Well, hell.

Wired News:

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a lower court decision that said federal officials cannot be sued for damages for the torture of Americans on U.S. soil.

In other words, the Feds can waterboard the hell out of you while holding you secretly and without trial, and you have no legal recourse.

Someone needs to explain to me very quickly how this doesn’t make it legal for the government to disappear people, a la Pinochet.

Dept of things you really ought to read

The May 28 New Yorker has a fantastic (and long) story on the extraordinary exploits of William Alexander Morgan, the American ne’er do well and wanderer who became the only American Comandante in the Cuban revolution (there was, apparently, only one other foreigner with that title).

We likely forget that there was a coalition of forces united behind Castro thanks to the excesses of Batista’s regime. Morgan joined a band of revolutionaries who were also ardent anti-communists; his star fell as Fidel moved to the left and the same sort of totalitarianism that doomed Batista, with predictable results, but the man’s story reads like something Hemingway could’ve written.

(Know anything about this cat, Gar?)

No, really.

I promise lots of UAE trip material, but work here has been such that I’m barely seeing anything but my laptop so far. Case in point: 21 project hours logged today. Put another way, when I called Erin just now to say I was finally going to bed and therefore ending my workday, she was also getting home from work and ending hers.

Houston is nine hours behind Abu Dhabi.

I’M NOT DEAD

Just busy busy busy. And traveling. And going to Dubai later. And buying a new air conditioner. and watching Willie Nelson and Snoop Dog. And not making any of this up. I swear.

Mad Men Redux

The excellent Mad Men Unbuttoned blog points out two bits you may have missed:

  • Joan wears the fur Roger gave her on her “date”; and
  • It turns out Lane’s commentary on Pete — a “grimy little pimp” — was a bit of foreshadowing.

What You Need To Do

Go see American Falls by Miki Johnson, over at DiverseWorks.

Mrs Heathen and I have just come from opening night, and I’m still processing it, but I can say this: It’s one of the most affecting, beautiful, amazing things I’ve seen on stage. It’s truly remarkable. I see lots and lots of plays. I see lots of plays with these people in them. I don’t see many plays that leave a lump in my throat or my eyes wet. This one did.

I’m going back tomorrow, because that’s the only time I can. Show runs through June 9. Don’t miss this. When people talk about what’s amazing about Houston’s arts community, it’s work like this that they mean.

Trust me. I know things.

Egan on Twitter: It’s like your grandpa trying to rap

Last year, I read the otherwise brilliant A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It’s a fine (and interestingly structured) novel of modern life, but it’s marred pretty seriously by a hamfisted stab at “modernity” or “experimentalism”: Egan renders one chapter as a PowerPoint-style presentation (presumably because in her life as a writer she’s never really exposed to the horror that is PowerPoint in American business life).

No, I’m not kidding. It’s the sort of overly precious goofball conceit you sometimes see in experimental writers (and Egan has certainly got some metafiction DNA), but not really in good ones. Frankly, I completely support attempting something like this — I mean, why not? — but part of being “experimental” is knowing when to wash your attempts down the lab drain instead of foisting them on a reading public.

Obviously, opinions vary on this — Goon Squad won big awards — but as a veteran of an English department I know all too well that some writers’ shit doesn’t stink, and that authors with the reputation Egan has can get away with things that others couldn’t. Sometimes, they’re even praised for it. Inshallah.

Anyway, fresh off the goofball presentation chapter, we find now the news that Egan will tweet a short story for the New Yorker. What’s hilarious, sad, and graspy about this is that Egan has no real Twitter presence today. There’s nothing linked on her site, and a Google search turns up only an account (@EganGoonSquad) presumably started to promote her last book, and probably not run by her at all. It hardly matters; there are only 7 tweets spread between August 2010 and the day before yesterday.

What this suggests is that, like the PowerPoint gimmick, this will be a nonnative usage of an established form by a writer mining for novelty, not narrative or story or character. Egan is not a digital native. She has no real online presence, nor any real engagement with social media or blogging or anything of the sort. Consequently, what’s likely to happen is that she’ll chop a story into 140-character bits, have an assistant type it in, and bask in the glow of an “experimental short story” that’s essentially free of any experimental character; after all, serialization is a 19th century technique.

