Category Archives: Writing
“I’m going to chop my left arm off with my dresser drawer.” My daughter holds herself in a Karate Kid meets Chubby Checker pose. “And put it in a sling and die.”
It would be funny, if she weren’t so damned serious.
If someone said “Nothing against women writers, but all of my favorite crime fiction authors happen to be men,” how would you respond?
Fuck you.
Probably, then I’d walk away.
If I didn’t. If I stayed and kept chatting, I’d add something like this:
Seriously. It’s the twenty first century, and you appear not to notice how offensive the phrase “nothing against women” is, or how it suggests, right off the bat, that you find the women’s works inferior. Also, you are an idiot if you didn’t notice you’re talking to a woman mystery author, so you are implying that you have no desire to read my work at all because it’s sure to be inferior to a man’s writing.… Read the rest
On Jury Duty: Point Four: What Happened to Innocent Until Proven Guilty?
What the fuck happened to innocent until proven guilty?
People don’t grasp the law. I don’t mean the fiddly bits even lawyers barely understand. I’m talking basics. If I am ever arrested, God save me from a jury of my peers.
In any criminal trial, the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof is on the prosecutorial team. The defendant need not prove innocence. The prosecutor must prove guilt. The judge reminded the jury pool of this as the selection process began.
And yet.
Through their answers, numerous of my peers revealed they clearly presupposed the defendant’s guilt and considered their own presence a technicality.… Read the rest
On Jury Duty: Point Three: The State of Alabama is Actually a Really Small Town
Alabama is the biggest small town on the planet.
I said before that a large part of the federal jury selection process involves repeating the answers already given on the million page questionnaire. For the most part, the judge could have given us copies of the forms we’d returned and said, “if you said yes and this would bias you, speak now or forever hold your peace.” But he didn’t, and we went through all of it verbally.
A shocking number of us responded to the “aside from traffic violations, have you or a family member ever been convicted of or arrested for a misdemeanor or felony?”… Read the rest
On Jury Duty: Point Two: The Whole System is Screwball
The system itself is often dumber than the people wrangled in. For all its specifics on a number of important points, the jury duty summons letter skips a basic bit of information. It doesn’t say, “You will, without question, be here until lunch the first day. If you are selected, you will be present through lunch for the length of the trial. You may bring lunch into the building.” In fact, it says nothing about eating whatsoever. Nobody on my panel was under any illusion of getting sequestered and fed by the courts (though all of us seemed to know that part.) … Read the rest
On Jury Duty: Point one: Some people are stupid as shit
In thirty seven years, I’ve never been summoned for jury duty. My number was due to come up, and it did, in the federal system. I knew dates when I scheduled my breast reduction surgery, and the doctor’s office thought I’d be fine to go sit around in a courtroom five days after having my chest sliced to ribbons. (They were right – breast tissue hasn’t got many nerve endings, so I don’t have much pain.) I was not ultimately assigned to a panel, and I don’t have to go back, so it wound up being a short term gig for me.… Read the rest
Our house has several circles of hell Dante never thought of. Today, I’m thinking in particular of Sock Hell. This is the underworld of mismatched socks, where no two look quiiite close enough to each other to be worn together in public.
But it’s worse than that. Sock Hell is a crowded place. In fact, because there are so very many socks in it, redemption is nearly impossible. The socks are damned as much because mates can languish nearly side by side, unmatched when one, perhaps is faded more than the other, or one (but not the other) acquires a fine glaze of pink paint when I tromp through something fresh I am coating.… Read the rest
When Emma was a poet, she wrote books even the least well-read listener enjoyed. She remains popular now only in academic circles and lives off her investments. She stays indoors, cloistered by agoraphobia, though she hungers for companionship. I hold the Huddleston chair at our University because I am her translator, the one person who can still walk inside and carry her words out again.
She’s moving from her house to an apartment across town, and we’ve been packing for weeks. Her psychiatrist thinks this means she’s finally coming out of isolation. But she and I know it’s merely a new phase of her particular funk.… Read the rest