I'm not sure what it says about me (altho I can take a pretty good guess) but my reaction to about 2/3 of this week's AV Club inventory of hip-hop revolutions that weren't was basically "oh man, I love that!!"
On a related note, here's one of the more surprising things I've seen on the internets lately: Michael Chabon writing about hip-hop. In case you didn't know, Chabon is doing some guest-blogging for Ta-Nehisi Coates over at the Atlantic's site. Definitely check it out. In addition to the piece linked above, he's also had nice stuff about reading Huckleberry Finn to his kids and the President's speech in AZ the other night.

Probably y'all have seen this already, since it's been making its way 'round the internets (apparently by design -- more on that later): I Write Like. The idea is you enter a block of text and the program tells you what writer it's most like. I tried it with a bunch of blog posts and got a wide range of responses but the name most often returned was David Foster Wallace. Which, judging by comments I saw around, was what a lot of bloggers got. Makes me think there's something that's common to many blog posts -- something other than writing style, like sentence length or paragraphing -- that the algorithm is matching up with Wallace. Tried it tonight with some of my old short stories and they all returned Cory Doctorow. Who, oddly enough, I never got as a result when I was entering blog posts.
Not sure what that means. But, according to Making Light, it doesn't mean much. First Teresa Nielsen Hayden reported on (and did) some testing which seemed to indicate that the algorithm maybe wasn't all it was cracked up to be. A side note: ltho amusing, I'm pretty unimpressed by the folks who entered short phrases or gibberish and then carried on like they'd discovered something. Whatever this code is supposed to be doing, I'd expect it's result to get worse as the sample size decreased. Pointing that out does not strike as particularly clever or interesting. But I digress. Next up, Jim McDonald called bullshit on the whole thing, saying that it was really just a kind of viral marketing, trying to direct traffic to some vanity publisher.
My take is that it's an interesting bit o' code. It does less than advertised, tis true. But I think it's got more going on than those Facebook "which Simpsons character are you?" quizzes (some of which are actually random, I think, at least in the sense that I gave the same exact answers to the questions and got two different returns). The fact that it's an attempt to drive traffic to a vanity press doesn't really bother me. I barely noticed the linkage -- not that it's hidden or anything, I just have a pretty strong mental filter for intrusive ads on websites.

Some more linkage, this time for Lewis Shiner. Nice to see Lew gettin' some dap over at boing² recently, as they might actually drive some traffic to his site. Altho I can't match Cory D's 10x readings of Glimpses, I have read Slam 3x which makes it one of the few books I've read more than once in my adult life -- the only other one that comes to mind is Kitchen Confidential. Not to get all name-droppy but Lew was part of the XDU wrrld music groop for a few years and he's probably the only person in this century to drop some Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons on the XDU listening audience. Meeting Lew was definitely in the top 2 most serendipitous things that have happened to me cos of being at XDU.
Altho not so much recently, I have perpetrated a fair amount of short fiction in my time and have been toying with the idea of adding a section for it in the oft-contemplated redesign of this site. I guess one of the things stopping me was some inarticulate and not-fully-formed concern about the market. But, as Lew points out, there is effectively no market any more. No sense then in holding onto storied until some certified content provider agrees to publish them. Better to get them online and out to the audience that way. Sure, it's not exactly a business model. But neither is YouTube. Yet.

It's good to be Neil Gaiman, apparently. Which the first thing I took away from that post. One of the things that shows what a good writer Gaiman is, I think, is that nothing in there comes off as bragging or annoying (in a "look at me, i'm wonderful" way). Further reading, tho, reveals interesting details about Gaiman's writing process. I was particularly fascinated by the stuff about page numbering. I guess because what little writing I've done lately has all been on the iBook, I hadn't really thought much about the importance of hand-numbering pages. But I can definitely relate to the sense of satisfaction when reaching the end of a chapter or section or whatever. Altho I've never drawn little grave markers to capture the moment.

Here's this week's gem (retrieved from behind the annoying log-in wall of the Sunday NYTimes online): P. J. O'Rourke absolutely takes apart a new book on slanguage and pop cultcha references in speech. There is, I suspect, a mostly unvoiced political edge to O'Rourke's critique. The author of the book in question, Leslie Savan, got her start as a media/advertising critic in Village Voice. But he stays pretty well away from screeding and focuses on ripping the book a new one. Reminds me of what, to me, is still the gold standard of NYTimes Book Review slash-and-burns, a review (this must go back a good 10 years or so) of one of the Tom Clancy books by G. Gordon Liddy, of all people.

