Bruce Springsteen’s “Meeting Across the River”
Bruce Springsteen’s “Meeting Across the River” is a song about a transformative night in the lives of two characters. Boundaries will be crossed. Dark deeds await.
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Writing Has Killed My Desire to Read
I can’t tell you whether I prefer Ian McEwan’s recent novel Saturday to his prior effort, Atonement. I can’t comment on whether John Banville’s The Sea deserved the Booker Prize (though I can tell you that his older work The Book of Evidence was certainly Bookerworthy). I don’t know if The Plot Against America continues Philip Roth’s unprecedented streak of literary home runs that began with 1997’s American Pastoral. Why? Because I haven’t read any … Read more
Progress Bars and Technological Progress
There’s a dialog box that appears in certain Microsoft products which caught my attention recently. It’s a progress indicator, one of those long horizontal bars that fills up as the computer gets closer to completing a task. The label underneath this particular bar comes straight out of Monty Python: This may take up to 1 minute or longer. So, it could take any length of time then, as long as it’s not exactly one minute. … Read more
Lennon People and McCartney People
Universities all over the world still give degrees in sociology and psychology, despite the fact that everything you need to know about human nature can be found at your local Tower Records store. (Or Amazon or Powell’s, for that matter.) There are two types of people in the world: John Lennon people and Paul McCartney people. It could be argued that all of human history has been a Darwinian climb to reach these two perfect … Read more
The Web Is Imperfect
The Web is making slow progress in separating content from presentation.
Science Fiction Writers and Toynbee Convectors
Ray Bradbury once wrote a fantastic story called “The Toynbee Convector.” The story’s protagonist claims to have returned from the future with tapes and films of a miraculous technological paradise in which humanity has solved all its pressing problems. Humanity, imbued with confidence that its dreams will come to fruition, proceeds to build that future — not realizing that said tapes and films were nothing but a hoax. Has anyone ever summed up the job … Read more
The Importance of Web Conventions
I’m looking forward to seeing the galleys for my novel sometime in the next few months. Pyr has decided to implement a lot of special features in the book design. Page numbers won’t be in the top or bottom margin as you might expect, but right in the middle of the text. And since readers get bored constantly reading text from left to right, my editor decided to make the text direction vary on each … Read more
About This Blog
Many of the blogs I’ve read start with the author saying “I’ve resisted creating a blog as long as I could.” As if a blog were an enemy force that needs to be kept at bay. I’m not going to buck the trend. I, too, have been resisting the urge to start a blog for two years now. Here’s why: I’m lousy at thinking on my feet, and I’ll inevitably write things that I wish … Read more