books

Tuesday various

Under the weather

Still not feeling so great, and there were times throughout the day when I wondered if I’d made a mistake going in to work at all. I’m still not entirely sure if this is a cold or just a severe allergy attack I’m nursing; none of the symptoms that are supposed to differentiate the two are definitive in my case; and in fact, I think I’d feel better if I was running a fever because at least then I’d know it was probably a cold, and therefore likely to end sooner rather than later. I’m leaning towards cold, if only for that wishful thinking — who knows when allergies would start to lessen, given the changing weather we’ve been having — and because I’m pretty sure I felt this coming on as far back as Monday or Tuesday. Then again, I’ve heard that yesterday, when I definitely knew I had something, was a particularly bad day for allergies… Maybe if I got myself a hookworm infection to get rid of allergies, I’d know for sure…

Yeah, I’m going to lean towards cold for the time being. All I do know is, I have a runny nose, watery eyes, and a persistent cough, and none of it’s very much fun. I’m not horribly sick or anything — I still have an appetite, mostly, and I did go to work — but I’m ready to feel not sick at all, thank you very much.

Is it any wonder that the rest of my day seems so uneventful?

The reading I went to on Tuesday night got a little bad press, causing a very minor kerfuffle online among genre (and specifically Neil Gaiman) fans. My feeling is, the article in question was very poorly reasoned, riddled with cliche and few factual errors, and not really representative of what I saw there at Columbia. Maybe it’s just that I’m naturally attracted to geeky women, but I don’t remember a crowd of only “balding Goths, girls with jutting chins and faux punks.” I do remember wishing, offhandedly, that the evening hadn’t been framed as “Neil Gaiman Returns to Columbia University,” since it was primarily a discussion of the new Stories book and focused equally on the other panel members. I do think some people came thinking it was going to be all Gaiman and nothing but and adopted maybe too worshipful an attitude towards him. But that was a minor not-even-quibble in what was a really excellent night.

This night has been quite as excellent, but at least tomorrow’s Friday.

And then what happened…?

This evening, I took the subway uptown to attend a reading and panel discussion at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College to promote the brand new Neil Gaiman/Al Sarrantonio-edited collection Stories. In attendance were several of the writers from the collection, namely Gaiman himself, Lawrence Block, Walter Mosley, Kat Howard, Joe Hill, Kurt Andersen, and Jeffery Ford. They each talked a bit about their work and genre and storytelling, and they each (with the exception of Mosley) read a section of their individual stories. They were really quite good, and I look forward to reading the book in its entirety. I bought an autographed copy there, from which I read Howard’s story (her first ever sale!) before the panel took the stage and then Andersen’s on the train ride home.

Before the show, I had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant about a block from the auditorium, which was okay but not exactly my favorite. (I wasn’t in love with the spongy and mildly sour injera, though overall the food was okay.) And then, walking home from the train station, I stumbled into a scene of about half a dozen police cars and an ambulance outside the local plastics manufacturer. I still have no idea what happened — the cops were getting into their cars and the ambulance was pulling away as I approached — but it was an interesting end to an exciting evening.

Monday various

  • Two from Roger Ebert: on racial intolerance and on why he tweets.
  • On the set of David Lynch’s Dune with Sean Young. Weirdly fascinating. I wonder if it’s at all worth revisiting that movie. I keep thinking I’ll re-read the book, but I think I’m worried it will just encourage me to read them all. [via]
  • Charlie Stross on the iPad [via]:

    The iPad doesn’t feel like a computer. It feels like a magic book — like the ancestor of the Young Lady’s Primer in Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. It’s a book with hypertext everywhere, moving pictures and music and an infinity of content visible through its single morphing page. The sum is much weirder than the aggregate of its parts. Criticizing the iPad for not doing Netbook-or laptop-like things is like criticising an early Benz automobile for not having reins and a bale of hay for the horses: it’s a category error.

  • The Sea of Galilee is out of fish. [via]
  • And finally,inside the Vatican’s private library. [via]

Wednesday various

  • Stieg Larsson is turning out to be an incredibly prolific dead man.
  • Scientists have created software that can recognize sarcasm. Now if we could just figure out a way to transfer that ability to more people… [via]

  • Whatever your feelings about deaf culture and cochlear implants — personally, I sympathize, but I still believe deafness is a disability — it’s hard not to be a little moved by this video of an eight-month-old deaf baby hearing sound for the first time. [via]
    • And that child later would grow up to be…Iron Baby.
  • And finally, Lorne Michaels on being Canadian and comedic [via]:

    “I think that Canadians have an incredible reverence for authority and regard for authority, and I think one of the healthy ways that it’s challenged is through questioning it, through the polite hostility of comedy. It’s allowed. It’s not encouraged, but it’s definitely allowed, and you stand very little chance of being shot.”