Reading With Cheap Eyeglasses
Published January 8th, 2012 | 
I was blog post by new media phobic writer, Nicolas Carr, a guy who though he himself uses new media as a platform for his writing is nonetheless critical of everything digital. His latest target is e-books.
More specifically, he ponders whether being able to edit on-the-fly is a good things since a book is never really complete if you can constantly revise it quickly and painlessly. According to Carr:
What will be lost, or at least diminished, is the sense of a book as a finished and complete object, a self-contained work of art…
Well, this is a good one. Truly. I had to clean my cheap eyeglasses twice to make sure I was reading that correctly. Think about this: When the anti-eBook crowd initially poo-pooed the e-book, one of the criticisms was that there was no editorial process at all. Now Carr is saying that there will be too much editing. Huh?
Here’s my problem with this argument: Revision is a necessary part of writing. And many writers have published revised versions of printed “literary” books even after publication. Jerzy Kosinski to name just one noted writers, was infamous for doing this. Walt Whitman made it his life’s work to revise and update Leaves of Grass. And what about the many editors and literary scholars who have posthumously revised and updated well-known literary works (how many different editions of Shakespeare, Homer, The Bible are there? And don’t even get me started on what The Powers That Be have done to Twain). The only difference is that it takes longer to do in print. However, for the vast majority of writers, when a book is finished it is finished. Does Carr imagine that the ability to make quick post-publication revisions will cause writers who wouldn’t normally make post-publication revisions to make post-publication revisions? Like it’s an addiction or something?
Further, is Carr suggesting that a writer doesn’t even have the right to change and update his own work if he so chooses? This is nonsense. This whole idea that the physical form of a printed book is all that defines a book as a book is ridiculous. Is a bound collection of blank pages a book? Or is the book the written arrangement of words and ideas? Is The Grapes of Wrath less of a masterpiece in digital form? Because that’s the question we have to answer going forward. Not whether revision changes a piece of writing. Because is does that’s why we call it revision. The definition doesn’t change just because a book goes from print to digital.
I’m Not Dead Yet, But I Might As Well Be
Published May 5th, 2011 | In an early entry of this blog, I arrogantly proclaimed that editors who have slow turnover rates for submissions were just lazy. Over the past few years I have been forced to eat copious amounts of crow due to circumstances beyond my control which have seen my own turnover rates on submissions and the timeliness of my publication schedule become unforgivably tardy.
The recent debacle with my late lamented PC is just the latest setback. A setback so grave that I was forced to buy a new computer despite that fact that it seemed financially imprudent to do so. However, I reasoned that I couldn’t afford to wait until fall to by a new machine that waiting wouldn’t only cost me more. So, I went to Dell. Shopping for a PC isn’t that hardest thing in world, but it’s a bit more complicated than asking your dermatologist to recommend the best acne treatment on the market. You have to find a configuration that will be able to do what you need it to do and falls within your budget. And these days there are so many different kinds of computers. After two weeks of trying to sort out exactly what I would need, I settled on a Dell Studio XPS 7100. I’m not a major league gamer, so I knew didn’t need (and certainly couldn’t swing) a $2000 machine, but I did need something that could run the games that I do play and could handle my software and the fact that I generally work a computer to death. The 7100 seemed like a good fit.
My order arrived last Friday. I set it up and started to business. The good news was that, unlike with Windows Vista, Win 7 worked perfectly out-of-the-box. Most of my software worked just fine. But there were some problems. First of all, I couldn’t find the serial key for my Wordperfect software, so I couldn’t install that (instead, I downloaded the trial version of the latest Wordperfect and If I cannot sort out my problem with my older version, I’ll probably have to shell out more money to buy Wordperfect 15. Second, although Dreamweaver MX 2004 installed just fine on Win 7 and basically works, I cannot set-up FTP to synch the remote web server with the local host on my computer. For some reason I keep getting an error message when I try to configure the FTP settings. And I know the problem isn’t with me because I used the same information to configure the protocol using FileZilla and it worked just fine. So I have to conclude this is a compatibility glitch of some sort. Third, I cannot find or even remember the name of the font I use for 13th Warrior Review’s logo. And, finally, my 12 year-old scanner is no longer being supported by Cannon, so I don’t have a driver that works with Win 7. Luckily, I don’t use my scanner that often (which is probably why it still works after four years despite going through three printers, four desktops and two laptops during that same period).
There are many nice things about me new pc, however. Aside from the stability of Win 7, I’m loving how videos, games and movies look on this machine compares to the old pc. I like how much faster Win 7 boots up. I love that this PC runs quieter than the old one. Multitasking is better on this machine too.
So, while it may seem to some that I am dead, I am slowly coming back to life.
Maybe Somebody Pissed in His Tea
Published April 22nd, 2011 | So my friend Cindy emails me this morning, telling me about this writer she’d published in the debut issue of Yellow Mama who requested that she remove his story and bio from the YM archive:
“I was wondering if you’d now be okay with removing it from the archives? This isn’t at all a comment on Yellow Mama, it’s simply that it’s a very old story that I’m not particularly happy with these days and, more importantly, a very out of date bio. The reason I ask now is that I’ve just sold a series of novels and this is coming up on the first page of google hits for my name; I’d much rather anyone looking for information on me was led to my current work and up to date information.”
Okay, so let me get this straight . . . guy wants his story and bio removed from her archive because he thinks the story sucks and his bio is out of date? Seriously? No, that’s not the reason because he goes on to say that he got himself a book deal and he doesn’t like it that YM’s page rank is higher than his own blog. How is that not a comment on YM? Of course it’s a comment on what he thinks of YM now that he imagines he’s in the big leagues.
Point one: As I told Cindy, since Cindy didn’t have an archive at the time she accepted the writer’s story and wasn’t accepting Internet archival rights at that time, the writer can technically request his removal. However, his reasons for doing so are ridiculous. Bios go out of date. Is he seriously going to write every editor who accepted his work and request they remove his bio? Of course not. And why would request the takedown of any link for information about him when he’s trying to promote a book? YM’s target audience is the same audience he’s trying to reach. Are you going to tell me that those readers don’t buy books?
Point two: If his blog doesn’t rank as high in Google as YM, why not, instead of fucking with YM’s page rank, do something constructive to raise the page rank of his own website?
Point three: What an arrogant dickhead! Who does he think he is? Let’s see . . . you’re an unknown writer who gets a story published by an editor and some years later, after you’ve made a little bit of a name (or at least after you imagine you’ve attained a certain level of literary celebrity), you decide it’s perfectly okay to take a big steaming dump on the editor because she knew you before you were sitting at the cool kids table. That’s fucking sad. I say, let’s dig some big ol’ outdoor fire pits, light’em up and toss his ass in for roasting.
