Writers’s Market has published an online interview with an all-star line-up of literary agents: Elaine English, Donald Maass, Evan Marshall, and Ann Rittenberg.
I found out about the article when Wendy Tokunaga posted the link on the the Yahoo ChickLit forum.
Searching for the perfect Friday post, and lo, I discover that Rochester’s own Century Discount Liquors made The Wall Street Journal‘s Friday Tastings column: “Taking Sides in the Butter Battle” (subscription required).
Turns out, a rebellion is brewing amongst wine drinkers, who are demanding the return of the buttery Chardonnay. Good for them, I say! Butter Lovers, Unite! So columnists Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, being gracious & tolerant sorts, phoned wine shops in various cities around the country
and posed this question: “If we walked into your shop this minute and asked you for a buttery American Chardonnay, what would you sell us?” We said they could choose one over $20 and one under $20, but they had to answer right away from wines that were on the shelf.
One of the stores they called was Century, where Michael Misch, general manager, recommended a Chalk Hill ($28) and Franciscan ($14).
So isn’t this grand? Now if you’re looking for bottled butter, you don’t have to say so out loud — and attract sneers from the anything-but-Chardonnay shoppers — or resort to passing a note to a clerk, which could get you mistaken for a criminal.
Otoh, pairing a Chardonnay, buttery or not, with the cold front that’s moved in today may well be the height of gauche. I’d better Google that, I think . . .
Joe Woodward, at Poets and Writers, explores the narrated-by-critters genre, which (he notes) started with George Orwell’s Animal Farm and in the past few years has grown to include Timbuktu, by Paul Auster; Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, by Sigrid Nunez; and The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.
Woodward then goes on to review this year’s newest additions, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, Verlyn Klinkenborg (February, Knopf) and Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, Sam Savage (next month, Coffee House Press).
The article doesn’t mention Paul Gallico’s The Silent Miaow. But that was, strictly speaking, non-fiction, insofar as it was a how-to manual for stray cats. So the oversight is understandable.
Behind the scenes photos from Westminster, by New York Observer photographer Eliot Shepard.
Not to be confused with moron plots. We’ll leave that topic for another day.
This past weekend, I picked up a copy of Monkey Love, Brenda Scott Royce, Feb. 2006, Penguin, given the face-up treatment royale on the “new releases” table at my local bookstore chain.
So I’m reading it (because why not have four or five books going at once?) and as I’ve been thinking about plotting, I notice that in the first chapter (19 pages) no less than four major plotlines are introduced: a girlfriend’s unplanned pregnancy; another girlfriend’s professional shennanigans; the protagonist’s preparation for an upcoming stand-up comedy gig; and the protagonist’s first encounter with he-who-will-emerge-as-the-love-interest.
Advantages:
1. Fast pacing? You betcha. You can’t have that much going on in under 20 pages without having . . . a lot going on.
2. Major interest grabation. Take your pick, there’s so much happening here, you’re bound to want to know how at least some of it works out.
3. Comedic effect. A caught-in-the-headlights straight man is a comedy staple. Plot breaking out right and left is a useful device for propelling a hapless protagonist toward that lite, happy ending nirvana we’re all rooting for-o.*
Disadvantages:
1. There’s a thin line between “madcap” and frenetic.
2. Pacing isn’t pacing unless it’s modulated from time to time. When the balance tips too far toward “hard plot” and too far away from the protagonists interior life, things start to feel downright speedy after awhile.
So what’s the answer. Dunno. But if the pendulum has swung toward “plot ’til you’re punch-drunk” (and I’m by no means sure it has btw — I have exactly one data point upon which to base this) I hereby Predict it will Swing Back.
*The “o” is so that I won’t be using a preposition to end that sentence with-o
Okay, now this just has to be useful. The Social Issues Research Centre has published a timeline of dietary advice.
Where else can you read that in 1861, the cookbook Christianity in the Kitchen warned that pie crust made with butter or lard was both indigestible and un-Christian?
Or that it was once considered wise to fear fruit?
(“What’s that? OMG an apricot! And I think it’s begun to roll this way. Run! Run!”)
(Dontcha just miss the 19th Century?)
I “lost” an argument this week to someone who must have used this as his handbook. His attack was a disjoint blend of Histrionics (“Use emotion . . . Sound indignant, outraged, self-righteous, passionate, ‘courageous’, ‘defiant'”) and Moral One-upmanship (“If people disagree with you, accuse them of Eurocentrism or elitism or intolerance or narrowness or conventional thinking or scientism or homophobia”). And then, the coup de grace:
Claiming is Succeeding: Blur the distinction between claiming to make your case, and actually making it.
At that point, I started to wonder what on earth I was doing, wasting my time. lol
Oh, I also realized how much I appreciate the clear and honest minds I’ve encountered since I’ve begun blogging. Thanks, you guys.
In The Guardian this week, Stuart Jeffries asks whether writing by hand will become a lost art, as technology increasingly enables us to communicate without it.
He passes on a bit of history along the way. For example, the Sumarian merchants invented a script 5000 years ago, using “a stylus and wet clay to record the ingredients for beer.” Notes Jeffries, “The endlessly inventive outpouring of human writing thus grew out of commercial necessity.”
Perhaps that observation holds the secret to whether handwriting will die. Does it have, today, any commercial necessity?
Blogs are hitting their stride in the media game. Pop music has been around longer. So we should have a pretty good handle on what would make a song a winner, right?
Nope. This short New Scientist piece describes the difficulty of predicting what songs will become hits.
To some degree, the popularity of a song is influenced by the, um, popularity of the song. Participants of one study, for example,
tended to give higher ratings to songs that had been downloaded often, and were more likely to download those songs themselves. That created a snowball effect, catapulting a few songs to the top of the charts and leaving others languishing.
But what researchers can’t figure out is what gets a trend going in the first place. Sociologist Matthew Salganik, Columbia University, is given the last word in the piece:
“Even if you haven’t made it yet, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s low quality music; you could just be unlucky. But it also suggests that even if it’s high quality music, you might not become successful.”
So that’s it. It’s luck. lol
Covered here by New York magazine, in a piece by Clive Thompson.
Key takeaway: of Technorati’s top ten blogs, nearly half were created as corporations, “carefully planned, launched, and promoted.”
