- Six degrees of literary separation? [via]
- If nothing else, I think this elaborte fake ATM is proof that you don’t need a carefully designed forgery to fool a lot of people. [via]
- The Cracked Guide to Fonts [via]
- You know, I’m sure Tin House‘s heart was in the right place with this prove you bought a book somewhere before you submit anything policy, but it’s not hard to see why it’s upset some people.
- And finally, an interview with Michael Palin:
I’m very proud of the fish-slapping dance we did in Python. We rehearsed this silly dance where John Cleese hits me with a fish and I fall into Teddington Lock. We were so intent on getting the dance right that I didn’t notice the lock had cleared and instead of it being a 2ft drop into the water it was a 15ft drop. I’m very proud of doing that.
The rest of the interview is pretty interesting too — he didn’t think A Fish Called Wanda was a good script when he first read it — although residents of his “worst place ever,” Prince George, British Columbia, might not love it.
books
Tuesday various
- Apparently, Megan Fox’s latest tattoo is a quote from a writer who doesn’t exist. And I am suddenly imagining tattoo parlors who inscribe quotes from books like those in the library in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, the books of dreams, whose common thread is that none of them were ever actually written.
Of course, I’m also reminded of Shelley Jackson’s Skin project, which maybe beat my brain to it.
- If this isn’t a real literary mashup novel, somebody at Quirk Books needs to get on it.
- Though they better watch out: apparently, novelty books are getting more expensive to produce. (Though, admittedly, those are more pop-up books and such than anything.)
- Meanwhile a “youth edition” of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father is being developed. What exactly is a “youth edition” and what makes the current edition inappropriate? [via]
- And finally: British scientist uncovers ‘secret messages’ hidden in Plato’s ancient text. Of course he did. [via]
Weekend with the dragon tattoo
Saturday went by much, much too quickly.
It rained for most of the afternoon, and I spent it mostly playing with the dog and watching TV or reading. I feel bad that I wasn’t able to mail out issues of Kaleidotrope this weekend, though I did finally mail a copy of issue #8 that I’ve been neglecting to for a little while now. (A very little while. I’m usually good about that sort of thing.) I just wasn’t going to be able to have all them printed, folded, stapled, enveloped, and mailed. Next Saturday, fingers crossed!
Last night, I watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (on Netflix Watch Instantly), which I think I liked about as much as I did the book. Which is to say that I liked some of it quite a lot, particularly Noomi Rapace’s fearless portrayal of Lisbeth Salander, but found the rest of it a weird mix of padded tedium and gripping (if inelegantly structured) whodunit.
It’s also funny that so much has been made of how the translated title, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is inaccurate, that Laarson’s original, Män som hatar kvinnor (or Men Who Hate Women), is more apt. And it’s true, the book is more about misogyny (and family secrets) than about Lisbeth. Her tattoo gets mentioned, briefly, but it’s hardly important, and she’s hardly the main focus of the story. And yet if you take her character out of the book — and out of the movie — you’re not left with much else that works. Certainly nothing that’s half as intriguing. Rapace is riveting every time she’s on screen; but every time she’s off, you notice. And while the movie streamlines a lot of the book — for better and for worse — it’s still two and a half hours long. Laarson’s title is more accurate, but it’s boring and underlines what doesn’t work; the English title is misleading, but it focuses in on what’s best about the book.
The movie also had what I think is a pretty big spoiler for the next two books. I say think, because I haven’t read them yet. (I may at some point, but it won’t be immediately, even with the second movie now playing in the US.)
Apparently, there’s also a TV show (starring Rapace) in Sweden. I’m a little dumbfounded by the mass appeal of the books, but there’s something there.
The same old doggerybaw
Today’s Forgotten English is “doggerybaw,” meaning nonsense. I’m just going to toss that one out there without comment.
It was a pretty ordinary day, actually, fairly light on the nonsense. We had a guest speaker at work, at one of our monthly “brown bag lunches,” Drew Levinson formerly of CBS News. He talked about his career and some behind-the-scenes stories about reporting on Jack Kevorkian, Afghanistan and Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina. It was actually really quite interesting…which these lunches are not always guaranteed to be.
Beyond that…well, I started reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, needing a break from the nonfiction kick I seem to have been on recently — and also with an eye to maybe being able to make some kind of informed vote on this year’s Hugo Awards. At Frederik Pohl’s suggestion, I bought a supporting Worldcon membership recently, getting with my fifty bucks not only the right to vote, but also access to this pretty amazing voter packet, with electronic copies of pretty much all of the work nominated this year. I don’t know that I’m going to be able to get through it all by the end of July — of the novels, the only one I’ve already read is China Miéville’s — but so far I’m quite enjoying Bacigalupi’s book.
So it seemed almost like fate when I read today that he (along with Jon Armstrong, whose novel Grey I quite liked, and Scott Westerfeld, of whom I’m a big fan) is going to be doing a reading in New York tomorrow evening. Alas, I think I’m going to skip it. I’m not sure I feel like hanging around in Manhattan for several hours, and trekking all that way downtown, for an hour’s event and some possible autographs. I haven’t exactly made up my mind yet, but I’m leaning towards just coming home after work.
We’ll see what kind of doggerybaw tomorrow brings.
I would gladly pay you Вторник for a hamburger today.
First of all, I just want to start by saying to all my readers that I am not, nor have I ever knowingly been, a Russian spy. I just wanted to make that known.
In other news…it was pretty much just your average Tuesday around these parts. No televisions on the lawn this morning, and nothing much more exciting than a quick birthday celebration for a co-worker — seriously, just a card and some cookies at his cubicle — at the office.
I did finish reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America this evening, the first full book I’ve actually read on my iPad. I liked it, although I think it works best as the story of one woman’s individual experience, with some interesting economic facts, than as an in-depth examination of what it means to be working poor in this country. There’s plenty of food for thought in the book — even if it does hover on the edge of feeling dated, now that it’s almost a decade old — but I found it interesting more as a narrative of a social experiment than anything else.
I did like her closing thoughts:
But now that government has largely withdrawn its “handouts,” now that the overwhelming majority of the poor are out there toiling in Wal-Mart or Wendy’s — well, what are we to think of them? Disapproval and condescension no longer apply, so what outlook makes sense?
Guilt, you may be thinking warily. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to feel? But guilt doesn’t go anywhere near far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame — shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, “you give and you give.”
Someday, of course — and I will make no predictions as to exactly when — they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth. There’ll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better for it in the end.