We're having a very interesting discussion on a recent blog post of mine about which modern authors will stick around to become classics. Do give us your thoughts.

Oh, and just to keep things fair, let's classify 'modern authors' as being people who have released new material within the last thirty years, and are still alive or only recently passed.

Very good stuff via Marginal Revolution -

In 1929, The Guardian polled its readers to find out which British authors they thought would still be popular in 100 years. Well, the century isn't quite up, but someone's unearthed this poll, and it's a cautionary tale for leading literary lights.

Here's The Guardian now:

Only another 20 years to go, and the top five are already looking shaky:
They are John Galsworthy (1,180 votes), H. G. Wells (933), Arnold Bennett (654), Rudyard Kipling (455), J. M. Barrie (286).

What of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, EM Forster, and Jean Rhys? This distinguished crew either do not figure in the 1929 poll, or clock in with derisory counts (Joyce gets fewer than 10 votes – alongside Max Beerbohm, it's pleasing to note).

Great War Fiction, where apparently somebody still reads this stuff, has some commentary:

Well, Galsworthy is still in print, and I’ve recommended the Forsyte Saga to my daughter as a good way of whiling away long cosy hours of breast-feeding. I don’t think he features on many academic reading lists, though. Wells and Bennett have their devoted followers, though there is more interest in Wells’s ideas than in his fiction, I think, and Bennett still seems to me the most under-appreciated of British novelists. Kipling is a great unignorable fact in English literature, but his name is at least as likely to produce vilification as praise. And Barrie and Walpole? Barrie is now a one-play man; Peter Pan continues to enchant, even when debased to panto. But have you tried any of his novels lately? The Little White Bird is positively creepy.

And Hugh Walpole, I fear, has quite disappeared from critical fame, and I can’t see him ever regaining it.

The list looks a little better once we get out of the Top Ten, with some more familiar names popping up:

George Moore - 165 votes
Bernard Shaw - 110 votes
Conan Doyle - 101 votes
R.H.Mottram - 79 votes
John Buchan - 63 votes
D.H.Lawrence - 61 votes
Chesterton - 60 votes
Aldous Huxley - 50 votes

Garnering only one vote is the still very popular P.G. Wodehouse. And getting absolutely no votes is a British writer who is far more widely read today than anyone else on this list: Agatha Christie.

Just yesterday I was reading a very good article by Eric D. Snider talking about the 50's John Wayne-John Ford western The Searchers, a middling hit when it was released that somehow morphed into a classic twenty-five years later. This largely unheralded film is now hailed as inspiration by two generations of filmmakers.

The fact is that books and movies that the popularity of a book or movie in it's 'moment' seems to have little bearing on its relevance to posterity. I think if you survey many of the landmark author with classic books that are a century old or older, you'll find that very few of them were immensely popular in their time. Many in fact toiled in near obscurity, only to be 'discovered' well after their deaths.

It's probable that there's a large element of chance in these things - if you're lucky some influential critic digs up one of your books thirty years after you're gone and gives it a new lease on life. There's no control over something like that.

But all the 'classic' literature tends to have a few things in common: either it deals in Big Themes or centers on some truly Memorable Characters. Stylistic choices, cultural relevance, progressive thinking - these generally don't speak to people fifty years on. They may sell books (or movies) at the time, but they also date those same works badly.

But who can really say what will stand the test of time?

How 'bout it? Anyone care to wager on what modern authors will still be read in 100 years time?

I might have mentioned earlier that I am currently reading a really brilliant book by John McWhorter called The Power of Babel - A Natural History of Language. If you have any kind of interest in language, you really need to get ahold of a copy.

Broadly, this book concerns itself with understanding what language is and how languages evolve and change over time. It also is a survey of not just the English language at its relatives but of the vast diversity of languages that span the globe. You'll encounter the strange, the baroque and the bizarre with languages like Fula, Swahili, Cantonese, Javanese and others. But even as he's holding the oddities of these tongues up to the light, McWhorter is always careful to explain how they got that way. And the explanations will change your conception of what a language is.

