{"id":3484,"date":"2009-06-16T18:30:17","date_gmt":"2009-06-16T22:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3484"},"modified":"2009-06-16T16:21:07","modified_gmt":"2009-06-16T20:21:07","slug":"tuesday-various-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3484","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday various"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\"><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I have never read <i>Ulysses<\/i>, and only a few of the stories in James Joyce&#8217;s <i>Dubliners<\/i> &#8212; I have a copy somewhere at home &#8212; but today is apparently <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bloomsday\">Bloomsday<\/a>, commemorating the life of the author and the events of his most famous book. As <a href=\"http:\/\/garydexter.blogspot.com\/2009\/06\/101-ulysses-by-james-joyce.html\">Gary Dexter writes<\/a>:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\">The paradox of <i>Ulysses<\/i> is that one needs to read it to understand twentieth-century literature, but one needs to read twentieth-century literature to build up the stamina to read <i>Ulysses<\/i>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\"><a href=\"http:\/\/genewolfebookclub.com\/\">Gene Wolfe&#8217;s &#8220;Solar Cycle&#8221;<\/a> is my big reading project this year, so I think Joyce will have to wait.<\/li>\n<li><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.avclub.com\/articles\/dana-carvey-and-robert-smigel,29184\/?utm_medium=RSS&#038;utm_campaign=feeds&#038;utm_source=type_interview\">Dana Carvey and Robert Smigel<\/a> in the AV Club:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\"><strong>Robert Smigel:<\/strong> One thing about Dana\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s determination not to be a showbiz person: Dana was the only celebrity I knew who was offered <i>Sesame Street<\/i> when his kids were very young, and turned it down.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\">They&#8217;re both refreshingly candid about the quality (and sometimes lack thereof) of their work, specifically on <i>The Dana Carvey Show<\/i>.<\/li>\n<li><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\"><a href=\"http:\/\/whatever.scalzi.com\/2009\/06\/16\/this-is-how-old-i-am\/\">John Scalzi offers some thoughts<\/a> on internships:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\">What bothers me about unpaid internships is not fundamentally that they are unpaid (although that really <i>isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t<\/i> a good thing), but that the purpose of internships seems to have changed in an uncomfortable way: it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gone from a way to train students in practical real-world application of skills they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve learned in college to a way to plug, for free, actual skill gaps in one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work force.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\">I don&#8217;t know for certain if our company pays its interns, or if we&#8217;re teaching them any valuable skills they can apply in the publishing world later on. But I do know it makes <i>our<\/i> jobs easier when we have one.<\/p>\n<p><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\">I&#8217;ve always sort of regretted not going after an internship of my own back in college.<\/li>\n<li><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\">Despite what <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/culture\/tvandradioblog\/2009\/jun\/12\/torchwood-children-of-earth\">Jonathan Wright might say<\/a>, I think story arcs are generally a good thing. They don&#8217;t always work, I&#8217;ll grant you that. You&#8217;ll find no argument from me that <i>Babylon 5<\/i> didn&#8217;t falter in its final season, or that the show&#8217;s mythology arc isn&#8217;t what eventually undid <i>The X-Files<\/i>. (Well, that and Annabeth Gish, but don&#8217;t get me started on that.) But I much prefer story arcs to the more formulaic alternative, where characters never change (or acknowledge past events), and where the status quo is never challenged. There&#8217;s room for both in my heart, but if I had to choose, for example, between <i>Star Trek<\/i>, where the status quo is <i>de rigeur<\/i> &#8212; the new reboot not at all withstanding &#8212; or <i>Farscape<\/i>, which repeatedly proclaimed to have no reset button, I&#8217;ll absolutely choose the latter. Story is all about character, and characters who grow and adapt are simply more interesting.\n<p><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\"><a href=\"http:\/\/wrongquestions.blogspot.com\/2009\/03\/end-is-nigh-thoughts-on-serialized.html\">Abigail Nussbaum had some interesting thoughts<\/a> on serialized vs. episodic television not too long ago.<\/p>\n<p><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\">I&#8217;ll reserve judgment on these new <i>Torchwood<\/i> episodes until I&#8217;ve seen them &#8212; I was a big fan of the second series, which I re-watched recently, but still think the first was pretty dire &#8212; but  it&#8217;s worth noting that this is a <i>mini-series<\/i>, which by its nature implies expectations of a self-contained story arc. (Also that there&#8217;s plenty of story arc to be found in the earlier episodes; you&#8217;d probably have better luck starting at the beginning than anywhere in the middle or at the end. I don&#8217;t know how standalone those episodes really are.)<\/p>\n<li><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\">And finally, I&#8217;m with <a href=\"http:\/\/greygirlbeast.livejournal.com\/562014.html\">Caitlin R. Kiernan<\/a> on this:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\">I need summer. Real summer. Too hot to walk barefoot on the sidewalk without blistering your feet summer. Sweltering after dark summer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana\">Well, okay, I don&#8217;t know about the &#8220;sweltering after dark&#8221; bit, but I&#8217;m a little tired of this schizophrenic weather. It could be worse &#8212; <a href=\"http:\/\/lectio.ca\/\">Heather<\/a> was reporting snow in her neck of the woods just over a week ago &#8212; but frankly, I like seasons that <i>feel<\/i> like seasons, genuine spring and summer, autumn and winter. And the less that one bleeds into the other, the better. Is that so awful?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have never read Ulysses, and only a few of the stories in James Joyce&#8217;s Dubliners &#8212; I have a copy somewhere at home &#8212; but today is apparently Bloomsday, commemorating the life of the author and the events of his most famous book. As Gary Dexter writes: The paradox of Ulysses is that one &#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3484\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-3484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-various"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3484"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}