Reality TV infects romance novels

In case you are too old for a personalized children's book with your name featured prominently, you can showcase your love in the new Vows imprint of HCI, which "will match romance writers with real life couples, turning the wedding column into steamy nonfiction."

So if your sex life isn't weird enough, you can now read someone else's steamy interpretation of your romance. Hell, send me $5 and a waffle recipe, and I will write you a story about your romance with a zombicorn (or in which you and your lover defeat a zombicorn? I'm flexible). It'll be super steamy.

Climate changing smut

You heard it first here: climate scientists made up global warming to up the sex factor in their novels. Dum dum duummmmmm. This is like Peter Parker level scientist gossip.

Thank you CKHB for the link (which she tells me is via Sierra Godfrey)! Your assiduous and meticulous coverage science will not go unrewarded. ...This is your reward.

If monks can rap, so can I

My name is Laura and I'm here to say, rapping monks are a-okay. Kansho Tagai, a.k.a. Mr. Happiness, is a rapping Japanese Buddhist monk.

Next up for this guy is tap dancing while chanting, and potentially the samba. This just goes to show you that working in an office is either looking terrible or really good in comparison. I choose the latter, because my last dance recital ended with a five year old Ombreviations arguing on stage with a friend about steps while everyone else danced their way offstage. These scars run deep, my friends.

Watch out for steampunkers

Because they now have working guns. Boing Boing highlights these functional blunderbusses. I am officially frightened, and will be more careful around the steampunk inclined in the future.

Soldier and author

The New York Times has an article about soldiers who write about combat, and says the main difference between soldier writers of yore and of today is that the modern American army is an all volunteer force. The article says:

As part of a modern all-volunteer force, they explore the timeless theme of the futility of war — but wars that they for the most part support. The books, many written as rites of passage by members of a highly educated young officer corps, are filled with gore, inept commanders and anguish over men lost in combat, but not questions about the conflicts themselves.

I don't think I've read enough books by soldiers to truly spot a difference between the writing of draftees and volunteers, but I think it's an interesting comparison, if anyone else is more qualified to comment.

Marginalia as a lifestyle choice

Toby Lichtig writes at the Guardian book blog about his love of writing in book margins–not just notes, but addresses, phone numbers, etc. He writes:

My flirtation with textual mutilation started off at school with primly creased corners and pencilled underlinings, but I soon progressed to cocksure highlighting and full-blown ink-on-paper action – the effluence of engagement, the living, livid trace of dialogue. If, as the poststructuralists have suggested, the act of reading is an act of violence, then scrawling across the page in cheap biro must be its logical corollary.

I'm not just talking about highbrow jottings: notes and queries, references and witticisms, the literary art of "marginalia" (a term coined in 1832 by that keenest of annotators, Samuel Taylor Coleridge). No, in my library anything goes: doodles, numbers, addresses, lists, recipes and the ensuing food stains. Personalising my books is an intrinsic part of the interaction (which is why I tend to be neurotic about holding on to what I've read). Perhaps it's the fault of my somewhat sluggish memory: the marks and scrawls help me to recall the text – and, crucially, the person I was when reading it: how I was feeling, where I was sitting, whom I was with.

While I don't tend to use my books as notebooks, I do tend to read and eat simultaneous, and can remember whole meals from the food stains as I reread (much ramen has been eaten in my lifetime). I think this system of self-memory only works for people who are book buyers, not borrowers, and big rereaders, but it's a nice way to pretend that you're not the egoist with the Moleskine–you're the reader who happens to take notes.

The answers are at the tips of your fingers

There's an article at Salon about braille dying out in favor of text to speech and audiobooks. It says:

In this New York Times article, we find that many blind people, including the governor of New York, don't read braille. Instead they rely on audiobooks, recordings of newspapers and magazines, and human assistants to orally brief them on the business of the day. Text-to-speech technology allows people to hear their e-mails and other documents.

And in this Canadian Broadcasting Corp. article, we find that the major provider of books in braille in Canada is about to go out of business if it can't get government funding or some other source of revenue. They are having a hard time convincing people that braille is even necessary anymore.

Thoughts?

Zombies versus unicorns

Who will win???

Zombies, biyatches.

Cat fight: Faulkner and Twain edition

Writers are filled with haterade, reader types. Example?

