Ken Fermoyle, Author and Bookseller

Email/Contact Info: kfermoyle@earthlink.net, Phone: 818 346-9384

Current Publisher and/or Agent: 2 agents currently interested in repping for the Vietnam book: “Hawks, Doves And The Dragon”, no agent yet for incomplete mystery. I have never worked with an agent for my freelance non-fiction (mostly magazine articles, some ghostwritten for others). Sold my 1st two freelance articles (Sports Car Racing on Frozen Michigan Lakes) direct to editors in 1952 and never saw a need to change.

Published Work(s):

“Mankind in Transition: A View of the Distant Past, the Present & the Far Future”; Author: Masse Bloomfield; Masefield Books, Canoga Park, CA, 1993 – edited and produced while a co-publisher in Masefield Books. Non-fiction

“How To Use A Library”; Author: Masse Bloomfield; Masefield Books, Canoga Park, CA, 1992 – edited and produced while a co-publisher in Masefield Books. Non-fiction.

Produced and edited three software user manuals for Genoa Technology, 1989-1992.

Wrote 75% of book (an annual softcover) on 4-Wheel-Drive vehicles and driving for Petersen Publishing in 1975.

Have had more than 2,600 articles published in everything from Playboy, Popular Science and PC World to Motor Life, McCall’s, MacWeek, Mechanix Illustrated, Better Camping, Wheels Afield, Microtimes, Computer Currents, L.A. Times Book Review, Detroit News, Outdoors Calling, and too many more to recall.

I think I anticipated the current trend toward multiple career changes by a generation or two – but always in writing and/or editing jobs. I started in weekly and daily newspapers, did a stint as house organ editor and speech writer at Ford’s Research and Engineering Center in Dearborn –where I first started freelancing. Swtiched to magazines full-time in 1955 (Motor Life, Petersen Publishing) and was auto editor of Popular Science in late, 1950s, early 1960s.

Sidetracked into advertising and PR for 5 years in mid-1960s, returned to magazines in 1966 when I moved to California as editor of Petersen’s Wheels Afield (a camping and RV magazine). Got into corporate publications in 1977 at Hughes Aircraft, where I began using computers and became the electronic publishing guru for our publishing group. Started freelancing for computer publications in 1984 and moonlighted as a partner in a pioneering desktop publishing service bureau in 1986. Took early retirement in 1989 to devote full time to freelance writing and publishing. Had syndicated computer column with up to 500 editor and webmaster subscribers from 1997 to 2001. Have been working on Vietnam book since early 1990s, started mystery novel in 2001, just after “opening” an online bookstore.

How did you get started writing professionally? About what subject? What interested you about that subject? Did/does the subject tie into something in your personal or professional (pre-writing) life? And, have you always written, as while you were growing up and long before trying to get published that first time?

Decided I wanted to be a writer at age 11 or 12. A Detroit News columnist, H.C.L. Jackson and, later, Ernie Pyle, inspired me, along with authors as varied as Kenneth Roberts, Hemingway, Thorne Smith, P. G. Wodehouse, Nordhoff & Hall and Upton Sinclair.

My first pro job was as sort of an intern on a weekly labor paper published by the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, beginning in 1947 while a freshman journalism major at the University of Detroit. They started paying me $5/day after a month. Moved up to a large weekly, The Highland Parker, as sports editor, feature writer and proofreader (luckily they had a janitor!) in 1948.

What type of worker are you when you write, i.e., do you write at certain times, or for a certain amount of hours daily, in long stretches straight through, as the spirit moves you, or???

I’ve done it both ways. As an auto writer and editor, I often worked 18-20 hours straight on deadlines for new car issues. I have never been able to discipline myself to work X many hours per day. I often get up at night, however, to write thoughts, sentences or long sections that have come to me.

Did you ever take any school or adult education courses in writing? If so, what, and did they help you? If you are a technical writer, have you taken courses in that area?

Although a Journalism major, I took nearly as many English and Lit courses in college. I’ve taken some post-grad writing courses (screenwriting, novel) at UCLA and extension programs, plus the outstanding Professional Publishing concentrated summer program at Stanford. But I’ve actually taught more writing courses than I’ve taken, beginning as early as 1952, when I taught several journalism classes at the University of Detroit. I’ve taught many classes on successful magazine writing, producing newsletters and desktop publishing over the years.

Do you conceive of an entire story or subject line to be covered in your head before starting to write, or do you get just an idea and sit down, outline it and flesh it out, or???

I seldom use outlines. For articles, I focus on a subject, write a head and summary “query” paragraph or two (for submission to editors). I begin with the lead (hardest part, most often) and a rough outline of the piece in my head. I most often write the 1st draft in one sitting for 1,000- to 2,000-word pieces, two or three sittings for longer pieces. Then I do a quick edit/revise and walk away from it for a couple or hours or longer, depending on deadline pressure. Usually I do a final reading/revise and off it goes.

For the Vietnam book, my subject and I (it’s a memoir) started with a rough outline. After much trial and error, we developed a routine. We work on a chapter at a time. My subject (and colleague for 15 years, beginning with our desktop publishing endeavor) prepares an outline and some anecdotal material. We do taping sessions (1 to 2 hours, enough for 8 to 12 pages) in which he fleshes out the outline and I ask questions. I write a first draft, usually with quite a few parenthetical notes and questions, go over it and make some revisions, then e-mail it to him. He inserts his comments and answers and gives me a hard copy when we get together for another taping session.

With my mystery novel, I started with an idea for the first chapter and a cast of main characters reasonably well fleshed out in my mind. (I gradually built bios for them and others who cropped up later.) Unlike most of my articles and the Vietnam book, I did not have a working title – and still don’t. I did have my first sentence:

“The body slid partway down the short slope, right hand splayed out on the bike path below, left heel hooked on the parking lot pavement above.”

Ideas and new twists have come to me as I progressed. I now have about 75% of it plotted out in my head.

If you have had a deadline for submitting work to a publisher, how did/does that affect you, i.e., have you ever found that having to produce on a schedule causes the creative juices to dry up?

I’ve long been accustomed to writing on tight deadlines so pressure doesn’t cause problems. In fact, I often write better under pressure when I don’t have time to agonize over every sentence.

Tell us how you first got published, and whether it was difficult that first time. Did you have an agent for that first published piece? Was it a book, an article, a paper, or what?

I wrote on my high school and college papers, but my first published pieces were in The Wage Earner, mostly short items I condensed from long articles or memos. My first bylined piece as a pro was an account of a farm workers’ strike in California. My first freelance pieces, both bylined, were about sports car racing on a frozen lake outside Detroit: a photo essay in the Detroit News Sunday Roto section and an article in a sports car magazine.

How do you feel about editors?? Does it disturb you or comfort you to have someone checking your work pre-publication?

Having worked as both an editor and a writer, I appreciate both sides of the coin. A good editor is invaluable to a writer – and vice versa. With my experience on both sides of the desk, I always tried to make things as easy as possible for editors with my freelance work (probably a major reason I have had only one article rejected in my career, and that was my own fault). That means being familiar with the publication’s style and following it, suggesting heads and subheads, finding decent art and photos – and, above all, knowing the audience that the publication addresses and writing to it.

Best editor I ever worked with was Frank Rowsome, managing editor of Popular Science while I was auto editor. He was a gem.

Having been a magazine and book editor but not yet a published book author, I hope I find the cooperation and useful guidance in editors for my books that I tried to provide authors in the past.

How are you (or your publisher or agent) publicizing your current work?

Not really applicable yet but I expect to use the Web, personal appearances, interviews, self-generated PR releases, etc., as much as possible. A lot depends on who publishes the books and how much they contribute. I think my past PR experience will be an asset.

