And the computer programmer, inadvertently demonstrating a common issue with "multitasking", tweets "Let's all get back into the car and and see if we hit a tree again."

I am a mathematician by education, but an actuary by profession.

You can tell an extrovert actuary because they look at your shoes when they are talking to you, rather than at your own.

Andrew Wells @ 2

No no no. That's the accountant version. You can tell an extroverted actuary because he's talking to you.

If he were normal, he'd send you a memo.

Jay Lake has passed away.

Back in 2008, I was at the worldcon in Denver. I was staying at the hotel across the street from the con center. After I got into the hotel's elevator, a distinguished older gent came in on a lower floor. Further down, Jay Lake did too and I said hello to him. He asked if he knew me. I said "No, I'm just a fan." Lake said, "There's no such thing as just a fan." At which the older gent - one Robert Silverberg - said "I'm a fan too."

That's my Jay Lake story.

Speaking of programming, this popped up on my FB feed yesterday.

Programming sucks

Way exaggerated, but a core of truth.

Teresa, are you implying that this joke you offer is Joke Number 197?

I don't think one can appreciate the full flavor of this unless one has known or knows at least one mathematician very well.

Had me laughing out loud.

It's all in the way you tell it.

How to make gold from mercury

Steve C @ 5

Thanks for the link; that is a very-on-target article.

Theophylact @ 9: But all the open threads here are gold!

Serge Broom, if not for context, I sure would have said that was your Robert Silverberg story.

John M Burt @ 12... Or one could say the story is about fandom at its best.

Go through the shallows, then out past the wreck
until you reach the point where water burns;
you’ll know it clearly by the sharp returns,
then note the ship, the one with golden deck
and figurehead of angel with wry neck,
you’d sign up on her as one does who yearns
for urgent journeys. Yet as each child learns
there are no funds left to support the cheque.
Still without vision no one would begin
a single enterprise, and we’d remain
stuck in the mud, unable to set sail.
Instead we face each whimsy with a grin,
allow the facts of chance to come out plain,
and turn our faces right into the gale.

Fragano, applause.

I was struck by a notion the other day and found myself without anybody to express it to. So I thought I'd save it for the next Making Light open thread. Here it is.

The Cooperative Extension System (100 years old this year!) doesn't get enough respect.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the Cooperative Extension people are the folks who take small amounts of federal research money, funnel it through land-grant colleges and turn it into informative pamphlets (or, modernly, .pdf files) on every basic agricultural question or conundrum that citizens are likely to encounter in their farming, gardening, and landscaping lives.

In the 1970s my mother used to order Cooperative Extension gardening pamphlets through the mail. In most counties, there's an office where you can stop in and pick some up, or seek more detailed agricultural advice of many kinds. And, of course, these days the Cooperative Extension pamphlets from most states are available on the internet. It's pretty much impossible to Google anything to do with domesticated plants and not find a Cooperative Extension result that speaks to your question with authority, brevity, and clarity.

Of course there's politics and corruption in it, if you look hard enough; you'll find plenty of advice, at least, that boils down to "this expensive chemical spray is effective" and says little or nothing about alternatives that may be healthier, cheaper, or more effective. But that is, essentially, a quibble.

So here's my notion: One could use the Cooperative Extension Service as a conversational litmus test for insanity and/or blind zealotry among persons whose politics include elements of hostility toward government and government services.

I've described myself as anarchist or libertarian for much of my life, and I could craft an ideologically "pure" objection to the Cooperative Extension Service without even breaking a verbal sweat. But, as I slide into that stage of middle life where people (sometimes) relax their politics and (sometimes) take up gardening, I find that I just can't be bothered to do it. If I did do it, I wouldn't agree with myself. In a moment of self-reflection after about the twentieth time I appreciatively perused a Cooperative Extension publication, I found myself thinking "How big of an a**hole would somebody have to be to take ideological issue with this?"

Doubtless other people feel the same about other collective projects that I might yet balk at. I'm not sure I can think of one, though, where the cost is so low, the service provided so good, and the fundemental object (grow more, grow better, grow smarter!) so universally unobjectionable.

"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" -- Reg, in Life of Brian.

I live in a city with the state's Land Grant College, and I suspect that the local Cooperative Extension doesn't get enough respect even here.

Cooperative Extension offices have been producing publications for 100 years now, and most of their work was done before the computer age. I would suspect that most CE offices have extensive archives that could be fascinating to look through.

Another paean for the unsung Cooperative Extension Services!

Serge Broom #4:

*facepalm* I remember you telling that story & remember the Silverberg quote, but it completely slipped my mind that the other person in that story was Jay.

I only met Jay once, last year at an open dinner when he was in New Zealand. I nearly met him in 2010 at Worldcon but was too shy to introduce myself. He was in mid-conversation & I was lurking in the background. Then the group conversing walked away & I wasn't brave enough to follow. I am grateful for second chances and the opportunity to spend time with him. There is less colour in the world today.

Daniel Boone #16: Try this idea on for size: People don't normally make moral decisions based on ideology. Rather, they tend to choose their ideology based on their moral framework, then use it to justify their moral decisions. At most, the ideology may be used to extend the moral framework beyond what the person already had worked out for themselves (hopefully but not always consistently).

Moral frameworks, in turn are based on almost everything except ideology and other intellectual exercises: emotional biases (including temperament, early imprinting/training, and later developmental changes), prior experiences, existing social relations (family, tribal, dominance, etc.), and social influences both accidental and purposeful. Stuff like sermons, demonstrations, and even non-violent resistance, all count under social influence, and/or attempts to reorder social relations. (So does textual influence, especially "inspirational" or "authoritative" texts.)

Where I lived in west Texas, the local extension agent had a column in the newspaper.

My brother works for the ag extension (ornamental horticulture, mostly) out of Davis.

Theophylact @ 9: My high school chemistry textbook recounted that technique, in a less jokey fashion, observing that it had in fact been done—twice: once to see if it would work, and a second time to make sure the first time wasn't a fluke. (It didn't say where, but I'd bet on the same Berkeley lab that gave us most of the transuranics.) The yield, it said, was just barely enough to measure, and it was actually more useful to make mercury out of gold, because the mercury you got that way was isotopically pure and could be used for some sort of precision measurement. I forget the exact details.

This anecdote seems to have sunk into my id: even now, more than ten years after I gave up the practice of chemistry, one of my brain's stock anxiety nightmares is the one where I am explaining to a generic-fantasyland autocrat that yes, it is possible to make gold out of base metals, and in fact I know how it is done, but regrettably it would cost more money than there is in the kingdom just to build the machine required.

AKICML, UK Edition: What's a council depot?

Why You Truly Never Leave High School

Bias warning: I've suspected for a long time that there is something deeply broken about the modern school system, and this article fits right into my ideas about that.

Jenny @23

"Council" generally is the Local Authority, US county or municipality equivalent, and the depot is the base for non-office workers: highways, garbage disposal, that sort of thing. It's where they keep and maintain vehicles rather than typewriters.

@Dave Bell no. 25: Thanks! We call both the department and their equipment/physical plant "Public Works." (West Coast dialect, Alaska variant.)

Fragano #14:

It little profits the hero who embarks
Upon a voyage in a ship of gold
To recognise, too late, that he’s been sold
A pup: the damn thing won’t float long, and sharks
Are circling. The captain’s sage remarks
About the angel figurehead, that bold
Conception, seem irrelevant, and cold.
Acidic seas, hence golden hull. What larks!

Regrettably, gold’s soft, and tends to sink.
It’s beaten, at the last. A silken shroud
Restrains more than a mast, or so you’d think.
And are the scuppers really lined with mink,
Or is that mould? Oh, hero, be not proud
You’re mighty only for the time allowed.

Fragano Ledgister #14 & Dave Luckett #27:

Thank you.

We towed her back to port, that ship of gold,
And sang the ragged heroes down the plank
While bilges overflowed. The water stank
As much of grief and weariness as mold.
I swam beneath the angel figurehead
And offered brine and mussels. She declined
(Some ships will not be guest-friends with my kind),
But told me of the voyage in their stead.

"The captain had a map, but part complete.
We followed it, and found the place they sought.
The heroes sang and feasted, fucked and fought,
Then won the real prize: they learned defeat.
Now, knowing failure, they can do some good
And sail to greater seas in ships of wood."

Fragano Ledgister @14, Dave Luckett @27, abi @29,

Ye gods and goddesses, I love Making Light...

(Thank you, all three of you.)

Zack @ #22: Yes, the fact that 198Au is the only stable isotope allows you to make isotopically pure 198Hg. Its green line at 5460.7532 ångströms was for years used as a length/time/frequency standard. It has since been superseded by hydrogen maser, rubidium, and cesium standards; as a clock, the last is accurate to one second in 300 million years.

From Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics: "Gold, in elemental form, has been employed for centuries as an antipruritic to relieve the itching palm."

Fragano Ledgister @14, Dave Luckett @27, abi @29: bravo!

Fragano, Dave, abi: Wow

Open threadiness wrt the whackjob who shot up Isla Vista:

I've been thinking a lot about the role media amplification plays in inspiring these mass shootings. It feels extremely unhealthy to me to have all the obsessive discussion of this sad nutcase's creepy video and ranting and planning and all.

This article by Zeynep Tufekci catches some of this. On one hand, inspiring messed up people to do awful things seems like a hell of a bad idea. On the other hand, I'm not sure what evidence exists for this kind of effect. And on the gripping hand, our news media already seems to spend an unhealthy amount of time spinning and evading to avoid giving the clueless goobers the wrong ideas in many other areas, and I generally don't think that's a win overall.

Open Threadiness: Nature is LOUD.

Lila: Yeah, and the downside to my neighborhood having a lovely diverse bird fauna (because of all the mature trees) is that the dawn chorus starts at 4FUCKING30am. Usually if I'm not already awake it's not enough to wake me, but if I am ...

Also, it just started raining in that "it is very hot and muggy and then a cold front and so humidity falling straight down" way. I watched a robin in our neighbors' yard briefly taking a bird bath in the raindrops (spreading wings, shimmying) before deciding it wasn't going to stop and he'd rather be somewhere drier. :->

albatross, #35: OTOH, at least we're now having the conversation about institutionalized misogyny and the rape culture in a lot of places and with a lot of people that were brushing it off prior to this. Some people's entire purpose in life is apparently to be the bad example that nobody can ignore or shove under the rug.

Tangentially related: I've been re-reading some of my Georgette Heyer books lately, and one of them was Powder and Patch. And ye ghods, has it had a visit from the Suck Fairy! The misplaced pride and bad communications between the young lovers I can deal with, because learning about that sort of thing is part of growing up, and they do learn. But OMG, the advice they're both given by people old enough to know better! "Lie to your lover" on both sides, and "ignore consent and force her because that's what women want" on his. Not just once either, but over and over again. I can still read the underlying story as an amusing piece of fluff and an illustration of "be careful what you ask for," but some of the bloom is decidedly off it now.

And I wish my browser would stop wiping my sticky information whenever I close it. That was me above, despite the all-lower-case typo.

OP: This has been bouncing round my Twitter time-line for a while so some of you may already have seen it:

Three Bayesians walk into a bar: a) what's the probability that this is a joke? b) what's the probability that one of the three is a Rabbi? c) given that one of the three is a Rabbi, what's the probability that this is a joke?

Lin Daniel #15: Thank you.

Dave Luckett #27 & Abi #29: Those are amazing!

Soon Lee # 28, Cassy B #30, john #33, albatross #34: Thank you.

Pointer back to Open Thread 196

Thank you, Fragano, abi, and all who commented.

May I say that this is the only place I know of where you can answer a Petrarchan sonnet with another, and have it capped by still another, all within twenty-four hours.

Come to think of it, it's the only place I know of where anybody cares about Petrarchan sonnets.

Just got back from seeing "Maleficent." Pay no attention to the critics that pan it, it was a romp and I liked the plot twists on the original.

Not only, "Fragano, Dave, abi: Wow" like albatross said, but where but here would those verses be interwoven with discussions about turning mercury into gold (and vice versa), the Cooperative Extension System, mathematical jokes, birdsong...

Fragano, thank you for the image and symbolism of the ship, and Dave, thank you for reminding me that poetry is a conversation. I've been too long away from versification.

Cassy, albatross, dcb, I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Where there are three, there could easily be four or more. Just sayin', sonnetrists...

So I've done two stupid things and I wonder if there's a way to fix one or both of them without more effort than they're worth.

The first stupid thing was letting my old shell account with my old blog on it lapse before taking a proper backup. I have a backup of the shell account, but I'm having a hard time making it see the right Perl for that version of Moveable Type to bring it up.

I could fix that, given time. But now, the second stupid thing:

I let my new shell account with my new blog on it lapse before taking any sort of backup.

So here's my question: Does anyone know of an automated solution for pulling the content from an old blog from archive.org (which is a backup! of sorts) into a new blog? Either in a quick-and-dirty way or in a nuanced, human-meditated way, or some way at all?

I'm not terribly mad at myself for the screwup, but I am anxious to start blogging again, and I'd like to put those back up first.

Since this is an open thread: Does anyone recall the name of the fellow in Ron Goulart's continuing run of very shorts in F&FS, many long years ago? It's been itching at my brain for a week, now, and I fear to Google it, as I know from experience about the SF rabbit hole.

Are you thinking of Reginald Bretnor/Grendel Briarton's Ferdinand Feghoot series, Walter? I think the G may have been confusing you.

Re. gold as medicine, yes it has been used as such for centuries, albeit based on rather out of date models about how the world worked, but there's at least one cautionary tale. Pasting from my blog:

A paper I found in the British Medical Journal suggests that Diane of Potiers, a 16th century French courtesan and mistress of Henri II, died from drinking gold preparations.
Her grave was desecrated during the French Revolution, and a sample of hair taken and preserved. A few years ago ICP-MS was used to find that it contained large amounts of gold. Well, large for someone’s hair anyway, and the hair was much thinner than normal, which is a known symptom of gold poisoning. Even better, it is recorded that she drank potable gold, thinking it was an elixir of youth, as indeed it was thought of since at least the 14th century."

They also found some mercury, suggesting that the gold had been collected or purified using mercury; either way you don't want to go drinking too much gold.

The only slight drawback of making gold from isotopes is that you spend more money on the electricity for the accelerator.

Regarding the particle about hoarders and collectors, aren't collectors merely hoarders with an organised aim?

Lee #39 - I found that I do indeed have my grandmother's paperbacks of Heyer in my attic, can you recommend one to start off with?

Tom Whitmore @51 -- um, yassss. (I do hate that my brain has such spasms of late. Why it fastened on Goulart is a question I will leave unresolved.) Bretnor! Of course. Feghoot forever! Thank you. Now my brain is free to it itch on other topics.

Walter Hawn, #50: I was going to guess Lefty Feep, but it turns out he's a Robert Bloch character.

Look over Goulart's ISFDB entry. Maybe it will jog your memory. He wrote a lot of series.

ISFDB is a boon to civilization. It isn't celebrated enough. We should have a holiday. And the people who maintain it should get garlands. Or something.

Lila and her family are at the edge of Fermilab, with Cally. Must go play tourguide.

RE gold-as-medicine, a friend sent me a link to this astonishing pile of newage:

http://starfirewater.myshopify.com/pages/about-us

Yes, Starfire water is INFUSED WITH ETHERIUM GOLD! And spinned for several hours to create vortices!

From the label:

"This water is amplified with a psionic wave oscillation tuned to the Unverses's frequency, helping to synchronize you with the heartbeat of our Earth. STARFIRE WATER(tm) is treated with Sacred Sound Resonance Transmission(tm) to vibrationally transform you on the deepest molecular level. All together, we've created the worlds' finest premium, alkaline performance, "living," hexagonal super-structured water."

Stefan Jones #56: Arrgh! All it needs is some quantum....

#58: They're probably saving that for STARFIRE WATER PLATINUM, which costs twice as much and is twice as hydrating because they add MULTIPHASIC QUANTUM PLATINUM and spin it in TWO directions simultaneously so the water is fooled into . . . Oh Glob, I should really stop, they might hire me.

In the vein of "poems about ships", though not necessarily in the vein of "really gorgeous sonnets", because I've yet to have a sonnet behave itself:

"Death of a Sailsman"

A ship is beautiful at night,
when snow and ice the rigging trace;
with the moon and stars the only light
on a sailor's fall from grace.

His hands were turning stiff and blue
where they gripped the slick mainbrace;
the ropes, they twisted 'neath his shoe -
there was horror on his face!

He fell! and wished with all his might,
(as his innards were turned to goop)
that he was home and tucked up tight,
not splattered on a sloop.

I had what feels like an epiphany. Checking here to see if it sounds plausible outside my head.

A friend on Facebook was asking why Game Of Thrones gets spoiled a lot and [his examples] he's never gotten hit with spoilers about Agents of SHIELD, Godzilla, or the new Dresden book.

My theory is that soap operas, and especially GoT, trigger the "this is important news and we must spread it" part of the human mind. Don't ask me what part that is, but I'm sure it's in there.

I think "especially GoT" because these are rulers and it matters a lot what happens to the ruler. Elephants fight; grass gets trampled, and so forth.

I may try a Petrarchian later, if I have time; Shakespearian is a twitch reflex for me, but I've never finished a Petrarchian .

HLN: Local woman, putting some packages thru the barrel-drop at the post office, manages to slam her right index finger between the barrel and its frame. Ice has been applied, and she has hopes that this will keep the already-visible bruise and swelling from becoming too much of a nuisance.

Guthrie, #52: The ones I keep returning to over and over again are A Civil Contract, The Quiet Gentleman, The Unknown Ajax, and Venetia. The Grand Sophy is mostly fun but has an ugly splat of anti-Semitism in the middle of it. The Masqueraders is mostly a romp, as is False Colours. Cotillion has a nice "good guy wins out over handsome scoundrel" arc that makes it very popular with modern readers. I do not recommend The Reluctant Widow because of its treatment of the heroine.

Stefan, #56: Egad.

Further to the conversation:

A hero doing good? I never heard.
They always seem to sulk in tents, or fail
To blow a horn (except their own), or sail
Beyond the sunset. They perform absurd
Abstractions: nothing useful, in a word.
In fact, the useful and the good entail
Exactly what they aren’t. The Holy Grail,
The Golden Fleece – quixotic is preferred.

At last, it comes to windmills, but the tilt
Is run in lists no ship can ever bear.
And so she founders, for her hull is built
Of neither wood nor gold, but crafted air,
Like Mad Tom’s horse, or hurricane. The guilt
For shoddy craft is ours: we sang that air.

Sandy B. #60: This seems reasonable, and I tend to agree with the theory.

I learn more about poetry here than I ever learned from my abortive attempt at taking a poetry class. This is fun. The class was not.

Thank you, Fragano, Dave, abi, Em.

I'm back from the Three Hour Tour of Fermilab, worth every minute. And the Hour Tour of American Science and Surplus, where it was fun to watch Lila and co make discoveries.

They're great people, with excellent taste in obscure post-modern vaudeville shows.

And then I come back here and find more excellent poetry. All in all, a very fine day.

Excellent Gathering of Light, epic shopping expedition to American Science & Surplus, amazing tour of Fermilab (still can't believe that part), fine Chinese food and conversation so good that we kept it up until the waitstaff started pointedly turning out the lights in the aquaria. Thanks, Bill! Thanks, Cally!

Now I ded from tired. *splat*

@Guthrie no. 52: I sneered at romance novels until I had to clear out my late mother-in-law's book room and wondered how such a down-to-earth woman could be so into something so . . . frilly. So I sat down with a stack of her Heyer paperbacks and kept reading and giggling until my butt went numb.

My favorites tend to be the ones that most obviously stick a pin in romance tropes. Any book that has the masterful, overbearing, handsome, rich, and ever-so-slightly dastardly lover running home to his mother to cry into her lap because he was a complete jerk while trying to woo the ingenue and now she is never going to speak with him again is aces IMO. (Her response, quite genteelly put, is relief that he has gotten over his cranio-rectal inversion.)

In no particular order, and not telling you which one has that scene in it, I recommend:

Frederica (mad genius children, independent women, baffled bachelors, and large dogs)
Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle (a secret author of Gothic novels and the bubbleheaded fangirl she is unfortunately stuck with)
The Nonesuch (a classic love triangle played for laughs, except when it isn't)
Black Sheep (the ardent young lover, his dissipated uncle, and two or three ingenues, except not in the least)

John @49:

I don't think there is anything ready-to-hand. There's a bunch of libraries for various languages, especially Perl, which do generic screen-scraping, though, and I'll bet you could adapt one of those.

Jenny, #67: The Nonesuch, while not one of my own top favorites, is nonetheless the one I'd most like to see adapted into a musical comedy of manners. Because the way the parts are laid out, the fortyish aristocrat (bass) and the well-bred spinster (alto) are the hero roles, while the beautiful, spoiled ingenue (soprano) and the meddling dandy (tenor) are the obstacles to be overcome. This is a complete inversion of the way voices and roles are normally assigned in a musical, and would be all kinds of fun to watch.

Apologies if you see this on another list I frequent. There appears to be some issue with post visibility and/or arrival there--maybe my post went through, maybe it didn't. Anyway.

AKICML: This is morbid and gross. It's so morbid and gross that I decided not to google it, not wanting to see any images. However, with the number of writers here, I thought somebody would probably know or know of a site free of visual squick that could explain the topic.

Say somebody dies suddenly in a house with the doors and windows shut. For reasons, nobody comes to deal with the body. The utilities are off. Spring is well underway, summer will be hot, winter more or less begins in December, but prolonged freezing won't occur until February. Local humidity is generally high. About when would this corpse enter the period of dry decay?

Jenny: After seeing your list of favorite Heyers, I had to go chase down this short fic. Put down your drink before clicking the link.

Hm, I am reminded by Em in #59 that there should be a "Travelling Sailsman" problem and a lot of debates in computer science would be gone if "Stationary Salesmen" were the default, rather than "Travelling Salesmen, Stationery or not".

Jenny Islander @ 70

Not a writer, but grew up on a farm. A basic timeline in warm weather:
Week 1: progressively more gross
Weeks 2-3: stably gross
Weeks 4-8: progressively less gross
Week 8+: not attracting flies any more

You can about double the time for each stage in cool weather (temperatures from 60 on a warm day to 30 on a cold night--a Tennessee winter). If it's stably freezing cold, I don't know--that didn't happen in Tennessee.

Josh Berkus @ 68: That's what I'll probably do if I don't find something prewritten. I've written a screen-scraper or two in Perl myself. It just seems this must occur often enough that someone somewhere has hacked up a solution.

I hate to think it's come to me having to be someone, after all these years.

Jenny Islander #70: "Scholarly" info on corpse decay comes from police forensic research, involving "body farms". If you can find their papers... well, I can't promise no pictures, but they won't be shoving them in your face just for shock, and there will probably be tables.

One spoiler (so to speak) for your particular scenario: If the house is well enough sealed, there might not be any (appropriate types of) flies available. (If they can get in, they will, following the smell.) I think that would prolong things significantly, and gas in the body cavity would have potential to make the scene really gross. Also, in high humidity, I don't know that you're actually guaranteed to reach a "dry" stage.

Other Heyers I have enjoyed:

False Colors: Identical twins, social calamities, doughty old ladies.

The Toll Booth: Mysterious lurkers, highwayman in love, caves. Also a slightly improbable love-at-first-sight thing, but if we reject the good while we search for the perfect we will have very little to read.

Lee, #69: I'm already imagining a big ensemble number entitled "But Her Uncle Is a General"...

and #61: I know I *shouldn't* like A Reluctant Widow as much as I do, because poor Elinor is really jockeyed into a ludicrously untenable position and doesn't get enough of a chance to push against it, but the rompiness of the whole thing overwhelms me whenever I read it. Plus, more large dogs.

Jenny Islander @70 - Bill Bass, the founder of the UT body farm, has written several books. They're kind of anecdotal, but you may be able to find some info there. There's also Paul Barber's Vampires, Burial, and Death, which made me decide to be cremated.

Jenny Islander @70: You're very unlikely to have dry decay (aka mummification): that requires high heat and low humidity. In your scenario, which has happened often enough in Real Life, the body decomposes rapidly -- if you want some idea of gross (as in general but also as in "ew") details, feel free to email me at (ROT-13'd) arvirg2@nby.pbz. In any case, bacterial decomposition begins within hours, and the body degenerates over time until there's not much left besides bones. Freezing temperatures will stop the deomposition process, but it will start again once the temperature comes back up, which can be essentially on a daily basis, if the house warms up in the sunlight.

If you want dry decay, your body needs to be in the attic, or in a tightly-sealed room with a running dehumidifier.

Thanks for the lovely sonnets (two Petrarchian, two hybrid and equally lovely); I might try later if I feel up to it (as a side note, I can't recommend the Fever Diet as a weightloss technique, even though the claims ("Lose six pounds in three days! Never feel hungry!") are technically true).

I went to Michigan State University, which got its start as an ag school and is still a good one (you like those Yukon Gold potatoes? MSU research). It participated heavily in the Cooperative Extension Service, which IIRC was more than just producing pamphlets; I seem to remember they sent experts out to solve some pretty dire crop problems, but it's all a long time ago now and I'm not sure my memory is accurate.

I do remember that when a bunch of professors and grad students formed a bluegrass band ("by day, Charles McClure, Professor of Mathematics; by night, Farley the Bluegrass Fiddler!") they called it, what else? the Bluegrass Extension Service.