Here's a brief breakdown of the book. See if it doesn't intrigue you -

• Introduction - Where did languages begin, and when, and what's so special about them anyway?
• 1) The First Language Morphs into Six Thousand New Ones - This chapter demonstrates the specific kinds of changes that languages can undergo over the course of time, especially the 'erosion' of language that always seems to be happening.  It explains why this process is inevitable.
• 2) The Six Thousand Languages Develop into Clusters of Sublanguages - One of the author's major points is that there is no such thing as a language, really.  All languages are dialects: interrelated, constantly evolving and impossible to truly untangle into discrete 'languages'.
• 3) The Thousands of Dialects Mix with One Another - The author continues to illustrate the point that 'language' and 'dialect' are not separate things, by surveying a remarkably wide array of 'languages' and 'dialects' and showing the surprising ways in which they are similar... and different.
• 4) Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones - This chapter examines pidgins and creoles, the special cases of language that dramatically illustrate the human capacity for linguistic expression.
• 5) The Thousands of Dialects of Thousands of Languages All Developed Far Beyond the Call of Duty - The flip-side of the first chapter: if languages are always eroding, they are also always becoming more complex.  This chapter examines the whys and hows of the many odd and over-complicated features of languages.
• 6) Some Languages Get Genetically Altered and Frozen - One can't deny that literature, education and technology have had a serious impact on many modern languages.  This chapter examines the nuts and bolts of those effects.
• 7) Most of the World's Languages Went Extinct - We are losing languages all the time.  This effect has been exacerbated by globalization, but has in fact been going on for thousands of years.  Discusses the whys and what can be done.
• Epilogue: "Extra, Extra!  The Language of Adam and Eve!" - If all languages descended from a single, original language, what can we know about that language?  Is it possible to reconstruct it? 

This book is chock full of moist tidbits.  If you've ever wanted to know why all those European languages have genders for their nouns, where the heck tonal languages came from, why it's so hard for native English speakers to learn other languages and why Charlie Brown is bald (he's only eight years old!) then you need to read this book.  Although it's dry in parts, it never gets too technical and the author's rather random illustrations and pop-culture references (see the Charlie Brown bit) are engaging.

Since I'm so taken with it at the moment I'm sure I'll be blogging further about it.  But you really should take a look for yourself.

Via Freakonomics -

Wired has profiled Paul Offit, the inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, and his ongoing battles with the anti-vaccination crusade, who have selected him as one of the unofficial villains of their movement. Some have gone so far as to label him a "biostitute."

Personally, I find the label "biostitute" extremely unwieldy. Even "bio whore" would be catchier. I think that the movement's propaganda team needs to go back to the drawing board on that one.

There are a lot of interesting issues here: human perception of risk, the workings of the pharmaceutical industry, knowledge and the internet, etc. But I think the most interesting question is this: given that we're a large, ordered society of people living in close proximity together, where do we draw the line in requiring people to participate in things like vaccinations?

Because arguably people who forgo vaccinations put more then themselves at risk. They are also risking their entire community. As the article points out, a non-vaccinated person in a group of vaccinated people can actually be more risky to someone who is vaccinated, but whose vaccination has not 'taken'. This is a condition that cannot be identified ahead of time.

More broadly, large swaths of unvaccinated population could allow diseases that have been almost eradicated to run rampant.

At the same time, there's something deeply distasteful about forcing anyone to inject something into their body.

What do you think?

For our last Bad Movie Night, we watched Clue, which several of us had never seen. I rather enjoyed it. I thought the writing was hilarious and the character acting by the large ensemble cast was pitch-perfect.

Of course famously the film has three endings, all of which we watched. Even though the third ending is, in my opinion, far and away the most plausible and satisfying, I find the concept of multiple endings to be pretty intriguing.

I mean think about it. Imagine seeing Clue in 1985, knowing nothing about the multiple-ending gimmick. You catch the film on a Wed. night, and then at work the next day you start discussing with your coworker. "Man, I totally knew that Miss Scarlett did it," you say. "Are you kidding?!?" he retorts, "it was Mrs. Peacock!"

