I won’t lie: some of our meetings turn out better than others. This meeting, on April 24th, was one of those great meetings, though maybe you can’t tell from my minutes.
Announcements
Brian Dunning, May 6! See details
Let’s go see a museum! We are thinking about seeing the Natural History Museum, Scientology’s “Psychology: An Industry of Death” museum, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology. We may see one of these in the upcoming weekend.
Leilani proposed a discussion panel consisting of students from various religious backgrounds. But we need volunteers.
Deja proposed the idea that we cook food in the quad. Unfortunately, if we start planning this now, it won’t happen until next year.
Meeting discussion
Some time ago, an atheist author named John Harrigan mailed us a copy of his book, The Professor and the Dominatrix. Deja offered to read it for us and give a book report on it. It’s taken a while for her to read it because it was so terrible, worse than fan fiction. The full presentation is not available, but here are some highlights:
- Summary: The book has ethnic stereotypes, homophobia, anti-religious BS, a terrible plot, terrible sex scenes. Most of it consists of babbling and cocks.
- Many characters have exaggerated and poorly done “Black English” or Latino accents, and are clearly stereotypes.
- The lesbians in the group “Dykes Taking Over” all seem to be women who had issues with men or their fathers.
- The hero, Synan Slane, is a professor, a former marine (just like the author), and has a massive wang. He seems to win every argument instantly, leaving his opponents sputtering. At one point, he gives a speech called “Critical Thinking 101” which consists of lots of boring sex and anti-religious BS.
- The dominatrix has red-gold hair. She plays virtually no part in the story, practically a macguffin. When she joins up with the professor, she becomes indistinguishable as a character.
- The villain is some religious nut cannibal serial killer.
- The author seems to completely forget the plot until the final chapter. Instead, we have a lot of babbling, and sex made boring.
(Also see another book review on Blag Hag.)
Next topic: Hoaxes! Let’s pull a hoax! Let’s make some UFOs with weather balloons. Or hold an anti-dihydrogen monoxide protest, or something like that. Of course, I won’t reveal all our secrets in the meeting minutes.
What things did you use to think were real? Did you ever believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy? Or maybe you had some superstition, such as wishing for the opposite of what you want in order to get it. Some people used to believe in the Montauk monster, or in various urban legends. We talked about some urban legends, like the Bloody Mary legend, and the idea that you can get pregnant from a swimming pool. And then comes the perennial question: would you lie to your kids about Santa? Debate ensues.
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Deja and Purdue Jen, identical twins?
My response to Jen follows, she has already spilt some of her acid on it. Deja and Jen have a right to criticise but not to distort a book’s content. The mind sees what it wants–nothing good for The Professor and the Dominatrix. Jen said that there was only one black in the story. When I said two, she couldn’t explain how she missed him. I held out saying three to see if she would pick up on it. She didn’t. How about it Deja, you correspond with Jen?
(Sent to those who have received a copy of my book)
Purdue Jen’s Criticism of Harrigan’s The Professor and the Dominatrix.
Jen invites readers to visit her at http://blaghag.blogspot.com/2009/04/book-review-professor-and-dominatrix.html. I did and read her “scathing” (nine page) assault on my novel–linked by some of her chorus of correspondents (nine pages more) to the writings of atheist Ayn Rand and the two religionists Tim Lahaye and Bill O’Reilly–people I’d rather not be linked to. The comment from the chorus I liked best was, “The book brought vomit to my mouth.” I got the impression that she meant the review did that, not the book. Another neat one was, “The book proves that God does nor exist because He never would have allowed such a book to be written.” So much for Free Will. Some thought I might be an undercover Christian trying to make atheists look bad by identifying myself with them. Sigh. Others thanked Jen for saving them from reading the book–“taking the bullet” for them.
