I was wondering about LAcon's Tor party and about the weird signs painted on the walls of the suite. It all comes clear.

Yep. Comprised of dead presidents in green.

As for the greater issue:

I don’t understand this person. If you’re going to fib about being a publishing expert, why put up a set of credentials that undercuts your claims?

I think that the targets of this scam (and, although I don't see a direct moneymaking setup here -- not even Adwords or Amazon links -- there's clearly something fishy going on, if only setting up a false front to funnel folks to places like Del Sol, maybe) aren't people who can actually see through these credentials. Given the outlandishness of some of the stuff online that does work (Nigerian moneymaking scams, etc), I could easily see this fooling plenty of casual readers.

...how many professional editors punctuate a question with an exclamation point?

In addition to more atrocious punctuation, her blog features a big pimpin' shout-out to a "pitch conference." Follow the link and...

"the registration fee for the conference is $495 until April 9. After April 9, it is $595.00"

*sputter*

All writers should begin their careers by learning Yog's Law:
http://www.sff.net/people/yog/

Race y'all to Google!

Kaley Noonan is associated with the Algonkian [sic] Writers Workshop, which handles the registration (FEES, that is) for the NY Pitch & Shop conference, which she pimps on her blog.

SCAM!

And she wants to be - oh how she wants to be.

But seriously, a quote from TPBs most recent post: "I seriously don’t know why I keep making adolescent sex a metaphor of the publishing industry (and we all know that “people who speak in metaphors can shampoo my crotch”)–whoop–there I go again."

You know, I'll admit that I've approached the publishing industry with a (little more than a) tad of irreverence at times --- but even on my snarkiest day I would never send any of my material to this editor regardless of who she might really be. I hope in the hungry self-absorbed world of the unpublished writer wannabe there is at least a modicum of something left that maybe/kinda/sort of looks like standards (just a little bit like standards please?)---and I hope those standards are never lowered down far enough to allow this kind of tripe to be taken seriously.

*edit* ePubs are now hardprinting their crap with the same wonky DAZ/Poser3d covers. Nevermind. No standards. Let tripe reign.*

an elite cabal runs publishing
Well, okay --- sure. But at least they like to drink and party at cons ;)

-=Jeff=-

Whoa. You'll personally work with me? And, if my manuscript is "promising," then you'll even query agents on my behalf for me? And, how much are you expecting me to pay you for this marvelous service?

Do I get a free set of steak knives with that?

To be fair:

(1) "Professional editor" =/= "proofreader." Lots of excellent book editors can't spot typos.

(2) Editors and, for that matter, proofreaders are as entitled as anyone else to make little mistakes in informal prose. I personally have very little patience for the "I'm shocked that YOU as an EDITOR would make this AWFUL ERROR" routine. Yeah, me as an editor also sometimes leaves the butter dish out. Disappointed? Deal.

It's certainly true, though, that if my online presence entailed promising implausible shortcuts to publishing success, people would probably be justified in amusing themselves by nitpicking my basic language skills.

(Someday, in the far future, a student who's set the translation of the preceding two sentences as an exercise in their Ancient Terrestrial English class is going to curse my name.)

Or then again, not. All I learned from that and from writing professionally is that I know -->this muchthis muchthis much

Ducts Magazine

And Mary Dell @ 16: "poofreading." I'm going to be saying that to myself all night. "Poofreading." Hee hee. (That my slightly lisping 5YO son would pronounce the word "poof-weeding" makes it all the more entertaining.) Thanks for lightening what has been otherwise an unmitigatedly horrible day.

What do you get when you cross a beautiful girl with a mime?

Ah, the eternal question...

(Background info: Poser is a 3D graphics program currently owned by e-frontier. Started out, way back, as a computer version of those jointed wooden figures used by artists. DAZ 3D are a company based in Utah which produces some of the most widely used figures for Poser, and it's own free posing and rendering program, Studio.

Note the word "free". But you have to spend money to get figures which can actually be adjusted to have different faces and bodies.}

Not a cheap Poser book cover, honest.

I once saw an ad on a local site where a gentleman was offering his professional services as an "experienced coypueditor".

http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=coypu&btnG=Search+Images

Sounds like one of those people who wants to believe the reason she's not getting the mainstream attention she so clearly deserves is because she's such a rebel.

You might want to up your meds a hair. I never said I was a commercial editor--not one place on the blog does it even imply that. I'm a fiction editor of online Algonkian workshops (stated clearly in the "About") as well as the Associate Editor of Del Sol Review (again, read "About"--stated clearly).

And you are angry that I started a blog stating my opinions on the publishing industry? Holy Crapoly--there's about half a million of blogs out there--happy hunting!

BTW--I've got nothing to hide. I'll keep posting--you people can flame all you want. Have a fab day, kittens!

You're entitled to your own opinions. You're not entitled to your own facts. And you don't appear to know the difference.

Brilliantly stated Xopher. I might have to steal that.
-=Jeff=-

I'm remembering the "artists" at art school (where I learned graphic design) pontificating about not being sullied by crass commercialism and payment.

Oh Lord, I would think (and still do), let me be so sullied. Let me appear to have wallowed in mud.

TPB, "you people can flame all you want." Oh darling, that wasn't a flame. Heck, I don't even see a lighter up there. You must be new to these interweebie tubular thingies. I see nothing but a critique and exposure.

I went to Emerson.....and I resemble that! !!

Brilliant line, but it's kind of wasted on this small delusion. The line has so much more potential - politicians, for instance. After all, there is a State of the Union speech tonight.

Is there such a thing as an insider in this case? Would anyone classify herself as an insider? Or is it something like 'adult' or 'professional' where no one thinks they're there, but they'll pretend because all the people around are clearly so? I wonder if I would count as inside for writing and publishing. I write, I know a lot of writers casually and more than so, I hear about PublishAmerica stings, I am not wholly unaware of how some aspects of the industry work.
I suppose the secret-cabal theory would match with the insider bit. But if there's a cabal, they're very unchoosy about who they let in.

Bah, apparently the "carrot S" for "strike" to show a word with a strike through it doesn't work here. I'll just put the crossed out word in italics.

Thedoubles wrote:
As you know, I work in gay pornography. One of my many duties for this company is to proofread their sites for typographical errors and bad links. Well today I was editing a movie's description that had been submitted for revision, and made this correction:

"Eduardo is packing a table leg that is 9.5 inches long and six inches in diameter circumference."

I can't wait to tell my old math teacher.

I currently go to Pace for my MS in Publishing...and this is the first thing I checked out when I was even considering the degree. "Tell me about your professors' experience. Don't leave anything out."

I am trying to craft some joke about the "PitchBitch"'s painfully unfunny schtick and how it's related to her living in Maine, but I find I'm too recent of a refugee from the Pine Tree State and I'm still too bitter. Alas.

I'd also like to point out that Gawker often has funny, snarky gossip about publishing folks...thanks to them and Miss Snark, I have ruined quite a few keyboards.

You have a customer born every minute, but a few might look you up, and now there's a better chance that some of them might see you here. I hope they have the mother-wit to realise that if you knew anything like what you claim to know, you'd be making a living editing, not peddling workshops by spam. We can hope. 'Bye, now.

I am still a little confused, though. I thought you were offering to help me with a pitch, and the slush pile, and agents and all that confusing stuff. I thought that was commercial publishing. Since you're an Insider and all -- I went back and read it again, just to make sure! -- well, don't take this the wrong way, but what sort of Insider are you? I know you must really have experience with this stuff -- I mean, you don't say you do, but you wouldn't imply it if it weren't true, and then say Well I Never Actually Said That!

Would you?

There's an entire world of difference between "Hey, I'm a wannabe (or very junior) editor and novelist, doing my volunteer time, and shopping my ms around to agents, hoping for that big break, and, let me tell you, it ain't as easy as it sounds!" and "I Have No Industry Experience, and Paper Credentials, but I Will Share My Sekkrits, Because However Sad I Am At Not Being Published, You Lot Are Sadder, I Can Still Fool You into Believing I Know Stuff."

Even without the scammy workshops the latter is dishonest and self-aggrandizing. It's sad when people who don't know any better get sucked in by this sort of sham.

Web del Sol was one of the first on-line venues for literary publishing; I worked for them as a volunteer years ago. Since then, on-line resources for writers in the literary market have leapfrogged past Web del Sol, which, like most portal sites, hasn't seemed to accomplish much to justify its independent existence. (The Algonkian Workshops were presumably such an attempt.)

Small correction: while the gulf between the micro-world of literary journal publishing and the much larger world of commercial publishing is huge, some of the journals listed by Michael Neff in his bio are in fact paying markets. (Whether they could be classed as commercial markets is another question, since most literary journals derive significant proportions of their income from grants, institutional subvention, etc., rather than from sales.)

And you make a lovely pinata.

Hint to TPB, your slip is showing, darling. Might want to see to that.

If we were going to flame her, we'd just start by transposing the words in her screen name. Only "Bitch The Pitch" doesn't work. In the world of flames, that's just a freebie.

As someone whose (entirely satisfactory)wedding reception was held at an American Legion hall, I am very glad we didn't invite Miss Noonan.

Or were you teasing me for saying it just as if I were just thinking it up? I didn't attribute it. Wikipedia attributes it to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which seems likely.

Btw it seems it's quoted without attribution all over the web.

Those are those icecream things, right?

Oh wait.

I'd also bet your average VFW wedding reception is a lot fuller of warmth and genuine celebration than the monstrous Bridezilla-style affairs that crop up in overpriced venues every weekend.

(My event photographer-husband's favorite TV show is "Bridezillas." Nothing says "future marital bliss" like a coked-out PR-type screaming over the late arrival of her $15,000-a-gig troupe of former Cirque de Soleil acrobats.)

There I was, merrily following the links, when I got to the Algonkian Workshop's interview with TJP and found this gem:

Versatile enough to publish short stories while simultaneously setting his sights on novels

I can't wait to apply this new concept of versatility to my own life. I strive for the day when I can be versatile enough to pat my head while simultaneously endeavoring to rub my tummy.

Hiya, Kaley!

Tell me -- how's that working out for you? Bypassed the slush pile yourself yet?

Or does "Pitch Bitch" mean that anyone who calls him/her/itself an artiste is entitled to a middle-class salary just for being an artiste, even one who produces three or four short poems a year?

P.S. For even more fun, run down the actual publication credentials of the writing and publishing faculty at Emerson. Hint: There are several vanity presses in there... and not just for poetry, where that's more "normal" (even if still a rip-off).

I have not finished a college degree, I make $12.75 an hour, but I can cut, size, and restitch academic articles better than a lot of people who have PhDs.

I can also tell pretty closely who will and won't fare well in peer review. And, even more impressive, I've had articles published, and I live in Maine and eke out a miserable living too. In publishing, no less.

Maybe I'm in the wrong racket.

Nyrond's Addendum to Yog's Law;

"but seldom very fast."

Thus the need for the term "cocktail lounge."

Incidentally, our wedding reception was at the American Legion hall, too, and we were quite satisfied with it.

Look at this post (Its subtitle, A No-Excuses Truth to Understanding The Publishing Industry, is almost enough on its own.)

That link doesn't work anymore. Is that cockroaches I hear scurrying?

The road beside the river tends to flood
When autumn storms bring rainfall to the hills.
Your wagons and your horses, mired in mud
Are trapped until the water rises, and it kills.
The mountain passes close with winter snows,
The desert's parched in summer's white-hot days.
The road that looks the safest often goes
To nothing but a hovel, thick with strays.
A canny guide is worth her weight in gold
When maps are not enough, and no one knows
When caution suits and when you must be bold,
And when to give up on the route you chose.
You wouldn't trust a guide who'd never been
Along the road, and learned from what she's seen.

(OK, now I really have to do some work.)

Hmm. I fail to see the selling point.

Teresa @74:
I don't know if they're villains. But a blog that claims to have the Inside Dirt on the Publishing Industry, and serves only to divert authors' energy strikes me as, to a lesser degree, the equivalent of the witch doctors who "treat" patients until the cancer is incurable or the cataracts have made them blind.

It wastes time, wastes hearts, wastes courage and wastes joy. It's possible that this one does this in good faith, which would be a mitigation.

Kaley Noonan now does have a reputation, as a shameless charlatan. From here on when anyone looks up her name; an agent, a publishing house, a reviewer, what they'll find is her history of misrepresentation.

That's gotta hurt. That's gonna hurt more.

I wonder if the folks involved in this debacle will somehow try and come clean and redeem what they can of their professional reputations? Or will they lay low hoping it all just goes`away (but Google doesn't forget.)

Gt ff yr BS hgh hrs. Mthnks hr lttl cmmrcl dgs brkng t p stn by bggr dg.

JF

Those in the industry who might have helped K.N.'s career are now all too aware of her name in a negative sense.

Ms. Noonan has shot herself in the foot enough for one planetary rotation. Time to limp home and consider wiser options than writing more blog rants that beg for mockage.

And the writing isn't all that good, either. Sure, I know about Sturgeon's Law. But in literary prose it's closer to 99% than 90.

At least Dan Brown convinced thousands of non-lit'ry people to donate their money and their time for his words. The folks who write for Conjunctions, et al.? They're hard-pressed to get the other MFAs to read their stuff. What really burns Kaley's bush is that Dan Brown made it out of the slush pile and she didn't.

You want the secret to avoiding the slush pile? Send your material to p/a/y/s/-/i/n/-/c/o/p/i/e/s/ free literary e-zines. They'll take anything. As long as it's unreadable.

Wow, these folks really have problems with reading comprehension. Would you like to point out where Teresa "dismisses and dismeans" those journals, Julia? Was it where she noted that they don't pay? This may come as a surprise to you, but being published in markets that don't pay don't make you an expert on the industry.

That says nothing about the quality of the market or the works in it. Several SF markets that pay pennies consistently publish work that wins awards and critical acclaim. But if you're claiming to be an expert on the industry, that means you deal with the commercial side of it, and that means getting paid.

As for the supposed depth of her ignorance--child, someday you may know enough about the woman you're talking about to be embarrassed by that remark.

Get off your BS high horse. Methinks I hear little commercial dogs barking at a pee stain by a bigger dog.

Bit of a logic problem here. Who're the little dogs? I thought you all were supposed to be the little ferocious outsiders, barking at the monolithic publishing industry. Now you're the big dogs? And yet...you have no publishing success, no insider experience...how does that work, again?

This is written by someone who's never in his life slept in a wet sleeping bag, or tried to walk in the woods on a starless, moonless night. Where's the light coming from, David, for your first-person narrator to see the things he sees?

"The underside of the porch drips rain like a child peeing." Let's assume there's enough light for you to see that. Do childen drip when they pee? What are you trying to say?

"She likes the smell of bathrooms, mirrors, warm toilet seats." Does your perfect Carla really spend a lot of time smelling warm toilet seats? Or was that just clumsily phrased?

What happens in this story? Plot summary: The narrator isn't smart enough to come in out of the rain, but Carla, apparently, is.

At least I didn't have to pay anything to read this. At least it was short.

Would someone -- anyone -- care to defend this waste of pixels?

Oh well. At least Kaley Noonan has apparently reconsidered her venture.

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Cllng gd ltrry jrnls "fnzns" s bth nccrt nd nsltng. t ws mnt t b.

Sometimes the world just doesn't listen when I want everyone to be friends. Alas for reality.

But when I came to make my Pitch,
(With hey, ho, the Merry Drones of Tor)
'Gainst knaves and thieves they pulled the switch.
(For the drones they drone on ever more)

But when alas I came to write
By swaggering could I never thrive,
And then my "friends" did raise their heads
With sockpuppets still I earn my bread

Not long ago my blog began
(With hey, ho, the Merry Drones of Tor)
But that's all done, Teresa's won
And abi'll write a sonnet every day

Yes, so what's your point?

Have you seen that lukewarm pap that Teresa Hayden calls fiction? I mean, the stuff she wrote?

No, and neither have you. Teresa doesn't write fiction. That Bitter Rejected Author fantasy of yours is just a square on the Bingo Card.

I do write fiction. Back when I started trying to publish commercially I listed "little and literary" credits in my first couple of cover letters. The Lit'ry Magazines didn't reject me. I dropped them when I figured out exactly how meaningless they were.

(And those were in the days of paper Lit'ry magazines. At least they paid in copies. What do the on-line 'zines pay in? Electrons?)

I also read literature. Real literature. I love it. It isn't in the literary e-zines. The literary e-zines are a refuge for the poseurs, the artistes, and the wannabees.

Don't try to sling words here, Molly. You're in the presence of people who actually can.

molly, if you spent much time here, you'd know that "fanzine" isn't a pejorative term at all. we are, you see, fans.

it is a comment however, on how "inside the publishing industry" a person whose work has only appeared in fanzines could be. fanzines can be repositories of great art, but they are, by definition, on the fringes....

nevermind. i'll stop feeding the troll now.

The MFAs, sensitive souls that they are, perceive that they're getting laughed at.

Oh, Jeeze. I'm going to get another scar from banging my head against the wall to get the stupid out that story/poem/whatever it was tried to get in. All I can say is that, way, too, many, damn, commas. I don't think it's a comma splice issue, I think it's death by a thousand commas. At least there's whale puke in there (really, there is). I doubt the author knows that's what the word means, only that it relates to "Pair-foom-airy."

So, have I crossed into the insulting side of this argument? Silly me.

At one stage, I had to attend a sort of literary salon where I was asked, perfectly po-faced, whether I found the act of commercial publication perhaps a little, well, um...

I answered cheerfully that it didn't require half so much pimping myself out as getting the Masters (Creative Writing) which was the reason I had to attend the sort-of literary salon. The conversation went south after that, alas.

At the government-funded "writers' house" where they paid me to present a "workshop" (which wasn't a workshop, but that's another story) I got asked whether it wasn't galling to have to put work in front of people who simply didn't understand, you know, its real artistic merits. I said something like, "Yes, indeed, not only don't they pay you, but you're out the postage as well."

Funny looks you get at government-funded "writers' houses".

The same place is talking about getting an actual anthology of their work out, but very few stories have been submitted, because the proposal is to get a grant and employ a, you know, professional editor with actual selection powers. Two of the leading lights remarked that they didn't feel quite right about being submitted to scrutiny in this way. A committee of members would be better.

Heigh-ho. Well, back to pimping myself out for commercial scrutiny.

So, we have a devotion of Snarklings. What's the collective noun for drones of Tor?* And do I get to be a drone? As I recall, drones get to make new queens by choosing who to feed royal jelly to. That would be kewl. Can I, can I, huh, oh great Tor-people? Pleeeeeease?

*"Hive" is obvious, but it sounds itchy.

Like I said, I prefer simple conflicts. "That's not a knife. *This* is a knife!" might have motivated the post, but it comes out looking worse. It's easier to show that we are not the enemy if we don't rip bystanders to shreds.

If you'll excuse me, I'll go back to the other threads that include:
abi and Fragano's poetry
discussions of all things linguistic
handcrafts and fiber materials
commentary on literature in translation and language shift
amusing pet stories
debates of current events and politics
a remarkably small amount of SFF colloquy

Now--stating the obvious here, but 'literary' is a genre like any other, albeit one that focuses on a theme, generally 'exploration of the self', rather than more easily-waved-about features of setting or style.

Like all genres, literary fiction has its freebee, publish-on-acceptance zines. Some of these will be reasonably good, some not so good.

The reality is, however, that on average any writer who feels that his/her work is of a standard to warrant payment will send it off to the bigger and more lucrative markets first. Writers, after all, like to eat too.

The result is that (again, generally speaking) paying markets will showcase a better quality of fiction than non-paying markets, simply because they have the first pick of the subs.

So, to be blunt, if you want 'quality' literary magazines you'd be better off investing time and effort in reading 'The New Yorker', 'The London Review of Books' or 'Meanjin'. All are paying markets, well respected, and at least reasonably well know.

I suppose, in a round-about way I'm saying that no-one here is attacking literary magazines or the genre in general. What has been pointed out (rightly) is that freebee online zines are nothing more or less than freebee online zines--and it's not sensible to claim vast publishing experience on the basis working for such a magazine.

Now it appears that MFAs may, in some cases, have the same effect. So the M[B | F]A degree is a marker of assholism?

Further study is needed.

Perhaps swarm?

Oh, hell.

Mabel, git my shotgun. We've been overrun by varmints.

Actually I think the Workers control the means of production.

Still, we could get "Tor Drone" T-shirts. "Two pens enter, one pen leaves"?

Definitely sleep.

Wow. These people really do not get reading comprehension at all.

When's the last time TOR book was made into a film?

When was one of yours?

Side note: If you're trying to pretend you're not the same person, or in the same group, you might want to watch out for miswriting the same proper name in the same way in different posts with different names attached. Just sayin'.

Or when has one of your select group written a nonfiction book about something real, and not related to "How to Get Published."

Well, you could use Google to find out, but since that was just a shot and not an actual inquiry, I'm sure you won't bother. But I'm confused--now "How to Get Published" is bad and lame? Because when you were doing it, you made it sound so hip and cool.

Here we go from post #108:

Chris Johnstone says: "The result is that (again, generally speaking) paying markets will showcase a better quality of fiction than non-paying markets, simply because they have the first pick of the subs."

Assuming, of course, that in your scenario all America's good fiction writers are following the Chris Johnstone formula and ONLY sending their work to paying mags. Also, it assumes no self-respecting fiction writer would want to be published in a mag that doesn't pay enough. Yes?

"So, to be blunt... "

Yes, be blunt Chris Johstone.

"if you want 'quality' literary magazines you'd be better off investing time and effort in reading 'The New Yorker', 'The London Review of Books' or 'Meanjin'. All are paying markets, well respected, and at least reasonably well know."

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Lt's lk t sm f Chrs Jhnstns rcnt plcs t snd hs "wrk" ...:

Th Hntng f Mrs Hggns - Fntsy nd Scnc Fctn, S
Th Pstmn's Nw Cstmrs - Wrd Tls, S
Rd f Lng Brdn - Shmmr, rlnd
Chtng th Ms - ntrglctc Mdcn Shw, S

Dn't th ttls snd hrrbly rgnl? Nw, lt's ssm th fctn f Chrs Jhnstn gts pblshd n n f ths ptrd rckt rgs tht rk f crtn chrctrs nd prdctbl plts, thn t gs wtht syng tht HS fctn MST b bttr thn nythng tht hs vr pprd n, lt's sy, Qrtrly Wst r Prr Schnr. Why? Bcs ntrgltc Mdcn Shw pys bttr!

