No! It’s not a depressing post. It’s about what happens to our books when we accidentally (on purpose?) leave them behind in public places. I call the phenomenon of things lost and found in public places like train stations, taxis, restaurants, parks, etc, “The Great Umbrella Exchange”. It’s an economy predicated on need. The rain stops or starts and you forget your umbrella or sunglasses because they are not needed at the moment. You finish a book, same. Eventually, someone else picks up whatever you lost when they do.Of course, none of this holds true for my hometown of Belfast where anything left behind triggers a bomb squad call. An offshoot of this is “The Great Charger Exchange”. You’ll thank me for this one. If you travel (travelled) regularly for work and sometimes forget your phone charger, just go down to the hotel desk and say, “I stayed here a while back and left a Samsung phone charger in my room. Can I check the lost and found for it?” Bingo. Then when you do leave, leave the charger behind. Good karma.
I have a bad habit of leaving books behind as I travel. Once I’ve finished with them, and as long as they’re not library books or books I’m sure I’ll reread, they feel like a physical burden. I’m reluctant to tote these along on lengthy travels. So I’ve spontaneously left books in hotels, trains, and buses, in addition to the more usual suspects (little free libraries, charity shops, waiting rooms, with willing friends, and my office).
I’ve always guiltily hoped that the books wouldn’t be discarded, but have had no proof of this. A hotel receptionist once told me, clutching the book to her chest, that she would read the China-set sci-fi novel (Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male) I’d just finished and left in my hotel room. Another time, after having been unexpectedly given some terribly erudite books on international relations that I knew I’d never get around to reading, a colleague told me that the hotel cleaners should be able to sell the tomes I’d left in the room.
So I admit that I’m an unscrupulous discarder and regifter of books. And I’m likely not the only one, as I’ve found books in some unlikely places as well (most recently on a park bench).
Kids went back to school here today! Tuck this article away for four weeks from now when they’ll be home again because no one is willing to spend the money on new ventilation systems for indoor spaces!;
NPR has a fascinating interview with psych prof Katherine Kinzler on how language creates or enables and supports discrimination. And it starts right away in young children. The main interview is audio, but there are excerpts below the player.
On the issue of speech discrimination
For people who speak in what others perceive as being a non-native or a non-standard way of speaking, often that can feel as if people are judging you. And in fact, people might be judging you. But so much of our understanding of communication is bidirectional. It’s about the listener, too. And so there’s a lot of evidence that when somebody doesn’t like the way somebody’s speaking, or thinks that they’re speaking in the wrong way, they can shut down as a listener and stop trying to listen. And so in that sense, people can really overlook qualified people in employment contexts and in many different contexts in life, because they think they’re not doing a good job communicating, when in fact the person listening might not be doing a good job listening.
Welcome to the first of three or four weeks you’ll get with your kids in school before all Hell breaks loose and the numbers of infected rise like a zombie film with a really low FX budget. Wait, is this the zombie apocalypse? It’s just tired teenagers and whining middle schoolers. And none of them want brains. Not even their own. Huh.
What is the difference between a myth, a legend, and a fairy tale? Easy: the first is the rumour that went around on that Monday in Grade 11 that you had to have your stomach pumped on Saturday night after calling your girlfriend’s dad a pedophile as he tried to pick you up out of pile of cow manure at that field party, the second is the series of events that culminated in what you did to end up in the shit at that field party, and the third is that you never suffered any social repercussions from the fallout of that field party;
You have some choices here: follow this link to watch live, or at least lie on the couch reading a website on the Large Hadron Collider making matter out of light while dreaming all that could be good or bad about this while registering somewhere in the back of your vaguely disinterested brain that you should check back here tomorrow for details. For instance.
Emma Cline took a shallow, yet harrowing dive into the Hellraiser-like horrors of the MRA reddit in order to write her new book of short stories (that we will be ordering today) Daddy. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, when I was still writing short fiction, I wrote an entire book from the perspective of various terrible men: rapists and rape apologists, pseudo-pedophiles, abusive misogynists, homophobes, murderers, racists, etc. It was a deeply uncomfortable experience, and even though I had an offer to publish it with a major house, I declined because I thought: what am I missing here? I didn’t have anything to fear from these guys, really. It was an academic exercise for me, this searching for the person inside the monster. Given how awful it felt writing it myself, I can only imagine what it must feel like for someone with something to actually lose. Funnily enough, I recently thought about those stories and decided that I can’t revisit them because now that I have children, I actually do have something to lose. Bustle has the interview:
It’s something that the culture has forced upon us anyway. Just the amount of time and energy people spend trying to understand what is going on in Trump’s mind. Or when you read these Me Too stories where an entire workplace had to translate the actions of this one man. The amount of fallout from one person’s interiority and moral compass is interesting to me. With Harvey [Weinstein] for example, there was this intense focus on him as this villain. I think news stories by necessity have to kind of flatten people into archetypes just because they’re telling us what happened. It’s not the place for exploring their motivations. But what I think is more frightening than them just being a cartoon villain is that there’s someone who probably thinks of themselves as a good person.
