writers

Tuesday various

Thursday various

  • I like Doctor Who. I’m not sure I like it enough to have a A Doctor Who-themed wedding, though.
  • Thomas Pynchon on plagiarism:

    Writers are naturally drawn, chimpanzee-like, to the color and the music of this English idiom we are blessed to have inherited. When given the choice we will usually try to use the more vivid and tuneful among its words.

  • A visual diary documenting a flight from New York to Berlin (with a layover in London). [via]
  • You know, it is kind of funny that programs like Word still use a disk as the save icon when lots of computer users these days don’t even know what a disk is.
  • And finally, even qwerty keyboards are falling by the wayside:

    Like the “Enter” key that becomes a “Search” key, the self-leveling card deck may at first seem trivial. But it’s also a sly way that digital technology that uses real-world iconography destabilizes experience. What, after all, is a more recognizable symbol of the capriciousness of life than a deck of cards, out of which your fate is randomly dealt? And yet here the deck icon is only superficial. At heart it’s not a random-card generator but the opposite: a highly wrought program with a memory, an algorithm and a mandate to keep children in the game. An app posing as a spatiotemporal object.

    As a populous commercial precinct, the Web now changes in response to our individual histories with it. Like a party that subtly reconfigures with each new guest, the Web now changes its ads, interfaces and greetings for almost every user. Some people find this eerie. But it’s nowhere near as shiver-worthy as the discovery that digital “things” — apps carefully dressed as objects — change as we use them, too. And it’s weird enough when those things are being solicitous and cooperative. What if the keyboards and decks of cards all turn on us? Let’s not think about that, not yet. [via]

Tuesday various

  • Textbooks Up Their Game. The Wall Street Journal looks at the evolving world of the textbook market and the role that e-book volumes will play in it.

    The iPad does seem better suited to the textbook market than most other e-readers, if only for its versatility. But I can’t see app-ready editions of textbooks having much widespread appeal (beyond the student who already owns an iPad) or impact, unless the price of Apple’s reader and/or the books comes down significantly. Students are unlikely to pay $69.99 (much less $84.99) for a book they can’t re-sell and that, once the iPad stops working or needs to be replaced, is gone too.

  • Daleks voted the greatest sci-fi monsters of all time. It’s a weird list. The original poll was for “Monsters, Supernatural Beings & Fantasy Creatures,” which means picks like Aslan makes more sense — although a CGI lion with the voice of Liam Neeson is a little monstrous, too — but Pilot from Farscape?
  • Real or not, I think I can live without J.D. Salinger’s toilet.
  • Deconstructing the Twikie. Surprisingly, this hasn’t been done by Cockeyed.com. [via]
  • And finally, I’ve really been enjoying Zach Handlen’s Star Trek: The Next Generation recaps:

    It can be difficult to convincingly show love in fiction, because the experience of falling for someone is both highly personal and curiously universal; the details and shared moments are what give the feeling texture, but the rush and elation of it are things that we all share. So you’ve got to find some way to make the small moments appear distinct and honest so that the big moments feel earned.

Tuesday various

  • “Scientists scouring the area around Stonehenge said Thursday they have uncovered a circular structure only a few hundred meters (yards) from the world famous monument.”

    Is it wrong that my first thought was to wonder if it was the Pandorica? [via]

  • Oh, good, because the one thing Torchwood hasn’t been is dark.

    But I kid. A warning, by the way: that link contains a pretty huge spoiler for (the pretty terrific) Children of Earth.

  • Tasha Robinson wonders: Should artists’ lives or opinions affect how people perceive their art?
  • Along somewhat similar lines — that is, of appreciating art on a level perhaps different than what the artist intended — separating the poem from the novel in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Spoiler warnings here, too, I guess. Mostly, it just makes me want to re-read Nabokov’s book.
  • And finally, Inside the City’s Last Silent Place

    “I wish there were more drama,” said Alexander Rose, “but it’s convivial and collegiate. There’s no Norman Mailer trying to kill his wife in here. No tension, no melodrama.” Mr. Rose, author of American Rifle: A Biography, was taking a break from his work to tell the Transom about the Allen Room, a hush-hush space on the second floor of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (formerly the New York Public Library “main branch”) on Fifth Avenue. Founded in 1958 as a tribute to Frederick Lewis Allen, the historian and editor of Harper’s Magazine, the room serves as a workspace to a rotating group of authors. Rubberneckers take note: The door is locked at all times, and access is restricted to those who have book contracts, a photocopy of which must accompany requests for a key card. “It’s like Aladdin’s cave,” Mr. Rose said of the room, which he heard about through the literary grapevine. “I looked it up, and it actually did exist.”

    I work just a block from the Library. Now I guess I just need to write a book. [via]

Wednesday various

  • Six degrees of literary separation? [via]
  • If nothing else, I think this elaborte fake ATM is proof that you don’t need a carefully designed forgery to fool a lot of people. [via]
  • The Cracked Guide to Fonts [via]
  • You know, I’m sure Tin House‘s heart was in the right place with this prove you bought a book somewhere before you submit anything policy, but it’s not hard to see why it’s upset some people.
  • And finally, an interview with Michael Palin:

    I’m very proud of the fish-slapping dance we did in Python. We rehearsed this silly dance where John Cleese hits me with a fish and I fall into Teddington Lock. We were so intent on getting the dance right that I didn’t notice the lock had cleared and instead of it being a 2ft drop into the water it was a 15ft drop. I’m very proud of doing that.

    The rest of the interview is pretty interesting too — he didn’t think A Fish Called Wanda was a good script when he first read it — although residents of his “worst place ever,” Prince George, British Columbia, might not love it.