Apologies for parachuting in like this, but I believe the Open Thread is a not-inappropriate place to do this.

I'd like to, well, not *disagree* with something Patrick said a couple months ago, but rather, point out some related information and inquire of the Fluorosphere if it qualifies as 'prior art' or not.

Patrick said "the electronic Hugo voter packet goes back only to 2006, when John Scalzi organized the first one on an entirely volunteer basis."

For the 2000 WorldCon, Alexandria Digital Literature (and in particular, myself), worked closely with the Hugo Awards committee, and was, in fact granted access to the Final Awards list *before it was released to the public*, so that we could contact all the short fiction nominees. We presented them with a contract to buy non-exclusive electronic publishing rights for a period that ended the day the Hugos would be announced.

About 75% (I'd have to pull some taps and unzip some files to find out for certain now, I think) of the authors eventually granted us those rights.

We published those works in multiple formats, sold them on our site, and provided special access codes to the Awards committee which allowed members of WorldCon to access the stories at no charge.

Prior to that time, some of the stories would be available online; usually magazines that had published shorter works would put them online; sometimes authors would post them on their web sites; and the WorldCon web sites had started having pages that contained links to the works that could be found online. But I believe the AlexLit anthology was the first time any third party had attempted to collect the majority of the works and present them as a packet.

I do distinctly remember requesting to attend the pre-Hugo cocktail party. The gate dragon said something along the lines of 'who are you and why do you think you should get to go,' to which my response was "Because I've published more of this year's nominees than anybody else."

Now, I saw this an event in the evolution of electronic publishing that followed on the *truly* visionary Nebula winners CDROM released by Brad Templeton in 1993 (Nineteen Ninety Three!!!! Amazing!)

But, whether the AlexLit anthology invalidates Patrick's statement depends a lot on how exactly one defines "electronic Hugo voter's packet." Being somebody with an oar in the water, I decline to attempt same. :)

[We even had the anthology for sale in the dealer's room. I'd provided a couple of book dealers with serialized certificates; you paid the dealer, they gave you the card, you took the code to the AlexLit site and picked up your stories.]

@Cally & @Lila (#65 & #66). Is there a description or summary of what you did/saw on your Fermilab tour? I got to visit Fermilab just after the recent Chicago WorldCon, but I'm pretty sure mine wasn't The Usual, and I'm hoping to compare them. . . .

It appears I spelled Professor MacCluer's name wrong.

Xopher Halftongue @ 80: I went to MSU, too. Not all ag-related research is good -- remember the chocolate cheese from the dairy school store?

Dave, not yet. All photos currently reside on daughter's computer, and none of us has written anything yet.

Ginger @ 79

Is "dry decay" mummification? I thought it was the "bones with bits of tendon and hair" stage--AKA, "you can touch it now." You got that in a Tennessee summer, which is fairly humid.

Pagining Elliott Mason: Is this the baby sign author you were referring to?

Ohnosecond: Paging. Not "Pagining."

Dave: Umm, let's see. Bill talked about how high-energy particle physics is done; about static targets and particle collisions; about how to make neutrinos, and Minnesota and South Dakota neutrino targets. We went up to the top floor and looked at the map, and to the window and looked at the ground. Quarks, Higgs bosons, and CERN, the tunnel mockup and how the magnets work to bend the beam in a circle. The copper radio-frequency particle accelerator. Astronomy. Down to the basement: the really cool Cockcraft-Walton particle generating machine (seriously, do a google image search; it's straight out of 1930s SF).

Lots of computing equipment (though we didn't visit the actual main computer center). The control room, with the panels of safety keys so the beam isn't run when anyone's inside the tunnel, and also plenty of snark, Geiger counters and oxygen masks.

And finally, Feynman diagram art. All in all, about 3 hours of fascinating stuff. Though I was sad that the Foucault's Pendulum is no longer there.

@Lee no. 71: Oh, perfect. I grinned a schadenfreude grin. They deserve each other.

*Schadenfreudische?

The Andy Duncan link is good, but the King link in it has an interesting light on recent discussions about the numinous. I'd heard of "Letter from Birmingham Jail" but hadn't previously read it; does anyone else feel a certain chill from "A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God."? Over the past decades I've had a bellyful of people using the "law of God" as an excuse for defying any law they don't like; all of his subsequent argument reads like a more-eloquent rendition of what I hear from so-called "family" groups every time an outcast (out-caste?) group moves a little closer to equality. (I see this a lot; the local paper is a bit too ready to print letters from Kris Mineau, the head of the Massachusetts "Family" Institute.) I can see reasons why King felt this paragraph was necessary at the time and/or in a letter addressed particularly to people holding religious authority, but from this temporal perspective I wish it hadn't been the opening to his strong arguments. (And I wonder whether he was ever aware of the irony of decrying anti-Semitism while idolizing his namesake, who I have read was a vicious anti-Semite even by the standards of that age.)

I would pass the article on minimalism to my wife, a professional organizer, only if I wanted another medical emergency to deal with. The claim that organizing is sneaky hoarding is ... contentious; part of organizing is recognizing what still has potential use (and how strong a potential), versus what can go. I suspect that organizing helps that process, if only by giving a less-fragmented view. (cf the Simak story "Leg. Forst.", in which magic organizing spores show an over-avid stamp collector just how many sets of tongs he has. (No, that's not a spoiler, just the setup.))

Inquisitive Raven @ 196::842: IIRC, post-brewing yeast is merely enspored (sporulated?), not dead; when I was a homebrewer, my landlady would make bread with what was left after I racked off the beer before bottling. Has "nutritional" yeast been further processed (boiled, pulverized, ...) to permanently deactivate it? Does anyone know whether Vegemite would make bread rise if I washed the salt out of it?

odaiwai @ 196::844 -- that sounds like an especially effective set; not quite a Dostoyevskian/Dicksonian trio, but James and Henry could balance active vs intellectual.

albatross @ 196::874 -- would you want Loki from Dogma? (I wouldn't -- too impulsive, and wimps out in the clutch.) The only other Matt Damon role I can recall is the tasteless kid brother (bit part) of Julia Roberts's boyfriend in Mystic Pizza.

various @ 196::, re Dinklage as Miles: AFAIK, Bujold's vision of Miles has typical proportions (except for perhaps the head); see, e.g., the NESFA Press covers, which were to her specs. (Did you know Bothari was supposed to resemble James Mason?) Dinklage is talented, but would be physically unconvincing for the role. (e.g., Miles can move fast when the situation demands).

TNH @0: reducing it to an already-solved case?

Lizzy L @ 7: I don't particularly know any mathematicians-as-such, but I've run into enough cases to appreciate the story.

Fragano @ 14: thank you; I need that reminder occasionally.

Dave Luckett @ 62: Have you read "The Dance of the Changer and the Three?" I tend to your viewpoint (cf the end of Niven's "Not Long Before the End"), but widening the definition of "hero" could be a Good Thing.

sorry I missed people at Wiscon; I was being too much of a hermit, partly in hope my voice would hold together. Having presbyphonia doesn't work well with a concert (which went OK) the week after a convention.

janetl 84: Indeed. And, may I add, *gag*. Do you know, I knew people who just loved that stuff?

As for research...well, if you don't try some things that don't work, you're not trying enough things.

CHip:

If you believe there is such a thing as morality outside of what the law says, then there's the possibility for the law to be in conflict with morality. It seems to me that your complaint is ultimately with the Massachussets family institute's version of morality, rather than the notion that just laws are laws made by man that square with moral laws. Similarly, if you think God made moral laws, then you can think that the laws of man sometimes don't square with God's laws. But again, I don't think that tells you much about the content of God's laws, a point on which even religious people don't all agree.

Jacque @87 (completeness, in case this subthread is interesting to others later): Yes, that's the gentleman whose works we found most useful.

Em #59: Very nice!

Theophylact, #9:

The funniest line in "How to Make Gold from Mercury" is the nonchalant

Discard the neutrino. We have no need of it.

As though you have a choice.

Xopher Halftongue 93 & janetl 84

I didn't *love* chocolate cheese but I did like it. Haven't had it in a decade. One problem people had with it was that it looked like fudge and they expected it to taste like fudge, rather than less sweet chocolate cream cheese. My understanding is that the current version is sweeter.

When my father (MSC '42) attended his first Patriarch Reunion in 1992, he was delighted that immediately after checking into the hotel, he and some fellow patriarchs were whisked away in a University car to the Dairy Store for free ice cream. Priorities, after all.

Jenny, #70: If you don't get a satisfactory answer from your online inquiries, you might try contacting the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee (aka "The Body Farm"). Determining the answers to questions like that is what they do, and that's one I'm sure they've been asked before.

cj, #77: The thing that really pushes my buttons about The Reluctant Widow is that all of Elinor's perfectly valid and understandable qualms about being pitchforked into a risky and potentially-lethal situation are brushed aside as "female hysteria". No one, not even the servants, ever so much as acknowledges that her observations might have some validity. It would take very little tweaking to change that book into a gaslighting-horror tale; the only reason it isn't already one is that the author was standing over it with a whip to make it come out right.

In a way it's a shame, as Francis Cheviot is one of my favorite "not what he seems at first glance" characters, and my distaste for the rest of the book means I don't re-read about him very much.

CHip, #92: What I got from the "minimalism" article was a combination of new-convert enthusiasm and one-size-fits-all evangelism. While I do somewhat envy those who can reach a level of Stuff which permits of the style of home decor I that think of as "spare and elegant", I have long since recognized that I will never be one of those people. And yet, I do go thru my Stuff and cull periodically, so I'm not all the way to Hoarder level. My basic reaction to the article was, "Nice work if you can get it."

What's the Matter with KS?

janetl 84: Indeed. And, may I add, *gag*. Do you know, I knew people who just loved that stuff?

As for research...well, if you don't try some things that don't work, you're not trying enough things.

Argh. Stupid phone. Stupid Xopher.

Sorry folks.

The 70th Anniversary of D-Day is rushing up. Veterans of that campaign in Normandy are getting thin on the ground.

A few days later it it is the first anniversary of my father's death. He was a farmer, kept at home using his skills, though he did volunteer for ARP.

My Grandfather, after serving in the trenches in WW1, joined the Home Guard in WW2. He told me a few funny stories, but he knew what the reality would have been like.

Lee @99 and Chip @92 - This reminded me immediately of http://vruba.tumblr.com/post/45256059128/wealth-risk-and-stuff. The premise is that wealth gives you options and so allows minimalism. The more minimal you go, the more risk you're taking on that given sufficient (and often not extreme) wealth can get you out of. If you lack the wealth, the risks have much more dire consequences, and so the less wealthy, paradoxically, can't afford minimalism.

Never done a Petrarchan before. Worth a try.

The dragon came at dawn, as dragons do,
Arising in the east, and, like the sun,
Set light to all the rooftops, one by one.
It chased the fleeing folk and ate a few,
Then settled down to wait for you-know-who.
The knight rode in at midday, at a run,
Rode straight to battle, fought, and nearly won.
The dragon ate his horse, then off it flew.

At sunset, footsore, following the smoke,
I came to offer help. What was aflame?
And who was hurt, or missing in the gloom?
We doused the roofs; I healed the wounded folk.
Now mothers bless their children with my name
The knight's, meanwhile, just decorates his tomb.

Also, a snatch of something I can't figure out what to do with. Anyone?

The one who makes the cut is not the one who binds it;
The one who hoards the gold is not the one who finds it;
The one who sows the grain is not the one who grinds it;
The one who saves the babe is not the one who minds it.

Abi #105: Lovely.

The one who bakes the bread is not the one who eats it;
The one who smiths the hoe is not the one who wields it;
The one who carves the door is not the one who guards it;
The one who gains the land is not the one who rules it.

Paul:

I see the point of the linked article--sometimes you keep stuff around because you think you might need to replace it. Certainly, when I'm traveling, I pack a lot of my potential needs in the form of a credit card I can use to buy, say, a raincoat if I need it.

But there's also a pretty unhealthy relationship between me and my stuff, one I can see that has tracked through times when I had little money, and when I had more than I needed, and now that I'm doing OK but not flush with cash. Even when I was broke, most of the crap sitting around in my apartment wasn't stuff I was keeping to cover potential problems in lieu of money. Mostly, for me, it was lack of attention--I had (and have) stuff sitting around that I would need to spend some thought to decide what to do with, and I've usually got other things (worthwhile and not) to spend my attention on. And I can see my kids with this same sort of unhealthy relationship, not wanting to let go of *broken* toys (sometimes throwing a huge fit about throwing out something that is broken).

And I have, over time, managed to throw out a lot of the stuff I used to keep around. This was overwhelmingly a good thing, in terms of the amount of space available in my house, and how pleasant it is to be in my house.

I'm not remotely into a minimalist lifestyle, and probably going to an extreme like the guy who was profiled will only work for a small number of people, but it felt like the article you linked to was sort-of dismissing the whole idea as some kind of rich-peoples' fad or something, and I don't think that's quite fair.

SamChevre @ 86: Well, dry decay is the end process of decomposition which is initial decay --> putrefaction --> black putrefaction --> butyric fermentation --> dry decay. In other words, once all the wet stuff is gone, the dry stuff decays slowly into something that could pass for a mummy. The process is variable, depending on temperature, humidity, access of insects/animals, etc. If the environment is humid, you get more putrefaction and fermentation, because the bacteria have a more hospitable environment. If you have a very dry, hot environment, you tend to get a more true mummification of the body, with much less putrefaction or fermentation (and depending on the circumstances, "less" could equal "none at all".) Warmer temperatures tend to support the entomological factors, which can strip the softer materials from the bones in a much more rapid period of time. And so on.

Having made everyone queasy, here's the unicorn chaser: my son graduated from high school yesterday. My parents couldn't be here, but they were able to watch the live streaming video, which they greatly appreciated (and we will make a quick visit to them this weekend for more celebration). A dinner followed, with close family and a few friends; the restaurant he chose happened to have its regular Monday Night Jazz program in the main dining area, so we had a lovely music program to go with our delicious dinner. I posted a picture of the happy graduate on my FB page, for those of you who have friended me.

Ginger @ 108: Congratulations on the graduation!

Lee #61 - thanks.
I now have a memory of people drawing similarities between Bujold's "A civil Campaign" and Heyer, presumably "A civil contract".

I have chutneyed myself with an idea for a stuffed animal that I will probably never make, because (almost?) no one but me would understand the joke without a lot of explanation:

Sandra Boynton's album Philadelphia Chickens* opens with a chorus line of cows singing about, well, being cows. At the midpoint of the album, another group comes on stage chattering excitedly about "this is our big, big chance!" and begins to sing "Cows" again. They are repeatedly interrupted by a heckler shouting that "You're not cows!" They finally trail off in confusion and admit that "...technically we're not cows" "We're aardvarks!" They then start to sing a parody of "Cows" about being aardvarks, only to be stymied by none of them knowing what sound an aardvark makes. Other than "a lovely intermission song", which they then sing.

So now I want to make an aardvark out of cow fur. I already have a pattern!

*If you're not familiar with this, you should go buy it. Really. Everyone should own this album.

Discard the neutrino. We have no need of it.

And the neutrino, which in your case you have not got.

abi #105: That's the hardest thing, and you did it.

Let's face it, the Petrarchan does not come easily and naturally in English. I'm told the finely-interlaced rhyming is easier in Italian, although I wouldn't know. But you made that one flow as naturally as conversation, without a single forced foot, and I had to go back over it to see the rhymes. It's perfect - that change of pov octet to sestet exactly fits the form. But best of all, it says something. Of course your earlier work does also. But this one is just so... neat.

Dammit, "neat" isn't what I mean exactly. It sounds so colourless, so mundane. But there's an aspect of neatness in poetry. Spareness, elegance, yes, that's part of it. But the idea of everything there, everything in its place, everything fitting exactly that's more, well, neatness than anything else.

And that was neat.

guthrie, #110: Bujold's A Civil Campaign is definitely a Regency romance in structure, although she fits it neatly into the overall structure of the Vorkosigan universe as well. But I remember reading it for the first time -- getting to the end, thinking for a moment, taking another look at the cover art, and saying, "OMG, she wrote a Regency!" The similarity of names to Heyer's A Civil Contract is a not-uncommon source of confusion among people who like both (it's much too easy to say the wrong one, although context usually makes it clear which one is meant), but the plots of the two aren't really much alike.

Just want to put in a word for two of my favorite Heyers, Friday's Child and The Convenient Marriage. Both of them feature younger heroines, both of them have Cinderella wish-fulfillment aspects, and they may not be to everyone's taste, but I find they both have interesting things to say about autonomy mixed in with the usual romp aspects.

Also, Ferdy and Gil in Friday's Child are so clearly a couple (and there's lovely fanfic on AO3), and Richard Armitage reads the audiobook version of The Convenient Marriage, which is a treat in itself.

Cally@#89: Thanks. Okay, fairly similar. I've told friends that touring Fermilab was like being on the set of a bad '50s SF movie. "If they built a set for the movie where the lab looked like that, I'd be going 'Oh, please, the real world doesn't LOOK like that!' Except that at Fermilab, it does. Mysterious Cubes inside Chambers with thick doors with thicker glass. Boxes that Hum and Buzz with blinking lights and cryptic hand-lettered labels. And, of course, the things that have Rings and Globes to harness the Invisible Energies."

Obviously you got to see the Control Room, looking way too much like the bridge of the Enterprise, if you saw the Panel of Keys. I thought that was awesome. Hundreds of keys for hundreds of doors, but not stored on pins or pegs, but stored in switch locks. With the designers THAT concerned about ensuring nobody could possibly be in the tunnel when they Threw The Switch, how can you possibly believe that anybody trapped in the tunnel when the beam turned on wouldn't be Mutated Horribly and become some kind of Unspeakable Monster or Uncontrollable Mutant, instead of merely dead?

Was the "Bill" you referred to William Higgins?

Indeed it was Bill Higgins, Fermilab tour director extraordinaire.

--Cal

CHip #92:

Neither Vegemite nor Marmite will make dough rise, not even if you wash the salt out. They are yeast extracts with no intact yeast cells remaining. You need live yeast cells to consume the sugars, either by respiration or fermentation, both processes producing the carbon dioxide* (CO2) causes dough to rise.

I've never eaten nutritional yeast (now I want to) & don't know if the yeast cells are still intact or live. OTOH yeast for brewing/baking is live and also contains additives that help them survive the activation process when you add them to warm water with a bit of sugar in it.

*Carbon dioxide is why soda bread works.

Congraduations to your son, Ginger!

119
I see what you did there (and second it).

So, I just got an email notifying my of a comment on a Blogger blog I used to have before Google took over and fucked it up so much I lost access to it. This is to my Yahoo account, the only email I had at the time.

So I look at the comment, which is, of course, spam. I click the Delete link, not expecting much. I'm immediately told that my current Google account (which I was logged into and which is linked to the Gmail account I'll be switching to RSN) doesn't have access to that blog, which isn't really surprising. I log out of it and try to log in with my old email.

To my surprise, it gives me what looks like a very reasonable password recovery process. I give it my email (the Yahoo one, associated with the blog) and it promptly sends me a password recovery email. I click on the link provided, and get a page where I can just enter a new password...to my NEW Google account, the Gmail one, the one that doesn't have access to that blog. (They're not changing the password to the BLOG, only to the Google account.)

Clear on that? They'll only change the password if it WON'T give me access to the blog. They'll only change the password I DON'T need to change. They will not change the password on the account associated with the email TO WHICH THEY SENT THE PASSWORD RECOVERY LINK.

So: Google is fucking stupid, and they fucking own our fucking lives.

Speaking of graduation... Glenn Glazer recently wrote -"I've found that if you have to ask 'what was he thinking', the answer is probably 'he wasn't'."-

Soon after that, someone else mentioned attending the Air Force Academy Graduation at Bolder, and described Vice President Biden as "hugging all the fit-looking young woman graduates". Later discussion revealed that he didn't hug quite all of them, and did hug at least one male, but even so.... In a group that size (c. 1000, how many women is unclear) I'm pretty sure a considerable number of them would strongly prefer to have control over whether they were hugged or not , and it seems to me that the VP went a bit too far in his "they have to do it, whether they want to or not, because _I_ am initiating it" Attitude/assumption.

So far, I've not seen anyone else -- journalist or OnLine political or feminist commentator -- remarking on this. Not that it's A Big Deal (like the recent scandal about rapes at the Academy), but it strikes me as something that people at his level really ought to think about. (I suppose the VP's intentions were fine -- he was simply expressing his enthusiasm & appreciation -- but I'm suggesting that he should have thought-through the possibility that other people might consider his action a violation of _their_ Personal Space limits.)

The nurse yesterday declared my wife's lungs free of pneumonia.

Praise be to Asklepios, Serge, and thanks to his servants!

Don Fitch #122: It occurs to me that Biden benefits hugely from the "known asshole/eccentric" trope.

Soon Lee @ 188 et al on yeast

Nutritional yeast is also inactivated (AKA dead) and can't be used as a leavening. The difference is that Marmite et al are killed by adding salt, which breaks down the cell walls; nutritional yeast is just heated, which doesn't.

"Brewer's yeast" is a tricky term, because it can mean two things: one is the yeast used for brewing, and one is the leftover yeast from brewing, heated and dried like nutritional yeast (and thus of no use for brewing.) The nutritional brewers yeast can be quite bitter from the hops in the beer.

The best way to try nutritional yeast (IMO) is on popcorn or in scrambled eggs, preferably in both cases with a tiny bit of soy sauce. (Yes, this probably marks that I grew up in a hippie-influenced household, but it's still delicious.)

I went to my third child's elementary school graduation last night. Technically, he's the garndson of my patner, but I changed enough diapers back in the day that I feel entitled to claim him. I usually do not show emotions readily, but to my astonishment, I found myself in tears . . .

Xopher... Thanks indeed!

Well, I'm moved. Ish. Mostly.

Most of everything I own is tucked into storage in a corner of my mother's basement, excepting my bed and one bureau, which are now in my childhood bedroom, which measures some 7.5 ft by 9 ft (2.3m x 2.7m). Oh, and a night table. I spent a considerable amount of time using a s/w called "Sweet Home 3D" trying to figure out how to make the entire rest of the apartment fit into a 21ft by 12 ft (6.5m x 3.6m) space. Obsessive measuring and some judicious pruning (tossed an old couch I always hated, etc.) got everything, furniture and boxes, tucked in (with some extra space for the fridge, which we will be using).

In the middle of the move, my mother had a medical emergency - a pretty serious infection. She's always suffered from eczema, which is exacerbated by stress, so when she had a flare up, we just put it down to the move. But it wasn't going away, in fact it was moving higher and higher up her leg, which was also swelling, which was unusual. So, Monday morning, she went to the clinic. They promptly flipped out and sent her to the hospital ER. I couldn't go, because I had to be here to let the techs in for phone/internet, so I hopped over to get my cousin, left her with my mum at the ER door, then came back here to wait while they hooked her up to IV antibiotics. I really wish it had been otherwise, because neither she nor my cousin understood much of what the doctor was saying.

Anyway, after about 4 hours my aunt was able to pick them up and bring them here - my mother has an IV port in her arm, and has to have Cefazolin administered via something called a Homepump, which I am supposed to connect every 8 hours, even though I wasn't there to see the nurse demonstrate it.

It went OK Tuesday, and Wednesday morning, but Wednesday afternoon I somehow ended up with air in the tube. So I clamped it, and called the 24 hour 800number to speak with a nurse. She told me I had to have a nurse look at it. Lovely. So, off we went to the CLSC, where another nurse took care of it and showed me how to fix it if it happens again.

More air this morning, but at least I was able to fix it.

Oh, and usually my mother takes my cousin to her hospital appointments - Cousin has chronic idiopathic acute anemia, so has to have a blood test every Wednesday and RBCs every Thursday, so since my Mum can't really drive, I'm doing that.

All of which means that I haven't gotten back to the apartment to clear out the last few things and clean it. Fortunately, I have the time (my lease hasn't actually run out yet), but geez.

::exhausted::

I will take a moment to say good things about my movers. They showed up on time, took really good care of my things, put them exactly where I said to put them (important to make it all fit!), and did it all pretty much within the time on the estimate. During which, they were unfailingly pleasant, polite, and helpful. They even grabbed a chair we were trying to throw out and tossed it to the curb for us. So, if you're in Montreal and looking for movers, Montreal Van Lines has my recommendation (if that means anything).

I noticed also that the supervisor was really good to the workers - two of them were new, and he was taking the time to show them how everything worked: this is how we do the paperwork for this, this is how we use the straps, this is how we wrap a glass-fronted cabinet. And when it came time to tip, he said, "you don't give that to me, it's for the guys! I'm the boss, I don't get the tips!". So, nice guys all around.

So, here I am, tucked into a corner of the dining table on my laptop. We woke up early so that I could give my mum her IV, then I took my cousin to her blood test. When I got back here, my mum was back in bed, so I figured it was a good time to absorb some of the light of the Fluorosphere.

Oh, and my mother's cat hates my cat with the power of a burning sun. Thank goodness mine is a furry zen master - he just serenely goes about his business while she spits venom at him.

TL;DR: Moved. Stress. Coffee. ::thunk::

There was a story discussed here about a bunch of clueless girls going drinking at a bar with a bullet hole in the door. I felt like that last night.