It's all so logical.

Thank you Chris Johnstone. Y wldn't knw gd fctn f t kckd y n th blls.

He's an EMT. He saves lives.

He has a wife and a bunch of kids, which is not exactly typical of hermits.

He's an instructor at Viable Paradise, teaching other people how to write.

He's a veteran of the U.S. Navy.

Who are you to belittle him?

Also, consider that you just ripped into one of the few people here who was treating you like a person capable of rational discussion. Good move.

a novel with fictional scenarios? horrors!

one by one, without any fuss, the vowels were going out.

And yes, Benedict Arnold, you are clearly Mrk Yrk. Go Yrk off somewhere else.

Would that that were true. Will no one rid us of this tiresome wanker?

Gee, thanks for that mental image, Xopher. I'm sure I'll be able to sleep now.

http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/

Ths hvng ld f bd SF nt nly mks fl f y, n pblc, bt dmnshs th dgnty f th hmn rc, rthr lk Rnld McDnld.

My rcmmndtn s t t yrslf t rck n th dsrt nd swt t yr nnr trll. Nxt, tk ll yr bks, sl thm n brrl wth trch, nd thn dpth-chrg thm nt th cn, t lst 50 mls ffshr.

Nxt, plgz t th hmn rc v th ntrnt nd swr y'll stp wrtng frvr.

Man, doesn't it just kill you that more people have paid money for her books than will ever know your name?

Seriously, good riddance. Thanks.

In the meantime, anybody here want to see what they can make of the IP address 4.249.15.21 ?

Ew.

I'm going to assume you're Kayley Noonan unless and until I'm presented with compelling evidence to the contrary. What we know from innumerable online dust-ups is that when a writer is spoken of unkindly, and an online persona with no prior history of posting pops up to defend them, turn after turn after turn, that persona is almost always the writer in question.

Perhaps dragging bystanders into this is wrong (though my comments on "Flood" and that thing in Black Warrior (another part of the Web Del Sol nexus) were mild). My comments were intended not to dismay the individual authors, who were no doubt doing the best they could, but to comment on the e-zines that "Julie Field" holds up as "high quality" models, not to be dismissed or demeaned.

Unfortunately, "Julie Field" is a common name -- too common to be sure if some story out there is hers. "Molly" is even worse. Lots and lots of Mollys in the world. If either cares to link to something they've published...? Or shall I just imagine that Molly's fiction is as bad as she imagines Teresa's would be, if Teresa wrote fiction? Shall I imagine that Julie Field was rejected by Tor?

No, just as I use my real name, I link to real examples that anyone can look at to see for themselves.

To spell this out for the MFAs (who really do seem to have reading comprehension difficulties -- is that why they like their literary 'zines so much?) the problem isn't that Pitch Bitch is a literary author. The problem is that she's selling snake oil for six hundred bucks a bottle.

She's pretending she can teach others something that she personally doesn't know.

http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/

As for writers, ace, you can't even write decent SF. Who would be fool enough to buy a book with a horrible cliche title like LAND OF MIST AND SNOW? It's sooooo bad it makes me ill. How pathetic of you to pretend to be a writer and hang out here like some kind of redneck curmudgeon attacking literary magazines. Conjunctions and those other journals are so far beyond your capability it's like comparing pearls to swine and guess who is the swine? You will never be able to write as well as the writers in those journals and that makes you furious and bitter.

It's so evident in everything you say!

And Terese DOES write fiction. It's even better than yours, which isn't saying much.

And btw, your lack of taste even shows in that putrid web page you use to showcase your garbage.

dialup-4.249.15.21.Dial1.Washington2.Level3.net

Another site places it in Washington DC, specifically.

I assume "dialup" means its a modem that subscribers can dial into to access the internet, which means someone is trying to cover their tracks.

Maybe some web head can figure out more.

So I guess that's at least one of us.

Oh, has anyone mentioned the kinds of books TNH used to edit? Hint: She's got academic chops, too.

As in also gotten it published, by a regular paying publisher, sold in actual bookstores, got critical attention, got paid an advance for it, am getting royalties? That stuff?

Is there any point in answering "I have, three times now, and what's your point?"

And who is MollyJones@aol.com? Danged if I know. See what you can do with 01.23.07 .

The Dial1 designation indicates only that it can handle dialup traffic — not that all of the traffic it handles is dialup. Many AOL-, UUNet-, and backbone-controlled servers have maintained old-style names to avoid having to rename machines and rebuild indices and traffic-management cascades. (As an aside, the machine's actual location is Ashburn, Virginia, where UUNet used to have a major server farm.)

I'll let you know when my stories appear in Conjunction and Black Warrior. I think I have some unreadable tripe in the bottom of my desk drawer that I can send them.

Who would be fool enough to buy a book with a horrible cliche title like LAND OF MIST AND SNOW?

Well, Avon/Eos. And several thousand people who could have walked right by it, but didn't.

Ever get published, anywhere, by anyone, "Julie"?

I'll take a credit from an on-line literary fanzine. Heck, for you, I'll even take PublishAmerica as a credit.

For what it's worth, the view from someone outside the publishing industry is that the "big dogs" of literary fanzines posting on this blog are coming across as Internet kooks who really don't have anything better to do than make fools of themselves on the Internet. (No, I don't expect this to change anyone's behavior, but I believe in the ritual value of rescue-making gestures.)

You'll hear from an attorney, dear, if you try anything beyond the petty. And I can drive to Brooklyn in 40 minutes or less and stop by the Tor office for a chat with your husband and his boss. Would that suit you? And that's just for starters.

And I'm not KN. Believe whatever you want. I'm just irritated beyond belief by the arrogance and ignorance of your acolytes.

I've had enough though. It's like baiting alien space monkeys from the land of snow and mist. LOL.

Aloha

JF

Level 3's a large-scale backbone provider that amongst other things does colocation and managed dialup service, which could in theory mean that it's someone's dialup to a small business or organization's machine. It's vaguely possible it might be a small local ISP, assuming those still exist. (I wouldn't expect something larger, simply because I'd expect there to be someone else's namespace involved if so.)

It will give a list of all the stop over points between you and the final destination. The last entry will be the interesting one.

I take it, then, "Julie," that you've never published anything? Not terribly surprising, I must say.

No, Teresa won't try to get you fired from your job, you silly git. Nor is she threatening you. Your own efforts have already gotten you laughed at all across cyberspace. No fair trying to give her credit for your words.

link

It's a student comment for a NYC Pitch and Shop conference for first novels.

Whether she is also Pitch Bitch, I have no clue. But if this is her comment, she's never been published.

Let's see... let's see... if that's our Julie, when she visits Tor she can say "Hi" to one of the Pitch and Shop faculty members, Anna Genoese, whose office is right down the hall from Teresa's. And maybe she can say "Hi" for me to another faculty member, Diana Gill, who was the person who was fool enough to buy a book with a horrible cliche title like LAND OF MIST AND SNOW.

(The title, BTW, is an allusion to Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And to think, this whole time I thought lit'ry types liked literary allusions. Must all my gods have feet of clay? Curse you, Julie Field!)

Wow. Shades of a tacky awkward 'roid rage. Can't look away.

Hey, Julie,
I'm curious. Did you do any research before you started posting here? Have you read any other threads on ML, to get a sense of the local community? Do you know what it takes to build a blog which can get hundreds of comments per post?

And, by the way, did you write the story "A Talk of the Rockies"?

A comment in the Lulu forums by Julie Fields talking about Pitch conferences.

Another comment here.

A comment by Julie Field over at Evil Editor defending Pitch events.

THere is a Lulu thread in their community forum talking about the NYC Pitch conference over here

People who posted a positive experience of the conference on Lulu's thread include:

William Holland
Julie Field
Guy Forcucci
Alice B
Susan Breen
Amy Hanson
Lisa Buie-Collard
Barbara Keegan
Kristine Tate
Greg Bascom
Richard Romfh

Every single person in this list only made maybe only 1 or only a few posts total to Lulu's forum. All posts occur from August 4 through August 7. Every single one fo these poeple created an accoutn, made a post, and then dropped out of sight. None of them have any published content on Lulu.

More weirdly, every single person in the above list was also compelled to make a comment on the Pitch Conference Student comment section here:

here

If I didn't fricken know better, I'd say every single one of these names are nothing but sock puppets.

The last post on the Lulu thread is by Kaley Noonan , spamming the URL for

h t t p : / / w w w . w e b d e l s o l . c o m / A l g o n k i a n / C l a s s e s /

I went through a conversation with some poster here once, misspelling their name every post for several days. I was rather mortified after I realised, and I was only having a spirited discussion, not a handbag at dawn affair. (At least on Julie's side.)

Bwuh?
Gollum? Is that you?

a number of student comments (I haven't checked them all) to the NYC pitch conference here appear to have been cut and pasted into the lulu forum over here

This is crying out "sock puppet" more and more.

I thought it was just flat-out hilarious that when someone tried to be polite to her, she was openly scornful that they'd pitched to F&SF.

Because, you know, getting your short fiction into F&SF... well, it's only one of the most prestigious markets in the English-speaking world: Chris should obviously have had the good sense to be like Julie, and aim lower.

Other things that lose you huge points in a flamewar:
--Threatening someone with your physical presence, since 99% of the time you're lying to make yourself sound grand in your head, and the other 1% of the time you're a certifiable nutcase.
--Threatening a female that you'll tell her husband might fly on some places, but the blog of a New York editor is unlikely to be one of them, as New York editors are famously liberal, and liberals are generally feminists.
--Threats in general mean that you've lost the battle for the mind of the readers, which is all that's worth winning in a flame war.

I'm glad you're though; the history of UUNet backbones is pretty darn interesting, and the flamewar distracts from it.

Do you know what would be hilarious? Getting a chapter of Atlanta Nights accepted by one of those demanding and prestigious lit'ry e-zines. I think I even know which one to use.

============

You'll hear from an attorney, dear ...

And a cartooney! Wow, the Bingo card is filling up fast.

============

There is a Lulu thread in their community forum talking about the NYC Pitch conference over here.

Want to see something else freaky? That entire thread was started by a "Dan Smith," and that post was his first and only post in the Lulu forum.

You don't suppose we're looking at "guerilla marketing," do you?

Onward. Let's have a word or two with Julie.

145: "To JAMES MACDONALD of ALL OVER:"

http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/

"As for writers, ace, you can't even write decent SF."

Now, if you want really bad SF, you need look no further than Kayley Noonan. All of her stories that I've been able to track down have been wanna-be SF, and they're risibly bad. Mary Sue Whipple herself would bow down in awe before the stories where the girl's going around with a big old workboot pulled down over her head (only her mouth shows -- and yet she navigates!) as a way of trying to "force those around her to acknowledge her pain."

"Who would be fool enough to buy a book with a horrible cliche title like LAND OF MIST AND SNOW? It's sooooo bad it makes me ill."

As for the question of who would buy Land of Mist and Snow, the answer is "at least two NYC trade book publishers --" (the other house got it), "-- plus the buyers for all the major bookstore chains, and a steadily increasing number of readers."

Turnabout is fair play: how many people have ever wanted to buy your work?

"How pathetic of you to pretend to be a writer"

Jim and his wife have been full-time professional authors for many years now, and are respected members of their community. You, on the other hand, are still paying to attend weekend conferences in order to get a few minutes of face time with some industry pro, and you're grateful for the opportunity.

When Doyle pointed out that you and Molly were making fools of yourselves in public, she was being kinder than you realized.

"and hang out here like some kind of redneck curmudgeon attacking literary magazines."

OTHER SPARKLYPOO STUDENT: I don't know. Everyone's been acting weird lately.*

"Conjunctions and those other journals are so far beyond your capability it's like comparing pearls to swine"

"and guess who is the swine?"

"You will never be able to write as well as the writers in those journals"

Tell me, Julie: why is it that all the instructors for the Algonkian Workshops who've made real paid professional sales are at such pains to feature them prominently in their bios? And why were you out trolling a pitch conference for editors, if you weren't hoping to have your work published in some more commercial venue?

"and that makes you furious and bitter."

I've known Jim for a long time. Believe me when I say that he's never spent a moment's time wishing his writing appeared in such places. He'd consider it a shocking waste of his time and effort.

By the way: are you defending those publications because they publish you, or because they turned you down?

"It's so evident in everything you say!"

"And Terese DOES write fiction. It's even better than yours, which isn't saying much."

"And btw, your lack of taste even shows in that putrid web page you use to showcase your garbage."

But the general core of this remains: the magazine produced by enthusiasts for a topic, with little or no commercial gain. And there is a class of SF fanzine which does match the literary magazine in scaope and approach.

Nevertheless, if you want to get published, and paid for it, while such zines might teach you something, not all the experience transfers. And I'm not sure the experience of SF fandom, and SF zines, is applicable to writers choosing other genres. SF is small enough a community that, if you're in it, there are editors who will have heard of you. Which, if your writing is competent, will help get past that first rough filtering of the slushpile.

And some stranger throwing insults at an editor is, strange as it may seem, a stranger throwing insults at a friend.

I'm not sure that somebody who doesn't get that is ever going to get to the point of making friends and influencing people.

I'm going to bed. Please, someone else explain to Chicken Little how Atlanta Nights is not like other books.

And Greg? That's good work. I'm impressed.

Waste of time. She wouldn't understand even if you drew pictures.

> The idea that "Julie" thinks our chapters in Atlanta Nights are representative samples of our writing is so bizarre that I still haven't fully assimilated it.

Did she come right out and say that - or was it a deduction on someone elses part?

I think I prefer the idea that you have a significant body of work that you've never noticed writing, and are living a Jeckyll and Hyde life. Or even a Jonathan Hoag life.

(Also, the PitchBitch blog seems to have disappeared in the twinkling of an eye, only without the resultant resurrection that usually follows.)

*wipes brow*

Phew. What a battlefield. Teresa, I bow to your patience. I don't know how you do it.

Steve @181: I think it was MWT @ 169 who first thought it might be an Atlanta Nights reference...

Also, how about the "Tories" for the Merry Drones of Tor?

Teresa's husband. And his boss. Oh, my, my. The dmbss assumptions packed into that sentence are legion. Julie, you do not have the intellectual capabilities or maturity God gave a turnip. You're an enormous amount of fun to bat around, though.

Had you bothered to read the Todd James Pierce threads, you might have noticed--then again, maybe not, as your reading comprehension skills are positively abysmal--that many people here are very good at research, and quite comfortable with technology. Consider that, sooner or later, your real name is going to be linked with your onscreen handle, and that Google is forever. That's a warning, by the way, not a threat, though I doubt you understand the difference even when it's explicitly pointed out to you.

I'm just boggling that this has lasted so long. Julie, lesson #1 of life: when you discover you're in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

This is a blog run by SF professionals: editors and writers. So the folks who read here tend to be people who like SF. Some of us also like literary fiction, but hey, if we wanted to discuss only literary fiction, we'd be off reading some other blog. Some of us don't like literary fiction.

Let me, however, make a distinction for you:

Author who has been paid money by a publisher (whether a magazine publisher or a book publisher) for their books = professional. Margaret Atwood is a professional author. Carol Sheilds is a professional author. James D. Macdonald is a professional author.

Person who works for a publisher that pays authors = publishing professional. Literary agent who sells to paying markets also = publishing professional. Teresa is a publishing professional. Patrick is a publishing professional. Miss Snark is also a publishing professional. I, gods help us all, am also a publishing professional, albeit not in trade, so I'm kind of in a different league.

I'm sorry if you don't like that cold fact. I'm sorry if you don't like it that some people here don't have a lot of time for the kind of literary fiction that appears in non-paying online publications. Me, I don't read much SF from non-paying markets, either, because life is too short to read amateur work for free (I get paid to read bad writing. It stops being fun when you do it all day.) I'm sorry if you haven't even read the mags to which the targets of your ire have sent their work, but feel that you must assert the superiority of your favoured publishing venues.

But, when we're talking about professional publishing—you know, the kind that pays—then we must concede that a paying publication, whether it be the New Yorker or Subterranean, is superior, from the point of view (you do know about point of view, right? Being a connoisseur of fiction and all) of a professional author. Sure, some fanzines (literary or genre-based) find the formula for consistently pubishing great work. But you know, if you're earning your living by your pen (or word processor, as the case may be) and you consistently give away your work, you're not going to last long.

Now, mayhap you prefer to read the stories in Prairie Schooner. Bully for you. Great. Toddle off and do so. Do come back when you've calmed down and can argue coherently. Or not.

Tantrums and insults such as "you wouldn't know good fiction if it kicked you in the balls" do nothing to demonstrate the validity of your arguments, if I may be so generous as to call them that, and they really won't do much to advance your cause here.

And when you've sold your first story to a paying publication, then you can style yourself a paid author, and mayhap you won't feel you've so much to prove. You'll forgive me, though, if I don't attend your first reading. Your prose here does nothing to entice me.

Oh, she's going to see Mr. Doherty (hey, lookie, I even know the name) about Patrick? Oh, that might be scary (makes "jazz hands" and says "ooooo"). So I have to ask, has anybody spoken for the popcorn concession license for the Tor Office? 'Cause that is going to be a great moneymaker. Although it's all going to be in presales as I don't expect the actual event to take too long.

Teresa (and I bet "I spelt that right 'cause I can copy 'n paste," unlike Julie), I think you're being way to generous in your usage of the term "bitch" to label her. I think she has a long road to walk before she can rise to that level. Mostly I see "whiner," One that isn't even as good at my 16 year-old niece. That may just be me.

Me. And since I have never to my knowledge set eyes upon Mr. Macdonald nor exchanged any direct conversation with him, it's not because he's a buddy of mine, either. Next question?

Nt gd d t thrtn m, Trs. Y'r cwrd. Y trn yr mnns

Oh! Oh! Can I be a minion? I've never been a minion!

Jst wht r y gng t d? Gt m frd frm m jb?

No, the penalty for rudeness (the thing with consequences that Teresa was mentioning) here is to be disemvowelled, as several of your posts have been. It makes it harder to read them accidentally (or really at all, for me, but that's not generally a big loss). I have disemvowelled your quoted comments as an example.

nd cn drv t Brkln n 40 mnts r lss nd stp b th Tr ffc fr cht wth yr hsbnd nd hs bss. Wld tht st y? nd tht's jst fr strtrs.

Wow. Just...wow. The comments that come to mind are 1)If you have a problem with Teresa, why are you going to talk to Patrick? Is he supposed to keep his lil' woman in line or something? 2)What's Patrick's boss got to do with it? Is s/he supposed to tell Patrick to keep the lil' woman in line? 3)Perhaps you aren't aware that you can't delete comments you make to ML. That means that 4)If for some odd reason it actually comes to lawyers at 20 paces, there's going to be evidence that Teresa mentioned that being rude on ML has a consequence (disemvowelling) and you escalated it. Perhaps not the brightest move you've made this week.

It would suit ME. Ohhh, how it would suit me. Especially if Patrick could maneuver her in front of a webcam.

Seriously, Julie: this is a great idea. You should absolutely follow through on this impulse. Do you need me to Mapquest some directions for you?

Alas, no. Somehow I always seem to miss the job fairs.

Aw, shoot, I didn't even notice "Dan Smith" being a sock puppet. You'd think "Smith" anything should have set off a red flag for me. Point goes to you, Jim.

The entire thread was contrived spam from beginning to end. And they would have gotten away with it to if it hadn't been for you pesky kids. And their stupid dog.

woooby Woooby WOO!

I used to work as an Editorial Assistant for the Antioch Review, which is a fairly respected literary magazine.

Want to get out of the slush pile? Simple: WRITE WELL. AND COMPELLINGLY.

The Review regularly plucked first time contributors out of the slush pile--hell, even first time authors. One memorable essay came from a gentleman in prison, writing about being the projectionist for the prison's weekly movie night. It was fascinating, compelling, and well received.

It ain't rocket science. But writing well and compellingly is something that can't be solved by a $600 workshop.

Is that JF girl smoking crack or what?

Thanks for the jump start to my day!

The word we use for people at Tor is "Toroids".

Oh, is that why the threats to talk to Patrick's boss? That actually makes a vague amount of sense. Not as much as talking to Teresa's boss would, granted.

As in "Attack of the Toroids II: The Coming of the Protractors"?

Does thta mean that, if ML has a gathering at Denver's worldcon next year, we won't get to wear toroids? I was kind of looking forward to that. Drat.

So who's the executioner in all this? I'm no literary expert, but that seems like a rather loose metaphor to me (not to mention mixed).

I think Julie overestimates her importance in this matter, suggesting that we need divine intervention (I do not think it means what you think it means) to keep her down. I think Teresa and the rest of the gang here have managed to rebut Julie's (let's call them) arguments here quite nicely without needing to muzzle her. The disemvowelling was for gratuitious incivility.

We are Toroid elves
Filling Toroid shelves
With books in hands
We attack in bands
Oh, we are Toroid elves

We sling invectives all day
But our work is play.
Trolls we pry out,
See if they cry out.
Oh, we are Toroid elves

The Yale bookstore stocks it, and, as I observed in comment #183 on this thread, they shelve it under Literature rather than SF&F.

I don't know; I can't stand watching or listening to the guy. I was reading the thread about it at firedoglake - the comments are probably much better than the speech was (it was around 500 comments when I was in there, and a new thread had started). Verbal tomato-throwing would be a good description.

Just pointing out that *this* Molly isn't *that* Molly. Or I'm not she, or she's not me, or something.

And as for this:

Who would be fool enough to buy a book with a horrible cliche title like LAND OF MIST AND SNOW?

...it reminds me: I went to my local corporate book emporium yesterday specifically looking for Land of Mist and Snow. The inventory computer said it was on hand, but alas, it was not to be found on the shelves. Still looking.

Also, who would be fool enough to buy (or publish, even unpaid) a story containing the deathless line "She said, 'Turn.' She meant, 'Around.'"? Still giggling over that one.

