Reading in the dark
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Kestrell" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
|
10:43 am
[Link] |
Books read in April
1. The Memory of Whiteness by Kim Stanley Robinson (1985) [scanned myself]
One of my favorite science fiction novels, in which music meets physics to create a synesthetic experience of space and time. Poetic prose, trippy images, and Machiavellian plots--what's not to like? Also, and oddly I had forgotten this, the protagonist is a blind musician. While he does have artificial eyes, a cool feature is that they are not perfect in that way that science fiction likes to render all prosthetics, but instead only give the musician a limited degree of low vision.
In the world of Kim Robinson's Mars trilogy, Memory of Whiteness is set after the Mars trilogy although Robinson wrote this right before he began the trilogy.
2. Mad Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors by Lisa Appignanesi (2008) [scanned myself]
Discusses the history of madness in women from the early nineteenth century through the present, with a focus on exploring how tied up the mind doctors were in not only diagnosing but transforming these patients into "star patients" who helped to make these doctors famous. I use the phrase "star patients" because not only, as the author points out, is there some transference from the doctor to the patient regarding what he desires in his ideal patient, but because many of the female patients discussed were themselves famous, from Mary Lamb to Virginia Woolf to Sylvia Plath (a slight disappointment was the lack of any mention of Caroline Lamb, who seemed referenced in the title, as she described Byron as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know," although the same could have been said, perhaps, of herself).
One of the truly disturbing threads is how male doctors linked creativity, or any mental exercise at all, particularly reading, with mental instability in women. These women were often given enforced "rest cures" --not to mention, often highly addictive drugs-- in order to prevent them from doing anything, period. Lots of fascinating information about the connections between women's writing and madness, such as the real-life doctor portrayed in the story "The Yellow Wallpaper."
Very readable prose, good starting place for the subject.
3. "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" from _Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences_ by Ursula K. Le Guin (1987) [Bookshare.org]
I Read about this story in _Coyote At Large_ and really can't believe I've managed to miss it all these years. A young girl is stranded in the desert after being in a plane crash and is temporarily adopted by Coyote. Fun feminist myth plus wacky eyeball humor--highly recommended.
4. Bats at the Beach by Brian Lies (2006)
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) alexx_kay read this one to me--it was a Christmas present from him--and it is just a really fun book with lots of very witty rhymes and pictures portraying some fun-loving bats. The author does a lot with the pictures, including the fact that he includes different types of bats.
You can hear Daniel Pinkwater and one of the NPR hosts reading this book and describing the pictures here
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5507234
--stick around through the end and you'll hear a few verses of Jimmy Durante singing "The Day I Read a Book."
5. _The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature_ by S.T. Joshi, editor (2000) ]scanned myself]
6. _The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction_ by S.T. Joshi (2001) [scanned myself]
I admit, I only heard about S. T. Joshi from mssrcrankypants at the 2007 Readercon http://www.readercon.org ,
since it is difficult for me to hear about small and/or indie press books, as they tend to not get a lot of publicity. Better late than never, though, and I was really excited to have an annotated edition of Lovecraft's _Supernatural Horror in Literature_, as it is one of the best books on horror, made even more valuable by Joshi's footnotes and bibliography.
As for Joshi's _Modern Weird Fiction_, it put into words some of my niggling sense of annoyance with a lot of contemporary horror, mostly in the fact that much of it seems to be mainstream fiction dressed up in cliched dimestore Halloween costumes. Don't read this unless you want your critical appreciation of horror heightened.
( scarecrows, space opera, a bit of snark and more below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: bookish
Current Music: birds twittering
Tags: books, reviews
|
|
06:09 pm
[Link] |
Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi interviews
Neil Gaiman at Google
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LmfCGy_ZLg
and for those in the Boston area, Neil will be the speaker for the first julius Schwartz Memorial Lecture happening on May 23, 7-10 p.m., Kresge Auditorium at MIT.