Philadelphia. A store with "deli" in small letters on the sign and BEER in very large letters. About five men hanging out by the door drinking out of paper bags. I just want a soda.

I go inside and there are about seven men and one or two women inside. They are drinking out of small clear plastic cups. The entire counter has security glass down it with no line of fire to the inside. One of the guys is yelling and someone else is trying to calm him down, repeating "There are outside people here!" I'm just trying to keep my "Your business isn't my business" field up. I got out with my soda, unslain.

Between this and the takeout place with a sign saying you're not allowed inside wearing a hoodie or a mask [!?!], should I be worried for my friend? I was helping her move in. Across the street from this place.

(Should I mention that the entire neighborhood is black, or does that kind of follow from "bad neighborhood in Philly?")

Cheryl: There are not enough **hugs** in the world, but here's a few more to stock up with, at least ...

Serge, I rejoice as one who has had pneumonia. Happy joy to you, times two.

Cheryl
Wishing you lots of energy and grace.

Sandy B
That has some commonalities with my old block 10 years ago. (I didn't live there when the bar at the end of the block was rowdy enough that the block had a betting pool on the time of the first fight, but I heard plenty of stories.)

The thing is, neighborhoods like that are often safe for the people who are part of them. The key thing is to become part of the neighborhood, rather than an "outside person."

Kip W @ 132... Thanks. Hers didn't require hospitalization, but pleasant it was not.

Sandy B @ #130. Yes, I would be worried for your friend. I have lived in such neighborhoods for many years, and no, they are not safe.

Watch for: meth addicts, who are especially violent and unpredictable and crazy. If someone is acting erratically and has a face that is covered in sores or is (look this is gross but true) falling in on itself, that is probably a meth addict. You cannot easily escape these people--and if you see many of them, if possible, help her find a new place to live, stat.

Drivebys happened in my neighborhood periodically. To find out if that is a concern there, ask the local police rep for the area (often a community organization will have a police rep name, you can also call the local non-emergency line). Newspaper crime reports generally focus on better neighborhoods.

If the people nearby are *stoners* that would be different. But those folks do not usually worry about bullets, smell of pot, and have distinctive social markers (which I can explain if there is interest). Coke and meth are, in my experience, the scarier drug cultures to watch for. (Heroin can be, but it varies.)

Sandy B @ 130: The more powerful stimulants, in and of themselves, cause a lot of violent behavior.

Don Fitch @ 122: I'm happy to have the president or vice-president hug me whenever we're both engaging in a public activity. It really doesn't matter who they are. Ask my friend from New Orleans who's got a great shot of herself with W's arm around her.

A former housemate was found unconscious in the hot tub last night. Never before have I been so grateful for Amtrak's weird schedule; I was back in town less than twelve hours after I got the call (eight of those were train ride).

I don't know how to mourn. It would be so much easier if there were rituals and ceremonies for grief outside the funeral. But I'm here for the chosen-family who found her, at least.

estelendur: I'm sorry for your loss.

estelendur: My sympathies.

estelendur: I'm sorry for your loss.

Cheryl #129: Sympathies for your trials, but congratulations on getting through the move regardless!

estelendur #137: Ouch, my condolences. I'm guessing he died of hyperthermia?

The relevant PSA: Hot-tubbing alone is risky, as it's way too easy to miss your stop and overheat. (Alcohol makes it downright dangerous.) The big differences between a hot bath and a hot tub are: 1) The hot tub has much more water (more thermal mass) and 2) The hot tub usually keeps the water hot while you're in it.

Lee @ 114: ...I remember reading it for the first time -- getting to the end, thinking for a moment, taking another look at the cover art, and saying, "OMG, she wrote a Regency!"
And Komarr is a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, in which he meets Harriet Vane. So delicious.

Don Fitch @ 122: A friend of mine helped out at a political event, and she has a picture of herself hugging Joe Biden which is one of her treasured possessions. She raved about what a nice guy he was, and definitely wasn't hugged "against her will." She also doesn't qualify as a fit young graduate.

Dave Luckett @113:

I realized fairly quickly that I could paint myself into a heck of a corner with a Petrarchan sonnet. I'd say I deliberately chose large word-clusters for the two rhymes in the octave, but actually, the first line-ends came of their own accord. They just had a lot of friends too.

There are a couple of infelicities of phrasing I'd rather have done without; "you-know-who" in particular breaks the tone of the rest of the work. And I let myself get backed into too many flat verbs like "came".

And I can't seem to resist a final couplet, even when it doesn't rhyme.

None of which is meant to discount your praise. I'm just all too conscious of the failings of the work. As I tweeted last night, I am so far out of practice with sonnets. It's like having to go out in the field and catch the language horse before I can ride it again.

But it's fun to be doing them, and doing them in good company.

estelendur @137:

I'm so sorry for your loss. I hope you and her chosen family can find a way to support one another through this time.

estelendur -- the way I read your post, I cannot tell if your friend is dead yet. Is she?

There's still some hope, if she isn't. Lots of possibilities, but I can't say any more without knowing the circumstances. I send you what strength I can to deal with the actual circumstances, and hope that all will work for the best outcome. The situation without a death, but with uncertainty about what's going to happen, is worse for many folks than knowing.

Serge Broom #123:
Glad to read the good news.

Cheryl #129:
Strength to you.

estelendur#137:
Sorry for your loss.

SamChevre #126:

I bought a packet of a local "nutritional" yeast on the way home & did an impromptu tasting: active dry baking yeast, active dry wine yeast, and "nutritional" yeast taste similar to each other. I describe it as nutty & (sorry) yeasty. I also tested to see if "nutritional" yeast had any activity. It doesn't. Only the active dry baker's yeast & active dry wine yeast were able to be revived.

Conclusion (in agreement with you): "nutritional" yeast can not be used to make dough rise.

Making Marmite (or similar) requires simmering & reduction, which explains its dark colour & also lack of live cells; the heat kills yeast cells.

abi #143:
I am in awe of people who can write poetry (don't have the knack myself), so really appreciate when poems get posted here.

pace Sayers:

If that is home where storms distress me not
then you were never home: I cannot stay,
wings furled, hands clasped, when you have whirled away
from rest, from sleep, from every peaceful lot.
For you no slumb'ring rose; you burn too hot
to let the world spin shieldless for a day,
to let the tide come in; your burden may
be lessened, but not settled, nor forgot.

Yet neither is my home the starry sphere,
and Heaven's gate is closed to me for spite,
for all my aims have lately been denied.
I cannot sleep, nor lay my sword by here,
I have a purpose, enemies to smite--
yet what rest I may take is by your side.

Like Harriet, I had a heck of a time with my sestet. But once I had the first sentence, I found the use of "wings" and "smite" to be...fortuitous. This is not a great sonnet, but I think it has some good bits.

abi 105: A lovely Petrarchian! And a good example of the form, in shape and mood, as well as an excellent metaphor for...well, your work here, for one thing, as well as its probable result.

Sorry I was too busy ranting about Google yesterday to give your sonnet the attention it deserved. I only had energy for minor comments else.

estelendur 137: I'm sorry for your loss and for the shock to those who found her.

abi 143: It's so amazing to read your self-crit here. I didn't notice any of those flaws, nor did they stick out when I went back to reread after seeing you list them. I'm not sure the final "couplet" is a flaw at all, since it's in the mood and POV of the sestet. Strikes me as entirely appropriate.

In fact on rereading I detect an echo of Owen's "Parable of the Old Man and the Young" in the rhymes near the beginning. Accident, or subtle foreshadowing of the result of the brave battle?

A more direct answer to Dave @62, and my second Petrarchan (I think; the rhyme-scheme of the sestet may disqualify it):

I sail a ship whose hull is crafted air,
Created in the drydock of the heart
Where all our words and wishes have their start,
Whose shipwrights build with love and carve with care.
They christened her with tears, that she might bear
Both tragedy and joy. There is no part
Of her that's shoddy, cheap, or dull. She's Art:
The craft that carries hope, delight, despair.

The frequencies of voice and radio,
The waves of wifi signals and the flow
Of current through the wires are all her seas.
Her cargo is what makes us humankind;
Her ports of call are every human mind;
Her voyages are poems such as these.

Carrie S! I love the echoes of Sayers!

Also, I realize that I've not said how much I enjoyed Em @59. It's like a vivid montage of snapshots. A good piece of work.

Xopher, you are all kindness. I knew when I started writing the poem that the knight was, well, toast; I'm not surprised that it came out in the language. But it wasn't intentional as such.

Soon Lee @ 146... Thanks. Some people recommended breathing exercises, but the nurse apparently said it wasn't necessary.

abi #149: Um, wow. I'm in no wise qualified to judge poetic structure, but I do get mood and, um, connections? Implications? The first one struck me as a wry tweaking of fantasy tropes. This one was moving -- in fact, I'm wiping away tears. (All the Mysteries make me verklempt....)

QFT: Her cargo is what makes us humankind;
Her ports of call are every human mind;

In #116 Dave Howell writes:

Obviously you got to see the Control Room, looking way too much like the bridge of the Enterprise, if you saw the Panel of Keys. I thought that was awesome. Hundreds of keys for hundreds of doors, but not stored on pins or pegs, but stored in switch locks. With the designers THAT concerned about ensuring nobody could possibly be in the tunnel when they Threw The Switch, how can you possibly believe that anybody trapped in the tunnel when the beam turned on wouldn't be Mutated Horribly and become some kind of Unspeakable Monster or Uncontrollable Mutant, instead of merely dead?

No, pretty much we're only worried about, you know, regular death.

(Don't let me damp your vivid imagination, though!)

It's been a big week for Fluorospherians around here. On Saturday Jo Walton and Ada Palmer came out to Fermilab from the city, between stops on Jo's epic book tour. We ended up in the Main Control Room you described, and visited with the Operations crew. I needed to make a phone call.

In mid-call I became aware that singing had erupted. Ada was performing "Somebody Will" for the operators. Wow.

Jo seemed doubly pleased with herself, both for showing Ada Fermilab, and for showing Fermilab Ada.

On Monday, Lila and her daughters turned up, accompanied by local guide Cally, as described above (#55, 65, 66, 89). They were great fun. Again I enjoyed myself, as I always do when I am the center of attention and I get to do most of the talking.

Can't help feeling wistful, after everyone has gone, about how much I might have learned if there had been more time to listen to them.

But Fermilab is a marvel. I love to share as much as possible of it, when people come visiting. (Carefully watching for signs of glaze-over.)

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Bill Higgins/PowerPoint presentations are my OTP. :-> You always find so many amazing things to say and great connections to knit together into an astonishing new whole.

A friend is trying to identify an SF book he read a long time ago.

His description: Somewhere in the 1973-1975 timeframe, I read a science-fiction book from the library in which Earth is invaded by dog-like aliens, who are astonished that plants and animals coexist peacefully. On all other planets they know of, one has wiped out the other. I haven't a clue what the title or author might be.

And a couple more "vague memories": As I recall, it was the only book by that author on the shelf. So it's not likely to be a hugely popular writer. There was a scene where one of the aliens was alarmed by a human brandishing a tomato.

===

Can anyone here help figure out what book he's talking about? (He has already told us that it is not Invaders from the Infinite (1961), by John Campbell, Jr., which someone else suggested as a possibility.

Thanks for any hints.

My ex-roomie had a hoarder's breakdown a few months ago. When he first moved to Honolulu, he used to prowl the streetside trash. (That stopped after a while, thank Ghu). He found an eroding, delaminating styrofoam bodyboard and brought it home. Stored it in the storage shed out back, where it blocked access to tools. It was irreparable, useless, and never used. After swallowing my anger for years, I asked him if he could get rid of it, since it was in the way. He had long ago bought himself a new bodyboard, so it wasn't as if I were asking him to give up bodyboarding.

Reaction: over-the-top fury. How DARE I mess with HIS stuff? When the house was full of MY stuff? I started crying, he stalked off ... and threw away the body board half an hour later. Apologized a day later.

He was an easy-going guy. I had never before seen him that angry. Over a bit of useless trash. That he had not bought, never used, and had ignored for years. Hoarding is a sickness.

Walt Farrell @155 -- rings no bells with me, sorry.

abi #149

Yes, it's Petrarchan: the abbaabba rhyme-pattern of the octet is required, and there may only be two rhymes in the sestet, but the pattern is not set.

Thinking cap on...

Oh, and I should have said: it's very, very good.

Balloons and art are held aloft by air,
By crafted air, no more. Someone inflates
The merest wisp. The same is true of States -
The Ship of State’s an airship. Yet beware,
That air is hot. A principle is there:
By heat, expansion, flame, one elevates.
A bag of breath is thus inspired. The weight’s
Inconsequent, if there’s sufficient flair.

Perhaps, but flair is not some passioned rant,
Some darkling flame that burns, but makes no light.
Such ships are lucifers. Of gauzy adamant
Her envelope, not lead. Nor is her flight
As windy chance dictates. Undeviant,
She steers true to her star, and shines as bright.

I delurk to delight in such conversation as your wits make, and to say I love your talk, the Fermilab, the meth neighborhoods, WisCon, the math jokes, Joe Biden's hugging, unwieldy golden ships and the aftermath of heroes. Oh, muses! Or, in a different way:

this is just to say

i have inhaled
the sonnets
that were in
the textbox

and which
you were probably
composing
for practice

forgive me
they were delicious
so apt
as I scrolled

abi @149: I am moved. So nice. Chills. QFT (I know, it already was. I will too):
Her cargo is what makes us humankind;
Her ports of call are every human mind

Thank you, everyone, for your sympathy. Former housemate drowned, we believe . :(

I would like to add my voice to those praising the poetry. It is beautiful.

estelendur, <hugs>

Bill Higgins @ 153... So nobody ever came back as Doctor Manhattan?

estelendur: please accept my belated condolences! What a terrible thing to have happen.

Dave Luckett @158: the abbaabba rhyme-pattern

If you change your mind,
I'm the first in line
Honey I'm still free
Take a chance on me—

Huh? Oh, sorry....

A notice for SF Bay Area Fluorosperians, to be shared as appropriate.

House share available:

I am looking for a quiet, responsible, congenial person (or two people) with whom to share my home and yard in San Pablo. The house is 940 square feet, 70 years old. You will have exclusive use of two bedrooms, a living room, dining room, and one bathroom. I will use the rear bedroom in the house as my office. It has a separate entrance onto the yard, and will be isolated from your space by a closed, lockable interior door.

My living space is in a detached studio behind the house.

Your kitchen space is not shared space, but I will be using the laundry facilities in your kitchen. We can pre-arrange how that will work. We will also share the yard and two parking spaces.

The neighborhood is lively and friendly. You will be close to a library branch, a post office, a large Asian food market, banks, and so on. The street is near I-80, and one 20 minute bus ride away from the Richmond BART station.

I am a quiet single person with a dog and a cat.

Rent is $1250 and includes garbage but not the other utilities. Pets are possible but it strongly depends on how many and what kind. I am looking toward an August rental.

If you are interested, or you know someone who might be, let me know here.

Serge@164

Someone did, but he had a bad case of the blues...

Michael I @ 168... With Rorschach at the sax?

Rorschach can't play a wind/brass instrument, he'd have to take the mask off for that. Bass, maybe.

To continue the maritime metaphor:

We navigate by methods good and fair,
our science has been tested and found true
for many seasons; the hard-working crew
have full and thorough trust in our good care.
So do not worry at the changing air
in certainty that we have paid our due
before the mast.The storms we have been through
are the best measure of how much we dare.
Yet each adventure has its own sweet trap,
since we dare not refuse to face the test
so must discover just how little sure
we really are of what is on the map
and what we know, but must face all with zest;
for all that matters is that we endure.

Lizzy @167, I may be interested. (Quiet geeky couple, two well-behaved cats, relocating to the Bay area in the next couple of months if this job pans out.)

Persephone, is your entered email address a working one? If so, I can connect you with Lizzy via email.

abi @173, yes, it is! Thank you very much.

You have mail, both of you.

Open threadiness... with thread. Someone has proposed a plausible use for those mysterious Roman dodecahedrons.

155 I have a feeling that it might be Christopher Anvil but I can't think of the title.

If the spirit of open-threadiness may absolve me of extending first-novel bragging allowances to a second occasion ...

I have just sold the second Alpennian novel, The Mystic Marriage, sequel to my debut novel Daughter of Mystery. (Both to Bella Books.)

I am now gathering some hard-learned lessons from the first book in preparation for the second, in hopes of avoiding some of the "no one will ever hear about or read my book" despair this time. It's been hard taking the expectations picked up from hanging out with mainstream sff folks and applying them to the small press experience where Things Are Different.

Only at Making Light is it possible to get rickrolled into watching a xavggvat video.

(ROT13 employed to avoid spoiling the fascinating potential solution to the technological mystery.)

Debbie #176: It's certainly an interesting use for them; what I don't see (admittedly, I'm not a knitter) is how the hole sizes or other distinctive features of the RDDs actually translate to (or constrain) the measurements of the result.

Obviously, the overall size matters, but otherwise, what makes the RDD, with its specific hole pattern, more useful for that particular task, than a simpler brass plate with knobs and holes?

abi @105.2:

Who minds the babe can help it dance or cower;
Who grinds the grain can hoard or give the flour;
Who finds the gold can buy or break the bower;
Who binds the wound with skill has healed the hour.

Debbie @#176 there's further discussion at Above Top Secret which I had never encountered before. My wife, a classical archaeologist by training, is also skeptical. Some of the findings, like wax residue on some, seem incompatible. But, nothing proven.

Okay, ATS is a bit woo-woo; the discussion of these is rational, but I might use incognito mode going there.

178
I'm looking forward to it - Daughter is really quite good! (I had trouble getting my mind away from Alpennia after I read it.)

Would wax help to waterproof the result, maybe? (I am also not a knitter or an archaeologist, and will happily be told I am totally off-base.)

In other open-threadiness, my provincial government (and my MNA, who introduced the bill) just made me very happy, which makes a nice change from "embarassing me completely".

#182: It seems to me that if I possessed a finely-made item like that in a world full of candles, the day would inevitably come when I would press it into service as a candle holder, regardless of its original design purpose. The more so if I had inherited it from an ancestor without also inheriting the skill in fabric arts to use it properly.

Re #176: That...is not particularly plausible.

The fact that all the fingers get stuffed inside is bad enough; I have *never* seen a glove pattern that had the same number of stitches for every finger, and five is far too few. Plus, the Romans didn't actually have knitting (though they had something similar).

I'm willing to buy that it's a knitting nancy, but not one that's specifically dedicated to making gloves. The primary reason for that deduction seems to be that the holes are different sizes, but it's not actually the size of the holes that determines the size of the stitches; it's the spacing of the pegs, which is the same all around.

Abi at 175, thank you.

Heather Rose Jones @178, congratulations.

Seconding P.J. Evans @184 that I'll look forward to it.

Actually, thank you for the reminder of the existence of Daughter. I was part way through it when I set it aside to read a couple of library books that had to be returned, and it had slipped my mind. That's a problem with e-books that I don't have with physical books.

Dave 158: Really? I was taught that only two patterns were allowed: CDCDCD and CDECDE (and the latter has three rhymes in the sestet). Was I taught too narrow a definition of the Petrarchian?

OK, now I have to write one. Where did I leave those spoons...

187
And you wouldn't want pegs with big knobs on the ends if you were knitting on the pegs.

187 - It's a very fun and inventive video, but I'm not buying it either. That's a pretty ratty pair of gloves, and painfully produced. A toasty pair of woven wool or fur mittens, removed briefly when dexterity was needed, would be preferred. The dodecahedrons seem relatively challenging to create, and why would you invest that time and craftsmanship in order to be able to produce those gloves?

Martin @177: Thanks; I'll suggest that to him. (And Tom @ 157: Thanks for trying.)

192
Rabbit mittens, with the fur inside and the skin outside, would be relatively easy to make for any culture that had knives and needles.

TNH's Particle on states dependent on federal money is really bad statistics -- it's impossible for me to tell what metric they used to determine the order of the states (it's not any one of the three numbers they give for each state); they use "per capita" wrong (it's probably per thousand population); and it's a bit of a mishmash. I expect their numbers are close to right, and do point out an interesting disparity between what those states say and what they do -- but this article doesn't do the topic any justice at all.

re: the dodecahedrons, I'm a knitter, but haven't made gloves yet. Given the flaws in the thumbs of the mittens I've made so far, that wasn't too bad for a first effort! ;)

I'm not invested in the theory, but it was a fun proof of concept, and IMO has more bang for its buck than some others that are much more long-winded (http://www.romandodecahedron.com/the-hypothesis -- sorry for the url, embedding links is hard on a tablet). Another major argument against the glove theory is that at least one of the similar objects is an icosahedron, which has the markings and knobs, but only one hole. Unlikely it's for mittens!

Non sequitur for the open thread: ebooks.

There was a book I wanted to read that was ebook only; I bought it on kobo, and downloaded the kobo reader program to my computer and phone, and it synchronized properly and it was neat, and I read on my phone while on public transit.

Then I downloaded a free epub from a website, and discovered that the kobo reader program will only read epubs from its branded store, so I had to find a different reader program - which couldn't read the epubs from the kobo store because of DRM.

Then I tried borrowing an ebook from my library, and I found out I had to use adobe something or other and log in to authorize devices, or a web-based reader interface, and those were my two options.

Is the ebook landscape really that scattered, or do I just have incredibly bad luck and hit a few incompatible books in a row? Am I missing something here? I've only downloaded a half dozen ebooks and already they're scattered across three different reader programs.

197
E-readers are supposed to be able to read un-DRMed in various formats, if you believe the various websites (like Wiki) that list what they can handle.
I have Calibre for the desktop, but stuff you buy from Kobo (or other bookstores) winds up in their own system somewhere, and I don't know where it is.

If you get a non-drm'ed .epub file, there are ways of loading it into most of the big names. How well it reads and how stupidly the formatting comes out is another matter. And DRM is a whole succession of non-overlapping armed camps, unfortunately.

I've got a Kobo; Adobe Digital Editions is the program, and it's generally fairly easy. There are a couple of hoops to "authorize" your e-reader, and then it looks a lot like a black version of itunes, where you can drag stuff from the library to the e-reader listing on in the left-hand pane. To get stuff INTO the library, drag and drop from file folder. I mostly use Calibre for changing e-book format rather than library management, so I'm not sure how similar it is.

Oh, it really is that scattered :(

Do most people just stick with their choice of branded store then, for the easy experience? I have heard people talking about how great and convenient ebooks are, so I have to conclude they're doing something different than I have been so far...

(Note: I don't actually have an e-reader device, only programs that can read ebooks on my laptop and phone.)

I have to admit that at the moment I mostly use ebooks from Project Gutenberg. I just did a two-semester class on Victorian Literature (much more interesting than I'd expected, and I suspect that's due to the professor, who was amazing, rock on Patrick McDonagh) and the advantage to ebooks there is that you save many dollars which you'd otherwise have spent on Norton Anthologies and Critical Editions of books which are available for free*. I don't tend to actually buy e-books, since there's so much really good public domain stuff kicking around out there.

Oh! I get fanfiction off of AO3, too. To date, I've only used three programs, and that's only because I really like the Mobipocket Reader program for reading on the laptop. I could get away with just the Adobe one if it wasn't for that.

*Anthologies and critical editions are super-handy, and honestly I'd love to buy them, but I could afford to pay tuition OR buy textbooks, not both. Anyway, searchable text is a student's best friend, and Norton doesn't seem to offer ebooks of its anthologies yet.

70 years ago it was D-Day, the Allied landings in Normandy, the opening of the Second Front, the Liberation of France, there are all sorts of labels.

The towns and people caught up in the campaign, fought over until the breakout, had a bad time of it. But, within the year, Germany had surrendered.

There are so many things that would not have happened without the two Great Wars of the twentieth century. We have had Peace since, armed and watchful against new threats but still Peace.

And, disturbing thought, today we remember and all the past suffering seems to be limited to the soldiers. It's the veterans who are being honoured, not the people who were fought over.

Meanwhile, we have a Parliament for Europe, talking rather than fighting, and some very questionable Parties elected to that Parliament which are uncomfortable echoes of the European past which led to those wars. They seem to have forgotten what War is, and why their predecessors in the ruling elites set up an alternative.

War is a Racket, and when we forget the civilians, even when we think of the soldiers, we give the Racketeers the chance to come back.

http://blog.sfgate.com/bookmarks/2014/06/05/colbert-to-amazons-bezos-this-means-war/

On the Amazon-Hachette conflict - Stephen Colbert has discovered that Amazon's policies are "deterring customers from buying books by Stephen Colbert. And as any longtime viewer of this show knows, that’s me.”

There's much actually interesting discussion in the SF Chronicle article, and his conclusion is “This means war!” It should be fun to watch this evolve.

I live. Apologies for my lengthy unscheduled absence; I have not been well. I've kept up some kind of presence on the Book of Face, but haven't had the energy needed to join in the general scintillation over here.

And it turned out to be such a silly thing! You see, from about the middle of March I started to notice I was tired all the time. I went to the doctor and had a blood test (much praise for the nurse, who managed to do it in such a way that I scarcely felt it), and this established that I do not have anaemia and that my thyroid, liver and kidneys are all in tip-top working order. (I wasn't surprised about the liver and kidneys, but I had been worried about my thyroid, since my father has an underactive thyroid and I thought it might be running in the family.) So I said "what now?", and the doctor replied, "I shall take you off the sertraline and see if that helps." This seemed like a good move, since I was wanting to come off the stuff anyway; so I have been weaning myself off it gradually, as one should.