[Mark] Twain himself took it on the chin from fellow Southerner William Faulkner, who called him a “hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven ‘sure fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”

Ha!

Texas prisons ban books, people are up in arms

Titles by Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Alice Walker, John Updike, Pablo Neruda, Pat Conroy, Hunter S. Thompson, James Patterson, Carl Hiaasen, John Grisham, Sapphire, Jenna Bush, and Jon Stewart have all been banned by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. And some people are mad.

Inmates who don't read, for example, have a harder time finding jobs, said Marc Levin, a criminal justice analyst for the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

"Literacy, or lack of it, is one of the biggest problems we have with respect to re-entry," Levin said. "Inmates who want to read should have that opportunity."

Guys. I'm sorry. There are 89,795 titles on the approved list. Maybe my heart doesn't bleed enough here, but if you're in prison, you give up certain rights. Like your freedom, but also your right to read whatever the eff you want.

Salinger fan mail: Not always fun mail

Joanna Smith Rakoff wrote an article that made me sad, about answering fan mail for J.D. Salinger. She says:

The letters came from Sri Lanka or the Netherlands or Arizona. They included deeply personal admissions—cancer diagnoses, bankruptcy, divorce—and were often written in Salinger's own brash style or, at the very least, incorporated the slang of the period he chronicled....For the most part, they knew that Salinger didn't read his fan mail—in fact, he'd insisted that nothing, not one letter, be passed on to him—but each was convinced that his letter was going to be the one that was so moving, so brilliant, so funny, so perfectly aligned with Salinger's interests and sensibilities, that we, at Ober, would pass it on to him.

...These were not letters that the writers had tossed off carelessly, but notes that had clearly been written and rewritten, until just the right tone was struck. How could I simply throw them away? I began sending them personal letters telling them how much we appreciated hearing their stories and explaining, more gently, that we were prohibited from sending Salinger his mail, but we so often wished that we could.

Back in the day I used to answer a subset of religious and spiritual slush, which was heavily populated by car crash victims and lonely little old ladies, and so I recognize the urge to write really, really, really nice "sorry and no thank you" letters. (A few times writers sent me long handwritten thank you notes in response to my rejections, which actually almost made me cry at work once.)

As much as people in the industry give shit to the slush pile (and I give a ton of shit to the slush pile), and as hardened to illiteracy and jerk-ness as everyone gets, there are still some letters that crack you open like a tiny crustacean.

Why do we keep reading "The Lottery"?

That story is messed. Up. And the Onion acknowledges it, in an article entitled, "Watching Faces Of Students As They Finish 'The Lottery' Highlight Of English Teacher's Year."

"Oh, my God, the looks on their faces when they realize the villagers are actually going to stone Mrs. Hutchinson to death right then and there!" said Hamlin, who added that she never allows students to read the story as a take-home assignment. "I'm almost too excited to sleep. Oh, it's so great! They're never gonna see it coming!"

My confusion about this article comes from the fact that it is, in fact, in the Onion. Isn't this what being an English teacher, nay, any teacher, is all about? Watching the faces of children as you crush their sense of what is right?

...No?

( Also thank you to the Rejectionist for emailing me yet another faboosh link, for which she has earned one waffle cookie, redeemable at her earliest convenience. Wouldn't you ALL like waffle cookies, reader types? Send links!)

Good morning!

I am right, once again, this time about hell

For avid readers (hi dad!), you will remember that I mentioned the EA game based on Dante's Inferno. The rest of The Divine Comedy was too boring for a video game, but the Inferno--that's where it's at.

While I suggested a follow-up game based on The Decameron, EW put together a good list of other potential book-to-game options, including:

Don Quixote: A lot like the old arcade game Joust, except your enemy is a windmill.

And:

Catch-22: There is no way to beat this game.

I need to start playing more video games.

Lost reading, for when Lost isn't on

I am an unabashed J.J. Abrams fan. I watched Alias for years, even when it went insane and everyone (especially the writers) lost the plot thread, and I am a (charmingly) rabid Lost fan. Because it is the greatest show, in the history of time. Eric disagrees, and I recommend that you leave anti-Lost comments on his blog, because I will not support those shenanigans here.

Anyway.

There are a ton of details to sift through, and Flavorwire very thoughtfully put together the best books from Lost, in terms of literary-ness, not Lost importance.