Have you ever been on a tour with one of your books? If so, what is that like? Did you find that it helped increase sales of your book?

Not applicable yet, though I have done a lot of PR for publications I’ve been involved with: personal appearances, radio talk shows, TV appearances, trade conventions, etc.

Can you tell us a bit about a book (or whatever format you are writing in) that you might be working on now or plan to start soon? If you do have another in the works, are you writing a series, on the same subject as your last work, or on something totally different?

I talked a bit about this above but can add some tidbits. “Hawks, Doves And The Dragon” is about a man, Tran Ngoc Chau, who played a singular variety of roles in Vietnam from WWII to 1975. While a teen-ager, he served as a courier for a resistance cell against the Japanese and their puppet French government. He joined the National Army of Liberation under Ho Chi Minh, with tens of thousands of other nationalists, in 1945. After rising to the equivalent rank of Major or Lt. Colonel, he left the Viet Minh late in 1949 when pressured to join the Communist Party, casting his lot with the newly-created South Vietnam. He was in the first graduating class of the South Vietnamese Military Academy and served with distinction (6 medals, including the country’s highest, the National Medal of Honor.) Tapped by President Diem for a relatively minor job in the late 1950s, he became virtually the only Buddhist member of Diem’s inner circle and was appointed governor of Kien Hoa province and mayor of Da Nang. He returned to Kien Hoa as governor after the coup in which Diem was assassinated. But I’m running on and into too much detail. Chau’s story is a complex one. His efforts drew many Americans to him, including Daniel Ellsberg, John Paul Vann (the “civilian general”) and many more.

In fact, when President Thisu (a former friend) had Chau arrested and imprisoned him in 1967 because Chau was beginning to represent a threat to the Thieu regime, many of Chau’s U.S. friends were incensed. Reports were that this action, tacitly supported by the CIA and Saigon U.S. Embassy who were trying to keep Thieu in power, was the last straw that convinced Ellsberg to release the Pentagon Papers – and Ellsberg has pretty much agreed that was the case.

My mystery is set in Ventura, CA, a seaside down on the lower part of the Central Coast – about 45-50 miles from L.A. Protagonist is a bookstore owner (!) but an atypical one. Kevin Corcoran retired at 37 (entered the USNA at 17) after more than 15 years as an Office of Naval Intelligence agent. He buys Main Street Books with an inheritance from an uncle and settles in to a peaceful life – until a member of an informal group of readers who meet at his store (and call themselves the Main Street Regulars) is murdered. He works with a Ventura PD detective (Miguel “Big Mike” Morales) and a beautiful investigative reporter (Marisa) to solve the murder. First suspected as a drug killing, it turns out the young victim was providing marijuana for seniors in the mobile home park where he lived – and arranging to get low-cost drugs for them in Mexico as well.

As the case develops, the trio learns that the hit-and-run death of a Ventura County official may not have been an accident. It seems too much of a coincidence when another official is listed as a suicide and a third dies in a suspicious drowning down in San Diego County. Were they potential whistle-blowers silenced to prevent them from blowing the lid off a huge scandal in County government? My plan is to have the first murder and the scandal connected by the final denouement. I have it pretty well figured out but haven’t plotted the exact details yet.

Could you please give us a synopsis of your current book/work and, if a series, what the whole series is about?

See above.

Tell us a bit about how you go about doing research for your work?

The Internet makes research so-o-o much easier today. What used to take days, even weeks, of endless phone calls and letter-writing now can be accomplished in hours. I have used search engines extensively for about 6 years. They are especially helpful for finding technical, historical, company/product and many other types of information. Learning how to use various search techniques is important.

Some things still require hours of reading, library time and correspondence. This has been particularly true of the Vietnam book. (I have become a minor expert on the country over the past 12 years.) For my mystery, I have to determine if the city of Oceanside, CA or San Diego County require autopsies in drowning deaths where there were no witnesses and there are indications that it might have been homicide. I also need to learn more about the structure of Ventura County government, recent slow-growth laws, the permit process and building inspection practices. That will take a few days in Ventura – a most pleasant duty.

Any stories about the hazards of trying to make your way as a writer, particularly when starting out?

I’ve been lucky enough to support myself and my family solely as a writer/editor and journalist. I didn’t make much money in the early years on newspapers – and I never got rich though I never had to live in a garret – but things picked up when I got into magazine work. And I’ve supplemented my income by freelancing over the years.

Any advice to aspiring writers on finding an agent or contacting publishers?

Write, and keep on writing – whether you aspire to journalism, novels, poetry, screenwriting or whatever. A 10th grade English class hammered that home for me. The teacher announced the first day of class that we had to write 1 page of something every day, no matter what other assignments he gave us. It could be an essay, poem, short-short story, slice-of-life…anything – but it had to be at least a page of normal handwriting. It was torture at first but some of us came to enjoy it, and looked forward to reading our work to the class.

I’ve found that concentrating on things that interest me and I know something about works best for me.

Are you a reader? If so, what types of things do you enjoy reading? Do you ever buy your own reading material online (had to ask that one!)?

Oh boy, am I a reader! I was sickly as a youngster (asthma, bronchitis, a few bouts of pneumonia) so I missed a lot of school. No TV then, so reading became my passion. At about 10, I read 25 books in 5 days one summer week. All my friends were away on vacation so I went to the library, read a book there, took home my allotted 4 books, read them that afternoon and evening – then repeated the procedure for the next 4 days. Admittedly, these were mostly Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys and Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazon novel – but not the skinny, large-print “children’s books,” either. My major reading feat, however, was finishing both Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time And The River by Thomas Wolfe one quiet Sunday while in the Army. I finished up after Lights Out by reading in the latrine.

And I have bought reading material online.

What other types of things do you enjoy doing, besides writing? Any hobbies? Pets? Sports? Traveling? Gardening? Music or art, etc.?

I have traveled a lot all my life, some of it in the line of duty (press junkets, covering events such as races, the Mobile Economy Run, conventions, etc). My wife and I have been to the Pismo Beach area, Palm Springs and Maui so far this year, with trips planned to the High Sierras, Newport Beach and New Orleans later this year. During my camping period (1961-1976), I camped from Canada to Mexico, Maine to California and loved it.

I was a serious cyclist for more than a decade (1980s-1990s); amassed about 34,000 miles before an old neck injury forced me to cut back. I still ride, but no more centuries (100-mile rides), weekly averages of 100- to 125-mile weeks or age-group competition anymore.

Crossword puzzles are a life-long passion; love the NY Times Sunday puzzles especially.

Cooking is another long-time interest. Got interested while stationed in Rome in the Army. Took my first cooking class in 1950 from a great Austrian chef, and later became his assistant for a time. I’ve since attended the odd cooking class during my travels. I do almost all the cooking for my wife and I. Specialties include Gumbo, Jambalaya and other Cajun/Creole dishes; curries and other Indian dishes; various stir-fry combination (I have a great wok), and stewed chicken and dumplings with a Southwest tilt (includes bell and chili peppers, tomatillos and chayote squash).

Please tell us anything else about yourself you’d like us to know, either personal or professional, and thank you very much for allowing us to interview you!

*Writing speeches for Earle S. MacPherson, inventor of the MacPherson Strut front suspension which was virtually the de facto standard for many years. He was a true gentleman as well as a brilliant engineer.

*Covering the Indy 500 13 times, covering Daytona Speed Weeks and the 500 in the 1950s when they ran on the old beach and road course – then covering many races at the Tri-Oval after it was built – and even driving around it with Bill France as a passenger.

*Doing my first “foreign correspondent” bit, covering a soccer match for Reuters circa 1948-49.

