Category: Book culture

Nitpicking

This post is really about language, thought it might not seem like it at first.

This afternoon, we went to a lice removal specialist up in Burlingame. We’d done the pesticide shampoo, we’d washed bedding and clothing in hot water, but it’s really hard to be patient enough to spend an hour combing through your partner’s hair to remove nits, and then spend another hour having your partner comb through your hair. We decided it was worth it to us to spend the money to have someone else do it for us.

As I sat there, I realized that what the fellow was doing to me was picking nits — he was, in fact, a professional nitpicker. As it is usually used, the word “nitpicker” has negative connotations: it means someone who pays too much attention to detail, who doesn’t see the forest for the trees, a micro-manager. But if you’re getting rid of a live infestation, you really, really want obsessive attention to detail. Thus it is curious that the word “nitpicker” has negative connotations; it makes more sense to me that it should have positive connotations.

But language changes over time, and the meanings of words often evolve away from their original meanings. So nowadays it is no longer a compliment to call someone a nitpicker.

Shameless promotion

If you’re looking for the perfect last minute-Christmas gift, there’s this great book by Carol Steinfeld called Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine To Grow Plants. Perfect for bathroom reading, the first half of the book has all kinds of bizarre and funny tidbits about how people have used urine over the centuries — as well as tidbits about the current state of peeing, including urinal video games. The second half of the book gives you serious information about how you can make your garden greener using urine.

So this is the perfect gift for the twelve-year-old boy on your gift list who likes pee jokes (and every adult American male is actually a twelve-year-old boy who likes pee jokes). It is also the perfect gift for the gardener on your list. And if you order by Wednesday, Carol can ship it to you via priority mail so you get it in time for Christmas (for an extra $4 in postage over the special Internet price of $12).

To get it in time for Christmas, call the phone number on Carol’s Web site. If you want it signed, she can sign it for you. And of course I think this is a great book, my sweetheart wrote it.

Anne McCaffrey: a brief homage

Science fiction writer Anne McCaffrey died on Tuesday. She is best known for her series of books about the dragon-riders of the planet Pern, but I also think of her as the writer who has made the lives of a lot of teenagers better. I still have a drawing of a dragon made by an eleven year old girl who made it through the first year of middle school supported in no small part by the Pern books. Another teenager of my acquaintance analyzed the dragonriders of Pern as characters who strove for and accomplished things that were challenging and important, and as such were worth emulating.

Not that McCaffrey’s books are just for teenagers. I first read her books when I was well into adulthood; for me as an adult, they provided a path into that same archetypal realm that the Star Wars movies, or the Lord of the Rings books, or the Harry Potter books and movies lead you into. But where Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are story cycles about the confrontation between good and evil, McCaffrey’s books are more about the ways that humans and other sentient beings confront impersonal natural forces.

Over the years, some of McCaffrey’s books made it onto the New York Times bestseller list; yet her stories never achieved the popularity of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter. I suspect McCaffrey achieved a somewhat lower level of popularity because the central conflict in her stories is between sentient beings and Nature, whereas the central conflict in Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter is between good and evil. The religious foundation of our Western culture accords greatest importance to battles between good and evil, and that cultural bias downgrades McCaffrey’s popularity. Given my own religious perspective, I prefer stories about confronting impersonal natural forces; I see more of that kind of thing in my day-to-day life than epic battles between good and evil; so I prefer stories like hers.

I would say that McCaffrey’s earlier books were her best. Her later books, especially some of the books she co-wrote with other writers, have the faint whiff of the writing-factory about them. But then, the majority of the Star Wars movies are less than inspired, the mock heroic language in the middle book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy is cloying, and there are far too many words in the Harry Potter books. Tapping into archetypes does not always produce great art, but it sure does produce satisfying art.

Brief obituary at Locus online.

