I have been finding some cool things on the Internet. Now I will share them with you:

1.

San Quentin prison records, complete with the mug shot and details of what the criminal did. Was the man above a perjurer? A murderer? A thief? (I don’t actually remember–I just thought the picture was funny.)

2.

Tom Gauld’s sketchbook. He is an artist and illustrator and has put his whole sketchbook online. I love looking at sketchbooks because they are little windows into how the artist thinks.

3.

St Vincent is a pretty good band, and right now you can listen to their newest album in its entirety on NPR.

4.

10 Most Fascinating Natural Phenomena by Oddee. These are Mammatus Clouds, which I hadn’t heard of before. 10 Most Amazing Ghost Towns and 10 Alien-Looking Places on Earth are pretty good too.

5. I don’t have an image for this weird little lulltone game, but it was pretty fun for about five minutes there…

My mother wouldn’t let me watch Different Strokes as a kid. I see why now…

1. I have sequestered myself in my office, hiding from this ridiculous heatwave. It seems to be fading back to normal spring now, and nature is doing things outside. For example, new birds have taken up residence in this nest by my front door. I found half of an egg on the ground yesterday (pictured above), so I guess the babies have hatched already.

2. For some reason, I’m obsessed with the color turquoise. It’s the weirdest thing. One day turquoise was just another color and the next, anything painted turquoise is the coolest, most vibrant, most edgy thing to me. It’s so strange that I could be into a color, like being into a band or into an author, but it feels like the same thing. I am sincerely excited about turquoise, especially the lighter shades of it.

3. I am also into tulips. For Easter, I picked one from my garden to have under the TV and then I had several store-bought bouquets scattered around the house. Finally the flowers all died and I went to put them in the new compost bin. The one that I had picked from my garden had opened wide and was filled with aphids. I was horrified. These disgusting, icky, plant-killing bugs had been in my house for over a week feasting on my tulip. I went right over to my basil and fuchsia plant, afraid the aphids had spread, but they were bug free. The aphids hadn’t gotten on any of the store-bought tulips either, just that one flower from my garden. It was weird and slightly disturbing.

4. I have a feeling aphids are going to be a problem this year….

Marcia Simmons is blogging again, and starting off with a bang by talking about something that annoys me too: The idea that the demise of the newspapers has to do with blogs. It doesn’t. It has to do with mismanagement and conglomeration. Or as Marcia said:

1. Newspapers, most of you were horribly mismanaged by poor businesspeople or unethical tycoons (on the high corporate level). Publications aren’t like real estate. You don’t buy as many as you can cheap and then flip them for more cash. You don’t pile debt on your business when you notice that your market share is shrinking. Newspapers, you were online before most “blogs,” and most of you did not use that opportunity to figure out how the internet works and use it to your advantage. Newspapers never made their money from subscriptions (that barely pays for the printing); they made it from the ads. That is still true on the internet! I am not sure why you are having such a hard time with a model you originated?

Bloggers pointed people to you, saying “I don’t have the skill or time to tell you this story, but go to the professionals and read their work on their site.” And you reacted like they were trying to take your money. Now, after many many years, they finally are. I don’t blame the internet for ruining newspapers, I blame greedy, short-sighted businesspeople.

Word. Read the rest of Marcia’s post here.

I’m hesitate to take this on because Grammar Nazis scare me, but I’ll try. I have long found many of the common writing rules unnecessarily bossy. For example:

– Don’t use adverbs and adjectives. But, putting aside the undeniable power of the right verb (the difference between a lightning bug and lightning, as Mark Twain said), adverbs and adjectives exist in language for a reason–they color and shore up the words around them. Am I really not supposed to play with them? Or:

– Don’t use passive voice. But there are entire novels written in passive voice, lyrical novels that gain much of their beauty from passive sentence structures. Are those authors wrong, then? Or:

– Don’t start sentences with “But,” “However,” or “And.” Why? The first two effectively shift thoughts between sentences and the last connect thoughts together. Okay, I admit I overuse “And” or “But” to start sentences, but I’m not the only one. Ever read the Bible? “And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.”And God saw that it was good.” (Gen 1:9-10 NIV version) That’s some pretty good precedent there.