Go ahead. Contact an attorney. Although I'm not admitted in New York, and I'm not Teresa's counsel of record, I feel sort of like Br'er Lawyer:

"Don' t'row me in dat dere courtroom, Sis'r Julie!"

Any attorney who takes action on the basis of what's in this thread — even writing a nasty letter to Teresa, let alone her husband or boss — would run smack into the ethics rules that prohibit harassment on the basis of a claim without factual or legal foundation. Now, admittedly, there are some intellectually and ethically challenged members of my profession, but (unlike litrachur) we can at least discipline them or kick them out and make it stick.

Teresa:
By "academic chops" (147) I meant the editorial work you've done for the Evil Empire (you know, the one from which I'm a refugee, back in my own academic-litrachur days).

Generally:
Rather than dropping to a DOS window, there's a much better way to get a relatively anonymized tracert from inside your browser:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/
(at the moment, you'll have to page down once). This has the bonus that you can use your browser's print function to make a time-stamped record. <sarcasm class="impersonal"> Of course, I wouldn't know anything at all about doing this sort of thing after being the successful lead counsel in Ellison v. AOL and working where I did before I became a lawyer. Or having been on the Internet and its predecessors since early in the Reagan Administration. </sarcasm>

DNSStuff.com also has other handy tools, like a much-better-than-average whois, a couple of good reverse-directory tools, and so on.

sock puppets, spam, "guerrilla marketing", "how to bypass the slush pile", threats to call a lawyer, threats to call a boss, threats to call a husband, and even an appearance by MrkYrk under a pseudonym. I feel like years from now I might recall this thread and say "I was there on Saint Crispin's day."

Confused about whether the whole thing is evil, or if it's just being marketed evilly.

2. And I can drive to Brooklyn in 40 minutes or less and stop by the Tor office for a chat with your husband and his boss.

Please remember to viddy that for YouTube.

I’d rather have people feel sorry for me than think I was stupid.

Can't we do both?

I thought comprehension was a necessary part of learning to read.

I'm puzzled that JF thinks the Tor offices are in Brooklyn. Have they moved recently?

Thanks.

I'm a Marxist-Lennonist, myself. And the Marx is more Groucho than Karl.

Also. And the Mageworlds books (which, as I recall, began in fanzines, and stood out quite nicely there as being well-written and attention-grabbing).

So, the NYC Pitch Conference website says at the top of its page: "A l g o n k i a n and New York Writers Workshops present: NYC '07 Pitch and Shop"

A l g o n k i a n is related to w e b d e l s o l and K a l e y N o o n a n. At the end of the Lulu forum thread about the NYC Pitch conference, N o o n a n posts:

If anybody is interested in taking any of the live or online workshops that precede the NY Pitch N Shop (the same organizers) I recommend the Algonkian workshops. I'm one of their short fiction editors.

http://www.web del sol. com/Al gon kian/Clas ses/

Not only do they help you to vastly improve your own work (I'm a vet of four of them), but if your work is good, the editors will maintain relationships with you to see you get published.

I couldn't figure out why n o o n a n was posting at the end of the Lulu thread about the NYC Pitch, but it appears she is somehow related to "presenting" the Pi tch and SH OP.

Alg on kian and New York Writers Workshops present
NYC '07 Pi tch and S hop

noonan is part of the organization (Algon kian?) that "presents" the pitch shop. Not sure what 'presents' means exactly, but she appears to have some kind of vested interest in it. Lulu has a thread that appears to be nothing other than spam for the pitch shop, with a number of apparent sock puppets (including a "Julie Field") to try and camoflage the real source. The thread ends with a post by noonan spamming her (Algon kian) thing.

This ML thread is created regarding The Pitch Bitch, and identifies noonan as TPB. Then an apparent sock puppet of noonan, "Julie Field", appears to attack this thread. Julie appears to have no other web presence other than posts and comments spamming the pitch shop.

I think that about sums it up.

The Firesign Theater album cover for How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All.

On the warm and wholesome side, here, Kaley's byline reveals that she helps girls get over their fear of the tech sort of "mouse". Maybe that's where the kittens thing comes in? There's a picture, too! Check out that hair, kittens, for an object lesson in the need for regular dye jobs to cover dark roots.

Okay, that was catty. Keep calling me a kitten and look what happens! I shouldn't make personal remarks. I should stick to criticism of her work. Repeat one hundred times. Right. Here we go:

The real prize is here, where we have an excerpt from her novel Backwoods East Jesus, with the immortal opening line:

"Mark cupped a protective arm around his cereal, watching the nutty nuggets bob in the milk like rabbit turds."

Along with the reference to eggs as "white gelatinous bulbs", it's enough to put you right off breakfast, isn't it?

Just a few lines further on we hear about Mark's father's retinas "jerking with every word". Is it just me, or does "Jerking Retinas" sound look a good name for a band or something? I'm more partial to "retinae" as the plural, myself. It's a Scrabble thing.

And then there are Mark's mother's breasts, "like five-pound sacks of flour". Can we all pause for a moment to visualize a five-pound sack of flour relative to the average human chest? Holy mammoth mammaries, Batman!

I'd go on, but I think the sheer artistry of the prose of the literary crowd may just be too much for my tender sensibilities.

I'll just go read the decomp section of the forensics manual now.

Abkhazia were wondering - it was issued in 1989. It was part of Abkhazia's efforts to show they were free of the Soviet envelope.

Is it true that flesh decomposes 20 times faster in sewage than in clean water?

Does that mean that leather bookmarks in Kaley's books are Right Out?

(Don't mind me...I'm still trying to visualize how you cup your arm.)

I'm wondering how a person's retinae can be visibly jerking, since they're at the back of the eye and inside it.

(I have to say, that writing would have gotten bad grades even in my elementary school classes.)

I dunno, but I can tell you that when it comes to putrefaction, one week in air = two weeks in water = eight weeks in ground. If you're really curious, I can ask tonight.

Also, for scrotal swelling/bloating/crepitence in a non-decomposed body: think tension pneumothorax/resuscitation. Or, um, don't.

I would tell someone that this manual badly needs an index, but I suspect that would result in my being put in charge of making one.

Do you have the manual in Word? Or just hardcopy? If it's in Word, making an index isn't a horrific task, not if you mostly want to index the headings and subheadings.

I only have the manual in hardcopy, but presumably the author has it in some electronic format - he gave me a printout to make copies from. It's basically a collection of lecture notes on various forensics topics (tonight is "Asphyxia"). If I had any ambitions of writing a murder mystery or forensic thriller, it would be a great reference. As it is, I just read it for occasional amusement and to get things like the nutty-nugget-rabbit-turd imagery out of my head.

I particularly enjoyed Aconite's turnip comment at #187, and Terese's (like the new spelling, by the way, but it'll be hell to change throughout the blog: perhaps better stick with Teresa?) one about the hair at #177. Thank you all for providing me with a whole load of entertainment, taken at little sips throughout the day. Wonderful. Flowers to you all.

Well, see, if his eyes are in the back of his head, but still facing the same direction, then if you just lift up his hair in back, the retinae are visible...oh, wait, that would be that trashy science fiction stuff, wouldn't it? Never mind.

I hate to break it to you, but her name is spelled Teresa. You're the one who spelled it wrong, as "Terese", first at #145 and then at #154. You are also the only one who's done so, as far as a grep of this page can determine.

By the way, I thought you were leaving? At least, it certainly seemed as if your comment at #154 (that being "I've had enough though. It's like baiting alien space monkeys from the land of snow and mist. LOL. Aloha") meant that you were retreating^^^^^^^^^^ leaving us to ponder your club-sharp wit.

Or perhaps you just meant "for now", or that the particular "Julie Field" sockpuppet was leaving, to be replaced by "Jane Smith"? You'll have to make that a little clearer.

The objection is to the "guerilla marketing," the comment spam, the sock puppets, the astroturfers, the dishonest and deceitful who promote one or another thing. We've commented on this sort of thing before.

Does someone want to lay out the anatomy of a pitch session from the editor's perspective, since we're on the subject?

There's nothing about commercial publishing that's necessarily morally or aesthetically superior to a "little magazine," a fanzine, a LiveJournal, or a self-published book. I can easily think of little magazines, fanzines, LiveJournals, and self-published books I'd much rather read than most commercial novels. Some of the best writers I've ever known have contributed the great majority of their work to such venues.

What's true about commercial publishing is that it's different from self-publishing your own fanzine, weblog, or garage full of books you paid Braun-Brumfield to print for you. People who represent themselves as having inside knowledge should, you know, have some inside knowledge. Otherwise they've got that "bearing false witness" problem going on.

Oh, great. Now I have to fit a leek on the T-shirt too?
muttermuttermutter

Books aren't movies. I don't want to be "pitched." I want to read the book, or at least part of the book. That's what the actual reader is ultimately going to do, after all.

I know some aspiring writers are big on these "pitch sessions," and I know editors who have positive things to say about the procedure, but I find it hard to escape the sense that the aspiring writers are getting a raw deal.

Steve, I want so very much to make that scan to the tune of Tori Amos's "Happy Workers". It doesn't quite work, but if I apply a shoehorn, we might get something plausible out of it.

I see them as part of the cost of the entire weekend with whatever other panels and presentations and whatnot go on. As long as you know going in the door what you're paying for, and what you're getting, I don't object. Not that I'd ever pay for one myself, or recommend that anyone else do so. If you've already paid for a conference for whatever reason, and they're offering pitch sessions, I don't see the harm.

Presenting pitch sessions as a kind of Golden Secret Key that will result in a sale is something else ... like Noonan in propria persona (for the MFAs among you, that means in her own person, that is, not a sockpuppet) saying "By the way, three editors have asked to see my manuscript."

What right? Why, the right to bare arms, of course.

Flourospheres!

Tee-hee.

I suspect (but I have no experience of the phenomenon, myself, so I'll defer to those who have either pitched or been pitched at), that writers like them because they actually get to sit face-to-face with the editor, and tell that person to their face why their book is so awesome. They know that the editor has actually been there! with them! in the room, and they've had their chance.

This is by contrast with the uncertainty of sending a ms or partial or proposal off to the murky submissions desk, where heaven knows what will happen to it, if it will ever be read, or if some publishing minion (that word again!) will simply open the envelope, extract the SASE, put the international reply coupon in a drawer, take a pre-printed rejection slip from a stack, stick the slip in the SASE, toss the MS, and crush the author's hopes and dreams, without even being told how wonderful the book is, or what a nice person the author is.

Just a guess.

As far as the rest of this thread... it's always amusing to watch "Teresa's minions" dismantle sock puppets into small piles of disemvowelled electronic fuzz.

The classics, they never go out of style.

ML is now the fifth result that comes up when googling Kaley Noonan. There are more excerpts from Backwoods East Jesus too!

Jeez, kids today don't know good stuff when they hear it. Uphill both ways in the snow.

'Rudolf Diesel and his Rational Engine'?

Mys sister's ex (while they were married) had a band named 'Bonnie Solder and the Hostages' (spelling not guaranteed).

How my life is enriched by Making Light.

It's not the weight, it's the volume. Proper Woman-Breasts are a whole lot denser than flour.

There's got to be someone here other than me who buys 5lb bags of flour regularly for baking.

When I read Steve's rhymes, I found it matching the earworm I've been fighting recently: "Oneovr Tvey." The first 4 lines scan perfectly, and at least now I've replaced the earworm lyrics. (a top 40 from 1997. more I won't say. rfcrpvnyyl nobhg gur cnebql ynjfhvg Znggry ybfg.)

Now I know why you never return my e-mails.

All I can think of are the Siamese cat lyrics from "Lady and the Tramp":

We are Toroid ELVES filling SHEH-ELVES.
We are Toroid ELVES filling BOOKshelves.

"Not a good idea to threaten me, Terese. You're a coward. You turn your minions loose to act as judge and jury then you deus-ex-machina in to dispense justice? Just what are you going to do? Get me fired from my job?

You'll hear from an attorney, dear, if you try anything beyond the petty. And I can drive to Brooklyn in 40 minutes or less and stop by the Tor office for a chat with your husband and his boss. Would that suit you? And that's just for starters.

And I'm not KN. Believe whatever you want. I'm just irritated beyond belief by the arrogance and ignorance of your acolytes.

I've had enough though. It's like baiting alien space monkeys from the land of snow and mist. LOL.

Aloha

JF"

I think that is a flounce worthy of being considered a Platonic Paragon.

Well flounced, Julie.

Regards,
Scott

The pitch-happy aspiring writers often seem to overlook the fact that a first-class stamp and a decent query letter can also get material requested. Maybe it's the fact that with a pitch conference, the feedback is immediate, and you don't have to wait. Maybe it's the idea of being face to face with a real live publishing professional. (Zoinks!)

Whatever it is they're getting out of it, I'm happy that they're happy; but I wish they'd stop talking about pitch sessions as if they were a required writer skill, because as far as I can tell they aren't. I've sent out queries that got agents and editors to ask for more material, and I'm a nobody. If I can do it, they should be able to, too. But they don't see that -- they just think pitch sessions are a really great opportunity to get their books in front of Real! Live! Editors! And then some of them try to go sell that theory to other aspiring writers as the One True Way, which just irks the hell out of me.

Strangely, they are often the same people who want to submit everything via e-mail because it costs so much to send a manuscript thorough the post.

Sorry, darling, we were too busy with the scales for me to make a sensible reply. And I will reply to emails, I will, I'm just... hopeless. Sorry.

That class of writer also seems to think that spending money on writing-related activities is proof that you're serious about writing.

Yes, thank you Aconite. Excellent point. The lovely modern American: How can you know I am serious unless I spent money? The inverse argument of "You get what you pay for." Maybe we should call them "designer writers" no, "designer authors" instead, that way we can't get them mixed up?

Strangely, they are often the same people who want to submit everything via e-mail because it costs so much to send a manuscript thorough the post.

Not so strange, they're lying. The other modern American fault: trained to instant gratification. e-mail is the next best thing to face time ... it's faster! Like kids who are willing to pay the College Board an extra $20 ($50?) bucks to get their SAT scores e-mailed before they show up in the mail a week later. They'll say it's the cost, but it's actually the speed, or at least the illusion of speeed: you know the editor got it faster, so you will get a response quicker.

Regarding my comment at 169 - that was meant kiddingly. ;) I have no special "inside knowledge" to the workings of "Julie Field's" mind. I just saw someone link to the Wikipedia entry, followed it, read it, and saw what I saw...

Of course, now I'm curious whether an Atlanta Nights chapter is really going to get submitted, and if so which one. ;)

After I picked my jaw up off the floor, and finished shuddering at the memory of the [printrun price deleted]-worth of defective Braun-Brumfield-printed college textbooks I had a hand in rejecting some time back, I have just one question:

Just how big is your garage, Patrick? Braun-Brumfeld's minimum order would keep you from using a typical one-car attached garage for anything else...

"Rudolf Diesel and his Rational Engine"? That might work.

Susan -- "Jerkin' Retinae." Got it.

We are Toroid Minions if you please,
we are Toroid Henchmen if you don't please.
Here we hanging out at our domicile,
We likey and post a good long while.

Do you see the scammers swimming 'round and 'round? (Yes!)
Maybe we could expose them and make them drown!
If we share publishing information openly
Maybe they no grab money so gropingly

Do you read what she post? (A baby cry!)
Where we finding whining, there are snark nearby.
If we look in business model there could be,
Plenty of snark for you, and maybe some for me.

and then my husband, reading this over my shoulder, notes that five pounds seems rather light for Proper Woman-Breasts, and should we try weighing mine just in the interests of research? ... How my life is enriched by Making Light.

Right, Susan? Right?

[reads #284]

OK, that's it, now I'm ignoring you.

(Didn't even have the decency to protect us from the earworm with ROT-13 a la Kathryn @ 281! Lordy, Lordy!)

I'm so ashamed! I want my teddy!

The P.B. stated in regard to something not related to this thread: "I’d rather have people feel sorry for me than think I was stupid."

Be careful what you wish for; now you've got both.

*CHA/Braun-Brumfield/Lulu.com

Poor, poor dears. If you wanted to count up pro editors laughing at you, you will have to list me, too. I have edited for Harcourt and Knopf. If you want to list pro writers laughing at you, I have shelfloads full of books, stories in little magazines and big, and poems as well.

If you want to count admirers of the N-H and Macdonald crew, count me there. I have been edited by the first and edited the second. Ah yes, we are a cabal.

I will, however, for free (I am feeling generous) tell you the secret word to getting published. No there is no secret handshake. We tell you that to keep you off-balance. The secret word is BIC.

Butt in Chair.

Feel free to pass it on to the poor saps who sign up with your scams. It's all right,. They won't believe it either. But, alas, it's true.

Jane Yolen (to make it easy for you, try www.janeyolen.com)

But a lot of the time, editors say yes because we want to be kind. And then the writer goes off thinking, "I'm in!" when often (usually?) all it means is that the writer gets a personalized rejection rather than a photocopied one.

At a house like Tor, where we have an open submissions policy, I'm not sure that taking a pitch from a brand-new writer makes one bit of difference. Interestingly, many-published authors also sign up for pitch sessions. That can make a difference by making a brief connection that may be followed up on later.

And sometimes this happens: I was at a conference last year where I overheard one of the people who pitched to me saying to a companion, in essence, "I pitched to three people and they all gave me the same advice, to stop trying to sell Project A and finish and try to sell Project B but I don't want to do it because I really love Project A."

I wonder if Project A will ever be finished?

*startled blink*

That's a generic sort of "you", right?

On your song, while it certainly doesn't resemble the lyrics belonging to any humor-impaired company, I do note that it loses the internal rhymes that one might expect if it did resemble any such lyrics. It nonetheless beats my modest effort all to flinders in its completion and general evilness.

ba boom, boom boom

Gak! earworm! earworm! make it stop! I've had that friggen bass drum riff stuck in my head since I read this.

The Deputy Chief Medical Examiner of New York says that being in sewage might slightly hasten decomposition, since it is a bacterial process, and being in a bacteria-rich environment might have some minor effect, but overall it doesn't make much difference since it's the internal bacteria that count, not the external bacteria. Twenty times faster is definitely a made-for-TV statistic.

(After giving this answer he got a certain gleam in his eye and started to expound on the possibilities if there were rats in the sewage, but I cut him off, since I don't share the local capacity to eat dinner while hearing about these things.)

While we are disclaiming, my "We are Toroid" lyrical musing should in no way be taken as my working for Tor or any business relationship with such as I do not and have not. My only contact, beyond reading what they have published, is meeting some editors at conventions. And they are all most wonderful people, really.

Also, GREG, DON'T READ POST #298! I tried to warn you.

Oddly enough, I only know "Lady and the Tramp" from one of those misbegotten school chorus things where we had to sing songs from various Disney films. I've never actually seen the movie.

I have no business connection with Tor unless you count one of my ex-boyfriend's other ex-girlfriends having sold a few books to Tor long after we had become friends, compared notes, and both ditched the jerk. I have about the social connections with Tor one would expect from a nonpro who socializes in New York-area fandom, which sometimes seems to be populated entirely by former Tor interns.

Susan, no worries. And, ah, (looking nervously around) me no speakaty HTML. No, no. Nobody home.

This was a fun (and enlightening) way to spend my working day (don't tell my boss).

#215 (C.E.): Thanks for the DNSStuff link. I have a feeling that is going to come in handy for many of us (me, I'm just nosy but some of you will put that to great use researching the disemvowelled, I hope that I never fall into that category).

Also don't know if this link has been posted yet (I combed the page a few times and didn't find it) but here's another lovely excerpt from Ms. Noonan's "Backwoods East Jesus."

Deep In The Reverend's Closet--K. Noonan

Can anyone help me figure out what she means by saying someone was "pooter-faced?" And just for fun, I did a find to see how many times the word "like" popped up in the fiction excerpt because it's all over her poorly written blog.

Seven times. Seems like a lot of like for a small excerpt.

Also--Does anyone have any idea why she yanked the blog so quickly? She posted here yesterday (#30) telling you all that no amount of flaming would make her shut down the blog and yet the blog was shut down 24 hours later.

Seems odd.

Gunmen of the Apocalypse : even if people didn't get the reference, it's still a good name (Guns, Men, Apocolypse - what's not to like?)

I feel like years from now I might recall this thread and say "I was there on Saint Crispin's day."

reminds me of something else which makes the same allusion: this peculiar encomium, which James Nicoll characterized as "How Jim Baen saved SF, Earth and the universe from commie leftist nihilistic postmodern anti-Western New Wave Literati."

(He's only kidding about the universe.)

It gets kicked around like a battered soccer ball here.

Did you notice that because Josephine has to go to work, Mark has to take care of the baby, but said baby apparently vanishes into the ether when Josephine calls him over? No sign of it at any point, Mark clearly doing two-handed tasks.

Of course, to notice that I had to actually read all her painfully broken sentences. Yuck.

My best guess at "pooter-faced" is that it's derived from a childish mispronunciation of "pouter" or "pouty".

I should also point out that the MFAs of my acquaintance have been people of remarkable discernment and taste, being as they were often effusive in their praise of MY writing and wit. Not that this will have influenced my opinion in any way. But seriously, if the various sock puppetry that's popped up here recently actually had MBAs, I'd have to say, it can't have been from a very rigorous or selective program. They ain't none of them Alice Sebold or Michael Chabon, that's for damn' sure.

Regards,
Scott

(Which is why real scholars don't say "where did you study?" as much as they say, "who did you study with?")

"When Mark turned back to the floaters in his sad bowl of cereal, he found his father's black eyes directly on him. It jolted him slightly; those eyes were scary dead like a tarantula's."

Raised a nostalgic smile.

"Ahhhh - he has his grandfather's eyes."
"Gomez, take those out of his cereal."

OK, slight word slippage, but still.

NB: This post is not intended to advocate putting your father's black eyes in your sad cereal bowl. The nutritional value of your father's eyes has not yet been established. But if they are that scary dead, imagine how terrifying they would be if they had been alive, bobbing about like things which are slightly bigger than rabbit turds.