This guy thinks we’re not in danger of sinking into a fully cancelled world – a big concern, he notes up front, for him and his friends (let me take a guess on age and race here….). No, cancel culture has limits, he says, pointing to the emerging spaces like Fortnight and TikTok and how they are ensuring careless assholetastic bigotry will always have a platform for teabagging fallen foes and saying “Muricafuckyeah” while surrounded by camera-hungry bunnies dressed in thongs. I mean, besides the presidency. Whew. Thank GOODNESS. Do me a favour: check your blood pressure before you read this and then right after and post the results, k? And if it’s too high, read somethign else, like this Time piece from last year. (PS: PC writing is humourless? I guess I should shut down the site again?)
Here is the fundamental point: With the rise of social media and low-cost communications, virtually everything that can be said, will be said.
It might be said on Twitter rather than on the evening news, or on 4Chan rather than on Facebook. But the sentiments will be out there, and many of them will be disturbing. The world has arrived at a place where just about every politically incorrect statement — and a response to it, not to mention every politically correct statement and a response to that — is published or recorded somewhere.
So the policing of speech may be vastly more common than it was, say, 15 years ago. But the discourse itself is vastly greater in scope. Political correctness has in fact run amok, but so then has everything else.
Wow, here we are again, marking the inexorable march of time by when we can do something for ourselves instead of merely surviving. What a life we’ve created for ourselves. Enjoy!
I bought this book a while back intending to read, but have mostly been reading non-fiction since. It’s a beloved scifi series by Chinese author Liu Cixin that is supposedly quite mind-blowing. So much so that the internet freaked out when they found out it is being adapted for Netflix. That lasted all of about 10 seconds though because then the internet found out the showrunners would be the guys who are widely thought to have botched the end of Game of Thrones. Now, I quite enjoyed the GoT series. Even the ridiculous end. Yes, it was problematic for me as a viewer, but it wasn’t my art. I am the audience. I can have my opinion (really, Dany? really? I don’t buy it), but I have no right to demand the artists involved give me anything other than whatever their vision was. Fan culture has degraded into consumer culture (much like academia: “A C-??? But my parents PAID for this course!”), wherein the fans act like they’re investors in a business rather than appreciators of art. It sticks in my craw when people claim ownership of art, because once they feel they own something, they feel they have a right to have it exactly as they want. Wrong. The only way you get to have it exactly as you want is if you are the one who made it. And let me tell you, it very seldom turns out exactly as you want anyway. So calm the fuck down. You’re not investing in a show, or comic, or book, or album, or painting: you’re paying for the chance to experience it. Vote with your wallet if you don’t like something, but otherwise either make your own art or shut the frig up.
“Liu Cixin’s trilogy is the most ambitious science-fiction series we’ve read, taking readers on a journey from the 1960s until the end of time, from life on our pale blue dot to the distant fringes of the universe,” Benioff and Weiss said. “We look forward to spending the next years of our lives bringing this to life for audiences around the world.”
The project boasts an all-star lineup behind the camera. In addition to Benioff, Weiss, and Woo, Rian Johnson serves as executive producer along with Brad Pitt and Rosamund Pike. Author Liu and accomplished sci-fi writer Ken Liu, who translated the English versions of the first and third books, serve as consulting producers.
“David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo have experience tackling ambitious sagas over time and space,” said Peter Friedlander, vice president of orginal series at Netfix. “Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman have long dazzled fans with thrilling and mind-bending epics. They are all fierce advocates of ‘The Three-Body Problem.’ As ardent fans, it was especially meaningful to us to get the support of Liu Cixin who created this expansive universe. We all share the same goal: to pay homage to this incredible story and take members on the adventure of a lifetime.”
Bookninja 