Confidential to the novelist: Your main character is obviously you. I can tell because the character is not interesting though his or her every thought is described in detail. He or she fascinates you but no one else.

Writing magazine headlines is about the hardest thing there is to do. It is very emotional for everyone involved. Ideally there is a hed that fits perfectly, that ties together the photo, the story idea, and the mood of the magazine. The greatest headline ever written was in Wired: "Nobody Fucks With the DMV." Anyone who read that hed knew what the story was going to be about, and what the magazine felt about the story. (This was earlier in the 1990s, before people said the F word so much.) A bad hed for that story would have been, like:

The DMV Goes

HIGH TECH

This is the kind of hed that floats around, though. It's adequate but obviously careless. It's easy for people to agree on. It would be easy to design around, using the latest "digital" font. Someone would imagine writing the headline on the touchscreen of an electronic ticketing pad like cops use. What a fun idea, someone else would say.

The key thing with headline writing is that you're shooting for the a-ha hed that makes everyone *in the meeting* look up and say, "Yeah!" but that has never happened in the history of magazines. No three people in a hed meeting have ever agreed on a headline except in order to move on.

Just read a bunch of Theodore Sturgeon for some reason. I always think I'm going to like reading old science fiction and then I start reading it and it's all messagey. Probably in 1965 it was so shockingly new and still the realm of fantasy to talk about, to mention a few themes, impotence and homosexuality that the story didn't need to be very awesome. I remember a similar thing in a mystery I was reading that was written in 1990, let's say, and in which the big shockeroo had to do with AIDS. Or how emotional it was to see Wings of Desire while the Berlin Wall was still up, and how I haven't seen it since out of fear that I won't feel the same way, since the wall is down and the heartbreak at the center of the story has been more or less solved. I think these books and movies are genuine artistic responses to current conditions, but I don't know how well they will work in future conditions. Imagine what will happen to literature when we cure death. Probably the same thing that happened to the kidnap drama when we invented cell phones. Though maybe the problem is that these problems are in the recent past. Once they're fifty years old we'll be able to see them more clearly, rather than just be annoyed by people who still think they are problems, the way we're annoyed by someone who doesn't have a cell phone and starts freaking out when they can't get in touch with you. Get a damn cell phone, you say to Harrison Ford in Frantic; you don't say it to the cast of, let's say, Suddenly.



In a similar vein, I played My Bloody Valentine for an 18-year-old this week and she was not as blown away by it as I hoped. I think it must sound like just whatever's going on now to her, or like a paler version of now. On the other hand, I played her some Butthole Surfers and she about busted a gut. I remember one friend who was so highly strung during the teenage years that we worried about playing the Butthole Surfers around him. Turns out my cousin is the same way. I think I'll give her one month at college without this record, so she can meet some people, then send it to her.