Fully searchable “Google Print is now out”:http://print.google.com/print?q=foo and there’s lots of valuable stuff. A fantastic resource!
From the category archives:
Books
A post over at the “Valve”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/going_around_the_room_at_the_desk/ asks, _inter alia_, “Do you compose on the computer? Why or why not? … Do you have a stationary and/or a pen fetish?” Scott McLemee at _Inside Higher Ed_ “chimes in”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/04/19/mclemee with a column about his own writing habits:
The reading notes, the rough outline, the first draft or two … all will be written there, in longhand. … My friends and colleagues are occasionally nonplussed to learn that someone trying to make a living as a writer actually spends the better part of his workday with pen in hand. … In my own experience, though, writing is … a matter of laboriously unknotting the thread of any given idea. And the only way to do that is by hand. … So the penchant for haunting stationary stores (and otherwise indulging a fetish for writing supplies) has the endorsement of distinguished authorities. But my efficiency-cramping distaste for the computer keyboard is somewhat more difficult to rationalize.
The implication is that, unlike the printed page and the ink-filled pen (or mechanical pencil), composing prose on a computer is different — perhaps efficiency-enhancing but somehow also inferior — and, more importantly, not subject to fetishization in the way that the pen-and-ink method is. But a moment’s reflection shows this to be wrong. Or, in my case, far too much time spent getting manuscripts (scholarly apparatus, tables, figures, indexes and all) to produce themselves automatically and beautifully shows this to be wrong.
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I was very pleased to get a copy of Nicholas Dent’s new “Rousseau“:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415283507/junius-21 in the post today. It appears in the Routledge Philosophers series edited by Brian Leiter. There’s an endorsement from yours truly on the cover, saying that is is “The best general introduction to Rousseau’s life and thought in English…” I think that’s true. Highly recommended.
By way of recompense to our readers for the dull bout of egotism below, here’s a link to one of the finest and most life-affirming things on the internet (Harry B, this one in particular is for you).
“Hold Your Plums”, featuring Billy Butler and Wally Scott on Radio Merseyside, is just an extraordinary piece of improvised folk-theatre. To begin with, it was a fairly banal bog-standard quiz, loosely based on a fruit machine (hence the double entendre). But as time went on, a combination of the native Scouse wit and the slight vagueness of housewives who have been able to have their first drink of the weekend as the kids set off for Sunday school, it turned into something far more comic.
Billy basically developed this Quixotic urge to ensure that everyone got the answers right. So he gave them clues. And they still got them wrong. It’s basically a phone-in quiz show for the very confused (and for people taking the mickey on purpose). Oh, it’s indescribable, just have a listen to it. The extracts on the BBC website are all named after the phrase that the caller is meant to be guessing. The most famous extract is “What did Walter Raleigh bring back from the New World?”, but my personal favourite is “Springboks”. This all falls apart on a strange point of local microgeography; there are some part of the North West of England where “book”, “hook”, “look” etc are all pronounced to rhyme with “puke”. But anyway; there’s about an hour’s listening pleasure here; forward the link to an expat Scouser of your acquaintance and they will be grateful.
PS: Someone once tried to describe my personality problems to a mutual acquaintance by saying that I bore the same relationship to the world that Billy Butler did to his callers. Make of that what you will.
I was going to write up my election forecasting model and I will (taster; the LibDems might be in a lot more trouble than anyone thinks), but I am too damnably tired this evening. So instead, here’s my responses to that book quiz which was so very hot about two weeks ago. I think it was passed on to me by John Band or Ted or somebody.
John Cloud, author of the Time cover story on Ann Coulter (via Atrios):
David Brock, who knew Ann Coulter from years ago, goes to a book that’s years old, and prints some mistakes from that book, and of course [there are] mistakes. And a lot of them are corrected. If you go out and you buy a copy of Slander now, you won’t find those mistakes in it, because the publisher has corrected them.