In general, these are decent thoughts to have in mind while writing. Adverbs often clutter up sentences; passive voice can weaken an argument; overusing “But” or “And” at the beginning of a sentence is lazy (guilty). The point is, we got these rules from The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. It is our classic grammar style guide. Every English teacher in the country promotes this book.

Well, Geoffrey K. Pullum, head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh makes a good case against The Elements of Style. Not only does he suggest that many of the book’s rules are unsupported by English literature, he pretty much points out that Strunk and White didn’t know what they were talking about. For example, they railed against passive voice and then gave examples of passive voice that, uh, weren’t actually passive.

Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. “At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard” is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:

* “There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.
* “It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had” also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.
* “The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired” is presumably fingered as passive because of “impaired,” but that’s a mistake. It’s an adjective here. “Become” doesn’t allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that “A new edition became issued by the publishers” is not grammatical.)

Even better, Strunk and White contradicted their own rules in the sentences of their style guide. According to Pullum:

[The book] is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can’t help it, because they don’t know how to identify what they condemn.

“Put statements in positive form,” they stipulate, in a section that seeks to prevent “not” from being used as “a means of evasion.”

“Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,” they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)

And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three adjectives: “The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.”

That’s actually not just three strikes, it’s four, because in addition to contravening “positive form” and “active voice” and “nouns and verbs,” it has a relative clause (”that can pull”) removed from what it belongs with (the adjective), which violates another edict: “Keep related words together.”

Wow, that’s pretty incompetent. See, I knew there was a reason I never liked that book. Adverbs and adjectives, here I come!

I have another book review up at Popmatters. This time it is on The Mayor’s Tongue, a first novel by Nathaniel Rich. Excerpt:

This April is the one-year anniversary of debut novel The Mayor’s Tongue, which would make its author, Nathaniel Rich, 28 years old. Rich’s age and his considerable connections—his father is a New York Times columnist, his mother works in publishing, he’s an editor at The Paris Review—tend to come up when people discuss his novel. To some, its publication suggests favoritism or nepotism or ageism or other ugly “isms”.

But none of that really matters if Rich can write—and he can.

More here.

I have an article in The Writer about book trailers. Publishers are starting to make advertisements for books very much like movie trailers. I explored this phenomenon in the current issue of the magazine–check it out on newsstands if you want to know more.

Check out the rotating compost bin Kyle make me last weekend!

It’s a wooden box on a v-shaped stand. It has a wooden brake that you pull out so that it rotates the box for you. He waterproofed the inside so that the rot wouldn’t eat away at the wood. The whole thing cost under $20 to make.

Now it is time to rot stuff.

My book review on A Reliable Wife, a first novel by Robert Goolrick, is up on PopMatters. A sample:

A Reliable Wife is the first novel by Robert Goolrick, whose previous memoir The End of the World as We Know It dealt with his abusive childhood. Set in 1907, the novel is about Ralph Truitt, a wealthy man in a small Wisconsin town who has put an ad in the newspaper for “a reliable wife.” But Catherine Land, the woman who gets off the train to marry him, is anything but. She carries with her a blue bottle of arsenic that she will use to murder Truitt and take all his money. Catherine wants “love and money” in this life, and while Truitt supplies the money, the love must be with her “useless and beautiful lover,” who she has left behind her in the big city.

The tone Goolrick establishes here is florid and descriptive with moments reminiscent of Jane Eyre, if that book were set in America and if Jane Eyre were an opium-smoking prostitute. Certainly the frozen landscape of rural Wisconsin works as well as the moors of England to portray isolation and severity. But this gothic landscape …

Cliffhanger! Read the rest here.

Kyle, I want a baby leaf monkey. Ok?