Looks Like Rudy Rucker Wasn’t That Far Off
I somehow missed it, but Justin TV is a 24-hour vlog, very similar to what Rudy Rucker included in his most recent novel, Mathematicians in Love. Audio and video of one man’s life. It even got written up in the Chron, with fulminating quotes from Andrew Keen. I couldn’t possibly imagine undergoing such 24-7 public exposure. For example, if Justin gets laid or takes a shower, does he still keep the camera on?
They Forgot to Supply the Kleenex
“We make computers work for you.”
Human Frogger
Roundup
- If you thought that Matthew Sharpe’s take on Jamestown was the first, Garth Hallberg reveals the history of Jamestown in contemporary fiction, citing not only one of my favorite contemporary authors, but The Sot-Weed Factor, one of my favorite novels of the past fifty years.
- The San Antonio Express-News interviews Jodi Picoult, only the third woman to have written for Wonder Woman. And if that little tidbit isn’t enough to disturb you, consider Wonder Woman’s origins: William Marston, one of the men who innovated on the polygraph, created the character with his wife. Of course, Marston’s ideas of female empowerment involved Wonder Woman tying her villains with her magic lasso and forcing them to tell the truth. There was an interesting book put out on Wonder Woman’s origins seven years ago.
- Another Banville interview is available at the Oregonian.
- A forthcoming PBS documentary series will examine the American novel. Thankfully, Ken Burns isn’t involved. I’ll never forgive Burns for making Mark Twain’s fascinating life into such a bore a few years ago. (via Orthofer)
- Finally, the Hugo Awards represent women. (via Gwenda)
- Authors, take note of this anecdote: Margaret Atwood really loves you. Who knew?
- How to write a bestseller. (via Bill Peschel)
- The Slate Audio Book Club returns. I haven’t listened to it yet and will only do if I feel compelled to become sad about what passes for populist thinking. But it’s a sunny day here in San Francisco and I’m in a pleasant mood. So I’ll defer such criticisms to my colleagues. It appears that Meghan O’Rourke has had enough. She’s been replaced by John Burnham Schwartz. I’m wondering if this is because O’Rourke, the only one of the pre-Schwartz trio to have any brains, finally came to her senses, demanding an amazing amount of money if she had to endure more of Stephen Metcalf and Katie Roiphe’s banal observations. If this is the case, I don’t blame her. You’d have to ply me with enough scotch to fuel a Jeep Cherokee gas tank (perhaps the same amount that was forcibly poured down Cary Grant’s throat in North by Northwest before James Mason and Martin Landau put him behind the wheel) to get me to talk books on this atavistic level. Perhaps O’Rourke will return in a Slate Audio Book Club (Higher Thinking Edition), which would be a more constructive use of Slate’s resources. In the meantime, listen to the rabble, if you dare.
- Does your English cut the mustard? My own results: Grammar: 100%, Vocabulary: 100%, Punctuation: 80%, Spelling: 100%. But then I have strange ideas about commas. (via Books, Words & Writing)
- The effect of viral video on publishing. (via Kassia)
- Apparently, a few Brits didn’t get the memo that you are not supposed to award John Grisham anything.
- Harry Turtledove fans, take note! The first chapters of an alternate history, co-authored by Turtledove and Bryce Zabel, in which JFK had lived have been posted. (via Lee Goldberg)
- If reading is dying, why are so many Canadians reading? Those ungodly liberal heathens above the 49th parallel are destroying our comfortable illiterate American way of life! They must be stopped at all costs! (via Bookninja)
- Oprah, Rooster; Rooster, Oprah.
Finally, A Film That Reflects the Truth of Relationships
Now If Only They Could Take the Piss Out of Frank Deford’s Forced Enthusiasm
Irrational Public Radio. Fun stuff. The patois is often dead-on. (via MeFi)
Permanent Age
“What’s your permanent age?” asks someone who I do not care to name, as located by Maxine.