Paying the bookstore tax

I went over to Berkeley to meet my friend Mike for lunch today. He told me about his forthcoming academic book. After we ate, we went to Dark Carnival, a bookstore in Oakland. As we were walking from the car to the bookstore, I told Mike that I now proudly claim my geekhood. “Geek pride,” I said. “I’m too f&$%ing old to be bothered hiding it any more.”

Claiming my geekhood means admitting — no, bragging about the fact that browsing in bookstores is one of my favorite activities. After a stressful week, I lower my blood pressure by going to bookstores. I probably read as much online as I read in books these days, but I still love going to bookstores. Bookstores are one of the few places where geeks and intellectuals still congregate in public, places where reading books is still a public and even social activity.

But bookstores are an endangered species, and I always make a point of paying the bookstore tax: you walk into a bookstore, you have to buy at least one book. Since I haven’t been to Dark Carnival in months, I bought four books, which was my way of paying back taxes. Despite the threat of the evil Amazombie, I want to be able to keep going to bookstores for a long, long time.

Dan McKanan on Tavis Smiley

Dan McKanan, the Ralph Waldo Emerson professor of Unitarian Universalist studies at Harvard, gets interviewed by Tavis Smiley, talking about McKanan’s new book Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition. It’s a good eight minute interview.

The book comes out in November from Beacon Press. You can pre-order it from the independent Seminary Coop Bookstore.

The Book of Revelation

“I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language. I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.”

Hunter S. Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 and other books, in his Generation of Swine (New York: Summit Books, 1988), p. 9; quoted in William McKeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson (New York: Norton, 2008), pp. 311-312.

“The day that changed the world”

With the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, coming up, it made sense that the exercise for our monthly writing group at church would be on some related topic. But of course not everyone was affected by the September 11 attacks in the same way, and for some people other events had a bigger impact on their lives than did the September 11th attacks. So the writing exercise for the month was to write something about the day that changed the world — as in, the day that changed the world for you, the day that changed your world.

To start us off, I read a passage about Pearl Harbor day from Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family by Yoshiko Uchida (Seattle: University of Washington, 1982, 2000):

It was one of those rare Sunday when we had no guests for dinner. My parents, sister, and I had just come home from church and were having a quiet lunch when we heard a frenzied voice on the radio break in on the program. The Japanese had attacked Pearl harbor.

“Oh no,” Mama cried out. “It can’t be true.”

“Of course not,” Papa reassured her. “And if it is, it’s only the work of a fanatic.”

We all agreed with him. Of course it could only be an aberrant act of some crazy irresponsible fool. It never for a moment occurred to any of us that this meant war. As a matter of fact I was more concerned with my approaching finals at the university [of California at Berkeley] than I was with this bizarre news and went to the library to study. When I got there, I found clusters of Nisei students anxiously discussing the shocking event. But we all agreed it was only a freak incident and turned our attention to our books. I stayed at the library until 5:00 p.m. giving no further thought to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

When I got home, the house was filled with an uneasy quiet. A strange man sat in our living room and my father was gone. The FBI had come to pick him up, as they had dozens of other Japanese men. Executives of Japanese business firms, shipping lines, and banks, men active in local Japanese associations, teachers of Japanese language schools, virtually every leader of the Japanese American community along the West Coast had been seized almost immediately.

Actually the FBI had come to our house twice, once in the absence of my parents and sister who, still not realizing the serious nature of the attack, had gone out to visit friends. Their absence, I suppose, had been cause for suspicion and the FBI or police had broken in to search our house without a warrant. On returning, my father, believing that we had been burglarized, immediately called the police. Two policemen appeared promptly with three FBI men and suggested that my father check to see if his valuables were missing. They were, of course, undisturbed, but their location was thereby revealed. Two of the FBI men requested that my father accompany them “for a short while” to be questioned, and my father went willingly. The other FBI man remained with my mother and sister to intercept all phone calls and to inform anyone who called that they were indisposed.

One policeman stationed himself at the front door and the other at the rear. When two of our white friends came to see how we were, they were not permitted to enter or speak to my mother and sister, who, for all practical purposes, were prisoners in our home.