The discussion which ensued before the two of you straightened things out would be fascinating.

Sadly, as far as my Googling can turn up, people going into the theater probably knew there were multiple endings as the gimmick was part of the marketing. That's a missed opportunity for a unique social experiment, as far as I'm concerned!

Maybe the time is ripe to try it for real.

The fact is, it's fairly common for a film to have multiple endings. Many, many films get reshoots after initial test screenings. When audiences react badly to an ending, it's not uncommon for the studio to demand that a new one be cut together. (Going strictly by DVD special features, it's my experience that these changes are virtually always for the better, studio interference notwithstanding.)

Meanwhile, international and foreign films are sometimes released with actual multiple endings. It's not unheard of for a film that had an ambiguous or downer ending in its original release to turn up in the US with a happy ending, at least of sorts.

If you've ever watched the 'alternate ending' on your special edition DVD, the changes in tone that a new ending supplies can be striking. A different ending can change a film from a cerebral thriller to a frenetic action flick. It can have you leaving the theater with a sense of confusion or an air of satisfaction. It can be the line between whether a film was brilliant or absurd.

The ending is the last thing you see in the movie, so it is going to have a disproportionate impact on how you perceive the tone of a movie. If the ending has a disproportionate amount of action, you're more inclined to think of what you've just seen as an 'action movie'. If the ending is happy, you're more inclined to label the movie as 'upbeat', even if everything that came before was doldrums and depression.

Even more importantly, for many films, is that the ending explains or interprets the rest of the film. Clue is of course a sterling example of this. There are three different explanations for the events that lead up to the climax, and three different reinterpretations of the characters involved.

Finally, and I think this is of paramount importance, the ending decides the themes of the film. Every story is a problem in search of a resolution. How that resolution is achieved is thematically significant. A story where all the bad guys get what's coming to them has strong themes of good versus evil and justice. This is a world where morality triumphs, the world that we all, theoretically, want to live in.

Take the same story, but now the good guys are killed too. Now you have themes of sacrifice and you find yourself living in a more tragic world. And then sometimes the story ends with the bad guys winning, or people just dying at random. These stories tend to ponder existential themes - who are we? Do we really matter? What does it mean to be human?

These are just a few examples. There are many different possibly themes to a story, and even more endings that get you there. But the point is that tweaking an ending even slightly could radically alter our perception of a movie.

I think it would be very cool for someone to release a movie that really played with that. Shoot two or three different endings and send different prints to different theaters. Don't tell anyone that you're doing it. Watch the confusion that results.

The key would be to make the endings differ in subtle ways: reordering key events, or emphasizing different things. I think a straight up happy ending versus sad ending would be too obvious, too quickly figured out. Likewise an ending where everyone turned out to be space aliens or where it was all a dream. Keep it subtle, just enough to twist the viewers' perceptions and expectations of the film they just saw.

Then see what people have to say.

Audience Participation: What kind of ending do you like best. Which was your favorite ending to Clue?

I've always had a slight distaste for 'Banned Books Week'. At the root of my unease is the fact that I don't see a lot of government censorship of books going on nowadays. Who in fact is banning these books that we're supposed to be reading?

It turns out, almost no one. The vast majority of the list is books that have been 'challenged', virtually always by private citizens and virtually always unsuccessfully. Which, last time I checked, did not constitute censorship in any sense of the word*. And in the light that this editorial throws on it, Banned Books Week starts to look a lot more like a powerful, secretive lobby making fun of concerned parents.

A celebration of Banned Books is a great idea if it actually addresses a problem. For instance, if it was raising awareness about books banned in, I don't know, say Iran. That would be cool. But when it's a bunch of librarian activists getting huffy because old Mrs. Tweedle is worried about Harry Potter, it starts to smack of self-righteousness to me.

Mind you, I'm in favor of lots of books being available. I'm in favor of parents doing the job of okaying what their parents read and not waiting on schools or libraries to do it. If that's what this is about, fine.