I also just want to comment, briefly, about... well, I've noticed some disparagement of MFAs. I'm a graduate student right now. I'm at USC. It's technically an MPW, or "Master's in Professional Writing," rather than an MFA, but a lot of my fellow classmates put "MFA in Professional Writing" on their resumes.

We're not all assholes. I've been a struggling, unpublished writer for a lot of years (and I probably will be for several more), but I needed this, and I've been lucky... well. I don't know if USC's program is remarkably different from others (it may well be. It was the only one I applied to. I didn't want to go to Iowa, or NYU, or Columbia), but it's been a godsend for me. I've learned a lot from Patrick and Teresa and Jim and Will over the years (Will, especially, and for that I thank him), but the progress I've made at USC in a few months has staggered me.

I registered my first screenplay with the Writers' Guild today, in fact. I hand it to an uber-producer tomorrow. And I'm only writing this right now because my class with Syd Field was cancelled. I have class with Sid Stebel on Mondays (who may not have written a whole lot, no, but check out what Bradbury said about him. And he's cool).

So far, I've studied fiction with Rachel Resnick, who doesn't write in the genre I prefer but managed to give me excellent feedback, anyway; Ted Post, who goes way back with Jim Harris (who produced Kubrick's "Lolita," and, yes, helped Kubrick write it [though it's credited to Nabokov]) and Richard Mattheson (and I probably don't need to tell you what he wrote); Coleman Hough, who worked with Soderbergh on "Full Frontal" and "Bubble"; and Irvin Kershner, who directed "The Empire Strikes Back."

It's been the sort of experience I never dreamed of because I simply didn't know it was possible.

I don't mean to act as wounded-feelings writer guy, here, or anything, but I've learned, over the years, how smart everyone here really is, and I just had to mention all that.

Owen King, son of Stephen and a friend of mine, has an MFA from Columbia.

He's not a douchebag. He's one of the funniest, wittiest, and genuine people I know.

"Send it out. Keep sending it out. Ignore all the bullshit tricks for getting past the slushpile. If it's good, someone will buy it."

Worked for me. Tooks years but it worked.

All who spoke up in defense of MFA's: thanks. I knew it couldn't be as bad as it looked.

point. ;)

...sometimes I come here just to find new vocabulary words.

I know Kaley Noonan.

Well, not personally, but visiting kaleynoonan-com was deja vu. A former beau of mine was looking to get some webwork/promo writing done and somehow she was on the list of locals he had. I was asked to take a look at their respective websites to see if the html code was sound on the inside (one of my particular sorts of geekery).

I don’t recall the evaluation, nor am I inspired to do so now, though he did go with someone else.

The fun part is that apparently he & Noonan overlap in some ways, and I’ve now an excuse to call him (and not incoincidentally twit him about forgetting my birthday.)

Wow–small world. Guess I know what’ll be cocktail gossip in it soon enough :)

Never again.

(Of course, I was trying to sell horror and then SF at a mainstream writer's conference. Shudder).

At one point, I was somewhat involved in the planning part of this conference for a year or two(which shall remain Anonymous to protect the innocent, save that I will identify it as being in Portland, Oregon and that its claim to fame was getting Jean Auel started). IIRC, the editors got some $ cut from the pitch sessions. The pitch sessions were viewed as money-makers for the conference organization.

After a couple of years, I started going to SF conventions (Orycon and Westercon, in particular). The writing advice was much, much better, the writing networking was better, and the cost of the con was *extremely* cheaper than any conference I've seen out there advertised as a "writer's" conference.

And...the editors at a SF con are much more interesting and entertaining. Especially at room parties....

Pity JF and their lot are so thin skinned that they have to stand up and provide us something to whack at... great sport for us, tho.

I have to said I read Land of Mist and Snow and I loved it. In fact I started it on their web site and said, 'this won't do, gotta BUY it so I can carry and read it until I finish it..."

I aspire some day to write that well.

Something struck me today, while thinking about this affair: "Julie Field" likely got more personal attention from professional writers and commercial editors in the course of this thread than she likely got at the Pitch and Shop she's pimping, and she didn't have to pay $600 to get it.

By the way, James, leading with those opening chapters of The Land of Mist and Snow was a bit nasty, but only in that it cost me the extra fuel to drive across town since I couldn't wait until morning for the strip mall store to open...

i'm very glad i went to art school; i learned leagues more than i would have staying home & drawing. both my technique & my direction would be nothing like they are, had i not done four years of art school (well, three ana half).

& i loved school, but i had no doubt that once i was done with it, i was done with it. the mfa programs i have heard of seem kind of like the writing mfa programs you have described: too much snobbery, theory, & patting each other on the back, fervently believing that an extra degree is better than extra talent/skill/something to say.

when i graduated, a perpetual-art-student friend of mine told me that bfa secretly stands for "bachelor's of f**k-all." that pleased me very much. & i guess that means that our sensitive literary trolls are masters of f**k-all.

#333: Nothing against MFAs here. All you people with degrees look alike to me.

#337: "Does it really surprise anyone that applying fandom terms to literary folks is like throwing Mentos in Diet Coke?" Don't know why, unless you think "fandom" and "literature" are exclusive sets. A lifelong lumper, I say fie. It's all literature. It's all fandom.

I don't know about other disciplines, but in medieval studies, "where and when" is a signifier of who in the larger sense. While my advisor has had a significant influence, those who taught my classes have also put their stamp on my research methods, my understanding of my subject in the broader context of place and time, and certainly in my writing/editing process. And someone who knows the faculty of this particular institution can trace certain bits and pieces back to specific people. When I've gone to conferences, I have been asked first for my affiliation, and then for with whom I'm studying (sometimes, it's unfortunate to obviously be a student. Sometimes, it's useful). Now, if who my advisor is had an obvious bearing on my specialty, it would give colleagues a lot more clues to what I do..."Oh, you must do French lit then!" "Not really, no. My French is atrocious." "But....."

The interviewer told me "Staff must never criticise a student's work, even if they ask for criticism. That is grounds for firing."

I think I had a brief tourettes moment, as in, "What the fuck are they teaching them then?" I had been jurying ConQuesT's art show for several years at that point and was just dumbfounded. I also went, "I am sorry I wasted your time, you don't need someone like me on staff, I am a consumer of art as well as a professional writer, and if they can't take criticism, that is a problem because the rest of the world, including the world they'll sell their artwork to, is critical."

And as a published writer, I know that if you fold at the first criticism, you just don't need to be there. Got taught that in college, where I was a journalism major and had Jehovah for my first editing professor (John Bremner, 6 foot +, curling white hair and beard, God-like voice, etc.). I write what I write, and if I feel it is good enough to submit to publish, I take what an editor says to heart, that it will make the piece beter. or that it's crap. or whatever.

(though I admit to having a really craptacular day when i worked for the ad agency, stopped at my PO box and got a really nasty rejection from MZB and melted down....I was just so worn down that that was a Last Straw. I revised and actually sold the story elsewhere.

1) Way up near the top, two limericks. I hate people who can write limericks, except when I ask: Dave Bell and Dan Layman-Kennedy, can I infuse some of your stem cells so my brain will write limericks, too?

2) I thought I was having browser trouble, but this was probably intentional. For me, some posts (including nos. 113, 116, 121, 123, and 126) come up blank. Please do not repeat the text, but tell me what deleted them. The moderators? My ISP? A department of the Federal Government that I don't even want to think about?

I also note that while the search "Kaley Noonan" doesn't (yet) result in ML, the first result for "Kaley Noonan writing" also is this thread.

And Kaley Noonan, this result isn't specific to you. It's just that ML has lots of Googlejuice*. Whatever they write about will get linked to Making Light. For example, look up "oathbreakers" or "freelance gig".

The sad part is, you (KN) could learn a lot, here. Our Good Hosts routinely hand out great advice on many diverse subjects, often related to writing and its Industries**.

* ML doesn't just have 20,000 readers, it has thousands of links from other sites to it. Google's algorithms consider this a good thing. Powerful stuff, googlejuice.

** by 'hand out' I mean write extended essays filled with insiders knowledge. I, for instance, learned how to throw a parties for hundreds of people. It went very well, thanks to TNH's essay on same: she's an expert on throwing even larger parties.

I've spent the last few years giving myself an unofficial PhD in a discipline which has few places that actually grant degrees, none of them particularly local to me. Its all about who I studied with. (Power twin: the past tense is only because I've been shoved out of the intellectual nest to fly on my own now.) His influence is all over both my dancing and my teaching and always will be.

That said, once I finish my unofficial thesis, I'd still like to shop around for somewhere that will then admit me to a PhD program, since that would give me an excuse to spend a few more years studying full-time and filling in background material.

(I live my life backwards: quit job, then buy house. Write book translating several hundred pages of Italian, then learn Italian.)

And the rest of it was very entertaining as well. Is it always so... invigorating? There goes another hour of my day.

I tried. I really did.

According to one of the pieces of metadata I could dig up, the novel is supposed to be about "incest, anarchy and the twisted Christian values of a small Ohio town," i.e. three nouns that don't seem to add up to a story. After reading two chapters, I'm still not seeing a story. But that's okay. I'm not the sharpest tool in the drawer— I could be completely missing the ineluctable transcendant beauty of the thing, for all my wanking over the game of guess the plot.

Alas, my head exploded when I read the following excerpt.

"I'll make time." She began a dance, one hand holding onto the boot. "Gonna go to the store for a Hostess Treat. Skipping out of class to eat. Don't care what the nuns do to me." She smacked the honey filter with her lips. "Hostess Treat. I'll give you a Hostess Treat." Josephine grabbed the front of his gray slacks. "Come here, boy, let me feel your Twinkies."

"Jesus!" Mark shoved her hand away. "My Twinkies are not yours to touch," he said primly.

"Oh really? What about your Ring Ding?" Josephine laughed and paused, serious for a second. "Think about all the Hostess Treats you can turn into bad words. Twinkies. Ring Dings. Sno Balls." She shoved him, then. " ‘Excuse me sir, may I lick your Sno Balls?' "

Mark stopped walking. "You are foul," he said.

"Oh come on," she said and grabbed his arm.

After they'd walked about ten feet, Mark said solemnly, "Jo."

"What."

"I know you want it up the Ho-Ho."

I'm going to print this out and tape it to the wall over my workstation, to help me get through the next time I'm staring at my horrible manuscript, wondering whatever possessed me to think writing would be a worthwhile expenditure of my time.

Of course, I'm probably just revealing my prejudice against "literary fiction" again. Who am I to judge the merits of this sparkling and provocative dialogue, eh? It could be fookinbrilliant, and I wouldn't know. Watch: Backwoods East Jesus will be sitting on the front table at West Portal Books next month, and I'll be like, totally, embarrassed.

Or, maybe not.

Maybe my experience with folks aiming for literature is not as typical as I thought. (There is hope yet.) But disemvowelment in a person's first post fits in with what I've seen when people from outside the Geek Hierarchy feel that people from inside it are assuming too much common ground.

My gods. I've read bad fanfiction, but that is *really* pushing for prizes in purple prose. I haven't seen anything so awful since the time I decided to work my way through the "Lord of the Rings" section of fanfiction.net alphabetically by author. I quit *that* at the e's, because I decided no matter what the karmic crime I'd committed, I'd surely atoned for it well and truly.

[Oh, and purely for statistical purposes: I wouldn't describe myself as a writer, since the only stuff I've written is fanfiction, and the only place it's been published is on the 'net. However, I would count myself as an experienced *reader*, and as such, capable of judging good and bad writing.]

My god! Travis Tea is real! Ms Noonan must be a pseudonym. No wonder she is pissed at Teresa, what with her pretending to have written a chapter of Atlanta Nights. It's like The Dark Half, only lamer and with Twinkies.

Arrrrrrgh! It burns! It burns! I must wash out my eyes with...tar! No, soy sauce!

Gawd is that terrible. I go away for a day and come back to find KN excerpts that explode the soul. What a world! What a crazy, crazy world.

Any one of her mistakes is a mistake anyone could make. Taken all together, they're something else again.

(Someday, in the far future, a student who's set the translation of the preceding two sentences as an exercise in their Ancient Terrestrial English class is going to curse my name.)

I really like that idea, but I suggest an improvement to your second sentence:

Taken all together, they're something different altogether.

Because why stop at slightly sadistic if you can go for truly horrible. :D

We have been gently shallow-frying Ms Noonan's coterie about her inability to spell Teresa, but Teresa herself has been prone to inserting an extra "y" in Kaley, thus rendering it Kayley.

This does not invalidate any of the substantive points that have been made about misrepresentations of expertise, writing both good and bad, the tension between Art and Money, et cetera, in verse and prose.

----
* You all do have one, don't you? Hanging about in your brain in a rumpled mac and a deceptively baffled expression, bringing up inconsistencies? No?

Oh, well.

(And the latter group seem to have a better handle on what the PW's L entails, i.e. financial insecurity, hard work, and lots of folks having very weird ideas about how you live.)

As I read all these comments, I keep thinking: where is Mike Ford now that we really need him?

JaneY

Sweet Madre Dios. Everday, in every class, we had critique.

Although this explains many experiences I've had working with other professionals in the design field.

Not quite the same thing, but I know from my friend's progress through Harvard's Graduate School of Design that they had regular critiques, which were apparently intense, detailed, and sometimes quite savage.

(Ultra-nit-picky-ness: "Madre de Dios")

Wouldn't that be "Madre Diosa"? Or is that a word Starhawk made up for that, uh, novel of hers?

I wonder if people in those programs develop their own code? I knew one instructor who, when she had nothing positive to say at all, would say, with painful enthusiasm, "I wonder how this would look outside? In natural light?" Eventually we all learned that this meant "I can find nothing redeeming about this piece at all, oh god, it burns, make it go away."

I rather suspect that anybody in a job where they were supposed to give critique but could not criticize student art at all might find themselves doing something similiar, and then the students have to learn to translate if they want to get any better.

Seems complicated.

(sobbing)

I'll never be able to eat another Ho-Ho again!

(points finger accusingly)

you ruined them for me!

You want awful? Try the Professional Wrestler Real People Fic.

(BTW, when you Google on Kaley Noonan this thread is now the fifth hit.)

But, as Teresa said back at #74, Kaley isn't a villain. She just tried to guerilla-market these pitch sessions (which may or may not have some value for some people) and got caught, giving us a little glimpse into the demimonde of 4theluv lit'ry fanzines.

For villainy, you have to look (again as Teresa said) to folks like:

American Book Publishing (a vanity press run by C. (for Cheryl) Lee Nunn (a former financial planner who lost her license for churning clients' accounts in order to generate fees).

Linda Dockery (AKA "The Book Doctor") a lady who took Todd Pierce's advice to "Lie a little. Yes, lie" about publications and awards and ran it into the ground, who used those credentials to appear at various writers' conferences and workshops as an expert on writing and publishing. (Todd Pierce is part of the reason MFAs are held in low repute around here.)

Barbara Bauer, a particularly obnoxious scam agent.

Robert Fletcher, convicted conman, another very enterprising scam agent.

PublishAmerica, a vanity press that relies on false and misleading advertising to reel in the unwary newbie writers.

D'ye know something? All of those folks, (Fletcher, PublishAmerica, all the rest of them) rely on one thing for their pitches: a desire among the newbies to "bypass the slush pile."

Also, am I misremembering or were Ring Dings once called Ding Dongs?

Lately I've been more into the cupcakes with little squiggles of icing on top of them, so this, um, memorable imagery isn't going to spoil my junk food habit.

Only from the standpoint that "there mother must be proud" would not be an acceptable critique of the piece (critique the work, not the person). Mine was undergraduate, and to give an example of the detail and intensity of our critiques, as a class we pooled our money and bought our Package Design professor a new box of red markers, because he must have gone through a whole box in critique. And you haven't lived until a prof calls your work, "Crap" and pulls it off the wall to throw on the floor. One prof also had a hand-held sign that read, "Do NOT use the 'L' word" (as in "I like this...").

And, yes, it was Mother God. Also, most speakers of the phrase omit the "de/of" or swallow that part. There is also a musical group by that name.

email thingie that will generate a response: http://www.kellymccullough.com/mail.html

WP 691 MFA Lifestyle Orientation
3.00
Lecture/workshop with the aim of helping students learn how to act like they have an MFA. Lectures cover proper kvetching technique concerning non-artiste Establishment; rejecting crass commercialism, including especially the mythical "steady living" and "student loan repayments"; balancing presentation of the student's artistic and technical shortcomings with arrogance; writing with authority after neglecting basic subject-matter research, knowledge, and/or analysis; misapprehending others' comments as criticisms of the Artistismus or self-invented technical language concerning the Artistismus (especially relying upon inept translations); and condescendingly criticizing all who disagree with the student's work, approach to Art, and/or personal hygiene and appearance. Optional laboratory sessions on advanced techniques of substance abuse and child support collection and avoidance (lab fee: $37).
</sarcasm>

If you think I'm somehow antiacademic, you should ponder why I found it necessary to add the HTML tags missing from the language definition to the above.

"I rather suspect that anybody in a job where they were supposed to give critique but could not criticize student art at all might find themselves doing something similiar, and then the students have to learn to translate if they want to get any better."

Try law professors — there's never a "translation problem" there. Of course, since that's not an entirely human subset...

Wouldn't that be "Madre Diosa"? Or is that a word Starhawk made up for that, uh, novel of hers?

Hmm... the standard Spanish (Catholic) phrase, I which assumed Steve was referring to, is "Madre de Dios" = "Mother of God" = "God's Mother." (Actually, I just noticed that Steve said that many speakers swallow the "de", so that it sounds like "Madre Dios", which wouldn't surprise me.)

But "madre" is also an adjective, so you could say "madre dios" = "mother god"[*]; "madre diosa" would then be "mother goddess".

[*] With a sense similar, I think, to the English translation (either male mother god or mother god of unspecified gender).

(UPenn. '81. Springer, Rosier, Irving, Wentzel, Lloyd. The sf/fantasy field is full of defrocked medievalists.)

This reminds me of something that really irritated me about Stephen King's writing in several of his books: the brand-name dropping. It would keep pulling me up and out of the story, while my mental imagery went racing off on the equivalent of a Google search (but in a paleo-Google epoch) trying to figure out from assorted clues in the story what it was he was trying to summon up. I never worked out until they started advertising here whether 'Chinos' were trousers or shoes, for instance. At least with Donaldson's sprinkling in of eccentric & obscure vocabulary, a simple check in a good dictionary was enough.

In its culture, King's habit was probably quite effective & evocative. Outside the culture, it was like using in-jokes, slang, or jargon to subtly exclude Not Us, or at least indicate that we aren't interested in communicating to anyone else. Ian Fleming would use brands in a slightly different way; I've heard there's a strand of modern writing that follows & overextends him in the snobbish line.

Mea cupola.

What? What did I say now? Oh, bother.

I kind of like "Her mouth was filled with broken promises."

For much more -- and much worse -- of this kind of thing, I would like to recommend some books by Bill Pronzini. (And I would think that most Making Light readers will enjoy these thoroughly.) They are out of print, but used copies are readily available:

Gun in Cheek
Son of Gun in Cheek
Six-Gun in Cheek

They are compilations of great (in an alternative sense of "great") lines and plot points from mysteries (the first two) and Westerns (the third). Like:

"She...unearthed one of her fantastic breasts from the folds of her sheath skirt." --Michael Avallone

"Tolefree heard the car door bang, a deep voice exploring the soles of its owner's boots, and footsteps in the hall." --R.A.J. Walling

"I felt as gay and feverish and as desperate and inadequate as a lover in a t.b. ward." --Milton K. Ozaki

"Camping in a deep barranca, daylight burst over the mountains to find the Legionnaires in saddle." --Walker A. Tompkins

"'Got you spotted,' he apostrophized the hidden rifleman." --Leslie Scott

See, it's not so hard to get out of the slush pile and get published after all!

As for "She...unearthed one of her fantastic breasts from the folds of her sheath skirt." --Michael Avallone... I had to drop by the grocery store yesterday, so I took advantage of that to verify how voluminous 5-pound bags of flour. Susan was right.

he apostrophized???

Good Lord.

We may occasionally put the boots into them, but brethren and sistern, let me tell you, anything we say is as nothing - nothing! - compared with the constant assault they mount on us.

(*) Because, and I quote, he had taken a wrong turn at 'Albuquoique'.

Jane

"Also, am I misremembering or were Ring Dings once called Ding Dongs?"

Ring Dings are by Drake's Cakes, a NE regional brand. (When I was really little, there were Ring Dings and Ring Ding Jrs. The former were huge; at least 4" across. Juniors were for lunch boxes. Now they're the default.)

Ding Dongs, AKA King Don's, are by Hostess.

While Hostess snacks were around when I was a kid, for some reason Ding Dongs weren't distributed in my area, and I thought the name was made up for the purposes of a parody song. It was a weird experience seeing them (and "Ho-Hos", the Hostess version of Drake's Yodels) for real.

SF/F is full of medievalists who have found a paying (*gasp*) outlet other than academia. Or in addition to sitting in the ivory tower. We've got some of the richest/most "accurate" source material for the most common setting of Fantasy, and had it pounded into our heads for 4, 6, or 10 years. *grins* And then we add the hobbyists and the numbers get staggering.

And while I'm here...what book of Ms. Doyle's would you start a new reader on? I ask the accumulated wisdom, because I can't decide!

I'm still thinking about the overall subject of pitch sessions. I have a couple more bits of fact-checking to do before I say anything at length.

This is a wonderful thread. It's made me laugh out loud too many times to count. I keep slowing down appreciatively as I read it. How often do you get to see Jane Yolen pull rank, with all the ruffles and flourishes? Then Charles Petit did it too, only he used a different (if equally daunting) set of them. And I have to pass on Paula Helm Murray's story about the art school policy to my father-in-law, who taught art for many years.

Busy, busy, busy. Must get back to work.

They almost put a loin cloth on the Wookie.

Land of Mist and Snow is also a swell book and a good place to start, and at the moment it's also easier to find. Keep an eye out for the allegorical personifications.

<p lang="EN-SARC"></p>

...with "SARK" as the alternate version for languages that use a variation on the Greek spelling instead of the Latin:

<p lang="FI-SARK"></p>

But the real question about this much-needed addition to the XHTML spec is how the companies that make web browsers and other user agents should handle the default presentation for information marked up in this way. Screen readers would definitely need a separate "sarcastic voice" in each supported languages.

