Pixel Scroll 9/21/16 “Repent, Pixels”, Said The Box-Tick Man

(1) STATHOPOULOS WINS MAJOR ART PRIZE. Although the critics gave their prize to Louise Herman’s portrait of Barry Humphries, the people have voted the 2016 Archibald Prize People’s Choice award  to a fine artist with fannish roots.

ault-and-stathopoulos

In Nick Stathopoulos’s commanding portrait which won the 2016 Archibald Prize People’s Choice award on Wednesday, its sitter, Deng Adut, sees himself exposed and vulnerable.

A monster, thought the former Sudanese refugee and lawyer when he first saw the finished portrait….

Of the eight artists who approached him, Adut selected Stathopoulos, who grew up not far from where Adut practices as a lawyer, to paint his portrait for this year’s Archibald Prize.

It took three sittings, one of nearly six hours, and four-and-a-half months – the longest time Stathopoulos has taken for an Archibald entry – for the artist to be satisfied he had captured the essence and likeness of his subject.

The portrait, titled Deng, is Stathopoulos’ first public choice winner and his fifth entry to be selected as an Archibald finalist. A “clear winner” among the pool, it comes with a $3,500 cash prize.

The Guardian calls it “vindication”:

The win is something of a vindication for Stathopoulos. In 2014, the artist was “astonished and disappointed” when his portrait of the author Robert Hoge, titled Ugly, did not make the finals of the Archibald or the Doug Moran prizes; it went on to win the people’s choice at Salon des Refuses, which features work that did not make the Archibald’s finalists exhibition.

…The Art Gallery of New South Wales director, Michael Brand, said: “This vote of appreciation by visitors to the Archibald recognises both the meticulous skill of artist Nick Stathopoulos and the wonderful contribution Deng Adut has made – and is making – to Australian life.”

The Archibald exhibition is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 9 October.

(2) THE TRIMBLES: The title of GQ’s article – “This Is How Star Trek Invented Fandom” – is bound to rub some who remember earlier fanhistory the wrong way, but the article itself has accurate information about the start of Star Trek fandom. Especially the part that comes from two impeccable sources:

“We’re pretty sure that the Trek community you see today would not have existed but for us,” Bjo Trimble says. “Not bragging.” Special guests at Star Trek Las Vegas (and a host of other 50th anniversary events), Bjo (pronounced “Bee-joe”) and her husband John are Star Trek’s ur-fans, the determined couple who saved the franchise.

They’re both in their eighties now: John wears red cap with a blue Vulcan salute on the front, Bjo has a streak of brilliant pink hair floating in her cloud of white. She’s the more loquacious of the two, but, she insists, “the whole Save Star Trek campaign was John’s fault.” They had heard the show was being cancelled in 1968, after its second season, during a visit to the studio lot. At John’s suggestion, the two launched a letter-writing campaign—all mimeographs and postal mail. It was the first ever to save a TV show, and the first time any fan community had flexed its collective muscle.

“NBC came on, in primetime, and made a voice-over announcement that Star Trek was not canceled, so please stop writing letters,” Bjo adds with pride.

TOS’s third and final season premiered with “Spock’s Brain,” commonly held to be one of the worst episodes of all time. (“We’re responsible for there being a third season,” John admits, “we’re not responsible for the third season.”) But by the run’s end, with a grand total of 79 episodes—barely making the minimum threshold—Star Trek could enter syndication. It had earned a second life.

(3) KINSELLA OBIT. Canadian author W. P. Kinsella (1935-2016) died September 16. Much of his fiction was devoted to depicting First Nations people of Canada, or baseball – and he is particularly well known as the author of Shoeless Joe, which was made into one of my favorite movies, Field of Dreams.

Kinsella’s first published book, Dance Me Outside (1977), was a collection of short stories narrated by a young Cree, Silas Ermineskin, who describes life on a First Nations reserve in Kinsella’s native Alberta. A later collection of similar stories, The Fencepost Chronicles, earned Kinsella the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Kinsella was criticized for engaging in “cultural appropriation” by writing from the point of view of Native people, while he rejected the criticism on the grounds that a writer has the license to create anything he chooses.

These stories use the ineptness of the white bureaucrats on reservations as background, and Kinsella defended them, saying, “It’s the oppressed and the oppressor that I write about. The way that oppressed people survive is by making fun of the people who oppress them. That is essentially what my Indian stories are all about.”