http://cms.mit.edu/events/specialevents.php#052308
John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow talk about their new young adult books, George Orwell fan fic, and new ways to mentally torture your dog
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THEGpbnp1tM
Also of potential interest is Cory's article in The Guardian about his top tips for sorting email
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/29/email.filter
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood:  cold
Current Music: www.wumb.org
Tags: books, events, mit, writing
|
01:17 pm
[Link] |
Free remixable audiobook of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Here's the announcement from Cory, and you can read my review of the book in the post previous to this one:
block quote start
My next novel, Little Brother, officially goes on sale today! In
addition to the US print edition, there's a DRM-free audio edition
(there's also forthcoming editions in the UK, Greece, Russia, France and
Norway, with others pending) from Random House Audio. My deal with
Random House is that they're absolutely not allowed to sell the book
with DRM on it, which, sadly, means that Audible (the largest audiobook
store in the world) won't carry it -- they insist on selling books with
DRM, even when authors and publishers don't want it.
Instead, you can buy the audiobook from Zipidee, a retailer that Random
House uses -- they have the spiffy embeddable Flash sales-object you can
find on Craphound.com (feel free to paste it into your own blog or
whatnot), and there's also a static URL for those of you who can't use
Flash.
The audiobook comes with my own sampling license: once you own it,
you're free to take up to 30 minutes' worth of material from it and
remix and then redistribute it as much as you like, provided that you do
so on a noncommercial basis, make sure that it's clear that this is a
remix and not the original, and make sure that you tell people where to
find the original. This is in addition to all the fair use remixing that
you're allowed to do without my permission (of course!).
I'll also be releasing (as always!) a free, Creative Commons-licensed
version of the text of Little Brother, just as soon as I get back to
London (I'm presently in Toronto, visiting my family with my newborn
daughter). It'll likely be Monday or so -- there's a bunch of little
clean-uppy things I need to do with the Little Brother distribution site
that I need to be in my office with uninterrupted time to accomplish.
Random House's page for Little Brother:
http://www.randomhouse.com/littlebrotheraudiobook
Buy Little Brother audio:
http://www.zipidee.com/zipidAudioPreview.aspx?aid=c5a8e946-fd2c-4b9e-a748-f297bba17de8
Buy Little Brother:
http://us.macmillan.com/Retailer.aspx?isbn=9780765319852
block quote end
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood:  excited
Tags: audiobooks, books, coryd, ebooks, science fiction
|
|
04:39 pm
[Link] |
Free download of Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh
Small Beer Press is offering a
free ebook download of Maureen McHugh's _Mothers and Other Monsters_
http://lcrw.net/mchugh/index.htm ;
if interested, here is a review I did of this book for Green Man Review
http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_va_fictionquartet.html
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: books, ebooks, science fiction
|
02:10 pm
[Link] |
Book review: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
block quote start
I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Mission district, and that makes
me one of the most surveilled people in the world. My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when
this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced "Winston."
block quote end
As is obvious from the very first paragraph of _Little Brother_, Cory Doctorow's new book
begins with a bang and pretty much keeps up the pace straight through to the very end of the
story.
Marcus and his friends are typical teenagers in a not-too-distant future. They worry about
dating, getting into college, and how to skip class and not get caught. Then one day they
are caught in the wrong place at the wrong time when a 9/11-style terrorist attack occurs in
San Francisco and they, along with many others, get picked up in a Homeland Security sweep.
Marcus soon finds himself under constnat suspicion and surveillance by his own government,
even as he begins to ask himself and others, including the adults around him, why he is
being forced to conform to a culture of fear or risk being labeled unAmerican.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: radical
Current Music: 1776 soundtrack
Tags: books, coryd, media studies, politics, reviews
|
|
11:38 am
[Link] |
Reader's block
I have read a couple of posts on this subject lately and, as I experienced this at the end of last year, I thought I would write about what I did to recover from this insidious and distressing condition.
During November and December of last year I found myself really struggling with a feeling of reader's ennui. I had never in my life as far as I could remember experienced a lack of interest in reading, not even when I had serious eye problems. I was griping about it at a party one night and someone said, "Well, maybe you're just not in a mood to read anything; I feel like that sometimes." I didn't reply verbally to this idea, but I'm positive my expression conveyed my thoughts of "Do I know you? or more to the point, do you know me?"
