You Go, Mr. Gowers!

Alright, so I've griped before about the limiting of access to the wealth of human knowledge by charging crazy amounts for academic journals and the like. Well, apparently, I'm not alone, and some people are actually doing something about it.

Thanks to Cambridge mathematician Tim Gowers, who started a boycott that now includes over 9000 signatories.

Seriously, this is super cool. 

Broken Arrow, Faded Giant

It's weird to me, given how much we thought about nuclear annihilation when I was growing up, that we really don't hear about it much anymore. Or at least nuclear meltdown, given that it's barely a year since Fukushima Daiichi.

Anyway, here's IO9's article on five times we nearly blew ourselves up. 

Prose Stylists

As is my modus operandi whenever I want to know something, I punched "Best Prose Stylist in the English Language" into Google. What I got were a series of discussion boards, which seemed like the best place to start. It's a subjective evaluation anyway, and I figure self-appointed literati on the internet should be a good mix of what's taught in schools and what resonates with enthusiasts on their own time.


There did seem to be a lot of agreement.


James Joyce came out as the de facto winner, with most of his supporters not even bothering to argue his case past a "well, of course, Joyce."


Here is a bit from the first chapter of Ulysses:

  Warm sunshine merrying over the sea. The nickel shaving-bowl shone, forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there all day, forgotten friendship?

He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness, smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck. So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and yet the same. A servant too. A server of a servant.

In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan's gowned form moved briskly about the hearth to and fro, hiding and revealing its yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor from the high barbicans: and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning.

Also enthusiastically represented was my man Vlad, which is to say Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. Here's a bit from the infamous Lolita:

“And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski; some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:

'You know what's so dreadful about dying is that you're completely on your own'; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions...”  

Joseph Conrad also got several points, plus bonuses for English being his third language. Here's a bit from Mirror of the Sea (I know, I should have put in something from Heart of Darkness, but I found this first):

Between the crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous red-brick pile on the Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to the grasp of the river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea which had accompanied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach, abandons her at the turn of the first bend above. The salt, acrid flavour is gone out of the air, together with a sense of unlimited space opening free beyond the threshold of sandbanks below the Nore. The waters of the sea rush on past Gravesend, tumbling the big mooring buoys laid along the face of the town; but the sea-freedom stops short there, surrendering the salt tide to the needs, the artifices, the contrivances of toiling men. Wharves, landing-places, dock-gates, waterside stairs, follow each other continuously right up to London Bridge, and the hum of men’s work fills the river with a menacing, muttering note as of a breathless, ever-driving gale. The water-way, so fair above and wide below, flows oppressed by bricks and mortar and stone, by blackened timber and grimed glass and rusty iron, covered with black barges, whipped up by paddles and screws, overburdened with craft, overhung with chains, overshadowed by walls making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with a haze of smoke and dust.

Also well mentioned were T. C. Boyle, Evelyn Waugh, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rudyard Kipling, and about five times someone looked around and said "Why hasn't anyone mentioned Ernest Hemmingway yet?"


Anyway, I do believe in vivisecting prose. I'm going to be looking at these and more by these authors carefully, pulling off legs and seeing what makes them scream. I will learn how it works if I have to carve the life and magic out of every syllable. I will cut until it bleeds true.


Happy reading.

Happy International Pixel-Stained Techno-Peasant Wretches Day!

It's a thing. Really.

Personally, I'm torn on this one. Writers certainly have the right to be compensated for the their creative work, and market economics do dictate it's much harder to sell a thing next to someone else who's giving it away for free. On the other hand, as a reader, I love free fiction, and as a writer who hopes to reach a number of people, I like the breadth of audience you can get in exchange for not making money. So I guess I come down on the side of it being the author's individual prerogative to dictate the cost of their work, within a considered strategy for their own best career advancement. I don't think people should feel pressured, ideally, to give away things they worked hard on and feel are worth material compensation. There's no shame in that. But I also don't think they deserve to be called names for trying to reach an audience in a crowded market.

You do your best, you know?

Also, I've started putting up free stories here that are on permanent archive elsewhere. Because, really, why not?

Squeeeeeee!

My story, Wendigo Bake Sale, is out in Drabblecast Trifecta XXI, focusing on families. I got a Norm Sherman reading (yay!), and it finishes out on a really great musical cue. It's a podcast with consistently great audio engineering.

It's really a thrill to hear them say your name on a podcast you've been listening to this long.

Also in this trifecta: Dustin Reade and Brenda Stokes Barron. 

Twelve Cities

I think I've mentioned before that I'm a fan of Benjamin Rosenbaum. This is a set of twelve flash pieces about fantastic cities. They're charming individually, and taken all together they're a lovely set. Published some time ago in Strange Horizons. 

Less Tits and Ass

Yes, yes, it's more ladies in comic books stuff. Artists work to redraw comic book vixens as people with spines and internal organs. They don't really look less hot, just more human.