Well, let me try to answer this question. This morning, when I woke up, I had a permanent age of six years old as I giggled over a few juvenile things. This escalated to a permanent age of 42, because I had to do actual work, and then dipped down to about 22 or so when I headed into work and finished a nonfiction book that was written at an undergraduate’s level, but that I nevertheless enjoyed. I suppose when I recognized the book as idealistic nonsense, my permanent age shifted up to 32, only to dip down to a permanent age of 30, and rise to the age of 41 during a morning moment in which I had to be adult. During the early afternoon, my permanent age was in the shitter again, and I became 21 for about twenty minutes. Then I had to conduct an interview, and my permanent age shifted to 36. Not bad, given that this is older than my real age. Now my permanent age is somewhere around 74. Because I’m feeling quite exhausted and I complained to someone about “kids, these days” and may have even said, “Back in my day!” When I get dinner, my permanent age will return to somewhere around 35. But I’m hoping to downshift again by watching a few episodes of Battlestar Galactica tonight, because I’m behind, which will cause my permanent age to drop to 16.
Since I failed to measure the precise times and durations of these permanent ages, I’m afraid I cannot offer a sufficient answer. But that’s okay. Personally, I don’t care to be permanent anything. Because being permanent means being inert and capitulating curiosity. But I suppose permanent anything works well if you’re a cartoonist offering mundane observations about office life under the guise of “humor” while failing to find laughs in its true horrors. When the cartoonist in question is quite happy to be a fatcat by his own admission, then I’m wondering if the question is not so much an interesting philosophical debate to be shared across the blogosphere, but a veiled call to conform.
Death Threats Against Kathy Sierra
Several people have forwarded me this post, which has been picked up by the Chronicle, suspecting that I might have something intelligent to say on the whole mess. You’re probably not going to like what you’re going to hear from me, but since nobody is stepping in, I’m afraid I’m going to have to speak up soon.
If the Judge Awards to Chooseco, LLC, Go to Page 42; If the Judge Awards to Daimler Chrysler, Go to Page 56
Publishers Weekly reports that Chrysler is in hot water. Chooseco, LLC, the publishers of the Choose Your Own Adventure series has sued Chrysler over a Jeep Patriot ad campaign. But perhaps some car advertising isn’t really meant to be interactive.
Roundup
- The New York Sun has more news on the forthcoming statue devoted to George Plimpton. As previously reported here, and, yes, this is actually serious, there’s been some controversy on whether to portray Plimpton atop a horse, with his bicycle, or carrying literature and boxing gloves. What the Sun uncovers is that a mere $4,000 of the required $200,000 cost has been raised. It’s clear that Toby Barlow, the man organizing this project, is going to have to do better. Maybe the only way to foot the bill is to have the National Boxing Association sponsor the statue, although I’d hate to see a placard cemented to Plimpton’s sculpted left buttock reading “SPONSORED BY THE NBA.”
- Book review cliche of the week: “Michael Gruber does a bang-up job incorporating it into his breathlessly engaging novel, The Book of Air and Shadows.” Am I the only person who sees the words “bang-up job” and imagines an author participating in an orgy? I promise to all who enlist my services that I will never use the words “bang-up job,” unless it relates to a viable copulative practice, and I shall never use the words “breathlessly engaging,” because if one is denied of oxygen, whether literally or metaphorically, one is not actually engaging with the world. One is, by dint of suffocation, coming close to expiring.
- In Malaysia, Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak is calling for “a nation of readers.” I look to my own nation and ponder whether such noble words can come from any of the politicians who purport to represent my interests.
- I forgot to mention this, although several readers have been kind to point it out to me: it’s Memoir Week at Slate. And you know what that means: apparently, Sean Wilsey getting lot of blow jobs.
- I’m about to crack open A.M. Homes’ The Mistress’ Daughter, as I do with any A.M. Homes volume that finds its way into my hands. Maud offers a few early thoughts. The memoir is expanded from a New Yorker essay that appeared in January 2005.
- If you’re interested in Bay Area literary journal smackdowns, Debbie Yee compares Howard Junker with Wendy Lesser.