Kinsella wrote nearly 40 short stories and three novels involving baseball. Shoeless Joe (1982) was his first novel, and the second, Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986), was written as an epic spiritual conflict in the form of a game between a minor league team and the 1908 World’s Champion Chicago Cubs which threatened to go on to the ending of the world.

(4) BESIDES THE FICTION. Abigail Nussbaum says don’t overlook another reason to respond to Strange Horizons’ fund drive:

But beyond my relationship with it as a writer, what makes Strange Horizons special and important to me is the material it’s put before me as a reader.  A lot of the testimonials you’re going to see around the internet in the next few weeks are going to talk about Strange Horizons‘s fiction department, which has and continues to give platforms to new writers, many of whom have gone on to great things.  That’s worth recognizing and celebrating, but to me Strange Horizons will always be special as one of the finest, most interesting, most fearless sources for criticism and reviews.  There is, quite simply, no other online source of genre reviews that covers the breadth of material that Strange Horizons does, with the depth of engagement and the multiplicity of perspectives that it offers.  The editorial team that took over from me in 2015, under the leadership of Maureen Kincaid Speller, has excelled at finding new voices, such as Samira Nadkarni, Vajra Chandrasekera, and Keguro Macharia, to offer their vital points of view, while maintaining the presence of reviewers like Nina Allan and Erin Horáková, whose writing is essential to anyone interested in the state of our field.

(5) ASPIRING TO GREATNESS. Kameron Hurley identifies another of her writing problems in “The Madhatter Teaparty: Rescuing Your Characters from Endless Cups of Tea”. I have wondered if she didn’t struggle, would she still have such a rich source of examples to use in teaching about the writing profession? (She probably would!)

Plot kicks my ass. It kicks my ass up one end of a story and down another, because honestly, all my characters want to do is snark at each other over tea. Or whisky. Or coffee. Or bug juice. Whatever. Any excuse for them to sit around flinging zingers at each other and discussing what they are going to do next works for me.

This over reliance on tea-and-conversation scenes is a hallmark of discovery or gardener writers like me. When we get stuck on what happens next, we just sit the characters down for a chat and let them figure it out. Needless to say, this is a time consuming bit of lazy writing, because while it may get us where we’re going eventually, we can spend literally thousands upon thousands of words over the course of a novel having the characters explain the plot to each other, and then we have to go back and remove all those scenes or make them more interesting in their final form (I spent a lot of time in Empire Ascendant in particular going back and making talking scenes more interesting. For real: in the first draft, the first 150 pages of that book was just people talking)….

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • September 21, 1897 — The New York Sun’s Frank Church replied, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
  • September 21, 1937 — J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit.

(7) COMICS MAKING. NPR tells about “A Comics Convention For The Unconventional: The Small Press Expo”.

In theory, SPX seems a lot like many of the other comic-cons that have been popping up across the country over the last few years. There’s the vast exhibit floor, there’s a packed schedule of panels and spotlights featuring interviews of, and discussions between, various comics creators. People mill about, lugging bags loaded down with stuff they’ve bought, or find an empty patch of carpeted hallway on which to plop themselves and rest while perusing their purchases.

If you close your eyes, its sounds a lot like any other con: the low, steady murmur of voices punctuated by the occasional exclamation of delight or surprise from someone who’s stumbling across an old friend — or a new passion.

But the moment you open your eyes, you’re reminded that SPX isn’t like most other cons.

It’s smaller, for one thing — the big shows in San Diego and New York attract upwards of 130,000 people, and SPX’s attendance is closer to 3,000. It fills the huge ballroom at a hotel in North Bethesda, Maryland, but unlike other comic-cons, where companies build massive booths that tower over you with video screens, loudly hawking all manner of comics-adjacent stuff like toys, games, statues and t-shirts, everything at SPX is at eye-level.

(8) CAN THOSE EDITORS. A piece on wired.com by Susanne Althoff called “Algorithims Could Save Book Publlshing – But Ruin Novels”  looks at ways publishers are using data to determine which books they buy, including a summary of The Bestseller Code.

The result of their work—detailed in The Bestseller Code, out this month—is an algorithm built to predict, with 80 percent accuracy, which novels will become mega-bestsellers. What does it like? Young, strong heroines who are also misfits (the type found in The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). No sex, just “human closeness.” Frequent use of the verb “need.” Lots of contractions. Not a lot of exclamation marks. Dogs, yes; cats, meh. In all, the “bestseller-ometer” has identified 2,799 features strongly associated with bestsellers.