OK, I kinda understand where he's coming from but, really, all I can think to say to Terry Pratchett is, "dude, bitter much?" There's a valid point or two in there, but if you're mostly gonna come off as just angry that your books haven't taken the world by storm and that you're not the richest woman in Britain (when you're so clearly more deserving), well maybe it would've been a better idea to not say anything. On the other hand, I appreciate that writers (some of them at least) are among the last creative types who don't seem to have their every utterance pre-approved by a committee of publicists.

Long day. Went from work to South Pointy where I parked myself at a table in Barnes & Noble and free wrote for about a half-hour. Worked thru a couple of exercises that Sharon had suggested last week and jotted down some things that I'd seen during the week and meant to write about but never got around to. Had dinner at the Q Shack there. Good stuff, of course. Had the sausage and it was nice and smoky. Yumm. And from there went straight to class. We started working as a group to create a story. Well, tonight we really only got as far as the beginnings of sketching out a protagonist. But it was interesting to watch the collaborative process and the creative process at work. And now I'm home. The Ricardo Montalban film club is convening in the living room but I'm too fried to socialize so I'm in the study blogging and listening to music (iTunes on random; Jolly Mukherjee just at the moment)

One thing I wanted to mention from the weekend -- spent a goodly chunk of Saturday afternoon surfing the internets for info on death, suicide, hanging, etc. Amazing the stuff you can find. At one point I ended up on the pages for some museum in Australia or New Zealand that had some exhibit on death. Somewhere along the way I saw a mention that one of the things you could get the death penalty for in England in the early 19th century was attempted suicide. The mind boggles. Probably I was spending way too much time on all that searching. The story I'm working on for WriMo has a suicide by hanging as a small but crucial plot element. Driving back from XDU I heard a story on "This American Life" about the people that clean up crime scenes. Which pointed out to me that I'd incorrectly written in my story that the police had cleaned up the scene after the event. So going back in to fix that got me wondering if there was anything else I'd gotten wrong about a suicide by hanging. Probably I should have just kept writing and left accuracy for December. But I've pretty much come to the conclusion that I'm not going to be able to write 50K words by the end of November. As long as I keep writing, I'll consider the month a success no matter what my word count at the end is.

In more evidence (not that any was needed) that I've completely taken leave of my senses, I'm planning to do this. So posting here will probably either be much more sporadic. Or possibly it'll have the reverse effect and I'll be more on top of all aspects of life.
(you can stop laughing now)

the Observation Deck :: "make a list"
Pretty much as expected. Discussion of the value of making lists -- lists as brainstorming tools. But did get to some specifics that I'd not thought about. Such as the idea of generating lists of chapter titles as a way to spur work on a novel. Also the idea that, when faced with a problem, instead of beating yr head against it trying to come up with the one perfect solution, try creating a list of 20 possible solutions. Sure, 15 of them will probably be either impossible or totally stupid, but in figuring out what doesn't work, we're perhaps better able to figure out what will work. (I note to myself that this might be a useful approach to take in some matters work-related that I'm dealing with)
Another interesting thing was the mention of a journalling workshop where participants are encouraged, before writing about a period of their past to first make a list of important people in their lives at that time (friends, lovers, family, bosses, co-workers, teachers, etc). Then expand that to include public figures of the time (politicians, movie stars, etc). And go on adding to the lists and elaborating -- what were they doing, what kind of problems might they have been having and so on. Oddly enough, I was thinking this very sort of thing this morning when I woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep. Not about myself but about some characters in something I'm thinking about writing. Maybe. (if i'm crazy enough). Anyway... list type thing in extended entry

the Observation Deck :: "ask a question"
Related to the earlier advice to be specific. The text discusses the value of asking questions, esp. in non-fiction. But it also talks about asking questions as a way to create and define characters in fiction. Starting from general and moving towards more specific.
Related to this, something I saw on boing boing today, an interview with Jaime Hernandez. As you might guess from the sidebar, I'm a huge fan of Love and Rockets and particularly of Jaime's stuff. Interesting stuff about drawing, and Hernandez's fondness for Dennis the Menace but esp. the passage where he's talking about aging his characters and questioning what that means for them and trying to figure out how they're changing.