Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: Books ‘n’ Authors
Review of Brutarian Quarterly #44
My review of Brutarian Quarterly #44 is up at Tangent Online. There’s one great story (Megan Crewe’s “Horns”) and two good ones.
See, despite what you might think from yesterday’s post, I don’t like to give unfavorable reviews.
More later. I’m busy taking tonsils out today.
D.
An Open Letter to My Victims
Updated August 13.
I’ve decided this post was too snarky to live. Consider it a humor-misfire.
As for authors who take issue with my reviews:
- I do my best to critique the story that was written, not the story I wanted to read.
- I approach every story with an open mind.
- If I gave you a negative review, I’m sorry, but your story must have irked me deeply. You can’t please every reader.
- And if you feel like I missed the point, by all means TELL ME. If you can make me appreciate your story, I’m not above changing my mind.
D.
Review of Lenox Avenue, #7
My review of Lenox Avenue, #7, is up at Tangent Online.
Lenox Avenue is a bimonthly speculative fiction/art zine that pays top dollar — 5 cents a word, up to $100. Max word count = 6000. Here’s what they’re looking for:
Quirky, edgy, stylish, odd
Exploration of cultural myths/traditions not well-represented in spec-fic
Magic realism, slipstream, new weird, all welcome
Stories in which the characters are immersed in the culture and events, not necessarily outsiders encountering it for the first time
Here’s a link to their guidelines.
Based on Issue #7, they have a smart editorial staff with a good eye for talent. Check ’em out!
D.
Chandler: Not a snowflake* kinda guy
Sorry to harp about Chandler, but Karen and I went to see Land of the Dead this afternoon, and I’m still trying to get the taste out of my mouth. This flick was not Dead goodness.
Here’s proof (I think) that Chandler didn’t write from an outline, at least not circa 1947. This is an excerpt from a letter written “To Mrs. Robert Hogan”, March 8, 1947, reprinted in Library of America’s second Chandler collection:
“One of my peculiarities and difficulties as a writer is that I won’t discard anything. I have heard this is unprofessional and that it is a weakness of the amateur not to be able to tell when his stuff is not coming off. I can tell that all right, as to the matter in hand, but I can’t overlook the fact that I had a reason, a feeling, for starting to write it, and I’ll be damned if I won’t lick it. I have lost months of time because of this stubbornness. However, after working in Hollywood, where the analysis of plot and motivation is carried on daily with an utter ruthlessness, I realize that it was always a plot difficulty that held me up. I simply would not plot far enough ahead. I’d write something I liked and then I would have a hell of a time making it fit in to the structure. This resulted in some rather startling oddities of construction, about which I care nothing, being fundamentally rather uninterested in plot.”
Chandler began writing The Big Sleep, his first novel, at age 50 (1938). He wasn’t a fast writer, nor a prolific one by today’s standards. By the time of his death in 1959, he’d written seven novels, all featuring Philip Marlowe.
As for Marlowe, I think the second paragraph in The Big Sleep sums him up best:
The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a group of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a night in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.
That’s Marlowe: a would-be stand-in for a tarnished knight.
D.
*Snowflake: this is not a reference to Chandler’s machismo or lack thereof. I keep forgetting you’re not all writers. The ‘Snowflake Method’ refers to a particular technique of novel outlining. See link.
Lethem on Chandler
Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem
During internship, I gave all my Chandler paperbacks to an old black man dying of laryngeal cancer. He spent his time in an eight-bed ward, nothing to do but watch TV (one TV for the whole ward, forever tuned to the Spanish language channel), and when I found out he liked to read mysteries, I thought I’d do something nice.
Parting with those paperbacks was like loaning out a stack of letters written to me by my best friend. I’m not usually the type to get sappy about my books, but — The Big Sleep! Farewell, My Lovely! Take my left nut while you’re at it.
There’s something almost painfully endearing about Chandler’s protagonist, Philip Marlowe. I can’t think of a more sympathetic fictional character. There’s more to Marlowe than just smart-ass wisecracks (that’s about all you get from most movie Marlowes — even Bogie, God bless him). More than just his self-effacing humor, or his White Knight ethos. For me, it’s the fact that Marlowe has a vision of how things should be, and he’s inevitably dissapointed. He’s a chivalrous character in a world that relegates its Knights to wax museums.
