publishing

Tuesday various

  • Plagiarism Software Finds a New Shakespeare Play. Well, maybe. Unless we can dig up Zombie Shakespeare, I think it’s still just conjecture. [via]
  • Speaking of zombies, however, I’m not so sure I agree with The Guardian‘s contention that:

    No zombie is ever going to be a pinup on some young girl’s wall. Just as Pattinson and all the Darcy-alikes will never find space on any teenage boy’s bedroom walls – every inch will be plastered with revolting posters of zombies. There are no levels of Freudian undertone to zombies. Like boys, they’re not subtle. There’s nothing sexual about them, and nothing sexy either. It’s all about splatter and gore and entrails and our own fear and fascination with just how messy and vile and extraordinary our bodies are.

    Which seems to be making all sorts of gender-based assumptions on some pretty shaky and limited evidence. I’d also suggest that the so-called subtlety of broody vampires like Edward Cullen is actually a pretty thin veneer over a shallow pond. [via]

  • Dr. Scott’s Case Studies of Comic Book Medicine. More here. [via]

  • Two new ways of looking at things: the US highway system as a subway map [via] and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” as a flowchart.

  • And finally, speaking of the Beatles, what if the band never broke up? [via]

Monday various

  • Regender.com is an interesting experiment, although obviously imperfect. In its regendering of this site, for instance, it changed Billy Joel’s “Don’t Ask Me Why” into “‘Donna’t Ask Me Why’ by Billie Joyce.” [via]

  • This raises the troubling possibility that some of our authors are in fact cats: Cat registered as hypnotherapist [via]

    I posted this earlier today to Twitter, and Nyssa23 replied, “Perhaps that explains the number of manuscripts you’ve been receiving concerning mice and cheeseburgers.” Still, as I told her, say what you will, Cheeseburger-Focused Brief Therapy works!

  • “A car crash victim who was believed to have been in a coma for the past 23 years has been conscious the whole time.”
  • Matt Taibbi on Sarah Palin [via]:

    And Sarah Palin sells copies. She is the country’s first WWE politician — a cartoon combatant who inspires stadiums full of frustrated middle American followers who will cheer for her against whichever villain they trot out, be it Newsweek, Barack Obama, Katie Couric, Steve Schmidt, the Mad Russian, Randy Orton or whoever. Her followers will not know that she is the perfect patsy for our system, designed as it is to channel popular anger in any direction but a useful one, and to keep the public tied up endlessly in pointless media melees over meaningless nonsense (melees of the sort that develop organically around Palin everywhere she goes). Like George W. Bush, even Palin herself doesn’t know this, another reason she’s such a perfect political tool.

  • And finally, speaking of, god bless parody. [via]

And they say romance is dead

I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who thought Harlequin’s proposed self-publishing imprint was a very bad idea. John Scalzi writes:

This is basically a skeezy, cynical and horribly demeaning thing Harlequin is doing, padding its bottom line by suckering a bunch of folks who don’t know better into thinking that paying for publication is a legitimate path into the publishing world. In a stroke, they’ve become the sort of scumbag publisher that writer’s organizations warn their members (and their aspiring members) about. But apparently the folks at Harlequin thought that the response would be different with them, because, after all, they’re Harlequin, and they’re too big to fail.

He also reports, encouragingly, however, on the reaction of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) (as well as the Mystery Writers of America and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), who have all announced sanctions against Harlequin in response.

Harlequin, of course, has responded with mock surprise, indignation, and a promise of nothing better than a change in the imprint scam’s name.

Why can’t more Harlequins be like this?

Thursday various

  • Following up on these 200 creepy stories about Calgary, Meredith has been posting similar stories for Washington, DC. I particularly like #4.

  • Ooh! Ray Bradbury is developing a new television miniseries!

  • This whole Harlequin Horizons “self-publishing imprint” business strikes me as deeply weird. It’s like, “We won’t buy your novel…but here’s how you can pay us to print it!” [via]

  • “[T]here is ‘no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed.'” Uh oh. [via]

  • And finally, a really excellent interview with Cormac McCarthy. [via]:

    Well, I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.

Wednesday various

  • Anybody need a cool jewelery box? I actually own these books. (Though a little part of me cringes at thought of any such book mutilation.)
  • Speaking of books, word on the “new” Vladimir Nabokov “novel,” The Original of Laura, isn’t exactly good [via], suggesting that it’s at best a curio for Nabokov scholars. But at least we have these neat re-imagined covers for all (well, mostly all) of his other books. [via]

    Man, it’s been way too long since I’ve read any Nabokov.

  • So yeah, Dollhouse was canceled, and I don’t think anybody is exactly surprised. I still think the show was some of Joss Whedon’s best and worst work, capable of some truly brilliant and startling moments, but also never really comfortable in its own skin or sure of exactly what kind of show it wanted to be. There’s a lot I love about it, but I won’t mourn it the same way I did Firefly (and to a lesser extent Angel), and I’ve long been resigned to its many flaws and limited chances for survival.

    • Speaking of Dollhouse, here’s an interesting look at the role of neuroscience in the Whedonverse that somehow manages to mention all his shows except for the one where people’s brains are erased and rewired on a regular basis. [via

  • And finally, Neil Gaiman on A.A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame:

    I once read an essay by A.A. Milne telling people that, of course they knew Kenneth Grahame’s work, he wrote The Golden Age and Dream Days, everybody had read them, but he also did this amazing book called The Wind in the Willows that nobody had ever heard of. And then Milne wrote a play called Toad of Toad Hall, which was a big hit and made The Wind in The Willows famous and read, and, eventually, one of the good classics (being a book that people continue to read and remember with pleasure), while The Golden Age and Dream Days, Grahame’s beautiful, gentle tales of Victorian childhood, are long forgotten.

    If there is a moral, or a lesson to be learned from all this, I do not know what it is.