By the time I came home, only one FBI man remained but I was alarmed at the startling turn of events during my absence. In spite of her own anxiety, Mama in her usual thoughtful way was serving tea to the FBI agent. He tried to be friendly and courteous, reassuring me that my father would return safely in due time. But I couldn’t share my mother’s gracious attitude toward him. Papa was gone, and his abrupt custody into the hands of the FBI seemed an ominous portent of worse things to come I had no inclination to have tea with one of its agents, and went abruptly to my room, slamming the door shut. [pp. 46-47]

Then each of us talked about the day that changed our worlds. I and one or two others spoke about our experiences on September 11, 2001; someone else spoke about Pearl Harbor Day; another about the Kennedy assassination; still another about a personal experience that was life-changing, even life-shattering. For each of us, it was the intersection of an exterior and catastrophic event, combined with a life-altering personal experience, that led to a “day the changed the world.” And then we spent an hour writing about our “day that changed the world.”

The varied experiences of our writing group made me curious about how other people define the “day that changed the world. So here’s a question for you, the reader of this blog: What was your “day that changed the world”? Was it 9/11, or Pearl Harbor Day, or JFK’s assassination, or MLK’s assassination — or something else? What happened on that day — both the world events, and your own personal events?

Experiments with blog books

I’ve been experimenting with producing books from blogs, using the Web-based service BlogBooker.

BlogBooker appears to have one or two bugs. First, while blog entries appear in chronological order, comments appear in reverse chronological order. Second, BlogBooker regularly inserts close quotation marks at the beginning of sentences. It does not handle blockquotes particularly well, leaving too much white space above them, and sometimes indenting the first line oddly.

BlogBooker is not perfect in other ways. While BlogBooker captures still images posted on a blog, it will not include the images associated with most embedded videos (e.g., YouTube videos). It inserts an ugly title page. As an option, it can list links in footnotes, which is useful, but it places the footnote at the beginning of the link, not at the end. If a blog post includes internal links within that page, BlogBooker lists those links like any other, which is not very useful. BlogBooker does not retain the italics and bold type of an original Web page, though it does retain strikethrough type. And it will only accept output from three blogging platforms: WordPress, Blogger, and LiveJournal.

One last feature that annoyed me: BlogBooker places static pages within the regular blog chronology. But I feel that static pages should not be included in the regular blog chronology. I chose to edit the dates of each page so that they would not be included in the date ranges which I used to generate the blog book.

Even though BlogBooker is not perfect, it does produce reasonably good output with some customization allowed. It uses LaTeX as its underlying publishing platform, which means the typesetting is attractive. It does offer a number of options: specified date ranges; 5 page sizes, including U.S. letter, A4, 6×9″, 7.5×9.25″, and B4; 6 type faces; and 4 font sizes (9, 10, 11, and 12 pt.). You can choose whether or not to include comments or post author. It will automatically generate a table of contents and number the pages. Layout options include two columns, and starting each entry on a new page.

Best of all, the service is free. You can give them a donation if you want, but it is not required.

Because BlogBooker provides a PDF file as output, it is easy to create a printed book using one of the online print-on-demand Web sites. As proof of concept, I used LuLu.com to generate a printed book in trade paperback (6×9″) size. I added my own title page, and generally spruced up the PDF generated by BlogBooker; this, and fiddling with the time-consuming LuLu.com service, took up quite a bit of time. I have not yet received the printed copy, but LuLu.com has always produced excellent printed materials from PDF files.

As for ebooks: The PDF file generated by BlogBooker can serve as a perfectly adequate ebook. You can also use LuLu.com or other online print-on-demand services to generate an ePub file from the PDF.

In summary, BlogBooker can generate a reasonably good PDF book from a blog. If you’re satisfied with their somewhat quirky formatting choices, you can easily generate a print book or ebook from your blog.