not falling down

My dear friend Joe Mcdaldno–writer, game designer, and fascinating Renaissance human–was kind enough to interview me about Anacrusis for his nascent radio show/podcast, The Stories We Tell. This marks the third podcast to feature me, and my second time on Canadian radio. Soon, listening to my nasal drone trail off in the middle of half-baked jokes will be completely unavoidable!

Incidentally, the term I can’t think of at around 16:45 is syllepsis (and more generally zeugma).

I suddenly realized why I hate the “humor” in Shakespeare so much: comic timing depends on confounding your expectations of rhythm in speech, so nothing is funny in meter! Also Shakespeare was bad at jokes.

Thus begins… VOCABULARY WEEK on ANACRUSIS

After seeing it on LJ a couple times, I put some stuff from my blogs into the I Write Like tool. Different NFD entries came back as Stephen King, Douglas Adams and (oh God) Dan Brown. Anacrusis consistently gets tagged as Margaret Atwood.

I was prepared to disclaim this whole post, but I cannot argue with that at all. “The world’s longest-running Atwood microhomage” is a painfully accurate description of Anacrusis. You win, Mémoires.

Hey, remember how the Washington Post took down a president thirty-five years ago? They’re still riding on that little laurelmobile, and yet their current policy, Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, is to censor themselves based on the likelihood of an argument from the administration. The merit of that argument is never even considered. Cameron W. Barr:

“After the use of the term ‘torture’ became contentious, we decided that we wouldn’t use it in our voice to describe waterboarding.”

Coates says these are the compromises one makes for a marriage. He’s right, and there was a shotgun-equivalent at the wedding, namely the threat of access withheld. Even Coates’s own house is a bit glassy in this regard, with Atlantic Political Editor Marc Ambinder bouncing around in castles with the Bidens. (Yes, castles. I’m not sure these people know what symbolism is.)

Among the biggest exposés of the past year was Matt Hastings’ infamous McChrystal article, published in Rolling Stone, of all places. Hastings is a freelance reporter whose highest-profile work was in covering the Iraq war for Newsweek, yet his piece ended up in Rolling Stone, which has spent the past decade sucking heartily on anything you have available.

The loudest media reaction to that article was not “oh hey, there’s dissension in the highest ranks of our government about the running of the longest war in American history,” it was “how could he risk losing his access?” When our military actually murders journalists, the people who tell us about it get arrested; meanwhile, news outlets are astonished at the use of journalistic currency to actually do it for a change.

This is the junkie’s mindset–I can’t do anything they wouldn’t like with it, or they might take it away! Access generates pageviews, and pageviews sell ads, and ad sales are an addiction as hard to kick as heroin or oil. This is what I was trying to say in my post about comments last month: a race for the bottom is a race we lose.

That is all.

Super powers and Tits Akimbo! Oh, I do like seeing my microfiction RSS feeds wake in the foggy dawn and cast about, noses into the rising wind, mad and bright as raptors.

Standard boilerplate about not necessarily buying everything in the article I’m about to link, but:

“Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.”

Yes, yes, infinite yes. It’s an iron rule. I know they drive pageviews, but if your business model relies on sacrificing the level of discourse to achieve pageviews, you’re in a bad business.

I, of course, have cleverly routed around this problem by never becoming popular, but this is the reason I’ll never turn on the comments on this blog or Ommatidia. (I honestly can’t remember why they’re on at the CHK, but that website is not a sole proprietorship.) The technology of blog comments is a net negative for the human race. If you want to talk publicly about a blog article, do it in your goddamn blog.

“The city of murderers is safe for travelers and strangers.”

On the plane to Kentucky for Christmas last year, I read Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. For the first half of this reading, I was under the vague impression that it had been published in 2008. I found it tremendously enjoyable, and contemporary–a gay protagonist of color and strong female characters, China as the sole world superpower, a mundane and difficult life on a lunar colony–but with some irksome anachronisms, like the way the characters used their wrist-implant cyberjacks to make calls from pay phones.

Eventually I flipped back to check the copyright page. It came out in 1992.

Jesus Christ, Maureen McHugh, you were on top of this shit while the rest of the field was just starting to get boners for steampunk? I will be reading more of your books.

This is an easy test for determining premillennial science fiction from the postmillennial, by the way: the ubiquity of cell phones (and how big a deal the author makes about them).