Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

An op-ed by Harold Bloom came to yesterday’s Boston Globe by way of the L.A. Times. I heard about it through a comic reading by Mike Barnacle on the radio this morning. Bloom uses the National Book Awards’ decision to award their 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Stephen King as an example of “another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life.” Bloom gives J.K. Rowling a sarcastic nomination for the Nobel Prize for literature.

As a fellow fiction writer [Boston joke], Barnacle was incensed. There’s plenty in the article to offend, most notably where Bloom says that “Rowling’s mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.” Bloom, in case you don’t know, is a prominent literary critic. [See his wikipedia entry.] The real trouble with his article isn’t the legitimate criticism of King and Rowling’s weaknesses, but that Bloom makes no effort to explain what Pynchon and Roth have that trashy genre writers lack. So he comes off looking like a snob rather than a critic.

Maybe that’s beneath him, or maybe he feels that if a reader can’t distinguish between J.K. Rowling and Lewis Carroll there’s no point trying to explain. That may be true, but it only adds to the backlash against mainstream fiction from us trashy genre readers. If it were my article, I compare King to Shakespeare, another author with commercial appeal, and see whether King measures up.

Speaking of dissing, webloggers don’t get much respect, either, but Joe Clark wants every serious blogger to get their own ISSN number (International Standard Serial Number). We are all semi-daily periodicals. I took a look at the US request form, but you have to give the Library of Congress your name, address and phone number to get an ISSN. That’s almost as bad as registering a domain - I prefer my privacy, thanks.

I went into this MBTI an INTP and came out one:

INTP - “Architect”. Greatest precision in thought and language. Can readily discern contradictions and inconsistencies. The world exists primarily to be understood. 1% of the total population.

Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test

My actual numbers were:

Introverted (I) 75.76% Extroverted (E) 24.24%
Intuitive (N) 57.58% Sensing (S) 42.42%
Thinking (T) 75.76% Feeling (F) 24.24%
Perceiving (P) 50% Judging (J) 50%

I got email today from the folks at NaNoWriMo, warning me I’d be eaten by the database gremlins if I didn’t confirm my address for Year 5. I did nanowrimo last year, and I’m planning to nano again, so I clicked the appropriate link and re-registered myself.

At the other end of that link was a plea for funds. That’s not an unusual sight by any means, but they also mentioned their annual expenses: $35,885. Hosting costs money, but not that much money. Fortunately, they provided a PDF expense report to itemize this huge sum. Mystery solved - $29,800 of the expenses are salary for various part-time and seasonal NaNoEmployees. An additional $1,100 is for graphic design.

Maybe I’m a little too used to free stuff free, but asking for donations to pay someone’s salary seems a bit much. At the very least, they could ask for donations of graphics from artists, rather than paying over a thousand bucks for graphics that, while nice, weren’t necessary. I’m not sure why a phpBB and regional parties require such expensive staffing.

I spend a lot of time doing free stuff that benefits other fanfic readers and writers, other sci-fi writers, and other geeks, and I don’t ask for donations to pay myself a salary even though I could use one at the moment. My payment is other people’s labor on other free things from which I benefit. I used to think nanowrimo was one of those things.

Three-day word count: 2,500

My printer arrived ahead of the as-yet-unshipped mac, so I’ve been printing away merrily. Printers are evil incarnate. The PDF looks perfect in Acrobat Reader, but by the time it comes out of the printer, the margins are too big.

The first munge was page margins. My initial searches turned up several suggestions to uncheck the “fit to page” checkbox. However, there was no “fit to page” checkbox for me to uncheck. Extensive google research led me to upgrade to a newer version of Acrobat Reader (5.1) which did have the checkbox.

Acrobat Reader is huge, by the way, and takes an hour to download over dialup. But I did, and I unchecked the checkbox and printed my PDF. The margins came out too .

I suspected my homegrown PDF files, so I followed the instructions on the otherwise useless Adobe troubleshooting page. I tried printing an entirely different PDF, namely, the $99 rebate form for my printer. The margins were too . I’m still going to use it to get my rebate, for that you should be paying me for using this plastic paperweight of a printer effect.

Somewhere in google groups I’d read that the native OSX Preview program did this same margin munging, so I hadn’t bothered trying it. Now I was desperate, though, with a backlog of PDFs and no way to print them. So I ran one through Preview and presto–perfect margins!

Preview did have its own peculiarities, however. The font came out darker (perhaps because Adobe wasn’t shrinking the text down to increase the margins), and it was also missing all superscript numbers above 3. In some cases a little smudge showed up where the number was supposed to be. I figured this was a font problem, so I changed the font of all my superscripts. At long last, my file printed properly.

My little HP inkjet doesn’t compare to the big HP laser printer at school that required the user to sacrifice a text file before it would print a PS file. It’s more of a print imp than a print daemon, but I foresee hours of amusement in my printing future.

Dyslexic link of the day: ctue

Seema says I should be writing, so this is going to be a very short entry about some nice Terminal utilities I found at MacOSX Hints. The long story is at Improving Unix-Finder Interactions in OS X. I installed the fink version and then saved a new terminal .term file as directed, and now I can open the current Finder directory in the Terminal with just one click.

Some of the tricks at that site (like iTerm customization) won’t work for OS 10.1, but one commenter mentioned that anyone can type open . to open the local Terminal directory in the Finder. That alone, without any of the downloads, is a very useful hint.