*Selling a piece to Playboy in 1967.

*Being wooed for the auto editor job at Pop Science.

*Being paid $1 per word the first time for a freelance article.

*Making my TV debut by doing the middle commercial on “The Day Lincoln Was Shot” at CBS in Hollywood, 1957. The show was done live with Raymond Massey as Lincoln, Elsa Lancaster as Mrs. Lincoln, Jack Lemmon as his assassin, Charles Laughton as narrator – and I was in the studio watching. BTW, Bing Crosby did one of the other commercials.

Not career stuff, but memorable moments…

*Spending a year in Rome (1945-46 in the Army

*Winning the flyweight boxing championship of Camp Wolters, TX

*Winning several drag race competitions in the ’50s.

*Winning both my class (65 and up) and overall in the Gold Coast Tri-County Senior Olympic

bicycle race in 1992. And loving how teed off the 55-year-old 2nd place finisher was to find some 10 years older had been the one to pass him on the last lap.

*Returning to Rome last year – after 52 years – and still loving it…while surprising myself at how fast my Italian, learned all those years ago, came back.

#authors #booksellers

Marjorie Helms, author of “Not In Front of the Children”

The background is that I was a First Amendment lawyer for many years at the American Civil Liberties Union. By the mid-90’s it became clear to me that a lot of the censorship issues that we were confronting on a daily basis were premised on a widespread assumption (rarely analyzed or discussed in any depth) that we needed to have censorship to protect minors. Some people thought that any sexually explicit information in education, art, or any form of entertainment, was harmful to minors. Of course, those are very broad categories.

I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t seen any good resources exploring the history of this assumption or analyzing what it really meant and to what extent it was true, so I decided to take some time off and try to do a really thorough research job. And I wanted to produce a book that would be useful in what I anticipated would be ongoing debates about minors and censorship and free expression, especially with the internet and all the fears that surrounded the development of that new technology. As I was doing research, the topic grew from what had begun essentially as a legal history of how indecency to minors and censorship laws came into being into a much more thorough examination of cultural history and social science research on media violence.

One of the points you make in your book is that many of the arguments are based on the presumed innocence of children. You have mentioned in your book that in the past children weren’t always presumed innocent.

The innocence that you refer to is generally in a sexual sense. Children are ignorant for the most part of sexual facts but it’s not at all clear that they are innocent of sexual impulses. In fact the contrary is true; and I began to look into that particular notion. I found that even in the West, in Western Europe, the notion that children had to be protected from sexual information or coarse language because of their so-called sexual innocence, didn’t become a strongly held belief, an institutionally and socially-enforced belief, until about the late 17th century. Then what you see is the development of some rather appalling measures for controlling sexual practices, such as youthful masturbation. Then finally by the end of the 19th century, you begin to have obscenity and indecency controls to censor what might be considered erotically arousing literature, again ostensibly in the interests of protecting innocent children.

Throughout its history the Supreme Court seems to have used different standards in determining whether something should be censored or not. ‘Offends taste’ seems to be behind many of the decisions rather than an actual ‘does harm to children’ or ‘community standards’ idea. Could you talk about some of the different standards? What do you see prevailing right now?

These first obscenity laws explicitly incorporated what was going to be criminally prosecutable and suppressible in the area of sexual artistry or expression: that which might deprave and corrupt a vulnerable mind. And that was in fact the obscenity standard for art and literature for the next hundred years.

Only gradually did judges in both England and America realize that this meant we were essentially reducing the availability of literature and art for the entire adult population to what was thought would not be too shocking to a kindergartner. Gradually the obscenity standard got narrowed, but meanwhile the politics of ‘harm to minors,’ the political rhetoric, and the strong feelings and anxieties that surrounded what was appropriate in terms of education, continued to be a very powerful political issue.

Other standards then came into play, which the book documents–hopefully in a fashion that is both interesting and readable, and at times humorousbecause it is humorous, especially when you get into the Federal Communications Commission and its Indecency Standard. That Standard focuses largely on the use of certain words that are considered vulgar, such as where the FCC punished a radio station for an interview with the rock guitarist Jerry Garcia because he used expletives. There are lots of other instances where literary readings, discussions among community members about Gay rights, and other subjects were considered taboo and were found to violate this Indecency Standard–which is very broad and wide-ranging and basically turns on whether a particular community considers something to be patently offensive.

There’s yet another standard, the harm to minors standard, which is sort of in between. It has a huge number of problems in terms of what age group we’re talking about, i.e., what is harmful to a17-year old is not the same as what might be considered inappropriate or harmfuland the words are not clearly distinguishedto a 10-year old. These standards are important now that we have the internet, which has generated a whole new round of extremely problematic censorship laws–basically driven by this widespread fear of kids encountering pornography on the internet. This is something that happens, and probably will continue to happen, as long as kids find sex to be an interesting subject.

We have had three internet censorship laws. The first used this very broad Indecency Standard, and was struck down by the Supreme Court; the second used the somewhat narrower Harmful to Minors Standard, and is currently under consideration; and the third is a standard which doesn’t use any standard at all. It delegates censorship responsibility to privately manufactured internet filters.

Can you briefly summarize what the issues are with the internet filters?

Filters are mechanical creations of private companies that by definition have to rely on mechanical means in large part in order to determine what should be blocked, because there are considerably more than a billion internet sites. The first major problem is that they essentially rely on key words and phrases, which has led to numerous examples of blocked sites that are not in any way sexual or otherwise problematic. My particular favorite example is the library at the University of Kansas, ‘Archie Barr Dykes Memorial Library.’ There are numerous other examples: ‘pussy willows,’ ‘at least 18,’ etc. Sometimes it’s a phrase, not a word. You’ll find those phrases on porn sites, but you’ll also find them on lots of other news, journalistic, etc., sites.

The companies say, ‘oh, we don’t use keywords any more. That was a problem with the very primitive first, generation internet filtering software.’ But of course they do. They call it artificial intelligence, but it amounts to keywords and phrases found in certain combinations, and if they are found frequently enough on certain pages, those pages are automatically blocked. These censorship devices vastly over-block in a way that’s mindless.

The second problem is that, to the extent they do have individuals reviewing content, they’re going to be doing it according to the particular moral, political and religious ideological attitudes of the filter manufacturers. These are private companies and it’s in fact been documented recently that a number of them have strong ties to the religious right, which sort of makes sense because that is a portion of the political spectrum that is very interested in censorship according to its own moral views.

So, for example, even when you get outside the area of sexual content, a lot of these filters have numerous categories, and you, or the schools, or the library, can decide which categories to activate. One example would be ‘Alternative Lifestyles’ or ‘Occult.’ In both of those there’s tremendous room for subjectivity in deciding what is ‘occult,’ and what is a form of religious expression that’s not mainstream. So you immediately have discrimination against non-mainstream religious beliefs. It’s the same with Alternative Lifestyles. Does it exclude all Gay and Lesbian sites?

And finally, the internet filters are produced by private companies. They are mainly interested in profit; they keep their particular technologies and, in many cases, their lists of blocked sites secret. When you have a law like the Children’s Internet Protection Act**, just passed at the end of 2000, and it mandates that all schools and libraries that receive forms of Federal financial assistance for internet access install these filters, then what congress has done is to order schools and libraries around the country to turn over their educational decision-making to these private, profit-making, secretive, companies.

Amazon.com seems to have a filter for books that we list, i.e., won’t let us list books with ‘Washita River’ in the title. That’s picking out words within the middle of a word and seems a totally unrefined kind of system.

It’s especially sad when a bookseller is going to adopt one of these filters.

