books

Monday various

  • Regender.com is an interesting experiment, although obviously imperfect. In its regendering of this site, for instance, it changed Billy Joel’s “Don’t Ask Me Why” into “‘Donna’t Ask Me Why’ by Billie Joyce.” [via]

  • This raises the troubling possibility that some of our authors are in fact cats: Cat registered as hypnotherapist [via]

    I posted this earlier today to Twitter, and Nyssa23 replied, “Perhaps that explains the number of manuscripts you’ve been receiving concerning mice and cheeseburgers.” Still, as I told her, say what you will, Cheeseburger-Focused Brief Therapy works!

  • “A car crash victim who was believed to have been in a coma for the past 23 years has been conscious the whole time.”
  • Matt Taibbi on Sarah Palin [via]:

    And Sarah Palin sells copies. She is the country’s first WWE politician — a cartoon combatant who inspires stadiums full of frustrated middle American followers who will cheer for her against whichever villain they trot out, be it Newsweek, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, Steve Schmidt, the Mad Russian, Randy Orton or whoever. Her followers will not know that she is the perfect patsy for our system, designed as it is to channel popular anger in any direction but a useful one, and to keep the public tied up endlessly in pointless media melees over meaningless nonsense (melees of the sort that develop organically around Palin everywhere she goes). Like George W. Bush, even Palin herself doesn’t know this, another reason she’s such a perfect political tool.

  • And finally, speaking of, god bless parody. [via]

And they say romance is dead

I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who thought Harlequin’s proposed self-publishing imprint was a very bad idea. John Scalzi writes:

This is basically a skeezy, cynical and horribly demeaning thing Harlequin is doing, padding its bottom line by suckering a bunch of folks who don’t know better into thinking that paying for publication is a legitimate path into the publishing world. In a stroke, they’ve become the sort of scumbag publisher that writer’s organizations warn their members (and their aspiring members) about. But apparently the folks at Harlequin thought that the response would be different with them, because, after all, they’re Harlequin, and they’re too big to fail.

He also reports, encouragingly, however, on the reaction of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) (as well as the Mystery Writers of America and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), who have all announced sanctions against Harlequin in response.

Harlequin, of course, has responded with mock surprise, indignation, and a promise of nothing better than a change in the imprint scam’s name.

Why can’t more Harlequins be like this?

The whole wide whorl

I’m currently reading Return to the Whorl, the concluding volume of Gene Wolfe’s fascinating (albeit sometimes difficult) Book of the Short Sun — the concluding volume, in fact, of his so-called “Solar Cycle.” This evening, while waiting for my train home, I came across this passage, which, in typical Wolfe fashion, appears to have many different layers of meaning — not least of all as an interesting description of the process of writing:

I should go back and line out my mistake, I suppose, but I hate lining things out — it gives the page such an ugly appearance. Besides, to line out is to accept responsibility for the correctness of all that is let stand. To correct that or any other error would be to invite you to ask me (when you read this, as I hope you soon will) why I failed to correct some other. And I cannot correct all or even most of them without tearing the whole account to shreds and starting again. My new account, moreover, would be bound to be worse than this, since I could not prevent myself from attributing to myself knowledge an opinions I did not have at the time the events I recorded occurred. No, there really are such things as honest mistakes; this account is full of them, and I intend to leave it that way.

Monday various

  • “TIGA, the computer games industry body, is facilitating links between publishers and computer games developers by inviting its members to create briefs for live publishing-based projects. That’s right. No more video games based on popular movies based on popular books; these folks are going direct to the source. Which naturally begs the question: which books would you like to see made into video games? [via]
  • Speaking of games, here’s two: Small Worlds and Quizapedia. [via]
  • Let Them Sing it for You: does exactly what it says on the tin. Amusing, though your mileage may vary. [via]
  • An interesting exchange between stand-up comedian Paul F. Tompkins and Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd. I’m not really sure which one of them I side with here. [via]
  • And finally, SCI FI Wire cancels its columns. I can’t say I’m at all surprised. Its steady race to be a weak clone of io9 (which isn’t always so terrific itself) continues.

Wednesday various

  • Anybody need a cool jewelery box? I actually own these books. (Though a little part of me cringes at thought of any such book mutilation.)
  • Speaking of books, word on the “new” Vladimir Nabokov “novel,” The Original of Laura, isn’t exactly good [via], suggesting that it’s at best a curio for Nabokov scholars. But at least we have these neat re-imagined covers for all (well, mostly all) of his other books. [via]

    Man, it’s been way too long since I’ve read any Nabokov.

  • So yeah, Dollhouse was canceled, and I don’t think anybody is exactly surprised. I still think the show was some of Joss Whedon’s best and worst work, capable of some truly brilliant and startling moments, but also never really comfortable in its own skin or sure of exactly what kind of show it wanted to be. There’s a lot I love about it, but I won’t mourn it the same way I did Firefly (and to a lesser extent Angel), and I’ve long been resigned to its many flaws and limited chances for survival.

    • Speaking of Dollhouse, here’s an interesting look at the role of neuroscience in the Whedonverse that somehow manages to mention all his shows except for the one where people’s brains are erased and rewired on a regular basis. [via

  • And finally, Neil Gaiman on A.A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame:

    I once read an essay by A.A. Milne telling people that, of course they knew Kenneth Grahame’s work, he wrote The Golden Age and Dream Days, everybody had read them, but he also did this amazing book called The Wind in the Willows that nobody had ever heard of. And then Milne wrote a play called Toad of Toad Hall, which was a big hit and made The Wind in The Willows famous and read, and, eventually, one of the good classics (being a book that people continue to read and remember with pleasure), while The Golden Age and Dream Days, Grahame’s beautiful, gentle tales of Victorian childhood, are long forgotten.

    If there is a moral, or a lesson to be learned from all this, I do not know what it is.