jlc

Shouldn't that read, "A Nunified?"

I always enjoy this series, but I've never actually built one:

http://cr.yp.to/hardware/build-20090123.html

A related, interesting read is Michael Chabon's intro to the 2005 Best American Short Stories, reprinted in his essay collection _Maps and Legends_.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-American-Short-Stories-2005/dp/06...

http://www.amazon.com/Maps-Legends-Reading-Writing-Borderlan...

His argument is, basically, that Modernism (here meaning the Joycean/Chekhovian "epiphany" story) has damaged the short story, or at least that it has played itself out, and that the old-timey plotted, adventure story looks fresh again.

But really, as others have mentioned, commercial short story markets have been in decline for 60+ years. Science fiction magazines are one of the last holdouts of the pulp era, and they're not all that healthy (commercially). This is making (has made?) general short fiction more like poetry. That ain't all bad. One upside may be that as commercial short fiction declines, writers and readers may be less inclined to think plotted short fiction == bad fiction.

Anyway, there is still a lot of quality contemporary-ish short fiction out there. If you like short fiction, you will certainly like some of it: Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Matthew Klam, Arthur Bradford, George Saunders, T.C. Boyle, and on and on and on.

JR by William Gaddis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_R

I feel certain that people w/ AS trend away from professions like, say, sales. I feel certain that a large chunk of people w/ AS are knowledge workers for exactly the reasons given in this thread. But it's worth pointing out that AS encompasses people w/ a broad range of abilities, and narrowness of focus and social anxiety are only two aspects of the syndrome. There are often so-called sensory-integration issues, rigidity, a low tolerance for frustration, compulsiveness, difficulties w/ executive function, and on on -- all part of, or concomitant to, AS.

So, I'm just saying, it is a disability, and I expect adults w/ AS also trend to underachievement. Anybody know a brilliant but difficult person (or two) delivering pizzas or working as a museum guard or the like? I do.

FWIW, my 5 y.o. has AS, so I've thought about this quite a bit.

Sorry, I don't have any specific tips. I studied Russian in college and didn't find Cyrillic to be a barrier at all. I just learned the sounds and with a week or two of practice, it seemed natural enough.

I've lost much of my Russian (such as it was) through disuse, but I can still read the alphabet just fine.

What about the hearing impaired? They should squirt water too.

Somehow I expected a bigger beard.

Or a side effect of cancer treatment . . . .

In particular, are hormone imbalances frequently comorbid with, say, pancreatic cancer?

I ran into this a while back:

http://blog.brianbeck.com/post/53538107/python-dsl-i

I don't just read books; I wallow in them. I remember well the acute pain of not knowing how to read and the relief when my mother taught me. I was five, and I just haven't stopped reading since. I'll be 38 in a couple of months.

I'm reading Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, because O'Connor is wicked and funny. Favorite book? As others have pointed out, this is a ridiculous question -- my favorite kind! Some books I love: Lolita, As I Lay Dying, The Ghost Writer, Goodbye, Columbus, Blood Meridian, Anna Karenina, Where I'm Calling From, Huck Finn, Dubliners and on and on. I read mostly literary novels, but I read fairly widely -- genre stuff (skiffy, crime), history, philosophy, pop science, whatever's good. I average around 1 book per week, but I read in jags and sometimes go a couple of weeks without reading anything but blogs and news.

I'm sure there are any number of studies that will show the benefit of reading, but I much prefer to classify books with whiskey and cigarettes. How do you measure the utility of whiskey and cigarettes? I like the Romantic idea that books are bad for you. You know, the kind of thing that destroyed Emma Bovary and robbed Señor Quixote of his sanity. Maybe I just need to manufacture a vice. I don't like cigarettes, and a beer (and a book) after the kids are in bed is about all I can handle these days.

Hm. That's an interesting observation, but I respectfully disagree.

It comes down again to the quality of the comment. Is it a good humorous comment (e.g., not cliched, satiric, perhaps humorous and insightful, and so on), or is it a bad humorous comment (e.g., stale, not actually funny)? Right back where we started.

As Homer Simpson says, "When will people learn? Democracy just doesn't work."

There are any number of measures of aesthetics, but here's one to get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versification

It's about poetry, but all of the devices of poetry, including meter, are useful in prose.

This is one of those arguments that can't be won outright, but that doesn't mean some opinions aren't better (better reasoned, better informed) than others.

FWIW, I love Yegge's essays, but they ain't literature. They're too careless and breezy on any number of vectors -- more like a better than usual newspaper feature article. You know, something about the local Pumpkin Festival or whatever.

They do seem to stick, but . . . am I the only one finding it increasingly difficult to remember what the names are and which release they represent. This is true of OS X, too. I use Ubuntu 8.04 and OS X 10.4. I have to stop and think what the "codenames" for those are.

Maybe it's just premature (?) senility.

Jumpin' Jehosaphat!

Novelists (and short story writers) who publish a first book in their twenties are perceived as wunderkinder. It is considered much more usual to begin publishing books in your thirties. I'm basing this on my experience as a keen reader of "literary" fiction and as a fiction writer (with a handful of pubs, but no book, dammit). And no, if I published one today, I wouldn't be considered a wunderkinder ;-)

Now, I'm pretty confident in my assertion that this is the general perception, but I haven't compiled the facts to see whether perception coincides with reality. Certainly, I can think of many young first novelists from over the years: Michael Chabon, Philip Roth, Zadie Smith, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace. Yes, Neal Stephenson, you hackers, you. But if you check out the press and reviews on their first books, you'll find that almost the most salient fact about them is their age.

Assuming most first fiction books are published in the writer's early thirties, why would that be? Writing fiction requires a lot of disparate skills. It takes a long time to develop them, and they tend to develop asynchronously. The typical case, is a young writer with the technical skills, but not enough life experience to really get inside anyone's head, which is necessary in fiction, of course. (Certainly, it sometimes works the other way around.) Some young writers are so good at the technical aspects that the reader is willing to look past shallowness of characters, a tired theme, etc. And their books are published despite flaws. I'd say this is the case with Zadie Smith's _White Teeth_ for instance.

And of course (he says cynically) sometimes books are published for reasons other than their quality.

Murakami, BTW, has all but disavowed his first two novels.

29 is not a "late bloomer" for a novelist. That's considered somewhat precocious, actually.

I used to agree with a lot of what you say. Then I had kids ;-)

Actually, I still don't disagree entirely, but you did leave out one very important consideration: schools. In many American urban centers the schools are poor, and housing in urban school districts that are good is prohibitively expensive.

So you start looking at suburbs, and the commute is a trade-off you make for the better schools.

Oh, and I wish we could order pizza here -- too far out in the sticks.

Sadly, those aren't opposites.