Later, Althoff discusses a company called Inkitt which invites everyone to submit their novels for everyone to read, and offers to act as agent for the books that are the best-performing. Inkitt sold YA novel Bright Star by Erin Swan to Tor, which will publish it next year.

The ability to know who reads what and how fast is also driving Berlin-based startup Inkitt. Founded by Ali Albazaz, who started coding at age 10, the English-language website invites writers to post their novels for all to see. Inkitt’s algorithms examine reading patterns and engagement levels. For the best performers, Inkitt offers to act as literary agent, pitching the works to traditional publishers and keeping the standard 15 percent commission if a deal results. The site went public in January 2015 and now has 80,000 stories and more than half a million readers around the world.

(9) KAREN GILLAN IN JUMANJI REBOOT. The Hollywood Reporter has “9 Theories as to Why ‘Jumanji’ Has Actress Karen Gillan So Scantily Clad”.

The first image of the upcoming Jumanji cast was released Tuesday, and one notable cast member looked like she got lost on the way to a Lara Croft Halloween party and ended up in the jungle instead.

Karen Gillan plays Ruby Roundhouse alongside Dwayne Johnson as Smolder Bravestone, Kevin Hart as Moose Finbar, and Jack Black as Shelly Oberon. Johnson promises there’s a plot-driven reason for Ruby’s seemingly sexist and totally nonsensical costume in the reboot.

“Her jungle wardrobe will make sense when you know the plot,” Johnson said. “Trust me.”

(Some fans are guessing that Gillan’s character is a trope. The original Jumanji from 1995 featured purposefully stereotypical characters who were part of the game — so perhaps that’s the plot device Johnson is referencing.)

(10) VOTE FOR FEMINIST AND QUEER COMICS AWARD. Autostraddle is holding is third annual comic award contest, for both excellence in the art form, and excellence in representation: “It’s Time to Vote in the 3rd Annual Autostraddle Comic And Sequential  Art Awards”.

This month is the three year anniversary of this column, which seeks to highlight and celebrate comics by, for and about queer women. So, that means that it’s once again time for the Autostraddle Comic and Sequential Art Awards, the only comic award that focuses on feminist themes and queer women’s representation in comics. Starting last year, these awards are voted on by you, the fans and readers of these comics and these books, and we’re doing that again this year, but now there are even more categories for you to vote in! This way, even more comics and creators get the recognition they so rightfully deserve.

(11) LANSBURY HELPS CELEBRATE BEAUTY & THE BEAST’S 25th. She can still carry a tune at the age of 90 – click through to watch as “Angela Lansbury sings ‘Beauty and the Beast’ theme in honor of anniversary”.

Twenty five years later, Angela Lansbury is ever just the same enchanting actress for Beauty and the Beast fans.

The actress, 90, reprised her role as Mrs. Potts during a special screening for the 25th anniversary of the animated classic. Lansbury, accompanied by composer Alan Menken, sang the title song, “Beauty and the Beast,” during the celebration in New York on Sunday. At the end, she even spoke her line to her character’s son: “Run along and get in the cupboard, Chip!” much to the delight of the crowd.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Rose Embolism, Martin Morse Wooster, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bruce Baugh.]

128 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/21/16 “Repent, Pixels”, Said The Box-Tick Man

  1. @Iphinome: I prefer Twist and Shout to Scream and Shout.

    @Standback: In fairness, in jungle adventure superfun times, it’s not unusual for guys to lose their shirts for a while. So I bet we will get a sexualized guy, too. 😉

    @SciFiMike: Just curious, since the checkbox (and nearly all not-totally-broken sites) works for me in Safari on my Mac. Are you using Safari on a small screen like an iPhone? /nosy

    BTW nice scroll title suggestion! 😀 I didn’t realize the movie would start this week, so thanks for mentioning it; I liked the book a lot, so I’m hoping the movie’s good.

  2. /Godstalking out of curiosity (I’m getting the “click to confirm your sub” e-mails, I know; I don’t normally sub to super-busy threads)

  3. The last File 770 email I received was the 9/19 Scroll Like a Pixel Day “new post notification”.

  4. The 9/19 Scroll notification was also the last one I received (I don’t normally subscribe to comment notifications, but I’m doing with this one, just to see if anything happens)

  5. (3) Kinsella’s passing hurts more than I thought it would.

    I don’t even enjoy baseball, and I loved Kinsella’s work. Shoeless Joe is well worth the read. Much better than the film they based on it.

    I re-read the book shortly before Turtledove’s latest (The House of Daniel) was released, because I wanted to see how Turtledove’s love of baseball stacked up against Kinsella’s.

    Both books made me want to love baseball more than I do.

  6. @Mike: I hit the tickbox in my previous comment and received an e-mail message asking me to confirm my subscription to comments.

    So that, at least, is working.

  7. The odd thing about baseball: I loathe the actual game. The idea of actually watching a game carries a high risk of Death By Boredom. If someone offered to pay off my mortgage if I sat thru an entire game, I suppose I could, but TV shots of the bleachers would mock me as the guy reading a book.

    But I’ve found myself liking a surprising number of stories about baseball. I’ll guess it’s because baseball fiction lets one see players as actual human beings in all their interactions, rather than anonymous interchangeable uniforms on a playing field. (Rec’d: Michael Bishop’s BRITTLE INNINGS, a mashup of baseball fiction and FRANKENSTEIN.)

    ID’ing bad fiction: Besides “that”, one of the other tells is an overuse of “was”. (I keep getting dinged for this by other members of the local writers workshop.)

  8. Dex said:

    On of my biggest pet peeves in fantasy/sci-fi is the lack of diversity in drinks or one drink thinly disguised as another drink. Drinking endless cups of tea is fine, but not when they’re calling it khah and the term buys the same damn thing everywhere in the Ten Kingdoms or whatever. Or barbarian walks into a tavern in a big city and orders an ale. Brewing is relatively advanced in the normal high fantasy world and local breweries were fiercely competitive in real period of the period.

    Amen! Not to mention the underlying problems with the assumptions about local agriculture and trade. I can’t begin to count the number of fantasy settings I’ve encountered where all the action happens in an area with a climate and setting that approximates northern Europe, yet it’s presented as normal to drink tea. Even if the author has bothered to remember to include some kind of stable society in a subtropical zone for our heroes’ kingdoms to trade with, it should still be an expensive luxury good.

    Having beer/ale available everywhere assumes a monoculture where everyone grows the same staple crop and has the same flavorings available. In a fantasy story where the heroes travel all over to different kingdoms, where’s the gin, ouzo, kumiss, soma, kvass, etc.?

  9. OGH:

    I get the confirmation e-mail, I subscribe to the thread and it all looks normal, but I get no notification e-mails. I am also not receiving notification of new posts. Happened about the same time as JJ mentioned, I was getting early 9/19 Scroll posts then it just stopped.

    Read “The Man Who Walked Home” by Tiptree Jr. yesterday and whoa. That was a helluva story. Ambitious and remarkably personal and very very sad.

  10. (8): Aside from my doubts about Wired‘s ability to weigh some new technogimmick instead of going ape over it, my first question would be how long the algorithmists think a set of preferences will hold? We’ve seen “Just like XXX, only different” produce some spectacular bombs from Hollywood; if everybody comes out with That Kind of Book, won’t people get tired of it? (I wouldn’t bet they would given Mencken’s axiom, but I wouldn’t bet they wouldn’t either.) I do note one algorithmist suggesting that the tool is best used for deciding which unknown to publish; if everyone was this moderate the market \might/ not saturate, but I don’t expect the corporations that control much of publishing to be moderate. (ninja’d by Seth Gordon, although I’m not as sure as he is that tastes will saturate.)

    (11) That’s not just carrying a tune; she can still carry the song.

    @Bruce Arthurs: at a recent discussion of Lord of Light, the editor of NESFA’s complete Zelazny shorts said that the many smokers in Z’s work (up to some date) reflected Z’s own heavy smoking; IIRC he got this from Z’s family.

    @Kyra: I also had mixed feelings about Borderline; I concluded afterward that the hardnosed ~halfway-house manager was probably realistic, as were the failings of some of the characters to act “sensibly” — but it seemed that too many people were acting implausibly. Possibly this is Baker learning how to show (rather than tell) how strong some characters’ ~irrational drives are; I may try the next to see if she learns more.

