zvi likes tv

Reading Kathryn Schulz's Why I Despise The Great Gatsby was the first time it ever occured to me that someone might read that book because they enjoyed it.

( I don't like Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby but I have high hopes for Luhrman's ).

This entry is all just a long way round to saying I think Schulz's essay was fabulous, and brought out some great points about how the book is a moral failure. Also, h/t to smartbitches_feed.

Baen's eAdvanced Reader Copies. I mean, clearly they work, I see posts all over my reading page of people chortling with glee that they've paid more than twice what I'll pay to read the final version of Captain Vorpatril's Allince in November, when the book is actually released in all of its edited glory.

And, okay, I get that early is cool. But…there's lots of stuff to read in the intervening period…that has been copyedited? Or that doesn't cost $15 for electronic files. I mean, okay, Baen does give you the good kind (multi-format and no DRM).

Hmm, I guess part of the problem is that the only pro author I would really want to pay money to get books extra fast for (a) is a terrible writer who needs all of the editing help that can be sneaked into her books at the last minute and (b) is dyslexic, so needs all of the copyediting help that can be sneaked into her books. Perhaps your perspective is just different when what you really, really like is Laurel K. Hamilton. (Yes, I know the books are bad. I like them anyway. In the same way that I love good cheese and I like that powder crap in a green cylinder, at the same time.)

Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book ($2.00 B&N), by Tom Spurgeon and Jordan Raphael, is the Nook Daily Find.
Book Description
Based on interviews with Stan Lee and dozens of his colleagues and contemporaries, as well as extensive archival research, this book provides a professional history, an appreciation, and a critical exploration of the face of Marvel Comics. Recognized as a dazzling writer, a skilled editor, a relentless self-promoter, a credit hog, and a huckster, Stan Lee rose from his humble beginnings to ride the wave of the 1940s comic books boom and witness the current motion picture madness and comic industry woes. Included is a complete examination of the rise of Marvel Comics, Lee’s work in the years of postwar prosperity, and his efforts in the 1960s to revitalize the medium after it had grown stale.

source booksontheknob_feed

Steve Saus is blogging How to Create an Ebook, which will become an ebook after he's done writing it.

I think fandom might want to look at e-books as another distribution method, particularly for either long stories or, the part where I think shit could get real, as curated collections of short stories (I'm bringing sexy zines back!)

I mean, yes, of course, the easy way to create an e-book is to drop the HTML or RTF document you've already got into Calibre and push a button. But I think Steve is going to tell us how to make it look nice.

(Steve Saus is the guy who rolled jimhines' DIY ebook for his first experiment with publisher-free e-book sales.)

[http://books.google.com/books?id=Wl7Akm-Se9wC&dq=nomad+ayan+hirsi+ali&source=gbs_navlinks_s] I finished this book a little over a week ago, and I'm sort of at a loss for what to say.

The first thing is that I'm really not the audience for this book. I'm reading about religions in order to figure out what to incorporate into my own religious practice, and this book is a warning to the liberal, Enlightened West (capitals deliberate) about the Great Muslim Horde. (Horde is going a little further than Hirsi Ali, but not by much.)

She really does propose Christianity as a solution to the problems Islam presents to global stability and the freedom of women, not because she believes in Christianity, but because it's a religion that has already figured out how to co-exist with (and, to an extent, promote) concepts like individualism, human rights, political freedom, and other founding ideas of a liberal, democratic polity; i.e. the Protestant Reformation/Vatican II happened and they have been assimilated into Christian approaches to religious community. Also, it has a global infrastructure in place that could challenge the spread of Wahabi schools of thought with both money and ideas.

I am not convinced that Christianity, as it is practiced outside of Europe, is the liberalizing force she envisions — witness the struggles of the Anglican Communion and the Dominionist Christianity of the Americas. If her goal is something like a Reformation, it seems as if, instead of pushing Bibles at Muslims, we should be pushing both the Quran in translation and, well, Unitarian/Ethical Humanist/Jewish traditions of wrestling with the text and coming to one's own conclusions.

I'm also a little skeptical of the way she conflates African and Arabic practices with Islamic practice. I wonder if the bad things she experienced in her Muslim family or observed in immigrant African and Arabic Muslim families in Europe reflect Muslim practice in Indonesia or Turkey or the Balkans, which are large areas of Muslim practice which have a different tribal history as the basis of their Islam, which may have had different cultural results. (Although, I have to do this wondering with the thought that she might possibly be right and, until and unless Islam goes through its own Reformation, being an observant, orthodox Muslim (part of an observant Muslim community?) leads to a pre-modern world view.)

I question all of these things knowing full well that Hirsi Ali would condemn me for moral, um, turpitude, or at least a moral complacency, because there are clearly some Islamic communities which have beliefs and practices which are currently and physically harming women. I don't think we should discount her insight into that, and also her insight into how profoundly ignorant about operating in a society with regularized and regulated institutions like banks and credit cards and mail order catalogues and public schools and freedom of religion and, however anemic, popular political rule. While I don't think we should require immigrants to share our cultural beliefs (first of all, we'd have to agree on what those beliefs are), she does make me feel like we need to do a lot better job at teaching immigrants about how cultural
institutions work.

I, of course, have no idea how to do that, without imposing culture on
people. :/