It's my official recommendation that graphical browsers refrain from visually differentiating text marked up as sarcasm unless the user presses a special key combination to indicate that he or she didn't get the joke. A unique key combination is essential; ctrl+W+T+F is recommended as the default combination.

Once this special combination is activated, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and most other browsers should cause the text marked up as sarcasm to flash in a sequence of eye-catching colors, perhaps accompanied by an embedded sound effect.

Internet Explorer should not recognize the designated key combination. Instead, a special-edition extended Microsoft keyboard should be made available, and should include a large, easily located special key marked with the interrobang (‽ or ?!, for those with less gifted browsers). When the user presses this special key, all text marked up as sarcasm should flash twice in neon green, and then Internet Explorer should close itself and the user should be logged out of his or her computer.

Lynx and other text-only browsers should ignore the markup entirely, as it's assumed that users of such browsing agents possess sufficient cognitive sophistication (and experience with the archaic customs of the pre-Netscape 2 interweb) to recognize sarcasm without the provision of additional interface cues.

I swear,sometimes nothing makes me feel like a humorless old fart more than reading about The Industry that employs me.

"Wetuwn, my wuv, I want you awways beside me..."

"Oh Bwunhilde, you'we so wuvwy"

"Yes, I know it, I can't help it..."

Oh hell. There goes *my* productivity for the rest of the week.

Serge--I'm constantly wondering that sort of thing.

Oh, btw, here you go.

And while I'm here...what book of Ms. Doyle's would you start a new reader on? I ask the accumulated wisdom, because I can't decide!

I assume you mean starting on SF/F? While I like TNH's choices, my favorite is actually Knight's Wyrd published and (I believe) still available through Scholastic.

You're welcome!

In an episode of "Rocko's Modern Life," Rocko and his pal Heifer (who's actually a young bull) go to a dude ranch, where the latter is accidentally hooked up to a milking machine. In one of the last scenes, Heifer and the machine and having a tearful farewell by a campfire.

Is that the Art Institute that's a chain of Art Schools around the country? Because if so - my first bit of advice to anyone looking at art school is to not go there. I have yet to see someone come out of there better than they went in. I will also say that your story does not surprise me - not one little bit.

"Wwabbit twacks" Bwahahaha.

ala #360: I've now had a detailed discussion with a half-dozen people of varying levels of dirty-minded proclivity; and NONE of us think that using the plural twinkies instead of the more obvious (and singular) twinkie makes any sense.

A twinkie is a spongy tube with a creamy white filling. Having a twinkie is a rather obvious phallic allusion. Having more than one seems to imply vestigial genitalia.

While there's certainly a spot on someone's bookshelves somewhere for a "highbrow lit" exploration of the intersection of romantic attraction and abnormal sexual organs, based on the excerpt at hand I have to think that wasn't really the allusion she was going for.

I am tempted to illustrate all of this with a blog post and pictures (ala the "Helm's Deep in Candy" Particle) using actual Hostess baked goods...but I'm quite sure that once we get to the Twinkie vs. Ho-Ho visual I'd be breaking decency laws somewhere.

That somewhere might well be my own mind.

Ditto. I just swoon and giggle every time it shows up.

Don't let's all forget that we're talking two separate Bugs episodes here, the Rabbit of Seville and What's Opera Doc.

Hey now, nothing wrong with pendulous breasts...

...um, maybe they're turbocharged V6 cows? As a born-and-bred suburbanite, your remarks caused me to Google "cow udders" to find out how many teats are accurate, and was promptly rewarded with cow udder eclairs. Thankfully, there are no pictures, but they're not just called that for visual resemblance though I think (or at least desperately hope) that the recipe is bogus anyway.

Must be an Issey Miyake skirt. I can't think of any other designer offhand who could manage something like that...

Or am I even less fashion-savvy than I think I am?

Let's find out... One, two, three.... four.

Four.

I assume you mean The Fifth Sacred Thing, which wasn't very good.

Mez #388: At least with Donaldson's sprinkling in of eccentric & obscure vocabulary, a simple check in a good dictionary was enough.

Only if he actually uses the word correctly, which with Donaldson is NOT a given. I'm convinced that for Lord Foul's Bane Donaldson just ran his writing through some kind of Thesaurificator or something, without paying much attention. I can't stand Donaldson. "The horses were almost prostrate upon their feet" is one of his laughably clumsy sentences. If you don't have command of the vocabulary, you shouldn't try to use it.

Also, I find a protagonist who's a rapist—even though he thinks it's all a dream—impossible to identify with or enjoy reading about.

As for King, in its own culture the brand-name dropping (why does that phrase make me think of highly-advertised shit? Or maybe it's the phrase 'Stephen King' that does that) seems like what it is: product placement. His horror fiction is all schlock in my opinion.

Karl Kindred #427: A twinkie is a spongy tube with a creamy white filling. Having a twinkie is a rather obvious phallic allusion.

A twinkie (or twink, these days) is also a young gay man, usually 18-22 or so, and generally not terribly muscular.

Shall I admit that one of my nicknames for my aa-of-ten-days-ago ex was "my cream-filled twinkie"? No, perhaps I'd better not admit that.

I'm at an Art Institute (Seattle) right now for culinary, and it's pretty good. It's not the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) or Cordon Bleu, but then, if I'd wanted one of those, I'd've gone there instead. (The CIA scares me.) I won't speak for any of the other departments, though. I never see anything with which I am impressed up on the walls, and the general education classes are abysmal. (I'm currently in a Public Speaking class, taught by a man who averages 2.4 "um"s per sentence, who cannot coherently present a story or lecture, and who speaks in a monotone.)

I'll admit I enjoyed both books. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I'm not about to argue ad sales figures because that way lies madness (cf. The Da Vinci Code, Left Behind, Eragon).

But it was not to be. :'-(

That said, I take it as more 'straight SF' with The Land of Mist and Snow as SF&F and requiring a bit more of a cognitive jump to get in tune with.

"YMMV", "Objects in the mirror..."

Maybe somebody has seen a synopsis or a hook or something for Backwoods East Jesus and can comment. Who knows? It could be the narrator knows full well that the sexualization of Hostess food-like products is a good way to twist the knife while she goes about squicking the reader with incest between Christian anarchists in Ohio. (For my part, I'm a lot more interested in the anarchy than the incest, but Ms. Noonan hasn't delivered any anarchy in the excerpts she's gotten published on the web. Why, Ms. Noonan, why did you make me carry this VW Microbus all the way up this hill?)

Oh, and Greg (#376)? Sorry about that, but you know they're bad for your diet, right? You'll thank me later.

I was just doing this in email.

"Your riprese?"

"Sparti, definitely Sparti. My saltarello too."

"Yeah, me too. Via Bourrassa. As opposed to -----, who's definitely a Brainard."

The comparison to lineages is perfect.

(Despite my best efforts to NOT fall back into the 15thc, I am about to venture forth into battle on behalf of the Sparti lineage against both the Brainard descendants and the Other One. Like I have time for this detour.)

Sorry, you're making me think of:

"HaHA! You're using Bonetti's defense against me!"

"I thought it appropriate, given the rocky terrain."

"You must have expected that I would counter with Capo Ferra."

"I find that Tybalt cancels out Capo Ferra. Don't you?"

"Unless your opponent has studied his Agrippa. Which I have."

Even if he did have two "Twinkies" of his very own AND they were BOTH stuffed inside his grey slacks (still not entirely out of the realm of possibility) the rest of the conversation still plays out awkwardly. It does add a bit of subtext to the whole "take it up the Ho-Ho" line though...actually, maybe you're on to something...

Either way, the resulting visual aids using real Hostess baked goods violate many expressed and implied rules of decency and good taste.

Damn funny, but a violation none the less.

Even if he did have two "Twinkies" of his very own AND they were BOTH stuffed inside his grey slacks (still not entirely out of the realm of possibility) the rest of the conversation still plays out awkwardly. It does add a bit of subtext to the whole "take it up the Ho-Ho" line though...actually, maybe you're on to something...

Either way, the resulting visual aids using real Hostess baked goods violate many expressed and implied rules of decency and good taste.

Damn funny, but a violation none the less.

Now that I've had a chance to think a bit more about it -- shouldn't it be "diosa madre" (or "dios madre")? Or is "madre" being used in a more figurative sense (e.g., "pobre hombre" vs "hombre pobre")? Or is "madre" just atypical as Spanish adjectives go?

Of course, "mother god" sounds somewhat odd in English; does "madre dios"/"dios madre" sound more odd, if you can make such a comparison?

It's an interesting world, one which I see from the outside, being almost entirely self-taught. And that messes with some heads.

JaneY

Barbara Gordon (446) "...is there a name for the listing of one's physical or spiritual progenitors?"

Yes. It's called "being Mormon".

I took it as a life (art) lesson to remember and think more people should as well.

JaneY

I mean, by definition, a sheath skirt isn't cut to have folds, unless there's some confusion present between "fold" and "kick pleat" going on, and since those are usually in the back, at the bottom edge of the skirt, I'm really having trouble imagining breasts there. Same with folds = pockets, really.

What MMORPG term? I'm curious.

... most of my other points have been covered, thoroughly and delightfully, and the conversation has moved on.

(I still get author-squee on here. )

The use of "madre diosa" and "diosa madre" depends on context.

Pero ¡Madre de dios! ¿Qué debo hacer con esa confusión entre la santa madre del salvador del mundo (por llamarle asi y por antonomásia) y las diosas madre de las viejas religiones de la zona mediterranea?

In MMORPGs a "twink" is a lower level character who has been set up with the best gear or items by a more powerful and experienced character.

Think: someone who benefits from a virtual sugar-daddy.

That's probably not the exact same definition as the MMPORG one, but I'm guessing it's similar.

And severely tweezes his eyebrows? And keeps his hair products in his hair rather than in his bathroom? And is excessively clean?

As a neo-eclectic upstart with no lineage before the night three of us initiated each other (unless you count my years-later almost-accidental initiation that came directly from the Goddess, in which case my lineage is...still short, but very ancient!), I think this is profoundly silly. But then I would, wouldn't I?

Since Hard-Gard stuffiness has no real power over me, this only annoys me when some Gardnerian brat with half my experience snoots me as "not really Wiccan," because only people "descended" from Gerald himself are "really" Wiccan. Generally I just laugh at them and they go away.

I wish to stress that only a tiny minority of Gardnerians actually snoot other Witches in this way—but all of them know their lineage at least a few steps back, and the High Priestess of any Gardnerian coven has papers to prove she can trace back to Old Gerald.

G. Jules @ 469

In our text-based or table-top RPing that's generally known as a Munchkin. A Munchkin is anyone who uses rules lawyering, ooc knowledge, and strategic character design with one goal: to be the strongest, mightiest, most overpowered person on the block. They often tend to be Mary Sue types as well - wanting to be incredibly handsome and strong and have a never-ending series of girlfriends...

Yet another story of folks who think they should get it all without paying their dues, taking their lumps, or grinding their experience.

There, I knew I'd tie this into the thread somehow!

Also, if I set that kind of trap...I'd find a way to take the gem away, since after all you cheated to get it.

About six years ago, in a different part of the country, I started fencing with a group of people who, as it turned out, had almost exactly the same style and learning/teaching philosophies that I did. Their instructor had learned to fence at a school in L.A. We theorized that their teacher and my teacher learned from the same instructor, back in the day.

Unfortunately I have no way of checking, but it's a neat theory.

The trick was ensuring, like Roger Rabbit, that you only did the smackdown when it was funny.

I'm also trying to figure out why the breasts are fantastic, and I've had this Bette Midler anecdote/quote/attributed quip going through my head since the breast and scales discussion:

Got myself a little mail scale, the kind they weigh postage and cocaine on. Unhooked my bra, flopped one of those suckers down... I won't tell ya how much they weigh but it costs $87.50 to send 'em to Brazil... third class!

I tend to . . . hmm. . . play to win. My defense is that so do actual martial artists and other people who spend ten years training for a ten second fight.

( farther off topic: http://www.gamegrene.com/node/131 )

"What makes you think an academic discussion isn't a formal challenge?" says a jaded survivor of the MLA convention.

Teresa@460:
Yes. It's called "being Mormon".

The grew-up-Southern version is what I call "playing 'who ya kin to'" -- it's a two-person game, and once begun, usually continues until some variety of personal connection is established. Blood relationship (however remote) is best, but in a pinch it can work with something as far-fetched as either you (or one of your close friends or distant relatives) having once lived in the same town as the other person (or one of the other person's close friends or distant relatives.)

This is not the least of her imperfections.

The naming of family connections seems to take up a great deal of my time in 3D social life. That's often because I'll say something and be asked, sharply, "How do you know that?" which leads to explication of who said what at Uncle Mervie's on Christmas Eve.

Okay. I'm glad to see you have nothing against MFAs. And can I just tell you that you were actually the person who inspired the beginning of my decision to return to school and seek a graduate program? Way back, many, many moons ago, on the Well. Because I said talent couldn't be taught in a classroom, and you said probably not, but craft might be (or something to that degree).

And years later, I remembered that. So, first, this is really thank you, because you Nielsen Haydens have really taught me as much about publishing and editing and blogging as USC has taught me about things I haven't yet put my finger on yet (forgive me. I have only just begun, and am yet green around the ink).

But the second part: "All you people with degrees look alike to me"... The only times I've ever heard people say "all you" anything "look alike to me" have been negative (they're all associated with racism, in fact. "A nigger's a nigger." [which I'm using as an example of racism, and not as a statement, mind you] "All you Asians look alike to me."

I can't imagine you meant it that way, and, in fact, I'm pretty sure I know better. But I hoped you might elaborate...?

Doyle (482): I know that game. When Lydy Nickerson was visiting recently, we determined that we're at minimum related through the Hopkinses.

I used to be a member of a group that was very big on "our lineage goes all the way back to Gardner!" (I didn't much care), so that made me laugh a lot.

With modest gleefulness at my own perspicacity, and with deep apologies to Kate Salter and all the others who keep the wheels turning at Viable Paradise writer's workshop, I note that staff are not allowed to criticize students' work. Faculty, on the other hand... If the staffer doesn't understand the difference between him/herself and Faculty, the Faculty will be pleased to rub the staffer's nose in it.

(Apologies to non-demigod faculty.)

The reason folks are there is to get critiques from the instructors, and they do get them.

And staff definitely reads and comments on student submissions during the acceptance phase.

Until I reread WtM, and possibly even after, I'll just have to remain humbly agnostic about its objective quality. That's all.

I miss made-for-cinema animation like the original T&Js. So much imagination went into them. The set-up with that poor bull--iirc, there's at least three elements to it, something with glue? then he has to strike a match at the end? Been too many years since I saw it.

I lurk here a lot, but rarely post. The competition's way too fierce!

Anyway, I know of a useful extension that leverages dnsstuff.com: ErrorZilla. It makes Firefox error pages more useful by letting you ping or traceroute or whois a URL that maybe failed to load, with dnsstuff doing all the hard work. It also lets you check the Google cache or Coral cache or even the Wayback Machine, tools I believe were also used in this thread (well, at least the Google cache).

Genealogy of Influences

And Viable Paradise was wonderful and everyone should go.

Bugs dressed up as Brunhilde and briefly married Elmer in 'What's Opera, Doc?' (if I'm remembering this correctly).

So thanks for clearing that up, Teresa. And also, to Patrick: just want to point out, I'd figured it would turn out, upon elaboration, to be as inocuous as it seems to've been.

Well, it's not the *degree* that's supposed to help, is it? It's the *program*. And the program, at least as I observed it at UCI, is essentially a two-year workshop series. Workshopping seems to help some folks more than others, but then, what tool or technique doesn't? At the very least, it provides a period of time when there is not only the time and money to focus on writing, but also an extensive and supportive peer network to hand who are all engaged in the same process to get feedback from, and practiced teachers to get extensive critique and help from.

And my sense from the folks who were in the Irvine program when I worked there was that they felt it helped make them better writers in their chosen genre. It's hard for me to argue with that view from the ones whose first novel sales came during or after the program, including Charmaine Craig and Alice Sebold and David Benioff and Aimee Bender and Andrew Winer and Glen David Gold. I know Alice credits the Irvine program with a lot of her progress as a writer, and she, as you may remember, made kind of a big splash with her first novel, The Lovely Bones

I wasn't in the program myself -- not my genre of choice, for one -- so all of my observations are second-hand, but at the time I was there, Irvine certainly seemed to be taking in a lot of not-published writers and turning them out to become published ones.

Arrgh, what is that from? It sounds familiar, but I can't place it.

The lineage that happens to be in my mind at the moment is actually a meaningful shorthand for how one performs certain sequences of steps. Hop in the vuodo at the end (shudder!) or at the beginning (rah!) or, horrors, in the MIDDLE, due to what I think is a sad misreading of Cornazano?

(Some people in the Brainard lineage do the middle thing, apparently not having noticed that Brainard herself (later?) wrote that she preferred the hop at the beginning. Such is the danger of teaching while still processing. The processing is neverending, or course, so all your early work will be coming back to haunt you forever....)

I don't have anything against MFAs, or holders of any other university degree. I'm stunned and flattered to have been such an influence on Will Entrekin's life.

I like quite a lot of writing that some people would describe as "literary."

I really, really hate the slighting epithet "lit'ry." What are we saying when we deploy this little joke? What we're saying is that proponents of the "literary" lisp. Now, what are we suggesting when we associate a class of people with lisping? (Programming language geeks: shut up.) What we're saying is one of the following: (1) they've got something physically wrong with them, (2) they're members of the decadent British upper crust, or (3) they're gay. Not to put too fine a point on it, but: ick.

Can we please come up with a way of talking about dingbat pretentiousness that doesn't rely on appealing to the nastiest prejudices imaginable? Thank you very much.

At which point, if I'd been the student, I might well have walked out. Maybe I knew perfectly well it wasn't a good piece, and maybe I was nonetheless still trying to figure out how to get that one particular technique right.

Any teacher who destroys a piece of my work because they think they have superior knowledge of what I was trying to learn is probably going to be an ex-teacher in a big hurry.

I really, really hate narcissistic, authoritarian "teachers" like that.

I don't know about the other two, but if someone needs to be shot now, I'll go quietly.

It feels to me like an exercise in making fun of the geeky lame kid. That kid was me.

I don't admire bullying. The whole Zen-master thunderclap sudden-realization thing? Zen was a system designed to produce an elite warrior class. Fuck elite warrior classes. Fuck Zen. And fuck teachers who think it's okay to destroy students' work merely in order to dramatize their point.

One of the questions I am often asked (as a writer, as a teacher of writers) is: how do you know when you are done? And I know that I myself have this problem. I can literally rework a piece to death. So I have had to learn when to slam my own hand down on whatever shit I am working on--and only then am I free to move on. A zen koan if you wish, or Cohen, the Jewish version. (Spelling has never been my forte.)

As an aside,am currently having that trouble with life, too!

Jane

Jane

But as a student, I despise the kind of arrogant teacher who thinks their position entitles them to interrupt my own learning process in order to enact their own little drama. I was working on a very specific piece of technique, and you came along and used it as an occasion to grandstand to the whole class. Fuck you. You get no more chances from me.

This is probably why I never finished high school, to say nothing of ever going to college. Because I know what I want to learn, I know how to do it, and I have exactly zero patience people who use the "teacher" role as an occasion for this kind of abuse. It's an emotional betrayal as bad as any other.

Only Mormons? (Not being snarky) I would have thought that since it's so prevalent in the Bible, most religions would have some form of it. That being said, it gets tricky in the Mormon lineages back around the 1840's when you have to start asking, "Which wife were you decended from"? Would you call it "Trading Begots"?

BTW, the Stupid Hair comment was priceless. Thanks!

Give me a name for that material that isn't "literary," that doesn't prejudice that genre with the seal of approval, that doesn't come right out and say that it's the good stuff.

Because whatever it is, it isn't.

which, i guess if you get right down to it, is either about the hickishness of the lower class or anti-intellectual know-nothing snobbery.

so i suppose you can't ever win.

Now, maybe the pot in question was already beyond salvaging as a pot -- maybe it had never been centered right in the first place for instance -- but the rest of the experience of wrestling with it, and feeling what it's like when it goes totally off course and collapses, that was still available. And the student needs to feel that for herself so she will be able to anticipate it the next time.

_______

As for the lineage games, it's my understanding that human beigns have been trying to trace connections (or potential enmities) in that kind of genealogical way for as long as we have recorded history. Is there really no pithy one-word description for it?

"How do I know when the painting is done? When the Fed Ex guy pries it out of my fingers!"

Upstream someone (Rachel? This thread is too long - I'm losing things) said that the culinary program at the Art Institute is working for her - that's good. I didn't even know they had one; I thought they were mostly commercial art/advertising. I do know that I have not been impressed with what the people who went there learned, at least as far as illustration goes.

I've been watching the FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST anime series lately, and keep asking myself, "Why does Al's armor* wear a loincloth. Why would a set of battle armor need a loincloth?"

It makes me think of the old chant from my Army days: "This is my weapon, and this is my gun; one is for killing, the other's for fun."

*The plot of FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST makes this a clumsy sentence. Al doesn't wear his armor; he's a human spirit that's been infused into, and animates, a set of battle armor. So Al actually is the armor. (Very interesting anime series, by the way; Bruce-Bob says check it out!)

..."artsy-fartsy"?

Patrick, before you shoot Teresa, please discuss it with her husband.

Li-Fi? (By analogy with Sci-Fi)

Not a pile-up now; a party. All the cool people came!

#518 Which rather leaves me at a loss for what to call those stories, since calling them "literary" means that I agree that this, and no other, is "literature."

Good question. I say "highfalutin" or "pretentiary." But I may have a leetle chip on my shoulder about that particular genre. I'm an escapee from an MFA program. Guess how much they respect SF/F? Nope, less...less...a little less...you got it.

