Month: March 2005

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GAW!

If a science fiction writer’s abdomen explodes, shooting pus and bile onto the dinner table, is it a sign?

Last night, I visited the aforementioned SF writer, who had undergone an emergency appendectomy two Saturdays ago, at a hospital near his apartment in Philadelphia (he stays down there during the week, where he teaches at Temple U).

A week after the surgery, he somewhat deliriously asked me to come get him and bring him up to his home in NYC. We were about halfway down to Philly when he called to cancel the trip, since his daughter had convinced him to stay down there for a scheduled doctor’s appointment on Tuesday.

The official VM girlfriend and I shook our heads, got off the Turnpike, and hung out in Princeton for a little while. I cut friends lots of slack when they’re under stress, so I didn’t get too put out by his vagaries.

Which turned out to be for the best. A day later, after his friend John made dinner for them, the writer got up from the table and his abdomen exploded.

I only have his description of this to go by, but it appears that the post-surgery pus and bile didn’t vent anywhere, and built up in his abdomen, putting stress on the staples that held his incision closed. In addition, he was growing feverish and weakening at a time when he should’ve been on the mend.

The pressure on the staples got too great, and they burst. The writer thought his number was up, for obvious reasons. “Geez, man,” I said last night, “not a lot of people are going to look down at their own exploding abdomens and say, ‘This’ll all work out for the best!'”

He laughed. “Yeah. I didn’t exactly look at John and say, ‘This is easily treatable!'”

An ambulance got to his place within two minutes of the rupture (he lives a few blocks from a hospital), and doctors got the wound cleaned and the infection treated. The downside is that the writer now has a GAW.

“GAW?” I asked.

“Gaping Abdominal Wound,” he replied, clearly milking the moment for all it was worth. He added that, if this had happened in my car on Saturday, he’d probably have died, and I’d have probably felt like crap for the rest of my days.

The GAW has to be cleaned and packed twice a day, and it’s going to take many months to heal. According to him (and I have to check on this), as many as 10% of appendectomies yield this sorta result. That number sounds pretty high, but people also project that 10% of the population is gay, so what do I know?

I sound flip about this, I know, but I do take it pretty seriously. So much so that I drove into NYC last night for a 10-minute visit with the old guy, since a friend drove him up from Philly earlier in the day. He seemed pretty well, just tired. Not as debilitated as I feared.

So if a male writer whose major works involve the ambiguity of gender now has a vaginal-looking gash in his abdomen, is it a sign?

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Witless for the Defense

Bernie Ebbers, former WorldCom CEO got his ass handed to him, with the jury finding him guilty on all 9 counts of fraud. His defense was two-pronged:

A) Say that your CFO was a coke-swilling scumbag, or rather, say that your CFO’s coke-swilling scumbag ways make him an unreliable witness;

B) Say that you were a terrible CEO, who was virtually deaf, dumb and blind, physically and mentally feeble.

Problem with this strategy was that Ebbers was somehow coherent enough to plan and execute the rollup strategy that took his rinkydink company to the point of becoming the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.

I mean, listen to his testimony, and you wouldn’t want to let this guy park your car, much less be the chief executive officer of a major telecom company.

Fortunately, he’s going to get jail time. And members of the board are facing shareholder suits.

In other legal news, CNN actually felt it was headline-worthy that the crazy-ass guy who shot a judge, a deputy sheriff, a court reporter and a federal agent this weekend won’t be getting bail.

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More on Gates

In our previous installment, I wrote about meeting up with Newsweek editor and author David Gates. During his conversation with the NYU writing students (the occasion of our meeting), he counseled them against coincidence in fiction. “We all know that this stuff happens in real life–people get hit by cars, tsunamis devastate villages–but in fiction, if an action just happens out of the blue, it feels like the author’s just inflicting it on the character. If a car crashes, it should somehow be the result of decisions, actions or inactions of the characters.” Pretty Aristotelian, and the kids seemed to get what he was about.

As we were wrapping up the class, I thought I’d ask Gates about a story relating to his second novel, Preston Falls. Just like with M. Swann, Gates pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes and the bridge of his nose for a moment.

