In yet another example of what was once science fiction becoming fact (in this case, the science fiction being “Fahrenheit 451”), in some libraries you can now “borrow” a person. In this particular story, a woman “checked out” a gay man in order to learn more.

To me, this is another example of people living in a culture of dislocation needing alternative ways to meet fellow humans. Because I would think there’s no shortage of gay men in London, or ways to meet them. I’m looking for the human book “Neocons Who Were Right.” That will be a challenge.

Thanks to Tom Boyle for alerting me to this.

Tonight in a discussion moderated by a funny and fannish Matt Groening at the Writer’s Guild, “Sopranos” creator David Chase was hit with two recurring and predictable questions: Whatever happened to the Russian who escapes into my old stomping grounds in the “Pine Barrens” episode, and, in the words of a misshapen middle-aged woman who seems to have sniffed too much bleach, “That ending — what’s the deal with that?” (I told my friend Terence that when his play “Tangled” opens in June, we’re going to make and pass out t-shirts that say “‘Tangled’ — What’s the deal with that?”)

Chase took the bait on one of these questions, and passed on the other. I think there’s a lesson here for any writer who’s ever in a discussion with his audience.

Here is what dramatists should not do in audience talkback situations:

• In a developmental reading, do not entertain ideas from the audience about how to “fix” or “improve” your play. Let your common sense prevail: If the person offering advice could have written the play better, he already would be doing so rather than offering to do yours for free and for no credit.
• Do not explain your play. Either they didn’t get it because someone didn’t do their job — either you, or the actors, or the director — or because even though everyone did their job, they still just didn’t get it. Explaining it merely assert that it needs to be explained. It doesn’t. It needs to be performed, and that should be the limit explanation.
• Similarly, don’t fill in back story or what would have happened next. It’s in the play, or it isn’t. If it belongs in the play, then put it in. If you don’t, there’s a good reason to leave it out. Filling people in with coulda-wouldas risks making these missing elements seem like shouldas.

That’s pretty much the advice I give to students facing an audience Q&A for the first time. What should a playwright do? Make the theatre or university or foundation or whatever brought you out happy that they did so. That means being charming and funny. Maybe they’ll even have you back.

While David Chase wisely passed on explaining the ending of “The Sopranos,” I’m sad to say that he told us exactly what happened to the Russian, none of which was ever scripted or shot. Boy Scouts find him in the woods, get him back to a hospital, his mob boss gets him back to his native Russia, and there he remains, brain-damaged. I don’t know if Chase was putting us on or not, but this inelegant connect-the-dots outcome, completely lacking in subtlety and wit, will no doubt never leave my mind — and has now forever ruined my favorite episode. I share it with you as a cautionary tale. Some things are better left as they are.

1. In Sunday’s Times, Scott Timberg offers this piece about three youngish men with the audacity to launch print journals. Timberg is a good writer and someone with an eye for important details. Which to me confirms that it was a copy editor who captioned a photo of Keith Gessen on the jump page as “Keith Gesson.” The first rule of journalism: Get people’s names right.
2. Evidently, at least part of the LA Times website is on Eastern time. I say that because every night sometime after 9 PM I’m able to play the next day’s crossword puzzle. If your own website operates in a different time zone, I don’t think you’re building a strong case that your paper is that important. Sorry.

The past six weeks it has been bizarre so often seeing Johnstown, PA in the news as a major campaign stop for the Democratic primary campaigns. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and for all I know Ralph Nader, have all made several stops. Until now, Johnstown was most famous for the Johnstown floods (all three of them) and for giving us Spider-Man’s co-creator, Steve Ditko.

In my family, it’s been most famous for giving us my mother.

Whenever we would visit on family trips when I was a kid, we would take in the same two Johnstown attractions: the highwater mark on City Hall downtown, which calibrated the effects of the three floods, and the inclined plane, which to me seemed slower than a nasal drip. One thing that always impressed me was the distinct local accent. Her Johnstown heritage is the reason that my mother pronounces “tire,” “tower,” and “tar” identically — “tarrrr,” like a pirate. Johnstonians also call soda “pawp” and at some point manufactured “yins” as a contraction of “you-uns.” I am not making this up. These unfortunate locutions provided fodder for my father, who told people he’d “rescued her from the hillbillies.”

