Reaching through the Web

I found this blog post about an author defending her work, anonymously, against a critical review. It escalated quite a bit, even after the author was identified. Although she eventually deleted all her posts, they were archived elsewhere by interested parties. You can read them if you want, or just read the comments in the article, such as this, from author Neil Gaiman:

And yes, it's a horrible car crash, and I post it here not because it's funny in an Oh God Make It Stop kind of way, but because, if any of you are ever tempted to respond to bad reviews or internet trolls etc, it's a salutary reminder of why some things are better written in anger and deleted in the morning.

I had an experience something like this not long ago, when I compared two products in an online review. I thought the review was unoffensive, but the seller of the losing product contacted me at my home email repeatedly, and had many unpleasant things to say in print on the website, as well. Rather than politely ask me to reconsider, she went ballistic, even accusing me of working for the competitor. I'm not even in the same state. So I know a bit about this tendency to feel like 1) we are writing for ourselves, although the internet is very public; and 2) we can reach through the internet to directly contact a person with whom we disagree. The internet gives us a false sense of intimacy with strangers. How far we take that is something that not everyone agrees on. Even famous authors (Anne Rice, Alice Hoffman, Alain de Botton) have reacted in this way.

I think that doing so breaks an unspoken agreement about how far we may go and in what venue. While in my case, the seller's comments on my review were nasty and her comments about the competitor even actionable, the thing that really bothered me was that she looked up my personal information and contacted me directly and angrily. She also has my home address, since I had the product shipped by ground delivery, something you might consider not doing with with individual sellers on sites like Amazon or ebay, and something I will never do again. From now on, everything goes to the PO box.

Science: Making Science Fiction Obsolete...

Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant, at Wired.com.

And Msnbc.com.

Cf. the souped-up soldiers in Old Man's War, by John Scalzi.

...and possibly ending world hunger. I'd go green.

Books to Burn

An embarrassment of riches, and of poverty, all at once.

Poor seniors are burning books to keep warm.

Book Sales: Not Bad = Good

Book sales were surprisingly not bad, recession notwithstanding, selling at the same numbers as in 2008. This according to Crains New York. The best news was that sales of adult fiction held their own.

There are several theories for this: people look for affordable entertainment in a recession; big blockbusters like Stephen King's immense Under the Dome and Dan Brown's thriller The Lost Symbol came out; and retailers' price wars drove book prices down.

The article also mentions John Grisham, Dean Koontz, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Although I like to think people would have bought other books if not for these -- out of a desire for books, or maybe as a result of publishers' pushing other titles. Or maybe it's just what I like to think. If I can't find exactly what I want at the bookstore, I'll usually try something new. But maybe less dedicated readers spend their book money on lunch and a latte?

Your Mind on Reading

Socrates feared that reading would undermine interactive dialogue. ... reading is different from talking.

Reading changed the nature of education completely, from the Socratic method of face-to-face dialogues to lectures supplemented with large amounts of reading. I think most of us feel that reading characterizes education now even more than classroom experience, at least after the early elementary grades. It's funny that Socrates feared that reading would ruin things. Nowadays, we're afraid that people will stop reading. I wonder what the next educational paradigm will be? And how we will work it into education, alongside lectures and assigned reading.

When a monkey sees a T shape in the world, it is very likely to indicate the edge of an object — something the monkey can grab and maybe even eat. A particular area of its brain pays special attention to those significant shapes. Human brains use the same area to process letters. Dehaene makes a compelling case that these brain areas have been “recycled” for reading. “We did not invent most of our letter shapes,” he writes. “They lay dormant in our brains for millions of years, and were merely rediscovered when our species invented writing and the alphabet.”

An alphabet in the shape of trees, fruits, etc., and people who read instead of swinging in trees and foraging for food. We read for excitement. We read recipes. As children, we draw triangular A- or M-shaped mountains and round O-suns shining on T- or Y-shaped trees. It's intriguing.

Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention by Stanislas Dehaene, reviewed at the NY Times.