“What happened is, my editor and I had gone back and forth over the manuscript of the novel. We’d found a bunch of sections that needed to be reworked, and had written all over the thing. In fact, I didn’t like the ending and wrote a brand-new one. When we finished, his office shipped the manuscript off to the typesetter, out in Pennsylvania.

“Then the [shipping company’s] truck it was on crashed, burst into flames, and all the contents were destroyed. And, as it turned out, my editor’s secretary had forgotten to Xerox the pages before sending them out.”

The classroom gasped. Gates did the thing with the glasses again.

“Yeah, I actually had fantasies about driving out to Pennsylvania and sifting through the ashes, trying to find remnants of the manuscript, so we could reconstruct it,” he said.

“I couldn’t really tell you how Preston Falls ends, in its published form.”

I chipped in, “And remember, kids: Don’t introduce bizarre accidents or coincidences into your fiction!” They headed off for spring break.

As I mentioned, we went out for drinks after. I had Gates inscribe a copy of Jernigan for a friend of mine (“With unironic best wishes”). On the way back to my car, I stopped at the Strand and picked up a replacement hardcover of the book, along with Cloud Atlas.

Last night, I opened up the replacement copy and noticed something funny: this book had previously belonged to a former friend of mine, an author whom I recently “disowned.” How’d I know this?

Well, his handwritten comments on the pages were one clue; his scrawl is pretty distinctive. The other clue was the part that read,

“Goshdarn, Gil is so afraid of life, like this Jernigan character. He has to erect a partition of humor between him and everything that might damage him, a humor glove, so he never actually comes in contact with anything.”

So remember, kids: Don’t introduce bizarre accidents or coincidences into your fiction!

Oh, and don’t write your thoughts about your friends on the back pages of novels they like and then sell those novels to bookstores that those friends might frequent.

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See the Gates

Well, dear reader, I have a pretty bad admission to make: I never got around to seeing The Gates, Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s big installation in Central Park. The one Saturday that the official VM girlfriend & I were thinking of going, it was too darn cold. So I missed it. I was somewhat interested in it, just to see if it’d make a good impression on me. Plus, I could’ve tied it into a visit to the Frick and the Met, where I’d spend some time among friends.

To make up for it, I spent yesterday evening with David Gates, a senior editor at Newsweek and author of two novels I really enjoy: Jernigan and Preston Falls. David & I had been in correspondence off and on since 1996, since I called him outta the blue over at his day job. I think he was the first legit author I ever shot the bull with.

Since then, I’ve come to know several more authors, and there’s a key thing to know about them: Writers like to hear from people who like their books and stories. Corollary: Writers don’t like to hear from obsessive stalkers.

Gates & I had several nice conversations/exchanges over the years, and I got to meet up with him last night. When we first sat down, I mentioned that it had been nine years since we started corresponding, and David did that thing that Swann and his dad did, raising the glasses and rubbing the eyes and bridge of the nose. (A past girlfriend of mine once marveled of the fact that I’ve managed to never meet my 20-something-year-old first cousin who lives in Queens; that’s Israelites for ya . . .)

It was an entertaining evening. He spoke to a class of NYU freshmen about writing, then headed out with me and occasional VM contributor Elayne for a couple of drinks at a bar I’ll never find a hyperlink for. We slagged some authors, praised others, drank Makers Mark, and got back to slagging authors. I won’t dish, since David’s got a job to uphold.

And I’ve gotta get back to writing about methods development for extractables/leachables testing in pharmaceutical processes.

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French Tickler

There’s a not-so-nice biography out about Bernard-Henri Levy, the Frenchman who wrote a book about the murder of Danny Pearl. Here’s a quote from the biography’s review:

Character assassination in France is less of a sport than in Britain, because the French care less about character, and in the culture that gave us Les Liaisons Dangereuses it is hard to inflame prurient sentiment by saying that a man has slept with a woman not his wife. On the other hand you can seriously damage a reputation by suggesting that an idea for a book was not the author’s own, or that he has misconstrued his classical sources.

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Power of the Press

A few posts down, I ran the From the Editor page of my magazine’s new ish. In it, there’s a quote from the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, whom I praise for trying to raise the alarm about the false numbers in the Medicare prescription benefit bill:

“Two equally plausible scenarios for the future of healthcare costs yield Medicare and Medicaid being either 11 % of GDP–half the size of the current federal government–or over 20% of GDP–larger than the current federal government. So there’s an enormous certainty out there but the trends in the long term, I think, are the central issue. There’s no question about that.”

