Bad readers

Nick Mamatas:

Right-wing conventionals see moral instruction as paramount in a story, and left-wing conventionals see immoral instruction as paramount to avoid in a story. Both positions can only come from the heads of poor readers. It is useful to point out “preachiness” on the one hand and potential offense on the other, especially when the author may not even realize that they are either preaching or offending, but conventionalists rarely stop at the text. Every story in a workshop is some sort of ethical litmus test, and even when there is no outrageous content there is often outrageous aesthetics. Is first-person fascist because it TELLS the reader WHAT TO THINK?? Certainly not, but I’ve heard this declared from liberal nitwits. Is anything other than third-person objective point of view in past tense told with “plain language” somehow sign of a homosexual/Communist plot? Anyone who has ever read one of the rambling semiliterate editorials in Tangent knows the answer to that! And let’s not forget the tyranny of “story” which conventionals always chirp abut. The morons even go on about Shakespeare as some sort of populist cartwheeler, as if people still look at Romeo and Juliet for the plot, which is “spoiled” by the author himself anyway in the Prologue. (“From forth the fatal loins of these two foes/A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.”)

#followalibrary on October 1st

A nice new Dutch originated, but worldwide initiative to make October 1st #Followalibrary Day on Twitter. The video below explains who, what, how and why:



It’s good to see such a creative, low cost promotion for something often seen as stuffy and oldfashioned as a public library. Especially now, when libraries are under threat in America and the UK as an easy target to cut spending on. It’s all a little less gloomy here in the Netherlands, but even so, in an age when we’re supposedly getting all our information of the internet anyway, the library is no longer the self evident public good it once was. Libraries are very vulnerable to misguided cost cutting attempts right now. Nobody will die if a library closes or limits its opening hours and people might grumble, but won’t get passionate about it the way they would if a local hospital would close.

On Kindle will reading highlights become ads?

In the same vein as that Facebook security leak that’s gotten Palau annoyed over at Prog Gold, here comes another scary story about how we’re losing our privacy and paying for the priviledge. This time it’s the Kindle that’s at the heart of it. Via Matt Ruff:

The Amazon Kindle, Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for iPad each provide a very simple mechanism for adding highlights. Every month, Kindle customers highlight millions of book passages that are meaningful to them.

We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people. We show only passages where the highlights of at least three distinct customers overlap, and we do not show which customers made those highlights…

Matt invented a similar scheme for his novel Bad Monkeys, involving a bug in the spine of physical books noting how long you spent reading each page, so he’s a bit miffed somebody made his paranoid fantasy real. The next step is to sell ads based on this data… It reminds me slightly of the soup ads the German publisher of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels used to insert in his books. They’re not his publisher anymore.

What an asshole

Ian McEwan talks about his novel Saturday and the confrontation at the heart of it between his protagonist, nice upper middleclass neurosurgeon Henry Perowne and the villain of the piece, Baxter, which is symbolic of some greater confrontation:

IMcE: Let’s put it this way: I am not writing an allegory here. I am not making Henry stand for something. But, nevertheless, just a little or maybe a lot below the surface in his confrontation with Baxter is an echo of the confrontation of the rich, satisfied, contented West with a demented strand of a major world religion.

As you know Bob, the plot of Saturday takes place on Saturday, 15 Februari 2003, the day two million people marched through London against the War on Iraq, but which none of the characters in the book joined, even the vaguely antiwar ones, because they all had something better to do. The march only features as the catalyst that brings Henry and Baxter together in their not quite symbolic, symbolic confrontation and in several minor encounters which are only there do drive McEwan’s point home that going on an antiwar march is a deeply unserious thing to do. That McEwan indeed intended the confrontation between villain and protagonist to be symbolic — “an echo” — of the War on Terror (as viewed bya a middleaged bedwetting upper middle class writer fearful of the loss of his priviledges) is no more than the rank icing on a rotten cake. Christ, what an asshole.

authenticity vs gender balance

Steve Poole blogs about Publishers Weekly‘s oddly womenless top ten best books of 2009 to note a particular phrase of speech, as is his wont. What niggled at me was his last paragraph:

If you make a list of your favourite books of the year and then notice that they are all written by men, should you remove some of the books and insert some written by women? If you don’t do so, are you “ignoring gender” or “excluding women”?

Then it struck me. What this paragraph does is to create a contrast between the spontaneous act of listing your favourite books of the years and the artificial act of genderbalancing it. It presupposes both that the original list would be the “real” one, reflecting the genuine tastes of the PW editors and unsullied by other concerns, while the adjusted list would have phonies on it, books only chosen because they written by women. Not that Steve meant it that way of course, but it is the sort of assumption that’s always in the background of this kind of gender (or any other kind of) equality discussions. It both ignores the reality of how a list like this is created and denigrates gender balancing such a list as inauthentic.