I haven’t had anything to do with college students for over twenty years. It was delightful to get a touch of their minds again, their enthusiasm for justice, even when misguided. Jen, God love her, intimated that if she ever had a class with me–the Giant Troll, the al-round bigot who fixedly smiled at her from the back cover–she’s drop it. Perhaps I could bring her along like I did Elsie in the book. In my defense, when I retired, my students established a scholarship in my name. Has that ever happened before? Anywhere? Don’t tell me it has: I don’t want to hear it.
So, let’s get to it. I’m going to correct her paper; just part of it, otherwise the corrections could go on for nine pages. First, let me say, Jen obviously likes to write and is rather clever. She could probably sell salt water at the ocean side and sell her opinions as facts when in an argument. Well, we all tend to do that. Distorted optics is a world-wide disorder, religiosy or atheist, doesn’t matter. Jen has a thing about the demeaning of women. I do too. It is one of my big gripes about the sky-god religions–all three of them give me a pain in the bowels.
Perhaps a point of contention, I don’t see men and women as genetically equivalent (gender feminism) but as genetically complementary, with a lot of similarities. They play complementary roles in reproduction, in raising children. Yet, this can be quite tricky. Female penguins have been known to donate an egg to a “married” male pair to hatch and raise the little one. With cloning likely in the future, what next? Have you ever tried to objectively define homosexual? Real buddy penguins have been known to break up and take off with females. Republicans become Democrats! Baptists become atheists! Behavior can change. Most homosexuals (cultural and genetic) don’t change over, yet some cultural ones do. Some play on both sides of the fence, depending on situation and opportunity. More fun, they say.
No cheers from Jen on the male characters I worked over: the killer, Officer Fudpucker, Senator Gaylord Sludge, Reverend Smiley Tuttle, porno Slick Wilson, governor’s aide Tom Collins. Jen said that I described all the women in my novel as either young and ditsy or old and disgusting. That’s an outright lie. Or, more likely, she has herself so hyped-up about the way women and homosexuals have been mistreated that she has become hyper-vigilant in looking for any sign of the old bigotries. See a sign and she becomes “The Avenger.” The sign? The villain in the story is a homosexual. Off and running, she then saw signs I was attacking women and blacks, too. I am inordinately fond of women. By choice, my primary physician is a woman. I voted for Obama. I have gone out of my way to emotionally support homosexual patients–even managing their money and medication, finding them a place to live, featuring one in a nationally- distributed education film. On women, I just don’t find in my writing the demeaning stuff that Jen does or imagines or makes up. I suspect that she was intent on damning the book from the first page on. (More on that later when I discuss The Silence of the Lambs.)
Consider, dungeon workers Kitty Kentuck and Tilley Jones are two charmers with good hearts and humor. Sexy plus but not ditsy. They get a lot of pages. Jen doesn’t even mention them. Old, neat, kindly Birdie Cabe has the whole second chapter to herself. I wrote her to contrast the homosexual psychopath of Chapter One. Jen’s description from reading me, “Frumpy old hotel maid who does nothing but talk about her deceased husband.” My description in part, “She pressed the draperies-control button on the wall by the multi-paned window: the motor hummed and the draperies opened and the morning sunshine streamed in. She looked out the large window, thinking again of Charlie, feeling lonesome enough to cry.” Clearly, she had loved Charlie. What Jen did to my beloved Elsie really got to me. I started Elsie, Beauty Queen of the Onion Festival, as the dumb blond of jokes, but with a heart, then evolved her to smarter than she seemed, finally to a real Wonder Woman who was the only one to face the killer and set him on the run. Did Jen even read the page? The female detective was seen by Jen as someone for other officers to hit one. Jen gave me another demerit for having the detective briefly become embarrassed in the porno shop interview. Simply awful that I did that. I gave the detective full credit for being a good cop in the tradition of her murdered father. The murdered bisexual clergyman’s prostitute wife I defined in the middle of the story as tragic. “When he (the lover all through her college years) left, she felt as if the bottom had dropped out of her life. She had no purpose. She knew, deep down, that she was desperate. She avoided loneliness by living unconcerned, living for amusements, but got bored and kept trying harder to amuse herself by being extreme in what she did. A thought haunted her: you can’t make a life out of games and amusements. In a way it seemed as if she had died.” It was after the loss of her lover that she became a prostitute. Jen, made her only a “skanky ho” on the basis of how she read me, keeping to her belief that I demeaned women. She criticized my dominatrix for a desire to find a good man, angry that I had not kept her fully independent. She distorted the roles of others and left out three more (that makes five) in a list she presented as complete.
