Day: March 17, 2010

Kiss me, I’m Irish!

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, everyone! Or, as we like to call it in New York, Drunk Tourists in the Street Before Lunchtime Day! Seriously, I can’t remember seeing this many obnoxious people in matching colors since my last home football game weekend at Penn State. I went for a walk around 12:30, since it was such a nice day outside, and I walked past several dozen bars with cheap shamrock decorations taped to the windows. I hadn’t had lunch yet and already some of these people — some who looked all of twelve or thirteen, I have to say — were can’t-get-up-off-the-ground or shout-random-things-at-strangers drunk. I suspect not a one of them was Irish.

For my (half-Irish on my mother’s side) part, I wore green today but didn’t even think to lift a pint. When I finally did have lunch, it was a slice of pizza and some fruit salad. I do drink on occasion, though almost never in the middle of the day — and then only in social situations — but I find the whole idea of taking the morning off to go binge drinking pretty depressing.

But beyond that, it was actually a really nice day. I sent a project I’m working on to our UK office, to get the ball rolling on a website we’re creating, and I put another manuscript into review. I also spent some time tracking down authors of some older books, with an eye towards developing new editions. So far, only one of them appears to have died since the previous edition, so that’s going well.

I did send out a bunch of rejection letters for Kaleidotrope, though, which is never fun. I noted earlier today on Twitter that when I read a story, I am looking for reasons to reject it. But, more than that, I’m looking for a story that doesn’t give me any reasons. I want to love every story, even if I don’t realistically have room for all of them, but in practice I’m going to love only a very small percentage. The number of stories I’ll hate is an even smaller percentage, of course, but that just means the vast number are somewhere in between. And it’s not that in-between stuff that I’m really looking for.

Anyway, that was my Wednesday. Right now, I think I need to take the dog out, and then I’m going to watch this new FX show Justified and go to bed.

Wednesday various

  • The very real problem of digital decay:

    Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

    Imagine having a record but no record player.

    Does this mean the people in my office who print out a copy of everything are on to something?

    There’s also the fact that, on a purely aesthetic level, digital archives tend to be pretty boring things. A novelist’s handwritten notes, for instance, are a lot more interesting to future readers than his half-finished draft in Microsoft Word. I think Emory University’s archive of Salman Rushdie’s work — this “access through emulation to a born-digital archive” — is a neat way to address this fact. [via]

  • The writer and editor in me liked this: Sentenced.
  • Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project — a teacher eats her school’s cafeteria food every day for lunch, with pictures! [via]
  • I don’t know that being able to identify Star Wars figurines with your mouth really makes you much of a fan so much as just a really weird kid. [via]
  • And finally, FutureStates : Play [via]: