books

Tuesday various

  • John Seavey on the “Vote With Your Wallet” Fallacy as it applies to comic books:

    And of course, the worst part is that DC and Marvel are the bread and butter of the modern comics store. For all that people encourage buying indie comics as a way to vote with their wallets, if DC and Marvel (possibly even just Marvel) got out of the publishing business and decided to focus on their movies and videogames, it would be an utter apocalypse for the comics industry. All the other companies combined do not sell enough copies to keep a comics store in business. And without comics stores, indie publishers have very few places to sell their stuff. So voting with your wallets…might actually mean buying DC and Marvel books you hate just to keep the store you like in business.

    The business model of the comics industry would drive Warren Buffett mad.

  • Is Detroit on its way to becoming a food desert?

    About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.

    Not a single produce-carrying grocery chain in the city. From the little I saw of it a couple of years ago, I’m sorry to say I can believe it. [via]

  • Is Accelerated Reader’s only criteria for assigning points the number of pages in a book? It sure seems that way, if Hamlet can be “worth fewer points than the fifth installment of the Gossip Girl series.” Shouldn’t some other factors be taking into account? [via]

  • “When Henry Hudson first looked on Manhattan in 1609, what did he see?” This, apparently. I got to see a little of the Mannahatta Project a couple of weeks ago when I accompanied my mother to an after-hours members event at the Museum of the City of New York. Interesting stuff. [via]

  • And finally, when the police shoot the Fire Chief in the courtroom over speeding tickets, you know that, just maybe, something’s wrong. [via]

Monday various

  • Michael Chabon’s essay on the Wilderness of Childhood got a lot of attention when it was first posted, back in July. (It’s been sitting in my saved links since then.) I think Chabon made some interesting points, but I also think Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky’s response is worth repeating [via]:

    I’m not really arguing with Chabon here: he may be right that all children are instinctively adventurers, and he’s certainly right that limiting their exploration of the world in the name of safety threatens their creative imagination. But let’s be clear: the maps we draw for our children are not the maps that guide their lives. They draw their own maps, but it’s a mistake to confuse them with the nostalgic – or anguished — images produced by adult memory. Childhood is a foreign country to us. We once knew its landmarks, but they’ve grown wild in our imaginations, so that the “adventures” we remember are now just stories we tell. Adventure is what we call it when we show the slides. The natives just call it life.

  • Leaving aside the silliness of a religion based on Star Wars, or the questions that are maybe raised about established religions when you ask why this one is silly and they’re not — or even Tesco’s valid point that plenty of Jedi(s?) in the movies don’t walk around in public in their hoods — why can’t you wear a hood in their store? [via]

  • Well, at least he wasn’t wearing this flip-top zombie shirt… [via]

  • Permanent Bedtime, which plays a complete recording from BBC Radio’s late-night Shipping Forecast. Warren Ellis describes it as such:

    • The latenight edition of the Shipping Forecast has long been praised by the British as a gentle aid to restful sleep. And dream-filled sleep, too, because the Forecast is famous for listing “places” that are entirely notional, a virtual geography inhabited only by ships and the wondering minds of people drifting off into sleep. Sleep districts of the British imagination: Fastnet, Rockall, Dogger, Cromarty, Viking…

    It’s quite interesting to take an afternoon nap with that playing in the background.

  • And finally, I’ve only watched a couple of episodes, but I quite like NASA’s IRrelevant Astronomy video podcast, particularly the Robot Astronomy Talk Show. [via]

    • I quite liked the most recent episode with Linda Hamilton and Dean Stockwell, super genius:

Found in translation

Jeffrey Ford on undoing the will of God:

Today it struck me that, considering the curse that God places on mankind by fracturing language so that we can never conspire en mass, the work of translators is, in a mythic sort of way, an undoing of the will of God. I had this day dream where after the fall of the tower, even though most flee in fear, a group of architects and workers determines to stick together, overcome the obstacle of language and eventually see the project through to completion. In order to be successful, they will first have to learn to communicate with each other. They study the new languages they each are now stuck with and then work to understand one or more of the other new languages. This takes place over centuries — there’s a secret society of Architects of The Tower Of Babel. Eventually they come to see that the actual tower isn’t necessary, but that their efforts at translation are rebuilding it spiritually one invisible stone at a time. In the process of undoing the will of God, they have entered into what could be considered a religious pursuit.

Wednesday various

Monday various