    @Dex: Brewing is relatively advanced in the normal high fantasy world and local breweries were fiercely competitive in real period of the period. I’d have guessed that most alehouses were “tied”, if not brewing their own beer; competition would be part of a more market-wide economy than appears in most high fantasy. And I’m not surprised when a bartender puts down a house ]brand[ whiskey in a more recent setting, just as many restaurants have house wine; a customer who wants a call brand will ask for it (and not slam it down, like the characters you point to) and expect to pay more.

  11. (Endless tea): Funny, Im the opposite. If I write something, Ill write as little dialogue as I can get away with.

    (Ticking boxes): I didnt get any email after not ticking a box, so at least that is working.

    Let me be the one, to scroll old with you!

  12. I was under the impression that a lot of bars do have a standard brew on tap for the person who doesn’t want to think past “orange-yellow drink with a head in my glass NAOW.”

    They do. When it comes to liquor, it works like this:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_drink

    But if you order “a beer,” most bars will also have a standard lager they’ll serve you. If you cared about what brand, you’d have asked.

    In fantasy novels, I assume that they’re at the stage where the tavern brews its own beer, so you’re not going to pick between brands; this is what they’ve got. Or the slightly later stage where breweries supply taverns, but each tavern will have a deal with only one brewery, so again, there’s not a lot of choice.

    Unless there’s snow on the ground. If there’s snow, it’s science fiction.

  13. @MIke No e-mail notifications.

    @Dex

    On of my biggest pet peeves in fantasy/sci-fi is the lack of diversity in drinks or one drink thinly disguised as another drink. Drinking endless cups of tea is fine, but not when they’re calling it KHAH and the term buys the same damn thing everywhere in the Ten Kingdoms or whatever. Or barbarian walks into a tavern in a big city and orders an ale. Brewing is relatively advanced in the normal high fantasy world and local breweries were fiercely competitive in real period of the period.

    In her Pern novels, Ann McCaffrey’s characters didn’t just drink wine, they preferred “Benden Wine,” described at one point as a “rare vintage.” Unfortunately, that was the only kind of wine ever named (if memory serves me), and after a while it got really old. So I guess I’d add that variety needs to mean “more than just one.” 😉

  14. I have attended one or more major league baseball games in my lifetime. The one I (dimly) remember involved both Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. (In later years when my father and brothers went to games, my Mom and I went to museums..)

    Looking back, I think part of baseball’s growth in popularity in the early and mid-20th century was because it was a good RADIO sport. A fan could turn on a radio and enjoy the game while engaged in other tasks. In some cases even while at work.

    The same leisurely pacing that makes it work well with audio commentary and no video feed makes it less than compelling in person when compared with more frenetic pastimes, where there is much more going on at the same time.

    Stories about baseball may share some of the advantage of the audio commentary.

  15. @emgrasso I agree. Baseball is a fantastic sport for radio, because there isn’t a lot going on at any given time, so a single play-by-play guy can keep listeners informed of everything they need to know.

    And I think you’re right about why baseball fiction tends to be so much better than that of other sports. Its flow is closer to the narrative/storytelling flow than that of most other sports.

    @Mike: No e-mails other than the initial confirmation.

  16. I’m working my way through some WordPress troubleshooting advice. The first thing I did was turn on the option that sends me an email anytime someone adds a comment — and that’s working okay.

    Is that good or bad?

  17. Looking back, I think part of baseball’s growth in popularity in the early and mid-20th century was because it was a good RADIO sport.

    It is also a sport that is easy to follow via the newspaper. The long season coupled with the way box scores can be reported makes it possible for a newspaper reader to follow the fortunes of their team and the individual players on their team even if they never hear a radio broadcast or attend a game in person.

  18. Baseball is a little like test cricket in that makes a good background while you’re doing something else. A season that lasts 162 games means that each individual game means only little until you get into the play-offs and the World Series. I think it’s different when you attend a game, but the last time I went, the people under 20 seemed much more interested in the food than the game.

    Even the best baseball stories concentrate less on the individual moment or even game and more on the season. But then, Kinsella’s work often had fantastic elements to keep things moving along like a black angel patrolling right field or a mysterious voice telling the protagonist to go pick up J.D. Salinger and take him to a Red Sox game.

  19. I seem to still be getting notifications for updates to the 2016 Recommended SF/F page. But I think most of those posts are copied over from other threads by Mike or JJ. (Might being posted by an administrator have something to do with it?)

    I only rarely tick an open thread, to avoid having my inbox flooded with emails. So can’t give anecdotal data about that.