- Bella Stander offers a report on the VaBook Festival, short for the less polite VGiniaBook Festival.
- Alas, it appears that an American Idol-style literary show is in the cards. (via Quill and Quire)
- Hey, New Yorker! If you’re going to devote a paragraph to a book as compelling as Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World, do you think you can offer more than a condescending series of rhetorical questions? You are a magazine of great style and distinction, but I read this paragraph and I wonder if you have Radar or Entertainment Weekly employees on staff. Surely, this was a novel to farm out to Updike, yes? Oh well, at least Updike’s making the rounds on Isaacson’s Einstein bio.
- The staff of The Wire, perturbed by Zodiac’s indiscretions on the preternatural tidiness of reporter’s desks, are taking photos of Baltimore Sun desks for accuracy. (via Frances Dinkelspiel)
- Philly Inquirer: “For a paper book to work the same way as the Internet book, readers have to sit by their computers and, whenever they come across a bold-faced word or phrase, click over to Walterkirn.com and hit the corresponding link. It’s a disruptive process. If you’re buying a physical book, you’re probably not the kind of person who wants to read long passages of text while sitting at your desk. It would be much easier to read the novel as it was originally presented.”
- Scott compares The Yiddish Policemen’s Union with Roth’s The Plot Against America and Marc Estrin’s Insect Dreams. Scott has some interesting thoughts, but I must ask, without singling anybody out in particular, why so-called literary people fail to account for Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Harry Turtledove, or Philip Jose Farmer (to name only three authors) in their comparisons. The hard line seems to be that parallel universes all started with Roth and Chabon. But there were plenty of writers dabbling intelligently in parallel universes well before these two authors-come-lately.
Something to Consider
I haven’t seen anyone point this out yet, but consider this: Cormac McCarthy will go on television for an Oprah interview, but Jonathan Franzen won’t?
Hobbits
I’ve wondered why hobbits always seem to be employed in the service sector. You never really hear of hobbit attorneys, hobbit investment bankers, hobbit doctors, hobbit teachers, or hobbit intellectuals. Really, a hobbit’s only apparent purpose is to run around like an asshole and accompany humans and elves on their quests. Which makes them sidekicks. Thus, hobbits are there to provide nothing more than comic relief. But life isn’t just about providing comic relief. Even in the role of servant, one must take some responsibility for one’s actions.
So what was the point of hobbits? Why for example didn’t they get it on with elves and have a half-elf, half-hobbit love child from time to time? Hell, why didn’t they have any sexual desires? I presume that hobbits were small yet integral in some way to Middle Earth’s economy, there to befriend non-hobbits like Aragorn and Gandalf and to remain more or less subservient the entire time, never expressing a singular self-interest. Thus, I have developed the theory that hobbits were the Burger King employees and janitors of Middle Earth, even though they seemed to possess a good deal of free time. Perhaps they didn’t need a service sector because nobody was ordering frappuccinos and everyone had settled upon drinking standard mead and blowing smoke rings.
But let us consider vocation: When wandering outside of the Shire, hobbits are not unlike antebellum slaves. Unchained, to be sure, but still the token inferiors. Even when the hobbits hit Bree in Fellowship of the Ring, they were largely ancillary figures, there to observe rather than participate. It was almost as if all the other characters put up with them because they were cute and subservient, as opposed to the intellectual and cultural equal to the men and elves. Why, for example, were there separate rooms for hobbits and men at the Inn of the Prancing Pony? Even accounting for the fact that hobbits are smaller, why not equip the rooms to serve both hobbits and men? Wouldn’t it be more cost effective, particularly at a highly frequented inn with limited vacancies, simply to have a few small roll-away beds for hobbits for the larger rooms? That such an expense would be actively carried out by the Inn of the Prancing Pony suggests a more ominous Jim Crow-like treatment between hobbits and everyone else. While hobbits do not have dark skin, they have hairy feet, as if to imply that they are a Morlock-like underground savage that has been skillfully domesticated to serve the master race of warriors and wizards.
If you ask me, Tolkien had Nietzsche very much on the brain.
