If you live in the Boston area, and you 1) like books and 2) need more cool people in your life, then do I have an idea for you.
Back Pages Books in Waltham has been struggling recently, but they’ve put together some creative ideas to raise money and stay in business. Of note is next Monday’s Bloomsday Fundraiser (Bloomsday explained here). For a paltry fifty bucks you get food from some of the better eateries in Waltham, live Irish music, readings from Ulysses by Waltham’s Reagle Players, and an art auction. Proceeds to keep a swell independent bookseller in business, and the odds are good that everyone down to shell out $50 for such an event is 100% awesome and worth getting to know.
Via Neil Gaiman: a blog devoted entirely to pictures of misused quotation marks. Just yesterday we find gems such as alleged candy and what are they scooping. Good stuff.
While I’m using friends from Bard as excuses to link to Neil Gaiman’s blog, here are a couple of bits for Adrianne. It seems that no matter how long you’ve been writing for a living, or how long the lines are at your book signings, some chapters:
There’s an odd point in writing, when you reach a bit that you’ve known was going to happen for years. Years and years. And then it doesn’t happen like you thought it would…
It’s as if there’s a ghost-story behind the text and nobody knows it’s there but me.
Still on Chapter Seven of The Graveyard Book, but I’m well into the last half of the chapter, and it no longer feels like I’m walking towards the horizon, with the horizon retreating as I advance… I’ve written about eleven easy pages today, and cannot wait to get back to it. If I’m still awake and writing I may pull an all-nighter.
It barely feels like I’m writing it. Mostly it feels like I’m the first one reading it.
are better than others:
The Graveyard Book is back on track, I think, and the thorny and evil thicket that was Chapter Six has been traversed and, I am told, does not sound like I was making it up as I went along, but sounds as if I knew what it was about the whole time. This makes me happy, because it was miserable writing it.
Keith is getting ready to begin a masters program with an advisor who is interested in data mining, and this got me interested in Padhraic Smyth’s book on the subject. Dr. Smyth is one of my favorite people at UCI, and he knows from statistical machine learning, so I expected the book to be good. Glancing at the reviews, I noticed that they show an interesting structure: there are a lot of 5-star reviews, and a few 1-star reviews, and a smattering in the middle. Clearly it’s a divisive book: some people think it’s a great survey of important techniques, and some people wish it was more oriented toward producing working code for large-scale business systems.
And then there’s “Mustafa,” who just thinks it sucks. And, while I haven’t read the book, I imagine that most of his criticism is valid:
Finally .. I recevie the book .. I read the list of content and I surprised about it .. and now I know why they dont write the contents here to read before bying the book ..
This is a bad statistics book, you can read any thing in it except about Data Mining … No Cluster Analysis .. No Nural Networks .. No Rule induction No Dicecion Trees .. Nothing and nothing and nothing …
And I want to sell this bad book which Name is Data Mining … for the three lier writers.
The omission of “Nural Networks” does seem to be a glaring mistake, but surely most of that important material is made up for by the inclusion of neural networks on page 173. And don’t get me started on the authors’ decision to exclude “Dicecion Trees.” There’s simply no excuse for that.
Who are the “9 of 44 people” who found this review helpful? More importantly, how can one avoid ever having to deal with them professionally?
The Da Vinci Code opens later this week, and I imagine that Ruth and I will go see it at some point. We both read the book. I bought it while in a foul mood after a painful dental procedure, planning to hate it in order to spite the world. It wasn’t as bad as I expected, having already sat through the audio book version of Deception Point. But it was bad.
I thought about trying to describe the ways in which these books are bad. Then a few weeks ago I found a bunch of old posts by one of the Language Log guys absolutely ripping Brown to pieces. I think the biggest thing is Brown’s “knack for coming up with exactly the phrase not to use.” Even if the plots of his novels were better, it is very hard to get into the action because the you’re constantly distracted by unfortunately phrasings and ludicrous dialog.
Dr. Pullman starts out by laying out some specific criticisms of word choice and style.
A voice spoke, chillingly close. “Do not move.”On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.
Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.
Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn’t speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. “Chillingly close” would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man’s pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.
Later, he explains how every Dan Brown novel begins with exactly the same sentence.
The simple fact is that if you are ever mentioned on page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you will be mentioned with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier (“Renowned linguist Geoff Pullum staggered across the savage splendor of the forsaken Santa Cruz campus, struggling to remove the knife plunged unnaturally into his back by a barbarous millionaire novelist”), and you will have died a painful and horrible death by page 2, along with several curiously ill-chosen clichés and mangled idioms.
And, in probably the funniest post on the subject, he returns to cover both the lazy repetition and the terrible word choice.
A renowned male expert at something dies a hideous death and straight away a renowned expert at something quite different gets a surprise call and has to take an unexpected plane flight and then face some 36 hours of astoundingly dangerous and exhausting adventures involving a good-looking (and of course expert) member of the opposite sex and when the two of them finally get access to a double bed she disrobes and tells him mischievously (almost minatorily) to prepare himself for strenuous sex. Where are we?We’re in a Dan Brown novel.
[...]
