books

That’s one way of putting it

Shaenon Garrity on Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay:

It’s fun. It’s just kind of like reading a novel about a Victorian inventor who comes up with the microchip, the integrated-circuit computer, the Internet, Google, and furry porn, yet is only considered on par with the guy who made those bikes with the one big wheel.

She also makes another really interesting point:

Also, just to put on my irritable-feminist hat for the day, I’ve noticed a tendency in fiction where these superhuman feats of intellect and inspiration are only considered plausible in male characters. While Joe and Sammy come up with every brilliant innovation in the history of American comic books, their lady Rosa Saks gets to be… the second-best artist of romance comics. Sure, in real life there weren’t many women during that period drawing great comic books, but neither were there any men who simultaneously combined all the best qualities of Siegel and Shuster, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Will Eisner in their prime. Why must our ridiculous wish-fulfillment fantasy characters be confined to fanfiction.net?

Via Bookslut

Thursday various

  • I was sad to see that J.D. Salinger had passed away. I think John Hodgman said it best: “I prefer to think JD Salinger has just decided to become extra reclusive.”
  • I’m much more sad to hear the terrible news about Kage Baker, who has apparently lost her battle with cancer and has only a few weeks to live. I haven’t read a lot of Baker’s books — just the first two in her Company series — but she’s a real gifted talent taken much too soon.
  • Today in banning: first, a Wisconsin jail bans Dungeons & Dragons:

    Singer was told by prison officials that he could not keep the materials because Dungeons & Dragons “promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling,” according to the ruling. The prison later developed a more comprehensive policy against all types of fantasy games, the court said. [via]

    And a California school district bans the dictionary. [via]

  • In much happier news, a story of a Haitian man rescued from beaneath the rubble 11 days after the earthquake — “and hours after the government declared search and rescue operations to be officially over.”
  • And finally, Zack Handlen watches the horror movie Orphan so the rest of us don’t have to:

    …just playing creepy music and panning over a room isn’t creating mood, it’s giving the production designer a clip reel…

Gosh dern it

The word for today in my Forgotten English calendar is dern, meaning “of actions done or proceeding in secret, or in the dark; kept concealed; hence dark, of evil of deceitful nature.”

I don’t know that it’s especially apt or anything, but it amused me.

Today was a really long day for some reason, not particularly more busy or more stressful than Monday or Tuesday, but a whole lot slower. Maybe it’s just the cold weather than crept back in after a couple of surprisingly warm days. They are predicting snow for the weekend. Whatever it was, it seemed like a long time before five o’clock rolled around and I could leave work for the day.

I spent most of the day working on that same gerontological counseling book. The way textbook adoption cycles work, it really has to go into production by next month so that it can be published before the Fall. So I’m trying to get the revised chapters I’ve already received as finalized as possible, so that, when the author has given me everything, it’s just a question of handing a ready-to-go manuscript over to an editorial assistant who can then transmit it to our production department. The good news is the author’s so far made some really terrific revisions, taking what I thought was an okay text and really strengthening it, making it even more accessible and student-friendly. In the unlikely event that I was ever to take up the counseling of older adults, I think this is a book I’d want front and center on my shelf.

So that’s an ever so exciting glimpse into my day-to-day as a developmental editor. Today it consisted mostly of re-reading chapters and copying my changes over to the electronic versions. The thrill ride never stops!

And that, for the most part, was how I spent my Wednesday.

Wednesday various

  • A whole lot of talk today has been about Apple’s new iPad. (You shouldn’t have any trouble finding plenty of links on your own.) Almost despite myself, I’m guardedly optimistic about its future and genuinely interested in its application — in a way, I should add, that I generally wasn’t interested in the iPhone. I think I’m going to wait a little before I try to justify buying one for myself, at least until a few more in-depth reviews are in. As Brad Stone notes in the New York Times, “Nothing ages faster than the future when you get it in your hands.”
  • Rachel Swirsky: “Genre is a tool. It’s not a prophecy.“
  • Here’s a fascinating article on confessions of a book pirate:

    TM: Do you have a sense of where these books are coming from and who is putting them online?

    [TRC:] I assume they are primarily produced by individuals like me – bibliophiles who want to share their favorite books with others. They likely own hundreds of books, and when asked what their favorite book is look at you like you are crazy before rattling of 10-15 authors, and then emailing you later with several more. The next time you see them, they have a bag of 5-10 books for you to borrow.

    I’m sure that there are others – the compulsive collectors who download and re-share without ever reading one, the habitual pirates who want to be the first to upload a new release, and people with some other weird agenda that only they understand. [via]

  • Meanwhile, the world’s largest book — it’s five feet tall by six feet wide, and it takes six people to lift it — will be displayed with its pages open for the first time. I like how the Guardian calls it “almost absurdly huge.” How big does a book have to be before they’d drop that “almost”? [via]
  • And finally, a movie made by chimpanzees. All the obvious jokes aside, I wonder if this is really as impressive as it may at first sound — since, as the BBC notes:

    The apes are unlikely to have actively tried to film any particular subject, or understand that by carrying Chimpcam around, they were making a film.

    This seems less like a film from the chimps’ perspective than footage they accidentally shot. Still, the study as a whole does sound intriguing. [via]

“Well the night does funny things inside a man”

I spent the day doing not much of anything, mostly because of the dreary weather and because my Sunday writing group was canceled. And yet, here I am, the day all but ended and the hours all but spent. I’m just sitting here, listening to some early Tom Waits, and failing to finish the Sunday crossword.

I was thinking maybe I’d find something to say about Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, which I finished reading last week, but beyond saying that I really liked it, or that the stories in it are all masterfully done, I don’t know that there’s a lot to share. Even saying which stories I liked in particular won’t offer much, since there’s not a wrong note in the collection and it’s tough to pick a favorite. I’ll definitely have to check out Lahiri’s other books, including her novel, The Namesake.

Okay, back to not finishing that crossword.