Dot Dead Diary

A Paean to P.A.

Sunday morning, weather in the 70’s, sky cerulean, breeze whispering, #4 and I took a bike ride around my Palo Alto neighborhood.

Then Sunday afternoon I headed to the synagogue for our annual meeting. A wood and glass homage to the tents of the ancient Israelites, the sanctuary sits on a knoll in rolling hills. When I was a boy, it was in the boonies, completely isolated and one of the few Jewish institutions in the area. Now an interstate highway is nearby, high tech buildings crouch across the street. And Jewish life in Silicon Valley is flourishing with the establishment of a Jewish day school and high school, a new Jewish Community Center going up, and a Stanford Jewish studies department that’s one of the tops in the world. I don't want to give the impression that Palo Alto is turning into a ghetto (in the original meaning) though. In my neighborhood, first generation immigrants from China, France, India, and Israel are all buying houses and making Palo Alto one of the most ethnically diverse places around.

From the synagogue, I went to pick up my dad for a quick bite at Peninsula Creamery downtown. My parents picked up and moved here from Skokie, Illinois over fifty years ago. I wonder how different my life would be if they had not. I love living in my hometown, just eight houses away from my parents' place. #1 graduated from Palo Alto High, just as I did. She wanted to get out of here bad, just as I did, and is now attending college on the East Coast, just as I did. #2 is at Paly High now and, thanks to her, I have discovered I remember very little sophomore chemistry.

Then after dropping off Dad, I headed over to Stanford to listen to one of the giants of Hebrew literature, A.B. Yehoshua, being interviewed over at Stanford. I found a seat with some literary-minded friends and listened to her tease out insights camouflaged by the speaker’s heavy accent. Yehoshua answered the question of who the biggest intellectual influence on him was by naming David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. Can you imagine anyone naming an American president as an intellectual inspiration? Yehoshua said that when B-G went to England he always stopped at Blackwell’s in Oxford (my favorite bookstore in the world). An intellectual in Yehoshua’s definition is not a professor who’s an expert in one subject. (That engendered some appreciative chuckles from the university audience.) It’s someone who transcends disciplines, who integrates thoughts across subject areas. Another insight of Yehoshua’s I appreciated: Jewish history over the past 2000 years has been primarily a story of crossing borders. Zionism, he said, is a big change in that it is about living within borders.

I so enjoy going to hear other authors speak. Stanford, Kepler’s, and M is for Mystery attract visiting writers like bears to honey. Despite what people say (see here for example), you can be a writer without living in Brooklyn. And the Bay Area has its share of authors including those of the crime fiction persuasion I bump into here and there like Cara Black, Cornelia Read, Lora Roberts, Mark Coggins, and so many more.

Downtown Palo Alto boasts the Stanford Theatre, probably the best repertory movie house in the country thanks to the generosity of David Packard. They recently finished three months of Hitchcock which included a double bill of Dial M for Murder and To Catch a Thief, possibly the best double feature of all time. They’re running a Bette Davis retrospective now. The siren’s song of the Stanford Theatre is so alluring that my Massachusetts friends Bill and Susan keep talking about getting a place to winter here.

What else about Palo Alto? Oh, yeah. It is the center of world technology, the capital of Silicon Valley. What movie-making is to Hollywood, entrepreneurship is to Palo Alto. A creature of my environment, even I, a history major, started a software company here and sold it. Google headquarters is three miles away from my house and Facebook’s is one. There’s enough greed, money, and ambition around here to provide background for a library of crime fiction and yet, for reasons I don’t fathom, that vein has scarcely been mined by crime writers. And when I get an entrepreneurial itch, there are plenty of kindred spirits who are willing to join in and start a company in the same way Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney found friends to help them put on a play in the barn.

Last night my-friend-since-fourth-grade Loren and I saw the Giants score some runs and win a game, an unexpected bonus to good conversation.  He and I used to take the bus to Candlestick when we were in high school.

Cue up the Boss here singing My Hometown:
I'm thirty-five we got a boy of our own now

Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said son take a good look around
This is your hometown.

Two Interviews That Get You Thinking

I read two articles this week that made me think some about this writing biz.

Lee Child is interviewed in The (London) Times.  Unlike most author interviews, this one seems to focus on material matters, and I am happy to report that Lee, whom I met at Bouchercon in 2006, seems to be doing okay with his Jack Reacher series.  Well, "okay," if two apartments on Manhattan and two near St. Tropez along with such trinkets as a Faberge watch and a Jag allow one to reach the okay benchmark.  So success and wealth have prompted to Lee to turn philosophical.  He says:

"When you have plenty it is really liberating but you reach a point where you realise, 'Wow. I can have anything I want.' This just prompts the question, 'Well, what is it that you want?' and I have found that actually I don’t want very much."

Easy for him to say. 

In an interview in our Times (the New York one, I mean) this week, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, known as Professor Happiness, says:

"We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends.

"We know that it’s significantly more important than money and somewhat more important than health. That’s what the data shows. The interesting thing is that people will sacrifice social relationships to get other things that won’t make them as happy — money."

Writing is, of course, a solitary pursuit.  Does that mean that we writers all have a tendency for melancholia?  We all know how important friends and family are.  But maybe the social relationships with fellow scriveners we foster at conferences, writing groups, in drinking establishments, and on Facebook help keep us sane and make us a little happier, too.