What I finally did was take a long look at what I had been reading and try to determine, much as if I was considering my nutritional intake, if I was getting what I needed out of my reading choices. My new habit of posting what I read over the past month and the source of those books is one of the things I am trying to do in order to more proactively think about what I am reading. I'm also conscious of the fact that I seem to have entered a phase as a reader where I am much more critical regarding not wanting to read a story that seems to be like a hundred or even a dozen other books I have read before.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: accomplished
Tags: books, readng
|
|
09:31 am
[Link] |
Book reviews: new books by Elizabeth Hand, Walter Jon Williams, and more
There is a new edition of Green Man Review online
http://www.greenmanreview.com/whats_new.html
and I have four reviews in it:
_Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration_
http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_ashenden_charleswilliams.html ,
Elizabeth Hand's _Bride of Frankenstein_
http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_hand_brideoffrankenstein.html ,
_The New Weird_, which made me question what the purpose is of all those extras editors are so fond of stuffing into anthologies nowadays
http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_vandanmeers_thenewweird.html
and
_Implied Spaces_ by Walter Jon Williams, which made me a new convert to Williams's writing
http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_williams_impliedspaces.html
Current Location: aerye
Tags: books, reviews
|
|
09:39 am
[Link] |
Books read in March +"science fiction melodrama"
1. "Fountain of Age" Nancy Kress (2007) [Fictionwise]
Along with the short story "Memory Dog" mentioned next, I have generated a subgenre which I call "science fiction melodrama." It tends to have really unsympathetic characters who I am supposed to want to see redeemed, except I don't believe it because a short story is too short a period for people like this to suddenly turn around and become someone else. Also, the tech in these stories tends to be just a MacGuffin used to instigate and/or resolve the story. All this aside, even as I forced myself to finish these stories, I found myself thinking "I just know these stories are going to win awards." Maybe I'm just not girl enough to like "relationship" stories.
2. "Memory Dog" by Kathleen Ann Goonan from Asimov's April/May 2008 [Fictionwise]
3. Midnight Premiere edited by Tom Piccirilli (2007) [scanned myself]
I had been lusting for this anthology of horror stories about horror movies since I first read about it last summer and when I saw a used copy on Amazon for under $25, I jumped on it. It wasn't a disappointment, and the stories range from the subtley weird to the complete gross-out. Standout stories for me were the first and last stories in the book:
Gary Braunbeck's story"Onlookers," which exploits the uncanniness of film itself and reminded me a bit of Ramsey Campbell's _The Grin of the Dark_ in its focus on early silent film, and Ed Gorman's "Scream Queen," which is the perfect endnote as it highlights the difference between movie horror and real-life horror. "Between the Storms" by Gerard Houarner was another excellent story which used an eerie setting to really deliver the shivers.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Tags: books, horror, science fiction
|
|
11:42 am
[Link] |
Free award-nominated stories offered by Night Shade Books
Whenever I start to feel that genre fiction is getting stale, I pop over to Night Shade Books and get an attitude adjustment. I'm currently writing a review for Walter Jon Williams's new book _Implied Spaces_, to be released by Night Shade Books in April, and noticed that NSB is offering some free downloads at their downloads page
http://www.nightshadebooks.com/downloads/
Andy Duncan's Nebula-nominated short story"Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse"
Garth Nix’s Ditmar-nominated story “Bad Luck, Trouble, Death, and Vampire Sex”:
Richard Kadrey’s novel _Butcher Bird_ (formerly titled _Blind Shrike_, it features a yes! blind swordswoman)
Jon Armstrong’s "shocking high-fashion dystopian" novel _Grey_, nominated for the John W. Campbell Award
You can also order other great new SF from Night Shade Books like Walter Jon Williams's _Implied Spaces and
_The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Vol. 2_, featuring stories by Stephen Baxter, Peter S. Beagle, Holly Black, Ted Chiang, Greg Egan, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Susan Palwick, Bruce
Sterling, Charles Stross, Michael Swanwick, and many others.
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: books, science fiction
|
|
04:49 pm
[Link] |
Finalists for 20th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Announced
Kes: The complete list other than the SF finalists is below the cut.
Q: I was thinking it would be great to try to organize a group of blind SF fans so that we could each pick one book and scan it, then contribute the group of books to Bookshare. Anyone interested in participating in a blind queer SF fan distributed effort?