And... nothing happened. If anything, I was still getting worse. Last week I didn't make it out of bed once before 10 am, which is extremely unlike me, and when I did I was still shattered.

And then I dug out my sleep mask. The sleep mask I normally wear in the non-winter months because I am light-sensitive, and I don't like being woken up in the small hours by the rising sun. I've now been using it for a week, and the results have been nothing short of dramatic. Clearly all that was wrong with me was that I'd been suffering low-level sleep disturbance in the early morning, so, although I thought I'd been sleeping late, I hadn't been getting any benefit from it, and I had accrued a sleep debt the size of a small planet. It's now down to about the size of a suburb, and I think I should get rid of the rest of it tonight.

So why wasn't I wearing the mask in the first place? Because the fatigue set in before I would normally have started wearing it, and so I thought I would leave it off in order to help me wake up at a sensible time. Duh. *headdesk*

TL;DR: your Mongoose is a bally clot, and in future years will be starting with the sleep mask on the first of March. And now I'm back, I have been delighting in the poems in this thread, and I have one of my own to offer:

The sign says "TOILET". Honestly, that's all;
inside, there's one just like you have at home.
It doesn't segregate by chromosome.
You can be male or female, large or small,
abled, disabled, trans or genderqueer.
There are some signs in pictures, text and Braille,
room for a scooter, a convenient rail,
and everything says "all are welcome here".
Should you require assistance, pull this chain,
the red one (you can reach it from the floor
if you should fall), and we'll attend to you.
Now listen. We can do this on a train
that reaches eighty miles an hour or more,
so why not with a stationary loo?

Mongoose... Glad that was resolved.

mongoose: Brilliant poem! And hooray for a solution to the horrid fatigue!

Mongoose #205: Lovely poem. And good news.

Dave Bell #203: I've started reading the "War is a Racket" article, and early on found a champion quote from the good general:

There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.

Hell's bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?

Mongoose #205: Hmm. <Dave goes to look for his own sleep mask>

It hadn't occurred to me before this, but most of my sonnets have been of a bastard form I don't see in my book. Twelve lines, likely as not divided in three stanzas of four, each in ABBA rhyme, finished with a rhyming couplet.

Shakesparch? Petraspeare? I'm sure somebody's named the thing by now, so I doubt they'd name it after me.

Hey, new protest happening against the NSA surveillance, with buttons on various websites:

https://www.resetthenet.org/

Critics persnickety
Nitpicking Piketty
Looking for rickety
Premisses used

Critics can stick it, he
’s nobody’s chickadee,
Split they may lickety
Buzz off, defused.

And, from the hamper, a little theme song:

Everyone loved the King of DC
Handsome and brave, looked good on TV
Led the free world in happiest days
And proved that politics pays!

They called him Gipper, Gipper,
Twinkly and cheerful
People like me
His eyes wouldn’t see.
We knew that Gipper lived in
A world of his own, there,
Sealed in alone, there,
Up in DC.

Though in his time, the ethics might stink,
Washington shined, when Gipper’d but wink
Words that would make his side scream today
From Gipper’s mouth were okay!

For he was Gipper, Gipper,
Everyone’s grandpa
No one 'd read
A prompter like he’d.
They wish that Gipper, Gipper
Was still smiling in there,
Covering sin there,
Under DC!

[ttto 'Flipper,' but if that's not apparent, then it doesn't matter]

AKICIML, medical edition: What are hydrating things people can drink that are not water or juice?

My mother is improving steadily, so that's good. She's napping right now, so I'm sitting down with some coffee and Making Light. We went to the hospital for a follow up yesterday, and her PICC had to be moved. It took four different nurses (including a Professeur Infirmière, which translates to [I think] "Teaching Nurse"? Or "Nursing Teacher"?) eight tries to get the needle set. Thank Ghu my Mum is not a needle-phobe.

She's dehydrated - her skin tents all over the place. She refuses to drink a glass of water; when she started taking daily meds, she went out and bought the smallest glasses possible. I think they're maybe a shot and a half? And even those, she won't empty. She takes the fewest swallows possible in order to get the pills down, and that's it.

Her liquid intake for the day is: one morning coffee, one after-lunch tea, one after-dinner tea. Point final.

She says she doesn't like water; she doesn't like juice, and thinks milk is disgusting. Neither of us like soft drinks. So, I'm looking for suggestions for liquids I can persuade her to actually drink. I know she used to drink sweetened lemon-water (less lemony than lemonade), but stopped because she decided it was too much sugar. Maybe I can make it with Splenda?

Oh, and if anyone can point to a good online resource showing that dehydration makes needle-sticks more difficult, I'd love to show it to her. She's insisting she's never heard of such a thing and doesn't believe it.

In other news: my bed is assembled. Yay! No more mattress on the floor.

Cheryl@215:Coconut water (not coconut milk) could be worth trying.

Cheryl #215: Broth and variations!

You probably don't want them too salty, but small amounts of salt may help her retain the water. V-8 (or just tomato juice) is also one of my favorites, and may not register as "juice==bad" for her.

Caffeinated drinks won't help much, and may be counterproductive. However, there are lots of nice herb teas out there.

On beverages -- there's been a big revival of shrubs -- sipping vinegars, most of which are actually fairly sweet, which one dilutes with water (still or fizzy). Another possibility -- plain or lightly flavored fizzy water. I moved from sugared sodas over to Talking Rain (and then to a Sodastream) without difficulty, personally.

But then, I like water, and I drink a lot of it.

Cheryl @215, iced teas of various kinds? Passion tea mixed with lemonade is nice (Starbucks sells it but you can make at home). I like a squeeze of lemon and a sprig of mint in water or in weak iced tea; I don't think it needs to be sweetened but you could.

Cheryl #215: PS: You might mention to your mother that if she gets badly enough dehydrated, the doctors will consider that to be a threat to her health, and IV fluids are not much fun.

Dave, I believed that about caffeinated drinks for a long time. But recent studies have shown that, while caffeinated drinks hydrate less (because of the diuretic effect of caffeine), they're still a net positive for hydration (that is, the diuretic effect is not enough to overwhelm the hydration provided by the water).

We're talking about iced tea, cola drinks, etc. here, not 5-Hour Energy.

I second the coconut water. It hydrates very efficiently, and it tastes - to me, at least - exactly the way water ought to taste. (I don't like water either. To me it doesn't simply taste of nothing; it tastes negative, if you follow me. Whatever is in coconut water restores the balance.)

Cheryl, #215: Have you tried adding a little plain lemon or lime juice (a couple of slices' worth or less) to her water? Sometimes people who dislike plain water can handle it better if it's got a little flavor to it, and at that level of dilution you don't need to add sugar.

Unsweetened flavored fizzy-water is my go-to replacement for soft drinks, so if she doesn't like sodas she probably won't care for those either. You might try flavored teas, of the fruity or spicy variety; IMO they don't need sugar and are less likely to trigger the same aversion as juice because they're lighter-flavored and not too sweet.

Is she likely to be more willing to make an effort if you explain to her that the dehydration is a serious threat to her health?

Cheryl, will she eat fruit?

If so, go for fruits with high water content -- watermelon being one.

Cheryl @ 215 -- if she has a PICC line, quite honestly, IV fluids may be the way to go. There would be no more arguing with her and it might even help keep the PICC line from plugging up. Speaking from experience (recent septic kidney infection) IV fluids via picc line are easy, particularly if you don't want to eat or drink anything.

@215: I would probably approach the situation head-on in a battle of wills, with the results you'd expect, so I won't give any advice on how to handle the situation.

Can you get her to EAT her water? Lettuce, carrots, apples, anything else that's water in a thin shell of fiber?

Cheryl, people with deliberately low fluid intake are often concerned with wetting themselves, embarrassed about bedpans, etc.

You might want to look at this from the other end, so to speak.

If part of her care plan is regular ambulation, a trip to the toilet while someone's there to wrangle her I.V. pole could be built in.

Open-thready question: what does TL;DR mean? Tks, which means "thanks."

I tried the squeeze of lemon-in-water today; it got a grimace and a refusal to finish the glass. I tried adding Splenda, but she didn't like that either.

Hydrating her via the PICC would work short-term, but she needs to keep herself hydrated long-term, so I need something that will work for her for that. I'll see if I can pick up coconut water when I run to the store.

She doesn't like anything fizzy. I'll try the iced tea - I have some decaf Tetley I bought for a pregnant friend, I can make it with that. She definitely won't drink fruity teas.

Oh, and she doesn't have an IV pole; I hook her up to the Homepump at intervals for her antibiotics; outside of those times, her PICC is tucked up in a 'sleeve' and she can move around freely.

She loves watermelon, I'll pick up one of those. She might eat an apple if I slice it paper-thin.

Thanks very much for all the suggestions!!

Brenda Kalt #228: what does TL;DR mean?

It stands for "Too Long; Didn't Read". When you're calling it on your own article or comment, it implies "here's the summary, if you don't want to wade through my wall-of-text".

Brenda Kalt (228): TL;DR* is short for 'too long; didn't read'. I believe it originated as a dismissive comment directed at long posts; nowadays it seems to mean 'here's a summary of my long post'.

*often pronounced 'teal deer'

Brenda @ 228:
TL;DR = "Too long; didn't read."

When used straight-faced in a response to anything but the most epic digressive schizoid rant, in my humble opinion (IMHO!) "TL;DR" is a confession of idiocy or at least complete disengagement by the (non-)reader.

On the other hand (OTOH!) people do use it ironically sometimes, even on their own responses. I've sometimes written a long impassioned essay-length comment on something or other, and followed it with "TL;DR version:" and a one-sentence summary of the meat of what I'm getting at.

"Somebody Will" is wonderful. Thank you.

A wee salsa. via one of the comments)

This Vox article very nicely captures my best guess about how we'll deal with global warming. (Badly, if at all.)

US politics[1] deals very badly with long-term problems, tradeoffs that hurt now to improve the future. We also tend to have our policies captured by the most successful and well-established companies and industries--both our politicians and our media are subject to being captured to the point that they'll tell you the sky is orange if that's what the powerful people are saying. And international agreements that impose substantial pain on everyone and create a huge incentive to defect seem extremely unlikely to work out, so even if we finally really address AGW, I doubt we'll have much effect.

The article pointed out that, in general, the richer countries (most, but not all, of the top polluters) will basically have the resources to weather what we can expect from a 4 degree C average temperature rise. Even a lot of unanticipated stuff can probably be adapted to, given a lot of wealth. We got through the depression and WW2 while we were *way* poorer and less technologically advanced than we are now, so we can probably adapt to things two or three times *that* rough without collapsing. But the implication of this is that, assuming the climate changes in the way the models predict, a really large amount of our wealth (mostly channeled through government programs and insurance payouts, but also through private losses in property values and such) will be needed to deal with that stuff. We're going to be poorer than we would otherwise have been. And this will happen all over the world, though some countries (like China and India and Bangladesh) will have much bigger problems to address, with smaller resources. In general, poorer and more southern countries will get hit hardest.

One consequence of this is that our willingness to help those poor countries that are getting hammered by climate change will likely be much diminished. If we're looking at massive record deficits and unpopular budget cuts at home in order to pay for remediating the damage caused by climate change, we aren't going to be sending a whole lot of aid overseas. Nor are we likely to be spending as much buying stuff from overseas.

I can imagine an even nastier feedback loop here. Climate change makes you much poorer, puts a big strain on your government budgets and your private economy. You adopted expensive measures to decrease CO2 emissions many years ago, when you were richer, and now you're paying 30% more for energy than you would if you started burning coal again. There will be a pretty big incentive to go back to burning coal. If you're trying to become a rich enoguh country to afford the kind of stuff you'll need to do to respond to climate change, you may prefer to keep burning coal now (and thus get richer).

The only realistic way I see for us to address this is by better technology. Solar and wind power have gotten a lot better and cheaper, but still are very expensive (and solar is heavily subsidized) and variable. Nuclear power is expensive and unpopular.

If we had a really appealing alternative to CO2 emitting power sources, something that cost less than burning coal or natural gas and worked as well otherwise, I think we could pretty rapidly drop our CO2 emissions. Among other things, we could subsidize purchase of the new technology the way we are solar panels now, to much bigger effect. But barring that, I expect we're going to run the experiment of seeing what happens to the planet when our CO2 emissions keep on going, average temperature rises 4+ degrees, and the ocean continues to acidify.

[1] Probably other countries' politics, too, but US politics is what I know.

Boy, do I know that one, Cheryl. My mother's favorite activities all involve being outside and getting sweaty, and then she comes inside, takes two sips of water, and wonders why she starts feeling awful. And when anyone discusses it with her, she is absolutely insistent that she just drank two whole glasses of water, despite the family members standing there ready to testify otherwise. I don't have any suggestions for your mother's taste issues, as it's not really the issue with mine, but what has worked for me wonderfully well is drinking WITH her. If I walk up, hand her a glass of something, and request that she drink it, it's only a prelude to extended and frustrating argument, but if I sit down next to her with two poured glasses and have a conversation about something else entirely while drinking my own glass, she will start drinking. Habit, politeness, subliminal suggestion - who cares as long as it works! I hope you find a solution that works for you.

albatross #235: Unfortunately, I think you're being unduly optimistic, certainly more so than Mr. Klein. You think your wealth will let us fend off the changes... I don't. The bumper-sticker's at least 20 years old, if not fifty: "... you cannot eat money". Or drink it, or breathe it.

As best I understand it, 2°C would already be a disaster. 4°C is an existential threat to humanity.

Most of the measures that would defend our own coastlines are themselves resource intensive -- earthmoving machinery, pumps, construction all run on fossil fuels. And what happens to those projects when simply feeding the workers becomes an issue, or when the weather gets bad enough to actually interfere with the work?

And where Klein says "the GOP has gone off the rails on climate change", I'd leave the last three words off. Global threat makes people crazy, and the GOP has decided that they're the party of crazy. But they're a symptom... living under threat makes people crazy, and the GOP is just the current expression of that. That craziness is another threat in itself, and can easily scotch any attempts to deal with the real problems. What happens to those projects, or any coherent action, if the Tea Party or their successors declare that it's all the fault of the immigrants/blacks/Jews/scientists, and if the government won't hunt them down, the "patriots" will? If the oil companies decide that the American government isn't really legitimate after all, because they started "interfering with private property"? Or if the TLAs decide that this obsession with global warming is the real threat to America? Or if the craziness reaches a new level, and some demagogue starts pushing The Sheep Look Up as a manifesto?

Of course, that's mostly American craziness: What happens if China or Russia or India -- or even the US -- decides this is their big chance to gain territory, or wonders if global warming could be cancelled by a nuclear winter? (BTW, I wouldn't bet on it.)

Me #237, erratum: "you think your wealth" should of course have been "you think our wealth" -- like it or not, I'm part of "the America problem".

Cheryl @ 229: I really like iced mint tea. No caffeine, and it doesn't need sweetener.

janra @ 201:Oh, it really is that scattered :(

Absolutely. The goal of each e-reader company is to have you only buy their books for their gadget, through their store, preferably with their DRM. (All hail to Tor for going DRM free!) I suppose I can't blame profit-driven commercial companies for doing that, but I do resent it anyway!

One of these days, maybe someone will introduce a lightweight tablet with electronic ink that runs various e-reader software packages? Pretty please?

Janetl - I have a Kindle, which can read a few Kindleish formats and PDFs, and I have a Windows machine with Calibre software on it. I've never actually bought an ebook from Amazon, nor registered the Kindle with them; after starting with Gutenberg, and free downloads from various authors or SF publishers who support them, and the annual Hugo nominee packets, there's been plenty to keep me busy. Calibre takes care of translating the formats (PDFs are annoying to read, because the purpose of PDF is to make a model of black or colored ink on specific shapes of dead trees, and scaling a letter-sized or hardback-sized dead tree page down to Kindle-size makes the letters to small and jaggy to read, so I end up setting the Kindle to rotated-90-degrees mode and reading stuff half a page at a time, grumbling at the publisher through the entire process, or else giving up and reading on the PC.)

Cheryl - besides watermelon, or maybe iced or herbal tea, does your mother like beer enough to drink non-alcoholic near-beers? Or iced coffee?

#239, janetl: I was hoping that wasn't the case. *sigh*

#240, Bill Stewart: that's great up until there's a few specific books that were recommended that you want to read that are only available in DRM'd e-book format. I've read various free PDF ebooks before on my laptop and those were no problem because they were free and PDF, and I have no problem reading on a screen.

@241 Bill Stewart

Cheryl - besides watermelon, or maybe iced or herbal tea, does your mother like beer enough to drink non-alcoholic near-beers?

Neither my mother nor I can stand to so much as smell beer.*

Or iced coffee?

I could try that one.

*This is not a judgement. Others are free to responsibly enjoy as much as they like.

I'm told that Calibre has add-ons for un-DRMing books. I've only ever purchased a relative handful of e-books (like half a dozen, which could possibly be held in a hand for purposes of my metaphor), and the rest came from archive, Google Books (which seems to have choked back somehow), and Gutenberg, as well as some other PD places whose names are bookmarked in another browser. If I want to read something they want to charge me for, I still have the mutant ability to check it out from a library or find it used and peruse it away from the reader. (I've also scanned some of my books that were just too important not to have — Ten Ever Lovin' Blue Eyed Years with Pogo, for instance, and The Pooh Perplex, which I could be fairly sure I'd want to read again and again.

A real joy of having a reader is that I can read things that have never been bound as books, like my old Live Journal entries or Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (still a work in progress, theoretically).

Just had a big interruption. Not sure if I was going anywhere else with this. I declare victory!

#237 ::: Dave Harmon

Here are my guesses-- things could get very bad, but I do expect material science to keep progressing-- at least some protections against the rising seas will get cheaper.

I'm not terribly worried about the Tea Party. I could be wrong, but I think their belief in amateurism (experience with politics means you're tainted) undercuts them a lot. Other populist/xenophobic movements could be a serious problem.

Big demographic shifts because of changes in where it's fit to live bumping up against national borders are going to be a huge problem.

Dave Harmon @ 237: I figure the Tea Party is running out of funds. After all, the Chinese have spending limits.

Climate change has cut our rainfall here by a third in the last thirty years, and our wheatbelt is contracting. As a result, farmers, among the most conservative of the electorate, are clamouring for something to be done about it, and even a conservative government is not in denial.

This season, and the last, hasn't been bad. But the trend is clear.

This is the time of waiting for the rain.
It yet may come. It may. Perhaps tonight.
This is the time for sky less infinite:
That God, repenting infinite disdain,
Might grant surcease, forgiveness, life again.
This is the time. And if that aching light
Remains as pure, as clean, as well it might,
What then? What else? We bear the pain.

Or watch, while others bear. The wheat is sown,
And once again, slow-dying hope. Again
There’s one more family, packing up alone -
But then, they hear. Five generations’ gain
Will fall to dust the endless wind has blown
Not yet… not yet! The wind has brought the rain!

I'm not an American. No disrespect to those of you who are, but I am, on the whole, grateful for that fact; America is a rotten place to be poor (although the UK is rapidly becoming equally rotten), and there are too many irresponsible people wandering about armed to the teeth.

However, I do have a lot of American friends, and over the last few days I have been unable to get away from all this hoo-ha about the American POW whose name temporarily eludes me (Bergdahl, is it?). It seems to be yet another in a long line of instances of Mr Obama being viciously attacked for doing things that previous presidents have done and not been attacked for, or even been praised for.

I don't think Mr Obama is perfect. I think if I were American I would vote for him because he's a better choice than the opposition, but that's as enthusiastic as I get about him as a politician. (As a person, he strikes me as very agreeable, but that's a different matter.) However, I am fed up to the back teeth with the apparently unceasing torrent of childish racism that is directed at him. It's unfair and unnecessary, as well as unkind.

So this morning I snapped, and I wrote this. It's called The Racist and the President.

Your ancestor was slave to mine;
for you to lead is out of line,
for White is Might by right divine
as God revealed by secret sign.
And yet how generous and fine
we are! You know you shouldn't whine;
we loosed your chains and let you shine
in our reflected light. Resign!
Your ancestor was slave to mine.

***

My ancestor was slave to yours:
I have forgiven ancient scores.

I can de-DRM ebooks in Calibre and store them in Dropbox. Books that don't need de-DRMing (such as Tor, small press, or public domain ebooks) also go into Dropbox. I do that on my desktop PC.

Dropbox has apps that you can load onto various ereaders, tablets, and phones. You can use your home wireless to sideload the ebook into the Dropbox app and then open with whatever ereader or ereader app you are using.

If your devices don't have wireless, or your home isn't set up for wireless, I think you can do this via USB cable. Not sure how that works. The folks at Mobileread would know. Do consult that website if you need help.

I have recently subscribed to Scribd, on my Android tablet. Netflix for books. Spotty collection, but still worth the monthly fee. Oyster provides the same sort of service for iOS devices. Both services have books that the local library does not carry in e.

Hoorah, poetry! Particularly Dave Luckett and Mongoose @246, 247.

AKICIML: I'm trying to think of an appropriate gift for a friend and his wife, who have been incredibly and unexpectedly kind. One friend suggested tea or coffee, and that would work for his wife I think, but he doesn't appear to have opinions about caffeinated beverages. Therefore: any (fiction) book recommendations for an anthropologist whose last-read science fiction was apparently Neuromancer and who finds dystopias fascinating?

Mongoose @248; I guess for me it's hard to separate anti-Obama racism from the regular political-party in/out-grouping; indeed, that very ambiguity could be an insidious cover for much racism, or regular dislike that, when taken for racism, widens the political gap more than it otherwise would. Troubling. I'm cis/white/male so i presume my blind spots are many. Also *his* ancestors weren't slaves here in the US, which makes the poem jar a bit to me, but maybe my consciousness of that fact speaks more about the struggle than the fact itself.

albatross @ #235: Thoughts echo my own, and seem to tie into abi's connected intermittent thoughts on limits, responsibility, and future. I must admit that my current thought-future is more Bacigalupi "Windup Girl" than anything else, because of how strongly I responded to that narrative. A less equal world, poorer and harder in many ways, especially the idea of not even knowing what one is missing. (Reef? what is a reef?)

estelendur: how about either The Telling or Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin? Neither is a dystopia, but they both have strong anthropological content (the author is the child of two anthropologists).

I found the world-building in Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl fascinating, but the title character's lack of agency nearly made me abandon the book. Ship Breaker, also by Bacigalupi, was better, and the fact that it's a YA book precluded some of the squick-inducing sexual abuse of the former.

If the folks in question are in their 40s or 50s and at all connected with the gaming/pop culture threads of the 80s, I heartily recommend Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

Lila @252, I'd mentioned Always Coming Home previously and he did not evince any interest, alas. Also they are remarkably disconnected from American pop culture of any decade, as far as I can tell. But thanks for the suggestions!

@estelendur no. 250: Definitely Always Coming Home. It initially presents like an anthropologist's notes on a dreamy California utopia, but as the book unfolds it becomes clear that the Kesh have created the most livable, humane society possible given the conditions they face, which are a post-apocalyptic toxic nightmare to an outside observer; the antagonists are definitely dystopians. Also the Singularity happened and nobody jumped on board. Look for the edition with the Kesh song collection, if there is still such a thing available (back in the day it came with a cassette tape).

estelendur @ 250: Then how about A Million Open Doors, by John Barnes?

Open Threadiness: Bill Watterson makes a guest appearance in Stephan Pastis' Pearls before Swine comic strip.

Nancy Lebovitz #245: "Materials science"? Exotic composites and even nanotechnology are certainly useful for a lot of things, but they need energy and infrastructure to produce too. And the problem with holding off the sea is sheer scale.

If anything, I'd hold out more hope for biotech sequestration of CO₂, but regardless of safeguards, any such tactic would fall squarely under Klein's "geoengineering is insane". Unfortunately, we may actually be in that much trouble. Slightly less insane would be repurposing fission plants for wholesale condensation of CO₂, but you wouldn't want that near human populations, or anything flammable. Pity the existing fission plants are mostly placed to serve some city's power needs.... (And then you need to do something with the liquid CO₂, which is still an unsolved problem in its own right.)

Hyper-Local News: Woman has had a complete meltdown over caregiving, lack of employment/funds, and the realization that the move from NYC to Seattle cost her more emotionally than she had expected. (The major thing is the lack of the musical community she had, which is slightly startling to realize that singing is more important than sex, but there you go.) Friends are helping, but she is drained. Suicidal ideation has been thwarted by learning that her partner would kill himself if she killed herself, which rather defeats the purpose of making his life easier. Partner is continuing to deal with his post-stroke health issues, but is incredibly supportive.

And Mongoose @205: A friend just put a blackout blind up in our bedroom. We took this apartment (after having to leave our original home in Seattle abruptly) because of the amount of sunlight that came in, but the ambient light from the courtyard plus the southern exposure apparently has kept me from sleeping soundly for the past ten months.

Who knew?

(Coming in very late ...)

Soon Lee, apropos #118: true, Marmite and Vegemite contain no live yeast. But I find that putting a dollop of the stuff in the bread maker (yes, I am lazy and use a machine to do the hard work) makes for a wholemeal loaf with a very crisp, malty-tasting crust and a slightly yeasty zing to its flavour. Strongly recommended. I leave out the salt completely and put in about twice as much Marmite -- so about 10g for a recipe that calls for 5g of salt (although I'd usually only put in half that in the first place -- most bread recipes are too heavy on the salt for my taste).