But calling it 'Banned Books Week' just seems a little disingenuous.

* And these are librarians. Shouldn't they know what a word means?

Hat tip to Nathan Bransford -

The dominant narrative in the media is that we're in the middle of a vampire craze, riding high on a bubble of sexy bloodsuckers. But Slate asks an insightful question - when have we NOT been in the midst of a vampire craze? Interactive graph included!

Do you think vampires will ever become truly played out? I thought so... but that was back in like 1996, and vampires are going strong today. So I am clearly in error. But will our appetite for endless permutations of "They're vampires! But with..." ever wane?

Discuss.

People have been talking about this idea virtually since the advent of Napster: that the rise of the mp3 heralds the end of the 'album' as a cohesive unit of music. Who needs labels? Who needs albums? Why not just record two or three songs that you really like and put them out there on the internet for fans to digest?

It's a testament to what a radical departure this is from the way we normally digest music that no major artists have actually done this.

Well, until now.

So, what noted rock group is crazy enough to try something like this?

I hope you guessed Smashing Pumpkins, 'cause then you got it in one. The name of the not-an-album has been announced as Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, which is actually a less ridiculous title than Mellon Colly and the Infinite Sadness, so don't hate.

Teargarden is supposed to consist of 44 songs, which will be released one at a time as absolutely-honest-to-goodness FREE downloads.

The songs will apparently break down into eleven four song EPs. Physical EPs will be released, as will a boxed set, but all physical media associated with the project is planned to be Limited Edition. In other words: downloading the songs for free is actually the Official Way To Get Them.

Hipsters United has the breakdown but generally speaking this should be a pretty interesting release to watch. And listen to!

( My thoughts... )

This smacks slightly of old fogey-ism, but Chris Higgins over on Mental_Floss links to some interesting ruminations from the NYT on the state of everyone's favorite Danish brick toys:

Even as other toymakers struggle, this Danish maker of toy bricks is enjoying double-digit sales gains and swelling earnings. In recent years, Lego has increasingly focused on toys that many parents wouldn’t recognize from their own childhood. Hollywood themes are commanding more shelf space, a far cry from the idealistic, purely imagination-oriented play that drove Lego for years and was as much a religion as a business strategy in Billund. …

In the United States, Lego’s biggest market and the biggest toy market in the world, games with themes like “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” were among the reasons Lego sales jumped 32 percent last year, well above the global pace. But experts like Dr. Jonathan Sinowitz, a New York psychologist who also runs a psychological services company, Diagnostics, wonders at what price these sales come.

“What Lego loses is what makes it so special,” he says. “When you have a less structured, less themed set, kids have the ability to start from scratch. When you have kids playing out Indiana Jones, they’re playing out Hollywood’s imagination, not their own.”

I was pretty into Legos between the ages of 10-12, which coincidentally seemed to be about the point where Lego began transitioning from 'generic colorful bricks' to very specialized sets. Even at that point I and my playmate Scott had mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, some of the new, highly specialized parts allowed you to build really cool stuff. There were certain pieces that were highly sought-after (at least by two specific twelve-year-olds) because they allowed us to fix more gun-turrets to our custom space cruiser or whatnot. On the other, the newer sets seemed to have bits that were so specialized that it was hard to imagine what you would use them for apart from what was on the box.

To be fair, I think that these 'super-specific' parts were definitely the exception. The fact is that a kid with a good imagination can make use of most stuff. And two years ago I bought a small undersea Lego set to use as a hands-on demonstration of following instructions for some kids, and I was impressed that the designers had leveraged mostly standard pieces to build an undersea angler!

What I think is perhaps more insidious about Lego's strategy in recent decades is that any purist worth their salt will want to build only with similarly-themed sets. If you're building your own spacecraft out of Star Wars sets, you're definitely not going to want to use clashing Indiana Jones bits willy-nilly. That means buying more sets as the kid tries to acquire the parts that they need with the right color schemes and paint jobs. And they're certainly not going to throw all their bricks into a big bag, as Chris Higgins describes!