The few SF-noir-hardboiled hybrids I’ve read usually don’t get it. You can’t do this on snarky smart-alecky patter alone. It’s not enough that your protag, at least once in the novel, drinks hard, is sapped on the head, gets slipped a mickey, runs afoul of the police, and falls for the dangerous dame. You can’t turn Chandler into a formula like that. The only way you can do Chandler is to do Marlowe.
Halfway through Gun, with Occasional Music, I told Karen that Lethem got all the elements right, but didn’t truly get Chandler. By two-thirds of the way through, I’d changed my mind. And if I had any remaining doubt that Lethem understands Chandler, it vanished after I read an interview he did with Trudy Wyss, for Borders. Here’s a relevant excerpt:
The Chandler detective is one who’s self-aware to just a degree where he can see the absurdity of his own actions, and particularly of the urge to rescue other people. That’s something Chandler was very tormented about: What does it mean to try to be a hero? To be a white knight in a kind of crumbling world?
And he’s just also such a beautiful writer. The secret of Chandler is that he’s really very romantic. Behind all that ennui there’s this enormous yearning that causes him to reach, in this very precarious way, for all sorts of beautiful phrases and unlikely poetic comparisons. And then he’s always making fun of himself for doing it at the same time. That’s why writers obsess over Chandler–because he’s found a way to have his lyricism and make fun of it at the same time.
So, yeah, he gets it, and in Gun, with Occasional Music, he’s proven that he gets it.*
Conrad Metcalf is a private inquisitor in a world where questions have all the political correctness of the N-word. Here, Celeste Stanhunt, wife of the murder victim, is talking to Metcalf:
“I’ve answered enough questions today to last a lifetime. Let’s see some identification, or I’m calling in the heat.”
“The heat?” I smiled. “That’s ugly talk.”
“You’re using a lot of ugly punctuation.” She stuck out a hand. “Let’s see it, tough boy.”
It’s an interesting world, not immediately recognizable as a dystopia. One of the beauties of the novel is the way it sneaks up on you like a revelation, exactly how dystopian this place is. The written word is all but extinct, and the spoken word is endangered. Morning news on the radio consists of mood music: the listener must intuit local and world events by the flavor of orchestration. Television news consists of clipped images — politicians smiling, shaking hands, kissing babies. Nearly everyone uses drugs (with names like Forgettol, Regrettol, Addictol) and, guess what, this junk is free courtesy of the government. As time passes, what at first seemed quirky becomes, by turns, ominous, and then outright nightmarish.
That’s why I had my doubts about Gun early on. At first it seemed that Lethem’s approach to Chandler was a sort of novel-sized Mad Lib. For cops, substitute Public Inquisitors; for rye whiskey, substitute make (the individual’s personal blend of drugs; Metcalf’s is “skewed heavily towards Acceptol, with just a touch of Regrettol to provide that bittersweet edge, and enough addictol to keep me craving it even in my darkest moments.”) For the lower class — ubiquitous in Chandler’s work — substitute evolved animals. There’s a kangaroo here you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.
But things change. The mystery unfolds as it deepens, time passes, caprice becomes meaning. The author has a plan, but I won’t spoil it by telling you. Trust me, trust Lethem.
Gun was Lethem’s first novel, so in fairness we should compare it to The Big Sleep. Like The Big Sleep, the mystery in Gun is, ultimately, a secondary concern. You could quibble over it, but you should bear in mind a much-repeated (and possibly apocryphal) story about Chandler. Humphrey Bogart (Marlowe in the first film version of The Big Sleep) and director Howard Hawks got into an argument over who killed the chauffeur — or was it suicide? Chandler replied that he didn’t know, either. (In another version of the story, it was Jack Warner who telegrammed Chandler with the question. When Chandler couldn’t answer it, Warner billed him 75 cents for the telegram.) Point being, if you’re here for the mystery, then you’re no fun at all.
