Sunday, April 10, 2005
Sigh. I am a bad blogger.
Volokh:
1. The chief barrier is not the fact that many blogs are boring, inaccurate, and generally not worth reading. Would you say “I don’t read books, because most books are boring, inaccurate, and generally not worth reading”?
2. Rather, the barrier is finding those blogs that interest you and are accurate (just as it is for books).
In my own opinion, this blog is boring, inaccurate, and generally not worth reading.
I find the left-margin links handy, so I come here myself now and then. Fewer clicks than typing in slashdot or stripcreator.
It is spring. I got my car running. I've been going out, drinking, socializing, instead of sitting online all day, and the blog gets neglected. Oh, it was bad before, but for a different set of reasons. It's not enough to be right and clever; one still needs to have something to say. This post has nothing much to say, and is not up to my usual standards, but the previous post is a week old, is about an olsen twin, and is badly edited (which i will go fix) and is missing a link (which i probably won't fix.)
When i get around to it, i might blog a little on the continuing drama of blog regulations (san francisco, FEC, etc.), update on books i've been reading,
or find some cute photo to link to. But not now. It's in the upper 70s today,
and my body has shut down from the heat. I unplugged the heater and plugged in the fan. Coffee isn't helping.
Those books include Ciderhouse Rules, John Irving, and
The Shadow of Albion, Andre Norton/Rosemary Edghill.
Ciderhouse Rules is a familiar format to those who know irving's According to Garp or Hotel New Hampshire. Characters have long complex lives that interact.
I have not seen the movie, but know that Tobey Maguire stars in it, which affects my mental image of the events. It's a book about apples, and abortion.
Yesterday I was at a meeting about planning for some land we might buy outside bloomington, and we talked about apple orchards - I was not expecting such an immediate payback from the book. Yesterday I was talking to a friend.. no, no, I really can't tell that story here. Suffice it to say the book's familiarity with the tools of the abortionist also came in handy.
I had a strange upbringing. While most normal kids were learning the facts of life in the gutter, I was piecing things together from trips to the british museum and from science fiction novels. Irving's novels are the sort of things a teen could read and learn from without being bored. It was some 600 pages, so I'm guessing more will see the movie than read the book.
Shadow of Albion is an alternate worlds romance. That's a genre I tire of quickly . And it's coauthored; that rarely works well. I review it here because Norton died recently. When I was 11 or 12, I had outgrown the hardy boys and the elementary school books. The county library on concord pike had a section pitched at jr high/high school aged readers, where I found Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein. Those were my transition books, before, at 12, I started mainlining the science fiction shelf of the city library downtown. I have tended not to go back and read those of her 60 books I didn't read then, but they hold up ok. Heinlein has had a major and defining influence on me, what it means to be a man or a citizen. But norton's influence is non-trivial as well. More than tolkein or haggard or baum, she introduced me to the world of speculative fiction, a world of possibilities.
It was a safe place for me, in which I could be myself, and I'm grateful for that.
At some point when this is better organized - and right now this is trickle-of-consciousness, I hadn't planned a blog post when I began it -
I may explain why I happen to be reading ciderhouse rules and shadow of albion.
These are books I found or that found me - I wouldn't have gone out and bought these or gotten them from the library, but when they came to me, these were the ones I kept to maybe read someday, and this is the some day.
Volokh:
1. The chief barrier is not the fact that many blogs are boring, inaccurate, and generally not worth reading. Would you say “I don’t read books, because most books are boring, inaccurate, and generally not worth reading”?
2. Rather, the barrier is finding those blogs that interest you and are accurate (just as it is for books).
In my own opinion, this blog is boring, inaccurate, and generally not worth reading.
I find the left-margin links handy, so I come here myself now and then. Fewer clicks than typing in slashdot or stripcreator.
It is spring. I got my car running. I've been going out, drinking, socializing, instead of sitting online all day, and the blog gets neglected. Oh, it was bad before, but for a different set of reasons. It's not enough to be right and clever; one still needs to have something to say. This post has nothing much to say, and is not up to my usual standards, but the previous post is a week old, is about an olsen twin, and is badly edited (which i will go fix) and is missing a link (which i probably won't fix.)
When i get around to it, i might blog a little on the continuing drama of blog regulations (san francisco, FEC, etc.), update on books i've been reading,
or find some cute photo to link to. But not now. It's in the upper 70s today,
and my body has shut down from the heat. I unplugged the heater and plugged in the fan. Coffee isn't helping.
Those books include Ciderhouse Rules, John Irving, and
The Shadow of Albion, Andre Norton/Rosemary Edghill.
Ciderhouse Rules is a familiar format to those who know irving's According to Garp or Hotel New Hampshire. Characters have long complex lives that interact.
I have not seen the movie, but know that Tobey Maguire stars in it, which affects my mental image of the events. It's a book about apples, and abortion.
Yesterday I was at a meeting about planning for some land we might buy outside bloomington, and we talked about apple orchards - I was not expecting such an immediate payback from the book. Yesterday I was talking to a friend.. no, no, I really can't tell that story here. Suffice it to say the book's familiarity with the tools of the abortionist also came in handy.
I had a strange upbringing. While most normal kids were learning the facts of life in the gutter, I was piecing things together from trips to the british museum and from science fiction novels. Irving's novels are the sort of things a teen could read and learn from without being bored. It was some 600 pages, so I'm guessing more will see the movie than read the book.
Shadow of Albion is an alternate worlds romance. That's a genre I tire of quickly . And it's coauthored; that rarely works well. I review it here because Norton died recently. When I was 11 or 12, I had outgrown the hardy boys and the elementary school books. The county library on concord pike had a section pitched at jr high/high school aged readers, where I found Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein. Those were my transition books, before, at 12, I started mainlining the science fiction shelf of the city library downtown. I have tended not to go back and read those of her 60 books I didn't read then, but they hold up ok. Heinlein has had a major and defining influence on me, what it means to be a man or a citizen. But norton's influence is non-trivial as well. More than tolkein or haggard or baum, she introduced me to the world of speculative fiction, a world of possibilities.
It was a safe place for me, in which I could be myself, and I'm grateful for that.
At some point when this is better organized - and right now this is trickle-of-consciousness, I hadn't planned a blog post when I began it -
I may explain why I happen to be reading ciderhouse rules and shadow of albion.
These are books I found or that found me - I wouldn't have gone out and bought these or gotten them from the library, but when they came to me, these were the ones I kept to maybe read someday, and this is the some day.
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