Cheryl, what about ice cream, sherbert, snow cones, shaved ice, etc? Or if she objects to the sugar content therein, frozen lemonade or lemon-water, or diluted fruit juice pops -- you could make 'em yourself. You could even smash up fruit with a high water content and freeze it -- strawberries work great for this.

Other thing I'd observe is that dehydration severe enough to cause skin tenting also causes people to be cranky and not think clearly. (I get wicked stubborn and generally bad tempered when I'm dehydrated.) Rehydrating her via PICC for a few days might improve her mood and general feeling of well being, and therefore, perhaps, make her more willing to drink.

Is it possible she has reflux? When I'm not taking antacids, even a small glass of water (or food, or anything by mouth) will give me a miserable acid attack and it does, indeed, make me reluctant to drink.

Velma 258: I'm sorry for your meltdown, and glad your suicidal ideation has been thwarted (someday I'll tell you what thwarts mine, but I'm not ready to talk about it yet).

I confess I'd had an idyllic image of you meshing effortlessly into Seattle's music scene and Seattle fandom. All I can say now is that I hope it will work out better than it has so far, and that I'll keep a good thought FWIW.

Velma @258: I hope the blackout curtain helps restore some strength for you. I wouldn't mind putting three up in the bedroom here. If my sister was still in Kirkland, I'd commend you to each other, but she's in Olympia now, where she's playing viola in a volunteer orchestra. Things are uncertain, but so far, so good. Have you thought about singing at retirement-type homes? Some of them even pay. I've seen a couple where the piano was in tune and not abused.

Like Xopher, I'll keep the good thought going. I wish the best to you both.

Velma @258:

I'm so sorry to hear that you've been struggling so much. If prayers and good wishes can help, you and Soren most certainly have mine in abundance.

Stefan S. @251 - President Obama's paternal ancestors were not slaves. However, I recall seeing somewhere that there was a slave somewhere in his mother's ancestry, back before 1700. Apparently a lot more white Americans than most realize have a little black ancestry; it took several decades before a clear distinction was drawn between white indentured servants and black slaves, and people intermarried, ran away, and "passed" more than was possible later. At any rate, for the racists it doesn't matter.

Velma, I've never met you but I know your voice so very clearly from Making Light and am grateful for your existence. You have all my sympathy for the huge pressure you're going through and and all good wishes for things to improve. If staying alive for each other is what you've got to keep going on, then go with that. You are an inherently worthwhile person.

Recently, there was some discussion here of moderate conservative sf writers, and I'd like to post a list in a discussion elsewhere. Does anyone remember who they are?

Zora @ 249: Sounds like you've got an excellent system for managing ebooks!

What I love, lazy creature that I am, is reading an ebook that loads onto my ereader automatically as soon as I buy it, and synchs as I read so that if I'm standing in line at the store, I can open the book on my phone and continue reading at exactly the same spot in the text. These are the features that keep people tethered in the various ebook walled gardens.

It was the longest that it's been in years,
almost to my waist, a weight of braid
and summer coming on. So it was now the time.
The hairdresser was late—she had
forgotten the buttercream
(when you have friends of many talents,
and they do house calls,
why not take advantage?)

We put on Tangled for the kids
(a very apt choice, I later realized)
and braided up my hair.
A quick confirmation, two cuts,
and then the trimming
and shaping,
the hair darkening as we reached the depths
unseen by the sun of years.
And now the gray looks less like dust
and more like the hint of frost,
and now for the first time in years
the weight of obligation is gone.

Oddly enough, the braids
weigh less than an earlier cut
as yet unsent.

———

HLN: Woman gets awesome haircut. And apparently this is the best mood-improvement she could have done.

AKICML: OK, my TV is definitely dying. It has a big dark patch (not all the way black, just anything that appears there is significantly darker) and lines all across the screen. Getting very hard to watch most things.

So. Can't afford to replace it. It occurs to me that my laptop has an HDMI port (I've used it to play videos on the TV). I don't know that much about HDMI; does it go both ways? Could I hook the HDMI cable from my cable box into the laptop and watch videos on the laptop screen?

So, It occurred to me that it was about the time of year for fireflies... so I went out after dark, and indeed, they are out and about. Not too many of them as yet, but definitely there.

Oddly, I'm still finding myself explaining to kids where my dog Gracie went. Have I been that shut-in for the last 5 months? I probably was -- I was pretty exhausted, and it's taken me a while to get back into walking around the area. (Also there was snow, and then rain.)

Xopher: I think HDMI will function only as an output from your computer. Pretty sure.

Xopher, have you looked at Goodwill? Mine has TV sets that would have been considered pretty advanced a short while back for something like ten or twenty dollars. Same with the DAV store and others. The VCR I got to replace my old one that died cost a sawbuck. I taped the receipt to the side so I'd remember. Just a thought.

Clifton, it appears you're correct. Kip, that's a good idea.

I'll second the notion of TV shopping at Goodwill (or similar thrift shop). First-generation 480p flatscreens are easy to find there. Usually "kitchen sized," but sometimes you'll find a "big" 32" 720p set (which was "OH MY GOD!" technology to me a few years ago).

I want to upload a photo I took with my cellphone (Samsung Galaxy S3) to my Flickr account. There's supposed to be a way for me to do this, but I can't find any control either in my Flickr app or on the Gallery app to do it. IME this usually means it's there, but hidden somewhere that I would never think to look for it, or called something that makes it not obvious. Help?

Not poetry, but serving the same function for me right now:

You know how holograms work? Well, not how they *work* but how they end up. You can cut them up, shatter them into tiny pieces, and you'll still be able to see the image they record. Holograms can be badly made and broken in such a way that you can only see part of the image, and they only work right if you look at them using the right kind of light.

Douglas Hofstadter says, though using different words, that we all carry imperfect holographs of each other in our heads. We all live in each other's minds as incomplete fragments viewed with light not entirely of the correct wavelength. After we die, these fuzzy and fragmented images are all that's left of us.

You can't put a physical hologram back together to restore the image if it wasn't recorded correctly in the first place. But we can show each other our holograms of each other, and re-record, de-fuzz, and expand our fragmented, degraded images. After someone dies, that's all we can do. It isn't a perfect process; but neither is it nothing.

Just to see what would happen, I logged in at Hotmail (Outlook Yayzors Outlook Awesome Cool Land dot com).

Now, back when I unloaded my Hotmail address, the message on the screen, I thought, said that if I cleaned out my inbox and clicked here or there or something and didn't touch it for a while, they would forget me. So I followed the instructions. That's been, I dunno, months now? A while.

Oh, hey, look, they still remember my old address and password, and YIPPEE, they also know my meatspace name! And display it! So helpful!

"Welcome to your new Outlook inbox." NO.

Logged out, never going back.

I know that a lot of the stuff I post here probably makes real programmers roll their eyes, but ISTM sometimes that the companies with the biggest market share are answering questions I never asked and assuming that I have problems when I don't, hence their attempts to provide Radio for You, the Viewer!

I want to read messages from people and send messages to people, and do it more quickly than paper and stamps will allow and with more editing ability than a phone call. And I want to do it in such a way that sometimes I can be in the sphere that used to require letters headed "Dear Sir," and sometimes I can be in the sphere that used to be known as chatting over the back fence, and the two spheres won't connect unless somebody who is determined to give me a bad day decides to connect them. That's it. That's all I want. What does Outlook keeping an empty inbox for months with my meatspace name on it do for me? Anybody who manages to get in will see my meatspace name and the e-mail address I used to use for my personal things, and have a place to play in, as me, that I didn't even realize was still there. I might never have realized that it was still there. This is kind of the opposite of help.

Xopher - There are USB dongles you can get that will let you watch TV on your PC. Some are as cheap as $20 (e.g. from DealExtreme), but I don't know if all of those do cable or how compatible they are with the version of cable TV you have.

Jenny Islander #278: This sort of corporate behavior is not about helping you send E-mail.

Partly it's about making sure the Corporation gets its cut no matter what -- after all, you might take a knock on the head and want to use the address again.

But on the flip side, consider that if they well-and-truly delete the account, that means someone else can pick up the address....

Cheryl @215/229: You say she hates fruit teas, but how about herbal? I have, for example*, peppermint, chamomile, chamomile-and-spearmint, fennel and anise, liquorice and cinnamon, cinnamon and clove, fennel and liquorice, lemon-and-ginger, peppermint-and-liquorice. Then there's rooibos tea and flavoured rooibos (mint, lemon, spiced, cinnamon, etc.). These are all naturally caffiene-free, and taste good cold as well as hot, so could be prepared as iced tea. Note: the liquorice-containing teas should not be drunk in large quantities if you have high blood pressure.

* I have more than 100 different herbal, rooibos, flavoured green and flavoured black teas in my collection - I love being able to choose exactly which flavour I want.

@281 dcb

Cheryl @215/229: You say she hates fruit teas, but how about herbal?

She won't. At the mention of them, she screwed up her face like a kid with a lemon. She won't even try them.

::sigh::

I'd forgotten how hard it is to get my mum to try something she's never had before. She sits there saying she doesn't like it, even though she's never tasted it in her life before. It was very hot yesterday, and is supposed to continue that way for the next several days, so I would really just like to tell her to DRINK SOME FREAKING WATER PLEASE.

Which will not be helpful.

She's supposed to get the IV out tomorrow and switch to pills; maybe I can convince the nurse to tell her that she has to drink more - my mother is much more inclined to listen to Authority than she is to me.

I do thank everyone for the suggestions. Watermelon went OK, since she's always loved it, but she worries about it being too sweet. I have to find low-sugar, high-water things for her to eat, and hope that she likes them.

Cheryl, if she listens to Authority, then don't hesitate to invoke it. You might be doing this already, but just in case you're not, the construction, "Nurse says…" or "Doctor said…" could be useful.

Cheryl #282: Watermelon went OK, since she's always loved it, but she worries about it being too sweet.

Worries? I can understand not wanting to pig out on sugar, and can at least imagine not liking overly sweet tastes, but this throws me -- what exactly is she "worried" about?

@284 Dave Harmon

Worries? I can understand not wanting to pig out on sugar, and can at least imagine not liking overly sweet tastes, but this throws me -- what exactly is she "worried" about?

Her mother was a type 2 diabetic, and so are two of her older sisters (as well as the one who died a few years ago). So my mother worries about becoming diabetic, and this comes out as not wanting to eat too many sweet things.

Unfortunately, they were/are all badly managed diabetics, so she doesn't really have a frame of reference for doing it right.

And before anyone suggests attending a Diabetic Clinic - they have a particularly excellent one near here, and she will not go. "I already know all that. They're only going to tell me to eat food I don't like."

Would she listen to NASA?

This picture came from the Hacker's Diet, that got it from a NASA presentation on what humans need if they're going to Mars.

As I said before, any conversation I can imagine having, if I were in your shoes, would end up in a war of wills. So I'm probably providing you ammunition for a gun you shouldn't be shooting.

285
They're much more likely to tell her how much she can have of the stuff she does like. And then they'll tell her she needs to drink more fluids, because dehydration is hard on the kidneys, and she really doesn't want that.

I found a swell, extra heavy duty cutting board in a "moving sale" pile:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/14188588028/

I thoroughly sanitized it (bleach, soap, microwaves, sunlight), but wonder it I need to do anything else, like rub some kind of preserving oil into it.

Well, that's weird. The submission form assumed my "I found spam" name variant was the default.

I did not find spam.

Cheryl, caffeine is at most a very weak diuretic, and the increase in urination it might produce is far outweighed by the hydration benefit from drinking its vehicle (tea, coffee). Caffeine is also the most powerful performance-enhancing drug legally available, with the fewest side effects and the greatest dosage latitude, and it would surely be banned from competition were it not traditional.

A random query for any American Doctor Who fans who may be here. I'm currently rewatching the best of the classic series (at least I *think* I've got far enough to be rewatching - I would have been 8 when these episodes were first broadcast, so my memory is understandably hazy) and have got as far as Planet of Fire. Now, to my non-sensitive ears, Nicola Bryant's accent sounds.. forced, is perhaps the polite way of putting it. Yet Wikipedia suggests she successfully maintained the fiction that she was American for some time. Does this sound plausible to you?

Some random queries about new turns of language (some of which I first saw here)

What does it mean to "give props to" someone? What is a prop?

Why do people say "wait for it..." before delivering the punchline of a joke? Did this originate with some talk show host or stand-up comic?

What does bog-standard mean? Why a bog?

Lee@275 I'm not sure about flickr, but other similar applications you would open the image, and choose share from the action menu. Is this not working for you?

Erik@292 I've always assumed that "bog standard" derives from the british slang "bog" for toilet (the phrase isn't really new... I've been using it for at least 20 years). As to the others, I have no idea.

What does it mean to "give props to" someone? What is a prop?

As I understand it "props" is short for "proper respect" or "proper acknowledgement" or the like.

Cheryl, does she like cucumbers or pickles? What about cucumbers and tomatoes (and onions, if you like) marinated in italian salad dressing?

If she's worried about calories too, show her the calorie content on an average dill pickle. They're basically a no-guilt food.

According to Urban Dictionary, "Wait for it" has been popularized in the show Ii>How I Met Your Mother.

The Urban Dictionary describes "Wait for it" as revived by that TV show. I did some digging, and it's a very old pattern, and looks to go back to WW1 at least, and comedy drill acts in general, where somebody would do the drill movement early, and the drill sergeant would declaim, "Wait for it!". I think I saw it in "Dad's Army" once, and it does rather depend on an audience who knows enough to spot the error. I wouldn't be surprised if it was in "Carry On, Sergeant"

And what about Bilkp?

Re: my mother's hydration

She will eat mini-cucumbers, if I slice them up very thin (she has a thing about thin slices). She's not a fan of dill pickles.

The Hacker's Diet image will not make sense to her, since water is obviously not drunk in pounds.

In good news: the IV is out! Ding Dong! No more getting up on short sleep to take the bulb out of the fridge, wait for it to warm up, set it up with her spending the whole time with her telling me I'm Doin It Rong, watching it obsessively for air ("That's a bubble!!" "That's not a bubble, it's a droplet on the outside" ::wipes:: "See?". 5 minutes later: "I see a bubble!!" Lather, rinse, repeat), removing the bulb and injecting the saline ("Bubbles!!!")... all over. Yay!! ::Kermit arms::

Is yoghurt hydrating? She loves it and the nurse said it would help her digestion, and I made sure she's allowed dairy on her new oral antibiotic, so I got her to eat a small bowl of it with dried cranberries mixed in (please do not mention how sweet yoghurt and cranberries are - what she doesn't know won't hurt me).

Oh, and I asked the very busy clinic nurse about getting my mother to drink more water. She was the only one on duty on a Sunday, so didn't really have time, but did offer a quick, "Sure, water's good! Drink more!" We'll see if that helps.

Oh, and about the war of wills: yes, that would happen, and it wouldn't help, so I'm trying to get around it.

Erik 292: I believe 'props' is short for 'propers' which is short for 'proper credit'.

Cheryl, #285: You've probably already thought of this, but... does the diabetic clinic have any literature that your mother could read, or that you could read to her? Because as long as you're fighting the conversation she's having with them in her own head, you won't get anywhere.

Jules, #293: Aha. Turns out I needed to scroll down the page after hitting the Share button on the gallery. There was no indication (slider bar, etc.) that I needed to do so. Thanks!

Lee@275 you should be able to 'Share' (icon is 3 dots in a triangle, one of them joined to each of the others by lines) from the Gallery as Jules @293 says.
Or from the Flickr App, select the icon of the camera from the top menu. This shows you the view from the phone's camera, ready to take a photo/video (by touching the big white 'biutton'). Select the photo (from the phone's camera roll) that it is displaying next to the big white button, this will give you a list of all the locations on the phone where it has found photos.

It's easier than having to write it out makes it look!

The phrase "wait for it" invokes memories of various stereotyped Sargent-majors in 50's/60's UK military comedies*. Along with "you 'orrible little man" and "you bleedin shower" they would be prone to shouting "SQUAD ATTEN -wait for it,wait for it - SHUN"

It is possible that some Anglophile writer brought it over the pond and re-purposed it. Or it might be a co-incidence.

*and then later lampooned in 80's show "It Ain't Half Hot, Mum" **

** Which was basically "Are You Being Served" only in a jungle...
with amateur dramatics and racism...
and slightly camper.

Jules @291: not plausible, if I'm not misremembering -- it's been a long time since I last watched Planet of Fire.

@ 292 Erik Nelson "What does bog-standard mean? Why a bog?"

It means basic, lowest standard, normal, ordinary, even rubbishy. But it's not really known why or where it comes from, though it has only arisen in the last few decades. The Phrase Finder discusses it here, including dismissing the theory that it is an amendment of "box standard" (and also dismissing the theory that the approving term "the dog's bollocks" is a corruption of "box deluxe").

@Cheryl no. 285: What Lee @301 said. If your mother is arguing based on what she thinks Authority says, giving her written proof of what Authority actually says, with Authority logos, all shiny and everything, may help. While I understand that this may feel weird and wrong, it may also be time to explain the situation to a nurse and have her put on her Authority hat and come and give an Authority lecture, especially if she can give a good impression of the Authority of your mother's formative years.

Cheryl,

Lettuce is apparently 98% water, so salad might be good. What about celery (the only non-fattening "food" if the tales of the energy used in chewing it is greater than its usable calories)?

Here in rightpondia there are flavoured waters (Volvic lemon and lime is very nice and available as "Diet" as well as sugared) intended for hot days. (Obviously this would not be a cheap long-term solution, but might give you a starting point.)

OK, so for once Hoboken's Radio Shack DID have answers (maybe because I got the manager this time). He said IOGear makes a device that will let me connect my laptop to a USB port on my laptop, and watch my cable that way. He said RS doesn't carry it, but Office Depot (a few blocks away) might.

I needed to look at the cable box first, so I went home. To try to find out more, I Googled for it. I started with "IOGear HDTV to laptop" (minus the quotes), which is what he wrote down for me. Neither that nor any of the other search strings I tried (and I tried many, with various things in quotes, using minuses to negate things I didn't want to see, etc.) showed me anything but devices to go FROM the laptop TO a flatscreen, which is vastly more common but not what I need.

Either there's no such device (and yes, I tried a couple of searches without "IOGear" in them), or Google's being stupid again ("oh, he probably meant this more common thing instead of the thing he's very explicitly asking for"). Anyone have insight into any aspect of this?

(Optimum does provide an app to watch TV on the laptop...over WiFi. My internet service is spotty at best, so I don't want to think about taking TV programs over WiFi. The cable box never seems to have a problem.)

Oh, and one other annoyance. IOGear offers a technician to answer questions online. They let you go all through the process of putting up your question and providing your contact information and THEN tell you they charge for this. Perhaps I'm simpleminded and everyone already knows everyone charges to answer questions about their own products, but this bugged me. I closed the tab.

Cheryl, Cadbury @307 made me think of TrueLemon, which is a little bit of powdered (and de-sugared) lemon juice in a packet, intended for tea I think. A packet will add just a tad of lemon flavor to some water.

Jenny Islander @ 277: I see what that's annoying for you. My sympathies. I've actually opened an Outlook account recently. I considered Not Being Evil, then laughed at my naïveté about marketing and went with the devil I've known and loved.

Loved to hate, I grant you. It's a thin, thin line.

A friend of mine who got promoted just in time for a bad-looking summer mentioned in passing he was there for this story.

I've known him for thirty years and I'd never known that particular fact about him. I don't know why I'm surprised that this came as a surprise. And now I'm going to worry about him all summer long, just like always.

Hm. Let me see if I've got this right, Xopher - you've got a cable box that you'd like to hook up to your laptop in order to use it's screen as your TV? Depending on how recent your cable box is, what you're looking for is either an HDMI input for your laptop, or an analog video input device for same. The latter is usually in the form of either a USB video converter, or a USB TV tuner with an auxiliary input. A quick bit of searching says that the cheap USB video inputs are roundly hated (the drivers are usually abominable). The USB TV tuners will be better (I used one in my dorm days), but they usually start around $60ish, and good ones seem to be $80-100.

Cheryl, are you sure you're not my sister? I know you can't be, because I don't have one. And because my mother didn't have an IV line this past week. But my mother never wants to take more than a sip of water, no matter what symptoms of dehydration she has, and she says all the infuriating things your mother says.

With my mother, part of the problem has to do with her bladder. When my mother finally overcame her embarrassment enough to consult a doctor, he diagnosed "minor stress incontinence," and advised her to limit fluids and work harder at holding it. (A previous comment mentioned that she might be embarrassed about bedpans or needing help to go to the toilet now that she's sick. But it might not just be that.) She's been limiting fluids for decades. It feels like the only thing she can do to control something that feels out-of-control, shameful, and anxiety-provoking.

Adults should be embarrassed to read YA books.
Summary: a person who, by her own admission, does not read YA fiction displays her complete lack of understanding of YA fiction -- and then says there's something wrong with US for disagreeing with her. She also appears to think that those of us who read and enjoy YA fiction read nothing else.

I think this just begs for a recommended-reading list. I'll open with the entire Young Wizards series by Diane Duane. Next?

The Dark is Rising series.

314
The Wizard of Earthsea.

Everything by Diana Wynne Jones and Robin McKinley.

@288: Mineral oil. Especially if it feels "dried out". Vegetable oil is fine also, if you frequently wash and re-oil. (I asked a group of friends once and an Awesome Housewife said "I re-oil twice a year with mineral oil, and yes it's on my calendar."

Continued from previous post. )

Lee @ 314: See Sandy B. @ 318 for my suggestion. I think it's a lot likelier to work.

288
The July Cooks Illustrated (cover illo: peaches, back cover has beets) has a bit on 'spoon butter', which apparently is better for wooden utensils than straight mineral oil - it's mineral oil and beeswax.

Lee #314: Scott Westerfield's Midnighters trilogy. Also Heinlein's "juvies" are still good.

YA? Ooh.

Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books. The Macdonald Hall books by Gordon Korman. Holes. The Westing Game (which, as a bonus, has a puzzle to solve!). Anything Madeleine L'Engle wrote, but I'm particularly fond of The Arm of the Starfish. I really liked "Divergent", which as a bonus is a movie right now.

I joke that I don't read anything whose title is "Blabla: A Novel", because if I can't tell it's a novel on my own, it's failed at being a novel and succeeded at being pretentious about it.

Oh, for an edit button. I forgot Margaret Laurence's "A Bird in the House", which is a short story cycle.

Ruth Graham appeared on NPR to explain her reasoning, and came across as a twit.

http://www.npr.org/2014/06/08/320024790/should-adults-be-embarrassed-to-read-young-adult-books

Someone on Twitter, paraphrased: "Why are people wasting their time on kiddie stuff when they could be reading a book about the rich inner life of an English professor with marital problems?"

The author of that piece is a lit snob, who wouldn't want any genre fiction to sully her doorway either.

I'm just happy that people read, for pleasure. That's uncommon enough in this world. We've done a lot of YA reading lists here before, and she's unlikely to be swayed by our thoughts in any case.

Never mind the Nobel Prize winners in literature who have written children's books (Kipling, for example). Never mind just about every other award having some winner write a good YA/kid's book. She's just trolling for reactions. And I would rather recommend good stuff to those who might actually read it (go check out Tove Jannson's Moomin books, especially Tales from Moomin Valley for some really powerful short fiction, or Walter Moers' really weird novels).

#314, Lee:

Can't those lovers of the literary genre use their oh-so-much-more-sophisticated minds to come up with something more original to say? That entire screed reads like every anti-genre rant I've ever read, with "YA" inserted in the [genre name] placeholder spot.

On the other hand, book recs! yay! (I've just finished book 2 of the expanse series and can now read Abaddon's Gate, which was recommended in I think the Hugo thread. Also, Ancillary Justice, recommended in the same place, was a fantastic read.)

@Cheryl, off Xopher no. 309: Yes! And their lemonade is powdered lemon juice and stevia. Their pink lemonade is colored with beet extract (I called and asked). We use these powders to disguise the taste of plain water, at 5 packets to every 3 quarts. It's very easy to drink a lot of either one. Perhaps they would appeal, as being basically just lemon juice diluted a little bit and made milder with something that is not sugar?

Em #323: The Westing Game

Oh, I'm embarrassed I didn't remember that, given I just saw it at my bookstore and raved about it to my boss.

Anything Madeleine L'Engle wrote,

Whoops, be careful about that. It turns out she also wrote some adult fiction, even "spiritual" and "trials of life" books, which are at least above YA level, and in some cases likely not suitable for young readers. (Her Amazon listing has 80 entries!) Sample blurb for one of those:

In this third volume of the Genesis Trilogy, Madeleine L’Engle takes us on a new journey. And It Was Good reflected on the marvel of new beginnings; A Stone for a Pillow tells the story of Jacob, one of the Bible’s earliest pilgrims, and follows his, and Madeleine’s, inner and outer journeys.

In Sold Into Egypt, we trace a new journey, that of Jacob’s favored younger son, Joseph—a journey on many levels: the abduction from Canaan country to pagan Egypt with its slavery and sophistication, from poverty to riches, from insignificance to the power of privilege and leadership, from the foolish arrpgance of youth to the seasoned wisdom of maturity, from parochial narrowness to the authentic human-ness which comes with hard lessons learned and relationships restored.

