I believe the book of Jonah was meant to be funny.
I couldn't agree more. I re-read Jonah a few years ago, and it wasn't at all the story I remember being taught in Sunday school. First of all, it isn't about righteousness and duty, it's about compassion and duty: Jonah doesn't want to bring a message of destruction to Nineveh; the sailors don't want to throw him overboard (but he insists); and ultimately, God doesn't want to destroy the city.
Second, it really is a barrel of yuks. God and Jonah have a kind of Borscht Belt relationship going on. Speaking as a skeptic, it was the book of Jonah that altered a lot of my received assumptions about the Old Testament.
Gallery owners are too often the audience, but they're not editors. And conductors don't come into play with electronic music, for instance.
I don't know about composers, but visual artists often have friends who drop by the studio and make fun of their work in progress every once in a while. This valuable experience is more difficult to reproduce with writing. There is one genuine difference between visual art and writing: it's generally easier to see visual artwork in overview, all at once, and thus check on its progress. It's much easier to overlook some detail in writing by just not rereading it, or skimming under the impression that you're actually reading. I don't know how musical composition fits into this comparison, but I would suppose that it, like visual art, has a more immediate visceral impact than writing, which in my experience makes it the author easier to maintain perspective. YMMV, of course.
By the way, Tim, I like your Shalmanezer stuff. Dynaflex is part of my iTunes random-stuff-from-around library now.
As a frequent reader and occasional delurker, I have to say that intelligent, articulate crankiness is vastly more entertaining, informative, and generally good than the timid politesse that Mr. Writer is calling for. As an aspiring writer, I say the same thing. (Granted, I only write short stories, and I have no intention of giving up my day job, which I quite like; I doubt the Nielsen Haydens have any direct power over my prospective "career," such as it is, even if they wanted and cared enough to exercise it. I suppose they could badmouth me to magazine editors at parties, but I don't know why they'd bother.)
The only responsibility anyone who writes in public has to their audience is to express themselves as well as possible, and to stand behind what they say. This is why Making Light and Electrolite are so good to read. Tenderness towards the feelings of potential readers who may happen by your blog someday is nice, but -- well, actually, it just turns the whole exercise of writing into a waste of everyone's time, which isn't really nice at all.
And not only is the world irritating, but it's been raining all week.
Since it's an open thread, if anybody wants to return to the issue of POD, Nick Mamatas, who writes for and has been involved with various small presses, has a fun rant here.
Also, to Grayon and Mitch Wagner: In fact it's the combination of the disco pants, the replicant thousand-yard stare, and the title "Bead Me a Shimmering Dance" that really makes me think that a Gate is about to be opened into a different and a terrible world. And she knows it too, you can see it in her face.
I for one could do with some comic architecture right about now. Also, Adam and Jeremy, you're both welcome.
Jeremy -
Baum wrote a lot of children's books besides the Oz books; the Oz series was the most successful, and eventually he just gave up and settled down to cranking out an Oz book a year, even though he was increasingly bored with them, I think.
Mother Goose in Prose was his first children's book. He also wrote a very interesting book called American Fairy Tales, which are tales set mostly in typical American settings (a Chicago tenement, for example) and for that reason was largely panned at the time. Critics wanted to see a magical fairyland, not a magical America.
American Fairy Tales came out the same year as Wizard of Oz; so did The Magical Monarch of Mo, which is a series of stories set in a magical otherland, and isn't nearly as interesting as either Wizard or American Fairy Tales.
The Master Key, about a Demon of Electricity, is also a fun one.
There's some other thread in which we talked about using particular sans-serifs for footnote text, and that's about as much sans-serif text as I personally would want to see at one time, on the printed page. Sans-serif is actually good for that; it compresses more easily, and the eye tends not to be distracted from the main text.
Conventional wisdom is that the opposite holds true for on-screen text; sans-serif text is easier to read in big chunks, because most monitors don't have the resolution to render serifs as sharply as they need to be to be effective.
I'd just like to add that Robert Bringhurst does indeed speak with the voice of the Holy Spirit, in so far as the Holy Spirit addresses typography. I love that book. This is Bringhurst on the Clarendon typefaces:
These faces reflect the hearty, stolid, bland, unstoppable aspects of the British Empire. They lack cultivation, but they also lack menace and guile. They squint and stand their ground, but they do not glare. In other words, they consist of thick strokes melding into thick slab serifs, fat ball terminals, vertical axis, large eye, low contrast and tiny aperture.