I gave the page to my associate editor, and told her, “Here’s my vituperative rant for the month. Sometimes I get so vituperative that I make typos.”

She proofread my page, found no typos, and said, “I don’t think it’s a certainty.”

“Hmm?”

“That part about how there’s an enormous certainty. I don’t think he meant to say that.”

“Maybe he was being ironic,” I said. She frowned.

Still, best to double-check, since the quote did come from a transcript, and not a prepared statement. So I called the CBO’s communications department. I got bumped over to someone’s voice mail, and figured that I’d have to let it go as is.

Y’know the funny thing? The CBO got back to me within an hour, asked to see the exact passage in an e-mail, and called back within minutes to let me know that Mr. Holtz-Eakin’s words had been mis-transcribed and that he meant “uncertainty”.

I’m just amazed at how quickly they responded to my request, especially given that my magazine doesn’t exactly have a household name. So, additional kudos to the CBO! Keep watchdoggin’!

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Medicare Frauds

What’s $320 billion among friends?

(Editorial from the March issue of my magazine)

Last March and April in this space I wrote about the scandal(s) behind the passage of the Medicare prescription drug bill. At the time, I was irate over the fact that the White House hid $134 billion in costs for the bill, conveniently capping the publicized cost at $400 billion in order to gain votes. It was transparent fraud, and it was compounded by the fact that the chief actuary at Medicare/Medicaid was threatened with firing if he revealed the “true costs” of the prescription drug benefit bill.

The former head of the agency, Thomas Scully, was recently fined $85,000–equal to seven months’ salary–for this action,* Fortunately, he’s now on the speaking/lobbying trail, discussing the intricacies of health care coverage. Why, “[f]rom Medicaid and Medicare to the future of U.S. public health services, Thomas Scully precisely understands the intricacies of health care & public policy,” according to his online biography. This job must’ve taken up a good deal of Mr. Scully’s time. After all, his busy travel schedule prevented him from testifying in front of Congress about Medicare costs last April.

But maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on Mr. Scully. After all, it appears that his strongarm tactics only cost the American people $134 billion (minus the amount of his fine). As we learned in February 2005, the true extent of budget mendacity was actually a lot worse than we thought.

Revised estimates of the prescription benefit’s cost now range from $720 billion to $1.2 trillion over 10 years. The higher number’s skewed by ignoring cost-savings that the program is likely to generate, but it’s a big number that left-wing partisan hacks like to publicize. The problem is, that leaves the right-wing partisan hacks swallowing a $720 billion program, nearly double what was approved.

How on earth did the numbers jump from $400 billion to $534 billion to $720 billion? Mainly because the initial estimates of the cost included years when the program wouldn’t yet be in effect. That’s right: Congress voted on a bill for a Medicare prescription drug benefit that takes full effect on Jan. 1, 2006, but the initial (fraudulent) costs floated were for the 10-year stretch from 2004 to 2013, since the first phase-ins were to begin last year. But the cost of the program is negligible for 2004 and 2005, making the program look cheaper than it is. This administration has made a practice of that sort of cost-estimate trickery, a hinge of its 2001 and 2002 tax cuts.

So it’s the 2006-2015 costs that are now leaping up to bite us, just around the same time that the administration has a much more valid point to make about the long-term insolvency of Social Security. Virtually no one will treat this matter seriously, since the White House has made a practice of crying wolf, fiscally speaking.

Last June, in a Policy Forum on fiscal policy, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the director of the Congressional Budget Office (and one of the few people to denounce the initial false numbers of the Medicare bill), remarked, “Two equally plausible scenarios for the future of healthcare costs yield Medicare and Medicaid being either 11% of GDP–half the size of the current federal government–or over 20% of GDP–larger than the current federal government. So there’s an enormous uncertainty out there, but the trends in the long term, I think, are the central issue. There’s no question about that.”

No question at all.

–Gil Roth
Editor

* Actually, the correct amount of the fine is $84,933. We want to be exact about our numbers.