In spite of the NYT highlighting recent media tie-ins, it's my experience that the days of generic Lego bricks have been long gone for quite some time. What do you think - is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Via Sexy Videogameland (Yes, really. Good blog, actually; female games journalist gives her perspective on the industry and the art. Check it out.) -

The final reckoning of the infamous Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas 'Hot Coffee' scandal:

With Take-Two's $20 million settlement with its investors late last week, the long-wrought 'Hot Coffee' episode finally comes to a close. The settlement comes after the $2.75 million the publisher had previously set aside for payments and costs to incensed consumers -- and that's not all.

Once a user mod revealed a hidden sex minigame, the recall, re-rating and re-release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas the publisher had to undertake was surely expensive, concussing revenues -- where major GTA releases usually bring windfalls, the company's third quarter in 2005 showed a $28.8 million loss.

An estimate based on legal costs and lost sales is ultimately just a ball-park guess, of course -- that $20 million also compensates investors for Take-Two's stock option backdating scandal, and the company's insurance paid much of it. It's also impossible to create a precise lost-sales figure.

But the financial cost of "Hot Coffee" to Take-Two is clearly in the tens of millions, at least -- a huge price tag for a small share of game content consumers were never even supposed to see.

More here.

Alexander notes in her article that the cost to the video game industry was probably ultimately far greater than the cost to Rockstar, the game's developer, and Take Two, it's publisher. Video games are a medium still struggling for legitimacy, and continually saddled with the reputations of their most extreme representatives. A hidden sex game in one of their most high-profile releases does not help matters.

Video games, or at least their descendants, will most likely be the last great frontier of entertainment and storytelling. I really believe that virtual worlds and interactive works will be very important to us in the future. We're just beginning to understand how to tell great stories with these tools, but in time they will be every bit as powerful in this regard as film.

Let's not limit the kind of things that we can do in a virtual environment to stuff as silly and puerile as 'Hot Coffee' at this early stage.

I read Francis Fukayama's The End of History a couple of years ago, and wrote at least a few very lengthy posts on it. I don't know if anyone read them, but the book itself IS worth reading. It's one of the most provocative and ambitious theories ever put forward about human development.

Whether you agree with it or not, once you've read it every argument or prediction you make on the subject must thereafter be in reference to it.

Very, very broadly, Fukayama argues that liberal democracy is the end point of human political development. Democracy, and everything that goes with it - free markets, globalization, a general lack of full-scale warfare between states. As we stand on the threshold of widespread, near-universal adoption of democratic forms of government, we are coming, in some sense, to the end of history.

Fukayama wrote his original essay (which he later expanded into a book) in 1989. By 2002, as the US became earnest about its War on Terror in the Middle East, Fukayama was often considered widely discredited. After all, here we are, a democracy, fighting a war. So history goes on, yes?

Via Marginal Revolution, this guy says 'not so fast':

[What is t]he best prediction of the past 20 years?

Before answering this question, let’s first examine what has happened over the past 20 years.

1. The world has gotten much more peaceful. I recall reading that the last couple years were the most peaceful in all of human history (and pre-history for that matter.) Perhaps someone can find the article.

2. The world has gotten much more democratic. The number of democratic countries has soared at the fastest rate in history, by far.

3. The world has gotten much more market-oriented. There has been a huge wave of privatization and deregulation of prices and market access. And this trend extends far beyond the formerly communist countries.

So the obvious choice for most successful prediction is Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 claim that “history was ending,” that the great ideological battle between democratic capitalism and other isms was essentially over, and that henceforth the world would become gradually more democratic, peaceful, and market-oriented.

So you would think that intellectuals would treat Fukuyama as a hero, that he would be figuratively hoisted on our shoulders and paraded around as the prophet of the new age. Just the reverse. I must have seen his name mentioned dozens of times in intellectual outlets like the New York Review of Books. And every single time, without exception, the reference has been derisive, mocking, a sort of rolling of the eyes in wonder than anyone could have believed anything so foolish. So what gives?

