Quotulatiousness

December 9, 2009

Tim Cavanaugh: would-be terrorist

Filed under: Books, Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:51

Tim Cavanaugh recently had to travel within listening range of some conversationalists:

Readers will say I’m making the following story up to further Reason‘s anti-Palin agenda, but it’s true: On a recent airplane flight, I sat behind two women who were not traveling together but broke the ice by discussing the late Ted Kennedy’s memoir, which one was reading. The other lady had never heard of Ted Kennedy, and needed the first to describe who he was. From the exchange it seemed to me that the second woman didn’t even know that there had ever been a president named John Kennedy, though I’m hoping I just misheard. The first woman patiently went through the storied careers of the Kennedys, and when she’d finished the other one said, “Well I want to get that Sarah Palin’s book. I’m a big fan of hers.”

Yet the two of them — separated by about 100 years in age, an apparently great distance in awareness of political matters, and sharply distinct attitudes toward politicians who are said to be among the most polarizing in recent history — got along famously, gabbing amiably through a four-hour journey. It was an encouraging show of our open and gregarious national character — unless you had to listen to it, in which case you were wishing you could crash the plane into a tall building.

I have to admit it’s hard to believe that any American adult hadn’t heard of the Kennedy clan . . .

December 8, 2009

Casting The Hobbit

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

In what I’m sure was meant to stir the fans, The Guardian headlines this story with “Tom Waits to star in The Hobbit?”:

Will Tom Waits battle Bilbo Baggins? A “trusted” source working on Guillermo del Toro’s production of The Hobbit claims that the singer-songwriter is up for a part.

Waits has acted before, in films such as Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law. But he has never played the kind of character you would expect to find in a JRR Tolkien’s novel. Though the role under consideration isn’t clear, an anonymous source told Ain’t It Cool News that Waits is near the top of del Toro’s list. “As much as I’d like to say he’s a lock, I’m told he’s simply someone the production is talking about,” claims the source, “but they seem to be talking about him pretty seriously.”

For all his charms, Waits seems an unlikely pick for Bilbo, the titular hobbit played by Ian Holm in The Lord of the Rings films. He is, above all, too grumpy. Besides, a cornucopia of much more avuncular, nerdy actors, including The Office‘s Martin Freeman, Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe and Doctor Who‘s David Tennant are reportedly under consideration for the part. The film-makers are reportedly auditioning unknown actors too.

November 25, 2009

Rule 34, Stross version

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:08

I can hardly wait until 2011:

If you’re wondering what this week’s excuse for scanty blog updates could possibly be, it might have something to do with me being 40,000 words into the (projected) 100,000 word first draft of 2011’s novel, “Rule 34”. It’s a sequel to “Halting State”, set some five years after the earlier novel, and focusing on the way our definitions of crime and morality (not to mention the practice of policing) change over time. (Yes, the title is an explicit call-out to you-know-what. The term “Hitler Yaoi” has been used with intent … but only after I googled, rubbed my eyes, and concluded that rule 34 was in effect.)

For the three of you who don’t know what Rule 34 is . . . don’t Google Image search for it. It’s a very short rule, but I suspect it’s true for most values of “true”: If it exists, there’s a porn version of it.

Rule-34

November 20, 2009

Those inevitable “new word” lists

Filed under: Books, Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:21

David Harsanyi falls into the trap cunningly laid for him by the devious wordmongers at Merriam-Webster:

Like other books Americans have a duty to own — the Bible or “Atlas Shrugged,” for instance — the dictionary does not require an absurd marketing ploy to sell itself.

Yet, every year a barrage of cockamamie “word lists” are unveiled by publishers seeking to bring attention to the evolving English language.

In the end, these lists establish two facts: 1) We are unable to invent any new words of value. 2) If you put a list together, a columnist will probably write about it.

One needn’t be William Safire, though, to be unsettled that the word “philanderer” is a major mystery to so many people. According to a new list by Merriam-Webster, “philanderer” (a national pastime, meaning to be sexually unfaithful to one’s wife) was one of the most searched words of the past year because of the crush of politicians and celebrities busy hiking the Appalachian trial.

The word receiving the highest intensity of searches over the shortest period of time was “admonish” (to express warning or disapproval). It was triggered by a crude outburst of a South Carolina congressman and the subsequent moralistic “admonishment” of him by Congress.

It’s not the lists themselves that bother me . . . it’s the blatantly contrived nature of the words appearing in most of the lists. “Unfriend”? Bleargh.

There is, admittedly, one trend that could prove to be a bright spot. The newly minted “teabagger” gives us hope that crude sexual terms will now regularly be applied to politics, where they can do the most good.

Perhaps “felching” will come to describe how the media gathers material for their coverage of the White House. Oh, wait . . .

November 2, 2009

Is the printed book nearing end-of-life?

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:59

Terry Teachout considers the wonders of the printed book and contemplates its looming obsolescence:

Regular readers of this blog know that I believe the printed book to be well on its way to ultimate extinction. As I put it in a “Sightings” column written in 2006, a year before the introduction of the Kindle:

The printed book is a beautiful object, “elegant” in both the aesthetic and mathematical senses of the word, and its invention was a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture. But it is also a technology — a means, not an end. Like all technologies, it has a finite lifespan, and its time is almost up.

