alecaustin, posts by tag: misc - LiveJournal

I've had a lot of ideas scrabbling at the back of my brain with no real energy to give them the treatment I feel they deserve, so I'm going to throw some of them out here without much development.

1) There's an oft-unexamined equivalency drawn between originality, quality, and the elusive "sense of wonder" that people hearken back to when they talk about what they want from SFF or why it appeals to them. Joanna Russ talks about it a bit in "The Wearing Out of Genre Materials" (found in The Country You Have Never Seen), though I find her notion of Innocence, Plausibility, and Decadence to be at least somewhat problematic, and she doesn't really deal with one of the core issues related to originality and the perceptions thereof, which is audience knowledge. Quite simply, if readers aren't familiar with cultural details or early precedents or source works, they will often perceive something as New! and Exciting! and Totally Original! which... well, isn't.

2) I have come to the conclusion that modern SFF short fiction - even if you restrict it to professionally published short fiction - has become a field which no single individual has a grasp on, and which quite possibly no one can have a grasp on, short of making reading and reviewing it their full-time vocation. Lois Tilton has dismissed Daily Science Fiction and other publications as beneath her notice, while Tangent Online and all the other short fiction reviewing venues I'm aware of have similar gaps in their coverage. In preparing for my Hugo nomination ballot, I read somewhere between one hundred and two hundred short stories last year, and started but didn't finish as many more, and that's without having read the entirety of any single publication's output. Under such conditions, I find the idea the idea that awards ballots and Years Best anthologies are the result of anything like a comprehensive survey of the field to be highly suspect.

3) There continues to be a lot of noise made about the notion that the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction is purely one of labeling and marketing categories. I think this claim is only really sustainable if one cherry-picks one's evidence, inasmuch as there are a range of genre discourses in play, many of which are overlapping. Yes, the work of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender has a lot in common, and no, this doesn't mean that it's really useful to talk about Joyce's Ulysses and... I don't know, Prospero Burns as being part of a single conversation. One is about linguistic exploration, literary ironies, and the lives of a Jewish man and those around him in early 20th-century Dublin. The other is about space battles and treachery and main battle tanks falling from the sky. Trying to blur that distinction serves no one, save possibly as a rhetorical tactic.

4) Also, seemingly as the legacy of some SFF authors and their attempts to claim a seat at the table of literature, I've seen people trying to claim that there is no distinction between SF work in the YA genre and SF work outside of it. In some cases that may be true. That said, the YA marketing category as currently constructed has a lot of conventions that are specific to it, and to say that just because one can't easily 'define' it means that it can't be distinct feels specious. Whether those conventions will remain stable is another question, but at least for the moment, the line between YA SF and adult SF seems fairly clear in the minds of many authors and readers (and editors, and agents, and...), even if on an individual level they all disagree with each other.

5) Everyone seems to want bright lines, and clear distinctions, and an utter lack of ambiguity in these issues. I understand why - clarity is far less stressful and anxiety-inducing than ambiguity, and we want to be right, not waffling about with probabilities or qualitative judgments. But ambiguity is what we're stuck with, for the most part, and trying to erase it and make claims to more precision than we can achieve are often harmful. See the example of storm surge height vs. levee height in Nate Silver's recent article in New York Magazine for one example.

Anyway. Possible more later, on the importance of being humane.

So the white paper I was working on appears to have been put to bed (all the relevant work was done by mid-month), and in theory payment should be wending its way towards me through the mails.

I have 9 stories in submission, with 2 hanging fire until Thursday due to 7-day post-rejection waiting periods at Clarkesworld and Fantasy.

I'll try to write up my book post for January tomorrow or the next day. I've been bouncing from book to book a lot, so while it's not totally embarrassing, it's not particularly astonishing either. Excluding comics, I've finished 5 books so far this year, though I've been reading various short story collections as well.

Speaking of short stories, I quite enjoyed yhlee's Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain when I read it this morning, even though I am not entirely sure how ( Collapse ) Ted Kosmatka's In-Fall is also interesting. The other stories I've read from Lightspeed which made the various Year's Best anthologies (listed on this post on JJA's blog) didn't impress me as much, though I'll admit to not having read even half of them (and also to being a rather harsh judge of short fiction, about which I will probably post more anon).

Anyway. 5 things make a post, and though it may be cheating, here's thing 5 - I'm going to bed.

So I'm still alive. No longer plague-ridden, except for a tiny annoying itch in the back of my throat that will just not go away. Desperately behind on my writing obligations, even if most of them are self-imposed, and not really long on bandwidth for posting to LJ. I very much intend to do another information density post, but I may need to break it up into smaller chunks just to make it happen. More on that topic soon, I hope.

I was also going to post about books here, but given how late it is and how tired I've been lately, I suspect that would mean that this post wouldn't get finished before I had to go to bed. So instead you get me rambling about computer games.

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Wow. Apparently I had more to say about those games than I thought. I'll leave my ramblings about Bejeweled Blitz on iPhone for later, since I need to actually get some sleep tonight.

Still sick. Went into the ER last night because of pain in the side of my chest which appears to have been from coughing too hard (rather than, say, pneumonia). Taking antibiotics and time off from work until I get better.

