You should be more of a fan of Mr. BEN HAMMERSLEY, variously an author, exhibited photographer, RSS authority, war correspondent, and second-in-command of Wired U.K. What will he do next? Hammersley has learned the secret of all accomplished people: Leave a good job early and do something different. I view him as a kind of Renaissance man and have told him so. I was shocked when he wrote back and said, in effect, “No, I’m not. You are.” Such flattery, while bullshit, was devastating.

I can recommend Hammersley’s ongoing series on the the complexity of converting legacy formats, like books and magazines, to digital formats. The term “format” has different meanings in that sentence. I think about the issue a lot. When doing so, mostly I rail against managers and self-styled experts in the publishing industry who are so fucking stupid they can’t run their own Windows XP boxen, let alone rescue their dying industries.

Established readers will evince no surprise when I reveal a few habits I consider dead giveaways – top-posting and, for book composition, the use of any or all of fake small caps, hot-metal typefaces from two centuries past, and nospace-emdash-nospace. These kinds of people don’t know what they’re already doing and, like a lesbian without a project, are a danger to themselves and society. They run, and ruin, the publishing industry. [continue with: Ben Hammersley’s useful precedent →]

With minor edits to improve anonymization and a few other elisions, here is the original version of a contract a literary agent submitted for my approval, with remarks.

The revised version I sent back was almost completely rewritten – not just for clarity but to remove dangerously nonsensical turns of phrase, as you will see. My revision was also actually typeset and looked like a contract instead of a letter banged out using MS Word defaults. [continue with: Anatomy of a literary agent’s contract →]

At root, Will Ferguson isn’t any funnier than gumtoothed millionaire lapdog Rick Mercer. Still, Ferguson inadvertently explains why we cultivate Fergusons and Mercers here while anybody with bite feels forced to leave the country:

We’re inundated with American pop culture, but it’s not our culture. Whenever you get a culture that’s swarmed with another culture, the people from the first culture tend to become observers. We’re outsiders to American pop culture, so we can look at it in a way they can’t, yet it’s not our culture. That outsiderness naturally leads us toward satire but even more toward spoof and parody. Satire is humour with an agenda, with a reason. Spoof is affectionate, it’s humour that plays on the form not the content.

Canadians are great at spoof; it’s what we specialize in, doing an affectionate, fake version of something familiar… There seemed to be confusion, among the reviewing class, who really should know better, a confusion between satire and spoof. [In Generica,] I wrote a satire, but because satire is considered to be more of a British form and Canadians are more used to spoof comedy, reviewers here tended to judge Generica as a spoof or parody. It’s not a parody, it’s a satire[.]

“Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City, p. 13”:

Did I read the New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn’t any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought…. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker’s font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth’s mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine’s oppressive context.

This is the same shittily-designed, shittily-typeset magazine whose shitty design and typesetting the elite can’t see through. Even Michael Bierut has been swindled. Meanwhile, all they’re using is stock Adobe Caslon with fake small caps.

“My magazine didn’t have a place in the modern world, there were too many magazines just like it, and people didn’t even know what its title stood for, but I still think I could have made a go of it.”

My esteemed colleague Mr. BRAD L. GRAHAM was found dead at his house yesterday (2010.01.04). He was a mere 41.

Brad and I maintained Weblogs of one form or another since the dawn of the medium as it is now understood. There were clear antecedents to what we were doing, but it is generally accepted, even by somebody like me who critiqued the era, that the late ’90s were dominated by about three dozen blogs. Mine was barely noticed, but everybody read Brad’s.

He was the soul of wit. You couldn’t write his shit down, or even remember it verbatim. What you remembered was unremitting humour, nothing by rote or from an expected place, no repetition, no rehashed war stories. What he had to offer was originality. Tweak a few variables and Graham could have been the Rakoff to Sedaris.

Rather like Mr. QUENTIN CRISP, Brad liked everybody and intended to meet everybody at least once. You were automatically his friend if you were onliné, and probably would be even if you weren’t. I met Brad at South by Southwest twice, in 2003 and 2005. I Broke Bread with Brad, making sure to sit no more than two places away from him so I could hang on to every word. He sacrificed his one and only A DRY CRACK IS A HAPPY CRACK key fob just for me.

Brad, Jonno, the only black gay type designer on earth, and some fat faghag I couldn’t get rid of spent a lot of time at a deserted gay bar in Austin shooting the shit. I felt like I was in a peer group with Brad and Jonno, who had bloody well better not keel over dead now. (Actually, yes: Who’s next? Me? Plasticbag?)

For several years I have frequently thought of Brad. I had strong suspicions – based on no objective evidence, unneeded anyway – that he was depressed. I dearly hope his was not another in a conspicuous string of apparent suicides or deaths by unexpected drug interaction. Yes, that would make it worse. It’s bad enough already.

