Matt O’ Rama

Compact nonsense

Great Books In Half The Time

Weidenfeld and Nicolson have come up with ‘Compact Editions’. Tag line: Great Books in Half the Time.

in the first series of Compact Editions Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick along with David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Vanity Fair and Wives and Daughters will be ’sympathetically edited’ down to fewer than 400 pages. But don’t fret – so sympathetic are these editors that they will keep the central plot, characters and historical background.

There’s not really much else I could say to add to what Jenny Diski says about this abominable practice. It’s one thing for someone to read the Cliff Notes of a book instead of the book but when publishers start “compacting” great books into less than half of what they once were, it’s unconscionable. Diski is completely right about this, a cut-down Moby Dick is not Moby Dick, it’s some other book written by someone who I assure you is nowhere near as talented as Melville. Why not just read the read the Wikipedia page and pretend you read the book? It’s the same practice. You haven’t read Moby Dick in either case so what do you care? It’s only giving people a safe way to lie about having read the book since in theory the words were all written down by the original author, just not in the same order, placement, or with the same impact. Yes, Moby Dick is a long book and it contains probably too much detail about whaling and whales but THAT’S PART OF THE BOOK! You can’t take that stuff out and pretend you read Moby Dick, you just can’t. You can’t drive halfway to your destination and then tell everybody you went there and it was great and wasn’t it awesome that you got to do it in half the time by avoiding the boring stuff, which is actually what made everybody else go there in first place? ARRRGGGH!

Charlie Stross on living as a writer

The writer’s lifestyle

So, to summarize: it’s badly paid, the hours are weird, the office environment can be claustrophobic, you can’t get the staff, you’re selling your wares to big corporations who can roll over in their sleep and crush you if you don’t make nice, nobody’s going to give you a champagne reception, a stretch limo or a signing tour, there’s lots of business admin stuff to deal with, and you still have to cram in a normal social life or you’ll go mad.

On the other hand: you’re doing exactly what you always wanted to do (or you’d get frustrated and go do something else). And what could be better than that?

This is why there’s the phrase “Everybody wants to be a writer but nobody wants to write”.

Professor Buckaroo Banzai?

Robocop, PhD in Wired

This article makes me smile. It’s about the actor Peter Weller, best known for being Robocop and Buckaroo Bonzai is now a professor teaching about Rome. I love to see smart people being able to do their thing and learn, which is what he’s doing now. He’s even an architecture buff, which makes me like him even more. His class on comparing movie portrayals of Rome to the real-life culture sounds incredibly interesting too, I wish I could take it.

It’s hard to imagine what freshmen think when they wander into Professor Banzai’s lecture hall. Weller reports that he loses a lot of students after the first class. “They thought they were going to get the easy A from old RoboCop,” he says with a laugh. The 450-page course reader tells them otherwise.

Surviving an Internet vacation

I Survived my Internet Vacation
By Lore Sjöberg

Lore Sjöberg is one of my favorite humor writers. He did one of the funniest sites ever to exist, Brunching Shuttlecocks. I don’t think it exists any more but you can still get some of the goodness with this Wired column. He also has one of my favorite author bios at the bottom of the page:

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become…(some new thing every time)

My new favorite phrase

I just read an article that contained my new favorite phrase: potentially straightforward. Any project you can think of is potentially straightforward if you know nothing about it. “Speaking as someone whose knowledge of geology could fit in 14 point font on a 3X5 index card, drilling to the center of the Earth is a potentially straightforward project.”

The Pluto formerly known as a planet

At the 2006 IAU meeting held in Prague this past summer, the scientists voted that every planet must also have “cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.” Since only spheres with a large mass can achieve such orbital dominance, Pluto was no longer a planet. The scientific bureaucracy had spoken; our solar system had shrunk.

Too bad for Pluto. But in the end I think this will turn out to be one of those nitpicky things only people like me know and bore everyone with.

“Did you know that technically a tomato is a fruit?”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, a tomato is technically a fruit but it was ruled a vegetable for tariff purposes. Hey, wake up!”
“Did you know Pluto isn’t really a planet because it doesn’t clear the neighborhood around its orbit?”
“Oh really…zzzzzzzz”

Pluto will stay a planet in everybody’s mind because it’s always been a planet. The IAU should have just grandfathered in Pluto, saved everybody a bunch of trouble, and made themselves heroes to every kid with even a passing interest in space (which should be a lot more of them).

Things My This Girl’s Boyfriend Says

http://www.thingsmyboyfriendsays.com/

This is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time. If you have a sensitive brain or are offended by naughty words, don’t click. NSFW if your boss can read.

Nokia N800 Internet Tablet: yummy!

Nokia N800 Tablet: A real-world review on MobileCrunch

I want this. I wanted the original Nokia internet tablet, the 770, and this looks like they even improved on that one. It’s definately a wishlist item for when I have too much money but it’s just so cool. It runs Linux so you can put all kinds of different applications on it, it has a great screen, plays videos or music, just tons of stuff. $400, which isn’t bad for a device of this caliber, but still more than I have to spend on a frivolous purchase I have no real pressing need for. A geek can dream though.

Building huge websites

Inside Myspace.com

Wow, if you’re into reading about massively scalable websites, and I am, this is a great article. The numbers Myspace is running up against are just insane. I’m extremely surprised to learn they run everything off of Windows servers with MS SQL Server databases. Their Windows admins’ lives must just be hell. I’m biased though (having a vital Windows2000 server completely die for no reason after a reboot to install an important security patch will do that to you) so they could sleep like babies for all I know. I do wonder how much more they could do with the equivalent Linux servers running Mysql or Postgres. Based on my somewhat limited experience, a lot more. But I’m sure Windows fans would argue, they do that. :)

Zadie Smith on reading

More from Zadie Smith’s essay:

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing – I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.

I’m going to start a series of posts on reading Any Day Now. After listening to a bunch of literary courses on audiobook and thinking hard about reading in building Unreads, I want to say some things about reading that relate to this topic. More soon.