I know that Ann Coulter had admitted to one mistake, but I didn’t realize how absurdly dishonest her “correction” was. From the Daily Howler:
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I’m not sure if this is an occult link with the Zeitgeist, or just a manifestation of the reallocation of attention that leads new parents to notice other people’s babies, but a month ago, I finally got around to ordering “The Strange Death of Liberal England” (George Dangerfield) which arrived at Easter. In the ensuing couple of weeks I’ve seen not one but two uses of the same idea, with both Protestantism and Toryism dying strange deaths. Maybe this is happening all the time and I’ve just started noticing.
I am not letting this performance be the sole CT contribution to the noble cause of book-related vanity-stroking blog memes.
“Tom B,” commenting at Making Light, points us to the Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator, which uses context-free grammar to generate papers, complete with graphs, figures and citations, which can then be submitted to conferences with low or no standards for the papers they accept. Its creators (MIT pranksters) have already succeeded in getting accepted by one conference – if they can raise the money, they intend, Yes Men style, to go there and deliver the paper with straight faces. It seems to me that pranks of this sort (the Atlanta Nights affair also qualifies) have the logic of a reverse Turing test – any conference (or publishing house, or journal, or whatever) which is stupid or unprincipled enough to accept this sort of nonsense is revealing itself to be a fake.
Peter Briffa “passes the latest meme thingy”:http://publicinterest.blogspot.com/2005/04/via-peter-cuthbertson-youre-stuck.html on to Crooked Timber. It’s a good job I never became a major celebrity (it was touch-and-go for a while there) because I am useless with these kinds of questions, and celebrities seem to get asked them all the time. I never know what my favorite _x_ (color, food, piece of music, composer, book, whatever) is; I can rarely remember the right answer to the “What’s the last …?” questions; and I can never think up a good response to the “If you only had …?” questions. This one is no different.
“The Strange Death of Liberal England” (George Dangerfield). A classic I’ve meant to read for years, but only just got to has a strikingly apposite quote in relation to the Tory party’s incitement to army mutiny in relation to any order to enforce Irish Home Rule on the Ulster Unionists. Dangerfield has this great line,
The Tory philosophy, up to the beginning of the war, might be summed up in this way: Be Conservative about good things, and Radical about bad things. This philosophy, so far as can be seen, has only one flaw: it was always the Tories who decided what was good and what was bad.
So while donning the mantle of conservatism in defence of the House of Lords, the Tories were prepared to tear up the constitution to defeat Home Rule. The same line seems applicable to the Bush Administration today.
“In Defense of Globalization” (Jagdish Bhagwati). Bhagwati is a smart guy, but he hasn’t yet learned that, on the internets nothing is as it seems. On the lookout for a good anecdote about globalization he finds one that seems too good to be true:
In fact, while the rich-country claim to be providing “countervailing power” against the far richer corporations in their midst, it is ironic that some of the the truly small NGOs in the rich countries themselves have voiced their fears over “unequal” competition from the far bigger and richer NGOs. A hilarious example is provided by a report in mid-2001 of “calls today for multinational pro-anarchy pressure groups to be investigated for monopolistic practices after the NW3 branch of the Radical Left Movement for Socialist Revolution Socialist Revolution was disbanded due to lack of interest.” The report goes on to say that the group’s spokesperson, Nigel Wilkinson, “believes that global anarchy movements such as the ones responsible for the G7 riots in Seattle are to blame for forcing out smaller, independent operations like his…. These large American anti-capitalist movements have effectively taken over the militant scene in this country.” As if this were not amusing enough, the report goes on to say: …”Wilkinson has seen his group’s membership dwindle by almost 70 percent over the last two years, from a peak of three members to one himself .”
Turning to the reference we find the source is Urban Reflex, which is currently running the headline Audience Stunned As Pop Star Appears On Stage Fully Clothed.
Which could be inconvenient as I fancy the knickers off him. Who are you? Via the younger Farrell siblings who are thinking of setting up a blog just to discuss the books, the George R.R.R.R. Martin Ice and Fire personality test.
