Today at the bookstore I had the pleasure of meeting a young author named Felicia Luna Lemus. Her debut novel, published by FSG, is titled Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties. This book is about both “princess dykes” and the chicana life, a blend that could only occur in Los Angeles. She seemed almost giddy at seeing her book on the shelves, and understandably so. She is diligently at work on another novel which she foresees finishing in about five years, which is about how long the first one took. In the meantime, she is actively seeking a position teaching creative writing, which should be well within reach considering this first novel and her MFA from Cal Arts. If you want to hear more check out this review at the San Francisco Chronicle and here is a double interview with her and one of the original outlaws of queer fiction, John Rechy (City of Night is the book that made him famous), which appeared in The Advocate magazine.
Author Sighting
You Autocomplete Me
If Carl Jung had lived to see Google Search, he might have had a thing or two to say about how its auto suggest function is revealing the Internet’s collective unconscious. For those who don’t know, auto suggest is a handy feature that helps you search when you don’t know what it is you’re searching for. As you type, Google tries to read your mind, offering helpful suggestions based on the letters you have already entered. If, for example, you were to type “the mill” Google might guess you are searching for “the millions” (you were, weren’t you?) and helpfully add the term to a list that appears below the search bar. On the other hand, it might suggest “the million dollar man.” We do, after all, have the technology.
Although it’s not entirely clear how Google generates suggestions, they are at least in part based on searches entered by other users. The more popular a search, the more likely it is to appear at the top of the list of suggestions. At first, this might seem like an innocuous feature, but on closer inspection, it turns out to be a powerful tool for peering into the murky depths of the collective unconscious. How murky, you ask? For a peek into the abyss, head over to autocompleteme (may be NSFW, if you can believe it….), where a team from among the legion of unsung Internet heroes has posted some of the bizarre treasures they have dredged up from Google’s auto suggest.
A quick peek at autocompleteme can tell you a lot about the state of the English-speaking world circa 2009. We’re stupid: “How come… a cupcake is not a mineral?”, paranoid “how to tell… your cat is planning to kill you?” and racist “I am… extremely afraid of Chinese people.” Its pages are full of bizarre, hilarious, and sometimes disturbing searches that are apparently so popular that Google assumes you, too, might find them useful. Of course, any number of the oddest results might just point to song lyrics, elaborate practical jokes, random hipster t-shirt slogans, and Simpsons quotes.
That’s all beside the point, though. Because what makes auto suggest most compelling is not the nonsense results or the unintentional comedy. It’s what it says about the human condition. Every day hundreds of millions of supplicants come to Google, the new Oracle, in search of answers. From innocence ( “how to… kiss”) to despondence (“I w… ant to die.”), they share their fantasies and desires, their deepest fears and anxieties. And every day, Google suggest lets them know they are not alone.
Staying Sane: A Year in Reading (Part 1)
I started 2004 with Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn. It surprised me greatly as I had finished Tropic of Cancer only about a month prior and expected more of what I imagined to be crazy real life accounts – starvation, the artists’ world in 1930s Paris, heavy boozing, sex, sex, and more sex. There’s a glimpse of this, but instead of more scandalous stories, I found in Tropic of Capricorn Miller’s inspiration for Tropic of Cancer. In this heavy, philosophical work, Miller puts forth his disgust for New York and everything it represents, draws a great picture of Brooklyn during the 1920s, and shows the first signs of his status as a misfit. Tropic of Capricorn is greatly revealing as the source of Miller’s genius, and it is by no means the easy going, fun, weird read that Tropic of Cancer is.Next came two Turkish novels by Tuna Kiremitci, both of which moved me deeply. Both Git Kendini Cok Sevdirmeden and Bu Iste Bir Yanlizlik Var are pop culture page turners that also managed in depth character studies. Unfortunately, the novels are not available in English, hence I shall cut the description short.A Confederacy of Dunces was the second English language novel I read in 2005, and a mighty one at that. The genius of this novel is even quoted in the coolest movie of late, Sideways. It is rather unfortunate that John Kennedy Toole committed suicide and left us with only one piece, because after reading about the funny, and brilliantly lazy Ignatius, I am left to wonder what else Toole was capable of. Ignatius’ addiction to hot dogs, the costumes, the literary efforts, the complicated love affair, a disgruntled mother, and finally, the closing of the valves make for an amazing, laugh-out-loud read.
A Real Time Saver
Too many books, no easy way to read them all? A remarkable device was once conceived to solve this vexing problem. (via)
Birnbaum and Jonathan Safran Foer
At The Morning News, Robert Birnbaum interviews Jonathan Safran Foer. In his email announcing the interview, Birnbaum tries to elevate the current level of discourse surrounding Foer, who seems to have a target painted on his back these days: First, a word about what you will not read here – no reference to Steve Almond’s kvetchy and disingenuous hand wringing about Jon Foer’s new novel (at MobyLives.com)or the exponentially vile and bombastic heaving by Harry Siegal about the same at the loathsome and vile NYC weekly that produces journalistic marvels such as “50 Loathsome New Yorkers” and includes novelists on that hit list.The interview is long, and once again portrays Foer as thoughtful and unwilling to respond to criticism or praise, preferring to concentrate on just the reader and the writer:Foer: Really good books are books that have two authors, the reader and the writer. Or maybe the idea of an author is actually just a combination of two people, the reader and the writer? So when writing you use the word “tree.” Four letters. Very, very short word. Fits a couple millimeters on a page. But in the reader’s mind it becomes a kind of idealized version of a tree, and that tree is different for each person who reads the book and because of that a book is customized for each person in a way a song never could be and as a painting never could be.