment industry. Someone as big as Stephen King doesn’t need a publisher. He can afford to do it all himself.

The people who need publishers are the people in the middle. And that’s just who this anonymous letter writer admits isn’t worth their time.

Smaller houses and probably smaller imprints at big houses are going to have an easier transition away from this, since the blockbuster isn’t within their grasp anyway. They’re not gambling big and hoping to cover their losses with the next big win.

But you have to have a good stable of authors by whom you do right (and do competitively with other publishers) and you can’t underestimate your competition or assume that they are just like you. And you have to be able to innovate. Smaller houses will find ways. Some of the big guys may indeed break against the rocks.

But this has been an issue for the last ten years. That’s not Amazon’s fault.

I Caught the Butcher’s Cold

Thanks for nothing, Butcher. Though he says he still has it, so I guess technically we are sharing the cold. Mom and dad would be so proud.

Did Anything Ever Come of Elvis’s Love Children?

Beth and I were talking over on Twitter about our belief that Wynonna Judd is Elvis’s love child. And it got me wondering. I that, when I was a kid, there were a series of stories in the tabloids about people who claimed they were secretly Elvis’s love children. What ever happened to them?

At the least, I wonder if they’ve all compared their DNA to each other. Finding out that some of them were siblings would be interesting.

Or was that just a thing while people were grieving the loss of Elvis and became less of an issue the more real his death became?

I guess I’m as curious about how “My mom told me I am Elvis’s kid” functions as a story not just as a matter of fact.