Girly-Man

My friend, the hilarious novelist Jennifer Colt, went to the bottom of the bucket of invectives she totes around with her and slung a "girly-man" at me several weeks ago.  (Apparently, I don't do enough drafts of my books to suit her.)

A girly-man?  That means I stay out of jail, get higher SAT scores, and read fiction?  Okay with me.

Why do I bring this up?  Doctor, it's my weakness for female British novelists.  I've 'fessed up to my attraction to Anita Brookner's oeuvre before.  Now another one.  Penelope Lively.  Yesterday, with only a break for dinner, I read her City of the Mind about a London architect who loses love and finds it again.  The inhabitants of contemporary London are seen as temporary occupants of what's really an eternal city.  Not everything in this book works -- the flashbacks are contrived, but the main story is terrific.  If I were going to start with one of Ms. Lively's books, though, I would pick her tour de force, Heat.

Dream Job

Newsweek reports that London's new Andaz Liverpool Street Hotel has hired a reader-in-residence.  He's journalist Damian Barr of The Times, who recently had a manicure with Paris Hilton's mom.  What does a reader-in-residence do?  He recommends books, joins guests for meals to discuss books, and is even available for in-room reading sessions.

Hey, what about me?   I love reading.  I get great satisfaction out of someone enjoying a book I've recommended. 

I live only a few blocks from a Four Seasons Hotel.  I might check with the hotel manager and see if a job posting is imminent.

Gritty Noir from Libby Fischer Hellmann

The Big Thrill asked me to interview my friend Libby Fischer Hellman, the Chicago crime fiction author and past president of Sisters in Crime.  Her new book, Easy Innocence, is just out. See what she has to say here about the challenges of writing her first PI novel and the flowering of Chicago crime fiction.

Feds Target Writers Who Use Performance-Enhancing Drugs

Passing along a story from the front page of today's Palo Alto Times.

Justice Department Sniffs Out Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Writing Industry

Palo Alto – The United States Attorney’s Office for the Midpeninsula District of California today announced that it is launching an investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) by well-known authors around the country.

“We have convened a grand jury that is taking in camera testimony from authors, editors, and agents,” said Hamilton Wiener, U.S. Attorney. “It appears that some authors have been resorting to PEDs which give them an unfair advantage over their colleagues who play by the rules.”

According to grand jury transcripts obtained by The Palo Alto Times, many authors, especially of mysteries and thrillers, do their writing under the influence of a pharmacopeia of stimulants, opiates, and such. Moreover, Times sources expect a perjury indictment this week of one prolific author who has set sales records for his books and denied using any PED while writing them.

“We’ve got this guy, whose latest book was about to be named an Oprah’s Book Club choice, dead to rights,” boasted Michael Jovert of the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General. “He relaxes at night by smoking marijuana according to his mistress. He denies it but she has phone tapes. He’s going down. Oprah’s so grateful that we saved her from the embarrassment.”

"The results of this investigation show our commitment to protect the integrity of America’s reading pastime from deceptive and fraudulent practices," said Inspector Jovert. "We have an obligation to pursue and bring to justice those who prey on vulnerable readers and place profits before public health.”

Bud Taper, commissioner of the Major League of Writers (MLW), said that PED use is unfair to those authors who have been writing while “clean.” He promises to rule shortly on requests to strike the books of an authors found using PEDs from bestseller lists. With the focus of the investigation on crime fiction, such lists may be drastically altered. The New York Times list of the top 15 hardcover fiction books for the week of April 6 contains nine instances of crime fiction.

Industry observers are wondering if Taper will lend his presence to the Edgar® Awards ceremony, crime fiction’s “Oscars,” on May 1.

“He can’t win either way,” said 2007 Edgar Award nominee Cornelia Read. “If he does show, it will look like he doesn’t care which of the nominees have been smoking dope or whatever. If he doesn’t, it will be disrespecting the game of crime fiction.”

In addition to its grand jury investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice is asking for reciprocity from its English counterparts. The Times has learned that descendants of Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, will be asked to forfeit the royalties the book has earned over the last century and a half.

Comments from writers have been mixed.

Jeff Shelby, the best-selling mystery author, said, “Late at night, I’ve seen my colleagues take amphetamines to stay up and hit their deadlines. It’s not fair to those of us who scrupulously follow the law and still write great mysteries. I’m sure Wicked Break would have hit the top spot on the Denver bestseller list if only my fellow writers had played fair.”

Author of the hot new mystery Thugs and Kisses, Sue Ann Jaffarian, said, “Dude. I live in LaLa Land, where we do what it takes to get the muse up off her lazy ass. Sometimes that means more than sugar and chocolate. Readers benefit. Where's the harm?”

Keith Raffel, the Silicon Valley mystery and thriller writer, has concerns about the investigation turning into a witch-hunt. “I have been questioned by the grand jury,” he told The Times in an exclusive interview. “What I don’t understand is if only illegal PEDs are being looked at or if any foreign substance that enhances your writing is taboo.”

Raffel estimates that he drinks up to 15 cups of green tea each day he writes. “If that’s outlawed, I’ll be driven back to the software industry where the rules are far laxer.”