Post script: My patient didn’t do well. Laryngectomy, fistula, recurrence, sepsis. “Piss-poor protoplasm” is how docs put it when we’re around each other and have to wear our stony faces. He had no family, no friends. When he died in the 10th Floor step-down ICU, I was Intern On-Call, and I had to come to his bedside to pronounce him dead, and I was probably the only one in the hospital who gave a damn about him. Some of you might say, “He would have liked it that way,” but I think he would have preferred not being dead. That would have been my choice.
D.
*Those of you who read this blog regularly may be wondering if I’m incapable of giving a bad review. That I leave all the snarkiness to my wife — the classic good cop, bad cop. Maybe you’re even wondering if I love everything I read, and that I would wax poetic over the ingredients list of Safeway’s Very Maple cookies.
But I don’t.
What’s the point in trash-talking a book, no matter how elegant, logical, and/or humorous that trash-talk may be? Do you really need to know that I sped-read Chris Roberson’s Here, There & Everywhere last night, and now I want my money back? Or that I gave up on Brin’s Kiln People in less than one hundred pages because he can’t control his damned exclamation points? No. You don’t need to know that. And you won’t find snark like that on these electronic pages.
And now, from SF Hall-of-Famer Adolf Hitler . . .
The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad
For me, Norman Spinrad is most memorable as the author of the Star Trek episode, “The Doomsday Machine”, better known in my household as “Kirk Meets the Cosmic Blunt”. (We have alternate names for all the classic episodes. Three guesses as to the identity of “Captain Kirk, Space Queen”, or “Spock in Heat”. That’s my wife and I. So —
knockingonwood knockingonwood knockingonwood.)
Yup, “Kirk Meets the Cosmic Blunt”. Still saying, “Waaaaaah?” Here’s an unloaded blunt:
Now do you remember? No? Imagine William Shatner and William Windom fighting over who can chew the most scenery. That episode.
The Iron Dream and I only lasted one chapter together. By then, I had tired of the overly dense writing (me like dialog) and the core joke had grown old after ten pages.
Karen, masochist that she is, finished it, and penned the fine review which you shall soon read. She thinks she might have gone a little over the top in her conclusions, but what the hey.
I’ve taken a few editorial liberties. Karen says, “I don’t want to be judged over something you’ve written.” Okay: I’ll put any major interpolations by me in blue.
Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972) caused a mild stir at the time of its publication. This satiric science fiction novel features an alternate history where Adolf Hitler emigrated to the United States in 1919 and became a comic book illustrator and science fiction writer. The Iron Dream (the actual title is Lord of the Swastika. I suspect Spinrad’s publisher chickened out and made him come up with a different title for the cover) is his supposed Hugo Award-winning novel of 1954, a story concerning the rise of Feric Jagger, a national hero who saves the nation of Held from the mutant hordes of inferior and corrupted humans.
Written in the bombastic tones of Mein Kampf, the novel is a distorted version of Hitler’s historic rise to power in Weimar Germany, and his subsequent actions in Europe and Africa. The story begins with Jagger returning from Borgravia (corresponding to Hitler’s youth in Austria). He arrives in Held, the last pocket of genetically pure humanity in a world still suffering from the devastating effects of an ancient nuclear war. Held is surrounded by radiation-contaminated land which has produced grotesque mutants who must be euthanized — for their own good, as well as for the sake of humanity.
Unfortunately for the blond, blue-eyed Heldons, these mutants are commanded by the sinister forces of the mind-controlling Zind, the analogue to the USSR. Ridiculously quickly, Feric gains leadership of a small political party, which he soon parlays into control of the entire country. How does author Hitler account for this? Feric’s amazingly powerful personal will and magnetism lead everyone to recognize his natural superiority. Under his magnificent leadership, the Heldon army finally confronts the vast armies of Zind in the book’s climactic battle.
Since Dream is written by alternate universe author Hitler, fascism is good, genocide justified, and everyone (everyone racially pure, that is) loves the good and wise hero who triumphs in the end. Spinrad’s difficulty, though, lies in maintaining a readable story that’s supposedly written by a psychopathic hack writer with no real insight into humanity. Thus, there is incredibly bad sentence structure and an obsession with the gory details of death and violence.