In your writings you indicate censorship can be traced to Plato and his proscriptions. We know that he didn’t think poetry was of the gods, and essentially established a state of “wise” men to censor. Do you want to explain a little bit more? And also tell us the tradition on which you base the principle of freedom of expression.

I got interested in Plato both because I wanted to do a thorough job and because one of the important school censorship cases of in the late 90’s was based on his views. A lot of censorship of kids happens in the school environment and in litigation in that area. The courts have gotten more conservative in respecting the free expression rights of teachers and students. In one such case, a drama teacher was punished for teaching her advanced acting class a play that, like a lot of theater throughout history, dealt with some difficult scenes–in this case, divorce and homosexuality. Some community members complained, the teacher got punished, and a lawsuit got filed which rejected the teacher’s claim that her rights were in any way infringed by this punishment. The court, a very conservative Court of Appeals, quoted Plato’s Republic.

I start the book with a quote from Plato, which is, of course, an argument for a completely totalitarian society run bysometimes the translation is philosopher kings but the actual closer translation is ‘guards.’ They are to censor anything that is considered immoral or inappropriate, including tales of the gods and heroes because they often had sexual adventures. Plato’s Republic especially proscribes strict censorship for the young because they are considered to be very impressionable, and should not hear anything but virtuous thoughts.

That Platonic tradition of strict censorship and suspicion of art, expression and free thought– that view of art– is what we would call a reductive view of art. It is a view that doesn’t take into account ambiguity or irony, or the notion that different people process the same material in different ways.

It also doesn’t take into account the well-known cathartic function of art where you have something very violent represented and it does not, for the most part, cause someone to go imitate the art but instead seems to have a cathartic effect of purging angry and violent impulses. In this view, art has a releasing effect. Plato was not interested in any such complexities of subject matter; instead had a more straightforward reductive view, i.e., if you see something violent and you have an impressionable mind, you will become a violent person yourself. So there was that tradition which we still have with us in our very contemporary debates over media violence.

The countervailing tradition I trace to Aristotle who was, of course, a student of Plato. Aristotle first articulated the notion of catharsis as he observed it in audiences watching Greek tragic dramas. This is an idea that can also be traced through history, and Freud understood the cathartic process of dreams and play, children’s play. People today, in this area of politics and censoring youth, sometimes confuse fantasy and fantasy play with aggressive tendencies in real life. So you have these two conflicting views of how bardic expression impacts on people.

Those are reflected in the legal arguments over free expression and the First Amendment. Those who would oppose censorship even for young people, and would support more of an intellectual freedom approach, generally understand literature and art and information and expression not to have simplistically reductive effects, but to be processed by human beings in very individualistic ways.

With the internet, is there a move even now to have the standard be what is appropriate for children even though adults are using the internet?

Yes, that is in fact the inevitable effect of these internet censorship laws. In fact, the primary reason for the very first of them, the Communications Decency Act of ’96, incorporated this very broad FCC indecency standard to censorship of the entire internet. The primary reason that law was struck down, the Court said, was that it reduces the adult population of publishers and speakers and readers and viewers on the internet to what it considered only appropriate to children, and that clearly violates the First Amendment. That’s a well-established principle, although it wasn’t always.

The problem with the internet is that to some extent unmonitored content can be directed at kids. If you have a bookstore or video store and somebody who obviously looks young wants to rent a video from the adult section, the clerk at the store can ask for ID if they think the transaction might run afoul of the state harmful to minors law. But an adult would have access to that video. On the internet, there’s no clerk looking to see if you’re over or under 18. As the Act developed, it became obvious that any attempt to have an adult ID system to screen out minors from so-called ‘indecent content’ would be very expensive, very burdensome, and very problematic. This, combined with the fact the indecency standard was incredibly broad and nobody really knew what ‘patently offensive’ meant, was fatal to that first internet law. But the problem of not being able to identify who is a kid online plagues any effort to censor the internet. So this is a continuing problem.

The most recent of the internet censorship laws, which we’ve already talked about a little–the one that requires internet filters to be installed in schools and libraries (called the Children’s Internet Protection Act**, so who of course could vote against it)–doesn’t only apply to children. All computers in schools, even if they’re only computers used by staff and teachers, have to have filters. All computers in libraries have to have filters. So again this ‘harmful to minors’ rhetoric gets used and it’s really an open question. There are a lot of people who sincerely believe yes, minors have to be censored, they are impressionable. They may only disagree about what. There are a lot of others, however, who use the ‘harmful to minors’ rhetoric but what they are really after is censoring the entire community. And that is reflected in some of these very broad laws and proposals.

You seem to have suggested that the courts follow public opinion, at some times strong on censorship, at others, more for free expression.

Oh sure. I’ve practiced civil liberties law long enough to know that the courts are always responsive to public opinion. As Mr. Dewey said, “The Supreme Court Justices follow the headlines.” That’s not to say there isn’t some legal reasoning involved and that on occasion you may actually find a judge who sticks to principles. But particularly in areas like the First Amendment where there’s a constant balancing of societal interests, you can see quite clearly that the courts are responding to the social pressures.

What Supreme Court Justice has been the most helpful in clarifying and opening up First Amendment rights?

William Brennan. He was a Justice who really grew. He was responsive. He had basically liberal instincts but he was very much a product of his time and early on he was responsive to politics and society round him, as judges inevitably are. Brennan even though we think of him as a great champion of civil liberties and especially the First Amendmentwas in fact the architect not only of our obscenity laws but also the ‘harmful to minors’ law.

In 1957, the court decided two cases. The first was a case in which the court attempted to delineate the line between obscenity that could be punished/prosecuted/suppressed and other art and information and speech about sexual subjects. The case is Roth v. the United States, and Brennan wrote the opinion. There were hopes among publishers and writers and others who were free-expression friendly that the Court would find that the First Amendment did not permit obscenity laws. Brennan didn’t do that. He crafted a compromise that narrowly defined what would be considered obscene and therefore punishable. About 16-17 years later (and in the interim there had been a lot of obscenity cases), Brennan came to realize there was no way to define obscenity: that this dividing line was imaginary and it had to turn on notions that were so subjective and vague that they couldn’t put any writer or publisher on notice of what was really on the wrong side of the line.

But Brennan grew and evolved and changed his mind; and he started dissenting in obscenity cases. He said that free expression is more important, that obscenity laws are chilling, and there’s just no way to know what these terms like ‘prurient interest’ or ‘patently offensive’ mean. After Roth, Brennan crafted this standard that I’ve referred to as the ‘harmful to minors standard,’ which is basically a variant on obscenity because he was responding to the common societal presumption that it was appropriate to have censorship for kids on materials that could not be censored for adults. He acknowledged such terms in the case of Ginsberg v. New York, the prosecution of a poor candy store owner who had sold a couple of girlie magazines to a 16-year old boy. The prosecution was upheld on the theory that censorship of this constitutionally-protected and fairly mild material was inappropriate for youth. But in his decision, Brennan said there was no empirical basis to believe these magazines would be harmful to minors, although the court would accept the New York Legislature’s judgment: that certain materials would somehow impair the ethical and moral development of youth. He had bought into a kind of notion of moralistic censorship, not that it hurts youth, but that society has an interest in communicating a message of disapproval to youth. Brennan never explicitly rejected the reasoning of that case as he did reject in later years the reasoning of the Roth case.

The last case I’ll mention is the Pacifica case, the ‘seven dirty words case,’ in which the Supreme Court by a very narrow vote upheld the FCC’s authority to punish radio and TV broadcasters for anything they considered to be indecent. Brennan writes a very impassioned and powerful dissent saying that the Justices are simply imposing their own conservative moral views on a very diverse American public, and that not all parents in our pluralistic society believe that hearing four-letter words is going to be harmful to their kids.

