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The Second Pass is throwing a party at Melville House Bookstore this Wednesday night, and I’ll be reading a very brief excerpt from the novel I’m finishing up.

The other readers are Carlene Bauer (Not That Kind of Girl), Will Blythe (To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever), and Jason Zinoman, theater critic for the New York Times, who’s working on a book about ’70s horror films. After the readings “conclude with an entertaining excerpt from a largely forgotten work, in keeping with the site’s preoccupations,” we drink and toast to Second Pass mastermind John Williams. All this begins at 7:30 p.m.

I’m going to bring a pile of these booklets (above) to give away. I made them last year, to send to people who seemed disappointed that they didn’t win my novel excerpt giveaway, but for some reason I decided to print extra ones that have now been sitting around so long, I just need them out of my life. You should know that I’m nobody’s idea of a book designer; I completely mangled Bill Ectric’s Photoshop handiwork on the cover. Inside are my doubt reading list for Bookforum and a little bit of “When the Flock Changed.”

If you make it out to celebrate with us, you’re welcome to one. And I’ll eventually give away any leftovers here.

By far, my greatest inspiration in October was attending the Highlights Illustrators' Party at their editorial offices in Honesdale, PA. Besides the specialness of hanging out for three days with a ton of other illustrators who freelance for Highlights, and meeting the art directors, editors and other staff of the organization, I finally met in person fellow IFKers Jannie Ho and Jennifer Morris! So there were four out of seven of us at this event! What fun we all had! And Susan and I were travel buddies and roomies, affording us LOTS of time to talk and share, especially on the lengthy drive from Montreal to Honesdale and back. I was re-energized after all that, I must say! If only we had illustrator parties more often. : )

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By Elvin Lim

The generic Democratic ballot appeared to rebound a little last week, in part because of the Republican Pledge to America, the story of Christine O’Donnell of Delaware spreading in the liberal base, and in part because of anticipation of the One Nation march on the National Mall this weekend. Could it be that Democrats may actually be able to keep their majorities in Congress if this trend continues?A cold look at history tells us that the odds are still low. One of the iron laws of American politics is that the president’s party almost always loses seats in the House in off-year, mid-term elections. Since 1870, there have been 35 mid-term elections and on all but four occasions, the president’s party lost seats in the House (the average loss is 34 seats).

On these four occasions, the gains made by the president’s party were minor. Republicans and Democrats respectively picked up 9 seats in 1902 and 1934 (perhaps having the last name, Roosevelt, had something to do with it.) In 1998, the Democrats picked up 4 seats in part because of the public backlash against the Clinton impeachment proceedings. In 2002, the Republicans did not lose any seats (or gain any) and bucked the historical trend because the country was rallying behind the president after September 11. (Democrats searching for hope this year should observe that three of these exceptions occurred in year two of a new presidency; 1998 was the only exception to the famous “six-year itch.”)

On average, Democrats have proven to be more adept at losing seats than Republicans, consistent with the conventional wisdom that the Republican party is a more orderly party and better able to act in unison than Democrats can. Democrats have typically lost 39 seats in the house in mid-term elections (exactly the number the Republicans need to take over to gain majority control this year), while Republicans have lost an average of 32 seats in mid-terms.

The virtue of being a not-so-big-tent party is that there tends to be less internal disagreement within the Republican party than in the Democratic party. It took a Tea Party movement to create dissension within Republican ranks, and yet some would argue that the movement has only rallied and unified the base.

On the Democratic side however, value, demographic, and ideological pluralism has always been a double-edged sword. For here is the telling history of 2009-2011: whereas Republicans are united that Obama was a mistake, Democrats are far from united about what mistakes Obama has made. The liberal faction of the Democratic party, for example, began losing faith in Obama when he compromised on universal health-care, and conservative “blue-dog” Democrats parted ways with their brethren just when the president proposed a middle-way in the form of a government sponsored “public option.” This is the perverse outcome of the party boasting more registered members than the Republican party (or for that matter, any other organization in the world.)

If Democrats, unlike Republicans, don’t do unity well, then it may well be that they could be better off, or at least no worse off than they are today, should Republicans take one or both Houses of Congress this year. If divided party control of government shall come to pass, it would be because the Democrats were already splintered from the very moment they were blessed with united or single party control of government. Put another way, it may not really matter what happens come November, because Democrats were only united in name in 2009-2011 (and that was possibly what made the infighting more intense).