Desperately needed comic relief is supplied by the homoerotic descriptions of missiles, bullets, and the “Great Truncheon of Held,” Jagger’s semi-magical club that he wields as the true heir to the former Kings of Held:
Despite these attempts to shore up the narrative’s deficiencies, Spinrad lets the novel drag in many spots, particularly in the repetitious battle scenes. After reading 20 or so descriptions of Feric’s mighty blows decimating the mutant horde, I began to skip these passages.
But there’s more to this book than just the smug feeling that we are too clever to fall for fascistic propaganda. (In fact, I found a neo-Nazi review on the internet which didn’t realize this was satire; supposedly, the American Nazi Party loves the book, too.) (That last link — to AryanUnity.com — is more interesting than you might think. According to Karen, the reviewer plagiarized the review from another she (Karen) had just read. Then he tacked on a few paragraphs at the end to the tune of “Great book! Warms the cockles of my pure Aryan heart!”) Spinrad includes an afterword by a fictitious literary critic who discusses the popularity of similar stories in both science fiction and fantasy. Furthermore, the back cover quotes praise the novel as comparable to J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton.
For example: recall, from LOTR, the slaughter of the mutant orcs and the short, debased men from the south by the racially superior elves and the tall and noble Aragorn. I have read a good deal of science fiction and fantasy and I have no doubt that a tinge of fascism, racism, and sexism seeped into a great many of the so-called classics of the Golden Age. In their defense, these stories were written decades ago and one shouldn’t necessarily apply today’s standards. However, their undeniable influence on today’s literature unconsciously leads some of us to separate different ethnic and religious groups into the ‘debased’ versus the ‘noble’, and the ‘fanatically homicidal’ versus the ‘protectors of humanity’. That, in conjunction with the ubiquitous scenes of slaughter and battle in the science fiction and fantasy genres, may lead the desensitized reader to support warfare and death in the real world.
Thanks, Karen. Folks, her next book review will be: “Charlotte’s Web: Beloved Children’s Classic, or Vegan Propaganda?”
D.
Start at the fifth book in the series? Why the hell not!
Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith
Arkady Renko and I go way back. Gorky Park came out in ’82, and, poor student that I was, I bought it as a paperback in ’84.
1984: First year of medical school. My mind was ripe for dermestid beetles munching flesh off human skulls. At that age, I hadn’t read much hard-boiled fiction, and the moody, angst-ridden Renko came as a breath of fresh arctic air compared to the science fiction characters I knew from childhood. (True, Neuromancer came out that year. That, too, was a kick in the head.) And the interlude sequence, two-thirds of the way through — when, suddenly, we are brought face to face with Renko’s nemesis, Pribluda — changed forever how I looked at fiction, both as a reader, and as a wannabe writer.
1989: the year of Gorky Park’s first sequel, Polar Star. I was still in medical school (don’t ask). Polar Star proved to me that a sequel could be every bit as good as the first novel. Having read at least one sequel to Dune (gotta be vague, here — I’ve struck those books from memory), I’d had my doubts. Gross-o-meter high point in Polar Star: the slime eels. Yum.
Red Square (1993) : This one almost put me off Smith indefinitely. Then my wife bought Rose (2000: not a Renko novel, but still a keeper). By now I was a grown-up. I’d done a bit of writing, enough that I could recognize Smith as a master technician. So I went back to the Renko series with book four, Havana Bay, and found our Investigator lower than ever. Near the beginning of the story, Renko is assaulted in his apartment. The usual rough stuff, right? No: there’s a twist (no spoilers here) which hooked me in to the rest of the book.
In Wolves Eat Dogs, Renko’s investigation of an apparent suicide leads him to the ruins of Chernobyl. What do you do with a burnout like Renko? Surround him with other burnouts! (I wonder if Smith ever worried whether his readers would say, “Enough already.”) The outskirts of Chernobyl is populated with soldiers, scientists, and folks too old to care about a little radiation. There’s a strong, unspoken feeling that Death stands just behind everyone’s shoulder.
The investigation begins in Moscow, where billionaire Pasha Ivanov, president of NoviRus, has jumped ten stories from the window of his luxury suite. There’s a bottle of salt in Ivanov’s hand, more salt on the windowsill, and a pile of it in the closet. NoviRus Senior Vice President Lev Timofeyev has a bloody nose . . . and before long, he shows up dead in a cemetery near Chernobyl. Unexpectedly dead, that is.