Madeleine L’Engle joins Joseph on this journey as she herself moves through grief. With the loss of her beloved husband, she traverses the barren desert of bereavement. And just as Yahweh was Joseph’s strong companion in the desert journey, in the house of Potiphar, in prison, and in his rise to power, so God was with the author of this book and, she assures us, he will be with us as we, too, move toward the human-ness of true maturity.

Dave at 329: I've learned something! Okay, then - "a large chunk of what she wrote".

My roommate teaches grade 5/6, so I get the scoop on a lot of great books. They read The Westing Game this year, and it lead to sentences like "Miss K, if we do ten minutes of math, can we read a chapter? PLEASE?"

Lee @ #314: Protector of the Small series by Tamora Pierce. Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi.

And very on topic: zefrank, of "True Facts About the Octopus" fame, on yucking other people's yum.

Because I am not, really, a nice person, may I suggest to the Fluorosphere that we cease and desist from indulging the urges of people like Ruth Graham to denigrate all other genres than their own? If nothing else, I am reluctant to concede to them possession of any sort of high ground they haven't personally earned.

Let's not call it "literary fiction". Let's call it what it is: mimetic fiction--you know, the sort of thing that's striving to Hold the Mirror up to Nature and all that. That's leaving aside the Experimental Fiction and Magical Realism and all the rest--because most of these kvetchers mean mimetic fiction, really and truly.

Either it's all literary, because it's written words, or (if we mean "enduring rather than ephemeral") it's often too soon to tell.

Lee @ 314 et al

I read the Slate piece, with substantial annoyance--but still thought it had a bit of a point. It seemed to me related to the Vandana Singh essay currently linked in the Sidelights.

In both cases, the argument could be stated as "The Mayor of Casterbridge[1] is a better novel than anything by Nora Roberts[2]."

That's probably true; it's also almost completely beside the point. A lot of the time, I want something where things actually work out in the end, and I can keep track of what's going on without any work.

In the great YA literature list, I'd nominate Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain and Tamora Pierce's Trickster series.

1)My nominee for "best novel ever"
2)Whose books I enjoy, and was introduced to by someone who's also not at all the stereotypical romance novel reader.

It snarls and growls, what Ruth Graham writes,
And yaps and howls, and hopes to bite,
But has no teeth and is short of sight.

And when it's done it huffs and sneers
And hopes to see you quake in fear
As it sniffs and chokes and fights back tears.

That some can have so much fun
And read of spies, or far red suns--
It's just not fair! It's just not done!

So quick to pen Ruth Graham darts
And grits her teeth to show her smarts
And make you see what is not true art.

Could it be just a stunt or sham?
How can it be that dear Ms. Graham
Has not read Green Eggs and Ham?

WRT Ruth Graham's inanities, and also SamChevre's observation @333: "A lot of the time, I want something where things actually work out in the end, and I can keep track of what's going on without any work."

My mother still recalls her introduction to the works of D.E. Stevenson (a cousin of RLS, and therefore also a Lighthouse Stevenson). It was the 1950s, a hot, stressful un-airconditioned summer which had been full of 2-hour-plus drives back and forth between Hometown and St. Louis on old US 66 for eye doctors and orthodontists and other things, and then by herself with three children and an agitated fox terrier to Oak Ridge (and boy, if you want scary office politics, try Oak Ridge in the 1950s, where the Summer Institute people were not spared in the slightest). They were back in Missouri, and getting ready for another long un-airconditioned drive to Mississippi to see my father's family. She hit up the library for reading material, and told a friend who worked there "I just want something pleasant where people are nice to each other". She ended up with Charlotte Fairlie and came back for more.

Nowadays. D.E. Stevenson would, like many another female author, be dismissed as a romance writer, because she wrote light novels which often have a love story embedded in them somewhere, although not always the protagonist's love story. I'm not sure that I would describe Miss Buncle's Book as anything but a comic novel which ends in a marriage, and another, Anna and her Daughters, is a bildungsroman of a sort, with a female protagonist (because young women have to grow up and figure out their lives too!).

But a woman wrote them, and they often have one or more couples paired off by the end, so they must be romance novels. /literarysnark

I know why we sort books into genres--it's so people who want to read someting else like that Brad Thor novel they liked don't end up with If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, unless they really want Calvino after reading a bit of it. But I do wish the people who write (and especially read) in different genres would learn to play well together.

I have been uneasy about the "literary" label ever since the first Mexicon, held in Newcastle, which was fun enough but used that label in a way which left me confused.

It's still a label, and I find it hard to attach to it any useful meaning. And the politicians and teachers all to often seem to want it to mean something dream-crushing. O, brave new world that has such people in it! Yeah, right. And meanwhile we have such people as Jo Walton.

"It's still a label, and I find it hard to attach to it any useful meaning."

This is the way genre labels usually go.

(Even if they made sense at one point, the genre evolves out from under them sooner or later. This rarely causes a label change.)

Re "literary fiction" -- when I was working in a bookstore, I started calling that category "unadjectived fiction," because that's what the shelf said.

And really, that's what the authors in that group (and the critics who like it, etc) want to do: they want to center themselves as the only ones who get to use "fiction" without a qualifying adjective.

An illustrative parallel might be to those dominionist thinkers who insist that they are "Christians" with no adjective or denomination, because clearly aren't all Christians one? By which they mean, THEY are the REAL Christians and everyone else should differentiate themselves with adjectives that make them less real.

I admit, with my gender history, I start longing for an equivalent terminology to cisgender. I'm not sure mimetic works; it's a $10 word and any label you have to explain won't catch on quickly. But unadjectived Fiction needs an adjective to make it the equal of all the other fictions. :->

Fond Memories of Vagina (or, as mentioned previously, the bad marriage of an English professor) is definitely central to the conception of that group of works.

fidelio (335): I adore D. E. Stevenson. Light, well-written, and soothing--perfect for low-spoons reading.

I like the way Graham Greene classified his book-length fiction: "Novels" and "Entertainments".

Em @323:

I joke that I don't read anything whose title is "Blabla: A Novel", because if I can't tell it's a novel on my own, it's failed at being a novel and succeeded at being pretentious about it.

The subtitle may be intended as an aid for shelvers, rather than readers, in some cases. There was a vogue a few years back for novels with titles that sounded like niche nonfiction ("A Guide to the Birds of East Africa" is one I remember); slapping "A Novel" on that tells the overworked shelvers "don't put this with all the other books that say Guide To Birds on them, but with the other books that say Novel". I can't tell you how many times I saw that one in the birding section of used bookstores, even with the subtitle.

janra @ #201:
I mostly use a dedicated hardware reader (a Kobo, as it happens). My normal purchase flow for ebooks (primary shopping sources: Baen, Google Play, Humble Bundle, Kobo store, Smashwords) is "buy the book; next time I am home, sit down in front of the computer where Calibre is; download the thing; If needed, open in Adobe or the Kobo app (then stop the app once it's been downloaded properly); load into Calibre and de-DRM as needed; shift onto hardware reader".

This takes 10 minutes, every few weeks, since the time-consuming things (plugging the reader in, wait for Windows to recognise it, clicking on dialogs, ...) don't take that much longer for "more than one book" and by amortising that time across multiple book transfers, the amount of sighing per ebook goes down.

It is still, to me, more convenient than paper books, especially when it comes to "reading while travelling". Simply going for an ebook reader instead of physical books means 5-7 kilos less for a two-week trip.

HLN: Area woman, having recently become aware of the requirement for US citizens abroad to file a report of the balances of all accounts on which they have signatory authority, spends the day completing the full seven years' filing to put her into compliance with the amnesty program.

(Area woman files her taxes on paper, and has therefore not been aware of this rather badly publicized requirement before recent discussions here caused her to do some rather stressful investigation.)

Area woman falls over in a very tired heap, still muttering numbers, hoping that the people who check these things will regard her good-faith effort to get the whole damn' ball of wax into the right shape...kindly. Or, at least, instructively rather than punitively.

Because aargh.

I've been listening to podcasts for several years now, and noticed in Apple's players (all I have used) a sea-change in default behavior regarding them. On my stick-of-gum-style iPod Nano, for podcasts, autoplay was forbidden: every time an episode ended, I had to pick up the device, wake it up, and tell it to play another episode. When I switched to an iPod Touch (with a newer OS), autoplay for podcasts became compulsory: there is no way to tell it to play only one episode and stop.

Now I'm on a secondhand iPhone 4 (with ceullar data turned off to turn it into an iPod touch, sort of). The newest iOS update, which my old IPod Touch could not run, has stripped Podcasts out of music; you must now install a separate Podcasts app. Ok, fine. It has an interesting change to autoplay. I can now choose the DIRECTION of my autoplay (oldest to newest or newest to oldest), and if I tell it Sleep Timer, I can tell it to stop after just this one episode it is playing.

Otherwise, autoplay is still compulsory. Except when I'm playing Welcome to Night Vale.

And I almost wish I were making this up, because it would be tidily creepy, awesome, and diagetic to the show. But I'm not. When I play an episode of Night Vale (and ONLY Night Vale, out of the over fifty podcasts I listen to regularly), the player stops after just that episode.

I am fascinated. :-> I wonder if there's a "stop the player" special code they managed to encode into their audio files somehow, either on purpose or by accident?

The movie and TV show The Odd Couple gave me an idea:

The Unger Games

12 neatniks stay with 12 slobs to see who will be the last person to crack up under the stress. The winner gets free housecleaning for a year.

Paul Lalonde @ 104: I hadn't thought of that aspect at all. I suspect the article also overstates, but it's definitely worth remembering.

various on Bujold: there should be no surprise that A Civil Campaign was partially a Regency novel, but I suspect a lot of people skim past front-of-book dedications (whose place is taken in many genre books by laundry lists of thank-yous) to get to the story.

Don Fitch @ 122: I have spread but did not originate the meme that "What was he thinking" is a punctuation error that should be "What -- was he \thinking/?"

zora @ 156: that's more complicated than hoarding ]sickness[. Unsolicited advice, regardless of intent and tone, can come across as an attack if it hits the recipient's filters wrong.

Dave Luckett @ 160: a pity so few politicos understand that -- and that we probably can't keep them from office until they do. (cf the Apollo 16 scene in Deep Wizardry.)

Mongoose @ 205: one answer to your sonnet may be density; making everything that way in space that must accommodate many people can cost. (I take health issues first to Harvard Vanguard, a chain of fairly substantial clinics; their facilities are universal, but distributed (at most 2 in one place), which may not cost much extra if they need plumbing everywhere for other functions.) But we've-always-done-it-this-way is certainly part of the answer.

Cheryl @ 215: I drink tomato juice on airplanes (a notoriously dehydrating environment) -- but I'm hypotense so the added salt is a bonus rather the problem it may be for your mother. (I was going to suggest herb teas but see that's already a lost cause.)
      From experience (a parent going through slow-motion kidney failure) I second cygnet@260's comment on dehydration and ]irrationality[. I could occasionally dutch-uncle the parent on the ride home from another hospital stay brought on by lack of self-care, but I'm not sure how you'd do it given the higher level of continuing medical attention in your case. For what it's worth, you have my sympathies; caregiving upwards isn't easy.

Anne Sheller @ 264: I suspect that many African Americans whose main heritage is post-slavery would find a slave ancestor given perfect documentation; slaves were commonly spoils of war, so some of them had probably already fathered children whose lines stayed in Africa past emancipation. IIRC, Obama's father was east-African, which may make this less likely for him (but more likely for African-Arabians?).

estelendur @ 276: a lovely realization, warmed by thoughts of how many ways Oliver Wendell Holmes would take it. (A piece in The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table talks about the difficulties caused by there being 6 people in each 2-person conversation: each has a self-image, an other's-image, and the Truth "known only to God".)

Lee @ 314: I second all the recommendations, but DWJones covers a lot of ground; if you really want to get to someone (assuming they're actually convinceable, which this person doesn't seem to be), hand them Fire and Hemlock, a wrenching retake on "Tam Lin".

Hm ... that's an ungenerous poem, and I wish I hadn't entertained the idea long enough to write it.

On the plus side, I have renewed respect for Dr. Seuss. Writing a poem with mostly* one-syllable words is not particularly easy, and he managed it well.

*I'd misremembered this as "only," but Green Eggs and Ham does contain the word "anywhere."

Elliott: Being a chronic binger, I love Netflix's (yes, compulsory) autoplay feature. But: if you let it autostart two eps in succession, it stops five minutes into the most recent ep with a dialog "Continue playing?" ::sigh::

This is, however, an improvement over the previous, which was that it would stop five minutes in to any autostarted ep. Which is not, for the record, autoplay.

I wonder how hard it would be to program it to lay down cookies to time your pausing and starting behavior, to get a statistical sense of the user's rhythms, and then time the appearance of the "Continue Playing?" dialog based on that.

Re Open Thread:

This beautiful gif from Google. While there's room for critique, I think, of wish fufillment as well as the equation of 'sanitary' with 'healthy', I am captivated by the lights, the dragons, the tiny pirate ship, and the tophat whale. (Perhaps this is a child who had Just-So stories read to her...)

Erik Nelson @ 292 -

Not UK myself, but the first thing that came to mind was the phrase "bog Irish", akin to "poor white trash". I suspect that's where the original 'bog as toilet' came from, but I wasn't there, so can't say for sure.

There are several American variations on 'bog standard' - the most polite is "that'll pass for government work".

SamChevre, #333: I agree with your summary of the argument, and I think it aligns well with my observation that she seems to believe that those who read and enjoy YA fiction read nothing else. One wonders how narrow the field of her own reading might be.

Also, making comparisons of that sort invites questions like "by whose definition" and "for what purpose" and "under which set of circumstances". Leslie Fish says it well in a different context.

fidelio, #335: WRT "something where people are nice to each other," Ursula Vernon just put up a very thoughtful post about perferring to read about people who are kind. (Note: so far I have not heard ANYONE say they didn't like The Goblin Emperor. I have a feeling it's going to be one of my next purchases.)

And yes, it's funny how sticky the "romance" label is for anything written by a woman, even if that's not the main axis of the story.

Lee @ 350

I'm curious--did you see the similarity I saw between Graham's essay and Singh's?

Elseweb goodness: anyone who hasn't read Ta-Nehisi Coates' article arguing for reparations should do so. Anyone who has read it should read this little piece by Betsy Phillips; it's one small vignette of slavery as the pervasive background in history.

Lee @350 o far I have not heard ANYONE say they didn't like The Goblin Emperor

I adored The Goblin Emperor, but FWIW I have heard several people say they bounced off it or struggled because of formality of language in the opening scene and/or complexity of names and naming conventions.

I do wish people would stop making blanket condemnations any genre/flavor/category of writing. I suspect that I've read an example from every single one that I adored. That includes both YA and "literary" fiction. I recognize that my wish is highly unlikely to be met!

I just finished The Goldfinch. I think I started it on Saturday afternoon. I read all day Sunday, and finished it this morning. I'm in a daze, but maybe I'll have managed to have some coherent thoughts about it in time for book group on Tuesday evening. Diana Gabaldon's latest Outlander book, Written in my Own Heart's Blood is winging its way to me from Powell's Books. Stumbling from one giant tome to another. The last thing I read before The Goldfinch was volume 3 of the Saga comic, so that was a lighter snack—and a delicious one.

I sometimes think of 'academic fiction'. It's not the greatest label, but it is a label that makes sense in my head.

Velma, I'm sorry things are hard.

Also, it's interesting to see different YA lists. This list looks nothing like what the Alphans might come up with, and I'd add a serious caveat to McKinley as well (Dragonhaven was the kind of bad that ruins future and past books). I'm more likely to give sets of books that have interesting conversations-- not just Twilight because it's important but also Sunshine and The Coldest Girl in Coldtown and Vampire High and-- there was a vampire anthology, yes, that had some amazing stories in. Not just 'some Tamora Pierce' but 'these specific ones, and then this, and then these two stories because she's responding to herself'. I'd point out the many ways that people converse in fiction.

349
Frequently seen as 'close enough for government work'.

Steve C @ 345... The Unger Games? I *like* that.

On "bog standard" - I've heard it, and used it. I always imagined it as being derived from "if it were any lower, it would be underwater."

An example of the way I'm used to hearing it is "In America, running water is bog-standard in houses."

lorax @ 341 : That's something I hadn't thought of, and is an excellent point.

janetl @ 353 : The Outlander series! I am looking forward to the next one so much, though I really need to re-read "Echo in the Bone" first to remind myself what's happening. It's been so long!

CHip @346, thank you. :) *finds Autocrat on Project Gutenberg*

keranih @349, it is a very charming Doodle.

Diatryma @354, ooh, yes, works that are in conversation with each other and so on: this is something I would like to see analyzed more.

abi @343: Sympathies.

Robin McKinley: I liked Dragonhaven - I've liked all her books. But not all of her books are YA.

#354 @ Diatryma -

Can you expand on how Dragonhaven didn't work for you (or, didn't work that badly)? It was not Hero and the Crown, true, but once I got past the first-person pov, I liked it rather well.

On the "works in conversation with each other" theme - I would not mind someone tackling, in a somewhat straight line, James' Smoky the Cow Horse, Farley's The Black Stallion, OHara's My Friend Flicka, Henry's King of the Wind, Johnson's The Sweet Running Filly, Lackey's Arrows of the Queen and Cherryh's Rider At The Gate. With notes about Dragonriders, etc.

abi @343, aargh indeed. I really hate finding out about things that I was apparently supposed to have known long ago. Best wishes that you have now dealt with the problem for good.

keranih @361:

I'd add The Heavenly Horse from the Outermost West and Piper at the Gate to your list.

Lori Coulson @ 363:

Oh, I did love those! But I left them off, along with Blaze and Stolen Pony and Black Beauty, because of the animal pov vs human pov difference. What do you think?

Although, I suppose to track all the threads to CJC's Rider one needs to mention Piper.

T-shirt encountered outside:

There.
Their.
They're not
the same.

Keranih, I had just discovered her just-started blog and read that, so I had a pretty good sense of her voice as her. Then the twenty-five-year-old* revising his twenty-year-old's* accounts of what happened when he was fourteen* sounded exactly the same. Scenes were repeated multiple times, each less compelling than the last-- the big dragon with the helicopter was in there three times, twice as, "So you've heard about this amazingly awesome thing," and once as, "So he did this, whatever." Same with said dragon landing in the middle of the town. There's so much rambling that the story collapses.

Then she does the same thing in Shadows-- I couldn't actually figure out the timeline until a few dozen pages in because the narrator kept bouncing around to what had happened before. Then! Just as things get interesting, when she finally snaps and shows some emotions, we get a three-page interlude involving magic, politics, charms, and her dog's collar.

I reread Sunshine, which before Coldest Girl in Coldtown was my gold standard for vampire books, and Sunshine does the same things, just less and there's a better story to hold itself up when the prose itself has completely failed.

Somewhere in there, I read Pegasus and was upset that it ended so abruptly; a woman I knew said, as if it were obvious, that it's a trilogy... but there's no sign of it whatsoever. I do not trust McKinley any more. I will believe in this trilogy when it is completed and not a moment before.

Dragonhaven is the book that showed the pattern so completely, at least with prose. I refer to many of her recent books as needing a blog-and-Dragonhaven-ectomy. I would still be dissatisfied with them had that book never happened-- perhaps I'd call for a Shadows-ectomy-- but the flaws remain, named or not.

*or whatever

Also, this is all for me as the reader. Many other people still like McKinley's books.

# 361 @keranih--

I'm not Diatryma, but I can say that I found the voice and narrative choices in Dragonhaven actively hampered the story-telling. There was too much discussion, too many digressions and reiterations, too much summarizing of otherwise interesting plot elements -- the voice itself bogged down the story, to the extent it took me a week to finish it.

Also, I felt that McKinley left a bunch of story on the table, untold. Which seemed a shame, for such an interesting premise (imported biological dragons and their management in the western US). I'm a long-time McKinley fan, but after Dragonhaven, I feel burned.

As an aside: In fanfic-fandom, there's a yearly challenge called Remix, where writers sign up to have one of their stories remixed by another writer, assigned at random. The results can be spectacular, because the point is not slavish duplication of the original text, but a re-invisioning that can really challenge the original in interesting ways. (It is by way of putting fanworks themselves through the same transformative process that we subject "canonical" texts to.)

It occurs to me that I'd love to remix Dragonhaven, and tell the story that I wish McKinley had told.

#366 @Diatryma -- sounds like we had much the same response.

My original review (to which I can't post a link because I'm at work and LJ is blocked) noted that the narrative voice of Dragonhaven sounded a great deal like RM's own LJ -- and, honestly, IMO, this is not a feature.

It's so disappointing.

Lee #350:

I loved the Leslie Fish lyrics. Applicable to a wide range of discussions where the subtext is "I'm better than you" or "we're better than them" or some similar thing.

It seems like a really large fraction of books I read, including very action-packed books involving war or violence, have one or more important romantic subplots, and often quite a lot of the plot is driven by them. I wonder if you can substantially change readers' perceptions of whether these are romance novels by changing the apparent gender of the author on the cover.

SamChevre, #351: I went back and re-read the essay, thinking specifically about your question. And no, I didn't get that at all -- if anything, I got the inverse of it. Singh is saying that we need more diversity in our reading (or at least in the things available for us to read), while Graham is saying we need less, need to limit ourselves to what she deems suitable. Could you expand a bit on what you saw as a similarity?

keranih, #361: I might also add Dun Lady's Jess by Doranna Durgin to your list. It adds an entirely new layer to the conversation by having the main character be a horse transmuted into human form by passing thru a worldgate, with attendant difficulties.

Em #323: I joke that I don't read anything whose title is "Blabla: A Novel", because if I can't tell it's a novel on my own,

lorax #341: The subtitle may be intended as an aid for shelvers, rather than readers, in some cases.

And this shelver frequently finds it damn useful! Even worse than titles like Gould's Book of Fish¹ are "biographical novels", which are often otherwise indistinguishable (title and cover art) from actual biographies.

¹ First I misremembered the title as "Gould's Book of Finches" (two degrees of association there :-) ), then I discovered that Wikipedian print-spam has infected the B&N store, too. :-(

Elliott Mason #338: Yup. "Literary" fundamentally means "related to books and writings". Trying to restrict that word to the particular genre favored by Old/Dead White Men In Ivory Towers, is very much a power play: Specifically, an attempt to claim an otherwise-unmarked state as a privileged norm.

And pretty much all the arguments we've been reading lately about how "we only take 'the best'" works out as pan-bigoted in practice, apply in spades.

To be specific, 'literary fiction' is a name given to a specific genre that is privileged not to be considered a genre at all...in exactly the same way white European-descended people are not considered to have a race. (These days they admit it's a race, but it's the unmarked case.)

I use the word 'privileged' advisedly. It has "born on third base, thinks it hit a triple" syndrome, as well as the lack of awareness of privilege that is itself a privilege. It considers itself superior by virtue of the position it has in academia, while not recognizing that that position is the result of the privilege in the first place.

If we said the same dumb things about them that they say about us, we'd have to say things like "No, my novel is NOT literary fiction. It's not about a suburban couple whose marriage deteriorates after the tragic death of their young son. It has a plot, and dialogue, not just internal monologue. And it's not utterly bleak and without hope, so it's already disqualified from the 'literary' canon."

But let's not.

Lee @ 370

I was thinking especially of the section of Singh's essay from which I've quoted key excerpts below:

[W]hen I first read it, I got to hear the voices of writers from diverse backgrounds, from Native American to Caribbean. I got to see the universe through multiple lenses that boggled my mind, made me at times uncomfortable (trying to stand in someone else’s shoes should not always be easy) and expanded my imagination. My fellow writers had taken the contradiction implied in the quote above and showed how you could unbuild the standard issue edifice of science fiction with the intelligent adaptation of old tools and introduction of new ones. Add some non-Euclidean structural elements, and put the whole thing together with a different aesthetic, an alternative logic, and you have a very different, far more interesting building. Wander through it, look through the windows and try out the furniture, and it might well leave you a little changed when you leave...

In the multidimensional space of possibilities, we can uproot the origin of the usual 3-d coordinate system and reposition it so that we have the view from different places, different races, genders, body types and abilities; we can, to expand on this lovely mathematical analogy, add new axes, throw away the old Euclidean straight lines and use curvilinear coordinates. Perhaps surfing this space of possibility holds the promise of freeing us from that terrible, invisible, insidious thing: the colonization of the mind, which remains well after the colonizers have gone home....

To read good speculative fiction from multiple perspectives is to get a little drunk on unfamiliar liquors, so that one can no longer walk straight and oblivious through the pathways of one’s unexamined assumptions. We need to intoxicate the imagination. How else than through speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy that has realized its transgressive potential?

And of the section of Graham's essay excerpted below:

But the very ways that YA is pleasurable are at odds with the way that adult fiction is pleasurable...YA books present the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way...

These books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. YA endings are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering. These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction.

Both seem to me to be saying that "good" fiction should help you see differently--see the diversity and complexity of the world--and neither golden-age Western-in-space sci-fi nor YA books do so.

It's a critique I can see, for some values of "good." I like brain candy at times, but I think there's a benefit to reading Nightfall and The Left Hand of Darkness and The Mayor of Casterbridge that you don't get from the 10th Pern book, or the 10th Louis L'Amour book. Sometimes--really, usually--I want the ease and pleasure of Pern books; I don't think they are likely to change the way I see the world, which some books can do.