One of the commentaries on Amazon.uk criticizes your book for not taking into account ‘the increasing intrusiveness of sexually explicit materials into homes.’ The idea of intrusiveness and invasiveness seems to have become a significant argument. The commentator wants to keep the intrusive “garbage” and “poison” out of his house.

The invasiveness argument comes from the Pacifica case where the Supreme Court went out on a very long limb and adopted the FCC’s argument that radio and television could be censored in a way that printed material such as books and magazines could not, because they were invasive and they came into the home uninvited. Which of course is silly because you don’t have to turn them on any more than you have to buy a book or a newspaper. That argument was again used in the Communications Decency Act case: that the internet comes into your home uninvited and therefore full First Amendment protection shouldn’t apply. The Supreme Court rejected that argument.

To move away from the legal to the practical for a moment, that critic is voicing what is an understandable and fairly common concern among parents: that there’s no way you can put your kid in a fishbowl and prevent them from being exposed to mass media culture. ‘Garbage,’ yes. ‘Poison,’ they’re not. They are products of the human mind and cannot be reduced to a sort of physical nuisance. They have to be treated differently because they are in the realm of art and ideas and expression, which isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of bad stuff out there.

So how we respond to the concerns about intellectual or cultural ‘garbage?’ I address this by talking about the essential ineffectiveness of censorship and the possibly greater effectiveness of non-censorial methods of educating or socializing youth into being able to make judgments on their own, and being able to reject what are bad messages in popular culture. One of the ways that is encouraged in the U.S. is through media literacy education. We all need to be more critical consumers of mass media and there are ways, starting in the early grades, to teach kids to understand that ads they see on TV can be understood as expressing a certain ideology, or certain messages, or reflecting certain stereotypes, and that they can’t just take them all as gospel truth. They have to be more critical in their viewing of culture. That’s a way of actually immunizing kids that is better than rating schemes, filters, and indecency laws.

Do you find any country that comes close to assuring the First Amendment freedoms that you are bringing forth?

We are the only ones with the First Amendment, although there are many countries with similar provisions, and even some international conventionslike the European Convention on Human Rights–which concludes basically that the censorship impulse is very powerful in all cultures and using kids as the focus for the taboos and anxieties of a certain culture, is very common. So that is common to all cultures, but what is very different is the actual subject matter that is thought to be dangerous, harmful, offensive and inappropriate. In many European cultures, sexual explicitness and sexual information are just not considered of grave concern. In fact, it’s thought that children should get early, explicit, sex education.

The basic conclusion is that what any particular culture considers harmful or inappropriate to kids is very much culture driven. And we know very littleobjectivelyabout what, if any, art information, entertainment, expression, is going to have a truly psychological harmful or traumatic effect. Probably those kinds of judgments are just too individualized, and it depends on the child’s particular upbringing, temperament and intellect in every case.

I guess the best answer is that most Western societies (and many other societies) at this point have some kind of free expression principle like the First Amendment in their legal system. But, as in America, how that’s played out how the courts and other institutions balance the free expression principle with other countervailing principles that are thought to be important– is driven by the particular culture. In the European Court of Human Rights on censorship, one famous case involved a sex education pamphlet that was developed in the 1960’s and was distributed all over Europe. In England it was called the Little Red School Book, and in England they decided that this had to be suppressed to protect children from unconventional ideas about sexuality. The case went all the way to the Court of Human Rights, which deferred to the judgment of the English establishment–that this had to be censored because, they said, you had to balance the free expression principle and the European Convention of Human Rights against the particular interests of the society in protecting youth. So it was a balancing that depended very much on cultural attitudes in particular countries.

Let’s talk for a minute about the relationship between reading something and actually acting it out on the streets, both in terms of adults and children violence, sex, taking a political position (putting a peace symbol on the flag), etc. Out of this complex of ideas it seems that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon developed their ordinance.

In the mid 1980’s they became famous for propounding a new theory of censorship of sexual entertainment or expression that would be subordinating to women, and their theory was that exposure to this kind of expression would condition men to become rapists and very misogynistic, and associate sex with violence. They managed to get their ordinance passed in Indianapolis and it was challenged by the American Booksellers Association, and was struck down as a violation of the First Amendment.

Unlike obscenity laws, the MacKinnon/Dworkin ordinance did not have any protection for material that had serious educational or artistic or literary value. If it was subordinating to women, and had sexual content, it could be censored. The court said that was pretty clearly ‘viewpoint discrimination’ censoring material that, despite its value, censors might disagree with.

In Canada, the Canadian Supreme Court was persuaded to interpret the existing censorship law there as barring material that had this viewpoint of subordination in sexual relationships. One of the ironies of that decision was that the police and prosecutors and communities around the country, as well as the Customs Service in Canada, began to apply that through their own particular attitudes of what was subordinating. They targeted largely Gay and Lesbian and Feminist material, some of which had sexual content and some of which had very little sexual content. I think of one instance in which one author whose name had a Gay connotation but who wasn’t a Gay author, got held up in Customs. The Gay and Lesbian bookstore in Toronto was targeted, also.

It was a good illustration of what anti-censorship Feminists who opposed MacKinnon/Dworkin had been saying for a long time: that if you give the government the power to censor they are going to do it according to their prevailing ideology and not what you may have anticipated or looked for, and so it’s basically a bad idea.

In some of your earlier work you addressed issues that weren’t about freedom of expression. Can you tell us a little bit about “Strictly Ghetto Property”.

It was my first book, I was about 25, I was not a lawyer. It was about a political trial in San Francisco, involving six young Latin American activists who were charged with murdering a police officer. It became a cause celebre in the community. I was at that time a writer for alternative newspapers, and I started covering the case as it developed for some of these alternative newspapers. I eventually got asked by Ramparts Magazine, which just decided to start a little publishing house, to write a book about the case. “Strictly Ghetto Property” came out in ’75 and Ramparts Press shortly thereafter went out of business, so the book got lost. So it’s a bit of a collectors’ item and it’s an important little piece of San Francisco history. Every so often I get a call or an email from the activists in the Mission District of San Francisco who want the book as the basis for a film or a play–so it has a bit of an underground reputation. It actually doesn’t read too badly even after all these years.

“Cutting the Mustard”, what about that book?

“Cutting the Mustard” I wrote after I’d been in law practice for about five years and it was inspired by a case I litigated against Boston University. That case had some discrimination and free expression elements to it since it involved a woman who was fired from her position as Dean of Students at the School of Theology because the Dean of the school thought she was not adequately representing his political view on various sensitive issues like Affirmative Action. She had been involved in protesting along with students and other faculty a couple of hiring decisions, or refusals to hire, of a prominent Feminist scholar and a young Black scholar. The Boston School of Theology, it turns out, had a very rich tradition of social justice. For instance, Martin Luther King, Jr. studied there. So the faculty was much more activist and liberal than the Dean who had been appointed by the President of BU, John Silber, who is well-known for very conservative views. It became a very interesting case study in academic politics with a strong dose of religious politics thrown in. I represented the fired Dean of Students in what was ultimately an unsuccessful lawsuit, relying on various theories under discrimination law including retaliating against somebody who protested what they thought were discriminatory decisionslike this failure to hire this feminist professor. We lost the case in front of a jury but there was so much interesting history involved in the case–the memos that went back and forth and the struggle for the soul of this schoolthat I got it out of my system by writing a book called “Cutting the Mustard”, about the case and the larger debate over affirmative action in universities.

And “Sex, Sin and Blasphemy”?

