The “rebellious major”

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In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton, “the pseudonym of an associate professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college,” writes about why students choose to major in English.

English is, among my undergraduates at least, one of the last refuges of the classical notion of a liberal-arts education.

I ended up a Comparative Literature major because I recognized, however dimly, that academia would let me postpone a bit longer the pressures of real adulthood–it would let me savor, for a few years at least, the freedom to do nothing but think, and read books, and write . . .

Awefull update

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Several people nominated awefull books on Miss Snark’s blog after I’d posted my compilation.

Here they are.

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett
Beach Music by Pat Conroy
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg
THE BELIEF TEST by Kate Chaplin
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
THE CRYSTAL THRONE by Kathryn Sullivan
The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans
THE HOUSE OF PENDRAGON I; THE FIREBRAND by Debra Kemp
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt

At this point it’s been 10 days since Miss Snark’s original post, so although I’m happy to keep making any corrections I won’t be adding any new books. Cuz if I did, the fun spontaneous bloggy feel might get compromised, and we can’t have that.

(If Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published in the last ten years, btw, then yours truly is about 19 again. Kewl.) (Ooops, sorry, that’s “Cool” — Kewl hadn’t been invented yet.)

(Not that some of the books on the original list weren’t more than 10 years old, too — actually quite a few would have been disqualified on that basis . . . )

Hover flies

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The other day my daughter and I noticed a small, slug-like caterpillar-y thing eating aphids that had infested a wild lettuce plant.

I looked around a bit tonight online and ID’d the critter: it was a syrphid fly larva.

Syrphid flies, also called hover flies or flower flies, are pretty ubiquitous insects in the summertime, so you’ve probably seen them. Many have coloring similar to bees (yellow and black stripes) although they don’t sting, and they are (usually) much smaller than a honeybee. They’re called hover flies because they can hover in place in the air.

Here’s a great site on syrphid flies including how to tell whether a bee-like insect is really a bee, or a fly in bee’s clothing.

I knew syrphid flies were a beneficial insect from my organic gardening days, but I’d never seen a larva in action before. Pretty cool. If you like that sort of thing ;-)

Writing grants & awards resource

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Poets & Writers has compiled a list of writing grants and contests that award at least $1000; a list of all the contests with upcoming deadlines; a list of contest winners; and a list of writing conferences.

The banquet begins here.

When life gives you toxic waste . . .

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Not recommended you make lemonade, but it turns out there might be some good that can come of it.

Scientists are racing to identify the weird microorganisms growing in Berkeley Pit Lake in Butte, Montana, before it’s cleaned up.

The “lake” was once a copper mine. It filled with water when the mine was closed 24 years ago.

Dissolved metal compounds such as iron pyrites give the lake a pH of 2.5 that makes it impossible for most aquatic life to survive. In 1995 Stierle discovered novel forms of fungi and bacteria in the lake. More recently her team has found a strain of the pithomyces fungi producing a compound that binds to a receptor that causes migraines and could block headaches, while a strain of penicillium fungi makes a different compound that inhibits the growth of lung cancer cells.

This week they reveal that a novel compound called berkelic acid from another new strain of penicillium fungus reduces the rate of ovarian cancer cell growth by 50 per cent (Journal of Organic Chemistry, vol 71, p 5357).

Wild.

Another alternative to DEET

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Compounds in the leaves of the American beauty berry plant (Callicarpa americana) apparently help ward off biting insects.

Here’s hoping they find a way to turn this into a product. Anything has to be better than citronella spray. Yech.

Speaking of natural remedies, if you apply the juice from jewel weed (Impatiens capensisto) a fresh mosquito bite, it won’t swell up or itch.

I mention jewel weed in my novel.

Dean’s driveway was so narrow that tree branches whipped the side of Maisey’s car as we drove in. I noticed the piles of brush I’d helped him move off of it after the ice storm were half-hidden now by brambles and, in the wetter places, tall pale clumps of jewel weed.

Yeah, that happened ;-)

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This is fun: The Mississippi Review has published an edition of Freymoir-inspired short stories.

Here’s an excerpt from editor James Whorton Jr.’s intro:

We talk about the various narrative genres — novel, memoir, short story, straight journalism — as though these categories have a separate existence from the particular works they describe. Credibility does not reside in the genre, however, but in the person of the writer. Books don’t lie to us, people do: we’ve been lied to by neighbors, Presidents, and novelists alike, and skepticism will never be made obsolete by any refinement of the literary categories. It will always be indispensable both to citizenship and to literacy.

Via Emerging Writers Network.

It’s “Da Vinci” Meets “Depp in Eyeliner”

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Yup, the time has come for high concept plagiarism lawsuits, because that’s where the money is, of course.

Royce Mathew has sued the Walt Disney Co., Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Touchstone Home Video and 24 other related enterprises that had a stake in the 2003 blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl for copyright infringement.

Mathew claims he’s spent 20 years working on “drawings, screenplays, outlines, blueprints, storyboards, and other original materials” and that he’d filed the lot with the U.S. Copyright Office, to boot. He also claims he’s shown his ideas to Disney people and their cronies, “both privately and through the William Morris Agency and Creative Artists Agency.”

I’m sorry. I realize this may be some poor little fella who’s been slowly draining the very blood of his veins into a creative obsession for his entire adult life (or his golden years, or whatever). But you can’t copyright a creative concept. You just can’t.

If people could copyright creative concepts, we writers would all be doomed. It would be like Internet domain names, a whole mini-industry would spring up aswarm with people copyrighting every conceivable plot line.

So some squatter would own the rights to “girl meets boy, girl denies attraction to boy, girl realizes oops boy is her One and Only” and just like that, every romance/chick lit/commercial women’s fiction writer on the planet would be back to their day jobs.

Via the always worth-the-read Booksquare. With a nod to E is for Editrix, who’s all excited about the eyeliner thing :-)

Update: see also this post on “extreme copyright.”