Indeed, D

What is the worst case of sunburn you ever got?

When was the last time you took a swing at a piñata?

At a party last night:

Person I just met: So, what do you do?
Me: I write stories for teenagers.
PIJM: So, you write vampire stories?
Me: No.

Hilarious.

Same party:

Guy: Yeah, this gal I work with keeps telling me I'm in big trouble.
So, we all bite. Why?
Guy: She wouldn't say, just kept saying over and over that I got her in big trouble.
We're like, uh-huh...
Guy: Then I find out that I outed the fact that she wasn't married any more [and hasn't been for like the past eight years!]. Turns out she'd been using her family as an excuse to not go out with her co-workers.

Hilarious.

My friend Sylvia suggested it. A housewarming. When I said goodbye to her in Big Sur, she said something like you'll have to invite me to your housewarming. I said sure, but I was like, really? But, we don't really know very many people up here, and well, there's just so much moving-in left to do, and we are still in boxes, and Mx just arrived home and I don't even know where to shop yet, and we're just renting, and we aren't going to be here very long, and what food would I serve, and I'm still trying to figure out why the story I've been writing for five years matters and, well, fill-in-the-blank. So I sent out invitations to neighbors I've just barely met and we sent Facebook event e-vites to the folks we know in the area.

But there was this question I wouldn't allow myself to even think about ...what if no one came? Admit it, that's got to be one of the biggest fears of a party-thrower, right?

Well, it was wonderful. And the weather last Saturday was beautiful. We had a great crowd and I made all the Indonesian food I love and people were into it. Thank goodness we had a spicy-food crowd. Joe's mom even came and so did her dog, Lovey, which made Oso very, very happy. Another neighborhood dog stopped by too, Molly. She was lots of fun. It was so much fun seeing people we hadn't seen in a while while we made new friends too. Couldn't have pulled it off without Mx and Joe. Mx was in charge of music and Joe was at the blender and BBQ. And I found my new mantra.

Chicken curry? Made. Beef Satay? Marinating. Beers? Cooling. Wine? Drinking. About ready to make the Krepok. Hmmmm. I've only been cooking for a couple hours but I'm exhausted. Maybe that trip to the gym this AM wasn't such a great idea? Hmmmm....No, a trip to the gym is ALWAYS a great idea.

I know how to make a million dollars in our new town. Own a PARTY STORE. Aside from super upscale wedding caterers [a la wedding on the beach in Carmel, Monterey, Big Sur] there's like nowhere to get butterfly confetti, piñtas and fun stuff. Only one small store in Monterey [who had NO butterfly confetti, can you believe?]. In So Cal we had four party stores in our sleepy little town.

There's a Tea Party coming with 19 squealing little girls. The Woog turns 6!

sketches:

final (completed with glittery flowers on the printed version):




past parties & invites

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at health-care reform. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

After attempting a pivot to jobs, the Obama administration has realized that a hanging cadence on health-care will not do. Perhaps they should never have started it, but closure is what the administration now must have. An encore after the strident audacity of hope on health-care reform was temporarily dashed after the election of Scott Brown to the Senate.

In the immediate aftermath of that election, Democrats were in danger of exchanging over-confidence for excessive humility. After Obama’s historic election the year before and Arlen Specter’s party switch, Democrats were overtaken by hubris that Obama’s tune of change could be used to overturn Washington and to compel it toward a Progressive utopia. But just as Democrats were foolhardy to think that 60 votes in the Senate gave them invincible power, they somehow thought after the Massachusetts Senate election that 59 made them completely impotent.

In the media, we hear, conversely, about the conservative comeback in hyperbolic terms. On Saturday, Glenn Beck, not Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney, delivered the keynote speech in the largest annual conservative gathering, the CPAC conference. If Beck’s stardom exceeds that of the winner of the CPAC straw poll this year, Ron Paul, it is because the conservative movement, charged as it is, remains a movement in search of a leader. It is also a movement, as Beck’s criticism of Progressive Republicans in his speech reveals, which is not exactly in sync with the Republican party – the only machine capable of taking down liberal dreams.