This is probably why I don’t care much for Tolkien.
(Thanks to Tao Lin for inspiring these thoughts.)
Norman Spinrad Reveals What Happened With the “Bug Jack Barron” Film
It was to be written by Harlan Ellison and directed by Costa-Garvas. But more importantly, this is a fascinating story about behind-the-scenes shenanigans at Universal.
(via Warren Ellis)
Gray Lady Slams San Franciscans with Base Generalization
New York Times: “Most plastic grocery bags are made from polyethylene, which is derived from oil, which is considered by many San Franciscans to be the root of most of the world’s problems, from $4 gallons of gasoline to the war in Iraq.”
Actually, not this San Franciscan. I believe that most of this world’s problems stem from peanut butter that you can’t lick from the roof of your mouth, poorly performed cunnilingus, clip-on ties, bad toupees, and, of course, money.
The Late Baby, Late Baby, Late Baby Roundup
- Jeff Bryant takes me to task about my thoughts on the Typepad Virtual Book Tour. Contrary to our disagreement (and don’t worry: we’ve kissed and made up; it only took five comments, as well as several naughty haikus and illicit JPEGs sent by email), I think Jeff does raise some valid points. I have been in contact with Typepad and will collect all of my thoughts in a future post, which is better reasoned. Give me a few days to do the legwork.
- I meant to mention it last month, but Matthew Tiffany has prepared a list of book-giveaway programs.
- Oprah has done the impossible. She’s coaxed the notoriously interview-shy Cormac McCarthy into an interview by selecting The Road (!!!) for her book club. Personally, I wish she had chosen Against the Day, just to see how resolute Pynchon is in avoiding the human population. Perhaps they could have hired the creeps who made that documentary to lead the camera charge.
- Tom Bissell on JSF. His review begins with a reverse homage to Dale Peck.
- A letter to Anthony Powell from Kingsley Amis.
- Tangerine Muumuu appear to have returned! For how long, who can say? But seven posts in five days is a good sign.
- Even confined to six words, DBC Pierre cannot write. (via Scott)
- Callie is seeking your answers on the author interview.
- At the NBCC, Steve Weinberg is seeking help for his freelancing directory.
- Rosenblum Productions, which owns the TV and movie rights to 1984, is not amused by all the YouTube/Obama shenanigans and are suggesting that Ridley Scott’s 1984 commercial is a derivative work. You know, I’ve read the Orwell book twice and I don’t recall a whole bunch of citizens sitting slackjawed in a public hall, nor do I recall Orwell writing about a jogger throwing a hammer into a screen. What are these folks going to do next? Sue anyone who uses the adjective “Orwellian?” (via TEV)
- France LOVES LOVES LOVES Vikas Swarup. They want to read him. They want to kiss him. They want to do naughty French things to him.
- The Diamondback’s Clara Morris reveals Russell Banks’ amusing story on having to pick the greatest American novel in the past 25 years for Tanenhaus.
- I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts on The Host, which I saw several weeks ago with nice people. But in the meantime, don’t miss Anthony Lane’s take.
- Bruce Sterling thinks blogs have ten years left to live. As soon as I get a chance, I’ll add a hand to the top of the right-hand column, where this blog will have lots of plastic surgery, proceed to have lots of sex, and do pretty much anything it wants. In ten years’ time, the orb in the middle of this hand will turning red. I will then gladly turn in this blog to the Sandmen, should the blog not attend Carousel. (via Locus)
Kermit is Hurt
Inbox Backlog
I’m now only twenty days of email behind: the best it’s been in some time. Bear with me. I’m replying as fast as I can.