I call my mother every weekend and never tarrrrr of hearing about her “wushin’ dishes” and “arrrrn’n’ clothes.” On Saturday I was unsurprised to hear that she was cooking sauerkraut and pork, although I was surprised to hear her say that she’d burnt the fish she was cooking separately. She blamed me for distracting her. Mom is 83 and that’s probably the first fish she ever burned, and I’m sure she ate it anyway. Those Depression kids are thrifty. I should have asked her how it’s felt seeing Johnstown in the news so frequently again — at my last count, about 19 people still lived in Johnstown, so the competition for votes must be fierce indeed. This will give me something new to ask her about when I visit the first week in June. And maybe by then, the Democrats will even have chosen a presidential candidate.

Pop quiz. See if you can identify what’s factually wrong with this story from the Los Angeles Times:

It used to always be the premium of the premiums. Now the cable pack’s catching up.
By Mary McNamara, Times Television Critic
April 19, 2008
REVOLUTION is a frightening, heady and often fatal business, but it’s what happens afterward that matters most. No one knows this better than the folks at HBO. “John Adams,” which comes to a close Sunday night, has devoted seven beautifully shot hours to defying the often overly patriotic legends of our past with a toothache-and-all portrait of a man who helped define modern democracy, albeit grumbling every step of the way.

In his portrayal of our second president, Paul Giamatti creates a man perpetually dissatisfied, disgusted by the preening ambition of politics even as he is infected by it. If his relentless crankiness was a bit hard for some of us to take in early episodes, in the second half of the series it makes much more sense. While exhorting angry men to throw off the shackles of tyranny offers many opportunities for rhetorical fabulousness, setting up a new government is a bureaucratic nightmare, with oversized personalities disagreeing over things both petty and fundamental. George Washington (David Morse) so quickly tired of the infighting among his Cabinet and vagaries of public opinion that he stepped down from the presidency after a single term. “I know now what it is like to be disliked,” he says to Adams, his perpetually disliked vice president.

I’ll bet you got it.

As most of us learned in grade school — or as one could have learned even by watching the “John Adams” miniseries this piece touches on — Washington served TWO terms, not one.

This is something evidently unknown not only to the Times Television Critic, but also to the copy desk of what claims to be one of the nation’s most important newspapers.

I recently told a friend that I’ve felt so sorry for Times employees that I’ve stopped picking on the paper. Despite its misspelling Allen Ginsberg’s name on the front page when he died. Despite the routine errors of both commission and omission. The paper has been shedding longtime employees left and right — including some friends of mine — and I do love reading the daily newspaper, so this is the cri de couer of a wounded lover. But by God, if you can’t even get right that the Founder, the “indispensable man” of American history, served EIGHT years and NOT FOUR, then perhaps you shouldn’t be publishing a newspaper.

(With all apologies to friends still writing for the paper.)

A friend recently directed me to this video, and I’m glad he did. It’s 19 minutes well-spent. In it, Sir Ken Robinson addresses the TED Conference on the topic of learning — what it has meant in the past, and why the current system isn’t built for the future. In some ways, what he’s calling for sounds like a new entrepreneurial approach. (And by that, I don’t mean privatized education; I mean consumer-based.)

I can personally relate to this as someone who was a victim of a hidebound school system every inch of the way until college — which surprisingly offered me choices I’d never realized one could have, even though I’d always felt I should have had them.

Today my nine-year-old saw the Barack Obama bobblehead figure on my desk and said, “I don’t want Barack Obama to win any more.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because he belongs to a church that hates America.”

See? Kids do learn things in school.

In general, I don’t care too much about film directors — I’m more interested in theatre and literature, and the auteurs I follow are writers as well as directors: Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Paul Schrader… and Werner Herzog, who is in a class by himself.