Continuing with distorted optics, Jen’s misreading, as I have noted, carried over to race. I introduced the black mayor in a chapter beginning with a discussion of the development of black English in Africa and America. He was defined as smart and savvy but slipped into the black English of his parents when upset–he was upset in a good part of that chapter. I occasionally ignored political correctness to phonetically spell Irish, Mexican, and Italian accents. ‘Tis more realistic, the way people actually sound. Jen really had a blind spot for the good black policeman who always spoke standard English. He stood out on several pages, including the final chapter. How could she have missed him? She said there was only one black in the story.
A minor item to be sure, she even saw the Mickey Mouse watch on the wrong person, an example of her constant tripping and falling through the text. I don’t buy into her claim that she was really trying to do an honest review. Some part early in the story really burned her. I have an impression that she then prepared for her diatribe by consulting a book or chapter on bad writing and attributed everything she found to me, desperate blows. Please kept in mind that an experienced editor praised my book and that my articles and scripts have always been considered tops. For ad hominem attack look at this: “Has this guy (me the author) ever even had sex. If he has, I feel bad for whatever woman had to put up with it.” I can’t write, I can’t even screw, I’m in a bad way!
There are three fully-homosexual male characters in the story: the serial killer; one of his victims, Valentine Sisley; and a denizen of a gay bar. The gay bar one is interviewed by a gruff and tough and homophobe cop named Fudpucker. These four characters are within the bounds of reality. To keep to reality for the chapter on Slick Wilson’s porn store, I got permission from a porn store owner in Florida to spend a week of evenings behind the counter to study customers. It was quite interesting, good duty. You’d be surprised who buys. This store, as is Slicks, is clerked by women and sells some scanty clothes. The majority of shoppers were young to middle-age women, singularly and in groups. When they bought dildos, they were always sure to get the right batteries. What do you make of me for saying that, Jen?
The demeaning of women Jen conjured up from my story reminds me of an event that happened when I was in the fourth grade, Catholic school, boys on the left by the windows, girls on the right by the blackboards. The kid at the desk in front of me cut a ripper. Everyone looked, even the nun. The kid turned and pointed at me.
Jen trashed my book in every way; “Horrible, unintelligible writing . . . Rambling, nonsensical monologues.” (Like this?) Her detailed condemnation was enough, as I have noted, to bring vomit to the mouth of one of her fans. That’s effective writing. I have seen this sort of thing before in an attempt to trash Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. The critic claimed that Brown had no knowledge of writing, couldn’t put together a decent sentence, diagramed paragraphs as proof. The critic didn’t mention religion at all, just Brown’s terrible writing. Several years ago, a church in my home city of Portland, Maine requested a permit to have a bonfire in the city park. They wanted to publicly burn Harry Potter books. They didn’t get the permit. In Thomas Harris’s classic suspense novel The Silence of the Lambs the serial murderer is a psychopathic homosexual known to the FBI as Buffalo Bill. As I recall the movie, there is one scene where he is sitting in front of a cosmetic-desk mirror wearing his jacket made of skins peeled from women he kidnapped. He is carefully applying lipstick, a cosmetic early used by Egyptian female prostitutes to denote the specialty of fellatio by bringing the color of the labium and vulva to the facial lips. Also, as I recall, a group of male homosexuals in reaction to the story angrily criticized Harris. And, it seems to be politically incorrect to link pedophile priests to homosexuality, which I do in the book. I doubt that Harris, any more than I by having a homosexual psychopath in my novel, was downgrading homosexuals per se. A male homosexual sadist who wanted to be a woman fit both stories. Obviously, being a homosexual doesn’t make one a killer on a pedophile.