  20. @Kendall

    “Just curious, since the checkbox (and nearly all not-totally-broken sites) works for me in Safari on my Mac. Are you using Safari on a small screen like an iPhone? /nosy”

    On a desktop Mac. I don’t get the same problems if using Firefox or Chrome, but I prefer Safari as most websites seem to load faster – I presume because it is optimised for OSX.

    I think The Girl With All The Gifts movie is released on Friday in the UK only, so any USAians may have to wait a bit. Best zombie-type novel I have ever read, so also looking forward to the film.

  21. Shoeless Joe is well worth the read. Much better than the film they based on it.

    This, for me, seems to be an instance of how an opinion is colored by if you saw the movie first or read the book first. I usually range from “am annoyed by” to “utterly despise” by movies based on books that I like (or even, I suppose, on books that I’ve merely finished.) But if I see the movie first, I tend to be more forgiving and might even think the movie is an improvement (for instance, I think that Bladerunner is approx. 1972 percent better than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.) I saw the movie Field of Dreams at least 20 years before I read Shoeless Joe, and thought that the movie’s streamlining of the plot improved on the book. (Salinger instead of an invented author might have been more meaningful, but I wouldn’t want to loose the excellent performance by Darthy V.)

    The odd thing about baseball: I loathe the actual game.

    But I’ve found myself liking a surprising number of stories about baseball.

    I’m the same way about MMORPGs and old-school RPGs. No interest whatsoever in playing them, but for some reason I like media about playing them. (For example, the South Park episode Make Love, Not Warcraft, The Community episode Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Strosseses Halting State, Stephenson’s Reamde, Austin Grossman’s You, etc.)

  22. I also had mixed feelings about Borderline; I concluded afterward that the hardnosed ~halfway-house manager was probably realistic, as were the failings of some of the characters to act “sensibly” — but it seemed that too many people were acting implausibly.

    Caryl was actually my favorite character in the book.

    I also didn’t mind that characters who couldn’t be expected to act “sensibly” weren’t acting “sensibly” … but I did mind that the internal reasons given for recruiting people who were like that struck me as completely implausible.

  23. I’d somehow missed that The Girl With All The Gifts was being made into a movie. I’m wondering how they’ll handle it; part of the tension of the book was the slow reveal, helped by the naivety of the tight-focus point-of-view character. And I don’t see how you can do a slow reveal in a visual format like movies…

    (Dancing around spoilers, in case someone hasn’t read it.)

  24. (8) Young, strong heroines who are also misfits (the type found in The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). No sex, just “human closeness.” Obviously, no one involved with The Bestseller Code actually read any of these books, which variously contain copious amounts of sex, plus rape and murder.

    This is just the latest iteration of the long-standing trend in the entertainment industry to copy last year’s hits; I don’t think the addition of computer algorithms is going to make this approach any more successful than before. It’s the same reductive impulse: If we just include a, b, and c into this book, it’s guaranteed to be a success! Books are nothing more than interchangeable product, and readers will be just as happy with one as with another.

    @Greg Hullender: But what it won’t do is find the very best works. Nor will it find “black swans”–books that manage to be bad for novel reasons.

    You’d need to have access to a publisher’s slush pile to build a thing like this, since it would have to be trained on actual bad books.

    I think you’re actually addressing a different issue than what The Bestseller Code is aiming at: they don’t have the slightest interest in whether a novel is good, all they care about is whether it will sell in massive quantities. (Seriously, is there anyone who believes The Da Vinci Code is in any novelistic sense a good book?)

    Trivia question: why is it impossible to use good books alone to train a classifier to separate good from bad? I don’t at all agree with your premise here: you are implicitly arguing that there is an algorithm for producing good books. What makes a book good, let alone great? That it isn’t like anything else.

  25. Seriously, is there anyone who believes The Da Vinci Code is in any novelistic sense a good book

    Yes. For a very specific value of good, that being providing a series of cliffhangers which are engaging enough to keep an audience that usually doesn’t read anything at all going through chapter after chapter and then compelling them to talk to their friends about how exciting it was and oh man you’ve gotta read this, it’s amazing.

    It was a novel for people who don’t read (m)any novels, and it was very, very good at hooking that crowd.