For YA that is not part of science fiction/fantasy, I enjoy Gary Paulsen and Julian F. Thompson.

em @ 323: You're missing out big time!

YA books present the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way...

There speaks one who hasn't actually read any YA books, or at any rate nothing beyond the Sweet Valley High or Babysitter Club series.

Speaking of YA novels, how about Daniel Pinkwater's Young Adult Novel (sic), along with Alan Mendelssohn, Boy From Mars? You want books critical of the typical teenage (and adult!) perspective, he's got 'em. Also funny as hell, with several dashes of genuine insight into life. I recently introduced my son (12) to Pinkwater's books, and he was totally taken with them.

John @ 376: I did say I was joking - I don't actually abide by the rule, precisely because I WOULD be missing out big time! Thanks for the recommendation.

SamChevre #374: It's a critique I can see, for some values of "good." I like brain candy at times, but I think there's a benefit to reading ...

Yeah, but that's just another facet of Sturgeon's Law, where "good" is defined as "challenging". There's a reason why junk food is popular, and the same applies to fiction in any genre.

On the usage"...: the novel" — I was working for a small book company, years ago. They distributed books they imported from other countries, and published books on horticultural topics. Many, but not all, of the books they imported were also about botany or gardening. This was so long ago, that I was doing data entry of descriptions of books to add to the catalog. I noticed one that someone else had entered: "Black Beech and Honeydew", by Ngaio Marsh. It was categorized as Forestry. I recognized Ms. Marsh as a mystery writer, and found that categorization highly unlikely. Turned out that it was her autobiography. I imagine it sold better when it wasn't printed in the Forestry section of the catalog.

Although the usage Blahdiblah: A Novel may be useful to shelvers, catalogers, and indexers, it has been around since the 17th century, when it began to be used to distinguish novels from romances. Indulging in the usage today is usually just cutesy. Or pretentious.

Although the usage Blahdiblah: A Novel may be useful to shelvers, catalogers, and indexers, it has been around since the 17th century, when it began to be used to distinguish novels from romances. Indulging in the usage today is usually just cutesy. Or pretentious.

Urrrrp! Sorry about that.

SamChevre, #374: Okay, I see how you got that. I think what makes the difference for me is that I perceive Singh as saying, "This is why I read what I read," and Graham as saying, "This is why you should read what I read, and should be ashamed of doing anything else." And I'm not sure it's entirely coincidental that the descriptive version comes from a person of color while the prescriptive version is from a white person.

What really struck me about the Singh essay was her statement that for a long time she simply accepted that there were no people who looked like her in SF -- that she had to "de-colonialize" her brain before she could write about protagonists who were like herself. This is indeed a strong argument for reading things that will stretch your worldview, but I don't see that it's a requirement for reading "good" SF so much as a suggestion that we read "different" SF. I think that in some ways reading YA books written for a different audience may serve the purpose as well or better, and in fact I've added one of Singh's YA books to my wishlist.

Lee@384 - or ti put it more briefly, the fundamental difference is that Singh isn't suggesting anyone should stop reading white male authors.

De-lurking just to say how much I'm loving all the poetry in here. abi@149, I want to quote this everywhere.

Thanks, everyone, for brightening a dull day at work with your amazing wordsmithing skills. :)

Lee @ 370:

Haven't read that one, thank you for the pointer!

In looking at the intersectional nature of human & horse lives, I think that Ash's Stallion Queen series needs to be included, and definately SM Charmas's Motherlines, etc.

(And the aim was to identify something that I would like to read, after someone else went through the effort of reading, research and writing. Not to volunteer. :))

cofax @366, Diatrym @365 - Thank you both.

It's been more than a year, but on my last re-read, I remember a long gradual shift in the voice of the narrator. Not as strong a shift as I would have expected if the protagonist had been making the record as he went along, but still present. I do remember the repeated phrasings, but put that down as an example of how many people talk, rather than an error in editing. *shrugs* Eye of the beholder, ear of the reader, and all that.

My own 'break' - if you want to call it that - with McKinley came when I read The Blue Sword - *after* The Hero and the Crown. Sword, I feel, simply wasn't in the same class, and I haven't re-read it since.

(It is by way of putting fanworks themselves through the same transformative process that we subject "canonical" texts to.)

Ah. And of course, because these are fellow fanwriters, all the authors of the works that have been transformed are supportive and celebratory of all the ways that their works have been rewritten, yes?

cofax @376:

PS: re I'd love to remix Dragonhaven, and tell the story that I wish McKinley had told.

There's a phrase, wait, it's on the tip of my tongue...what is it...oh, yes.

You should totally write that.

(I myself would love to see more of the biology/environmental impact of preserving this charasmatic species. I would love to hear if there was something from the debris of dragon scales that encouraged a bacteria that ate a lichen that fed a rodent that preyed on an insect that ate a bush that housed a bird that spread a seed.)

Or, you know, even without. You should totally write that.

While it is true that they don't change my life, stretch my brain, or hold my actions up to the mirror to be judged, sometimes I'm in so much pain that I want a book whose message is "All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well."

Even--or perhaps especially--because I don't believe that to be factually true. The best I currently hope for is that for me, all will eventually be over. This, alas, leads to a life that involves a great deal of time spent gritting my teeth and not accomplishing anything. Depression sucks.

(My go-to book for comfort reading is B.J. Chute's Greenwillow.)

Xopher Halftongue@373

It has "born on third base, thinks it hit a triple" syndrome, as well as the lack of awareness of privilege that is itself a privilege.

Applause.

I couldn't have put it better. I trust everyone on here is familiar with Iain Banks's scorching article on LitFic types writing SF in the Guardian a few years back? It did bring a wry smile...

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/13/iain-banks-science-fiction-genre

James Harvey @390, thanks for the Iain Banks essay; I'd not seen it before.

James Harvey @390: ...and then sometimes the opposite happens: someone writes an sf boundary-breaker without even realizing it:

I am reliably informed (by his daughter Hillary) that Daniel Keyes wasn't even thinking "science fiction" when he wrote "Flowers for Algernon," and was taken rather aback at the sf community's response to it.

Xopher:

There's an irony there somewhere, since my guess is that romance and mystery novels outsell literary fiction by a pretty big margin. At any rate, discussing how my favorite books are better than yours and that's why my kind of people are better than your kind of people is ultimately pretty boring. Better to point out what's exciting about our favorite books, and maybe manage to share some enthusiasm.

Open threadiness, literary/SFF edition:

How many really good books or series in SF are in some sense responses to (or expansions of the ideas in) Star Trek?

The obvious example is Banks' Culture series. Also, _The Mote in God's Eye_ drew on some imagery from Star Trek.

What else?

Jacque@392

That's a wonderful anecdote!

albatross @ 393: The irony of it is that literary fiction, which doesn't sell well at all, is seen as privileged over genre fiction, which sells a hell of a lot better. There's some truth in it, but the brute force of the market doesn't talk, it swears.

The analogy I think of is the poor, pitiful geek, so terribly abused by the educational system, now pulling down a quarter-million dollar salary in San Francisco and helping to destroy what made one of America's greatest cities great, with no sense of irony whatsoever.

albatross@393

Better to point out what's exciting about our favorite books, and maybe manage to share some enthusiasm.

At the risk of saying "but they started it!", this needs some reciprocation. The number of SF&F fans I know of who think the "canon" of literary fiction is worthless or boring is vanishingly small: even if their reading is limited to A Tale of Two Cities and To Kill a Mockingbird. Whereas the victory of The Lord of the Rings in the UK's Book of the century public poll was met with nothing but incredulous teeth grinding by the Great and the Good, who, despite their squawking, had either never read it, or never read it remotely critically - a courtesy they would have extended to every literary fiction genre writer as a matter of course. Jeez guys, just read Tom Shippey if you can't think for yourself.

This leads to a large number of amusing situations: by any measure surely a Classic must be work of sufficient universality and quality that it speaks to multiple generations. LoTR manifestly does this, and their inability to see it is laughable. It is the most important of the fantastical reactions to combat experience in the World Wars: more so even than Gormenghast or Slaughterhouse-Five

Also witness the cogs currently grinding with TV and cultural critics as they try to grapple with the manifest fact that the best written TV series at the moment, with the best characters, dialogue and plot can also have dragons, zombies and magicians in it! But surely these two are mutually exclusive!!! I have to praise it and belittle it at the same time!! How can mediaeval fantasy have these strong female characters!! Arrrgggh my brain is melting!!

I'm not crazy about Dragonhaven-- the first long chunk was very slow and repetitious. Once the narrator finds out more about dragons, it gets interesting.

Has anyone else read How Fiction Works? I only read about half of it, but the general idea seems to be that the current idea of literary fiction has its own history, iirc is largely based on Flaubert, and can be undercut by many examples from books generally accepted as classics.

John A Arkansawyer: I think not selling well is supposed to be a feature rather than a bug. "Too good for the customers", as it were. Bonus irony in the frequent pointing out in literature class that, e.g., Dante and Chaucer were scorned for writing in the vernacular; Shakespeare pandered to the groundlings; Dickens was a hack who wrote serials for magazines, etc.

keranih @364:

Indeed(!) and by the way, have you read Judith Tarr's A Wind in Cairo?

It's a fantasy, but Arabians! What's not to like?

James H., #397: The literary canon is not the same thing as contemporary lit-genre fiction. The canon is largely books which have withstood the test of time, and can therefore be reasonably assumed to have something of genuine value to say, even if it's only by virtue of being the first to say it in that way. I do find much of the canon to be turgid, but that's a function of the way writing has evolved (and a matter of personal taste), not something intrinsically wrong with it.

The contemporary genre called "literary" is subject to the same amount of Sturgeon's Law as any other genre, and much of what gets the critical buzz is indeed boring and lacking in long-term value.

If I had to make a guess at which lit-fic work of the last 10 years is likely to be considered canon-worthy 100 years from now, it would be Brokeback Mountain; most of the other books currently garnering critical acclaim will be lost in the mists of antiquity, and rightfully so. Fond Memories of Vagina just doesn't have a lot of staying power to recommend it, especially when it's already been done.

Bladiblah: A Novel can also mean, approximately, "Okay, yeah, this is a genre work, but the author sells well enough to be respectable, so we're going to call it a Novel instead of a Mystery." I'm thinking of Robert Parker's later books, but I'm pretty sure I've seen it on other mysteries as well.

James Harvey @ 397: [Lord of the Rings] is the most important of the fantastical reactions to combat experience in the World Wars: more so even than Gormenghast or Slaughterhouse-Five.

Mmmmmaybe. What about Catch-22? Or Gravity's Rainbow? (The first just killed me as a teenager, whereas the second one stopped me in my tracks about a hundred pages in and didn't kill me till my twenties.)

Lila @ 399: I think that's technically known as "bullshit". Not what you're saying, but what literary writers tell themselves. And not all literary writers, but the ones who write perfectly comprehensible fiction that just doesn't sell.

James:

IMO, the only prize worth fighting the "SF isn't real literature, only litfic is" war over is the readers who might come to read some new and interesting books--including both litfic readers who might enjoy SFF and SFF readers who might enjoy litfic[1]. Otherwise, it's just dick-sizing and cheering on our own team, and I get enough of that in the rest of my life.

[1] And obviously, these aren't mutually exclusive, nor should they be.

Open threadiness:

Connor Friedersdorf on how we decide whom to call terrorists, and why it matters.

The phrase "government work" in most factories I have been in (quite a few) refers to a project in which the worker involved is using factory machinery and materials to build something for his own personal use. As an example, I frequently used the lathes/milling machines of a factory in which I was employed to build parts for a vintage rototiller I was rebuilding.

I think the significance of Lord of the Rings is that the war inspired the fantasy world. Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five solidly contain the war which inspired them, even as they go beyond the reality.

I doubt that the latter two books could even have existed without their war. Tolkien, to some extent, needed two wars, but he certainly did something very different.

I know that I, for one, would be more comfortable in these "litfic looks down on SF and that's really kinda shitty" conversations if I didn't also read romance.

abi (408): A-men!

abi @ 408: I can read that two ways. Do you mean that there are romances which are clearly literary fiction? Or that literary fiction looks down on romance? Or possibly both? I'll contain my multitudes if you'll contradict yourself!

(That last sentence is an attempt at a joke. I have no idea whether it's funny or not. As often happens, John Barnes has done it better.)

CN @406, that's not a usage of the phrase I'd heard before.

Looks like you're new here. Do you write poetry?

John A Arkansawyer @410:

Yes and yes, but that's not what I mean.

What I mean is that I have read more than one SF fan in this past week treating romance as a genre, and romance readers, far worse than anything that SF fans here have complained about.

Which rather takes the edge off of my sympathetic ire.

Abi: oh yes. Oh yes. Very much oh yes. I used to be one of those people, and then I read a ton of Nora Roberts while finishing my master's thesis and coming to terms with my complete failure as a human being* and that led me to... everything. Including Courtney Milan, whose honor I will defend at dawn if necessary even if she never wrote anything other than the sex scene in The Duchess War.

*How does one refer to one's past mental narratives when one's present narratives of the past have become healthier?

Many people know intellectually that other people have myriad reasons for reading what and how they read. But most of us cannot believe it emotionally. This genre is worthless trash, that genre is a bunch of Twilight ripoffs, YA means Heinlein juveniles because that's what you read when you were twelve (does that make Auel middle-grade because I was ten?), this is porn for women, this is masturbation for academics, that's politically correct ranting about how horrible white people are, that's a bunch of gun nuts playing out their personal Rambo fantasies with terrible covers.

I was about to say that as long as you can say why you like something, there's the conversation worth having, but then I realized that my mother can't do that most of the time. We read some of the same books and unless she's just finished them that day, she retains very little of what I want to talk about. That's okay. We eat for different reasons, we eat different things for different reasons, we like different things for different reasons, and thinking is the same way.

Also, don't diss romance because you don't have a leg to stand on.

keranih @387: Ah. And of course, because these are fellow fanwriters, all the authors of the works that have been transformed are supportive and celebratory of all the ways that their works have been rewritten, yes?

Generally, yes, less because these are fellow fanfic writers, than because the authors all signed up voluntarily to have their stories remixed. IIRC, however, you're allowed to designate one or two stories as off-limits for remixing. If someone were to remix your story in such a way as to, hmm, disrespect you -- well, (a) you signed up for it; and (b) you can always complain privately to your friends. I'm sure it's happened, but I haven't seen anyone really melt down publicly over it: the sensitive snowflakes tend not to sign up for Remix.

I've participated a couple of times, and the results have always been entertaining, and occasionally surprising.

You should totally write that

I suppose I could: I wonder if it's ever been nominated for Yuletide?

abi @ 412... The first time my wife went to a worldcon as a professionaly published writer (as opposed to her going as a fan), when she'd say that she wrote romance, the negative reactions tended to be from the female writers of 'real' F/SF. Mind you, that was ten years ago, and there are now plenty of romantic tropes in the real stuff these days. (There was one male writer who was quite disrepectful, but I silently gloated when that writer later went on to praise manly John Huston's "The African Queen", which is a romance novel thru and thru - except that, when Bogart takes off his shirt to make it easier to remove leeches, nobody ever thought of comparing him to Hugh Jackman.)

I haven't noticed many bookstores with a separate "lit-fic" section (except maybe for classics); it tends to be part of the general fiction section, which includes any fiction that doesn't have a more specific genre section (almost always SF/mystery/horror, romance if the store carries it, children's, YA these days, sometimes religious fiction.) The lit-fic authors and readers know who they are, of course, but seem to treat themselves as the 1%, Authors as opposed to merely writers who write books intended for entertaining reading, with genre fiction being by definition Not The 1% (which would be part of Sturgeon's 90% if they were aware of Sturgeon.)

Lila #399: I heard an Australian author who writes... well, I can't label it anything but consciously literary fiction: accounts, shall we say, of formless angst and guilt... tell an audience of graduates and undergrads at one of our Better Universities that he was very happy that his last outpouring of soul had sold less than 1500 copies, although it had taken a number of literary awards. He said he only wanted his work read by an audience that appreciated the finer things.

I stand witness that I actually heard this. I further say that this audience actually took him seriously - or seemed to. I mean, they didn't burst into raucous laughter, and there were nodding heads and reflective expressions. (I could see that, because I was facing them.)

In my pusillanimity, I also refrained from ridicule, and even notable dissent. I mean, my eyeballs might have bulged slightly, but they didn't roll, and I may have made a faint motion suggestive of gagging, but I didn't make a noise. I was only there more or less to make up the numbers, anyway, and I had already been reflecting on that fact for a full day or more.

I can't say that he was practising to deceive. I don't know that it was merely sour grapes. For all I could tell, he really meant it. But was this, also, art?

It was the nearest thing that I have ever experienced to true contact with an alien mind. John W Campbell would have approved. I guess.

And hence I can say that I have experienced the true power of the consciously literary mindset to move me.

In other news, the USDA wants cheesemakers to stop aging cheese on wooden shelves, because the shelves aren't absolutely sterile.
I guess no one at the USDA eats real cheese.

Dave @ #417, I guess moving you AWAY counts as moving you!

Bill Stewart @ 416: My favourite bookstore not only shelves literary separate from fiction, it's the largest fiction section, and takes up the main centre aisle of the store.

Of course, it includes modern literary fiction works, AND all the novel-shaped classics, which rather muddles the question of what counts. And the bookstore ALSO has a tendency to slip in more literary-style genre writers into it.

________

My complaint about DragonHaven was less the voice, which didn't feel inappropriate at all (Then again, I don't read her blog much), but that it was in fact two separate stories set in the same place: the main one, and the so-called Epilogue, which is after all 50 pages. I like the main story, even with its hyperfocus and repetition, more than the sequel novella, even though the latter expands a lot more on the world and worldbuilding in a way that is usually what I look for in a book.

____________

Abi @ 412: AGREED. (Although the SF fans I saw denigrating romance were also showing signs of explicit sexism, and therefore not to be taken as anyone I care to listen to, I am aware they're not the only ones who do so and have done so.) I tend to challenge anyone who thinks a romantic **comedy** can't possibly be a worthy read to try Jennifer Crusie's Faking It. It's not Shakespeare ... but it tends to resemble a certain number of his works (the ones that make one laugh and end with people marrying) in ways most literary fiction, and SF, does not. And has some truly clever banter that also resembles same.

PJ Evans @ 418... is this where we reenact Monty Python's Sermon on the Mountain?

I'm trying to remember whether it was a Borders which made a distinction between Fiction and Literature. The difference was whether the author was dead.

Sounds like a british comedy threat. "I'm gonna move you from Fiction into Literature."

re 422: It was Borders. I think John Updike did actually get exiled/exalted to literature even when he was still around.

When I was a teen, I remember the sudden startle when I realized that Barbara Hambly covertly wrote Romance novels with fantasy premises - Romance with the serial numbers filed off. (Also, mystery and Lovecraftian horror, all in the same novel.) Only recently did I figure out how deep her knowledge of the great Hollywood films was, and how that influenced her.

It took me even longer to realize that chunks of Anne McCafferys novels were from that genre too, though even as a sixth grader, I knew the sex scenes in The White Dragon were from something else.

cofax @414 - That is good to hear. The opt-in policy...on the one hand, shame that pro authors don't get that. On the other hand, there goes The Trojan Women and The Aeneid. Upsides, downsides.

Lori Coulson @400 -

Oh, yes, through several paperback copies! And yes, that's perfect, now I have to check out Dunn Lady's Jess!

My experience is the same as Bill Stewart's. Some bookshops have a Literature section, but that is for books about literature or classic texts with notes. Contemporary 'literary' fiction is shelved along with popular fiction. I remember a time when it was not so, but even then the term used was not 'literature': rather, a distinction was drawn between 'fiction' (i.e. the highbrow stuff) and 'popular fiction'. I suspect the distinction was largely abandoned because it was too hard to police; while some books clearly belong on one side or the other, there are a lot with which it's uncertain.

I find in these discussions people often oppose 'literary' and 'genre', and neglect the vast amount of fiction which is neither (i.e. not sold with a specific genre label, but not taken seriously by critics or nominated for literary awards).

I was once in a bookstore (Scribners?) that had a small section labeled "Classics" which contained the sort of books that are assigned to High School seniors (Dickens, ...) and one of the books therein was by David Sedaris.

My only issue with Romance as a genre is that it tends to be stocked with heterosexual activities. I have read lesbian romances for years with great pleasure, as they tended to be the better written of the lesbian fiction available. Mysteries abound, and are also well-written; the one thing lesbian fiction seems to lack is a steady source of good F/SF, which is why our own Heather Rose Jones is a beam of light.

Ginger @ 429: You are hip to A. M. Dellamonica, right? This story really blew me away, both as SF and as a story of human solidarity: The Cage

That's all I really know by her, but it's enough to say something good.

OtterB, I used to post here years ago, but have been unable to do so for awhile.

I can just barely read poetry, and don't usually get it, unfortunately for me. I wish I could write it.

Ginger @ 429... That is less the publisher's fault than a result of most of its readers's preferred sexual activities though.

John A Arkansawyer @430, I totally didn't sit here and devour that short story here at work when I should have been, oh, WORKING, so I can't possibly say what a charming story that was....

Seconding thanks for the link to "The Cage." Must go leave a comment.

Andrew, #427: Oh yes, and the edge cases. We've had this discussion for a long time in the context of SF vs. fantasy, but it's easy to have in the context of genre vs. non-genre as well. It is not helped by people like Margaret Atwood.

I suspect that the lit-snobs would dismiss your "books that aren't genre but don't get attention from the critics either" as "B-list".

Ginger, #429: The fic rec community fancake on Dreamwidth is having a "femslash" theme this month, and there's been quite a lot of good stuff up, ranging from courting/romance to explicit. You might want to check it out.

Serge @ 432: Lots of people who prefer to perform heterosexual activities nevertheless like to watch adult movies with non-heterosexual content. Why would readers be different?

Lee@435: Indeed, there are edge cases between genre and non-genre, but I was rather talking about edge-cases, within the non-genre field, between literary and popular. (Other permeable borders are that between adult and youth, and that, within youth, between children's and Young Adult.) In each case there are certainly books that lie clearly on either side, so it's not as if the distinctions had no meaning; but there are plenty that don't.

And yes, I'm sure some literary types would dismiss the mainstream-but-popular field as B-list. But I find that genre fans often neglect it as well, and this does sometimes distort discussions. I have seen people argue as if the norm was for a book to be assigned to a definite genre, and then literary fiction is for some strange reason treated as an exception to this. But really, there is a vast mass of fiction, including 'literary' works but by no means confined to them, which is not assigned to a specific genre; and then there are some special cases where books are assigned to a genre, because there is a dedicated community of readers in that field.

Sten @ 436... Maybe readers tend to be more 'conservative'. My wife wrote a space opera where the main character was a woman from a culture that treated women as second-class citizens and yet she made it to starship captain because part of her mind harbored the personality of a dead male relative. I'm not sure which of those elements led to the book sinking like a stone.

Ginger @ 429

Thanks for the kind words! I agree on the scarcity of good, well-written lesbian SF/F. I need to become more systematic in drawing up lists of my own recommendations in the field (because I'm awful at being able to come up with titles and authors off the top of my head but I feel like I have a responsibility to be able to do so). It isn't that there's none, but once you add in personal preferences for this theme/setting or that plot/character type, you can intersection yourself down to fewer than half a dozen books in a lifetime that have really hit the sweet spot.

And I'm going to say something I'm rather hesitant about expressing: it's not that the stories aren't out there. Sf/f is a fairly minority interest in the larger lesbian writing community but there are plenty of self-published books and fan-fic that fall in the category. It's the requirement that they be well written. There's an awful lot of just plain pedestrian prose even from the professional publishers, to say nothing of the self-published. Not bad necessarily, just ... not good. My own sneaking suspicion is that if a lesbian writer can write truly stunning prose, too often they'll succumb to the temptation to actually make a living by that skill, which generally involves leaving the lesbian characters behind. I can't imagine having successfully pitched a 5-7 book historic fantasy series where all the primary characters are in lesbian relationships to anyone but a small specialty publisher. And that means abysmal press, distribution, and sales compared to a mainstream publisher and an awful lot of knee-jerk assumptions on the part of potential readers who might otherwise enjoy the stories. If I were trying to earn a living as a writer, I couldn't do it with the stories I want to write. And that sort of thing, I suspect, accounts for a fair amount of the lack of good lesbian sf/f.

Serge, I'd put the lack of gay romances on the publishers more than on the community, but my part of the community is totally okay with gay romances, so. Because the romance is a central part of the story, or can be handwaved to be a central part of the story, and because Romance Is [characteristic], there's not as much diversity there as I'd like. Sort of like thinking it's not SF if it doesn't have spaceships.

But again, I am not part of the greater romance community. I don't have any particular insight into publishers vs readers vs expectations of both.

Cassy B/Lila @ 432-433: See, it is charming, and it's also the sort of story that can make me cry like a baby. Solidarity forever and all that jazz. Like the ending of the novella of "Beggars in Spain", Like "Sonny's Blues". Like that.

A post by John A Arkansawyer is showing in the Recent Comments list as being on this thread right after Diatryma's #440. But I'm not seeing it here, and clicking on it takes me nowhere.

(On Preview, I see that that post is now down at the bottom of the thread, where it should be. Posting this anyway for the diagnostic value, if any.)