On the other hand, I have yet to buy a Kindle, and at the moment I have no plans to do so. This is partly because I prefer to wait until the kinks are ironed out (I’ve never been a truly early adopter) and partly because, like most middle-aged authors, I remain enamored of the sheer physicality of the old-fashioned printed book.

[. . .]

So am I really a closet Luddite, a technological Moses who can’t bring himself to enter the promised land of the e-book? Maybe. Six years ago I declared myself to be “open, at least in theory, to the possibility of abandoning the book-as-art-object.” Now that technology has finally caught up with me, I find myself unexpectedly unwilling to put my money where my mouth is. Yet I believe no less firmly than ever that the printed book is a technology whose time has come and gone. Am I, then, a hypocrite? Or merely a middle-aged man who, like most middle-aged men, is reluctant to put aside the youthful things that remind me of myself when young?

I find myself in the same position as Terry . . . I’m not a leading edge early adopter, but I’ve been eager to “get to the future faster” for most of my life. I still remember Usenet when it was “the internet” as far as most people were concerned. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t consider my email far more important and urgent than “snail mail”, and I was a fan of “telecommuting” back when 2400 baud was “high speed”.

And yet . . . I don’t want to give up the book. I just got back from a book-buying spree in Stratford over the weekend, and don’t plan on buying a Kindle any time soon. I’ve got ebooks on my iPhone, but I consider them “emergency” reading material . . . when I don’t have a physical book to hand.

Am I also a luddite?

I hasten to point out that I no longer own any long-playing records or cassettes, and that I spend more time listening to music on my MacBook and iPod than on my CD player. No doubt the time will also come when I spend more time reading books on a Kindle, or something like it, than reading the handsomely bound volumes shelved in my living room. Not for me the self-conscious posturing of those curmudgeonly poseurs who wail Change and decay in all around I see! at every opportunity.

I had largely gotten out of the habit of listening to music until I got my iPhone last year. Since then, I’ve bought more CDs and MP3s than in the ten years before. I’ve still got a few vinyl LPs and a large collection of cassettes, but they’re just gathering dust.

October 9, 2009

Awful book covers

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:50

John Scalzi has a nominee for the “Worst Book Cover by a Major Publisher” award:

Worst_book_cover_nominee

Seriously, now, DAW, wtf? I know there’s a recession on, but there must be a better class of 12-year-old you can hire to push about the “liquefy” tool in Photoshop. I get that you were aiming for “chintzy, kooky fun” but you landed on “Fourth grade class project on Lulu.com,” and that just isn’t cool, and more to the point, you should know the difference. Were I an author in this particular anthology I would be sad I couldn’t show my friends the book I was in without them asking how much it cost me to publish it. I’m frightened to show it to graphic designers I know because I don’t want to be sued for damages when it causes blood to shoot from their ears. And as a reader, I can say the cover makes a really excellent argument for owning a Kindle.

September 25, 2009

QotD: CanLit

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 17:26

Canadian literature (or CanLit, as some insist) has gradually become a genre of its own- one of books that are bleak, desperate, *meaningful*, and above all, dull.

Jesse Brown, “You and the Pirates”, Boing Boing, 2009-09-25

September 23, 2009

Condescending Brits on CanLit

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:04

The feathers are well-ruffled in yesterday’s post on In Other Words, as a British judge for the Scotiabank-Giller Prize tries to describe CanLit:

It seems in Canada that you only have to write a novel to get grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and from your provincial Arts Council, who are also thanked. Complaints were once voiced that most shortlisted Giller novels emanated from just three big-name publishers, all owned by Bertelsmann, and that virtually every winner lived in the Toronto area. Now, many of the submitted authors, and their rugged subject matter, hail from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland. That’s maybe because small publishers too are now subsidised, and they proliferate. If you want to get your novel published, be Canadian.

H/T to (yes, this time I’m sure) Chris Taylor, who expects “predictable outrage from hypersensitive arts community in 3..2..1”

September 17, 2009

On demand book printing

Filed under: Books, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:17

Want a copy of a rare old out-of-print volume? For collectors and antiquarians, this is probably of lesser interest, but for researchers and readers, this is great news:

What’s hot off the presses come Thursday?

Any one of the more than 2 million books old enough to fall out of copyright into the public domain.

Over the last seven years, Google has scanned millions of dusty tomes from deep in the stacks of the nation’s leading university libraries and turned them into searchable documents available anywhere in the world through its search box.

And now Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand Books, is letting readers turn those digital copies back into paper copies, individually printed by bookstores around the world.

Or at least by those booksellers that have ordered its $100,000 Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a 300 page gray-scale book with a color cover in about 4 minutes, at a cost to the bookstore of about $3 for materials.

September 4, 2009

How many blog checkmarks would you need?