My first page revealed the killer to be homosexual. As I said, perhaps setting Jen off from page one on? Did you notice when reading her criticisms how quickly she rejected my social explanation of a bad relationship with men being the cause of man hatred by the two “dykes-taking-over” students? Nothing aberrant about them: no need to find a cause. For a discussion of the role of experience as source of uncommon behavior, see my discussion of the Flanagan masochist case on pages 67-68.
Jen’s writing suggests to me that she is excitable, prone to race along, miss things, decode by illusion. She is so upset by fem and sex issues that she distorts what she reads in the same manner that some religious people distort by seeing demons and the devil lurking–just the way the pious killer of the story does.
Professor Slane says to his students, “Hear me loud and clear, sexuality in itself does not make a person bad or unworthy of respect.” Sexual behavior is so varied. Most kids start out as simple (to use a British slang word) wankers. Then what often follows seems unbelievable. There is a toe licker in the book, a TV producer that gets off by being spanked, and. a tri-sexual priest (tries anything sexual). Some (those of little imagination?) stay with wanking.
I conclude now. I wrote The Professor and the Dominatrix–a book on mind-corroding religion; sex, the big player in the mind; and violence, the tool of hatred–to be more active in exposing religious nonsense. The nonfiction books by greats such as Richard Dawkins are double-damn good. But what about all those regular American folk who don’t read science or seriously consider their religious beliefs? One day I read that there are eight million references to Anna Nichole Smith on the Web. I had it. Load a book with sex to attract the regular folk. Put in pious bad guys, atheist good guys. The Professor and the Dominatrix was born.
I have always been laid back about sex or anything that people agree to do that doesn’t create a disturbance or hurt others or themselves. Fairly early in life I learned that some people enjoy hurting others. Two older boys in my neighborhood would chase down a younger kid and stick his head between a forked branch of a bush–every yard had a bush or two–then yank the ends of the branches together. One time I nearly passed out from choking. To this day I cheer when the bad guy gets trounced in a TV wrestling match. Have been known to take on bullies. Take one on in the book. Returning to the fourth grade for a moment, as I said, Catholic School, boys sitting by the windows, girls by the blackboards, a park just a half-block away. Teacher’s pet Roberta and all-round boy Richard were absent from class after recess. The nun went out looking for them. Found them behind a tree in the park going at it to beat the band. She led them back to class, stood them up-front, and gave a loud (accurate for a nun) description in detail of exactly what they were doing that would lead them straight to hell. I added nuns to the bully list. To this day just the sight of a nun makes me inwardly cringe. Back in the first grade Patti never got caught. The nun must have had a urinary problem because she was forever leaving to go to the teacher’s room. Little Patti would dash to the front of the class and expose herself, several times a day. We all would wait for the performance, in time had a lookout by the door.
Forgive me, I am an old man–mid eighties–and my mind tends to turn back time. I have wondered if Patti became a stripper? Roberta a guilt-laden nun to save her soul? Or did she just decide not to get caught again?
I hope I haven’t bored you. Amazon and I will appreciate your comments on the book’s page where you see “Create Your Own Review.” No response is the worse thing.