CN @431, welcome back.

I don't see a lot of fiction with gay male romances either. I think HRJ's formula applies there too. Also, there's a lucrative market in porn, and while the "quality" measures are different, avoiding rookie errors that make the reader stop and notice the writing is still important.

I've tried writing porn. I get sidetracked by the characters and plot. Last one I tried ended up not having a sex scene until chapter FOUR. I gave up.

Diatryma @ 440... I'll have to ask my wife about the greater Romance community.

Diatryma @440

When looking at the reception of non-heterosexual romance among the general readership, keep in mind that you can't generalize the reception of gay male romance to the reception of lesbian romance. I don't know if you were making the distinction or assuming that there was no distinction, but my experience is that in discussions of genre literature, the unmarked adjective "gay" invariably means male. Heck, 90% of the time, if you see a literature-related event, website, or social-media group advertised as LBGTQ, it will really mean "gay male but we won't actually kick you out if you're not".

(I have once again followed my rule that when the parenthetical comment exceeds the non-parenthetical part, just eliminate the parentheses. Except then I added this statement.)

keranih @ 361: I also bounced off Dragonhaven. My best guess (recalling from reading ~2 years ago) is that I found too many setups (~"it's this way to make the plot go"), and a narrator who acted more childishly than his calendar age (where I'd have expected him to be grown up quickly given the environment/responsibility). (wrt other responses) I haven't read RM's LJ, but it sounds like she didn't distinguish between personal rambles and a story -- maybe she didn't cut away enough of not-an-elephant?
      wrt conversation, what about Tepper's Grass in that sequence?

albatross @ 369: a fascinating thought (re swapping adventure/romance label by changing the envelope). An extreme example: Dickson's Tactics of Mistake as a romance?

SamChevre @ 374: Graham's essay began with such an offputting tone that I didn't have the stomach to get to the section you quote -- which is a good thing, because I can't afford to throw my computer across the room. Graham apparently doesn't recognize Sturgeon's Law; she's condemning all YA based on the 90%, and suggesting that all literary fiction is in the 10% based on it not having a wrapup. Giving a new perspective is good, but few readers can survive having their perspectives wrenched around ALL THE TIME. I also wonder how much Graham-defined literary fiction just confirms her naturalistic view of the world, rather than dragging her to a new perspective.
      I shouldn't go on so long after so many other people have chimed in -- but I assumed answering this nonsense wasn't necessary in a paper I wrote in 1971, so I'm a bit irritable.

James Harvey @ 397: good point on groupthink. (Of course, they don't \know/ they're being Orwellian....)

abi @ 412: From what I read about the genre, so much of romance (at least in the U.S.) is such Extruded Romance Product (drop in the required elements for the very specific strain and omit all the messy bits it bars, cut to length, and slap on the strain's required ending) that people may not realize there's anything better than wordwooze (cf Leiber, The Silver Eggheads) out there. (There's a story that Laser Books was shut down because Harlequin couldn't cope with readers actually buying according to the quality of the work and/or the author's track record, and the resultant variable sales. Granted that Harlequin may be lowest-common-denominator rather than a median.) People who haven't learned how widely tastes vary may be stunned to find ]peers[ appreciating what seems unappreciable. (Some of us have learned the hard way not to be stunned by anything; see my recent response to your comment about the numinous.)
      OTOH (wrt to the abuse you saw), we know that "SF fan" covers a variety of types, from the saintly down to anus vulgaris.
      And I'm not sure how much longer SF will be in a position to talk; I'm finding less and less non-formulaic work on the new-book shelves at my local SF store.

Dave Luckett @ 417: Your Eric (channeling Tony Miles) had something to say about that; so did Poul Anderson in "The Critique of Impure Reason" -- although his typical ose-epic style makes his mockery of other approaches a little hollow.

HLN: our solar-electric system is finally up and running! (After the installation, there was inspection, the fixes for what the inspector objected to, the replacement of the electric meter with one that ran both ways, and a service call after we threw all the switches and the inverter said it couldn't find the panels.) I have been ridiculously pleased to see that our lifetime kWH consumed (as displayed on the electric company's meter) has gone down on bright days; that and a little set of moving blocks indicate that we are in fact feeding power back into the grid (and getting credit for it) as promised. I don't expect the panels ever to put out more than the 2.8 kW they've approached as it's a small setup due to a hipped roof, but it's \something/.
      My wife told my mother-in-law that I was going to geek out about this worse than I did about the Prius (that she prodded me to buy). Different strokes (cf above)....

Dave Luckett @ 417/literary fiction

It seems to me that “literary fiction” is in a large class of things, which I find interesting, and some of which I enjoy. I’d call the class “things for people who are familiar with and like that sort of thing.” So in the comestibles category, in whisky, you have Laphroiag; in food, you have foie gras and Szechuan ma la food; in cocktails, you have things like the Angostura Sour (bitters and lemon juice) and Fernet Branca (imagine drinking an extremely bitter version of Vicks Vaporub). In the entertainments category, you have the books and movies that are much more enjoyable if you already know a lot about the genre they are in: Tennyson and Pope with their pervasive allusions to mythological/allegorical figures, Twain’s “Story of a Good Little Boy,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Redshirts”, “The Princess Bride.” Literary fiction seems to me to be this, for the “like concentrating on structure, narrator/POV, form, internal vs external narrative” class; if you like reading books the way that a college or graduate literature class reads books, these books are the sort of books you will really like.

Note for all the above, these are going to be connoisseurs’ items; if they are appealing to the broad public, they aren’t what you were intending. The foundational assumption is that this is great given the right background knowledge and experience.

Note that this definition of "literary fiction" is something rather different from "canonical literature;" it's the sort of fiction that's specifically designed to require and reqard the tools learned in literature classes.

Xopher @ 444

I wouldn't give up--you could always be one of my favorite authors. (Uther Pendragon on nffge, who has among other things a great description of the economics of conglomerates, a decent summary of Schweitzer's theology, and a story using all the possible verb forms for the future in English).

The Russian government is working to prevent ordinary life for homosexuals-- jobs, homes, and organizations are being targeted.

Any ideas about ways to apply pressure to the Russian government and/or get other countries to accept refugees?

Discussion from last year about possible methods, also mention of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the USSR permitting Soviet Jews to emigrate.

******

Lesbian sf: Rituals: Rhasody of Blood by Roz Kaveny. Just one book, but very lesbian and has enough good stuff in it for half a dozen ordinary novels.

Dare Me by Megan Abbott-- more or less mainstream fiction, but massively weird. I think of it as a real world dystopian existentialist cheerleader novel.

I do tend to use 'gay' and 'lesbian' interchangeably for romance, largely because I read according to what shows up at the library and am thus limited to the straight stuff. I've had a couple recommended to me, but often with the caveat that oh hey historical, we all know how those sodomy trials end up, so the ending may not be as happy as one wishes. Still, the people I know who read romance are so thrilled to see... well, anything Courtney Milan does, really. I have my bubble. I like my bubble.

As for extruded romance product, yes, but let's remember that Sturgeon's Law specifically references science fiction. I have read way, way, way more bad SFF than bad romance in my life, and I will freely admit that it's because I haven't been reading romance long enough for my tastes to change or to run out of the really good books. And Nora Roberts, who one would assume is in fact the extruder of extruders, gets shit done. I don't like all her books and am not reading her latest fantasy trilogy, but her heroines consistently and realistically save their own damned selves. She writes beta males and female smoke jumpers and women who fight back and teams, oh teams, and female friendship.

When I started reading romance, I didn't see any of that in 'my' genre. Because 90% of my genre is extruded dragon product or extruded spaceship product, same as anything else on the shelves.

SamChevre, #448: Note that this definition of "literary fiction" is something rather different from "canonical literature;" it's the sort of fiction that's specifically designed to require and reqard the tools learned in literature classes.

And if this is the case, and Graham is talking about the same sort of thing when she says "fiction for adults", then she's overgeneralizing from the subset of "people who have learned to use and enjoy the tools of literary analysis" to "everyone over a certain age level".

I should perhaps note that I've encountered SF which was every bit as plotless and incoherent as I've learned to expect lit-fic to be, and I don't like it any better just because it has an SF label on it.

Xopher, if your porn keeps getting sidetracked by plot, you may have m/m romance on your hands, and that's highly publishable (if mainly small-press). Chapter Four is a GOOD place for the first sex scene in a romance! (Mine was in Chapter Six.)

Would "Hornblower" be considered cannonical literature?

Diatryma @ 450... "extruded romance" is the name of my next rock band.

SamChevre 448: I have to admit, I'm kind of floored that you would entertain anything within miles of the border of gay porn. This community never ceases to surprise me.

Nancy 449: I've been struggling with that sense of helplessness too. Now that any organization can be tagged as a "foreign agent" (spy) by a bureaucratic stamp in Russia, and all LGBT and LGBT-friendly organizations are on notice that they may be so tagged at any time, Russia has become the kind of hellhole for LGBT people that Germany was for Jews in about 1933...except that LGBT people, especially the young ones, often don't have the support of their families either. I disagree with Foxman; it's not at the 1940 stage of Nazi Germany, but this is where it starts. And Putin has continued the pattern in other ways, too: annexation of portions of a neighboring country with substantial numbers of speakers of the annexing country's language is also familiar.

Just saw yet another picture the other day of a gay teen who'd just been beaten bloody by Putin's version of the HJ. Two friends were comforting him, but they were surrounded by guys in camo with police helmets and nightsticks. I don't know whether this was the last picture of the three teens alive or not, because the article (once I reluctantly clicked through) didn't say anything about the picture at all.

It's possible the guys with the nightsticks were actually police, but in Russia the police are at best no help at all to LGBT people. It's inconceivable to me that that ring of camo'd thugs was there to PROTECT those teenagers.

I don't know. I don't have the spoons to organize demonstrations. If there are any, I'll go and sing

Россия, Россия с ума сошла
Долой, долой Путина

This is why I spend big parts of any day when I think about this fighting off utter despair. That and other topics that are not appropriate for this venue keep me pretty depressed, adding to the burden of my own deeply shitty life.

Rikibeth 452: Unfortunately it also had a vampire in it, and at the time Twilight was...well, when I became aware of Twilight I decided I really couldn't write a vampire story.

I can't find where I posted a short-short story about The Candle Man here, but lo!, via bOINGbOING, it's a real life-sized, melting candle man.

So there's that.

Xopher, your #444 made me laugh out loud.

Do you have any fiction posted anywhere? Because I would like to give it a shot.

I wonder if people who aren't in the straight-cis-white-male demographic are more open to diversity in protagonists, since we have to accept protagonists who aren't like us ALL THE DAMN TIME if we want to have anything to read at all. (If I am wrong in assuming that hardly any romance novel protagonists are ugly fiftyish women, someone please let me know and I'll increase my romance intake.)

(And yes, I do write fanfic with middle-aged, not particularly attractive female OCs as protagonists. Only one of the viewpoint characters of my original novel fits that description, though.)

Serge@454:"Extruded Romance" is probably opening for my spouse John's favorite hypothetical rock band, "Erroneous Spike and the Sexual Frustrations".

Lila, only on a site I'd hesitate to link to here. Perhaps we can arrange to exchange emails, and then I can send you a copy of the story in question.

...and looking at it now, there are errors I wouldn't make today. Sigh.

Xopher, I remember reading the first few chapters of that vampire story, and liking it a lot - and there are plenty more vampires out there in fiction-land than Twilight. I'd check out the m/m romance publishers.

John A Arkansawyer@403

Mmmmmaybe. What about Catch-22? Or Gravity's Rainbow? (The first just killed me as a teenager, whereas the second one stopped me in my tracks about a hundred pages in and didn't kill me till my twenties.)

I confess to having read neither, though Catch-22 has of course been on my list for years. Just on cultural pervasiveness though, I would say that LotR increasingly wins out: I sense that, if anything, it's cultural star has been in the ascendancy (Peter Jackson obviously has something to do with this), whilst Catch-22's has been waning a bit. They both tower like giants.

The interesting thing though is that Catch-22 is critically perceived as a book about the Second World War: unsurprisingly given the story. I'm not sure LotR has historically had critical insight and engagement - and if it has it has been of a dismissive, "oh it's just a lot of recycled Beowulf" variety. It's only when you connect Tolkien's Catholicism, experience on the Western Front, and the fact that drafts of LotR were sent to Christopher Tolkien on active service that a massive driver becomes apparent (or at least that's how it worked for me).

Lee@401

The literary canon is not the same thing as contemporary lit-genre fiction.

Exactly so: you've hit the nail on the head. The odd thing though is that much of the critical establishment (the sort of people who in the UK write book reviews in major papers and appear on the BBC) don't seem to understand this. It's just a seamless continuum from Samuel Richardson to Salman Rushdie.

I think though that the dividing line is not an either/or. "Canon" is simply "literature from probably dead people that has stood the test of time", regardless of genre. The "lit fic" genre is something else. One of my greatest tutors put it this way. There is a divide in English literature (and I do mean English here - I am insufficiently educated on American literature) that occurs at the end of the nineteenth century. It's perhaps best illustrated by reference to a couple of key authors.

Thomas Hardy, though living until 1928, stops writing novels with Jude the Obscure in 1895. He is writing in the tradition of Dickens and Eliot, but most importantly he seems to me to be writing bestsellers that dominate the literary landscape (and made him quite a bit of money). But he is finished by 1895. Henry James (OK I have read some American writers) is largely done by about 1903. It is the end of an era.

By 1908 you have EM Forster's Room with a View, and by 1914 Joyce, Woolf, and Lawrence are arriving on the scene. And they, for me, are writers of Literary genre fiction: writing literature-as-art for a self consciously smaller, middle class, educated, intellectual elite. There is no attempt here to write serialised blockbusters for a wide audience. Why is this? I don't know, but I suspect some combination of:

- an increasingly broad literate public allows for more fragmentation
- the end of serialised novels in periodicals
- the end of the Victorian/Edwardian era with WWI must to some extent shatter the cohesive social milieu which such fiction inhabited.
- a growing respectability of the novel as a form, built on the achievements of the previous century allowed people to take a more rarified view of the novel, and themselves, as "art/artists"
- Snobbery, both academic and social, valued nice prose, description, characterisation, experimentation over vulgar plot and storytelling.

Even now the "literary novel" is a shorter form than almost any other - my favorite example being Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, which, though painfully beautiful in its writing, remains for me an unfinished authorial experiment. It's essentially the first three chapters of a fifty chapter nineteenth century novel. But once the author has created (wonderfully) the characters, emotions, setting etc the tedious business of actually sustaining a story for 700 pages is seen as superfluous.

albatross@404

IMO, the only prize worth fighting the "SF isn't real literature, only litfic is" war over is the readers who might come to read some new and interesting books

Agreed, but things like Game of Thrones are probably doing more than anything else to break down some of these barriers.

albatross@404

IMO, the only prize worth fighting the "SF isn't real literature, only litfic is" war over is the readers who might come to read some new and interesting books

Agreed, but things like Game of Thrones are probably doing more than anything else to break down some of these barriers.

James Harvey #462: The big difference is that Catch-22 is overtly tied to the war and the soldiering experience in general. Among other issues, it's liable to fail impromptu keyword filters: "oh, I'm not interested in WW2...". LoTR¹ is certainly informed by the war, at least as far as the plot and atmosphere goes. But it's set within a world that's deep and engaging in its own right, rooted from Tolkien's linguistic expertise. That world has plenty of room for any number of other stories, unconcerned with WW1, WW2, or any other war -- and that's why LoTR has far more staying power than Catch-22. (Compare also: Gaiman's Sandman epic, against pretty much any title or era of the super-hero comics.)

¹ Also Narnia, but that's a lesser work; as many here have noted, if you're not a child, the preaching tends to get in the way of the story.

CHip @447 -

what about Tepper's Grass in that sequence?

...It's in there. Oh, yes, in there. (And it's apparently not a sequence anymore, but a web.) Which also weaves in Moon's Heris Serrano trio. And ties back again to various "animal mind meld" stories of much further back (Norton, some Kipling, etc) and then forward again to some of P.C Hodgell's GodStalker work.

And also needed, imo, as part of the American lit canon, is Steinbeck's The Red Pony - which I read long before I was ready for endings that weren't "happy ever after". (I was reading Kjelgaard, I was okay with stories where some things died, just not with stories where it destroyed characters.)

And that reminds me, re: TNC's reparations article - I haven't seen anyone bring up Steinbeck, and TNC's masterful manipulation of the reader with the material about the boy and his pony. Which makes me wonder if they make people read Steinbeck in pre-journalist school any more.

Xopher: myname at markandmyname dot com.

CHip @447 - re: 'cutting away everything not elephant'

That phrase is new to me - I'm familar with Michelango's "cutting away everything not angel" version, but no packyderms. Is this a writing thing? *plans to steal quote*

Dave Harmon MASTER OF UNDERSTATEMENT@466 wrote of Narnia:

the preaching tends to get in the way of the story

Oh yeah. Sometimes crashingly so, some times disturbingly and unpleasantly so IMO. You couldn't be more right.

James Harvey #463: How would you consider the cases -- to stick with purely British writers -- of Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett, and A.J. Cronin? All are contemporary with the writers you mention, all are writers aiming at a popular middle class audience, and all three would fit into the LitFic category today. Unlike Forster, Woolf, Joyce, and Lawrence they aren't read today. In the case of Maugham that is, I think, a bit of a pity.

Your argument also leaves out the complicating case of Kipling who was writing both in the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. He has managed to hang on almost in spite of himself.

abi@408

I know that I, for one, would be more comfortable in these "litfic looks down on SF and that's really kinda shitty" conversations if I didn't also read romance.

Well of course, even with SF&F, I have been accused (with some reason) of proposing a heirarchy of acceptability...

Outside SF&F I also read (occasionally) detective fiction, Clancy-esque military thrillers, gay fiction, historical fiction, literary canon and lit-fic amongst others. I don't know which of these is beneath the contempt of SF readers! Probably Tom Clancy, who I still remember as a brilliantly plotted and memorable author I'm afraid. Sorry.

Obviously there is some overlap on the Venn diagrams here, but I have to say that lit-fic is one of the most variable to read, with some exceptional highs but the most disappointments all round. I can remember trying to read the Booker-winning The Sea by John Banville and just... ...grinding... ...to... ...a... ... ... halt in his prose. I never finished it. It's not like I can't cope with demanding material. Beowulf is not simple, especially in Old English. Piers Plowman is demanding in more ways than the Middle English dialect it preserves. I don't actually think that Middlemarch, or Tess of the d'Urbervilles or War and Peace are that easy. But they are all a walk in the park compared to Joyce, Woolf or other equivalent twentieth century bores.

Fragano Ledgister@471

How would you consider the cases of Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett, and A.J. Cronin?... ...Unlike Forster, Woolf, Joyce, and Lawrence they aren't read today.

Regrettably, to add weight to your point, I haven't read them, so am unable to comment. I do also wonder quite how much Joyce and Woolf would be read these days if people weren't forced to read them by syllabuses and critical opinion. Beyond those audiences, I never see people reading Ulysses on the Tube. Whereas I see Dickens and Austen and Trollope all the time.

Lawrence I think is a different case: he's isn't an excellent technical writer with no story to tell, he's a pretty slapdash author with some fun stories. How he ever go let into the lit fic club is beyond me: probably Lady Chatterley's notoriety wins him his place.

Your argument also leaves out Kipling

Not sure if he has managed to hang on? Beyond If and Disney's Jungle Book, does anyone read him any more? I perceive him as being viewed, in British cultural circles at least, as a sort of slightly embarrassing Elgar-like apologist for Empire these days?

To all + mods. Apologies for the shotgun of replies today, rather than consolidated postings. In mitigation:
- I have limited windows for interaction, so you tend to get bursts
- I grew up on Usenet and CIX: so tend by habit to respond individually to individual posts in a conversational style derived from threaded discussion, rather than the Facebook-single-thread-here-is-my-digested-view-single-post approach
- my witterings today have mostly been too long to be digestible unless broken up anyway
- I've just made it worse by writing ANOTHER post :)
- at least I'll probably stop talking soon and you can have a moment of peace!

Seriously, let me know if I'm getting the interaction style wrong here folks - though my time constraints and wordy style are unlikely to be very mutable.

James Harvey @473

Re: Kipling

He's had a visible strong resurgence among the sort of people who like mil scifi. The world being the quasi-cyclical thing that it is, certain world events have made his subject matter more relevant recently than they were in, say, the 1990's.

I'm not sure that he ever went out so much as those who liked him stopped saying so outloud in the presence of people who equated his writing with the evils of colonialism (an inaccurate and unhelpful oversimplification, imo, but I hit Kim, The Cat Who Walked By Himself and Bagherra at the wrong age to be in the least little bit objective.)

James @474:

We have highly variable styles about replies; some combine, some don't. Either is acceptable. Consistency is pretty optional, too.

Since our comment threads regularly run into the triple digits, you can trust that we're pretty comfortable with verbosity in all of its forms. As long as the content is respectful, engaged, and engaging, we'll put up with a lot. And if there's a problem, I'll be happy to set you straight right.

James Harvey @#474: I'm not a mod, but some people do individual replies and some people do big consolidated replies, and as far as I can tell both of them are followable. Do what works for you. :)

keranih@475

Thanks: that's interesting and I totally hadn't picked up on it.

James Harvey: Can't speak for the mods, but speaking for myself: as long as you're polite and interesting, you can do any damn thing you want. :-)

CHip @447:
From what I read about the genre, so much of romance (at least in the U.S.) is such Extruded Romance Product (drop in the required elements for the very specific strain and omit all the messy bits it bars, cut to length, and slap on the strain's required ending) that people may not realize there's anything better than wordwooze (cf Leiber, The Silver Eggheads) out there.

I've bolded the place where I sighed.

The question is, where did you read about the genre? Because as some of the people who read, rather than just read about, it have mentioned, there's a whole lot of romance that is not extruded anything.

In which aspect it bears an entirely canny resemblance to SF&F, about which many people say many similarly-shaped things to those that you have gone on to say about romance. And those things they say are true of many of the SF&F books that are even now being published, by the Big Six, by many smaller publishers, and by the authors themselves.

These things are true of both genres because a certain proportion of the time, a certain proportion of our readership wants books that are "just like the last one they read but different". (And books that are a safe bet are a totally legitimate thing to publish, buy, and read. Sometimes you feel like a challenge, sometimes you don't.)

But the selfsame readers may very well also be reading challenging, complex, unexpected works in the genre at other times. And yet SF as a culture judges romance as a culture by its most predictable works...and then demands to be judged otherwise itself.

James Harvey #473:

Not having read A.J. Cronin is not a problem. I've never been sure why anyone ever read him. Arnold Bennett is a slightly different matter. Clayhanger may slip back into the canon someday. Or maybe not. Maugham was a decent storyteller, and Ashenden, at least, was enjoyable by me in my teens.

Kipling is a complicated case precisely because of his association with empire as you note. The problem is that the man could write, and in Kim produced a truly immortal boy's adventure that manages to evoke a different, vanished world beautifully and with real sympathy. Don't just take it from me. Edward Said has a very similar take. He's also an excellent short story writer, though there have to be more ten-year-olds than just me who gagged at 'the Ethiopian was just a n...' It's hard to equate a writer who could throw himself into the Other as thoroughly as Kipling with that sort of crude racism.

abi and other romance fans:

Can you recommend some good starter books for people who might like good romance novels, but don't know where to start? What books in that broad genre do you think are especially good or fun, and also accessible to people who haven't read a dozen previous romance novels?

Re: sometimes you want a challenge, sometimes you don't:

I have specific books I reread (sometimes many, many times) when I'm too tired or stressed out to want anything demanding. I find that many series books serve a similar need--the up-front cost to decide to read yet another Honor Harrington book, say, is relatively low, since I basically know what I'm getting into.

As someone who has read A. J. Cronin and some Forster, I think it clear that the literary establishment (however you define it) simply doesn't see Cronin et al as literary, rather as good middle class entertainment with a moral to the story. Whereas FOrster etc seemed to be writing in a simply more literary fashion.
Perhaps it in part comes down to how much of an effect the authors in question had on other authors. I don't recall reading about anyone inspired to write literary fiction by Cronin, for instance, whereas Woolf and FOster and suchlike are often used as inspiration/ groundbreakers within the genre of literary fiction.

albatross @482

Madaline Brent, particularly Golden Urchin and Moonraker's Bride. First person late-Victorian novels on an astonishingly repeatable formula over which Brent (note: pen name) layered a variety of individual tweeks. A degree of mystery and will they/wont they always involved. Romance, not erotica. Strong characterization, solid young female leads, as well as well rounded older female characters who were the heroes of their own stories. Not free of believable moral conflict, but everything generally turns out well in the end.

Note: part of the formula is what I read as an appreciation for the variety and breath of experience of humanity in the British Empire at its height. Others may well see that as appropriation/exotica fetish.

albatross (482): To start with authors already mentioned in this thread:

Nora Roberts is usually a good bet, although I find her fantasy-tinged romances less than convincing. She has a few zillion* books; her recent Bride Quartet (beginning with A Vision in White is excellent.

Jennifer Crusie is also good. Faking It is a great place to start, or Welcome to Temptation.

*more than 200 at last count

keranih (485): I second Madeleine Brent (which I believe is a pseudonym for Peter O'Donnell, author of the Modesty Blaise books). Note that they are long out of print. Try your library, or used booksellers.