Perennial pain-in-the-ass Renko doesn’t think Ivanov jumped voluntarily. When Timofeyev’s body is found, Renko’s boss ships him down south to the Ukraine for a bit of hot time. In graduate school, we had to wear those little radiation badges so that we’d know when we’d been poisoned. Renko gets a Geiger counter and a bit of advice — don’t eat the locally grown food.
But, wouldn’t you know it, before long the Geiger counter has been retired, Renko’s scarfing down the local produce, lovin’ the local women and scrappin’ with the local brutes. You gotta love him.
Smith does everything right: three-dimensional characterization, clearly written action sequences, crisp dialog, a deft plot, and plenty of poignant drama. Some folks read Elmore Leonard to hone their craft; I read Smith.
D.
P.S. I think I may have gone way beyond the boundaries of good taste tonight with Bare Rump’s Diary. Box me about the ears if you are offended.
Ancestor worship
Digging Up Donald by Steven Pirie
Keith Pirie (Steve to his publisher) is one of those fellas you know is going to make it big some day. Oprah big. (Her book club! Jeez.) I suck up to him every chance I get so that, when that day comes, I’ll be riding on his coattails. As in, “Hey, Doug. Here’s a used tissue I found in Oprah’s wastebasket. Think you can make something of it?”
So you may be wondering why it has taken me so long to review his book. I dunno, it may have something to do with the fact that we’re living down here in Crescent City and 95% of my books are in the money pit-cum-children’s tuition charity fund for my contractor, i.e., the house in Harbor. Out of sight, out of mind. And, to continue the trite saws, better late than never.
More to the point, I have a memory like a sieve. Not the kind of thing you want to hear from your doctor, right? To which I must say: That’s what the chart is for, bucko. I have over 2000 active patients. Do you really want me to trust my memory, especially as regards your history of anaphlyactic shock with penicillin? Hmm? Anyway, I have been known to reread books three or four times and be surprised by the ending each time. Sometimes the old Warner Brothers cartoons knock me for a loop.
What I’m trying to say is, I read Donald last October, and that’s a really long time in Doug years.
Without further ado, here’s the review I posted in Amazon, with additional commentary in green.
Digging Up Donald was on my stack with Bruce Sterling’s Distraction, China Mieville’s King Rat, Robert Rankin’s The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, and Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, yet it was Donald I kept coming back to. The comparison to Terry Pratchett is most apt, not only in the style of humor, but also in the manner in which both authors build up a nice “what the hell is going on here?” tension.
Distraction: I never got past the first chapter. Boring.
King Rat: This is one I really wanted to like. Mieville has talent. Trouble was, one hundred pages into it I realized I didn’t give a damn about anyone, and there were other books I wanted to read more — like Donald.
Hollow Bunnies: Wonderful title, and the first chapter is a corker, but it fell down after that. I lost interest after about one hundred pages.
A Cool Million: I finished it after I finished Donald. If I can make one recommendation to all the writers here: if you haven’t read West, read him. Start with Miss Lonelyhearts, move on to The Day of the Locust. The Library of America collection is well worth the $.
Donald: I would have finished it even if Keith wasn’t a friend. Donald met my two most important criteria for a novel: I cared about the characters, and it was fun. (I shouldn’t be too strident about the ‘fun’ part. I’m a Le Carre fan, but I cannot think of his novels as fun.)
Back to my Amazon review:
This book has a host of fine points: domineering matriarchs; a sex-crazed reverend with, shall we say, unwholesome intentions for the world; young love; not-quite-so-young lust; a bar fight in the land of the dead; high tea in hell . . . I’d say more, but a large part of the fun lies in figuring out Pirie’s particular brand of mythology.
That’s for sure. Don’t expect the usual thinly veiled warp of Greek or Norse mythology. Keith’s universe is Keith’s and no one else’s.
My favorite part of the book was the well-developed relationship between young Robert and the Reverend’s daughter, Joan. These passages were surprisingly sensitive and insightful.
All in all, a fine read!
