Month: October 2004

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, I haven’t actually read — nor do I feel any real compulsion to read — Anne Rice’s latest book, but I was struck by the following comments she made to The New York Times today:

“People who find fault and problems with my books tend to say, ‘She needs an editor,'” Ms. Rice said. “When a person writes with such care and goes over and over a manuscript and wants every word to be perfect, it’s very frustrating.”

She added: “When you take home a CD of Pavarotti or Marilyn Horne, you don’t want to hear another voice blended in. I feel the same way about Hemingway. If I read it, I don’t want to read a new edited version.”

What struck me was not the fact that I’d never in my life before heard of Marilyn Horne. (Ms. Rice and I must not share the same musical tastes.) It was the fact that, unless I’m very much mistaken, recording artists like Horne and Pavarotti have record producers and other collaborators who work on their albums. And Ernest Hemingway had an editor.

After all, it isn’t always enough to want every word to be perfect. As Aldous Huxley once said, “A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.”

In his recent review of James Gunn’s The Immortals, Gerald Jonas writes:

Magazine science fiction of the 1950’s placed a premium on clever premises. Only rarely were those premises worked out in plausible stories about believable people in authentic-seeming futures. Gunn’s characters in “The Immortals” were clearly created to serve the needs of the plot. The projected future — an America whose social fabric has all but disintegrated — feels thin and arbitrary; it is hard to imagine anything going on in this world outside the narrow spotlight of the narrative. Readers with fond memories of yesterday’s science fiction will enjoy the deja vu quality of “The Immortals.” Others might use as a yardstick to see how far the genre has come in wedding mind-opening premises to the time-honored virtues of literate fiction.

Just found that interesting, is all.

My search referrers are a weird mix of Elizabethan study and often misspelled porn. They range from “shakespeare and his use of supernatural” to the always popular “sex with chicks”.

Someone also came here yesterday looking for “dirty amish jokes,” so if any of you filthy butter-churners know any, do tell.

I’m not sure if I should find this offensive or just surreal:

That said, even the most repulsive photographs bear witness. They are evidence. And therefore a kind of gift to memory. We live in an amnesiac society. The Abu Ghraib photographs have passed from the headlines to the art pages in half a year. One can only imagine how much further they may retreat in six more months.

Again, registration or BugMeNot login required for the full story.

(Incidentally, I hadn’t noticed this section before. I assume it’s a parody.)

Have you ever heard a song (say in a commerical or a movie or wherever) and thought, “Gee, that sounds neat. I wish I had a copy of that.” — only to discover later that you already do have a copy of the song?