Scott Summer has some interesting theories on why intellectuals disdain Fukayama, and takes a broad look at the various 'exceptions to the rule' that still plague our world. Also, China. Worth reading.

This is exactly what I hate about online product reviews.

One of the lessons that living with Dr. Mike taught me is that you should never assume the nutritional content of something. Often foods whose packaging markets them as 'green' or 'healthy' or 'lite' turn out to be surprisingly high in caloric or fat content. Fortunately, the back of the box can't lie. But you do have to actually look at it.

You have to especially watch out for stuff that says 'zero calories' or 'zero fat', I've noticed. There's almost always a trade-off being made! Low in one often leads to high levels of the other.

So I was looking at the back of a can of my addiction Diet Dr. Pepper this morning, just to make sure I wasn't imbibing liquid fat by the gallon. No worries there:

Calories: 0
Total Fat: 0g
Total Carbs: 0g
Protein: 0g

Not a significant source of other nutrients.

Great, but what, exactly is in the can?!?

---

No doubt all the cool kids have already seen this, but as usual I'm a bit behind. Anyway, it's pretty freaking hilarious, and catchy as all get out:

The Guild's Do You Want To Date My Avatar -


The Guild is a pretty awesome web show in and of itself, so you should watch all of those too. Also, I'm going to run away with Felica Day and marry her forever.

---

I was never that enamored with the first Silversun Pickups album. Their sophmore release is different, though. "Swoon" isn't just parroting the chord progressions of The Smashing Pumpkins circa 1994. It's a genuinely original piece of work that still harnesses that sound. Very, very good.

Give it a listen.

I've written before about how I'm not very impressed with Charles Stross as an author. I don't think he's an idiot, though. After diving into his latest novel, Halting State, I just wonder if he isn't in the wrong profession.

What should we do with him instead? Make him an economist, maybe? Give him a law degree and put him in charge of sorting out the intellectual property mess? Or possibly just make him a consultant for architecting Web 4.0?

I think he'd shine in any of these positions. And then we'd be spared sentences like this:

TI is an angel specializiing in high-tech start-ups, your typical Web 3.1415 outfits, and TI contracted DBA - in the person of Chris Morgan, full partner (and Director of Risk Management) - to produce full pre-IPO investment reports on their clients.

If you feel like you just accidentally read the prospectus for a Silicon Valley startup instead of a line from a novel, well, wait until you try the whole thing. And that second person singular thing is not an accident - throughout the entire book, all three different characters are referred to as you.

Which, believe it or not, doesn't help to make the long-chain molecules of jargon porn less hard on the ear. It's like being whacked over the head with a baseball bat made of old Wired articles. Stross is clearly trying to emulate old-time cyberpunk heroes like Gibson, but he comes off sounding like a copywriter for Microsoft on cocaine.

The plot doesn't make a lot of sense. Or maybe it does, but the author never slows down long enough to explain the soup of acronyms and buzzwords he's spewing at you, so whether they resolve themselves into something coherent at some level is anybody's guess. And remember, I write this as a member of the target demographic. What someone would make of this who is over 35 doesn't eat, drink and breathe the internet for a living I shudder to think.

So no, there's no character and no plot and the sentence structure will burn your eyes, yet I'm going to go ahead and recommend this as a book possibly worth reading.

Halting State takes place about twenty minutes into the future, and even as he does violence to the very concept of a novel, Stross has a lot of interesting and intriguing things to say about What's Next. Peer-to-peer networks, cellular phones, network security, quantum computing, ARGs, risk management and the economics of MMOs all get some attention here and it's fascinating stuff. I would rate his vision of the future as one of the least implausible ones I've read recently. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, this really is your ticket to ride.

The cliff notes of Stross's vision is a world where information is not getting any more centralized or any more secure. As distribution spins out of control, international powers have to find new ways of spying on each other and keeping their own stuff secure and where the spheres of corporate gamesmanship, international NGOs, government policymaking and the dabbling of private citizens bleed into each other. The resulting vision is somewhat compelling.

