The thing is that part of the problem is skipping the politics. Here, for instance, is a sentence … er … ah … kind of:

“Relatedly, because the campaign has had to [something something] in order to [something else], their [something goes here] has often been [something you don’t care about].”

Okay, kids: “has had to”.

Anyone? Anyone?

(sigh)

-bd

-bd

Watching Hugo voters choose “no award” instead of their nominees did not teach the Puppies Catholic virtues like humility or grace, however. Instead, many became consumed with rage. If they couldn’t take over the Hugos, the next step was to destroy them.

(Marcotte)

It’s a tough year for the Hugos; the Puppy Wars will be a movie, someday. To wit:

➤ Tingle, who claims to be a Tae Kwon Do grandmaster and masseuse from Billings, would not allow himself to be used by a bunch of bigots who think his work is an embarrassment just because it’s about gay dinosaur sex in space.

➤ “I would have withdrawn it from consideration,” Gaiman said of discovering that his nomination had Puppy support, “but even that seemed like it would have been giving these sad losers too much acknowledgement.”

And there you essentially have the debate about how to deal with Puppy politics needing your book; there are, I suppose, worse problems to have. Naomi Kritzer makes the point:

“If Wright considers my story unworthy of a Hugo―which is an entirely legit opinion, tastes vary―I would encourage him to take a look at the four other stories that would have been nominees. Would he like them better than mine? Quite possibly! But they were not on the ballot because of a slate he supported and participated in.”

If it really was a good story about Saint Nicholas berating a grieving mother and lecturing about theology, or the space raptor butt invasion, perhaps it wouldn’t sting to be one of the writers left out for the literary analogue of Gamergate. Still, though, we might take a moment to salute Chuck Tingle, who so understood what was going on with this year’s Hugo Awards that he sent Zoë Quinn to accept in his stead should Space Raptor Butt Invasion actually have won.

As it was―

Unfortunately for the mediocre men driving the Puppy campaign, their efforts failed even more spectacularly in 2016. The four winners this year of fiction awards were all women, and three were women of color, none of whom were on Beale’s Rabid Puppies slate.

―readers put the Puppies in their place. It is unfortunate to witness this manner of naked political strife about the Hugo Awards, but as Beth Elderkin notes in her review of Hugo politics and winners, “The big victor of the night was N. K. Jemisin”, and it really is worth enjoying that particular result, given how the white supremacist who put together the Rabid slate saw himself expelled from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America because it was just that important to denigrate a writer of color … (ahem!) … named (cough!) … N. K. Jemisin.

Yeah. Too many Puppies. This is still going on.

What a show.

-bd

____________________

Elderkin, Beth. “Hugo Awards Celebrate Women in Sci-Fi, Send Rabid Puppies to Doghouse”. io9. 21 August 2016.

Marcotte, Amanda. “The alt-right attacks sci-fi: How the Hugo Awards got hijacked by Trumpian-style culture warriors”. Salon. 23 August 2016.

To wit, I can’t explain the not/now joke properly insofar as it seems difficult to decide just what, between five hundred and, oh, say, two thousand pages is required in order to receive the full punch, and in truth, by the time it gets to twenty-four novels with no guarantee that the final tally won’t get larger, is it really worth it just to know why “not now” is one of the funniest jokes in literature?

Meanwhile, yeah, good luck with the sword.

-bd

____________________

Image note: Detail of xkcd #1722, by Randall Munroe, 18 August 2016.

• In order to accomplish a task one must forget the fact of being about it.

And that’s the thing: I cannot actually tell you what that means at the stake of paradoxical nullification.

Okay, okay, that last might be at least a shade toward the superstitious.

Zen pollution.

Fresh nothing.

-bd

Er … uh … (ahem!)

Right. Anyway, I’m going to give you three quotes―

➤ “In order to answer this question, it seems that immigrants in Queens and New Jersey, Catherine the Great, Russian oligarchs, Imperial relics and top auction houses had to all get involved.” (Irina Reyn)

➤ “Someone on Goodreads took the time to write out “Meh” as their whole review. I admire that dedication to sharing your indifference with the whole Internet forever.” (Bob Proehl)

➤ “In my heart, I’m a comedian—not a successful comedian, but one who is both sad and deeply committed to the art.” (Hannah Pittard)

―and then you’re going to go read the rest of Teddy Wayne’s July Q&A with five authors: Jennifer Armstrong, Patrick Flanery, Hannah Pittard, Bob Proehl, and Irina Reyn.

Sound good?

Excellent! Thank ye!

―bd

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Wayne, Teddy. “Life of an author on the internet: ‘Someone on Goodreads took the time to write out ‘Meh’ as their whole review'”. Salon. 5 July 2016.