Drabble count: 4 new Stargate drabbles

So I went to a wedding of an unnamed cousin at an unnamed Massachusetts college this weekend. My cousin is a graphic designer and over 40, and the setting was gorgeous, so this was far and away the most tasteful wedding I’ve ever attended. In fact, there may have been more good taste involved than in all the other weddings combined.

Weddings have an odd subculture all their own - I’ve always wondered how the chicken dance and the garter thing made it big. My cousin skipped those bits, but she didn’t manage to avoid the ceremony question. The unnamed groom is an atheist, so the officiant was a Massachusetts justice of the peace. I thought that might be an interesting change of pace, but it wasn’t.

Rhetoric is a lost art, so lost that not even the President of the United States can find it. Gone AWOL with it is the sense of ceremony. To pull off the wedding ceremony itself you need at least one of those, and usually both. For this reason, most weddings are flops long before the chicken dance. Many people don’t seem to realize that they are entirely unqualified to write a wedding ceremony. Being ordained minister, appointed justice of the peace, or even being the bride or groom does not confer the literary talent necessary to produce lines like With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.

What’s far more unfortunate than not being able to write the Book of Common Prayer is not being able to tell which one makes a better ceremony: the vows in use for hundreds of years or the new vows you and Tyler wrote for your “special” occasion. I’m not saying that no one can improve upon a traditional ceremony; I’m just saying that if someone can, it’s probably not you and it’s certainly not that nice justice of the peace I heard this weekend.

I’ve also seen my share of lovely traditional ceremonies marred by heartfelt sermons at the literary level of, say, off-the-cuff remarks by the President of the United States. This is only a slight improvement over impromptu vows themselves, and it’s a much harder problem to avoid. How do you stop the officiant from sermonizing? The best you can hope to do is find a known good public speaker, and we couldn’t even find one to be President.

My printer came yesterday, sans USB cable. I knew there had to be a catch somewhere in the whole $99 printer and $99 rebate scheme. But thanks to Radio Shack, I’m now printing merrily away.

I’ll be gone again for the weekend, so don’t watch this space.

Word count: 1380

Festivus is a festival for the rest of us. If you’re a trashy genre writer like me and my hundred thousand fanficcing friends, you may enjoy the Wired article linked above. Here are some excerpts:

According to the Internet Movie Database, 20 of the top 25 highest-grossing films of all time come from the sci-fi, fantasy or horror genres.

“Science-fiction, fantasy and horror films are not a niche,” Meyer said. “They are as mainstream as it gets. The biggest authors in the world are genre authors. Taken together, these genres represent the biggest form of entertainment in the world, which people still don’t understand.”

In other words, Trashy genre writers rule! Who wants to make the buttons?

You may ask, what is jute? (Or, alternately, Que é a juta?) Well, this entry is devoted to answering all your jute questions.

Jute is a plant from India used to make burlap, twine and a variety of other materials. Production involves fermenting the jute (retting) then separating out, drying, and sorting the fibers. See JM Jute for details and pictures.

The word jute comes from the Bengali jhuto. There are two species of jute: Corchorus ularis (Jute) and Corchorus olitorius (Jew’s mallow). You can see a picture of the jute plant at the Bangladesh Jute Research Institute. They’ve developed a cheap wool substitute, jute yarn. Jute is a big industry in India - the Jute Commissioner even has his own website.

Why jute? Evenweave jute is the base for Arraiolos rugs. In the US, you can get ten-count jute (ten threads per inch) and Persian yarn (a three-ply needlepoint wool thread - Paternayan makes the best one) to approximate the traditional Portuguese materials. Or you can order a kit from Portugal, which is how the whole jute question came up.

The oldest Arraiolos rugs were made with wool on linen, but linen has been out of style for several centuries now. It’s beyond me why Casa dos Tapetes de Arraiolos offers any wool on linen products, or which ones they might be. I have established that my kit (Seteais, the top one in this image) contains jute.

The price may seem like a lot (for Portugal), but it’s cheap compared to, say, buying painted needlepoint canvases and then wool on top of that, plus shipping. The kit is 1 1/2 feet square - not quite a rug, but big for a pillow. It takes a lot of wool to cover 2 1/4 square feet. The real appeal to me, though, is the Seteais pattern itself. Seteais is the most popular Arraiolos design and my favorite as well. It comes from the carpets of the Seteais Hotel outside Sintra, though it can also be seen in the Portuguese Embassy in Washington D.C. Normally it’s laid out in alternating squares, as in this rug. I don’t have a pattern for it.

Now that I’ve bored everyone to tears, I promise to stop rug geeking.

Word count: 300

[Update 9/17] Seema gave it a shot and couldn’t find the Site Feed tab. I tried with my old Blogger account and had no luck either. So skip the instructions below and go straight to complaining to Blogger. Or get a real blog - the people from MovableType now host blogs at TypePad. All levels have RSS feeds (the XML Syndication in the TypePad feature table). [/update]

Now that BloggerPro features have been added to non-pro Blogger, you too can publish an RSS feed! All you need to do is follow these simple instructions at Blogger.com. I’d prefer it if you pick “full,” so I can read your whole entry in my RSS reader rather than just the summaries. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read the Blogger intro to site syndication.) If this doesn’t work, leave a comment but also bug the Blogger people. Even LJ has RSS feeds!

You should also link the RSS feed somewhere in your template, preferably using one of the cool buttons that are everywhere these days. Pick one out of the huge collection at gtmcknight (under feeds) or make your own with Kalsey’s button maker.