Best American Fantasy 2006
The entries for this year’s Best American Fantasy have been announced. To whet everybody’s appetites for this interesting and variegated collection, I’ve provided links to all of the stories that are online:
“A Hard Truth About Waste Management” by Sumanth Prabhaker
from Identity Theory
“The Stolen Father” by Eric Roe
from Redivider
“The Saffron Gatherer” by Elizabeth Hand
from Saffron & Brimstone (M Press)
“The Whipping” by Julia Elliott
from The Georgia Review
“A Better Angel” by Chris Adrian
from The New Yorker
“Draco Campestris” by Sarah Monette
from Strange Horizons
“Geese” by Daniel Coudriet
from The Mississippi Review
“The Chinese Boy” by Ann Stapleton
from Alaska Quarterly Review
“The Flying Woman” by Meghan McCarron
from Strange Horizons
“First Kisses from Beyond the Grave” by Nik Houser
from Gargoyle
“Song of the Selkie” by Gina Ochsner
from Tin House
“A Troop [sic] of Baboons” by Tyler Smith
from Pindeldyboz
“Pieces of Scheherazade” by Nicole Kornher-Stace
from Zahir
“Origin Story” by Kelly Link (excerpt)
from A Public Space
“An Experiment in Governance” by E.M. Schorb
from The Mississippi Review
“The Next Corpse Collector” by Ramola D
from Green Mountains Review
“The Village of Ardakmoktan” by Nicole Derr
from Pindeldyboz
“The Man Who Married a Tree” by Tony D’Souza
from McSweeney’s
“A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets” by Kevin Brockmeier
from Oxford American
“Pregnant” by Catherine Zeidler (excerpt)
from Hobart
“The Warehouse of Saints” by Robin Hemley
from Ninth Letter
“The Ledge” by Austin Bunn (excerpt)
from One Story
“Lazy Taekos” by Geoffrey A. Landis
from Analog
“For the Love of Paul Bunyan” by Fritz Swanson
from Pindeldyboz
“An Accounting” by Brian Evenson
from Paraspheres (Omnidawn)
“Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot” by Daniel Alarcón
from Zoetrope: All-Story
“Bit Forgive” by Maile Chapman
from A Public Space
“The End Of Narrative (1-29; Or 29-1)” by Peter LaSalle
from The Southern Review
“Kiss” by Melora Wolff
from The Southern Review
Roundup
- First off, there are two stories pertaining to the Los Angeles Times. After the Martinez fiasco, the Times has decided not to rely upon guest editors. This is a pity, because I was really looking forward to Uwe Boll guest editing the opinion section, offering his thoughts on why film critics are more evil than investment bankers and why violence (specifically boxing) is the only possible response to detractors. And the LATBR has, as previously reported, merged its section with the Sunday opinion section. That’s Sunday instead of Saturday, which means that Sunday morning routines won’t shift nearly as much as loyal Times subscribers feared. There will apparently be more book reviews throughout the paper, as well as heightened Web coverage. So it appears to be more of a general journalistic shift rather than a complete capitulation. And I’ll reserve judgment on all this when I see the results. (First link via Callie)
- Regrettably, due to diabolical sleet and snow plaguing the East Coast a few weeks ago, I did not get to talk to John Banville. But Minnesota Public Radio did. The interviewer, I’m sad to report, appears to have not read the book. But Banville is a gracious subject and, as such, the clip is worth your time. He’s also big on Donald Westlake, which should tell you all you need to know. (via Banville Booster Prime)
- The Arizona Republic talks with Max Barry, who confesses that his current reading is a transcript of a Raiders of the Lost Ark story conference. I’ve heard stories about this meeting between Kasdan, Spielberg and Lucas, but I had no idea that such a transcript existed. A Google search has proved fruitless. So perhaps it’s one of those documents one must locate in the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
- The Guardian’s Kate Kellaway talks with five first novelists about their labor.
- Also at the Guardian: an interview with A.L. Kennedy. (via Maud)
- Sasha Frere-Jones on Against the Day: “It’s the Columbine teen in him, the voice saying, ‘Everyone is a philistine! Nobody understands REAL writing!’ and urging him on to all his drastic signification and tortured plotting. I take no pleasure in being defeated by Pynchon, and I don’t think he’s full of hot air; I just think we have very different pleasure principles.”