As I am resting and rather too muzzy-headed to write anything of worth or length (or, in fact, of any measurable degree of coherence), I present to you an article on caves. Really cool, huge, caves in Borneo, complete with pictures and ancient paintings of human hands.

(I am reminded of the story my mother once told me about fiber mats being discovered in caves in Thailand. Which some of you have heard already, so I will not repeat it here unless asked to do so.) (ETA: Story recounted in comments, at aedifica's request.)

Anyway. More resting, less writing. Ta.

So papersky has a post up at Tor.com about skimming, in which I noted that I used to be able to read holographically (I think I've talked about this with cyphomandra in the past - I vaguely recall that she does it too).

In the interest of continuing the discussion, I'm transcribing bits of my comments to that post here and adding additional notes, because I think this sort of thing is fascinating.

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Additional thoughts:

I mentioned this topic to mrissa this afternoon, and she noted that circumstances needed to be right for her be able to read in this way. Which is true of me as well, though I'd forgotten! For one thing, the line length on paragraphs can't be too long, or your eyes have to track from left to right anyway, which kind of defeats the purpose of the thing. I generally found that there needed to sensible break-points as well - a page-long paragraph was generally too much for me to absorb all at once, meaning I had to break it up into smaller chunks and/or read more closely, for fear of missing something important.

(When I'm trying to read quickly these days, I tend to read in chunks that are 4 lines long. That seems to be about the size that my brain can take in and process within a reasonable amount of time before I move onto the next bit. Not sure how much of that is borderline-OCD behavior rather than a mechanical property of how I read, though.)

PS: The next information density post should be going up as soon as I'm over this stupid cold. This post was brought to you by Tedium^TM, and Alec not having much of anything to do at work today.

(Via yhlee)

These 100 year old color photographs of Russia that were taken via combining 3 exposures taken with different colored filters are really cool, and also drive home how the depiction of much of the last two centuries in black and white photographs has warped my perceptions of how the past must have looked. I keep thinking that the scenes being depicted must be more recent, from the latter half of the 20th century at the earliest, but they're not - they're from before WW I and the Russian Revolution.

Pretty good day yesterday. I went to the new location of the Other Change of Hobbit, found a bunch of books I hadn't gotten around to picking up from other sources, and got to chat with Dave (the owner) for a while. (Relevant backstory: when I was the bookkeeper for Comic Relief, our offices were actually underneath the Other Change, so I got to know Dave and Jan and [while he was there] Will decently well just by stopping to chat with them on my way down to the office.) The new space is much bigger than the old one, which isn't even filled yet - Dave made a pointed (and entirely true) comment about homeless people using the old location's entrance for shelter perhaps not quite achieving the landlord's ambitions for the space - and I chanced across the new Walter Jon Williams short story collection from Night Shade Books, The Green Leopard Plague, picking it up along with Magic Below Stairs and Empire in Black and Yellow.

After heading home for a bit, I drove over to the City (San Francisco, for those thinking that it might be some other City, like Bezel or Ul Qoma or something) and had Korean BBQ with a couple of friends from EALA*, as well as someone from EARS** who we'd met during the testing process around C&C 4 and a bunch of her friends. So that was really good, but by the end I was pretty tired and not entirely sure how to get home, not having done a lot of driving in the City, so I bailed on going out bowling with most everyone else, and made my way back onto the 80 and back across the Bay Bridge without too much trouble.

(Then, of course, as I was writing this, one of my best friends called me with a bit of a personal crisis, which is why this didn't go up last night. Can't win them all, I guess.)

*: Electronic Arts Los Angeles
**: Electronic Arts Redwood Shores

...I have literally no idea how I'm going to be able to drag myself out of bed early enough to miss traffic tomorrow on Thursday. Even with breakfast and half a bar of chocolate in me, I'm barely conscious.

Actually, the real trick is going to be teaching myself to go to bed at an hour that is significantly before 2 am. No idea how I'm going to be able to pull that one off - it sure as heck didn't work last night.

My Comcast internet connection continues to crap out intermittently, often for 10-12 hours at a time. We've eliminated local hardware issues as the cause by replacing the modem, so I'm guessing that some stretch of the cable between my house and the main line is broken or otherwise compromised, and a combination of temperature, wind, and humidity fluctuations is making it switch between a functioning and a non-functioning state. (I shifted the modem pretty far up the coax chain inside the house when things weren't working, and it was still dead, so it's clearly an issue with the outside cabling.)

The current plan is to ask the maintenance guy who shows up tomorrow (when the connection will, almost inevitably, be working - 3-day lead times on tech support appointments are hell on fixing intermittent bugs) to replace the entire length of cable connecting my house to the spur up here in the hills. Hopefully that'll resolve the issue, at least until the local vines drag the cable down and break it again - that happened once before, and it's my working hypothesis for how this particular break occurred.

...or Berkeley, depending on who you ask. Hurray for houses which are technically in one city but only accessible through another one.

I really hope I can be mostly unpacked and recovered from the drive in time for my job interview on Friday. That trip took a lot out of me.