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:38

Jacob Sullum looks at the quaint, old-fashioned notion of internal fact-checking:

When I was a “reporter-researcher” at Fortune during college, the Time Inc. policy was that one verification by book was worth two verifications by newspaper. If I’m remembering the color scheme correctly, the former was a “red check,” which was good enough on its own, whereas the latter was a “black check,” acceptable only in pairs. I may have the colors reversed, but the point is that we all assumed books were more reliable than newspapers (or other periodicals). That was a mistake, I think. While some books categorized as nonfiction, such as reference works and peer-reviewed releases from academic presses, go through some sort of fact checking, the vast majority do not. (They are generally reviewed by lawyers with an eye toward possible libel issues, but you can get lots of things wrong without risking a lawsuit.) In fact, judging from the finished products, I’d say most books are barely edited, let alone checked for accuracy. By contrast, newspaper stories typically are reviewed by two or three editors before they see print. It’s true that books take longer to produce, which gives a conscientious author more time to catch mistakes. Then again, they are a lot longer than newspaper stories, so there is more room for error.

So, how many checkmarks (of a murky shade of orange) would be required for blog references? Can any blogger count that high?

August 31, 2009

Frederick Pohl graduates from high school

Filed under: Books, Education, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:42

Fred Pohl, the long-time science fiction author (his first published piece was a poem in the October, 1937 issue of Amazing Stories, according to Wikipedia) has finally received his high school diploma:

Happens that I never graduated from high school, the reason being that I quit school as soon as I was old enough, which was 17. I had several reasons for doing that, but the one I prefer to give when asked that question is the one given by my friend John Brunner when he quit in England, at about the same age. That was, “I had to leave school, because it was interfering with my education.” (In case you wonder, I didn’t go to college, either. I did teach at several and lectured at scores if not hundreds of them, all the way from local community two-year schools to the Ivy League, in maybe a dozen different countries as well as our own, but I never attended one.)

[. . .]

I do have one problem, though. I remember matchbook ads for a correspondence school, back in the days when people still carried matchbooks, which promised that people who got a high-school diploma would get $25 more a week. The problem is I don’t know whom to bill.

August 20, 2009

It must be a slow week in movies . . .

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:14

. . . so John Scalzi decides to kick over the hornet’s nest of Star Wars geekdom:

I’ll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here’s ten.

R2-D2
Sure, he’s cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion — and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: “Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we’ll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That’s just madness.”

C-3PO
Can’t fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I’m still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he’d later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the “mincing gay man” module.

And the crowd goes wild.

August 13, 2009

If they won’t voluntarily read lit’rit’cher . . .

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:47

. . . repackage it as sleaze:

The Valley of Fear

“Years ago, a PI out of Chicago brought justice to a dirty town. Now he’s going to pay,” trumpets the cover copy for US publisher Hard Case Crime’s new take on the classic novel, which it will release in December. “The man needs the help of a great detective … but could even Sherlock Holmes save him now?” The cover shows a scantily clad, backlit blond, reacting in terror to a muscled man showing off a brand on his forearm. Arthur Conan Doyle becomes AC Doyle, “bestselling author of The Lost World”, while the reader is further enticed by the tagline that “They All Answered to… The BODYMASTER!”

Publisher Charles Ardai said he had been looking for a classic novel to “playfully repackage” in Hard Case Crime’s pulp style since he launched the press five years ago, keen to follow in the footsteps of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw a cleavage-revealing cover dreamed up for 1984 (“Forbidden love … Fear … Betrayal”), and a “bosomy lipsticked redhead” on the cover of Frankenstein. “This is the tradition we wanted to revive with our edition of The Valley of Fear — presenting something ‘good for you’ in ‘bad for you’ garb,” he said.

August 5, 2009

Maybe there isn’t a lot of ruin in a nation? Or a civilization?

Filed under: Books, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

Adam Smith remarked that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, but he perhaps was speaking just of economical ruin? In culture, things seem to have the ability to change remarkably quickly … usually in a ruinous direction. Ghost of a Flea looks at an interesting — but depressing — phenomenon:

In less than a generation, we have come to an extraordinary pass. Once right thinking progressives lined up to purchase copies of The Satanic Verses — my first edition sits untouched and unread — and death chanting rioters in Bradford and elsewhere were called out for the barbarians they so manifestly demonstrated themselves to be. It was the thin edge of the wedge. 9/11 worked as it was intended by its authors, sending every weakling into a panic, lashing out at the men on the walls lest they provoke another raid from the borderlands.

These days, Salman Rushdie would most likely be charged with something by a Commission for the Promotion of Human Rights and Prevention of Hatred. In Ireland they would cut to the chase and press criminal charges. Under the new regime, all demons may be mocked save the one pretending to be God.

These Weimar conditions are a hot house for growing hatred against the people they are ostensibly meant to protect.

July 28, 2009

Did James Lileks like The Watchmen?

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:23

One quote from a fascinating take-down:

. . . it’s a sign of the movie that leaving in the giant squid would have made it less ridiculous.

Haven’t seen the movie myself, although Victor said he liked it.

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