Poetic geekiness is the best.
Katherine - What a great run-down. I agree almost entirely, especially about Titus Groan, but please don't make me give up my semi-colons. I love the little things.
Elmore Leonard's advice actually boils down to "make the parts readers tend to skip easily skippable, so the readers can get to know them better on the second or third re-read." For me, a book without the "skippable" parts generally isn't worth re-reading, however good I thought it was. I've read a few of Leonard's books, for instance, and while I remember enjoying them immensely at the time, I can't remember a single thing about the books themselves. Whereas I have to admit I could eat Italo Calvino's books for breakfast every day, even though they tend to consist of all the skippable bits with the story surgically removed.
It's so much fun I'm going to jump in.
crippled al-Qaida
I don't even know where this one comes from. Is Bush claiming to have done this? Strategically, he can't, or justification for further anti-terrorist measures goes straight out the window. All he's claimed that I'm aware of is to have captured some key al-Qaida middle managers, which isn't crippling so much as kicking vigorously in the shins.
Put nuclear inspectors in Libya, Iran and North Korea without firing a shot
What CHip said about N. Korea. Anyway, we put nuclear inspectors in Iraq without firing a shot, and look where that got us. Big deal. Also: what we did is put nuclear inspectors in Libya, Iran and [North Korea] without firing a shot in Libya, Iran or North Korea. Shots were fired elsewhere. Bully leverage is not a world-stabilizing strategy.
and captured a terrorist who slaughtered 300,000 of his own people
We call that a dictator, not a terrorist. He wasn't a nice man, but let's get our terms straight. Since it's all good clean fun, I won't talk about the number of Iraqis who died as a result of the U.S. embargo, the crippling of the middle class from the same cause that strengthened the nasty "terrorist's" stranglehold on his country, etc.
Worst president in history? Come on!
I concede to the author that this may be an overstatement. I'll just go with worst president in my lifetime.
Also, there's a story about the Plot, Eisner's graphic novel, here.
But when "c" does break out of its shell, it makes quite a statement, as in antic or magic. It just hangs out there being a hard sound all on its own.
On these occasions "k" gets a bit jealous. Sometimes he tags along anyway, making a nuisance of himself, as in magick. "K" can be a little bit of a bully that way. They have a conflicted relationship.
Tekton was treated for a while as a slightly more classy Comic Sans, I think. People in the early 90's with their first really powerful desktop computers got all excited about type that didn't look like, you know, type. Tekton is actually an architectural script, but it was seized on and made popular for a while, like a hard-working touring band that suddenly has an unexpected hit on the radio. Now the thrill is gone, and Tekton has gone back to its day job.
Mitch - That may be the best thing anybody's ever said about Comic Sans.
BSD - I suspect no one's ever said that about Comic Sans, and I suspect you didn't either, but I like it anyway. It's hard to have absolute trust in a document printed in Comic Sans.
Helvetica isn't very good for masses of text, but it's coming into a sort of retro vogue for signage. Trollback & Co. just re-did all of AMC's advertising in aggressively simple Helvetica-family typeface. If the only thing on the page are the letters AMC, legibility isn't such a big deal.
Myriad is another nice sans-serif font for block text, such as footnotes. So is Scala Sans.
And yet the good news predominates: There is a new edition of Making Book. This means that my months-long outstanding order, and all my dreams, are about to be fulfilled.
And not only that, but I get a one-of-a-kind reproduction of the vintage first edition, with all the mistakes lovingly hand-restored. Some people would pay good extra money for that.
On a slight tangent, but a better analogy: a few years ago Polo Magazine, a magazine about the game polo, was sued by Ralph Lauren for infringing on his trademark, the word "polo." RL won; the magazine was given 90 days to change its name, and folded rather than go through all the expense.
RL's case was helped by the fact that Polo Mag had recently undergone a redesign, to a new, glossy format involving nice photos of attractive people wearing polo clothes -- just like in Lauren ads. Lauren's trademark isn't just the word polo, but the image of poloness transmitted by that word.
The message is, if you're a superhero, don't wear brightly colored tights, and you'll be fine.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 17 |
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