Well, to continue the biography. At the time I litigated the BU School of Theology case, I was a young lawyer at the Massachusetts Office of the American Civil Liberties Union, and I remained there doing civil rights and civil liberties work for a number of years. Then in the early 90’s, I came to the national office of the ACLU in New York to start a project on art censorship. That was just around the time the National Endowment for the Arts became front page news because Jesse Helms and others were complaining that it had funded inappropriate art work by Robert Mappelthorpe and a number of other artists. In the late 80’s and early 90’s obscenity laws for the past 20 years at least had been generally understood as primarily directed against hard-core pornography. But in ’89 and ’90, obscenity laws started to be used by prosecutors in a couple of places to go after non-pornographythe famous prosecution of the Cincinnati Art Museum for exhibiting a retrospective show of Robert Mapplethorpe’s works, for example. They were prosecuted for obscenity and that was quite unusual. Rap groups and music stores were prosecuted under obscenity laws for rap music. All of this led to the creation of an Arts Censorship Project at the national office of the ACLU. About two years into that job, the New Press, which is a non-profit social justice-oriented small press in New York City and which had worked with ACLU people on a couple of books, asked me to do a little guide book on censorship issues. So “Sex, Sin and Blasphemy” came out in ’93 and the 2nd edition came out in ’98 with some updated material on the lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Arts–or rather challenging some censorship provision that Congress had forced down the throat of the National Endowment for the Arts–and some other updating. It’s really a guide book, unlike “Not in Front of the Children”, which is an attempt to be a more in-depth and scholarly investigation of a particular issue down through history. “Sex, Sin and Blasphemy” is certainly shorter and simpler, and has fewer footnotes.

Some have said that the difference between erotica and pornography is nothing more than a class difference, a coffee table book versus a mass market paperback. Any comments?

Actually I talk about this a little in “Sex, Sin and Blasphemy” where I say erotica is sexually arousing material that you like, and pornography is sexually arousing material that you disapprove of or find offensive. Both terms are very subjective; neither has any specific legal definition to it and pornography has certainly gotten a bad reputation if used in a pejorative sense more often than erotica. I don’t see any real distinction, and as you suggest it may very well be class-based.

What led you to become interested in First Amendment rights, and moving from writing for alternative newspapers to becoming an attorney for civil right, on to becoming an attorney for free expression?

I was a 60’s kid, I went to college in the 60’s, and became involved in the anti-Viet Nam War movement. I also was an English major and really loved literature and film, and had a passionate appreciation for books and literature and art. As the 60’s came to a close, it became clear that the movementthe New Lefthad deteriorated, had disintegrated, very fast. I became interested in the history of social reform and radical movements in the United States, and why they disappear so fast and do not leave much of a tradition or institutional memory. I began to do some reading, including reading on periods of political repression like the Hollywood blacklist and the McCarthy era, the ways in which professors, writers and artists were censored, and interestingly, the ways in which–until the political winds began to change a little bit–the Supreme Court was of very little use in protecting against these kinds of blacklists and witch hunts. That sort of aroused my interest in the First Amendment and the history of censorship and dissent in art. I went to law school and was lucky enough fairly early in my legal career to start working for the ACLU. So, when the censorship controversies started in the late 80’s and early 90’s, because I had a longstanding interest in art and literature, this seemed like a good fit. So I went down to the national ACLU and started this arts censorship project, and I’m not bored with it yet.

I left the ACLU in 98′ to write “Not in Front of the Children”. I had a grant, which helped me to do that. Then in 2000, I came to the National Coalition Against Censorship to start a little think-tank called the Free Expression Policy Project. It is housed here at the National Coalition, but it’s independent. We’re putting out policy reports and trying to find public policy solutions to some of these perennial censorship issues–solutions that would not involve censorshipmedia literacy education being one example.

To finish, then, with “Not in Front of the Children”. The cover of the book has a puckish, perhaps even mischievous sense about it. With the cherub-like figures sporting the sign “not in front of the children,” and the sexual background, it seems that there is a certain sense of humor being promoted with regard to a very serious issue. Who designed the cover? You? The publisher?

The publisher designed the cover. But the publisher sometimes asks the author for suggestions. In this case I had collected a number of reproductions of art wok that I particularly liked and, of course, in the history of Western and Eastern art sexuality, nudity, children and adolescents, are very common scenes. This Correggio painting is of Danae receiving the shower of gold from Zeus. Danae was a young adolescent girl and Zeus a very randy god who wants to have sex with her. So we decided to use it for the cover. There was a little difference of opinion over the bright yellow parental advisory stickers they wanted to put on it. Although I am all in favor of humor I was not sure that those bright yellow stickers didn’t communicate in some way a less than totally serious purpose. But in any event, a number of people have liked it and by now I’m quite used to it.

Let me thank you for taking us down this serious, even if sometimes humorous, introduction to the ideas behind censorship.

Barbara Lightner

**In May of 2002, a Federal Appeals Court struck down portions of the Child’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) that would have required libraries to use filters, saying the act violated First Amendment rights. The Justice Department expressed dissatisfaction with the decision but has not as of this date, appealed.

#authors

Anirvan Chatterjee and Charlie Hsu, BookFinder.com

Anirvan Chatterjee and Charlie Hsu, BookFinder.com

To start off, Anirvan, you’ve been generous with information about yourself, somewhat generous with information about Charlie (let’s see if we can’t get you out and talking about yourself, Charlie) and very generous with information about BookFinder.com.

If I may, though, I’m going to dig a bit deeper.

You’re both twentysomethings living in a high tech area, based as you are in Berkeley, CA, doing high tech work and, in many ways, living the “good life.” From what you’ve written, Anirvan, can we assume that running BookFinder.com doesn’t leave much time for either of you to be party (or family) animals? Is it all work and no play, aside from work and reading, though? Some questions for you both follow.

Anirvan and Charlie, do you see yourselves continuing to run BookFinder.com for many years, or forever, or??? Do you think, since you have so many of the programming problems solved and have the site running smoothly, that it will continue to be gratifying emotionally, financially and intellectually for both of you?

Anirvan: Many things get easier over time, but there are always new challenges to be met. For example, we’ve been working for over a year now on a set of infrastructure improvements to BookFinder.com that (among many other things) will help users search for books in languages other than English. I’m currently working on a project to figure out how we can best improve new users’ experience with the site. This stuff goes on. I love what I do, and I’m fortunate to be able to work with good friends. I can’t imagine being bored anytime soon.

Charlie: I think Anirvan has said a lot of what I would say. While many problems are solved, there are always more problems to tackle, more interesting things to try.

Anirvan, when you originally conceived of the idea of a multi-database book search, what triggered the idea, i.e., was it being unable to find books you personally wanted, or what? How did you go about deciding what would work as a metasearch through book databases? Was it a trial and error process, or one of those inspired ideas that seem to sprout full-grown into your consciousness? Did you talk this idea over with Charlie at the time?

Anirvan: I got interested in developing a book search tool based directly on my experiences as a book shopper. I’d been buying books online for some time, particularly stuff that I couldn’t find locally. Jumping between sites in order to check on prices and availability got frustrating very quickly. Developing a metasearch system was a way of scratching that itch.

In the fall of 1996, while I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I took an information science seminar on the theory and practice of network agent systems. We had to develop a prototype network agent system as a class project; I chose to build a network agent that would help me find and buy books. The site grew from there. I got an ‘A’ in the class, and I put a version of the software online in January 1997. I made pretty heavy use of the software early on to help me complete my collection of Doonesbury titles — nearly fifty volumes in total, most out of print.

Most of the improvements to the site came incrementally. I didn’t initially think of including options to search for signed books or first editions, or even a keywords field. We’ve continuously been making little tweaks here and there, often based on user feedback.

Charlie, when did you first start working with Anirvan on the book-search database? And does BookFinder.com, as a mental and professional challenge, suit you still?

