This might sound a little weird from a guy who bought a projector TV so his home experience would match his cinema experience as closely as possible, but I still think there is a huge difference between a movie to see in the theater and a movie to wait to see at home.
Well, Christopher Pendegraft at Scriptshadow has the same take: Continue reading
Once upon a time a man said “women in stories shouldn’t need a man to rescue them!” To prove his point, he wrote a story to rescue women from stories in which women needed men to rescue them.
The above is a true story about Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle, but it could just as well be a fairy tale, as fairy tales are often simply fantastical reflections of the foibles of real-world society. The foible in this fable is the incessant spreading of the archaic gender trope of female frailty by people who are convinced they are confronting archaic gender tropes.
Gaiman’s wildly ironic (yet clearly well-intentioned) effort is a perfect example of how gender tropes are so deeply embedded that human attempts to address them all too often only scrape them ever deeper into our cultural consciousness. If you think women shouldn’t need rescued by men in stories, then don’t be a man who rescues them with stories.
What good is a writer if he can’t destroy literature?
Julio Cortázar
It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
Richard Dawkins
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
Anton Chekhov
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Gabriel Garcia Márquez
It’s funny, in literature no one ever goes to the lavatory.
Tom Baker
But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it’s by way of heartbreak, sometimes it’s by way of injustice, sometimes it’s by way of fate. There’s an infinite number of ways to examine it.
Tom Hanks
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.
Victor Hugo
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.
Christopher Hitchens
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
Charles Dickens
In a feat of utmost unexamined irony, the habitual bashers of corporate monster Amazon over at Melville House report on how Hachette has now resumed gobbling up literary properties like some sort of … uh … corporate monster?
Hachette bought Black Dog & Leventhal yesterday …
Hachette’s had a big year. About four months ago, the company did not end up buying Perseus … We all assumed it had to do with the Amazon standoff … All of that ended last week … So who will Hachette acquire next?
Hachette US bought the Hyperion backlist, and formed Hachette Books to start acquiring in a similar vein. Hachette UK bought Constable & Robinson in February and Quercus in March. They’re buying a whole lot of small nonfiction publishers with strong backlists.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Hachette takes a moment from devouring everything in sight to reward its boot-licking minions at the Authors Guild for standing by them against Amazon?
But … probably not, as the hilarious Dan Meadows explains (after quoting comments from Authors Guild president Roxana Robinson):
“It is our hope that Hachette, in light of the loyalty its authors have shown throughout this debacle, takes this opportunity to revisit its standard e-book royalty rate of 25 percent of the publisher’s net profits.”
Sweet Jesus! Tell me you’re not that naive. Loyalty?! What part of “billion dollar corporate negotiation” don’t you understand? You hope, in light of your “loyalty”, that they take this opportunity to revisit that standard? What opportunity would that be? The one where they’ve settled up with Amazon, already have you all under contract at that standard, and don’t need to name-drop you morons in an obviously coordinated PR assault on a rival anymore?
The opportunity to do a hell of a lot more than “hope they revisit the standard” was the past seven months when Amazon had Hachette over a barrel and the other publishers were all worried they were next. The only opportunity you have now is for them to laugh in your face.
Yup. And when they do, don’t get made when we say we told you so.
Every once in a while, a book story comes along that’s so weird and cool, that you almost think it has to be an Onion parody. Get ready to roll a saving throw vs. spells, dear readers!
Researchers have deciphered an ancient Egyptian handbook, revealing a series of invocations and spells.
Among other things, the “Handbook of Ritual Power,” as researchers call the book, tells readers how to cast love spells, exorcise evil spirits and treat “black jaundice,” a bacterial infection that is still around today and can be fatal.
The book is about 1,300 years old, and is written in Coptic, an Egyptian language. It is made of bound pages of parchment — a type of book that researchers call a codex …
The ancient book “starts with a lengthy series of invocations that culminate with drawings and words of power,” [researchers] write. “These are followed by a number of prescriptions or spells to cure possession by spirits and various ailments, or to bring success in love and business.”
For instance, to subjugate someone, the codex says you have to say a magical formula over two nails, and then “drive them into his doorpost, one on the right side (and) one on the left” …
The opening of the codex refers to a divine figure named “Baktiotha” whose identity is a mystery, researchers say. The lines read, “I give thanks to you and I call upon you, the Baktiotha: The great one, who is very trustworthy; the one who is lord over the forty and the nine kinds of serpents,” according to the translation.
Why do I suspect Baktiotha might own a tentacle wig for those special occasions that call for Victorian dress?
You can check out the rest of the story at Live Science, but only if you’re a high-level cleric or magic user.
There’s no rule about how to organize your own book collection, but National Public Radio listeners had some interesting suggestions: Continue reading
In chapter 120 of the Chinese classic, Wen-Tzu’s Book of Pervading Mystery (通玄真經), we read: “If they are valued for what is valuable about them, then all things are valuable. If they are despised for what is worthless about them, then all things are worthless.”1
So when Ursula K. Le Guin recently quipped at the National Book Awards, “I see a lot of us, the producers accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant,” one has to wonder how enthusiastic that crammed room full of applauding deodorant slanderers would have been had none of them been wearing deodorant.
And, the remark stank beyond its implied dismissal of products engineered to overcome human body odor.
From the New York Times:
A federal judge on Friday approved a settlement in which Apple could begin paying $400 million to as many as 23 million consumers related to charges that it violated antitrust law by conspiring with publishers to raise e-book prices and thwart efforts by Amazon …
Apple initially agreed to pay up to $400 million to settle the class action in June, ahead of a damages trial set for two months later in which attorneys general in 33 states and class-action lawyers were expected to seek up to $840 million …
The suit accused Apple of being a “ringmaster” of a conspiracy with the five major publishers to raise the average price of e-books from the $9.99 price that Amazon had made standard for new e-book releases. Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and the Hachette Book Group settled the day the case was filed; Penguin and Macmillan settled months later.
Read the rest here.
And, to reiterate, I recognize the economic danger of Amazon’s size, but (a) Amazon is nowhere near a monopoly or monopsony, (b) it was Amazon’s competitor Apple that showed its willing to break the law to the rip off readers, and (c) the Big Five were an economically dangerous cartel long before Amazon’s first 1’s and 0’s hit the Internet, and they prove their intentions to behave as a cartel again and again, to the detriment of readers and writers.
The facts in this scandal make the deluded National Book Awards polemic delivered by Ursula Le Guin, who is otherwise a remarkable advocate for literature, all the more tragic. Continue reading
How would you feel if I told you that a hack “appropriation artist”—Cory Arcangel, best known for founding a trashy clickbait site (BuzzFeed) notorious for propaganda and plagiarism—landed a book deal with a traditional publisher (Penguin) to reprint other people’s social media activity?
What if I told you that the whole point of this prep-school brat’s essentially plagiarized book was to ridicule working-class writers who included the phrase “working on my novel” in their tweets?
Now, what if I told you that an assistant editor at Harper’s had dedicated nearly 1600 words reviewing this smug lump of crap?
But … hold on, and put down the torches and pitch-forks … what if I told you that his brilliant conclusion was this: Continue reading