******
A matter for student writers: I submitted a query letter to Prometheus Books last year. After waiting ten weeks, I was informed by an editor that they were not taking general fiction at that time. A friend had just been published by PublishAmerica. I got a contract for Prof. & Dom. a week after submission. I was very pleased. They seemed to be a successful company, so they claimed. (One of Jen’s chorus, apparently a professor, said he knew instantly what kind of book it would be once he saw the publisher’s name. Do you always make book-by-the-cover judgments, pal? Tom Flynn reviewed a PublishAmerica book last year that he found good enough to note in Free Inquiry.) I was given six days to correct the proofs. I was determined to meet the deadline, even thought in intensive care and on heavy doses of morphine. (How Satan stayed Satin.) PublishAmerica doesn’t have relationships with print reviewers, TV, or radio. The kind of awful stuff they have the reputation for can be seen in the very last pages of my book. Some of their authors bid for publicity at the back of all PublishAmerica books. Look at the religious titles in mine and you’ll laugh. They overprice so that when they have a sale to their authors of 40% off, they still make good money. They will put your book cover on valentines, encase a copy of your first royalty check in plastic–for a fee. My friend who introduced me to PublishAmerica had a royalty check of about five dollars bounce at the bank last month. Yes, they do make their money by selling to their own authors. Really, it is heart-breaking for a lot of people–the whole publishing industry is. A good article for you folks who write is “The Last Book Party” in Harper’s Magazine, March 2009. Only three of any ten well-edited, well-published, and actively-promoted books ever make money.
I have a cousin who has been trying for a lifetime to get published. Has read all the books on how to write, listened to radio programs where authors are interviewed, everything. I sent her twelve pages of my first draft of Prof. & Dom. for comment. She called me on the phone–as she is prone to do and talk for hours at a time–and said, “How can you write stuff like that? I’ve read six pages and I can’t read anymore.” (Shades of Jen.) It was my description of the bonobos that did it, the GG stuff. I used to share a table in the faculty dinning room with an elderly teacher from the education department. She had not read a novel written after 1945 because of the “F” word. She’d roll over in her grave if she read about the whang Captain Marvel. (My spell corrector doesn’t like the “h” in whang but my dictionary prefers it.) Damn! Jen will seize upon the elderly-teacher story and use it for another diatribe!
How did I get the marvelous comments from the experienced educator, author, editor Roy P. Fairfield? I read an article by him in Free Inquiry, saw that he lived in Maine, called him on the telephone, and asked him to take a gander at my script. He was busy finishing a history book, but looked anyway. (Now, he has just finished yet another history book–and he‘s older than me).
The editor of The American Rationalist has been talking about reviewing Prof. & Dom. May it not bring vomit to his mouth. Ee-nuf.
Deja has not corresponded with Jen as far as I know. She had not seen Jen’s review until after I linked to it in these meeting minutes.
For the sake of completeness, I should also link to Jen’s response to the above, as well as her further correspondence.
I did not correspond with Jen. I slogged through this entire thing on my own.
Mr. Harrigan, you were in dire need of an editor, or at the very least, the spell check function in Microsoft office. More than that, you needed an outline, something to keep your story on track. You continually wandered off onto tangents that added nothing to the plot. Even though the murder was revealed in the first chapter, you still made a half-hearted attempt at a red herring for your characters with the white latex glove. I kept expecting for that or for any of the tangents on sex and religion to come into play as plot points and they did not. At least when Dickens soapboxes, he works it into the plot.
Somehow, in writing a book, you failed the, “Show, don’t tell,” rule. I kept reading that there were complaints by the local fundies but never did I see anything done by them aside from the hearing (which allowed for more soapboxing) and that was deflected by a deus ex dominatrix.
Your sex scenes sucked. Hatesphut’s twat is wetter than mine was reading those. Don’t get me wrong, I think sex is great. I’d say it was the bee’s knees, but bee’s have got nothing on sex. You write a sex scene with all the sexiness of an Oscar-fic.
I don’t need to read about a dog with huge testicles. In fact, your book had an amazing fixation with the male genitalia. One would expect something about the female genitalia as well (something even the worst Literotica.com author can pull off) but all we get is some FGM details. Oh and a fond remembering of being sexually abused as a child by your protagonist.
Your protagonist was unsymathizable, your antagonists were caricatures and you can’t write a sex scene.
As I said when I gave my book report, your idea wasn’t bad in the least, it was your execution that was atrocious.
And yes, I did see the one other black character. Your stereotypes were still godawful.
[...] meeting, Deja presented her review of this horrible book. I summarized Deja’s review in the meeting minutes, but I didn’t really do justice to it. Now we’ve decided to make Deja’s [...]