books

Wednesday various

  • I don’t know, there has to be a better way to reform our failing public schools than by firing all the teachers. [via]

  • Is it just me or is having Abe Lincoln say, “I’ve been a slave to vampires for thirty years” sort of in questionable taste? It feels like maybe it’s just me. Still, this is pretty neat as far as book trailers go.

  • I admit it, I got a kick out of Hark! A Vagrant’s Canadian Stereotype Comics.

  • Yes, and this font joke. [via]

  • And finally, I meant to post about this when BBC Audiobooks America did their whole audio book by Twitter thing with Neil Gaiman, way back in October, but I just never got around to it. You can read the whole story here (or you can listen to the audio version here), but even I haven’t done that, and I contributed a line to the darn thing. They’ve apparently since done at least one other such story, with author Meg Cabot, but I’m much more interested in the experiment here than the results. It was fun to participate the day-of, but like Salon’s Laura Miller, I’ve yet to be convinced that the results are particularly readable to outside eyes.

    Raymond Chandler once offered this piece of advice to his fellow writers: “When in doubt, have a man with a gun come into the room.” Yet even the excitement of an armed intruder wears thin by the time you’ve got 30 of them milling around for no apparent reason….At some point, every tale needs to stop expanding so it can begin to contract into a coherent whole. People often ask great storytellers, “Where do you get your ideas?” but the real question is “How do you make sense of your ideas?” [Samuel R.] Delany believed that good writers read so much that they “internalize” certain “literary models” and thereby acquire an instinctual feel for a story’s proper shape. As they build on that evocative first image or scene, while they are still venturing further out into the unknown, an unconscious part of their creative intelligence is figuring out how to knit it all back together again. Writers who never develop that instinct tend to keep dragging new gunmen into the room until the story stalls out, which is why a decent ending is so much harder to write than an enticing beginning. The ability to pull it off is one thing that separates the Neil Gaimans of this world from the rest of us saps.

    Which may just be another way of saying too man cooks — especially untrained cooks — spoil the broth.

Tuesday various

  • You meddlesome kids get off Richard Schickel‘s lawn!
  • That, my friends, is one big bunny. [via]
  • There was a lot of talk recently about a new law in South Carolina that would require “subversive” organizations to register with the state. This, of course, put me in mind of a line from Good Morning, Vietnam: “Well, we walk up to someone and say, ‘Are you the enemy?’ And, if they say yes, then we shoot them.” Turns out, it isn’t exactly true. Or, rather, the law’s been on the books for about sixty years. There’s actually a bill before the SC legislature to repeal it. So, you know, that’s good. [via
  • Here’s an interesting article from the New York Times last month:

    To millions of “Twilight” fans, the Quileute are Indians whose (fictional) ancient treaty transforms young males of the tribe into vampire-fighting wolves. To the nearly 700 remaining Quileute Indians, “Twilight” is the reason they are suddenly drawing extraordinary attention from the outside — while they themselves remain largely excluded from the vampire series’ vast commercial empire. [via]

  • And fianlly, ever wonder what the Westminster dog show would look like from the opposite point-of-view? [via]

“Shall I walk you through the history?” “I’m going to explicitly say no.”

It was back to work for me today after a three-day weekend, and I think it’s safe to say I prefer snow days to work days. Not that today was particularly bad or anything — far from it — but it’s always nice to have an excuse to sleep late in the morning.

Overall, it wasn’t a terribly exciting day. I did some work, wrote a little, and watched tonight’s episode of How I Met Your Mother. (It was a decent, if unremarkable episode, but that’s been pretty much the norm for this entire season.) I also finished reading China Miéville’s The City & the City, about which I think I’ll have more to say later. I’m not sure what to read next, although my signed copy of Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead did arrive in the mail today. I already read and really liked Heather‘s story in the collection, and the rest look really interesting. Though, after the Miéville, I’m thinking it might be nice to take a short break from genre fiction. We’ll see.

Right now, though, I think I’m just going to go to bed.

What’s in the box?

I’m a big fan of Keith Phipps’ Big Box of Paperbacks project. Here are two reasons why.

On The Metal Monster by A. Merritt:

Beneath the pulp frills, Merritt animates the book with a real—and justified— anxiety about the potential for humanity and nature to get ground down by machines, a future that applied no conscience in eliminating lives because they didn’t fit into some overarching agenda. The term “megadeath,” used to measure human casualties by the millions, wouldn’t be coined until after Hiroshima, but Merritt offers a glimpse of what’s to come here. Godwin never learns the origins of the Metal Things—the novel ends with the working theory that they come from the stars. I think they ultimately come from the same place as the Elder Things envisioned by Merritt fan H.P. Lovecraft: the dark heart of a new century still being born.

On Naked to the Stars by Gordon R. Dickson:

For starters, I think originality gets mislabeled and a bit overvalued. Whether storytellers mean to or not, they usually end up offering another of the infinite variations on a finite number of stories, and with good reason. Here’s a thought exercise: Would you rather watch a well-done movie about a cop investigating a crime that isn’t what it seems, or one about a super-intelligent muskrat who translates Homeric verse, communicates with the ghost of Abe Lincoln, and can teleport to the moon? One has been done many times and lends itself to repetition because of its persistent resonance. The other not at all, and with good reason: It’s a new idea, but it stinks. Often, creators accused of unoriginality have just hung clichéd elements off a reliable structure.

Monday various