If you're not quite ready to wade into Stross's prose to dig these gems out, however, you can go straight to the horse's mouth. I don't know who got a leading New York Times economist and a science-fiction writer together for a panel, but somebody did and the resulting transcript is worth reading.

Watched a film in Swedish with some friends last night. We had subtitles on, natch, but I was surprised to recognize some words and even puzzle out some very simple sentences. Swedish pronunciation is definitely very strange, though.

While I was in Amsterdam the Dutch often questioned the utility of learning their language. But it definitely seems to me that the Germanic languages share enough commonalities that knowing one means having a hook into any of them.

A German speaker is not going to be able to understand spoken Dutch or (I imagine) Swedish very well, but they'll definitely recognize certain words. When the languages are written down it gets even better. Even I with my very poor Dutch could puzzle out many German signs when I visited the country.

My study materials are still back in A'dam (they should come back to me next week, though) and I'm definitely going to pick them up and do some review work. While I'm sure it doesn't help to not be exposed to the language every day, I don't think that I've lost nearly as much as I feared I might.

Certain phrases still pop into my head in Dutch at times, and I occasionally annoy friends and family by speaking a sentence or two in the language.

All this only strengthens my resolve to find a way to continue my mastery of the language. If nothing else, I could always use it as a springboard into German (I don't see myself learning Swedish, as I delightful as the people are*).

So far it seems that I learned enough Dutch that it actually sunk in and doesn't simply evaporate as soon as I'm not using it. Hopefully that will continue to be the case in the months or years to come.

* I knew one Swedish girl in Amsterdam, and she was pretty much everything you would expect. She had a hilarious accent, loved to party, wore bright clothes and listened to dance music obsessively. Oh! and she was blond.

I actually think that shaving is kind of an interesting topic.

I assume that my forebears were not so different from me in that they found sporting a bristling growth on the bottom half of their face neither comfortable nor attractive. But how did they shave without the power of Gillette? And while we're on that subject, how did Gillette and Schick corner the market on selling me over-priced disposable blades?!

As always, it's Mental_Floss to the rescue.

So, any guys out there want to ditch their razors and give pumice a shake? How about clam shells?

*shudder*

Novel writing research, guys!

As I pull together the outline for my Future New York Times Fiction Bestseller I am among other things trying to figure out the characters. A couple of characters who were fuzzy placeholders are starting to come into focus. I've got a brother and sister, and I've decided that a defining feature of their story-arc is that they're the offspring of a biracial family.

I've done some Googling on the subject and already found some really fascinating writing about children who grow up 'between two worlds'. In fact it's clearly one of those story ideas that you realize could easily be the focus of a book all by itself. Sadly it's just going to be squeezed in there somehow, since the focus of the book is already set. But I'm still interested in understanding this phenomenon a bit more.

If you or anyone you know have a perspective on growing up as part of a biracial family I'd love to hear about it. Also, any articles or blogs you may know of on the subject are of interest to me as well.  Note that I'm interested in personal experiences and the psychology of the situation, not the politics.

Thanks!

NOTE: Biracial does not strictly mean black and white, although that seems to comprise the bulk of the writing on the issue. That's probably both the most extreme and the most common kind of biracial family in America, but I'm actually leaning away from that combination for my characters. So stories of being half-Asian, half-South African or half-Philipino, half-French are also welcome.

Also - the most interesting articles I've found so far are this one, from a parent's perspective, and this one, from a child's.

ginnyz responded to my earlier post on great works of literature that suck with her own list of works that should be 'fired from the canon'. She reports being allergic to 'works with an entirely too British sensibility.' Fair enough.

That got me thinking about where there's a specific type of literary volume that, uh, doesn't exactly speak to my soul. Upon further reflection I have concluded that there is. It is this:

I can't stand novels where I'm inclined to dislike most or all of the central characters.

I'm not simply talking about not identifying with certain types of characters. Yes, if you populate your book with characters I find insufferable then I will be annoyed. But I'm talking about this form of literature (which I think is VERY twentieth century) where authors protagonists who have essentially no redeeming features. They're hateful, spiteful, dingy, dirty, miserable, small-minded and they have no aspirations to change. And here we have a 300+ page novel, starring them! In God's name Why?