  26. @Kurt Busiek: A brewery doesn’t necessarily brew only one type of beer, though. European monasteries in the middle ages, for instance, might brew one type of beer for the nobility, another for the monks and a third for pilgrims and the poor. One relatively easy way to do this is to make a strong beer with the first runnings from your wort and a small beer with the second runnings; you could even make three beers.

  27. @MaxL: Fair point; I vaguely recall one reviewer saying “This is the worst book that I couldn’t stop reading!” That is, however, as you say, a very specific value of “good”.

  28. @PhilRM : @MaxL: Fair point; I vaguely recall one reviewer saying “This is the worst book that I couldn’t stop reading!” That is, however, as you say, a very specific value of “good”.

    I remember a particular Dean Koontz book grabbing me that way (From the Corner of His Eye). I hated it, but I couldn’t put it down. I hated the characters, I hated the development of the bad guy (a vaguely sympathetic guy until the author flipped the alignment switch in his back from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil, so suddenly I wasn’t sure I was supposed to believe that ur’q npghnyyl whfg chfurq uvf tveysevraq bire n pyvss, onfvpnyyl sbe ab ernfba bgure guna gb urne gur fbhaq ure obql znqr ba vzcnpg). I hated the smug version of Christianity that supposedly denoted the good guys and was always proven right by Authorial Fiat, I hated the child-character-with-esp-as-hand-of-God-in-this-fallen-world conceit, I hated it on a line-level word-by-word writing quality level too, but I had to find out what happened next.

    So I finished reading it. Then I never, ever picked up another Koontz book again.

    It’s kind of like, some people think that “it must be an effective advertising campaign if you remembered it! That’s all that matters!” without realizing that an advertising campaign that’s memorable for the wrong reasons may help ensure that potential customers remember never to buy from that brand name.

  29. 1831 is a welcome digression from the main The Wicked + The Divine storyline; a one shot look at an earlier set of divine incarnations who, of course, turn out to be Byron, Shelley, et al. Set in one night, in Switzerland, it’s a reimagining of the events that led to the creation of one of the great myths, in this case an actual act of creation. If then we are as Gods, we might as well be good at it.

    A welcome work, and a fine example of the single issue story.

  30. kathodus: @Mike Glyer – Are your plugins all updated?

    Yes they are.

    Also, things seem to have gone south a couple of days ago, which is when installed all the latest updates that I hadn’t gotten around to. I suspect Jetpack has improved itself by stopping sending notifications about comments, even though WordPress still provides the option on the dashboard. (Jetpack is a set of plugins to WordPress, and seems to be the software that actually controls the notifications.)

  31. emgrasso: “I think part of baseball’s growth in popularity in the early and mid-20th century was because it was a good RADIO sport.”

    Yeah. I remember summers in the 1980s while working on Mackinac Island in Michigan, sitting out on the beach, drinking beers, throwing stones in the water, and listening to the Detroit Tigers game and watching the bridge and the stars. Good times.

    Never read Shoeless Joe, although I did read Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. It was good, but weird.

    Speaking of beer . . .

    The bar I usually drink at has about 20 beers on tap, mostly craft beers but some mainstream brew, and more in bottles—Miller High Life and Bud Lite and such, but if you order a beer, you pretty much have to name a brand. On the other hand, a long time ago I walked in and ordered the basic shelf scotch, and the bartender said, “No, you don’t want to drink that,” and he gave me Dewar’s but only charged me the price of the generic brand, whatever it was. One reason I still go back there (too often) to this day.

  32. I’m not that old, but a lot of pubs tied to breweries would have bitter and mild, and if posh, best bitter, on the hand pumps. Then the lagers started arriving, then premium brews from the brewery, then 960 different imported marketing driven beers.

    Of course, if it’s snowy outside, the beer is made by transporter technology, so you have almost infinite choices.

  33. I tried to read the DaVinci Code. I really did. I lasted two pages. The writing at the sentence level was SO BAD. SO CLICHE.

    I am happy that so many people enjoyed it, but it was not for me.

    Someday I hope to enjoy the movie. But I honestly could not believe how popular it was. It’s right up there with 50 Shades as far as my puzzlement about The Market.

    And I’m no snob about writing. I happily consume lots of non-highbrow fiction. But there’s a line there. And for me, Dan Brown crossed it.

  34. Just left a comment on the 9/22 Pixel Scroll. I’m not even getting the “confirm subscription” email now.

    EDIT: Well, at least not for 9/22; I just got another one for 9/21. ????

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