NPR: “McEwan’s prognosis is surely hyperbole, but only slightly. Surveys consistently find that women read more books than men, especially fiction. Explanations abound, from the biological differences between the male and female brains, to the way that boys and girls are introduced to reading at a young age.”
Author / Edward Champion
I Wonder if He Could Muster Up These Emotions About Global Warming, Poverty, or Iraq
Perfection, of a Kind, Was What They They Were After
I somehow missed this article on Sunday, but the Philly Inquirer has a nice overview of poetry podcasts.
Take Care with the Noun Phrases You Type Into the Ether
Siva Vaidhyanathan: “Google’s not required to ensure that the search engine that would guide people to these books actually delivers good results. Google is not required to make sure that the scanning process actually gets every page of every book and makes it all clear. There are no requirements that Google use metadata effectively or the metadata certainly already attached to books. There’s no guarantee that Google will offer people the best possible results for their queries. And most importantly, Google does not do anything to protect user confidentiality and in the world of book searching this is a really important factor. It is an essential part of librarianship. It is an essential part of the ethics and policies of libraries. Users should not feel that their use of any sort of research material might someday come to light and be misinterpreted as some sort of nefarious activity. We should feel comfortable in our information seeking habits. And I’m afraid that Google corralling so many of our information seeking habits puts us all at risk.” (via Ron Silliman)
To Italicize Comic Strips Or Not to Italicize Comic Strips
Good Man Park asks, “Does one italicize comic strip names?”
I say, yes! A comic strip is a set of works over the course of many years, is it not? Therefore, if one is permitted to emphasize a television series, one should likewise be permitted to do the same with a comic strip or a comic book. Ergo, you would refer to the September 12, 2007 installment of For Better or For Worse, and not the September 12, 2007 installment of “For Better or Worse,” which is a bit like referring to the episode “Mirror, Mirror” of “Star Trek” (redundant, yes?) or “The Flying Machine” in Ray Bradbury’s “S is for Space” (likewise, odd to the eye!).
Nevertheless, I really had no idea that this was such a controversial issue. Or perhaps Mr. Park, as is sometimes his wont, is getting me unduly excited about something pedantic. I’d like to know if there have been any vociferous arguments with the copy desk on this subject. If there are any stylistic gurus who have ample justification for ghettoizing a comic strip to quotes and denying a strip’s rightful place into a grammatical terrain that, for crying out loud, is used in relation to Jackass and WWE’s SummerSlam, I’d be curious to hear from them.
(And, no, this assault on exclamation points will not do! It will not do at all!)