Sunday 31 January
Wayne Booth Has Something to Share with You

Filed under Books

No, it’s not chlamydia. Nor is it the secret mark he made on his keys over there in the glass bowl by the front door, the one that lets you know which are his. It’s this, from his essay, “Distance and Point of View”:

It is not surprising to hear practicing novelists report that they have never had help from critics about point of view. In dealing with point of view the novelist must always deal with the individual work: which particular character shall tell this particular story, or part of a story, with which precise degree of reliability, privilege, freedom to comment, and so on. Shall he be given dramatic vividness? Even if the novelist has decided on a narrator who will fit one of the critic’s classifications—”omniscient,” “first person,” “limited omniscient,” “objective,” “roving,” “effaced,” and so on—his troubles have just begun. (more…)

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-31  ::  dave

Tuesday 26 January
“Give Me Children” – Palace (tab)

Filed under tabulature

This is I think the one song of the stellar and (for me, at least) seminal Arise, Therefore record that hasn’t been tabbed online. I’m not sure whether it’s 100% on (the song is piano heavy, which always makes transcription difficult), but it’s a start. Please revise/edit as needed.

Note: This is for a guitar tuned down a half step (EbAbDbGbBbEb). The D/G# chord is a D chord with a G# bass. You can play it with a regular D shape by just sliding your index finger up the G string to hit the G# on the first fret. If this pulls your ring finger off the E string, it’s not much of a problem.
(more…)

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-26  ::  dave

Monday 25 January
Final sentence?

Filed under taxidermy

I just wrote what I think might be the last sentence of the taxidermy book, at least in this version I’m about to send to my editor:

“We are not animals, we are given them.”

It felt righter two minutes ago.

1 comment  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-25  ::  dave

Saturday 23 January
A New Coinage

Filed under Announcements

weird-science
verb, trans.
1. to fashion an object out of thin air, or to improve the general quality of a pre-existing object, using the vague powers that have seemingly been placed within you by a pair of horny experimenting teens: I’m starving; it’d be great if someone could weird-science me a pizza | Huh, this sweater must have gotten weird-scienced in the dryer because it totally fits now.

2. to influence or affect something far beyond any expectations or senses of logic and reason: I think eight days without sunshine has weird-scienced my brain. | Gee, thanks, Massachusetts, now the right is totally going to weird-science health-care reform.

Use with caution.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-23  ::  dave

Thursday 21 January
Being Part of the Thinking World, and Also the Loving One

Filed under Announcements

I.
One of the effects of being on the academic job market as I’ve been since, oh, September, is that you stop thinking. You stop engaging in much else around you that’s not an academic job posting, or a certain wiki. Your loved ones suffer and your liked ones do. Your students. And but it’s also very hard to think about exactly how other people are well if not “suffering” then at least being neglected because of course you’re too busy thinking about why someone you’ve never met hasn’t called you on the phone.

II.
Sorry. – “you” and + “I”
(more…)

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-21  ::  dave

Monday 18 January
What Appears to Now Be a Series, Assembled by a Cheapskate: The Value(s) of Books, Part 2

Filed under Books

Here’s another book I want, seen in a well placed ad in the New York Review of Books. Why (and not, please, whether) we care about literary characters is a subject I’m committed enough to to want a read a whole book that finds an answer.

Would you believe it’s $60.00 through Johns Hopkins Press’s site? Sixty! Amazon drops that down to a mere $43.20.

We won’t ever care about Blakey Vermeule, no matter how brilliant her book may very well be, the way we do about, oh, John Dowell, say. And The Good Solider has surely never cost $60, not even with its adjusted-for-inflation 1915 first-edition rate. What the F’s?

It’s clear: there are very few university presses in the world whose business models don’t hinge on overcharging libraries for their products.

2 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-18  ::  dave

Thursday 14 January
maystephen’s mixtapes

Filed under music

About 90 percent of everything I know about music I know from two friends who both now live (not together) in Brooklyn. One of those is my Pittsburgh friend Steve who has been making and sending me mixes for so long that the first ones were on tape, because few of us had CD-burning laptops even at the turn of the century.

At any rate, I’m still without my laptop, which means I’m without my iTunes music to write to, and while I’ve enjoyed the stuff last.fm has tossed my way based on recommendations I’m ready this morning for something new. And then I remembered it’s been a while since Steve sent me a mix, and but that they were now all available (well most of them are new) on 8tracks.com.

You can find them at 8tracks.com/maystephen, where they stream through your Web browser. There’s classic country, gangsta rap, French soul, British postpunk, and classic alt-rock. I’m listening to “MCMCXIII” right now, and reliving teen years.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-14  ::  dave

Wednesday 13 January
On Finishing Up a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years, Part 2.

Filed under Books + taxidermy

Taxidermist Carl Akeley is considered by most taxidermy folks to be the father of modern taxidermy. Taxidermy. Taxidermy taxidermy. Certain words when you write a whole book become very easy to type. Taxidermy. Can’t remember the last time my fingers in that pattern didn’t hit their targets: Taxidermy. Certain words’ meanings begin to fade as their sounds take over. Or no: their status as signifiers gets lost, and they become instead like one’s eyes’ specific shade of yellow, or a hairstyle one’s worn for too long.

For the record, in all my notes, taxidermy’s rendered as capital T. Taxidermists become “Tmen”, viz., “Purpose here is to do what 13 Tmen did up till yesterday—mt part. [i.e. "mount partridge"] in exact pose as reference pic.” I know: Tmen. I regret the sexism.

At any rate, Tman Carl Akeley is the father of modern T. He’s famous enough that you can be his Facebook friend, but his a little too famous to respond to friend requests on time. My book opens not with his birth, but just after: with his first mounted specimen of a canary. Beginning at his birth wasn’t much of a choice because all of us get born in more or less the same way and it takes some time for us to become people enough. People enough to write about. People who act and speak and think on their own in ways that can be illustrative. So gone from the book are the first 12 years of Carl’s life. It’s not a problem.
(more…)

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-13  ::  dave

Sunday 10 January
The Value(s) of Books

Filed under Books + Reviews

There’s a new book I want. Well, it’s two books, the two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. I like very much my Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, which has smart little editorials on words and their usage from Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Stephin Merritt, and other smart people whose opinions I don’t just trust but more like place the entirety of my faith in. (And I know, having read thoroughly my DFW, that the late grammarian would have no problems with the preposition hanging out at the end of that there sentence up there.) The other great thing about the OAWT is its superlative tables for certain groups of adjectives. Like the one that ties “kind” to “cruel” through words like “humane” and “inoffensive” and “pitiless”. Also the tables of specifics for those writers like this one who tend always to satisfy themselves with dull generics. A whole table of terms involved with knitting and crocheting! A list of oaths and curses inclusive of both “fuck it” and “jeez Louise”!
(more…)

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-10  ::  dave

Friday 8 January
Texas, Alabama

Filed under Announcements

Maybe we don’t have to choose.

Or maybe some don’t. I chose Alabama. Suck it, Texas.

1 comment  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-08  ::  dave