news items of the day

[calimac]

1. Pauline Baynes in Massachusetts.

2. Tolkien on e-book. Might be extremely convenient for quick lookups in the middle of conference paper discussions. But judging from past experience reading literary prose on a computer screen, this is unlikely to become my pleasure reading of choice.

3. Robert Silverberg as Philip Roth. Except that he's a better writer. I've tried both, and I know which one I like. This is a good, thoughtful article on the virtues of Dying Inside, but a couple of things grate. The subhead, "stuck in limbo between literature and sci-fi." As if it can't be both - unless, of course, "sci-fi" means "bad science fiction," which it often does. "too literary for sci-fi reviewers" - I think not; in the field it was considered Silverberg's masterwork from the time of publication. And a quote, "the perfect science fiction novel for people who don't like science fiction," but that really depends on why they don't like it, doesn't it?

4. Newt Gingrich as a professional historian. Not a favorable review.

5. Four Corners in the wrong spot. This is not news. The latitude/longitude grid on my 6-year-old DeLorme Street Atlas CD-ROM shows the displacement clearly. However, established boundaries even if mis-surveyed are usually allowed to stay where they are. Many grid line boundaries are off. Even the Mason-Dixon line wobbles slightly, and the supposed 45th parallel boundary between Vermont/New York and Quebec veers around as much as two miles off. So unless the town of Dinosaur, Colorado, is to be transferred to Utah, the Four Corners monument is the correct border marker and will stay where it is.

Comments

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I think "sci fi" is totally established instead of sf. At the Popular Culture conference, someone who is mainly in film but did a great paper on Kit Reed's novel Thinner Than Thou used "sci fi" and, when I asked her about it, said her colleagues use the term all the time.

In th8is case, I'd guess the phrase in question meant that Silverberg didn't quite make mainstream literary acceptance.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'd guess the phrase in question meant that Silverberg didn't quite make mainstream literary acceptance.

Indeed, that's the main point of the article. But if that's all the phrase meant, he wouldn't be stuck in limbo between them. The overtone of "too good for that yucky sci-fi stuff, too tainted for literary acceptance" is pungent.

[ckd]

I have a few hundred ebooks. Some of them I only own in ebook format; others, I have in multiple formats but have read more often in ebook than in all paper forms combined. (*cough*Cryptonomicon*cough*)

I'm glad I can now carry around The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings without having to find homes for, at a minimum, four mass-market paperbacks or one mmpb and a beefy trade paperback....

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

When I think of the terms "Gingrich" and "book," I'm reminded of how Newt brought down Speaker Jim Wright on ethics violations when Wright arranged to have organizations buy copies of his self-published book as payment for speaking engagements. And then how Gingrich liked the idea so much, he adapted it slightly for his own enrichment.