That reminds me of a story at the Customers Suck LiveJournal. IIRC, the poster was on staff at a convention center that was hosting some sort of academic thingumabob at which the leading lights of some discipline or other were to lecture, complete with transparencies. (I think they were mathematicians.) The lecturers were to handle their own projection. Except they couldn't, because the poster couldn't get to them to explain how the thing worked, because somebody in a suit kept getting in his way and telling him that Doctor So-and-so did not talk to persons of his type.

This is why I am a self-taught bookbinder with no lineage in the hereditary dynasty of the craft. That and the fact that the only person who was a candidate for a teacher at my current level wanted me to study under him, in many senses of the phrase. Some of that would have stayed as an emotional subtext rather than a physical reality, but still...ugh.

Having said that, I too have learned that sometimes I have to toss a partly completed binding in the trash. There is only so far one can save a disaster. Or sometimes I have to set it aside for a month, or a year, to untangle my own feelings from it and see it clearly for what it is. I had to do that with the Dream Hunters binding that's now en route to Boston.

David @527:
The Princess Bride it is. The swordfighting scene between the man in black and Inigo Montoya.

Possible answers regarding Al's loincloth:

a) It's a visual reminder to us-the-viewers that Al is the armour, not someone wearing armour.

b) Despite being a living suit of armour, Al still feels naked without clothes.

c) Since when has anime had anything to do with sensible clothing choices, anyway?

Not sure, but it has a long tradition:

"From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper.
From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character.
From my mother, piety and beneficence, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich..."

--Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

"Hurry up, snatch the pebble already."

All the fencing/swordplay school references are there in the original novel by William Goldman (who of course also adapted his novel into the screenplay for the movie). It wouldn't surprise me if Goldman knew that these weren't really "fencing" styles and used them as a sort of inside joke; proper historical fidelity isn't quite the point of The Princess Bride (and the book has references to a made-up "McBone" style).

The novel tells the scene from Inigo's viewpoint, and doesn't have quite as much dialog; it's kind of fun to compare it to the movie's version:

They touched swords, and the man in black immediately began the Agrippa defense, which Inigo felt sound, considering the rocky terrain ... Naturally, he countered with Capo Ferro which surprised the man in black, but he defended well, quickly shifting out of Agrippa and taking the attack himself, using the principles of Thibault...

If you compare that with the dialog abi quoted, it makes for a nice little demonstration of how to successfully translate a scene from a book to a scene onscreen.

There's a brief rundown of the different swordmasters mentioned in the movie here (mild spoiler warning if you haven't seen the movie or read the book).

Well, in the early 80s, Cherryh was Sue's favorite writer. Meanwhile, 3000 miles away, there was this guy (that'd be me) who felt the same way. Both separately joined the same Cherryh fan group. That's how we came together. Later, in the pre-internet days, Sue was involved in a group of fans of Sharon Lee & Steve Miller. In that group, was another writer called eluki bes shahar, who'd read some of Sue's Beauty and the Beast fanfic and said she should write a novel.

But what good is that? The people who most need the visual differentiation are the ones who can't be counted on to recognise that it's time to press the special key combination.

Which doesn't answer the question, but at least it isn't something that anyone did after Al was bound into the armor.

I also highly, highly recommend Fullmetal Alchemist; it ate my brain like nothing else on screen, and very few things on page, have before or since. I wrote a recommendation post about halfway through the series, which I don't think I would materially change now.

I'm feeling a touch of that old academic shame. Before anyone mistakes me for anything I'm not, since I've publicly mentioned doing skiffy school via Stonecoast, I'd like to state for the record why I decided to get an MFA:

1) Jim Kelly teaches the genre program. (Anyone who's ever workshopped with him should know that this is, in some ways, enough to justify anything.)

2) Financial aid is the magic license to spend two years doing something that is not working myself into the ground.

Does this make me a better writer? Only in the sense that two years of profuse reading and writing, and exposing my backside to criticism and advice* is going to make me a better writer, which is to say, sure. To be candid, I wouldn't have gone this route initially if not for the financial aid. In fact, I got the idea when someone referred to the MFA process as "taking out two years on loan to write a book." But after a year and a half, if I had to do it over again, if there were a way to take the two years without going through the program -- I'd still go through the program. Good teaching has done more for my writing than a year and a half in a cabin with a well-stocked bar would have done.

But it's still worthless if after all the workshops and teas and ices, I've not the strength to force the moment to its crisis -- 'scuse me, random spasm of Eliot -- I mean, if I sit there and write or don't write and either way don't sell a thing.

Or if I sell pittances and puff myself up like an angry housecat. Er, kitten.

* From people with actual publishing records. I would advise anyone who's going to go this route to check up on the list of faculty names and their publishing houses. I'm pretty satisfied with mine.

I don't think you need to defend your choice from anyone here. Sounds like you've had a really good year and a half, and I'm really pleased for you.

I think what a lot of people are saying is just what you've said: it doesn't matter what credentials you have if your writing sucks, if you don't write, or if you don't do the work to become a better writer. Like anything.

In fiction, it's the writing that counts not the credential.

"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way."

Whoops.

Regardless, I'm glad I got to throw in a bit of praise for Stonecoast and Jim Kelly.

And, really, Doyle @ 329 bears some loud repeating:

real scholars don't say "where did you study?" as much as they say, "who did you study with?"

I did indeed.

It's also one of those books that I don't like very much, but I keep being compelled to read anyway. I don't know why that happens, and it rather annoys me.

I meant to mention that Starhawk's novel "Walking to Mercury", which is set in the present day, with a main character much like Starhawk herself, IS good.

I think I read that, and was disappointed because I thought Maya was about the least interesting character of the first book. Also, Mary Sue.

This being your blog, your existence may need no justification, but I've got to say I really appreciate it when someone comes out and says they didn't finish high school. Thank you. Hearing someone actually talk about these things is refreshing.

I was only in high school for a year. I got my GED and muddled around in lots of maladaptive environments until I found a couple of self-directed ones, and I'm well aware this was equal parts luck, unwillingness after the first several tries to accept a teaching system that did nothing for my learning style, and having a family well-off enough that this meant slow progress rather than homelessness.

I find it spooky when people say high school is how you learn life -- I have to bite back remarks like oh, is that how you learned that working yourself sick was normal and okay, or yeah, if the people some authority figure says are your peers don't like you, you might as well shoot yourself.

It's where a person learns some things about life in an authoritarian society. Not having those concepts drilled so deeply in makes living different. Choices and sacrifices that people make in order to live are more visible as choices and sacrifices, not automatically assumed. I could write at length on that subject, but on the West Coast it is bedtime for one anti-authoritarian blog-bat.

The lecturers were to handle their own projection. Except they couldn't, because the poster couldn't get to them to explain how the thing worked, because somebody in a suit kept getting in his way and telling him that Doctor So-and-so did not talk to persons of his type.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden@513:
Zen was a system designed to produce an elite warrior class. Fuck elite warrior classes. Fuck Zen.

I admire, and partly share, the sentiment, but let's be just: Zen wasn't a system designed to produce an elite warrior class. At least not from start. It was a system that flourished because the existing warrior class had cultural affinities with it... And hoped to find in it a good tool to produce an elite warrior class.

"Useless nitpickers of the world unite."

Pity. I've learned quite a lot of things by going down a path only to find it a dead end. If I never get there on my own, I'd never know it ends. Back in college I seem to recall unintentionally blowing up, smoking, frying, burning out, and destroying various bits of electronic components as I tried stuff that turned out to not work. But the process can give you the lay of the "land", a sense of the hills and valleys of knowledge. Alright, so that circuit didn't work, but I learned something else.

Student/Teacher relationships are interesting too. The most important thing, in my opinion, is that the student is engaged in learning. Engaged being the key point. Actions and words that have a high probability of disengaging the student should be avoided.

Lastly, I recall something an EMT said to me long ago. EMT's don't deliver babies. The mother delivers the baby. All the EMT does is assist in the delivery. Teachers don't deliver knowledge. The student acquires knowledge and the teacher assists.

I do recall one professor I had who seemed to think we acquired knowledge by lapping up from the trough of his infinite wisdom. I dropped the class after the second week.

As for Zen, I find it was useful for me. However people can misuse Zen like any other set of language rules.

Well, yes. I've been taught moves from DiGrassi (1594) which (sadly) promptly exited both body and brain through lack of opportunity to practice. They were "fencing" moves but the fencing was done with something rather heavier than the modern rapier - an epee, perhaps? Saber? It was Really Really Heavy.

I suppose I could ask tonight, since I'll be sleeping right underneath a rather large collection of microfilms of these manuals, if anyone wants to get a copy of any of them. Capo Ferro is on the list.

Costumes are never finished, you just run out of time.

I've sort-of managed to break myself of the habit of refusing to release any dance reconstruction until I'm abso-positively sure it's perfect. I've realized that (1) I'm never going to be sure of that, but (2) I'm now knowledgeable enough to detect when it reaches the "good enough for now" stage.

I don't admire bullying. The whole Zen-master thunderclap sudden-realization thing? Zen was a system designed to produce an elite warrior class. Fuck elite warrior classes. Fuck Zen. And fuck teachers who think it's okay to destroy students' work merely in order to dramatize their point.

I'm not going to comment on the teaching issue, just on the mischaracterization of Zen.

It's understandable that someone might get the idea that Zen is "a system designed to produce an elite warrior class," since what most people in the US (and the West in general) know about Zen comes from Japan, where it was certainly adapted to the needs and practices of the samurai class, who dominated Japan up until just over a century ago.[*] Western martial-arts enthusiasts sometimes perpetuate this association.

But Zen Buddhism originated in China, and developed there and in Vietnam and Korea for centuries, with no special connections to any warrior class, before it was introduced to Japan. There are still Zen traditions in China, Korea, and Vietnam; the famous peace activist and writer Thich Nhat Hanh is a Zen monk from the Vietnamese tradition.

The whole "thunderclap sudden-realization thing" is an argument that "enlightenment" should be understood as a sudden intuitive flash of understanding ("I get it!"), rather than some plodding, logical/analytic intellectual process. You can argue about whether that's psychologically realistic, or whether that's how "enlightenment" ought to work -- but it's got nothing to do with "bullying."

Saying that Zen was designed to produce a warrior class is about as accurate as saying that Catholicism was designed for that purpose. (Were there strong ties between medieval Catholicism and the warrior aristocracy of Europe, so that the former sometimes took on characteristics of the latter and produced practices that benefited them? Absolutely. Was that the underlying origin and purpose of Catholicism? Of course not.)

[*] This is primarily true of the Rinzai school of Japanese zen. There's a Japanese saying which contrasts the historical appeal of the two main Japanese Zen traditions: "Rinzai for the Shogun, Soto for the peasants."

vuodo 1 (pause) 3 4 (close) 6 1 2 (close) 4 (pause) 6 1 (close) 3 4 5

Evidence: minimal for the rhythm pattern, but it does get four sequences on the same foot into three tempi nicely.

(Not that anyone here cares except possibly Power Twin, but it makes me warm and satisfied.)

Thank you. On so many levels, thank you.
I was one of those kids in high school and later in military schools that managed to attract undue attention from teachers and superiors.

"How is it that you have to audacity to present this project in my class? Why do you think you're God and can solve everything on your own? Your equations aren't even correct."

But the math worked. It was ugly, but the math worked. After completing nuclear power school in the Navy I went back to that phys/astronomy teacher and apologized for my behaviors as a student--- I never received an apology in return. I still to this day haven't figured out what I did wrong. I think perhaps that my questioning attitude was always seen as a challenge to her authority. Heaven forbid that another human being is seen as fallable.

I think this is a big part of why I can't completely commit to returning to a traditional classroom setting to complete college...

There's a lot of potential in a young mind. Imagine the possibilities if you just foster creativity and passion for something, anything.

I love Medium Large.

Yes, though it's not documentable much before 1300, I don't think. Google around a bit. The Higgins Sword Guild does a lot of this stuff. They do demos at Arisia every year.

(It's not that I know anything about the history of combat, it's that dancing and fencing were intertwined in the Renaissance and my research mentor is an expert in both, so the information crosses my radar now and then.)

329-depends on the field. My wife's a PhD and a physics professor. In her subfield nobody asks who you studied with because as soon as they know where you studied the who is obvious. It's a small but highly employable area of physics. The year Laura graduated there were 26 PhDs and 27 tenure track openings nationally.

518-How about "Lit-Fic?" It's a term I've often heard used by academics who are also F&SF people and who most definitely don't want to advance one genre over the other. My wife's university has a very F&SF friendly English department. Sure, the subtext is still literary fiction, but that becomes a bit more like background noise and less like the one true way.

Potholders and ovenmitts are the same thing. Hotpads are floppy trivets

http://www.kellymccullough.com/mail.html

* (It's been a long time, so some of those vocabulary may be mangled)

Why didn't these techniques survive? After all, we have Roman plays, "novels", cooking manuals, treatises on agriculture, many other things. Yes, but what has survived is very hit-and-miss. Consider that nothing in writing has survived of Roman shipwrighting, or even architecture. And the military methods and equipment of Rome were overtaken and lost.

It seems reasonable to assume that Roman fencing technique grew out of military practice, because using a sword was a necessary skill for a Roman soldier, once the pilum became standard issue for all legionaries. The soldier who throws his spear at the enemy as he closes with him must know how to use his sidearm. It seems reasonable to believe, therefore, that effective use of the gladius was taught and drilled. And it must be remembered that service in the Army was a prerequisite for nearly all civil offices. This service might have been largely nominal, but nevertheless any Roman patrician would have been familiar with Army equipment.

There are a few examples of beautifully made and decorated Roman swords, too, which would argue that at least some Romans regarded them as more than efficient butchering tools, and this would argue in turn that there was some mystique, some idea that it was worth devoting thought and art to the sword itself.

I hope that this is all true. If it isn't, it ought to be. I have a book out shortly with the above as an assumption, anyway. If I get landed on from a great height, I'll let you know.

Consider that nothing in writing has survived of Roman shipwrighting, or even architecture.

Vitruvius?

Perfectionism isn't necessarily good.

http://www.kellymccullough.com/mail.html

It just happens that one of my favourite courses at university was the Topography and Monuments of Ancient Rome, which started with the Palatine Hut and traced the development of the city until the time of Constantine*.

We discussed architectural styles, specific buildings, districts and monuments. We touched on damnatio memoriae and apotheosis (that's where I heard about the apokolokintosis of Claudius). The professor's favourite emperor was Hadrian, and by the time he was done, I was persuaded to his view**.

Naturally, we spent some time on Vitruvius.

----------
* Whenever I go to Rome, I find myself struggling against a strong feeling of annoyance at the Renaissance, which cluttered up some of my favourite bits of the ancient city.

** One word. Pantheon. Did you know that, because of the lower street levels and the proximity of the surrounding buildings, no one approaching it could see that it was anything out of the ordinary until they got inside? How cool is that?

Crap? I'm not being facetious, not really. I've read an awful lot of that for various university and other literary/academic journals, and, well, it often is crap, or textual masturbation, or, most likely, both.

I started labeling some slush as PGN, or Please God No. There are a lot of writers who strike me as the textual equivalent of tone deaf, who describe themselves as literary writers. I wish they'd get out and read more literature . . . 'cause that's not what they're writing. It really isn't.

Defrocked and other sorts of medievalists; I am going to put together a paper session and probably a panel for the 2008 Kalamazoo International Congress on Medieval Studies that I hope will be made up of Making Light folk. Mark your calendars . . .

I missed that match, and was surprised by the score; Roddick had been playing so well up to that point and the set and a half I watched of Federer's quarterfinal looked a little shakey.

Hopefully Gonzalez continues playing well and the final will be great.

Because, as you imply, it is extremely cool.

What's your paper session/panel topic? I'm presenting at Kalamazoo this May, though I'm actually a completely fake medievalist - a Renaissance person taking advantage of a certain looseness of definition at Kalamazoo.

I am of the school that says that stirrups were first developed in Scythia, circa first century BCE, and then spread slowly, being first noticed - as no more than leather loops attached to the saddle - in northern India, by the fourth century CE, and were then seen in Europe no earlier than the seventh century CE. The slowness of the spread indicates that they were not actually as mightily useful as some think they were.

This construction is given the academic equivalent of the Bronx cheer by many others who have as much right on their side as anyone. And why not?

However, it appears that everyone agrees that Romans did not use stirrups. Why not? I dunno. Why didn't Romans use the wheelbarrow, or the horsecollar, perfectly simple ideas that somehow didn't get taken up then? Beats me. They showed a quite amazing technological sophistication in some ways and not in others. I wish I knew.

The linked article is an interview with him on his retirement, and gives a very good flavour of his character. I can hear his voice when I read this:

it is a surprise every time a crummy potsherd comes out of the ground. Do you know what it means to be the first person in 2,000 years to touch something your ancestors have made, to touch that coin or that stone and know that some ancient mason worked on it, smoothed it down, carved the relief that’s seen there? That thrill never leaves.

He also ran the annual Easter barbecue, with lambs on the spit. We used to get his grad students drunk and try to get them to eat sheep eyeballs.

The man really made the course what it was. I don't know if anyone else could make the stone tell such a lot about the people who shaped it.

Serge @578
Our best guess is that the Romans did not use stirrups, nor indeed did anyone in Europe before the Middle Ages. It appears to have come from the Huns, early enough that some Romans may have seen them.

But the Romans were, as a culture, indifferent horsemen. As with boats, they could use horses. But they were primarily, culturally, walkers.

--------
* There is a famous story around the time of the Punic Wars. The Romans cerated a navy from virtually nothing, teaching legionaries to row with benches on beaches while the ships were being built. On the one hand, it shows a lot of adaptability. On the other hand, they didn't already have a navy.

Did you lose a bottle of oil somewhere?

Serge, are you imagining a scenario something like Heinlein's Double Star? Unlike the story, we would not like to mimic the sitting Senator; no point to the exercise if we cannot have an improvement.

The wikipedia article on literary fiction looks weak, but from it (and the little I know about self-styled literary fiction) it looks like the label 'literary fiction' covers at least two genres: characterization-focused and style-focused. (I am skeptical of Wikipedia's assertion that literary fiction doesn't have genre conventions. I think this is a sign of lumping multiple genres together, and also not realizing that genre works can deliberately violate genre conventions.)

How about "psychological fiction" for characterization-focused fiction? For style-focused fiction, I'd be tempted to just say "experimental fiction" (and most experiments fail). "Stylistic fiction" seems too close to 'literary fiction' in asserting the quality of the work rather than its genre conventions.

Small horses? Googling 'roman cavaly' and 'stirrups' gives me the impression that their saddles were designed to allow a firm seat already, and that stirrups would not have been needed.

Um. I'm not sure that the slowness of spread indicates any such thing. Various useful technological innovations seem to move more slowly than their utility would suggest.

Tile stoves, for instance, are damn' useful, if your object is to get the most usable heat out of any unit of fuel, and yet while they spread into common use up and down the Germanic countries in Europe and Scandinavia from their inception in the 14th century, they never did make any significant inroads in Britain, or subsequently, the US where the Franklin stove was essentially reinventing the wheel of the established technology of tile stoves.

I don't know if it was a matter of various animosities -- Britain has a long history of being mostly on the opposite side of conflicts with the masters of tile technology, the Dutch -- or the fact that British potteries never did seem to take much of a bent for tile-making until much later, or what, but it seems pretty clear to me that utility is not the only factor that plays into the spread of any given technology.

Stirrups are not essential to a secure seat on horseback, In fact, they have their very own special risks--ask anyone who's ever fallen off a horse but had a foot stuck in a stirrup! What stirrups do is increase your leverage, making it possible to use weapons somewhat differently than can be done without them. A lot of the medieval cavalry maneuvers and techniques require stirrups--charging with a couched lance is the best example I know of.
People who are horsier than I am (and that wouldn't take much) can probably add a lot more to that, and will probably also find errors in there to correct.

Now, there's varying amounts of guesswork in such efforts, and some of the plausible chainst of reasoning from the evidence might depend on later knowledge.

For instance, I've seen a British chariot that interpreted the wickerwork side screens (as the coins seemed to show) as a suspension system of leather straps. Recent archaeology makes it a pretty good guess, and it certainly works.

But we'll never be quite sure of what a British chariot, or a Roman saddle, was really like.

Which rather leaves me at a loss for what to call those stories, since calling them "literary" means that I agree that this, and no other, is "literature."

Give me a name for that material that isn't "literary," that doesn't prejudice that genre with the seal of approval, that doesn't come right out and say that it's the good stuff.

Because whatever it is, it isn't.

The term "literary fiction" is so lame in describing what it names that it make the rather lame "science fiction" seem not-so-lame by comparison. Jim McDonald and I cannot have been the first people to notice this.

I wonder whether any attempts to give "literary fiction" a different name (there must have been some) have gotten any traction.

Apropos of snobbery, for years the Chicago Tribune's Sunday Arts section ran headers over various feature stories: THEATER or MOVIES or OPERA. It always irritated me that stories about rock were headed ROCK, and stories about jazz were headed JAZZ, and stories about folk were headed FOLK, but stories about classical music were always headed MUSIC.

Sometime in the past decade or so, this changed quietly. Today a story about classical music is headed CLASSICAL. Hooray.

Adventures among the toroids

Hey, I've got it: vanilla. Vanilla fiction.

#585: How about "psychological fiction" for characterization-focused fiction? For style-focused fiction, I'd be tempted to just say "experimental fiction" (and most experiments fail). "Stylistic fiction" seems too close to 'literary fiction' in asserting the quality of the work rather than its genre conventions.

The problem is that both of these concepts relate to different types of work within a genre. Gene Wolfe writes style-focused SF/F; P.D. James writes characterization-focused mysteries. Neither of these is a distinguishing trait of vanilla fiction.

If you want to say that Maya (or any of a number of other characters, for that matter) is a Mary Sue in TFST, I might even agree with you. But I don't see it in WtM. (Please note that I am not saying you are Just Plain Wrong; I'm just disagreeing, with the usual IMHO, YMMV, IAOAE etc.)

Dave Luckett 565: This reminds me of the fact that the only reason we know the work of Gaius Valerius Catullus is that one copy, printed on fireproof parchment, survived. ONE COPY. That's why "Catullus 5" means always and only the poem that begins "Vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus..."—it's on page 5 of the original book.

