Category: Books

Governor Sarah Palin may be getting $7 million for her presumably forthcoming book, but I hope the eventual publisher has set aside a chunk for whoever’s going to have to edit that baby.

“We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there and understand the contrast. And we talk a lot about, OK, we’re confident that we’re going to win on Tuesday, so from there, the first 100 days, how are we going to kick in the plan that will get this economy back on the right track and really shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars?”

—Sarah Palin, suggesting we are at war with Iran,
FOX News interview, Nov. 1, 2008

I remember being enthralled by The Andromeda Strain when I first saw the movie as a kid. It’s one of those stories that hit me at an impressionable time, and in such a way that I remember it far better than other movies from the same era.

Despite being a big sci-fi fan though, I never read much of Michael Crichton‘s stuff. I watched the big movies like Jurassic Park, even picked up a used copy of his early Muslim warrior gone a-viking novel Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan Relating His Experiences with the Northmen in A.D. 922 (and laughed at Antonia Banderas’s performance as the title character in the movie adaptation: The 13th Warrior).

His later stuff, however, seemed to go off the rails. Just “wack” as the kids say. Like 2004’s State of Fear, in which “eco-terrorists” plan to break off a piece of the Antarctic ice shelf with explosives in order to create environmental crises that will enable them to keep raising funds on climate change. Enough explosives to break off huge chunks of ice? You could sell that stuff on the market to raise funds if you had it.

Still, sorry to hear of his death, for old times’ sake.

From an On the Media interview with a former Ayn Rand enthusiast who wrote an article about why some teenage girls are drawn to Rand’s work:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: As research for her piece, Benfer wrote to book editors she knew, trolling for opinions about Rand.

AMY BENFER: One book editor wrote back to me and said, I avoided reading Ayn Rand until I was 22. And after I finished The Fountainhead, I felt I had discovered something very important – never date a boy who is reading The Fountainhead.

I saw the best minds

Of my generation

Destroyed by Madness

Twenty-odd years ago back when I was a young man working at Himber’s book warehouse in Eugene unpacking box after box of everything from Gödel, Escher, Bach to Sweet Valley High: Double Love, I picked up the habit of reading the back cover copy of nearly everything that I touched, just to inform myself about what was on the market. I had a particular fondness for the copy on romance novels, and when I found a particularly good one, I’d save it for a dramatic reading to my co-workers, which usually got a laugh.

After I moved to Portland and had worked at Powell’s for a while, I ended up in charge of stocking the popular fiction section. I called it the “swastika and bodice” section, because about half of what I stocked was thrillers of some sort, which tended to have visual referents to the Communists or the Nazis on the cover, or they were romance titles. I continued my practice of reading out the covers, and at one point made the suggestion that this could be turned into some sort of event.

Other, more-highly-placed people than myself (I didn’t even do the ordering for the section, which was itself looked down upon because it was, well “popular” fiction) did the organizing, but on the next Valentines Day, there was a packed crowd in the Anne Hughes Coffee Room, where several actresses from the community — and one guy, me — read passages from a variety of bizarre and sultry novels.

None of them, however, had anything about ferrets in them, so far as I’m aware.

You probably can’t tell it from my blog, which has no editor watching over my words and no staff overseeing my hastily-jotted notes, but once upon a time I fancied myself a proofreader and copy editor.

For a short while after I attended the New York University Summer Institute of Book and Magazine Publishing, I thought I was going to be able to make a career of proofreading manuscripts. I did a couple, including The Random House Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation, but work petered out, I didn’t follow up, etc.

Even so, I get a laugh out of stories like this:

For Want of a Proofreader, or at Least a Good One, a Reading Exam Is Lost
By SAM DILLON
Published: November 20, 2007

In an episode that has embarrassed the Department of Education, thousands of flawed testing booklets forced the invalidation of United States reading scores on an international exam administered without major mishap in 56 other countries.

The contractor that printed the faulty exams for the government is reimbursing it $500,000, government officials said yesterday. But the department admitted it had not proofread the tests.

…

Conducted every three years, the international test focused on science literacy in 2006, but also included sections on reading and math. The problem with last fall’s test was that pages in the exam booklet were assigned incorrect numbers. As a result, questions referred students to texts, said to be “on the opposite page,” but in reality printed on a previous page.

…

“The testing industry is stretched,” Dr. Schneider said in a conference call with reporters. “There are some systemic problems, but the problem with this test was simply a copy-editing problem. A good copy editor would have caught this in 10 seconds.”

Haw. Haw.

This is what happens when you don’t pay enough attention to your calendar. I almost missed St. Crispin’s Day.

And Crispine Crispian shall ne’re goe by,
From this day to the ending of the World,
But we in it shall be remembred;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers:
For he to day that sheds his blood with me,
Shall be my brother: be he ne’re so vile,
This day shall gentle his Condition.
And Gentlemen in England, now a bed,
Shall thinke themselues accurst they were not here;
And hold their Manhoods cheape, whiles any speakes,
That fought with vs vpon Saint Crispines day.

Henry V, William Shakespeare

Many years ago I was a big fan of Mike Baron‘s comic book series The Badger, which was just the right mixture of goofiness, psychosis, and brilliance to appeal to me in my early twenties (the most psychotic character in the series was the title hero who, after being his in the face and bleeding on his torn costume looks at his adversary and says: “You broke the shirt! Now you’re going to pay!”).

The Badger and Baron and a lot of other things from two decades ago sort of drifted away when I went back to college, but I’ve been working on a web site with some Google ads and up at the top was a banner graphic for one of Baron’s latest creations, an online graphic novel called The Architect, that mixes allusions to Frank Lloyd Wright, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and H.P. Lovecraftian horror in a brief, entertaining experience. It ain’t The Badger, but it’ll kill a few minutes.

Although I met many of the Oregon-based science-fiction and fantasy writers community over the course of a couple of two decades from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, I never had much contact with the late Robert Sheckley. For a number of years he lived within walking distance of my house; his wife, Gail Dana, wrote a couple of pieces for my book review magazine. In earlier years, I probably would have tried harder to meet with him, but I’ve tried to be more observant of authorial privacy as the years go by.

I always admired Sheckley’s wit. His stories, in particular, always seemed to have a sardonic edge to them that appealed to me. Sheckley belongs to the tail end of a generation of science-fiction writers that is fast disappearing, a generation that developed in the dark of an era where you really had to go looking for material from the genre, before it broke into the light of mainstream culture and movies. I’m already starting to regret not pressing harder to get to know him personally.

Robert Sheckley’s website