But the acme of inexpertly crunched metaphors in Deception Point is on page 27 (and I swear I’m not making this up): he uses the expression “learning the ropes in the trenches”. Think about that for a while. Learning the ropes is a naval metaphor; it’s about rigging and sails and mooring. Being in the trenches is an army metaphor. You can hardly be in both services simultaneously — hauling up sails on a naval frigate while dug in with the infantry on the western front. Dan has to make his military metaphor mind up.
I’m sorry, but this man is simply not competent to write prose for public consumption.
Good stuff all around. Please go read all of those posts, and if you enjoy them, also the one on Digital Fortress and abuse of eyebrows.
Finally, a bit of google bombing. There is compelling evidence that someone named Mark Steyn is a plagiarist.
So, I’m currently tearing my way through the most recent Neil Gaiman novel. I was holding out for paperback, but my mom mailed me a copy, which was awesome. Anyway, that got me poking around online, and I found a remarkable reference for American Gods. The entries for Shadow and Mike Ainsel are particularly interesting.
Update: Speaking of Neil Gaiman. One of these days I should point out that his blog is often pretty entertaining. He’s very generous about answering questions from fans, which is nice, but not always compelling. Better are the more bloggy posts, such as this, concerning a bear that has been tearing up his garden:
Lacking bear pepper-spray, I walked home across the garden last night singing very loud bear songs, which went something along the lines of, “Lalala, I am singing very loudly to alert the bear to my presence, Lalala because most of the websites I’ve found talk about making noise and giving bears lots of time to get away, Lalala also I do not want to startle a bear at all because according to everything I’ve read on the subject bears do not like being startled.” You don’t have to worry about rhymes with bears. They don’t mind about rhymes. Or tunes. Or scansion. Frankly, hypothetical bears are a very easy sort of audience.
In the spirit of spring poetry, I thought I would post a work by Fyodor Tyutchev, in my case also a recent discovery of a poet. The translation has been rendered by none other then Vladimir Nabokov and nine out of ten slavicists agree that he’s done quite a nice job. But for those who happen to have the Russian, there is also the original.
Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.
Deep in your spirit let them rise
akin to stars in crystal skies
that set before the night is blurred:
delight in them and speak no word.How can a heart expression find?
How should another know your mind?
Will he discern what quickens you?
A thought once uttered is untrue.
Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:
drink at the source and speak no word.Live in your inner self alone
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blinded by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard…
take in their song and speak no word.
(~)
It’s April, and everyone knows what that means: poetry party! Break out the beer pong and your freshman seminar books, because this is going to be awesome.
I thought I’d start things off (assuming other people are interested, of course) with a little something by Anna Akhmatova, translated from the Russian by Jane Kenyon.
I hear the always-sad voice of the oriole
and I salute the passing of delectable summer.
With the hissing of a snake the scythe cuts down
the stalks, one pressed hard against another.And the hitched-up skirts of the slender reapers
fly in the wind like holiday flags. Now if only
we had the cheerful ring of harness bells,
a lingering glance through dusty eyelashes.I don’t expect caresses or flattering love-talk,
I sense unavoidable darkness coming near,
but come and see the Paradise where together,
blissful and innocent, we once lived.
I only recently stumbled upon Akhmatova, and had a hard time choosing which poem could persuade you to read more of her work.
Anyone else want to bite?
Perhaps my new favorite thing in the world is this audio recording I discovered of Ernest Hemingway descibing the plot of a book, “In Harry’s Bar in Venice” (which, to my knowledge, he never got around to writing). Besides Hemingway’s awkwardly stilted delivery (not to mention his over-emphasized way of saying “Cipriani”), it includes such memorable lines as:
Harry’s Bar is a small place, but it is, in effect, a microcosm of all of that great and beautiful city which has been so well described by those writers, Ruskin, Sinclair Lewis, Byron, and others.
Or, perhaps my favorite:
God himself is absent for a time, probably on his own business, but he returns to Tornicello to bring happiness to these star-crossed lovers.
Truly some of the best 8 minutes of audio I’ve heard in my life.
(I should mention that there’s apparently an entire Salon.com Audio page, which I was unaware of, that has many other clips posted more recently than 2001.)
My parents visited me in the fall, and when I hopped into the backseat of their rental car for a glorious free dinner, my stepmom immediately handed me a shiny, hardcover book. “This is fantastic,” she said. “Read it, you’ll love it. But you have to make sure to give that one back, because it’s a first edition.”
Whenever my stepmom recommends a book, my ears perk up. And Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was hardly a disappointment.
When Christmas rolled around last month, and my family wanted to know what to get me, I emailed them links to PZ Myers’ Updated Book List for Evolutionists. As a result, I came home with copies of Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautifu and Andrew Brown’s The Darwin Wars.
Myers describes The Darwin Wars as “a study of the sociology of evolutionary biology.” In reality, it is little more than a blow-by-blow account of the ‘war’ between Richard Lewontin and Steven Jay Gould on the one hand, and E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett on the other. It is, here and there, a lot of fun. He describes the birth of Richard Dawkins as having been attended by a pair of fairies.
The good fairy gave him good looks, intelligence, charm, and a chair at Oxford specially endowed for him. The bad fairy studied him for a while and said: `Give him a gift for metaphor.’
Elsewhere, he quotes biologist John Maynard Smith descirbing a theory as “Absolute fucking crap,” and the footnote attributes this to “Personal communication, walking back from the pub.”