The most tragic case, of course, is Sappho, but I've ranted about that elsewhere.

As for the name for the kind of "literary" fiction that is the only kind credited with the name by academicians—how about calling it academic literature?

Something similar happened when the formal ("classical") music world was in the grip of the whole 12-tone psychosis (which wouldn't have happened if it hadn't fallen into the whole equal-temperament psychosis 50 years earlier, don't get me started). If your music wasn't well-formed by strict 12-tone standards (and yes, in some places and times that meant the number of notes in your piece had to be a whole-number multiple of 12, with exactly the same number of each "tone"), it wasn't considered "serious music," and you were considered a "popular" (anathema to academics) composer.

This led to abominations like the "music" of Milton Babbit, which really is a mathematical exercise. He completely forgot that Duke Ellington's famous principle has a converse (or is it an obverse...hmmm): if it doesn't sound good, it isn't good.

Oddly enough, Babbit was Stephen Sondheim's composition teacher. Flowers do grow from shitheaps.

And FWIW I'm with Patrick on the pottery teacher. Grandstanding asshole. There is a class of student for whom this sort of thing is good, but it's hard to know whether you are one until something like that happens, and even harder for the instructor to predict...so much so that for an instructor to assume that that behavior is appropriate in any individual case is deeply irresponsible and negligent.

Oh, wait. I forgot I'm living in the age of mass-produced education, where the individual needs of students always take a back seat to the average student, the most common pattern, and of course the standardized test. Silly me.

But I'm not bitter.

However did they get those baked clay ships to float? {Running like hell...}

However -- most of the Hollywood actors brought up in the studio system (1930s-1950s) had good seats and should have been able to ride without stirrups.

Nowadays, with Westerns and Costume Dramas being scarce, few actors ride well. When you do see an actor that can ride (Kevin Costner, Viggo Mortesen, Morgan Freeman) most filmgoers who are riders will comment on it (search rec.equestrian by film title or actor's name).

Classical riding, also known as dressage, begins with teaching the proper seat. The student has no reins, a saddle pad, and no stirrups. The instructor holds the lines that control the horse. Only when the student is balanced at all gaits is he allowed to handle reins and use a saddle with stirrups.

An expert rider trained this way can control the horse by use of seat alone.

You will find most instructors who teach English riding will require that you ride part of each lesson without stirrups to build leg strength and to acquire a balanced seat.

After seeing the full title, I *really* regret that there is no cover image available.

"Yes. It's called 'being Mormon'."

But do you all know WHY geneaology is so important to them? So they can baptize the dead.

My husband was raised Mormon and his family has traced (a portion) of their ancestors back to Brigham Young's time. In fact, they learned that one of their ancestors, a General Higbee, helped Brigham engineer the Mountain Meadows Massacre on September 11th, 1857.

They've also recently learned that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and when I gently pointed out that they must have been Pilgrims, I got yelled at by my grandfather-in-law. Even though good ol' Joe Smith hadn't been born yet, they were still Mormons, gosh darn it.

Anyways. Part of being an active Mormon is performing Baptisms For the Dead. Without going into the Mormon idea of afterlife ('cause it's whacked), by baptizing their dead relatives, those relatives can then travel to whatever planet the baptizers are on and they all be together in the afterlife.

My husband has done hundreds of these (according to him) baptisms and it basically involves being in the Temple, having a church member say the dead person's name aloud while the baptizer (my husband, in this case) thinks about that name while water is dumped on his head. He said it takes a few seconds per baptism and they'll baptize as many dead people as they can until their live volunteers get tired of kneeling and having water dumped on their head.

Since I know my mother-in-law is hoping to out-live me JUST so she can baptize me after I'm dead, I've already petitioned the LDS church to leave my dead soul alone.

Also thanks Xopher @ #471 for the information about Gardnerian Wiccans. I've been a practicing solitary witch since I was sixteen (and no, my Mormon in-laws have no idea that I'm a practicing witch because I'm sure we can all imagine how well THAT would go over with them) and I didn't realize that I might not be considered a "real Wiccan" by some Gardnerian Wiccans. Although I'm with you on the matter--I don't care what people think about the fact that I practice witchcraft (I have gotten prejudice from some covens who try to tell me that I'm not really Wiccan since I'm a solitary practitioner, which does hurt a bit).

And thanks to Fragano @ #324 for enlightening me about pooter. I thought it was some bizarre colloquialism and, of course, knowing what it means doesn't help me figure out that wretched sentence (not your fault, I just can't figure out how someone's expression could be reminiscent of genitalia). Although it did make for some odd imagery.

And (the last one) abi @ #454: Ha! I thought the same thing when I was reading the thread! After trying to figure out the pooter-faced thing, it was nice to think about The Man in Black (not Johnny Cash).

Teresa does know, having been raised Mormon and participated in that very ritual herself.

"While I was learning to work with clay, I made a lot of pots and had to believe that even if they were less than perfect the making of them was worthwhile and important. To continue, I needed to find faith that the expression of my inner forms would become easier and that it had intrinsic value to me as a process of growth. I had to believe that my vision and its pursuit were valuable to me and to those around me even though the world didn't necessarily need more mediocre pottery." - Rheya Polo, Spinning from the Center - Creation and Transformation

Now, when I say "extremely long-term" and "on and off," I really, really mean it, but would it be out of line if, sometime in the extremely vague future, she were to get in contact with you?

When I was in Copenhagen in late 2004, there was a great exhibit in the Nationalmuseet of Roman and local goods, with particular attention to the captured weaponry and equipment of the Roman army. Seeing the "sacrificed" weapons that had been recovered from bogs and reassembled was pretty good. There certainly were a lot of them. Seeing the contents of the army carpenter's toolbox was really cool, as was looking at the fastenings for various armor, clothing, and equipment. The exhibition catalog is home and I am not, right now, or I'd look up the ISBN -- but you probably already know it and very likely have a copy. They talked a certain amount about how the army was organized, which levels of ornamentation corresponded to which ranks, both in armor and in weapons, and so forth. The northern folks who whupped that particular Roman army sure got a lot of stuff, so it was truly impressive to see case after case, vitrine after vitrine, showing groups of weapons and detailing the differences. The equipment for the horses was pretty cool too. I googled around, but couldn't find a link to it, alas. If you don't have the book, send me an e-mail and I will try to remember to look it up when I get home.

Good exhibit. One really big room, big enough to have a boat in the middle of it and still have lots of space. I spent two days in that room.

(This included an hour and a half spent looking at one single thing: the Gundestrup cauldron from about a foot and a half away, circling it, and getting every angle I could manage, but that's something else again. So was the bit of silver [and gilt?] tribute that for all the world looks like something that Liberty's would have sold during the Arts & Crafts period. I kid you not. Blew my mind.)

Huh? I said they cerated the navy. It was a large task.

The wax was obtained from bees throughout the Italian peninsula - they fought a minor war in Cisalpine Gaul over one particularly bee-rich province. The beekeeping lore they obtained in that effort descended into Roman folklore, best recorded by Vergil in his Georgics (Book III, if you're interested - he thinks the queens are kings, but gets a lot of the details right.)

The lard came from a massive sacrificial effort - the bullocks and cows were lined up all along Forum Romanum, and the smoke from the Altar of Neptune rose into the sky for three days and nights.

The herbs chosen were borage and yarrow, to bring courage in war. The legionaries were made to lie down on special ceremonial cloths (towelii) on the beach while the mixture was rubbed on their torsos and backs by specially chosen youths of good family.

Throughout the day of the ritual, the soldiers wore face masks that covered their eyes in darkened glass. They chanted the obscure ceremonial Greek invocation "Eo Dyd" for an hour, and then were ready to take to the water.

Major barbecue. (No EPA either.)

What did the Romans do for barbecue sauce?

Susan #555: I care, too, I truly do. I can't do it right now (my left knee being frozen up), but I care.

Plenty of medieval and renaissance sword combat manuals (or pieces of manuals) survive, though some of them are pretty cryptic. It would come as a surprise to me that there ever was anything comparable from Roman times. Organized training, yes, but not manuals. The audience for written material and swordplay instruction for the individual combatant (vs military strategy and tactics) overlapped by the late middle ages, but it didn't in Roman times. Besides, this sort of thing, like dance, is best learned from a person, rather than a book.

Before the Renaissance, was there such a thing as a swordfighting technique, beyond hacking at each other as hard and as fast as one can?

In short, yes. You do more damage to yourself wielding a weapon you don't know how to use than you do anyone else. We don't know the methods aside from some generics; infantry in Medieval eras were pretty much taught all techniques that depended on holding the line, which means few refined moves, and a dependance on sticking by your allies. The advantage this had was it required *less* training.

Knights were definitely taught hand to hand work, as tournaments where the warriors don't know what they're doing are not especially entertaining. (I know from experience). Can't say about vikings, but I doubt they'd be considered formidible if they couldn't do more than swing wildly. Also, as with someone above commenting on the Romans, they made pretty swords as well as plain utilitarian ones, and this does imply something about the weapon use.

I've also seen what happens to ignorant fighters in front of my eyes. Members of the SCA whose personae are too early for fighting manuals, or from groups who aren't as history focused, often start by flailing wildly. Then someone starts to see which flailings and methods of power generation actually work. And they start showing the others. They don't stay with wild flailing. They may end up reinventing the wheel, or doing "non-period" things, or adapting the wrong martial arts, but they lerarn something, and start drilling it and passing it on. Nobody who isn't wilfully ignorant (And I know one who is) fails to start learnign *some* technique.

Add horses in, and oh, yes, there *must* be training.

(For peasant levies, no, but then peasant levies used whatever weapons they had available, and that was almost never a sword.)

Sorry, this isn't closely edited or looked over for egregious errors. Gotta run. late for class. it's only the really bad movie of Titus, which i've seen, but I should be there.

Garum, I'd imagine. (Mmmm.... fermented mashed-up fish and fish intestines...)

The musical marriage of Bugs and Elmer is in "Rabbit of Seville." Elmer is hunting Bugs in the California exurbs and accidentally chases him into the Hollywood Bowl, where a performance of The Barber of Seville is about to begin. Bugs takes on the Figaro role to torture Elmer as his "customer." When Elmer recovers enough to fight back, an arms race ensues. It ends abruptly when Bugs stops brandishing weapons and instead holds out flowers, then candy, then an engagement ring. I guess since Bugs does the proposing, he gets to be the man that time. He looks just as ravishing in a tuxedo as any of his best drag outifts.

No marriage in "What's Opera Doc" but there is a pretty impassioned love scene.

The music in Barber of Seville was already funny before Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese got hold of it. It practically has Carl Stallings-type effects built in - they just go along for the ride. The Wagner in "Whats Opera Doc?" on the other hand, is being actively (lovingly) parodied.

Chuck Jones has a substantial body of cartoons that delight in classical music perfromance tropes.

It has long been a dream of mine to see "the Rabbit of Seville" performed live by a real opera company. It would be a bit difficult to stage but the lyrics are priceless (and not really any sillier than the original.)

Not "modern" in the sense of being contemporary or fashionable or up-to-date, but "Modern," in the sense of exhibiting the characteristics of mid-twentieth-century High Modernism. That is, we're talking about fiction that emphasizes originality over quality, and rejects traditional forms and standards.

There's nothing really wrong with being a Modernist, provided that you were born sometime between 1860 and 1930. The problem is that Modernism has pretty much played itself out as a creative philosophy. Modernism is now dated and old-fashioned. The Modernist insistence on originality, for example, is what leads contemporary Modernist writers to wallow in scatological and visceral metaphors, simply because those metaphors are dubiously "fresh."

And speaking of viscera and scat, I find it astonishing that someone could look down their nose at science fiction while simultaneously stealing clumsily from contemporary horror fiction. (What would Joe R. Lansdale or Chuck Palahniuk say about that cereal bowl full of turds and black eyeballs with jerking retinae?)

My personal experience of the art-versus-entertainment struggle has been in music. (I have a BM, which is like a BFA but less practical. I also have an impressive musical lineage, which I occassionally trot out when people dismiss the saloon music I currently play.) I've come to realize in the decades since I left music school that it is all but impossible to create original Art-with-a-capital-A on purpose.* On the other hand, if you seek to engage people, to entertain them for a while without embarrassing yourself, if you focus on your craft and never lose sight of the audience, then sometimes Something Wonderful Happens.

And in the meantime, you're not annoying anyone.

* A few years ago, I heard a young musician ask the legendary drummer John Von Ohlen, "Do you like Blues music?" and he says, "Oh, yeah, sure. I like Blues music. Just not when it's done on purpose."

Since I knew nothing about Mormonism until I married my husband, I foolishly assume that most people don't know much about it, either. So, again, I'm sorry for making such an assumption. Thanks Xopher for hitting me with the clue stick.

ethan @ #604: I'm also a high-school dropout! Although, in my case, it was a complete technicality. (Long story shortened: for medical reasons, I had been excused from P.E. since I was in elementary school and I was told my senior year of high school that the rules had changed and now I had to make up the missing P.E. credits with electives, which could only be done in summer school after I "graduated" with my class. I could've petitioned the CA State Board of Education to over-throw the school district's new rules, and I probably would've won, but I didn't care anymore by that point.) I'm not particularly successful (by my own standards) but I'd be glad to help your friend with her project. It's something I've been thinking about doing, as well, because a high school diploma nowadays is completely meaningless, but yet those of us without them are frowned upon because we are presumed to be really, really stupid. I'm thrilled that your friend is taking on the project.

Your friend might be interested in the fact that, although I'm a high school dropout, both of my parents were teachers at the time (now retired) and my Dad actually taught for 30 years at my high school. Between the two of them, they taught for almost 70 years and you would think they would've been upset that I never got my diploma but they agreed that the system is completely flawed and they certainly weren't going to force me to take electives.

(Does being a dropout make me cool like Patrick? And yes, I think Patrick is cool.)

Anyway, I'm in full agreement with you, and happy to have cleared it up. Sorry about the nasty prejudices thing, and in the future, I'll try to come up with better analogies.

But doesn't "literary fiction" usually also include early and mid-19th Century writers, like Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Hawthorne, Dickens, Stendhal, Balzac, Dostoyevksy, Tolstoy, etc., etc.? All of them would certainly be "pre-Modern," by your definition.

(Did that sentence make sense? I'm not sure that sentence made sense.)

Mary Aileen, 624: Made sense to me. Maybe we're both weird?

Lit-fic works for me, especially since the assonance with "fanfic" makes me giggle.

#554: Points taken about Zen and its history. I was being an ill-tempered asshole, and not only about that particular subject.

#604: Sure, your documentary-making friend can contact me any time.

Sounds right to me. [g]

Finally I realized that the tiny imperfections she was smoothing were thinner than the blade of her spatula, and said one word: "Deb."

She immediately said "You're right," and moved on. She knew it was time to stop; I just noodged her.

Smashing her cake? Right out! In fact, I would submit that even had I been her teacher such a thing would have been deeply antisocial.

Let's do the time warp again...

The sadists make you post without stirrups.*

My instructor regularly made me drop my stirrups** and ride transitions. I have many riding flaws and bad habits, but relying on stirrups for balance through transitions is not one of them.

*Inside every dressage rider is a masochist.***

**Contrary to what you might think this means if you don't ride, it means to take your feet out of the stirrups.

***And someone who believes in reincarnation, because one lifetime is not enough to learn this stuff.

The Pitch Bitch was so courageous that she just folded her blog after your withering assault!

Someone above suggested mainstream fiction for non-genre books. I think that literary fiction is a genre, with tropes and clichés and conventions all its own. Done badly, that's the angst filled plotless depression inducing dreck that is (rightly) derided. Done well, it's, um, done well.

But maybe I shouldn't talk, since most of what I read from those shelves should be in with the skiffy or the mysteries, anyway. (On what planet is The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde) not skiffy? It has time-travel, alternate history, characters who are *characters* - sorry. A rant for another time.)

And then a step to the right

Guerilla marketing only works if no one knows it's guerilla marketing. If people know you're doing guerilla marketing it makes you look cheap and desperate. With this thread up, anyone who Googled would find out what was up. Therefore there was no longer any purpose to that blog.

I've stayed out of this discussion because I am probably only a fictional writer, since any suggestion that I might be able to do it for publication has always shut down my ability to write anything. But I rather think Jane Austin was more like today's fic writers than the people who are published in literary magazines with aspirations of seriousness, because she did not, from what I've read about her, intend to produce art; rather, she was having fun and telling stories to amuse.

"Serious literature" of the past often started out as popular fiction; it's just true enough to have aged particularly well. Contemporary "literary fiction" is something else entirely: it aspires to be "extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances" and thence more serious and important than genre, but all too often it just ends up being a drag to read.

Re: Lit-Fic, etc, I'm going to review here my favorite of the terms with which I am familiar. (It's an ongoing debate at my MFA program, now that the genre and general fiction programs are getting along well.)

Lit-fic -- I rather like this one. It's simple, it doesn't have a case of "I will call you MY short-bus word because YOU are calling me YOUR short-bus word", but it does have the sort of casual, diminutive sensibility of "sci-fi" -- which, IMO, levels the playing field.

Disadvantage: it doesn't actually say anything about the genre.

Vanilla fiction, mundane fiction -- Not bad; these terms sound slightly sneering while not actually meaning anything unpleasant or inaccurate. Ignoble words with noble enough meanings -- worldly, common-denominator, and I will be the first to say and what do you think is wrong with that?

Disadvantage: might make people go 'what'? ("General fiction" is a little funky but might fly better with the people who write it.)

I'm for dividing the genre into "vanilla/mundane/general fiction" and "experimental fiction", personally. Experimental covers the kinds of style-and-form play that fall into this category. Vanilla/mundane/general is any non-experimental story that simply contains no supernatural elements or subject/form elements that make it another genre.

I decided to dissect this terminology and make a full fix in my blog; check it out here.

NAW-nanner-nanner-nah-NAH!

I do most of my book-shopping online these days and thus don't really know where things get shelved.

It appears to me that this is a genre, with genre conventions. Classification in a genre says nothing about quality, naturally. Some mimetic fiction is like "Pride and Prejudice" and some is like (what was it again?) "Backwoods Jesus Thingie" (?), just like some SF is like "The Stars My Destination", and some is like "Plan 9 From Outer Space."

Of course, this is not an exclusionary definition, but a general description. Where the fractal boundary lies changes from moment to moment and observer to observer. (So don't hit me, Patrick.)

524: my first reaction to 518 was just "artsy"; IMO sufficiently contemptuous (but not so much as to backfire) \and/ sufficiently free of associated prejudices. The subsequent "Lit-fic" appeals, but seems more like an in-joke, where IME "artsy" is already widely known as uncomplimentary.

wrt the pottery instructor: it's possible that he was reacting properly to that student. (Some teachers actually do that....) Each person finds enlightenment in their own way -- some by flashes, some by labor, and some by both. I remember first hearing Bach, Jefferson Airplane, and Stravinsky -- realizing each time that somebody had opened a door where I hadn't even realized there was a wall -- and the much more laborious process by which a heap sort made sense. (I wasn't exactly a teachable student either.) Sometimes a teacher can do a positive service by saying (or ~shouting) "This is not repairable; restart from scratch." (cf "This is so bad it isn't even wrong.") There are places where this is important to \know/; I still cringe thinking about a certain botched instrument training approach that I should have broken off much earlier than the decision point.

#521 et seq, for fanatics: at least one of the mentioned schools' manuals has been reissued in facsimile.

#545: High school experiences vary radically. The impression I got from my sister (~2/3 public, while I was all private) is that some schools have teachers who will thwart the fit-in-at-all-costs attitude, and some don't -- and (from others) many have escape hatches (one of mine was theater tech, which I've since heard can have its own hierarchy, based on achievement rather than manners). How to get there? The attitude "blow them up because they're only for grinding down" seems unhelpful; different people make different uses of frames.

Susan@550: what do you call "modern rapier"? IIRC, the 1970's Three Musketeers got closer than most, but didn't match the real length (up to 4 feet) reached by weapons for unarmored single combat; even a light blade that long will \feel/ heavy (especially compared to "epee", which IIRC is \only/ a practice weapon, albeit practicing for something more real than foil).

DaveL@565 (cf Tracie@611): I think of fencing as single-combat only, where the Romans would have had well-established group/mass techniques (probably even more focused on straight-forward moves than modern on-the-piste fencing) that would have been taught to largely illiterate recruits; I suspect the techniques wouldn't have been documented because the literate classes wouldn't have been involved in teaching the masses. (Pause for telling comment from JMD about the differences between NCOs and officers.) All guesswork (I am \so/ not an expert), and I don't know what the officer class would have learned -- but would it have involved single combat, or ways to move masses of scutum-and-gladius fighters?
and wrt
Why didn't Romans use the wheelbarrow, or the horsecollar, perfectly simple ideas that somehow didn't get taken up then? Beats me. They showed a quite amazing technological sophistication in some ways and not in others.
The rap I learned in day school (~40 years ago) was that the Greeks were idea people while the Romans were great at using other people's ideas. Probably a gross oversimplification, but I don't recall Roman equivalents of Archimedes, Pythagoras, ...; if they didn't see the idea in use (and get it back from (e.g.) Scythia to headquarters) they might not have realized that it could be developed. (Also, cf many philosophies of cavalry, and experiences like the later battle of Kephises River; the Romans may have concluded that fighting from horses just didn't work with properly-trained foot troops. Other posters have noted that stirrups help with specific weapon techniques, possibly more than they do with just riding.)

Xopher@597: Oddly enough, Babbit was Stephen Sondheim's composition teacher. Flowers do grow from shitheaps.
Babbit may have been Sondheim's formal teacher, but S grew up around people who \got/ popular music (e.g., Rodgers & Hammerstein). He certainly delights in mechanics in both words and music; I suspect the combination of knowledges is what makes him a great songwriter. (cf, IMO, the great result of the Jefferson Airplane from the massively heterogeneous experience of its members -- everything from Delta Blues to Indian).
Equal-temperament psychosis only 50 years before 12-tone? Where did Das wohltemperierte Clavier disappear to?

wrt "in a pit, with broadswords" (and why have there not been a houseful of Clue jokes): "In his soup," the tosspot said, "like crackers."