As I’ve remarked before, Herzog’s films are simultaneously wonderful and bad. He always seems to miss precisely the shot he needs to convey the story. In fact, entire scenes seem to go missing, with plot threads dangling in the wind. At the same time, every single one of his films is loaded with individual moments so startling, so compelling and odd, that it will never leave you. In “Aguirre, Wrath of God,” one of those moments is the little raft that gets caught in a pool of turbulence, eventually drowning part of the expedition. (Which, in typical Herzog form, almost actually happened to a member or two of the cast.) In “Fitzcarraldo,” it’s Klaus Kinski’s character awakening to find that the riverboat he’s on is careening toward a waterfall. In “Grizzly Man,” it’s the shot of the supremely naive Timothy Treadwell swimming serenely with one of his bear brethren and then seeing that bear swing about to take a swipe at him in an awful premonition of Treadwell’s ultimate fate. These films, plus “Rescue Dawn,” “Little Dieter Needs to Fly,” “Where the Green Ants Dream,” “My Best Fiend,” and several Herzog short subjects have given me hours of delight (mixed with frustration over the errant storytelling.

But who knows what delights await me in this boxed set, pictured above, which arrived just today, new and unopened and for about forty bucks? (Thank you, eBay.)  The set includes  “The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser,” “Even Dwarfs Started Small,” “Fata Morgana,” “Lessons Of Darkness,” “Heart Of Glass,” “Strozsek,” and “And Little Dieter Needs To Fly.” I imagine many hours of enjoyable late-night viewing by myself.

Why by myself? Except for two close friends whose schedules rarely match with my own, and a third friend who lives on the East Coast, I can’t think of anyone who’d like to come watch these. (And I’m not even sure that two of those three would enjoy these. In fact, sometimes I’m not sure I “enjoy” Herzog’s films — I’m just compelled by them.)

A story I’d like to share. Several months ago, “Where the Green Ants Dream” arrived at my house, courtesy of Netflix. My wife and I were both home that night (a rarity), and as we lay in bed, she wondered aloud what had come from Netflix. Now usually, Valorie rips open my Netflix envelope, reads the sleeve, shakes her head and sighs and slips the disk back into the envelope. At least, that’s what our son Lex reports. I’ve offered to set up her own queue of things she’d like to see, but she’s not interested, so the queue is entirely my own and it’s not generally things found at your local cineplex four months ago. My tastes range from obscure documentaries to obsessive narratives courtesy of German directors. This time, though, she thought why not, and agreed to watch “Where the Green Ants Dream.” In this film, a mining company is blowing up whole landscapes of the Australian outback — at least until a group of Aborigines set up camp expressly to block further dynamiting. From there, not much happens, except an old woman pulls up a lawn chair and waits patiently for her dog to emerge, said dog having entered the system of artificial caves. Much later, either the dog returns or Herzog simply forgets about it — I can’t remember which. We start watching this film at about a quarter after midnight, in bed, both of us wondering what if anything is going to happen. Finally, Valorie sits up and announces that she’s going to do the laundry. At 1 a.m. And she did. After watching half the movie and already being in bed.

To me, this episode speaks volumes about why I’ll be enjoying the Herzog oeuvre alone.

In that selfsame issue of Reason, Ronald Bailey debunks yet again the myth that the U.S. was founded by observant and proselytizing Christians. He also reminds us just how recent and faddish evangelism is — and how it may be a fad that is ending.

Let’s hope so. Because in today’s news there was little I found quite as distressing as this piece, which shows Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama trying to out-God each other in Pennsylvania (an event that no doubt made Benjamin Franklin’s gout flare up in the great hereafter).  I don’t care which is more godly (given the history of things done in the names of so many disagreeing and disagreeable gods). I care which has a better sense of how to help us here on Earth.

Comic-book artist Peter Bagge covered the now long-ago New Hampshire primary for Reason magazine. Here’s what he learned. (Especially about Ron Paul.)