LGBT SCI-FI/FANTASY/HORROR
* Wicked Gentlemen, Ginn Hale (Blind Eye Books)
* A Companion to Wolves, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear (Tor Books)
* Spaceman Blues: A Love Song, Brian Francis Slattery (Tor Books)
* The Dust of Wonderland, Lee Thomas (Alyson Books)
* Ha'penny, Jo Walton (Tor Books)
( list below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood:  tired
Tags: books, queer, science fiction
|
|
12:47 pm
[Link] |
Cory Doctorow and Ben Rosenberg's new story True Names available as podcast
Sqwee! I recently read the Vernor Vinge story which Cory is talking about here--it was probably the first story to mention virtual worlds, but was written in the mid-1970s--and of course, I am always excited about a new Cory story.
Here's the info form the newsletter:
block quote start
I've just posted the first installment of a podcast reading of a new
novella that I co-wrote with Hugo- and Nebula-nominee Benjamin
Rosenbaum</a>. The story's a big, 32,000-word piece called "True Names"
(in homage to Vernor Vinge's famous story of the same name), and it
involves the galactic wars between vast, post-Singularity intelligences
that are competing to corner the universe's supply of computation before
the heat-death of the universe.
Ben and I will be reading the story in weekly installments, taking turns
as our schedules allow. The reading is Creative Commons licensed --
Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial -- and the story itself will be
published this fall in Fast Forward 2, Lou Anders' followup to his
knockout 2007 anthology, Fast Forward (regular Boing Boing readers will
remember Paul Di Filippo's Wikiworld story from that volume). Lou's
given us permission to post the story's text simultaneous with the
book's publication, under the same Creative Commons license.
I had a nearly illegal amount of fun working on this story with Ben, who
is a gonzo comp-sci geek with a real flare for phrasing, and I hope
you'll enjoy hearing it as much as we enjoyed writing it!
MP3:
http://www.archive.org/download/CoryDoctorowPodcast114TrueNameswithBenjaminRosenbaumPart01/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_114_-_True_Names_With_Benjamin_Rosenbaum_-_Part_01_64kb.mp3
Podcast feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
Ben Rosenbaum:
http://www.benjaminrosenbaum.com/
Fast Forward:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/23/fast-forward-1-wonde.html
Wikiworld:
http://www.pyrsf.com/chapters/WikiWorld.htm
block quote end
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: ecstatic
Tags: books, cdoctorow, podcasts, science fiction
|
|
08:28 pm
[Link] |
Jennifer Pelland's "Captive Girl"
I just read this Nebula-nominated short story from Pelland's collection, _Unwelcome Bodies_.
It's another one of those disability science fiction stories which explores the really scarey outer limits of our own brains and our perception of ourselves. Until now, I thought Kelly Eskridge's story "Alien Jane" was the edgiest of these stories, because it demonstrated how easily people can lose track of their own ethical compass even while claiming to do so in the name of medicine, but "Captive Girl" is even more transgressive in that the relationship in the story is between two people who are intimately involved and not just patient and caregiver. Not that that makes their relationship any more politically correct, quite the opposite, actually, because we give people we love all sorts of power over us that we would never hand over to anyone else under any condition.
Proof again that exploring the shadow self is the real final frontier.
Note that "Captive Girl" is included in Jennifer Pelland's short story collection _Unwelcome Bodies_, which is available as a multiformat ebook from http://www.fictionwise.com. If you are concerned about accessibility, the multiformat ebooks can be converted to accessible text using any one of a number of ebook format converters. If you need a recommendation, post here and I will leave a link to the program I use.
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: impressed
Tags: books, disability, science fiction
|
|
03:36 pm
[Link] |
Hofstadter's followup to Godel, Escher, Bach
From Time.com
"The year of mathemagical thinking "
Thursday, Mar. 15, 2007 By
LEV GROSSMAN
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1599720,00.html
When I was growing up, there was a book in our house that my brother and sister and I all read. It was a very odd book, a rattlebag of art, mathematics,
music, philosophy, symbolic logic, computers, genetics, paradoxes, palindromes and Zen koans among many, many other things. Most of it went way over my
head--my precocious older sister, who later became a mathematician, and even later a sculptor, was the real target audience--but it was playfully written
and deeply weird and off-the-charts smart and generally just the thing for a household of pretentious, alienated adolescents to chew on. My siblings and
I weren't especially close, but we always had that book in common: it was our secret shared nerd bible.