Economists from Italy’s University of Padova compared data on 5,820 European men to see if longer compulsory childhood education could increase kids’ earnings over a lifetime. It does: Averaged across nine countries, boys who attended an extra year of school due to changing age requirements eventually returned an additional 9% of income.

But the researchers were surprised to find that, among kids who benefited from an extra year of school, those who grew up with more than 10 non-school books (that is, books they weren’t forced to read) at home eventually doubled that lifetime earning advantage, to 21%. Factors like whether the boys’ fathers had white-collar jobs, and whether their homes had running water, did not seem to make a difference.

Crucially, there was no significant difference between whether participants reported having 50, 100, or 200 books growing up. The key was whether they grew up with any number of books greater than 10.

The 2015 study from Brunello, Weber, and Weiss, published in The Economic Journal, is presently posted for open access.

Thus we find a scrap of evidence supporting something I think we all have known, instinctively at least, is true.

Keep reading. Keep teaching. Keep learning.

―bd

____________________

Brunello, Giorgio, Guglielmo Weber, and Christph T. Weiss. “Books are Forever: Early Life Conditions, Education and Lifetime Earnings in Europe”. The Economic Journal. 25 April 2016.

Ha, Thu-Huong. “Economists show that boys who grow up around books earn significantly more money as adults”. Quartz. 2 June 2016.

(h/t Science of Us)

By the end of this treatise on “appropriate choice of vocabulary” and the human impulse to “relativise” emotions, the reader still has no clear sense of how [Catherine] Millet feels about her mother’s suicide or what, if anything, this suicide has to do with her pained relationship with her husband. We learn more in one sentence of [Edouard] Levé’s about both the precise nature of the narrator’s feelings for his dead friend and the complications of intimacy in general.

And while I will not take a side―nor even try to figure out what the sides are, or if they actually exist at all―in Hannah Tennant-Moore’s introspection, I would at least go so far as to note she would seem to have a point with that paragraph.

Yeah, I know. Everybody’s a critic. Doesn’t mean a one of us has an answer. The answer. I mean, you know. An answer? Do I need an umbrella today? “Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nineteen! Nineteen!” Yeah, you know? It’s an answer.

―bd

____________________

Tennant-Moore, Hannah. “Too real for reality TV — or even memoir: The new novels that dare use fiction to reveal secret truths”. Salon. 14 February 2016.

Selma director Ava DuVernay has just been set by Disney to direct A Wrinkle In Time, an adaptation of the 1963 Newbery Medal-winning Madeleine L’Engle fantasy classic novel that has a script by Oscar-winning Frozen writer and co-director Jennifer Lee. Deadline revealed February 8 that DuVernay had been offered this film and was also in the mix at DreamWorks for Intelligent Life, a sci-fi thriller scripted by Colin Trevorrow and his Jurassic World collaborator Derek Connolly. DuVernay now has the offer on that film and is in negotiations on a pic that has 12 Years A Slave Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o attached to a fable about a UN worker in a department designed to represent mankind if there was ever contact with aliens, who falls for a mystery woman who turns out to be one. That film is produced by Frank Marshall, Trevorrow and Big Beach principals Peter Saraf and Marc Turtletaub.

I would imagine this is good news.

―bd

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Fleming Jr., Mike. “Ava DuVernay Set To Direct Disney’s ‘A Wrinkle In Time’; Script By ‘Frozen’s Jennifer Lee”. Deadline. 23 February 2016.

The CNN story goes on to interview various scholars who all say that to one degree or another Trump is, indeed, fascistic if not what we used to call “a total fascist.” Historian Rick Perlstein was the first to venture there when he wrote this piece some months back.

It’s hard to understand why this has been so difficult to see. On the day he announced his campaign, Trump openly said ....

As long as I have been aware of Digby, it has been through electronic media. And in the question of the ever-growing online world, I have tended to compare the reading experience to paper; this might well be the wrong context in the twenty-first century. She is good at what she does, but this is a quirk of the new era that continues to defy me.

That truncated second paragraph is not a quote; it is the next paragraph of her narrative. As one raised on paper, the last sentence of that first paragraph just reads strangely to me; without the embedded hyperlink, it makes no sense.

Historian Rick Perlstein was the first to venture there when he wrote this piece some months back.

Or … am I being pedantic?

Maybe I’m just too accustomed to the idea of the Martian eye, or alien anthropologists. Even as we find the internet today, hyperlinks can break. Imagine trying to put the record together sometime in the future.

____________________

Digby Parton, Heather. “The unprecedented nightmare of Donald Trump’s campaign: We’ve openly begun using the F-word in American politics”. Salon. 25 November 2015.

Perlstein, Rick. “Donald Trump and the ‘F-Word'”. The Washington Spectator. 30 September 2015.