#619: cf Poul Anderson's sardonic story "Critique of Impure Reason": But how can you have intellectual content without four-letter words? As you note, that species of Modern has been past its sell-by date out for some time now....

We're barely in sight of the record number of comments, but I think we've set some sort of record for thread creep (or spread, or metastasis, or...). Perhaps we should toast Kaley as the casus discussio, but in what? Mogen David, Boone's Farm, Ripple, Thunderbolt, Big Herman, ... The list is long. Dirac Angestun Gesept

Guerilla marketing only works if no one knows it's guerilla marketing.

And, especially after I've watched the behavior of those particular marketers here on ML, the word "kitten" as a form of address is now forever marked as "possibly tainted." Thank you, everyone. Very helpful in the thickets of cross-claims and counter-attacks. I'll put my money on ML and the denizens here every time.

Crazy(and reminding herself once again, Google is a good reason for minding my p's and q's!)Soph

Lenora Rose @521:
Capo Ferro, at least, is most definitely not a "heavy swordwork style," but is fencing (a word which comes from "defencing," the art of defending oneself with a blade), although as Susan noted, the blades used were significantly heavier than modern epees. That's because modern fencing is very stylized, and isn't actually used for fighting. Its relationship to the fencing of Capo Ferro and other Renaissance masters is like that of T'ai Chi or Judo to, oh, Kung Fu or Jujitsu -- a stylized form intended for competition fighting only. The masters might be able to actually fight using the techniques, but the average student won't. Capo Ferro was teaching men who would fight for their lives; it's entirely appropriate to The Princess Bride.
(Um, I actually took a class or two in Capo Ferro's style, at a period amrtial arts academy in Redmond, WA. I'm nothing like an expert, and no good at fencing in any style, but I know a little bit about the history.)

Mimetic fiction is good.

Howard Peirce:

The problem with calling mimetic/lite-fic/whatever Modern is that (a) some of it is too old; (b) some of it, and often the worst, is too recent (i.e Post-Modernist.)

I also don't think that Modernism is a `played out force'; I think you are applying selective memory, and Sturgeon's Law to create a misleading picture of Modernist fiction.

The problem is that Modernism has pretty much played itself out as a creative philosophy. Modernism is now dated and old-fashioned. The Modernist insistence on originality, for example, is what leads contemporary Modernist writers to wallow in scatological and visceral metaphors, simply because those metaphors are dubiously "fresh."

Modernism is `tired' and `old-fashioned', yet it is Modernist writers that insist on originality.

The sales rep in question knows better now and makes sure I get advance copies. He is also learning not to assume similar things about Iain Banks (I don't care if there's an M in there, I want to read it... and so do about a hundred of my customers). Marketing people, however, routinely leave me off the mailing lists for such stuff.

Indeed, you dastardly villainess!!! And, since post #635 turned out not to be by TexAnne, this proves that History can be changed! The world is safe, for now, but we must remain ever vigilant.

Of course originality of expression is a great quality. The problem for those who follow the fashion of modernism rather than its insight is that they have emphasised this particular quality to the point where it mars rather than adorns, and begins to detach the work from the concrete realism that was, I believe, a basic tenet of modernism itself. The more high-flown the figure, however visceral it might be, the more distant from the actual material it is.

But... I post here all the time without using stirrups! Am I doing something wrong?

The reason it made aikdo make so much more sense is that mush of the body movement for aikido is based on body movement for the sword.

The official reason for using weapons (tanto/knife, bokken/sword jo/staff) is that it forces one to have good physical form. It also makes one pay more attention to the movement of center, and the extension of self.

It also makes it easier to deal with someone who has a weapon (though to be honest, ignore the knife stuff... at least if the guy really knows what he's doing. I was told to just go for it, and use what I know of knife-fighting, at a seminar, and I was able to touch everyone with the edge, sometimes after I was slammed to the ground).

But mostly, people start to do it because it's fun. If they are serious about their aikido, they start to get serious about the weapons forms.

One of the nice things about the weapons kata is they make it easier to practice aikido, without a partner. One of the small pleasures comes from the weapons being something one can make for oneself. I made myself a pair of jo (twenty dollars and a few hours worth of work) so that I could have one at the dojo (and not worry about forgetting it) and one at home.

Which meant I had the difference (about 100 dollars for a pair of inexpensive jo) to spend on attending a seminar, as well as the pleasure of knowing I'd made them.

My second piano teacher at university also contrived to mention, fairly early on, that she'd been taught by [someone] who'd been taught by Liszt. This, having a shorter chain of influence, was to be considered more impressive than my previous teacher's pedigree. She spent a year scattering the feeble remains of my confidence into the ether, and basically taught me nothing.

Doing post-grad work in Leeds, I asked my third piano teacher if he'd been taught by someone who'd been taught by someone who'd been taught by Liszt. He sniffed, and said that he didn't know. He went on to explain that lots of half-decent piano teachers had arranged to have one lesson with Liszt, because they could then claim to be one of his pupils, which meant they could increase their own lesson fees. He (my third teacher -- not Liszt) then spent the next two years actually teaching me stuff and improving my technique and generally being very inspiring.

What I took from this is that it's not who taught your teacher that's important, it's what they learnt.

After Patrick's little rant in #508, this feels a bit like being handed the black spot. I seem to have used it once in Ansible, yes. The joke, I thought, didn't lie in affecting to believe that literary people talk funny (Patrick's disapproving interpretation) but in pretending to be a trifle lowbrow oneself. Rather like calling "literary" fiction "highfalutin'", in fact, which Patrick approves in #626. Oh well.

PS: Thanks to Dave Luckett for the kind word about Thog, who got his own website last year: Thog.org.

There are many well-tempered tunings, of which equal temperament is only one. Bach certainly was not referring to equal temperament. IIRC it was a large piano company in the late 19th century who decreed that all its pianos would be sold tuned to equal temperament, and that's when equal temperament became a psychosis. I didn't look up the specifics, but Schönberg started his depredations in the 1920s, so I took a stab at 50 years.

With modern electronic instruments there's no reason for the psychosis to continue. I have an old-fashioned equal-temperament synthesizer, but a friend (a self-described "just-intonation geek") has a keyboard with a variety of tunings available; after you set one, the first key you strike becomes the keynote for the tuning. Under certain circumstances you could change keys (and tunings) in mid-piece with such a system.

This is one reason I always beg our choir directory not to play the organ along with us when we're singing Anglican Chant. We might screw up sometimes, but with the organ forcing us into equal temperament the chords will never sound as they should; with no keyboard playing, we'll naturally fall into just intonation (i.e. the tuning derived from the natural harmonic series) and the chords will spring to life. The difference is amazing. (Of course, it's also helpful to have him conducting; staying together rhythmically is the hardest part of Anglican Chant, as anyone who's ever sung it can tell you.)

which makes me wonder why, back in the late 50s, when I was taking lessons on Lips from the first Spanish Riding School set up in America (Rye NY in case you are interested) I was taught on the lead line but rode a saddle and had reins.

My teacher--who spoke no English, only German-- would shout "Gallop!" at me and it took some time
before I understood him to mean "canter"!

Jane

I am not worthy.

I am not worthy.

It's always good to encounter another fan of Jane Austin. There are too few of us about.

(And our number clearly do not include any of the programmers at Google, which I have just discovered has a built-in bias toward the English author of Sense and Sensibility.)

Classical riding, in the sense used, is English; moreover, it's being used about English Dressage, which is not at all the same thing as Spanish Dressage. (Or, for that matter, strictly, riding a horse for some practical end; dressage is a different competition category from everything else.)

And then there's what cavalry schools call dressage, which is a different creature again, in many flavours.

I think I'll take that website with a grain of salt.

Of course everything is technically "Literature" but I think that term should be reserved for stuff over 50 years old. Sort of like things move from being "vintage" to "antique."

Labour was expensive in the ancient world. Even slaves had to be fed, and labour productivity was very low, by our standards. A simple device like a wheelbarrow, by which labour productivity on, say, a building site might have been doubled, surely would have been worth it. And the horsecollar. It actually adds at least 50% to the tractive power of a horse, and this must have been as useful to the Romans as it was to the medieval peoples who seem to have invented it.

As for thinking that cavalry was ineffective against properly trained foot, quite so. This was because it usually was ineffective, at least early on. See Arrian, "The Campaign against the Alans" for information on this. But the Roman Army nevertheless became more and more a cavalry force in the later Empire, and they were always trying out new methods: lancers (at first not successfully), complete cataphract armour, bow-armed lights, bow-armed heavies, even armoured scythe-chariots (a disaster, as always). It seems very odd indeed that they didn't adopt the stirrup. They were in contact with Scythians who used it, if the archeological evidence can be accepted. But the Romans didn't.

The first people in Europe to use stirrups seem to have been the Lombards, in the eighth century. This is still under dispute. Heavy dispute.

You actually want the next number. "Don't judge a book by its cuh-uh-ver..."

I'm curious -- has anyone else ever wanted to abbreviate "mimetic fiction" as "mi-fi"?

Disadvantage: it doesn't actually say anything about the genre.

How about "lit-fi," then, or maybe even better, "liffy" to go along with "skiffy"? (This last has a built-in "Modern Literachoor" reference--for me, anyway--so may be preferred on those grounds.)

I'm not a lit-crit guy. Most of my thinking about creativity and art is rooted in my study of music, which I then try to generalize as far as possible to the whole of human creativity. Maybe that's a mistake, but it's my perspective, and I'm sticking with it.

The diversion in this thread about lineage is important, I think, because everyone comes from somewhere, whether they like it or not. It doesn't matter whether your lineage includes Nadia Boulanger or John Updike or just sitting and listening at Grampa's knee. Human beings have been telling stories, painting pictures, and singing songs for at least 50,000 years. That's a ginormous lineage, and everyone is part of it.

Some people try to break free of that lineage. They want to do something "original" (there's those quotation marks again). Some fraction of those people even succeed. But there's no guarantee that a truly original work will have any value to anyone. It's entirely possible for a work to be both original and awful.

The problem (and I think this is a problem that arises out of capital-M Modernism) is that some people think that originality in and of itself has value. They want to be recognized for their originality apart any other quality their work might or might not possess. Personally, I think originality is part of the human condition. It's the default value. People are unique, and every human's every utterance is unique and original in its context. If you strive to create works people will value and appreciate, originality will take care of itself.

As an aside to all the sword-stuff: when my sister moved into her new house about two years ago, which is one of the only terrace of cruck-beamed houses left in the UK, and was built, I think, in the 15th or 16th century (and yes, it is as gorgeous as you'd think, full of inconveniently-low ceilings and exposed timbers), she was pleased to find in one of the fireplaces two narrow swords and a bayonet which had all clearly been used as rather stylish pokers for the fires (there was also a thingy--no idea what to call it--with a big curved blade on one side, a point at the top and a hole in the bottom so it could be mounted on a long stick, but I digress). She decided that my home would be a better place for them so we brought them here, stuck them on top of the panelling in our sitting room and thought no more of them until a visitor announced that they were old something-swords and would have been rather valuable but for the fire damage on the sharp ends.

As you can tell, we're rather casual with our antiques here. They're still up on the top of our panelling and at Christmas my husband used them to poke the fire with. He thought it fitting. My boys just like to chase around with them and poke at the dogs. No wonder my life is as it is.

But that comes out of a smidgin of experience of working with clay, and I wouldn't say it was the only plausible reading.

Pants.

In more modern historical movies, legionnaires ar often shown wearing pants, at least in stories set later in the Empire, I think. Is this another concession to Hollywood? Or did the generals think that, yes, pants are for Barbarians, but we'll make an exception when our boys go where it's very cold, and eventually Rome kind of got used to it?

Serge (662): Bwa-ha-ha!

Xopher/ (682): Nope, that's not one of mine. Perhaps one of my minions put it up. (But I love it!)

Serge (683): I've never been *seen* near a TARDIS, but I did help build a TARDIS console once.

One of the interesting points about originality in art, poetry, music, etc., is that it hasn't always been valued. In some times and places, imitation or recreation of past exemplars was held to be the true aim of art.

One striking case of this -- if I'm remembering the details correctly -- was the Heian court of Japan (8th to 11th Centuries), where poetry in classical Chinese modes (and often using Chinese language) was considered the highest literary art form. In general, only men were taught enough Chinese to produce this kind of poetry. The irony is that what is now considered the best literature from Japan in this period was often produced by women -- who, not having access to Chinese, wrote instead in Japanese, and some of the time in prose. (Examples include Izumi Shikibu and Lady Murasaki, author of The Tale of Genji, which is sometimes considered the world's first psychological of character.)

Obviously given the capabilities and literary preferences of people here, the correct address should have been "kittons".

Wonder if perhaps you meant to say: "'Mimetic fiction' is good". Otherwise you appear to be making some sort of blanket claim about the quality of mimetic fiction. A counterfactual one, at that.

Lori Coulson (#599): An expert rider trained this way can control the horse by use of seat alone. Sorry, but I couldn't help thinking of Earl in recent "Pickles" cartoons boasting of how he could change channels on a TV remote control while sitting on it!

I like 'vanilla fiction', it's good. Richly expressive of a genre preoccupied with middle-class folks fucking, getting married, getting divorced, dying, having babies, having career problems.

I don't eat vanilla icecream because it's not worth the time it takes to eat. I don't read vanilla fiction because...

I guess that's why I don't care for the term applied to kinds of literature one finds jejune. Also, we don't want to say that the entire field is jejune, do we? Turnabout may be fair play, but an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind; moreover, what we're really trying to say is that it's genreless. (Is anything ever really ENTIRELY genreless?)

On behalf of lovers of true vanilla everywhere, I must protest! Vanilla ice cream may not be to your taste, but a good vanilla, such as that made by Metropolitan, is well worth the walk down to the village to pick up a pint, and the time to scoop and eat it.

Vanilla, true vanilla, not your over-sweetened, flavourless stuff that was waved near some vanillin sometime in its creation, is a rich, wonderful flavour, and well worth the cost of the beans.

Vanilla and its cousins need not even be considered completely devoid of kink, as witness the [whatever the noun form of sublime is] that is fox testicle ice cream.

Oh, and his music sounds good, too, although when I'm feeling strictly dodecaphonic I usually reach for Webern.

I'm right with you on the vanilla thing though. True vanilla is a wonderful thing.

http://www.kellymccullough.com/mail.html

I concede this may be a lack in me, rather than in the music.

Oh, and you can only say that I'm calling Babbitt a shitheap if you really think I'm calling Sondheim a flower. Plus, as a neo-Pagan I don't undervalue shitheaps! The phrase "flowers grow from shitheaps" means that something very annoying, something whose value is hard to see, can have a result whose value is easy to see.

Looks like Babbitt was a very good teacher. I just don't think he was a good composer...in fact, I have trouble seeing that his radical serialism (serializing dynamics and rhythm and all aspects of the piece) is really music at all.

And here's what I said:

Something similar happened when the formal ("classical") music world was in the grip of the whole 12-tone psychosis...If your music wasn't well-formed by strict 12-tone standards...it wasn't considered "serious music," and you were considered a "popular" (anathema to academics) composer.

OK, I did refer to Schönberg's "depredations." That was overstated (intended as a flip remark, and also I'd read Mann's Doktor Faustus, which...well, I'm sure you know). I think 12-tone music was a bad idea, a bad thing overall, and in general a dead end. In its favor I will say that it did allow people to become more adventurous when it comes to harmony, and more comfortable with dissonance; I just don't think it was worth it.

I think vanilla is underrated as a flavor...partly because vanilla things tend to be underflavored. If you don't believe me, try my vanilla buttercream, which has a distinctly brownish color from the amount of vanilla extract I put in.

I guess that's why I don't care for the term applied to kinds of literature one finds jejune. Also, we don't want to say that the entire field is jejune, do we? Turnabout may be fair play, but an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind; moreover, what we're really trying to say is that it's genreless. (Is anything ever really ENTIRELY genreless?) '

Heh. Yeah, I see that, but it's fun to just give 'em some back, and wait for the squeals of injured outrage.

And people who use 'jejune'... makes me laugh. Like 'irony', doesn't matter how many times I consult the dictionary, I always have to go back ONE MORE TIME, and then think about it. A reflection on me, not you, bud.

I suppose I should clarify: I like vanilla - ice cream, fiction, and sex (say, that sounds like a nice evening...). But it's not automatically better than the alternatives, and is just as capable of being terrible, so it should have a name that doesn't carry connotations of quality.

I realise that you didn't solicit my culinary advice, but if your vanilla buttercream requires you to use that much extract, may I suggest you try a vanilla paste? Much more intense vanilla flavour, with much less change to the consistency of whatever you're concocting.

The drawback to using a paste is that you get a slightly more uneven appearance to the buttercream, which may not be desirable if you're doing careful cake decorating. However, it does pack a much better vanilla bang than even a very good, pure extract.

And I thought the point was that lit-fic (which I tend to think of as academic fiction or OMG teh literary teh fiction depending on how catty I'm feeling and how appalling the example I've just read was) does constitute a genre, by virtue of being a distinct marketing category, having a distinct, clear audience, developed style with distinctive stylistic, narratological, and plot markers, and tropes.

My experience of 12-tone music is similar to how most people experience* Khosian (click consonant) languages.

With Khosian, you see a person talking, but you can't connect those clicking noises with the speaker.

With 12-tone, I can see the people playing their instruments, and I hear sounds, but I don't associate the two. I understand that they're playing 12-tone music, but I don't believe it.

* or how I've read that people experience them

I'm another fan of real vanilla; I keep vanilla beans in my sugar canister (which in turn flavors my tea as well as my baked goods and ice cream).

That said, the problem with using "vanilla" as a genre label is that, if you aren't using it to signify "boring" or "not kinky" (which has other problems, given that there's plenty of fiction in almost any genre without sex, kinky or otherwise), the hacker slang use of "vanilla" is to signify the most common/popular kind of something. Vanilla ice cream is, I think, still in that position; "literary"/"mimetic"/"mainstream"/the genre we're trying to name isn't (unless "mainstream means "not sf", which isn't a genre any more than "not mystery novels" is a genre). I suspect romance novels would qualify as "vanilla" in that sense, and that not only doesn't solve the problem at hand, it further complicates "vanilla"/"kinky" as a dichotomy.

Vanilla bean paste is, well, vanilla beans in a paste form. I'm out and don't have a bottle, but these folks sell it. When I've used it, the effect of the paste has been similar to the difference between using liquid food colouring and food colouring paste: it's just that much more concentrated, and more like scraping a vanilla bean into your mix.

Hmmm ... I'm sensing a need for a vanilla-themed table at the hypothetical-but-wouldn't-it be-awesome Making Light potluck.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I thought it was clear from this that the 12-tone psychosis was taking only 12-tone music seriously.

Thanks for the clarification. I certainly prefer this to my misunderstanding of what you meant, and would even agree that a lot of the rhetoric of serialism was extremely off-putting. Music is the greatest of the arts, not the least of the sciences.

You also said, though, that "this [the 'psychosis'] led to abominations like the 'music' of Milton Babbitt," which implies to me that you think Babbitt wrote the music he did because he only took twelve-tone music seriously, or that he thought writing it was the only way to be taken seriously. I trust I've made it clear that the former is simply false. I would argue that the latter is also pretty hard to defend.

I think 12-tone music was a bad idea, a bad thing overall, and in general a dead end.

We got Messiaen, Stockhausen, and Xenakis out of the deal. Good enough for me. I'm very excited about tomorrow night's performance of Hymnen...

Stockhausen...you don't want to know what I think of Stockhausen.

I didn't know some of the information you've now provided about Milton Babbitt. It's now a mystery to me why anyone who could teach and encourage Stephen Sondheim would write the way he did. We'll have to agree to disagree about the quality of his music.

You may regret saying "Music is the greatest of the arts, not the least of the sciences." No, not that you don't really believe it or anything; I'm just going to quote it all over the place! That's a really great line.

Netflix has an amazing DVD of him improvising on the organ, along with an excellent performance of the Quartet For The End Of Time, which I would recommend to anyone wanting an introduction to his music.

How even are we talking Serge? You're about a depth micrometer away from OCD...

Madeline@666: I'd argue that the principle is valid provided people are telling the truth; those "students" sound like cheaters to me. (In fact, it sounds like an inverse marker, i.e. did Liszt ever actually \teach/ anyone, or just give them a lesson for them to advertise?)

DaveL: I was speaking not of innovation (a sprawling term) but of the difference between actual invention/discovery and the implementation of someone else's invention/discovery (which is the distinction I was recalling -- I tend to have decohered by midnight local time). But it sounds like I was given an oversimplification if the Romans actually invented concrete.

TexAnne@676: taking along a saltshaker when you visit ~cri is a good idea; he is subtle and quick to snicker.

Jane@687: could the oddball be a glaive blade?

Serge@711: I've been noodling around computers most of my life, and paid to make them behave for almost half; when I ate icecream from the tub, I ate down the outsides, because otherwise the outsides would melt (faster than the top) then refreeze in a less-good texture. (This is also easier, and matches the advice of some fanatics that even the best icecream needs to warm up a little from freezer temperature.) (I still like icecream, but I don't keep it in the house -- one less source of cholesterol and temptation.)

Jane

Myself, I have an 'apartment' fridge with a wafer-sized freezer unit. The smallest unit of ice cream I can practically buy is the pint, which is too small to fit into the freezer unit. So if I buy a pint, I have to commit to eating it all at once. The last time I bought a pint, I also had to buy a box of plastic cutlery so I would have a spoon. This is most likely to happen during the summer, so by the time I have biked far enough from the store to sit down and eat the ice cream, it typically melts in from the surface. So I eat the ice cream into toward the center from the surface. Next summer, I'll try to remember to include a spoon amoung the tools I carry in the backpack.

I consider myself a computer person; hence the local environmental variables*.

* 'Local environmental variable' is probably a programming oxymoron.

Trader Joe's had vanilla paste today, at least in Everett WA.

I would like to note that aspirated cranberry juice appears to have some measure of effectiveness against incipient upper respiratory infections. It is, however, recommended that one have a good stain remover on hand for the subsequent expulsion.