The book was called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid--Gödel being the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel; Escher, the fantastical Dutch artist
M.C. Escher; and Bach, the Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach. The extraordinary mind that braided these three figures together in one book belonged
to one Douglas Hofstadter, a physics Ph.D. who was only 34 years old at the time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for Gödel, Escher, Bach, and it went
on to become a cult classic that influenced a generation of thinkers. Since then Hofstadter has published on numerous subjects, but he never went back
at length to the themes of his first book.
Until now. Later this month Hofstadter will publish I Am a Strange Loop (Basic Books; 412 pages), in which he expands and builds on the groundwork he laid
in his earlier work. But Hofstadter has been through a lot in the past 28 years, including the tragic death of his wife, and I Am a Strange Loop goes to
far darker and more personal places than the playful book I read as a teenager.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Tags: books
|
|
04:50 pm
[Link] |
Happy World Book Day
In honor of
World Book Day
http://www.worldbookday.com/
I have submitted Neil Gaiman's new book, _Odd and the Frost Giants_, to Bookshare.org.
It's doubly appropriate, being both Neil's contribution written especially for World Book Day and the subject being about a winter that seemed as if it would never end.
Other places to find books (these are all free):
Tor free digital books
http://www.tor.com/
ManyBooks.net
http://www.manybooks.net
Richard Seltzer's Samizdat.com Free ebook of the Week mailing list
http://www.samizdat.com/
(Yes, you can buy CDs that contain the numerous vast collections Richard has organized, but you can also sign up for the free ebook of the week and recieve a free ebook delivered right to your inbox. There is also a kid's version of the ebook every week.)
The Baen Free Library at Baen Books
http://www.baen.com/library/
and there is always the megasite of The Online Books Page
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/new.html
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: bookish
Tags: books, world book day 08
|
|
08:54 am
[Link] |
Books read in February
Mathematicians in Love by Rudy Rucker (2006) [scanned myself]
Everything you want from a Rudy Rucker book: weird science and an even weirder geek love story, plus a steampunk version of the oracular brass head. Whenever I feel science fiction is getting stale, Rudy snaps me out of my ennui.
The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse
Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace (2007) [scanned myself]
At times a bit bombastic, but overall a decent introduction to the discussion of the politics of virtual worlds, both in-game and out. Sometimes the pretense by which one of the authors refers to his avatar in the third person gets a bit grating, the best parts of the book are when the authors stop talking about themselves and focus on other players's experiences and comments. Also includes some nice bits about the potential for players to develop original content and to do completely unexpected things with the in-game narrative and game mechanics. Includes a useful bibliography, including Web links.
You can read the Table of Contents and some excerpts from the book here
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11295
The Feast of Love Charles Baxter (2000) [scanned myself]
Very loosely plotted along the lines of "A Midsummer Night's Dream,"
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.wers.org
Tags: books
|
|
12:41 pm
[Link] |
More about access to virtual worlds + In which formats do blind readers get their books?
The AFB AccessWorld Extra just arrived in my inbox, and it included the results from a set of questions sent out in December regarding where blind readers get their books and in what formats they like to read. I am including that information here, but I also wanted to mention that the March issue will include an article titled
Exploring Methods of Accessing Virtual Worlds by William S. Carter and Guido D. Corona
We provide an introduction to virtual worlds and propose ways of making them
accessible to people who are blind.
Here is the book info, and I just want to note that I am in a minority due to my preference for text over audio.
block quote start
In December, we asked about reading electronic books. We received 100
responses.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: accessibility, books, ebooks, virtual worlds
|
|
01:21 pm
[Link] |
Cataloguing, cross-referencing, and copyediting my eBooks
Both freerange_sanrk and alexx_kay have discussed proofreading electronic texts (okay, I'm not sure alexx_kay outed himself previously, but he does).
I admit I do this also, but it sometimes causes a conflict between my "the text is canon and should not be tampered with" side and my "but the author misspelled the word!" side.
