On Snark and Men Named Thursday, Plus More...

One should probably be asleep at this hour, and yet there are so many wonderful things to watch and read that sleep seems a rather frivolous way to spend one's time.

Unless you're having extravagantly weird, or dark, or glorious dreams. In which case you might enjoy this little slice of Neil Gaiman history from a Canadian television show called, Prisoners of Gravity.



This is exactly the sort of show I would've watched as a young boy, delighting in the tinfoilness of the set and the very small television set on which Neil's face appears. It's also the kind of show I would watch now, if such shows still existed.

Speaking of things which may or may not exist, there's a sort of ongoing war over Snark, which as Clive James points out, was originally a nonsense monster created by Lewis Carroll, but has, in recent years, come to mean a bit of snidely delivered sarcasm, or sarcastically delivered snide. The current debate began with David Denby's new book, Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. Adam Sternberg wrote a not exactly snarky rebuttal in the New York Magazine Book Review in which he didn't quite label the book an EPIC FAIL. And now, the good folks at the Elegant Variation have put up a link to a 2003 article by Clive James which more or less anticipates and puts a lid on this particular debate.

And because I promised a man named Thursday, go read this Wall Street Journal article on the aphoristically gifted G.K. Chesteron who said such marvelous things as:

"The business of the Progressives is to go on making mistakes, while the business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance."

"He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head."

"The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce."

And that is enough of that.

Happy beginning of the week, readers.

Zombies Versus Unicorns, Part Deux

In an earlier post, we reported on the ongoing feud between zombies and unicorns, but recently things have gotten out of hand. What was once a small skirmish restrained within the civilized and intangible discourse of blog posts and YouTube videos, has now escalated into book form with the announcement of the upcoming anthology, Zombies Versus Unicorns, edited by Justine Larbalestier (pro-zombie) and Holly Black (pro-unicorn). The collection will be published in 2010 and feature about half zombie stories and half unicorn stories, plus one story in which the supernatural competitors battle it out AVP style***. According to Ms. Larbalestier, the line-up of writers is composed of "more best-sellers, award winners, and all-round geniuses than you can poke a stick at."

It's all enough to make one wonder if, perhaps, this long-running feud on the interweb wasn't a very clever bit of advertising. But then again, it's not all that hard to imagine such arguments taking place as I know my friends and I have argued over similar matters, such as the great Ninja Vs. Robot feud of '98 which resulted in the loss of a good friend's ear. In any case, I'm excited about this anthology. Despite i09's concerns over the difficulty of "keep[ing] zombies fresh" (oh, the beauty of unintentional puns) or the lack of unicorns in contemporary science fiction or urban fantasy, it seems to me that there are plenty of cool metaphorical and narrative possibilities out there for aspiring writers. Nazi snow zombies in Norway, anyone?


***Two things of note. One, I've never actually seen AVP. Two, I have no idea if such a story exists, or will ever exist. But wouldn't it be cool?

For the Weekend

Dear readers, it's Friday and it's a new world, but people still seem to die a lot.

Here's some stuff to look at this weekend.

John Leonard: editor, critic, sentence exploder, and person I've never read but may now become obsessed with, has died. Matthew Cheney at the Mumpsimus, along with Edward Champion and Salon, have written wonderful tributes.

In the young adult world, few feuds engender more passion and lost friendships than the one between zombies and unicorns. John Green has more.

Amazon has announced it's Best Books of 2008, which is funny considering, you know, there's still a couple months left, but I guess the "best of" year is kind of like the "fiscal" year in that it ends somewhere around October. Top ten lists include: Fiction and Literature, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Comic Books and Graphic Novels, Mysteries and Thrillers, and Romance, among others. It occurred to me to comment on the fact that there's one category called, "Fiction and Literature," and then a bunch of other categories, a demarcation that seems to imply that the other categories are neither fiction nor literature, but then I got lazy and decided just to comment on the thought of commenting.

Sometimes women writers choose, or are asked, to hide the fact that they don't have man parts. It's a topic this blog mentioned once before. Io9 has a list of "Women Who Pretended to be Men to Publish SciFi Books", a list which includes the likes of JK Rowling and the ever-present James Tiptree, JR. who, as it turned out, was neither a James, a Tiptree, or a Jr.

Enjoy the weekend. Say hello to a squirrel.