The nominations for science fiction’s Hugo awards were announced yesterday. In alphabetical order, the nominees for Best Novel are:
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Iain M. Banks – The Algebraist.
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Susanna Clarke – Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
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Ian McDonald – River of Gods.
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China Mieville – Iron Council.
- Charles Stross – Iron Sunrise.
I’ve read four of the five of them, which is a personal record (the exception is the Banks book – while I love Banks’ stuff, the reviews of The Algebraist were mixed enough that I didn’t feel inspired to buy it in hardback). Indeed I and other Crooked Timber people have blogged extensively on both Iron Council and Strange and Norrell. I haven’t blogged on either the Stross book (which has gotten a fair amount of well-deserved blogospheric love recently), or on Ian McDonald’s book, although I’ve been meaning to write about the latter for a long time. It’s both smart and fun, a collision between booster-stage cyberpunk (the underlying story of the book riffs on William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero) and a reinvented India. McDonald has been engaged in a very interesting effort over the last ten years to re-imagine science fiction from the perspective of the developing rather than the developed world, and in this novel he’s made a crucial leap forward in imagining what an India transformed by information technology might look like and mean, on its own terms. Only two of the many viewpoint characters are Westerners, and they serve more to provide contrast than to translate and domesticate the exotic. McDonald’s West retains economic and political dominance, but is quietly losing out over time, because it’s trying to shut out the disruptive impact of new technologies. It’s an aging monopolist which is about to have its lunch eaten. India is where it’s at – new sexes (neuts), AI-driven soap operas, towed icebergs, and finally, the gateway to a new universe. I’m not sure whether the book is (or even tries to be) authentic in any strong sense of the word (I’d be fascinated to hear the opinion of anyone who’s from India and has read it), but it’s exciting, thought-provoking, and (once you come to grips with the many viewpoints that McDonald uses), very entertaining. Not a book that I’d pass on to anyone who isn’t already an SF reader – the future-shock might be a little much – but something that I would recommend without hesitation to anyone who loves the genre, and wants to read something that feels fresh and new. As far as I know, it hasn’t found a US publisher yet – perhaps the nomination (and the British Science Fiction Association award that it’s also picked up) will prompt somebody over here to pick it up.
(nb – as always with my posts, all commission from the Amazon links above will go to charity).
You should read Scribblingwoman more. Also, Jonathan Goodwin. Here’s a thing, courtesy of the former. [Specifically, tomorrow I want to visit Miriam’s blog and find more edifying ‘recent comments’ are available than those left by that hopeless ‘online casino’ character. Not that I blame Miriam. She just deserves better.]
“n+1” magazine, which sent out its second issue a few days ago, is really very good indeed. It’s a nice mixture of politics and literature – a deliberate antidote in 248 pages to both the self-congratulatory coyness of McSweeneys and the ghastly sincerity of the Believer. The stand-out article in the current issue is Elif Batuman’s piece on Isaac Babel, which is shot through with small fragments of genius. It combines a finely judged assessment of Babel’s work, which makes you want to run out and read him (if, like me, you haven’t done so yet), with an exquisite and devastatingly funny deconstruction of the Babel industry in academia. I suspect that I’d get even more from it if I’d already read Babel’s stories. I especially liked this short passage on cultural identity and alienation (n.b. that Batuman’s point goes far beyond Jewish identity politics – the Irish have a more highly developed, if less historically justified, version of the same trope).
Tolstoy observed, “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and he was right: surely everyone on this earth, vale of tears that it is, is entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering. But in the end, I am too deeply invested in the idea that literature can render comprehensible another family’s unhappiness. For this reason, I once became impatient with a colleague I met at a conference in New York, who was insisting that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov’s “specifically Jewish alienation.”
“Indeed,” I finally said, “as a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.”
He nodded. “So you see the problem.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t available on the WWW; you’ll have to go to your bookstore and buy yourself a copy of the magazine (or become a subscriber) if you want to read it – I’d recommend the latter if possible (it’s really a great little magazine).