Books to Live Without?

"Is a gentleman’s library of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves anything more than a vanity?" -- Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the U.S.

Well, um. This article at the NY Times blogs has a few philosophies of weeding through books, and one holdout who refuses to get rid of any (Joshua Ferris, whose latest, The Unnamed, is on my to-read shelf), but vanity? Books I've read work as mnemonics for me. Not sure I'd remember them as well if I didn't keep them. The co-owner of The Strand in New York says honestly that it's a matter of how much space you have, and if you haven't got it, to send your books to him.

So do I need to get rid of some books or can I just get a bigger house? I have culled through books in the past before moves. It's never pleasant. I seldom miss what I toss, tho I have replaced a few discards.

And I do have a fantasy of a permanent residence with lots of storage space.

Are the English Human, Lesbian Horse Stories

and my personal favorite, Ductigami. At Abebooks, Literary Oddities.

The Collective Conscious, or, Mind-Blowing Massive Math

In January, Timothy Gowers, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge and a holder of the Fields Medal, math's highest honor, decided to see if the comment section of his blog could prove a theorem he could not.

In two blog posts he proposed an attack on a stubborn math problem called the Density Hales-Jewett Theorem. He encouraged the thousands of readers of his blog to jump in and start proving. Mathematics is a process of generating vast quantities of ideas and rejecting the majority that don't work; maybe, Gowers reasoned, the participation of so many people would speed the sifting.

Six weeks later, the theorem was proved.

By now we're used to the idea that gigantic aggregates of human brains — especially when allowed to communicate nearly instantaneously via the Internet — can carry out fantastically difficult cognitive tasks, like writing an encyclopedia or mapping a social network. But some problems we still jealously guard as the province of individual beautiful minds: writing a novel, choosing a spouse, creating a new mathematical theorem. The Polymath experiment suggests this prejudice may need to be rethought. In the near future, we might talk not only about the wisdom of crowds but also of their genius.

From the NY Times Year in Ideas.

But bear in mind that this crowd consisted of at least one other Fields medalist in addition to Gowers. I'm not sure I ever had the prejudice that mathematical theorems were as privately arrived at as spousal choices, but this sounds amazing, anyway, the connection of (eventually) all our minds.

Department of Dinosaurishness

Did crotchety old penmanship aficionados claim that the typewriter destroyed writing? So why do crotchety old typewriter users think that ebooks and the computer will?

For that matter, we should all be chiseling words into stone. Then, we'd be sure only to say what we mean. None of this papery, verbose stuff.

At the Guardian.

Pissy Moods Are Good for Your Writing

Research shows that irritable moods spur creativity. But, don't get too depressed.

Kindle for PC

Does everyone know you can get a free download from Amazon to read Kindle books on your PC. You don't have to have a Kindle.

I just found out...tempting, and interesting that publishers make the same money from e-books as from hardcovers. I still like paperbacks, tho.

*Sits on hands, does not press download key...yet*

Also interesting is this multimedia reader, Blio.

E-books = the future?

Thanks to Nathan Bransford (see sidebar) for this link to predictions about the future of e-books.

I agree that the prices for e-readers will most likely come way down, but $99 (his breakthrough price point) is still a bit high for me with e-books costing almost as much as paperbacks. Maybe if e-tailers run a program of, buy 10 e-books, get a free reader? Kind of like convenience stores around here do with gallons of milk. Otherwise, I'll be bidding on ebay, hoping to win an e-reader for, oh, $19.99.

Cormac McCarthy's typewriter goes for $254k

And it doesn't even work that well any more, five million words later.

Recycle those old phone booths

I think this is a great idea, altho in my town, we have a lot of options: the library, the library used book sales, where people often buy and then re-donate books, and the laundromat across the street from the library, which is also an informal book and periodicals exchange locale.

Still, I like the idea of book kiosks scattered about. Forget what you were driving to the mall for? Pull over and read a quick story or chapter, then on your way.