The earliest bloggers are old enough to die.

Rice queen is a mildly pejorative but accurate and widely-used description of a man who is mostly or only interested in “Asian” (i.e., Oriental) men. (We could have a separate discussion about what “Asian” actually means [Borat is “Asian”], where it means what [in England, “Asian” means Indic], and why it isn’t descriptive enough for the current context while “East Asian” and “Oriental” are. But we won’t, as this discussion isn’t about linguistics.)

If you don’t think rice queens really exist, you must be a hateful leftist girl or a liar. You probably haven’t witnessed obvious first dates at restaurants between, say, a six-foot-tall redhead and an Oriental or a stocky iceblond and an Oriental, or witnessed a group of six or seven CBCs milling around on Church St. with one old, balding White guy standing in their midst (unnoticed, a full head taller, and wearing a hopeful smile).

Rice queens exist even if you, or nearby radical lesbians, think they’re scarcely better than slaveowners or Nazis. But how may of them are there? How many are the exact opposite – fervently unattracted to Asians, East Asians, or Orientals?

I checked up to the first 100 hits on Craigslist for all variant terms used (Asian, Oriental, azn; singular, plural; not Chinese or similar) in all rice-queen or inverse-rice-queen contexts.

• Ads were surveyed that used any of the synonyms, about 190 in total – a small fraction given that just the word “Asian” retrieves over 850 hits. There are untold hundreds of personal ads on Craigslist; there was no attempt to quantify that number. Hence we are dealing solely with proportions of ads that mention any of the synonyms, not proportions of ads mentioning synonyms compared to all ads.
• I did not attempt to limit the time period and did not put much effort into removing duplicates, save where noted. (For that reason, figures are accurate to one significant digit at best.)
• Very few ads articulated anything resembling a radical lesbian’s anti-racist utopian ideal of Open to All Races.
  • One ad (with several duplicates) was in that vein; every other such ad sought Asians or Whites and nobody else.
    • Ads seeking Asians or Whites and nobody else never also sought out hairy guys. The determining factors there seem to be “not dark-skinned and not hirsute.”
  • No ads sought Asians or blacks and nobody else. No ads appeared to be written by blacks seeking Asians.

Results

Anti-Asian

“No Asians” or equivalent: 18

Pro-Asian

• “Yes, Asians” or equivalent: 59 (+ 17 duplicates of one ad)
• Asian for Asian: 6 (+5 dup)

Asian-neutral

• The author of the ad is Asian: 68
• “Asian” means Indic: 9 (mostly dup)
• Other: 2

Interpretation

• Pro-Asian ads outnumber anti-Asian ads six to one. There are six times as many rice queens as there are anti–rice queens.

• About one-third of all ads that mention Asians (or any synonym) are ads from guys who more or less are rice queens.

• Confirming a related stereotype, barely any Asians are on the hunt for other Asians. Apart from the six Asian-for-Asian ads, all ads written by Asians either didn’t mention a desired race or asked for White guys.

Future work

It would be interesting to run similar surveys that:

• carefully counted all total ads
• deduped the results
• did content analysis to locate elusive, unicorn-like Open to All gays, who are, by implication, the only gays among us who aren’t racist crypto-Nazis
• looked at sites with different clientele (predictions: results similar on BigMuscle; huge preponderance of no-Asians ads on BigMuscleBears; SilverDaddies ads highly polarized)
• looked at large cities with relatively few Orientals, like London, or cities with many, like Vancouver or San Francisco, or cities where Orientals (again: sic) are the primary non-White population, like Sydney
• attempted to count how many guys are anti-Asian in sexual orientation but afraid to say so
• counted the apparent race of men at bathhouses (weekends at Spa Excess are 30% Oriental)

But aren’t rice queens just racists in disguise?

Nope. They’re just pursuing their true sexual orientation. They can’t pursue yours no matter how loudly you shout at them. If they were able to do that, they wouldn’t be gay: If they’re not supposed to be attracted to Orientals, maybe something else they shouldn’t be attracted to is other men. You don’t get a veto on other people’s sexuality.

The same goes for anti–rice queens. If you wouldn’t be caught dead having sex with an Asian, more power to you. It’s a free country. Among guys who express any kind of preference, you’re outnumbered.

Or, more accurately, troublemaker.

Leaving a bad taste in one’s feedreader as ever, Liz Spiers alleges that I badgered an editor after I got a no. That never happened. Again: Verify your facts before you publish them.

This, I will remind you, is the Gawker alumnus who derided Jesse Oxfeld in business-English terms as not “a good fit,” so I have come to expect tone-deaf dismissals. Now I also expect her to be insistently wrong. We do seem to disagree about expectations.