If she or her editors had any grasp of the culture of Twitter, this might’ve been interesting. Twitter is not a broadcast medium; Twitter is a conversation. Chopping an otherwise unremarkable short story into 140-character pieces isn’t particularly inventive, and is unlikely to include anything unique to the form.

Further, Egan’s little stunt overshadows the countless inventive uses of Twitter already happening — there’s fiction there, and character-based commentary, and a whole host of other genuinely novel expressions that Egan apparently knows nothing about.

What we’re left with, then, is an old-school magazine (which I love) and a Boomer writer establishing in a very public way how little they understand about the online world. Again.

Unfollow.

Dept. of Missed Opportunities

The iPad is now in its third year, and it’s difficult to overstate the impact its had on computing, especially portable computing. I know it’s certainly changed the way I interact with the richness of the web, for example, and has made it vastly easier to have a ridiculous amount of information just a few taps away — and on a big screen. I love that.

Because I am a giant literature nerd, though, one of the most exciting developments on the iPad was, at least for me, this edition of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot’s masterwork. Dense with allusion and reference, it’s a poem that’s launched a thousand dissertations and annotations. And the folks at TouchPress realized they could bundle the text with reams of backing information, readings, annotations, and reference material in a single beautiful package on the iPad.

(Older Heathen will remember that there were attempts at this sort of rich publishing model in the initial CD-ROM boom, but the iPad gives us a much richer experience.)

I hoped that the warm reception (and immediate financial success) of The Waste Land app would mean we’d see similar treatments of important works — and especially important works that were logistically hard to carry around. The two that I’d most love to see are Ulysses and Infinite Jest, which also happen to be two of my favorite novels. In either case I’d gleefully pay for a work again just to have a bundled experience of the quality delivered with The Waste Land.

And yet: Nothing. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed, either. Won’t someone make this happen?

Dept. of Crazybats in Houston

Local shutterbug and tech guru Jay Lee cuts a relatively wide path in Houston between his column at the Chronicle and his radio show over at KPFT. He’s also been investigating just how often his (quite good) photography is being used illegally by other sites.

This story of what happened when GoDaddy (correctly) shut down one offending site is pretty amazing. tl;dr? The site owner — some local lawyer named Candice Schwager — went full crazybats on him, accusing him of being in cahoots with her political enemies, threatening to sue, and the whole nine yards. Seriously wackdoodle stuff.

For maximum lulz, read her account and compare it to Jay’s. We’re not friends, but we have lots of friends in common; he’s a nice, friendly guy who would just prefer folks not view his Flickr stream as a stock photo catalog, and he’s within his rights to feel that way.

Well, Candy, welcome to Google.

Update: Jay had to take down the post, but there’s a mirror here, which happened after the post made it to Slashdot. Meanwhile, the attorney bullying him still has her one-sided rant about it over on her blog. What a tool.

Dept. of Obsessive Attention to Detail in Mad Men

It should surprise precisely nobody that Matthew Weiner is very, very careful about the correct current events in Mad Men, even including what play Don and Megan went to see.

(Also cute: the modern Hare Krishna movement — more formally known as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON — was founded in New York in 1966, just months before the last night’s Christmastime episode.)

Update: It gets deeper. I’m informed via the Well that:

  • The diner Crane and Kinsey meet in at the end of the episode is identifiably Ratner’s, which happens to be just down the street from an actual ISKCON storefront on 2nd Avenue.

  • Mohawk was hit by a strike in December of 1966, which lasted until the end of January.

Yet more reasons to love Miles Davis

From this Guardian piece, pointed out to us by BoingBoing:

In 1987, he was invited to a White House dinner by Ronald Reagan. Few of the guests appeared to know who he was. During dinner, Nancy Reagan turned to him and asked what he’d done with his life to merit an invitation. Straight-faced, Davis replied: “Well, I’ve changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fuck the president?”