And so a Democratic comeback on health-care reform is afoot. With one vote shy of a fillibuster-proof majority, Senator Harry Reid has opened the door to the Budget Reconciliaton process that more Progressive advocates of health-care reform like Governor Howard Dean have been pushing for a while. While it is not clear that there are 50 votes in the Senate for the public option, assuming that Vice-President Biden will cast the 51st, what is clear is that Democrats are much more likely to push through a liberal bill with the veto pivot sliding to the left by ten Senators.

In the White House too, we see a coordinated move to bring Reconciliation back as an option. Obama used his weekly address on Saturday to lay the ground work when he warned that “in time, we’ll see these skyrocketing health care costs become the single largest driver of our federal deficits.” He said this because in order to use Reconciliation, Democrats must show a relationship between health-care reform and balancing the federal budget.

No one in Washington believes that Thursday’s Health-care Summit will magically generate a consensus when in the past year there has been nothing but partisan bickering. If so, the President is not being naive, but signali

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Congress. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

On this Presidents Day, it would appear that everyone but the President’s rivals for public affection are doing well in the polls.

Hillary Clinton has shed the image that she is a soft liberal and she is well poised to say, “I told you so,” about her erstwhile charge that Barack Obama lacks experience and fortitude. Even Dick Cheney is doing well, with the public behind him and against civilian trials for terrorist suspects. And we just found out that Evan Bayh is bowing out, probably to escape the anti-incumbency wave on the horizon even though recent polls put him 20 points ahead of his competitors. Given that Bayh left his party less than a week to scramble to collect 4,500 signatures for a viable candidate for his Senate seat, he appears to be setting himself up for a future run as a centrist Democrat who stands up to party apparatchiks. (And here’s another clue: “I am an executive at heart,” Bayh told reporters on Monday.)

The only people doing worse than Obama are Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the Democratic Congress as a whole. As Evan Bayh put it, “I do not love Congress.” The atmosphere now in Washington is toxic and the poison is leaking down Pennsylvania Avenue and inundating the White House. That is why I am wondering if White House strategists are secretly hoping to lose Democratic control of Congress this year.

The conventional wisdom is that whatever the President proposes, Congress delivers. But not only has this not happened, the failure of Congress to act collectively to pass legislation (especially on
healthcare reform) has tarnished the name of the Democratic Party of which the President is titular head. As a result of the seeming asset of unified Democratic control of all branches of government, Barack Obama could not do what Reagan did when he too suffered from bad poll numbers in his first years in office as a result of recession – blame the other branch. The American people love to hate Congress, and unified Democratic control of all the elected federal branches has merely reinforced the Americans’ instinctive fear of consolidated power as the Tea Party Movement most viscerally represents. The American Presidency thrives on blame avoidance and freedom from party ties, not single-party government.

Because Washington moves so slowly no matter who is in power and when it does it invariably creates a program so sullied with pork-barrel compromises, it is often better to be able to blame someone else for failing to deliver than to have delivered anything at all. Lyndon Johnson doesn’t get high marks from historians for creating Medicare. And FDR’s fame did not come from the Social Security Act. If we do not judge presidential success by legislative achievements, then presidents are better off when they act unilaterally against a recalcitrant Congress. Better still if this Congress is controlled by another party because presidential unilateralism can be executed without dilemma. Barack Obama would then be free to descend from the law professor’s lectern, as Sarah Palin put it, and move, as Publius recommended, wi

Writer's Digest is Turning 90, We're Having a Party & You're Invited!...

Writer's Digest is hitting the big 9-0 so we're celebrating with a birthday bash at the ubercool Northside Tavern in the Nati on Wednesday, January 20th at 7 PM.

We'll be giving away lots of writerly swag and there will be cake (and a well-stocked bar).

“All of us on staff are honored and humbled to be a part of the Writer’s Digest legacy, and this anniversary gives us a moment to celebrate and give thanks to the writing community that supports us,” say Jane Friedman, our Publisher and WD Community Leader. “Anyone who’s ever worked with or for Writer’s Digest is encouraged to join us, as well as anyone who has read and appreciated the magazine over the years.”

If you are in the area--or even if you're not--come join the WD team in anniversary revelry.