Good heavens. Is that the best I could do? What a lame ass review. Anyway: young love does it for me every time. I remember how it feels — the intoxication, the madness of it. Clearly, Keith remembers, too. I was/am so taken with Robert and Joan that I will be tickled silly if Keith puts them center stage in the sequel; and, really, my main disappointment with Donald (almost a spoiler!) came towards the end, when I found myself wanting to see far more of both of them.
Are you listening, Keith? (Keith apparently hates blogs.) More Joan and Robert! And move that WONDERFUL animation you have on your Writers BBS homepage over to your website — now!
D.
No! Not Eminem! ANYTHING but Eminem!
As an early Father’s Day present, I asked my wife and son to come with me to Eureka for the afternoon. I wrote until 1PM, so it’s not like I was slacking. Primary point of this trip: Borders Bookstore. I’ve griped about this before, but we have to drive 90 minutes to get to an actual bookstore.
I tried to find books by some of the folks I’ve linked to. Sad to say I couldn’t find anything by Gwenda Bond or Scott Westerfield, but they did have John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (but I already own that!) Nor did they have Keith Pirie’s Digging Up Donald, but I’m beginning to despair of finding that in a US store. Which reminds me, I need to give Keith’s book a good plug here sometime soon.
Here’s what we got:
make love!*
*the bruce campbell way
by Bruce Campbell
gun, with occasional music
by jonathan lethem (what’s with all the lower case letters, anyway?)
Tales of Neveryon
by Samuel R. Delany
Nightfall
Isaac Asimov & Robert Silverberg
plus a Catherine Asaro fantasy (The Charmed Sphere) and a Piers Anthony fantasy (Being a Green Mother), both for Jake. Surprisingly, Nightfall was his pick, too. I say ‘surprisingly’ cuz he usually doesn’t read SF (unless Piers Anthony wrote it).
I’m still trying to recover from the shock of learning that our government has used pop tart Christina Aguilera’s music as a form of torture at Gitmo.
You gotta rub me the right way honey
I’m a genie in a bottle baby
Come, come, come on and let me out
Message to the Feds: if you ever want to break me, put me in a padded room with a continuous loop of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Hell, just show me the CD and I’ll talk.
D.
Harris Beach
I had a productive morning. Finished a 1300+ word scene (tough one, too), finished the week’s laundry, drank two cups of coffee. Aaaah.
Also cool: we increased Jake’s dose of propranolol last night and today he felt better. Yippee! He felt well enough that we drove up to Oregon and spent several hours at Harris Beach State Park. Currently in bloom: foxglove, daisies, salmonberry, milkweed. Present year round: pillow moss, horsetail, poison oak. We had a clear blue sky, temp in the high seventies, and a stiff wind.
Nothing of note in the tidepools except hermit crabs, and regular crabs of the I-don’t-need-no-steenking-shell ilk. On the beach, we found lots of desiccated sailors by the sea. Here’s a photo I pilfered from the web:
They’re Cnidarians — related to the man of war, medusae, and jellyfish. There: you’ve met your cool critter of the day. Here’s another link for Velella.
With all the wind and sand, I pretended to be T. E. Lawrence while Jake spent a couple hours building dams and destroying them. When it came time for DBE (deep beach extraction), I steeled myself for the inevitable five-hours-per-mile departure, what with Jake stopping for every hermit crab, every odd rock, and — especially — every running stream of water (more dams, more destruction). My son the hydraulic engineer.
We stopped off at the pet store and bought two land hermit crabs. I’ll get a photo or two up sometime soon. Cute devils. Land hermit crabs are known to swap shells rather promiscuously, all for fun.
We also made it to the library today. I picked up Michael Swanwick’s Jack Faust and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. I was tickled to see that they have John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War on the shelf, and shocked to see Cintra Wilson’s Colors Insulting to Nature. And here I thought I was so cool, probably the only person in Del Norte or Curry County who knew of Cintra Wilson. If you’re unfamiliar with her work, Cintra is a razor-sharp humorist — I prefer that to the stuffy ‘social commentarist’ — best known for her articles in Salon. I think she’s gorgeous (check out her gallery), but her home page is way, way over the top. Poor kitty!
D.