Well, it’s finished. What’s finished? My terrible novel, of course.
I know it’s terribly unimportant to anyone else but me, and that it should be unimportant to me as well, but I so rarely finish what I start, that I can’t help but be a little please with myself. Of course, it’s so late, and there’s nobody reading this, so I feel I’ve every right to be a little smug, here in the perfect isolation of obscurity.
See you next year.
The BBC has a curious article about author Ian McEwan that makes an interesting error about his novel Enduring Love. In fact, the truth is much more subtle.
The article notes that:
McEwan made up a medical condition for the stalker and wrote a spoof article from a psychiatric journal explaining the illness and included it in the book.
His description of De Clerambault’s Syndrome fooled reviewers and psychiatrists alike.
In fact, De Clerambault’s Syndrome (where someone has the delusional belief that another person is in love with them) is well known in the medical literature and McEwan’s description is quite accurate.
So, in other words, McEwan was writing about a real disorder, but included a fake case study, supposedly reprinted from the fictional “British Review of Psychiatry”. Interesting, no? Doctor Vaughan Bell goes on to explain a possible reason for McEwan’s ability to fool the experts.
For reasons that aren’t worth going into, we spent this past Thanksgiving alone, lying on the couch watching television. It was not the most edifying experience in the world, but at least it did provoke a strong emotional response: utter disgust.
The arbitrary line in the sand, popularly known as “New Year’s”, seems to inspire the worst retrospective navel gazing parts of the human imagination. And, with the most retail giant’s cold, cynical, calculated decision to schedule Christmas a nearly a month earlier than normal, the Christmas/New Year’s nexus of emotional vulnerability and confusion seems to be reaching its tendrils further backward into the rest of the year.
Basically, what were saying is that we’re sick of the 2007 retrospectives, already.
We imagine that they are the last thing in the can before television professionals are allowed to go on their holiday vacations, but sheesh. The cable news networks might have a kind of a reason to look back, reminding us all of the news stories they’ve covered in the past 12 (actually, 10) months, but that justification barely cuts the mustard. Since most of the topics they focused on were the worst sensationalist, time-wasting dreck that they were able to broadcast, and the fact that that they ran all of those stories into the ground, what need do we have to see them again?
The worst, however, are the inevitable, ubiquitous, and completely unnecessary celebrity news retrospectives. Holy hell, didn’t we spend enough mental energy paying attention to this crap the first time around? We are intimately familiar with all of the crap that this year’s crop of talentless, coke-head starlets could muster, and we don’t even watch eXtra. We do, however, shop at a major chain supermarket and, as much as we would like to avoid peering at the tabloid headlines, we simply do not have enough to occupy our minds whilst waiting to pay for our groceries.
We realize, of course, our small protests will not be heard. The vast mountain of — well, anything actually — justifies its own existence, right? That is, there wouldn’t be so much celebrity coverage if there wasn’t a huge demand for it — just like, there wouldn’t have been so much opium in China during the 1800s if there hadn’t been such huge demand. Right? Right?!
In the end, however, we are opposed to any yearly retrospective just on principle. 2007 was not a great year for us, and we sort of resent having to remember any of it. Nevertheless, keep an eye out for our own end of year coverage — scheduled to appear sometime around May of 2009.
So, Amazon has launched their new E-Reader. Color us unimpressed.
We’ve been this way before. As yet, no ebook reader has been anything like a smashing success. We’ve mentioned what we think a successful (we’re talking iPod levels of success, here) ebook reader might look like, and we stand by our suggestions. Which are:
1. It must be priced at, or close to, $100 — or less.
2. It must be able to display any book from any publisher ever, in the entire history of the written word. And the digital copies must be cheap and unlocked (that is, no DRM).
3. The batteries must last a really long time.
4. It has to be available before really good smart phones that are actually useful are available.
Those first three features would probably entice people to buy this hypothetical device. But, we hasten to add, we suspect that those three conditions will never be met before the forth one comes into play. Oh well.
As for the Kindle, I don’t think anyone will be willing to waste their money on it.
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