If you want specific examples I'll throw Madame Bovary or Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (a book that basically ruined Faulkner for me) out there. The first at least had the advantage of being intended as social satire, but the reason why we should want to read about the Bundren family will forever elude me. These aren't good people. They're not interesting people. They don't have an interesting story. Why should anyone care? I, for one, fail to.

Even in the obvious presence of satire, like in Bovary, I find this sort of approach to character very spurious. Madame Bovary, the person, does not exist in real life. No one is truly that shallow, that completely self-centered, that "bourgeoisie." Or if they are, they weren't always. Making a character that is so completely two-dimensional and then making fun of them seems like getting in some cheap shots. I don't feel like Camus is really sticking it to the middle class when he doesn't make any good faith effort to find out who the middle class really are.

I'm not saying that I only like books where the heroes are heroes and the protagonists are saintly in their conduct. I enjoy the flawed anti-hero, the tragic figure and even the selfish bastard who has a momentary glimmer of repentance just as much as anybody, if not more. But I don't like characters who have been cynically dehumanized and stripped down until they're nothing more than objects of misery.

If that's your vision of humanity and that's what you want to write about, fine. But to me it seems like a colossal failure of the imagination. Throwing in the towel on humanity and declaring "Well, I guess life just sucks," is something any alienated fourteen-year-old can do. When adults do it, only presumably with less ignorance and more cynicism, should we really reward the steaming pile that results with the title of 'Great Literature'?

I'm just asking.

I'm of the opinion that the literary movements of the first half of the twentieth century did us no favors. Not only did a lot of the books produced by modernism suck, but they carried along with them this bizarre conceit that we should like them because they were so bad.

Possibly we should extend the blame back to their predecessors? I object to the Romantics on ethical and philosophical grounds (ever since reading Plagues of the Mind) but at least those people knew how to tell a story. Tess of the d'Urbervilles may be maudlin and overwrought, but it does have characters, sentence structure, and a plot, and for that we should applaud it.

This modern fallacy that good writers can and should chuck all these things out the window is dwarfed only by the one that says that readers who don't get the deep inner meanings buried in the resulting mess must be card-carrying members of the bourgeois. If you're bored or annoyed or disgusted by hundreds of pages of tortured inner monologue written in a fractured style, then YOU are to blame!

I'm not of the opinion that one should never have to make an effort in literature. Struggling through some of the giants of literature is a noble endeavor and will arguably make you a better person. But the idea that a book can't be good unless it's a struggle? That's poison.

Ahem.

I could rant on about this topic at length, but this is really just a preamble to this wonderful list I found via Crof's Writing Fiction Blog: Fired From The Canon. Literary blog The Second Pass has compiled a list of books by literary giants that you should feel no compunction about skipping. Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and Cormac McCarthy make the cut (or don't), among many others!

I have been fortunate enough to have been spared all the books on this list*, and for most the argument seems strong for continuing in my ignorance. The only exception is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Based on everything I know about it, I think it's something I would like, and perhaps more importantly, something I need to read regardless.

What about you? Are there any books on that list that make you beg to differ? Any books that you would add to it? Go!

* I have sort of a sense of smell that instinctively warns me away from books and films that I won't enjoy. My experience is that this internal early warning system tends to be fairly accurate. It's not simple luck that I've never tried to read On The Road.

One of the student volunteers at the nearbye Mission House is a German girl named Anna. She is quite interested in English slang and wants me to make her a list of the more obscure or esoteric slang words to use to amuse her language teacher. Fair enough, but I have a hard time of thinking of these things in a vacuum. So I turn to you, dear friends and readers. Please leave your comments and I will compile a nice list of slang to pass onto her. Clean stuff only, please, although certainly you are encouraged to make suggestions that would sound funny coming from a German. I've already got her using "off the hook" and "all up in yo grill".

British slang also welcome!