- The problem isn’t that bloggers are stealing from other bloggers, it’s that people have been blogging for several thousand years now, and blogging in earnest for several hundred years, and at this point in time we’ve just run out of original stuff. Our collective unconscious has to recycle old ideas and find new links because we’ve used up all the fresh ones. Basically, it’s summer reruns for the mind. And it all means a better Technorati ranking and plagiarism to boot.
- George Murray is launching a book of poetry! He plans to use an ancient catapult, well-oiled by many of his Bookninja minions, to eject his tome into a magically airborne parabolic arc, where it will land on a random Canadian’s laundry lines and the resultant collision will bring forth protracted litigation that will leave Mr. Murray a broken and financially crippled man. Nevertheless, a big congrats to Mr. Murray.
- Has the time come for a change in Australian literary studies?
- Another excerpt from On Chesil Beach. If you missed the New Yorker excerpt in December, read here. Given that the book is a mere 176 pages, at the current rate of excerpt releases, we should have the entire book online before pub date.
- The good Prof Fury reveals the last time Captain America died.
- Jeffrey Ford on giving blurbs. (via Gwenda)
- Open questions to the Typepad Virtual Book Tour people: Outside of free books, do you remunerate your participants? Or do you still expect them to pay the $4.95/month for the privilege of devoting their blog to book shilling? A form of shilling, I might add, that Six Apart is profiting from. Look, if you’re going to shill, shouldn’t you be disseminating the monies, not just a copy of the book, which any Jane Friday reviewer can request of her own accord? Paid content is one thing, but when there is no clear separation between content and advertising, and when the bloggers, in turn, are still paying their monthly Typepad dues on top of any shilling, it strikes me as unethical and quite exploitative.
- Harlequin needs REAL men!
- Regarding yesterday, I hereby propose that the sentence, “I don’t like Mondays,” be removed from everyday discourse.
- Derik Badman continues his ongoing examination of comics, unfurling a close study of the first page of Jaime Hernandez’s “Files on the Ceiling.” Derik, for the love of comics, please get a book deal. This is the kind of analysis that will help people to take comics seriously. And it’s been thirteen years since Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. The time is ripe for another consideration.
A Tribute to Those Daring and Possibly Insane Bike Messengers
On Twitter
I have attempted Twitter and I can’t say that I’m happy. It might help if there was more of a payoff. You see, I had thought this was some kind of social networking application, but aside from a kind friend invite from someone named “hephatitssundae,” who seems, based on her user profile, to be a pleasant pink-haired individual who I will likely never meet, my online ramblings, as far as I know, have been received by deaf ears. Perhaps I’m not meant to communicate in shorthand. Perhaps I’m simply too old.
140 characters? Hell, I can just barely get in a haiku within the box. What possible significance can I offer with such a diminutive limit? I may as well “type” a text message into my phone. At least I know that my text message will go to someone I know and that it will have some actual content value, such as conveying where the hell I am or telling someone I’m running five minutes late or describing a rather strange place I happen to be in. But if I’m typing every thought and I don’t have unlimited space to consider depth or nuances, then the Twitter people are almost ensuring a kind of Sturgeon’s law effect. I could be in the middle of a perfectly fantastic sentence, only to be warned that I have 20 characters left, and then where will I be? Spreading it out across a vast chasm of other text messages? That’s inconsiderate to the other users. That’s ineffectual communication. The problems may very well be mine, since I’m sort of a long-winded guy. But Twitter’s approach suggests that “long-winded guys” aren’t part of the constituency, which suggests, in turn, a kind of conformity masquerading as community.
And that’s just it. Aside from quibbles over meaningless messages, I don’t feel like conveying what I am constantly doing or thinking to random strangers, particularly since I don’t know if this content is being aggregated or data mined or sifted through by a server farm. I feel that the whole Twitter exercise is less of a social experiment and more of a way to rifle through anything I have to say so that people can sell me things somewhere down the line or so “friends” who are less concerned with who I am and more concerned with what I can purchase can form some kind of deranged impression of who I am. I have no proof, of course; only instinct. I do know that Twitter was set up by Obvious Corporation, a corporation led by one-time Blogger head man Evan Williams, who once worked at Google and who likely learned some inside information about how Google keeps track of user data (see, for example, the cookie set to expire on January 17, 2038).