Charlie: Officially, I started working with BookFinder.com after I graduated from UC Davis in 1999. Unofficially, I’d been helping out since even before the site was launched in 1997. I even built the site’s first server, back in the very beginning. BookFinder.com suits me as a challenge because it lets me do things I wouldn’t normally get to do. Running a small business, you have to become proficient in a lot of skills. BookFinder.com helps keep me from being pigeonholed into just being a coder.

Charlie and Anirvan, is one or the other of you the “idea” person and the other the “programming person”? Or do you both work on all functions of your business?

Anirvan: We both do programming and planning/design stuff. We handle different parts of the technology — Charlie works with the databases and the complex guts of the system, I work with the interface and search code. Otherwise, I’m more involved with marketing, advertising sales, bookseller relations, etc. Charlie handles the financial and legal side of the business. That’s just us; we also have part-timers and consultants working on support, marketing, design, accounting, etc. Running a site like BookFinder.com is a big job!

Anirvan and Charlie, can you foresee BookFinder.com morphing into metasearches for other products besides books?

Charlie: We’ve thought about metasearching other types of products, but decided against it. Every kind of product has its own complexity. The technology is only one part of building a comparison shopping engine and, at least to a technologist like me, the easier side. There’s a huge amount of knowledge about books and the online book industry that we’ve accumulated, which we use while working on the site. It would take a long time to get that knowledge in other fields.

Anirvan and Charlie, has the overall super-abundance of more common books and part-time booksellers affected your business negatively or positively (aside from requiring more computing resources, of course)?

Anirvan: Compared to two years ago, we’ve found that when given the choice, somewhat fewer users opt to buy new books, perhaps due to the greater availability of cheap used copies. Not much else. We identify a lot with booksellers but, in the end, our allegiance is to the customer; the presence of “kitchen table” booksellers and larger online inventories helps consumers by increasing selection, and driving down prices.

Anirvan and Charlie, I read in one of your press releases that there are 40,000 of us booksellers online now: was this a mistake or are there truly that many people listing used books online now (last I’d heard was around 10,000)? For instance, I wondered if many of us listing on several databases had inflated the apparent number of booksellers.

Anirvan: We include in our count the most active “kitchen table” booksellers from sites like Half.com; the figure’s not inflated.

Both of you, again. Do you have any plans (that you wouldn’t mind giving away, of course) about other types of businesses, whether computer or book-based or not, that either of you are considering or would be interested in for the future?

Anirvan: We see a lot of room for growth in the used book area. Most of our future plans revolve around that sector.

Both of you, why do you continue with BookFinder.com Insider? Even with it being an essentially unmoderated list, it must take many hours of your time and add to your work week. Do you get ideas about what’s needed for your business from the list? Do you just enjoy the chatter of book people? Even though we all love having the list I know we must drive you nuts at times, and I’m curious about why you put up with some of our antics.

Anirvan: We love the list. It’s frustrating to run at times, but we get a lot out of it. As with many list members, being involved with the Insider list is a way for us to keep an ear to the ground of what’s going on in the world of online bookselling. We’ve also really gotten to know some of the list members. The community’s crucial; the BookFinder.com Insider started off as a stale tech support mailing list — it’s the list’s members that give it some soul.

Charlie, how did you and Anirvan meet (I know it was during high school, but what brought and kept you two together)? Were you both “into” information technology as it existed then?

Charlie: We actually met in the locker bays of our junior high school. The lockers were assigned alphabetically by last name. I had a good friend whose last name was Chang. Anirvan’s last name is Chatterjee, so the three of us met by my friend’s locker. We all started talking, and eventually became friends. We had a great computer science teacher in high school, so we were learning how to run our school’s Unix network back in the days of the pre-commercial Internet (this would be the early 90s). I still remember when we first saw Mosaic (the first graphical web browser), and how surprised we were the first time we saw a URL advertised on TV.

Anirvan, how did your reading about and the reality of India coincide when you visited your grandparents? Was that your first trip to India, by the way?

Anirvan: I’ve been visiting my extended family in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) every year or two, all my life, so I’ve always felt pretty connected to the place. I can’t say that I’ve ever had to deal with any substantial culture shock, either in the US or in India.

Anirvan, why mysteries? Is solving problems such a deep part of your personality that it is fun for you even when relaxing and reading? Or is reading mysteries when you can turn off your brain and really relax?

Anirvan: Definitely the latter. I’m an embarrassingly unsophisticated mystery reader. I miss obvious clues, and have to wait till the conclusion to find out whodunit. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of mysteries set in Berkeley, California (where I live and work). I’m enjoying seeing how different writers take on the city’s quirks in print.

Anirvan, I’ve seen your lists of books read on the BookFinder.com site. What are your favorites, current and past? Is there a particular type of book or author you collect?

Anirvan: I read pretty widely (and buy books accordingly). Stuff I’ve been into over the past few years include Isaac Asimov novels, 1960s radical librarian literature, black science fiction, Russian novelists, anti-technology commentary, graphic novels, and punk music history. But to the extent that I can say that I collect anything, I’m probably most into English language fiction from the South Asian diaspora — authors like Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy.

To indulge my compulsive need for list-making, here are some of my favorite underhyped lit titles from the South Asian diaspora:

* “The Shadow Lines” by Amitav Ghosh (India) * “Afternoon Raag” by Amit Chaudhuri (India) * “English, August” by Upamanyu Chatterjee (India) * “Anita and Me” by Meera Syal (UK) * “Once Upon An Elephant” by Ashok Mathur (Canada) * “Junglee Girl” by Ginu Kamani (US) * anything by Ved Mehta (US)

Charlie, I’m assuming you are a reader, also? What do you like to read, and what appeals to you about those choices?

Charlie: I’m a really big fantasy/sci-fi fan. It probably comes from my interest in ancient and medieval European history. On the other hand, maybe it’s because I’m such a big fantasy fan that I’m so into history. One of those chicken and egg things, I guess.

Charlie, have you made up a `books read’ list like Anirvan’s? If so, what are some of those books (and even if you don’t have an official list, what do you like to read)? Which are your favorites, and why? And do you read much about your cultural or ethnic heritage?

Charlie: Anirvan, as you may have noted, is very much a list person. He keeps lots of lists in his life, and a reading list is very natural for him. I, on the other hand, am not a list person; I’m far too disorganized to do something like that.

Favorite books? Well, let’s see, it’s hard to say, there have been so many…I’ve always enjoyed humor, the books in Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series are some of my favorites. More recently, I discovered Terry Pratchett and am quickly on my way through reading all of his Discworld novels. “The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco — murder, mystery, monks, a Sherlock Holmes-like character, all set in medieval times — what’s not to like? Finally back to the classic fantasy genre, the Thomas Covenant series (“Lord Foul’s Bane”, “The Illearth War”, “The Power That Preserves”) serves up a slight twist to the generic fantasy world.

Charlie, Anirvan has written that he had pretty much an upper middle class U.S. upbringing. How about you? My understanding is that you were born in Taiwan, but grew up mostly in the San Francisco Bay area. Did you grow up with mostly Western values and heritage, a mixture of Twaiwanese and Western, or a traditional heritage? Have you visited Taiwan since moving to the U.S.?

Charlie: When I think of my upbringing, the best way I have to describe it is to say that I’m a second generation immigrant from Taiwan. I grew up with a mix of values, both American and Taiwanese, with many of my friends around me growing up the same.

Charlie, I understand you have many hobbies besides books and your programming. Anirvan has said he’s seen you juggling flaming torches, for instance. How did you get interested in juggling, and how long did it take you and how many different types of objects being juggled to get to the flaming torches level? Any burns along the way???

