Kanye tweets to the New Yorker

There's a whole list of these here. Awesome!

Language geeks of the world, unite!

Oh em gee, so awesome:

I bet China Mieville would be interested in this. That's an extra perk!

Libraries and spoofs, all the rage

In my round up last week at PMN I pointed out this video of the Old Spice guy shilling for libraries. Now I bring to you Stephen Jones, on the value of studying in the library:

I'm on a cart!

Fingerprinting for library books

Because library cards are so old hat, the school system in Machester wants to use fingerprints to check out library books. What, the retinal scans were too expensive?

This is quite clearly appalling,” said Phil Booth, national coordinator of NO2ID, a privacy campaign group.

“For such a trivial issue as taking out of library books the taking of fingerprints is way over the top and wrong.

“It conditions children to hand over sensitive personal information.”

I think the real point is to crack down on library theft more effectively. You don't return your book? Your fingerprints are already in the system! So when you, 13 year old Joey, get pulled over for speeding and arrested for assaulting an officer, they'll match your fingerprints to your stolen library book and fine the crap out of you. Libraries saved!

Garrison Keillor shits on your dreams

Keillor paraphrases The Incredibles, saying if everyone is a writer, no one is. He tells us about hanging with publishing celebs at a rooftop party, with "wall-to-wall authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses" (the last being either call girls or the assistants from the publishing house). And, you know what?

[T]his book party in Tribeca feels like a Historic Moment, like a 1982 convention of typewriter salesmen or the hunting party of Kaiser Wilhelm II with his coterie of plumed barons in the fall of 1913 before the Great War sent their world spinning off the precipice.

That is bold, sir. And at fault? Drum roll please...oh, it's self-publishing, the whipping boy of traditional publishing everywhere!

Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it's all free, and you read freely, you're not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you're like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.

I choose not to articulate my thoughts on this, sirs and madams, for the sake of my sanity. Oy.

Science pop-up book makes me feel smart

Sure, it might be aimed at a slightly younger crowd, but this pop-up book about particle physics will make a scientist of me yet. Collide your own atoms and see if you can discover popped-up Higgs Boson particles before CERN--I double dog dare you.

Neil Gaiman charges $45k for four hours

Neil Gaiman recently spoke at a library event, and was paid $45,000 for a four hour talk (and before anyone asks, the money was earmarked for speakers, so they couldn't spend it on anything else).

Some people are angry, but I say, hey, I would also charge that much. Now taking speaking engagements! Mail cash, and I assure you I'll show up.

Outer space + reading = awesome

Outer space is super awesome. Case and point made by this picture, taken from the Hubble:

Check out an explanation of what this picture is and even more pictures, from the book Hubble: A Journey Through Space and Time by Edward J. Weiler, at Boing Boing. They include the Sombrero Galaxy! Man, I wish I were a scientist.

Knowledge of volcanoes trumps that of zombies

Hello, American friends stuck in Europe and European friends stuck everywhere but Europe. Are you mad about this whole Iceland/volcano thing? If so, I hope you are only mad at yourself, for not being properly prepared for the temporary volcano apocalypse in the same manner that I'm sure all of you are ready for the zombie apocalypse and Y2K part 2 (The Reckoning).

For those of you who are sure you would be ready for volcanobliteration, take this quiz of volcano knowledge (um, about volcanoes in literature) and see how you stand. Stand ye strong?

I took this quiz and got 5 out of 10, and the admonition, "Don't blow your top, but nothing much erupted there." So maybe someone else should be in charge of our survival from volcanoes. Volunteers?

So you need a typeface?

Check out the flowchart. Flowcharts for life!

Reading and gaming: So happy together

Are you a serious gamer, reader type? If so, you may want to read the 5 best books about video games. Because reading about video games and playing video games go hand in hand.

But don't read and play at the same time, or you will fall off your Wii Fit and develop a sex addiction. You can't make this stuff up, guys.

Vampires do shop at Whole Foods

An open call to Emily Colette Wilkinson: please be my friend. Although I ever so slightly mocked this conference on vampires in modern writing, and still think it is a little silly, Wilkinson has written a really amazing analysis of vampirism in the Twilight and Sookie Stackhouse books, which made my inner psuedo-academic fall in love. She writes:

Our vegetarian vampires, I think, are afflicted with the same crises of conscience that we are as first-world twenty-first century humans. We eat too much, we shop too much, we use too much fuel, water, land; we mistreat the animals on which we depend for food and the other peoples whose labor produces for us the cheap abundant goods we have all grown so used to....Contemporary vampire fiction mirrors our collective anxiety about our need for self-discipline and a return to a more humane approach to our fellow beings....From the shimmering pâleur of the vampire radiates something new and hardly otherworldly: an aura of white liberal guilt.

The whole post is absolutely worth the read, and is only the first of two. Is there such a thing as being a pop culture PhD? Because if so, I will start working on stuff like this posthaste.

Decoding Palin, don'tcha know

Honestly, I can't remember if Sarah Palin ever said "don'tcha know" or if that was only the mom from Bobby's World, but either way, I think the point is made that Palin has some great folksy shit to say. Luckily, for those of us too bourgeois to understand the peasant dialect she speaks, a translation has arrived.

But seriously, it's a really interesting analysis of how Palin speaks, and how she conveys her message through her style. You betcha!

Number crunching: Family fun

Publishers Weekly put out a revised list of 2009 book sales, fiction and non-fiction, hard covers and mass markets. What's really interesting (and perhaps obvious) is that almost all of the top selling titles are by authors who are franchises in and of themselves.

I super do want an iPad, it turns out

So, yea, I think in theory the iPad has a lot of weird problems, and I understand that no Flash, and no USB ports, and the weird keyboard issues, are all bad. And these beautifully rounded up iPad skeptics do point to something important.

But...it is so. Shiny. Apple, how do you make everything so desirable? Clearly the answer is that Steve Jobs is a wizard.

Dogs and fonts

To the font lovers of the world: doggy typefaces!

The science of romance

At one point or other, I considered pursuing an academic career, and then decided that it wasn't for me (with some help from those who have already been there). Now that decision is vindicated, because I would no longer be the first to do an academic analysis of romance novels. And what an analysis it is!

Coming from an evolutionary psychology perspective, they hypothesized these titles would reflect mating preferences that have evolved over the millennia — specifically, a desire for a long-term relationship with a physically fit, financially secure man who will provide the resources needed to successfully raise a family.

They found considerable support for this theory, although some of their speculative specifications were spelled out more directly than others.

Love it. Love. It.

Dead pigs + the ocean = science

Why is science so gross and so cool all at the same time?

Medicine and the Bible

Seriously, this is great.

Occupation: Optimist

Margaret Atwood, prolific author and adorable lady, may write about really depressing things, but she says she's still an optimist.

"Anybody who writes a book is an optimist," the much-honored writer says, with a dry impishness, in a phone interview. "First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that?"

Hurrah to you, optimists! Who says being an aspiring writer isn't fun?