It occurs to me that I would have liked Sin City better if they had made all the comic’s monologue boxes into subtitles instead of voice-overs.
Category: Books
Addendum: I have officially quit reading The Well at the End of the World. I’m sorry, I just don’t have the strength. I really want to know where those entries in the dictionary came from, but there’s a reason I rarely read anything written before I was born (the reason is that I’m a terrible person).
Dear everybody who loved Sideways so much
Didn’t you guys see it the first time? When it was called Swingers?
I liked the movie okay, and of course the cast members–especially Thomas Haden Church–did their jobs with pinhead spot-on laser accuracy. But to what purpose? How many books and movies are there in which a pessimistic, divorced English teacher writes a book that’s too long so he goes out with his immature, more handsome friend and ends up finding some kind of unresolved redemption with a woman who blah blah blah. I saw Wonder Boys too. I guess this one had wine in it, which is great, if you like wine.
I can’t remember where I saw this, but a nice human with an odd smile has created a pretty nifty scheme for serializing public-domain books via RSS. He claims it’s probably slow and buggy, and indeed I couldn’t get it to work the first time I tried, but now I am happily reading through The Well at the End of the World, which is way too dense to read in large chunks on a screen, but works perfectly at a page a day. (I’m reading this book in particular because it has several of the best entries in my Dictionary of Imaginary Places.)
Anyway, you can pick any of the many books on the site if you want to do this yourself, or you can even read along with me.
I try my best to give Daredevil money
I finally figured out one of the things that’s so different about Daredevil as written by Brian Michael Bendis: No thought bubbles. Ever. There are internal-monologue narration boxes, but no thought bubbles.
Huh.
I really wish they’d go the next step and just, you know, print extremely mild cuss words if that’s what the characters are saying. Having the assassin go “kick his @$$!” knocks me right out of the narrative; it looks like he’s trying to slip through a message-board word filter, and it’s not exactly fooling anybody. The kids who read Daredevil at this point–when it’s mostly about organized crime, issues of identity and mental breakdowns–are not going to be scarred by the word “ass.” Why did Marvel ditch the Comics Code if it was just going to pull shit like that?
Gibson Strikes Back
“… I see from a post that Neal Stephenson has evidently used it as well. I would have liked to have gotten him permanently out of the way shortly after reading Snow Crash, of course, but I could already see that I would need him one day to help battle Bruce Sterling. Literature is a long game.”
–William Gibson
Short entry frenzy
Margaret Atwood draws comics.
Things Neils and Neals Say
Neil Gaiman: “And I’ll write another Neverwhere novel in two or three books’ time, I expect.”
Well, !
I was… can I say not impressed? I’m not trying to bash anything here. I’ll say that when I read it, I didn’t find the prose and plot of Neverwhere to be extraordinary. It was a good novel, but it was a first novel.
That said, the imagery of the book had an enormous impact on me–I am still in the process of writing that out of my system. I think Gaiman’s prose improved immensely in American Gods, and I’m eager to see its application to the Neverwhere universe again.
Neal Stephenson: “Accountability in the writing profession has been bifurcated for many centuries. I already mentioned that Dante and other writers were supported by patrons at least as far back as the Renaissance. But I doubt that Beowulf was written on commission.”
Stephenson’s answer to the second question in that series is the only clear and reasonable delineation I’ve read of why lit fiction and genre fiction are so distinct, and why they tend to sneer at each other. Even more to his credit, he never uses the word “jealousy” with regard to either side.
Plus, in the third one, he and William Gibson totally fight.
P. S. I just want to point out that this is the first time I’ve ever linked something on Slashdot, because I don’t read Slashdot. It could well be the only time I ever link Slashdot.
I guess today is Juvenile Humor Day
Found via Clickolinko: a simple regular expression search-and-replace is applied to Harry Potter.