- A lot has been written recently about the “film,” Innocence of Muslims, notably its offensiveness to Muslims (and film lovers), the violence that’s erupted in its wake, and the duplicitous nature with which it was made. Now, via Neil Gaiman one of the actresses speaks out:
It’s painful to see how our faces were used to create something so atrocious without us knowing anything about it at all. It’s painful to see people being offended with the movie that used our faces to deliver lines (it’s obvious the movie was dubbed) that we were never informed of, it is painful to see people getting killed for this same movie, it is painful to hear people blame us when we did nothing but perform our art in the fictional adventure movie that was about a comet falling into a desert and tribes in ancient Egypt fighting to acquire it, it’s painful to be thought to be someone else when you are a completely different person.
- I’m not quite sure I buy into the idea of Breaking Bad as a “White supremacist fable” entirely — it’s probably true the show doesn’t get the drug trade right, but, then, it’s not really about the drug trade, is it? — but there’s some interesting food for thought here:
White-washing the illegal drug market involves depicting it like markets wealthy viewers are more comfortable and familiar with, namely those of the farmers market or the local pharmacy. Walter White combines the ostensible moral complexity television audiences demand in a post-Soprano protagonist with a cleanliness that allows him to market expensive cars. The U.S. is still very much a white supremacist country, but classic cowboys-kill-Indians narratives don’t play with wealthy viewers or the critics who help determine those tastes. And Jack Bauer can drive only so many cars. For the credulous viewer who likes to imagine he’s a couple of life crises from being the Larry Bird of meth — and for the people who sell him stuff — White is right.If nothing else, the article makes me want to re-watch The Wire.
- John Green on self-publishing and Amazon:
Here’s my concern: What will happen to the next generation’s Toni Morrison? How will she—a brilliant, Nobel-worthy writer who doesn’t have a huge built-in audience—get the financial and editorial support her talent deserves? (You’ll note that there’s no self-published literary fiction anywhere near the kindle bestseller lists.) Amazon will have absolutely no investment in that writer, and they won’t need to. Over time, I’m worried this lack of investment will hurt the quality and breadth of literature we actually read, even if literature remains broadly available.
- This isn’t new, but: Jonathan Coulton on the future of music, 3D printing, and scarcity:
This is my bias: the decline of scarcity seems inevitable to me. I have no doubt that this fight over mp3s is just the first of many fights we’re going to have about this stuff. Our laws and ethics already fail to match up with our behaviors, and for my money, those are the things we should be trying to fix. The change is already happening to us, and it’s a change that WE ARE CHOOSING. It’s too late to stop it, because we actually kind of like a lot of the things that we’re getting out of it.
- And finally, PBS asks, “Can fandom change society?” [via]
books
Tuesday various
- Here’s a question: How many people can Manhattan hold?
Some perspective: As crowded as the city feels at times, the present-day Manhattan population, 1.6 million, is nowhere near what it once was. In 1910, a staggering 2.3 million people crowded the borough, mostly in tenement buildings. It was a time before zoning, when roughly 90,000 windowless rooms were available for rent, and a recent immigrant might share a few hundred square feet with as many as 10 people. At that time, the Lower East Side was one of the most crowded places on the planet, according to demographers. Even as recently as 1950, the Manhattan of “West Side Story†was denser than today, with a population of two million.
- Trying To Tame The (Real) Deadliest Fishing Jobs:
From 2000 to 2009, workers in the Northeast’s multi-species groundfish fishery (which includes fish such as cod and haddock) were 37 times more likely to die on the job as a police officer.
- Enjoy this Shakespeare Insult Kit, thou impertinent folly-fallen flap-dragon!
- Klingon remains surprisingly unpopular in the United Arab Emerates. [via]
- And finally, an LA garage door painted to look like bookshelves:
Monday various
- There are huge spoilers in this Breaking Bad article (In Hell, “We Shall Be Free”), but it’s some of the best writing about the show, and particularly the character of Walter White, that I’ve read going into this current, final season. And, really, if you’re not watching Breaking Bad…? [via]
- Living grass portraits created by photosynthesis.
- The Sound and the Fury — now in color! [via]
- All Work and No Play Make the Baining the “Dullest Culture on Earth”. I can just imagine Rush Limbaugh claiming there’s some kind of conspiracy because they’re called the Baining. [via]
- And finally, a really cool rendition of the Doctor Who theme song:
Pennywise lives
I don’t know what it is about this week. Maybe it knows that next week, and even the week after, are going to be considerably busier and it’s over-compensating. But oh man has there ever been nothing to write about this week.
I finished listening to It finally this afternoon. As I said here, it’s not a perfect book — it’s too big, in length and subject both, for anything like that — and it maybe is a little too long in places. Also, some of the characters — okay, Beverly mostly — get a little short-changed if not outright abused.
(There is, however, a nice moment nearer to the end when King takes what seems to have been his forgetting a character for several long chapters, and in fact maybe even confusing him with another character, and turns that into a feature. That the characters are interchangeable actually becomes somewhat important to the plot, and it’s a moment when you can maybe see the craft of the writing at work: King turning a first-draft mistake into an asset. Of course, it’s possible I’m just imagining that, and he had the whole thing planned out from page one. But, having read enough of King’s thoughts about writing, I don’t think that’s the way he works.)
Anyway, I really did enjoy revisiting it. I thought Steven Weber did a really excellent job reading the book, and the parts I hadn’t remembered well — I read it when I was a teenager — were some of the best parts.
Tuesday’ed
Today was just an ordinary sort of Tuesday.
Honestly, with the It audio book and my recent discovery (and tonight finishing) of Limbo, it’s amazing I got anything done.
What I got done, of course, was mostly getting turned down by potential reviewers who are either too busy or want more money. But that’s the job.