Also, Charlie, I understand you’ve dabbled in fencing, whittling and woodworking. Are any of these still hobbies? Could you tell us how you got interested in each, and how proficient you became at them?

Charlie: Fencing, juggling, woodworking all came about after high school. During college, I decided that I wanted to do something else besides just taking classes every quarter. UC Davis had a great program called the Experimental College, with classes taught by members of the community. I tried fencing because I wanted some sort of exercise to keep me in shape. A good friend of mine also fenced and encouraged me to join. (Also, you can’t tell me there isn’t something cool about the idea of swashbuckling.) After about 3 years of fencing, I still consider myself pretty much a beginner, and I haven’t fenced in several years now.

Juggling was just something I’ve always wanted to learn. My roommate and I signed up for juggling classes together. The funny thing about juggling is that once you learn to pass clubs, juggling becomes a very social event as people get together to play together; it’s not just one person off doing tricks alone. I can juggle up to four balls at a time, or three clubs, or three torches, which can be thought of as clubs with flames at the end. No major burns, though I lose knuckle hair every time I try it.

As for woodworking, I’ve always been a craft-oriented person. Programming is fulfilling in many ways, but what you create is so ephemeral, I wanted something solid, thus whittling and woodworking. I’m still a rank beginner, but my eventual goal is to make my own furniture.

Anirvan, you write beautifully and eloquently. Are you ever intending to try to write a book? Have you had papers or books published? If you did ever decide to write professionally, what would you write about?

Anirvan: Thanks. I dabble with an article here and there, but haven’t done much writing otherwise. As with so many things, it’s a matter of not having enough time.

I idolize the technology/culture journalism from about 1992 to 1996 — that’s something I wish I could have been involved in (the fact that I was still in high school at the time was something of an impediment). Most mainstream journalists didn’t even know which stories to investigate; others fell into the trap of recycling existing metaphors. But writers like Paulina Borsook, Steve Silberman, Simson Garfinkel, and Howard Rheingold were part of the first wave of smart internet-savvy journalists writing about the social implications of these new technologies, trying to write critically about a medium that was changing by the day. Exciting stuff. There’s a Library of America anthology of American journalism during the Vietnam War; I won’t be terribly surprised if, some decades from now, there’s a similar anthology of journalism from the early networked era.

Anirvan and Charlie, aside from reading and working, what do you like to do? Do you enjoy art, traveling, concerts, animals, sports, or???

Anirvan: Nothing out of the ordinary. I try to spend time with friends and family, and attend concerts, plays, and movies. I end up making three or four film festivals a year (the San Francisco Bay Area’s a great place for the arts).

Charlie: Aside from the hobbies I mentioned, I enjoy watching movies — comedies and (not surprisingly) period pieces. I boot up the occasional video game, and enjoy hanging out with friends.

Anirvan and Charlie, I just finished reading “The Blue Nowhere” by Deaver, and was quite surprised to find so many supposed characteristics I shared with hackers (and I’m not at all a programmer, just a compulsive computer user). Do you “legal” programmers do the same things as hackers? Like eat sweets or drink the strongest caffeine drinks you can find to keep alert for long hours at the computer (that one I share), never drink alcohol or use “anything” that would make you drowsy and unable to function at the computer, have to shave off calluses on your finger tips from keyboarding so many hours (makes me glad I learned to type (pardon, keyboard) with fingernails), wander around at 4:00 a.m. in online chat rooms looking for other computer-compulsive night owls even after your “official” work is over, wear out keyboards at a fantastic rate, be able to “feel” if your computer is being hacked or interfered with in some way from response time either in the drive or monitor, drive noises, etc., or program for 36 hours straight with no sleep? How much of this stuff is correct for you true computer mavens? And hey, is either of you going to admit to ever hacking – in your younger, wilder days, of course? :>)

Charlie: Well, as with many such portrayal of hackers, this contains a grain of truth, but some of it is exaggerated for dramatic effect. Many of my friends who are coders do tend to be habitual coffee drinkers, but these days, who isn’t? I don’t think my keyboard wears out any faster than most. Almost all the coders I know, including myself, are night owls. I’ve tried to cut back on the all-nighters (I’m not as young as I used to be, you know.)

Hacking in our younger, wilder days? <laughs> Can I take the fifth? No seriously, because we became system administrators to our high school network, we spent a lot more time keeping our system running than trying to go out and “hack.”

Anirvan, you’ve written about feeling “racialized” after 9/11 because of your Indian appearance. Was this a phenomenon that you felt primarily immediately after 9/11, and were there actual occurrences of discrimination against you or any of your Indian friends? Does this feeling (or do these occurrences) still persist today? Would you care to comment on how this felt to a U.S. citizen of Indian descent?

Anirvan: My parents are from India, but that’s only one part of who I am. When I talk about feeling “racialized,” I mean that in the days and weeks after 9/11, it was very difficult to think of myself as anything other than someone of the wrong skin color. I’ve encountered explicit in-your-face racism a couple of times, but it tends to be something I can ignore. I’ve rarely felt physically vulnerable. The domestic backlash after 9/11 changed that.

My parents called me the morning of 9/11 to let me know what was happening. In the midst of our shock, it was very clear to all of us that there would be a huge backlash. Through websites, newsgroups, and mailing lists, I kept hearing about Americans of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage getting attacked, people being jeered at, schoolchildren assaulted, businesses threatened. There was a rock thrown through the window of one of my favorite Pakistani lunch spots in San Francisco. A friend’s brother was refused service at a restaurant. Everyone got glares. It wasn’t a good time. I got involved with a group doing hate crime education in the South Asian community; a lot of people were scared to report incidents, for fear of calling further attention to themselves.

It’s unfortunate that as thousands were dying after the terrorist attacks, we immediately started turning on our own. If the aftermath of the 1997 Oklahoma City bombing had been anything like that of 9/11, Irish-Americans and Gulf War veterans would have had to fear for their safety after bomber Timothy McVeigh was identified. Just goes to show far we have to go as Americans to overcome our -isms. It takes a long time to shed the stigma of being the “Other”; it may take another fifty years before Indians are as accepted as Italians, Hinduism as accepted as Judaism.

Both of you, I have some questions from my personal point of view. I grew up in an era when typing and data entry was primarily a low-paid woman’s job. Now, with computers affecting almost every aspect of our lives, we’ve all been turned into “typists” and for much longer hours than typists worked in the old days (and in many instances, for less pay per hour). I realize it is called “keyboarding” these days, and that modern day keyboarding is, for programmers at least, simply the current method of getting the machine to do what you want it to do. But do you ever get the feeling that you’re chained to that darned keyboard? Do you really get those calluses on your fingertips? Do you both have carpal tunnel syndrome? Do you think the day will soon come when you can program by speaking, rather than keyboarding? And, in that vein, what advances in computer technology do you anticipate in the near future?

Charlie: I don’t think it’s so much chained to the keyboard as chained to work in general. The computer is nothing more than a tool to get things done, and the keyboard is just an input tool. I could sit here and talk for hours on end about what I think of the future of technology (and no doubt be mostly wrong), but briefly, I don’t think that voice technology for programmers will be ready anytime soon. There have been many interesting developments in the pursuit of lighter, smaller, flat screens that are easier on the eyes. Once they can get something thin, light, and approaching the resolution of printed text, ebooks will look that much more appealing.

You asked about typing calluses. So far, that hasn’t been a problem. My biggest worries are actually carpal tunnel syndrome, and possible damage to my eyes from staring at a monitor for 9+ hours a day. Luckily, nothing has happened so far but it’s always a concern.

Thanks to you both, Anirvan and Charlie!

#SearchEngines