Add to that the many scannos that occur when one is using a scanner and an OCR program. One example: typefaces which use extended headers and footers often cause the OCR to misrecognize the word "the" as "die." Do you know how often the word the, or similar words such as "Them" and "Their" are usedin an average text? And how carefully, if one reads a lot of mysteries, one must read to make sure that the word really is "the" and not "die"?
But mysteries cause the least of my copyediting quandaries. Science fiction writers, as a group, really like getting cute with language.
A couple of weeks ago I was scanning Rudy Rucker's _Mathematicians In Love_ and realized scores of articles were missing. Now, I realized that, this being science fiction, there might turn out to be a perfectly valid reason for this (there was, but it wasn't brought up until the last third or so of the book). Anyway, I think I slipped in a few articles before I felt really confident that Rudy was just messing with me.
On the other hand, in recent years, copyediting on the part of publishers has definitely gotten more slapdash, to a point where missing words or repeated words or even misspelled words are not that unusual. I just read a book on writing where the author misspelled "urbane" as "urban" throughout the entire book.
( more copyedting quandaries and a peek into my library )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: books, ebooks, hermione inclinations
|
|
01:11 pm
[Link] |
Books read in January 2008
This is part of a project to not only record what books I read, but indicate which books I have scanned myself and what other sources are available for etexts and accessible ebooks. Things which I hope this project demonstrates: 1. the availability of science fiction books in alternate formats.
2. What kind of sources are available for accessible ebooks.
3. the number of books I scan per month and the amount of production time these books represent, each scanned book requiring 6-10+ hours of time flipping and scanning pages.
True Names by Vernor Vinge with an afterword by Marvin Minsky (1984) [etext from somewhere[
Before there was the Matrix, there was "the Other Plane," Vinge's conception of what an interactive online environment would look and feel like and how this other world would ultimately influence people's sense of identity. Mindboggling to find a note indicating that this story was written in 1979, and Minsky's afterword is fascinating also if you are interested in following the links between science fiction and science theory.
Precode Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934 by Thomas Doherty (1999) [Bookshare.org]
Doherty, a professor at Braindeis,
as in the case of another one of his books which I read and found fascinating, Cold War, Cool Medium about television during the McCarthy era, Doherty explores how this time was far from being the uptight black-and-white repressive era that it is portrayed as in less in-depth studies. Good book as much for the development of the "talkies" as the development of ratings systems.
Coyote Road Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow editors (2007) [scanned by me]
( continued below cut )
Current Mood: Hermione-like
Current Music: www.wmbr.org
Tags: books, ocr, reading
|
|
10:47 am
[Link] |
Meta blogging: books on blogs
The New York Review of Books has a "book review" written by Sarah Boxer
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21013
which is extremely short on reviewing the ten books supposedly under discussion but does include some interesting questions regarding the state of the blog, its culture and its writing style.
On one hand, I like Boxer's questioning of whether blogs are a new genre; on the other hand, I feel much more ambivalent about her statement that "While putting together my anthology of blogs, I marveled many times at the large numbers of bloggers obsessed with masked superheroes." As for her final paragraph, I can only guess this will provide the thesis for her own book on blogs (bet you couldn't see that ISBN coming, could you?). Here is the final paragraph:
block quote start
Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It's the flying. It's the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their
computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains,
and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it's
like, "Dude, the ball."
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who
they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can't fake that. ;-)
block quote end
For more context and questions, also read
the Language Log commentary on the review
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005350.html#more
which discusses the gap between blogs and other forms of media such as magazines and radio.
( bits I liked )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: slightly irked
Tags: blogs, books, writing
|
|
08:54 pm
[Link] |
Now I know what to title my autobiography...
After
this conversation
http://alexx-kay.livejournal.com/200651.html
with alexx_kay last night, the title defintely needs to be "An Unreliable Narrator."
Now I'm pondering whether the protagonist of _Zeroville_ is an unreliable narrator....I've always thought that the number of fictional and non-fictional characters who fall under the category of "unreliable narrators" are far more numerous than most lit professors and mental health professionals would have us believe.
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: call me unreliable
Current Music: Call me irresponsible, too
Tags: books, lit crit, writing
|
[<< Previous 20 entries] |