I’m wondering if he is familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mind set shortly before his death. After all, what do you do after you’ve given the world Blogger? Perhaps this is another case of the time-honored tech equation:
1. Twitter
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
Twitter is gaining apparent steam right now. Obviously, this is going to cost bandwidth. And obviously, Obvious is going to need some way to recoup their investment. I can imagine the pitch to advertisers: “You think Google AdSense provides context? Well, not only do we have a user base revealing their immediate impulses online without fear of any of it coming back to bite them in the ass later. But we’re building a community to keep them addicted to this confessional impulse. We all know that nobody cares about privacy anymore and our user base demonstrates it!”
To be fair, Twitter has given you a Trash icon to get rid of your messages. But let’s say that you get on a roll and you have hundreds of messages to sift through. Who’s honestly going to take the time to go through them? A blog is one thing, where you can single out your thoughts by categories and the like. But Twitter offers no easy way to sort through your messages except chronology, which implies, in addition to the meager 140 character cap, that thought isn’t part of this new form of communication.
Of course, it’s very possible that some smart people, perhaps inspired by David Markson’s books, might find a form of free association and interesting expression with this tool.
But without thought and with an ostensible attitude and an interface that collides against the idea of thinking before writing, I’m afraid I have serious reservations against Twitter’s possibilities.
For Those Tired of Three Handed Analog Devices
A dot for every second in the day.
Walter Tetley, Pet Boy?
Credits Castrate: The Voice of Walter Tetley (via Messr. Brownlee)
His Undersides Are Like Sharp Potsherds?
Mainichi Daily News: “Once the basic basin service has finished, the genitals are swathed in a chunk of mud supposed to cleanse the skin. Once they are completely covered, the woman (or women) providing the service, then show their handiwork, so to speak, until the client reaches climax, or what Spa! calls the ‘ascent to Heaven.’”
From the Folks Who Gave Us the Judaswiege
Scientific American: “A new German study, however, has found that, when practiced correctly, a method of periodic abstinence known as the sympto-thermal method (STM) leads to an unintended pregnancy rate of only 0.6 percent annually. This rate is comparable with that of unintended pregnancies in women who use birth control pills, the most popular method of contraception in the U.S.”
Three Identities? Small Potatoes. I Have 452 Identities in a Spreadsheet
Guardian: “It is said that we are all three different people: the person we think we are (the one we have invented), the person other people think we are (the impression we make) and the person we think other people think we are (the one we fret about). You could say it would be a lifetime’s quest to reconcile this battling trinity into a seamless whole. Maybe, but for the time being I am convinced that, in Kurt Vonnegut’s words (there I go, quoting again): you are what you pretend to be.”
More Lethem, More Copyright
New interview with Amy Benfer.
C-C-Catch the Wave
So let me get this straight. Max Headroom, a major cyberpunk cultural item that aired for two seasons on ABC in the mid-1980s, is unavailable on DVD. Yet a handful of episodes are available for free on AOL? I don’t understand the logic behind this, but I know what I’ll be downloading very soon. There is also the V television series (as opposed to the more interesting miniseries), a smattering of Wonder Woman episodes, and even Freddy’s Nightmares, which I’m confident is an unintentional laugh riot. (via Fimoculous)
[UPDATE: Actually, it’s too good to be true: “Your PC is not running a supported Windows OS (Windows XP Professional x64 and Vista x64 are not currently supported). You can not buy and download videos.” To hell with AOL.]
Lydia Millet 2.0
Lydia Millet has relaunched her website. If you haven’t read Oh Pure and Radiant Heart or Everyone’s Pretty, there are now excerpts of these books for your enjoyment — as well as an assortment of other writings. And coming in September 2007 from Soft Skull Press: How the Dead Dream. You can also listen to a conversation with her, when I was still pretty green at this interviewing thing, at The Bat Segundo Show #12.
