Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman sounds like an interesting book:

“Drawing on decades of research in psychology that resulted in a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Daniel Kahneman takes readers on an exploration of what influences thought example by example, sometimes with unlikely word pairs like “vomit and banana.” […}Thinking, Fast and Slow gives deep—and sometimes frightening—insight about what goes on inside our heads: the psychological basis for reactions, judgments, recognition, choices, conclusions, and much more.  –JoVon Sotak

Thinking, Fast and Slow received some good press (selected as one of the best books of 2011 by New York Times Book Review, Globe and Mail, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal), which means more people searching Amazon for the book. Except they might find something else by accident.

Thinking, Fast and Slow was published on October 24^th, 2011, the same day that Fast and Slow Thinking by Karl Daniels became available on Amazon. Read more »

Bot courtesy of Creative Commons, Mattie B

Amazon gets stranger by the day. Robots are in the middle of crazy bidding wars while we sleep. These “bots” are dropping the price of books to $0.01 or raising them to $2,198,177.95 while we mess our way through discussions on how much a cup of coffee should cost if you bring your own mug. But while the market (well, the cafe here) isn’t listening to customer opinions on cost, it (well, Amazon) is following the advice of the algorithms or bots.

It’s not new that Markov chains collect information from Wikipedia, curate the articles, and sell the finished books on Amazon. Betascript does this kind of publishing all the time. Narrative Science kind of does the same thing with basic sports/business articles/reports.

One computer program, donning the human name Lambert M. Surhone, created and sold such a book about computers pretending to be human. And I don’t think it was a memoir. The Lambert bot was selling its book new, print-on-demand, for $47. Before you knew it, there was a used/like one available for $46.99. The bot bidding war had begun.

Last year a human software engineer at Facebook, Carlos Bueno, wrote  a children’s book where the main character, Lauren Ipsum, meets the Wandering Salesman, fends off Jargon, etc.  Even though you can read it on a tablet, it’s “a computer science book that doesn’t involve a computer.” He self-published as print-on-demand and set the price to $14.95. Enter the bots. Read more »

How are we on time?   You know, chronological, nanosecond by nanosecond, always, always, running, time…  Before you answer, please note the following:   it’s been about 48 years since the death of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (and that’s roughly my own age… he added, self-consciously).   And more to the point –

Stephen King has written a new novel (released on Nov. 8, 2011), depicting events leading up to and beyond “11/22/63″…  In fact, this is the title of the 849 page tome of fiction, in which the protagonist, Jake Epping, travels back in time to 11:58 a.m., September 9, 1958, and accepts the mission of preventing the assassination.  The 35-year-old school teacher therefore has a good five years to move to Texas, get close to Lee Harvey Oswald and otherwise unravel layer upon layer of  elusive history.

What he discovers, of course, is that history’s not like a tangled string of Christmas lights.  It doesn’t even resemble an onion.

History, it seems, has been wrapped and rewrapped, inserted and re-inserted, into and out of the autonomous individual’s psyche — an individual who is embedded in peculiar communities from which we, upon “pain” of non-existence, may never detach ourselves.   There is no such thing as objective history.  Here’s the quote from the main character, favored by a New York Times Critic:

“For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. . . . A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”

Poetic, eh?   Or maybe a hybrid of Soren Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death and Rogers & Hammerstein’s The Music Man (King’s novel even goes the extra mile and includes a librarian-love-interest)…

At any rate, I’m thinking you can either read this epic, suspense-filled revision of history — something I plan to do over the holiday season.  Or, you and I may delve into the John Hodgen poem, “Teachers,” from his collection, Heaven & Earth Holding Company.

Read more »

A while back, I picked up Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing at my local library. It was one of those books that sort of jumps out at you and begs to be taken home, so that even though you wouldn’t go looking for it, you check it out and, inevitably, end up paying late fees. I’ve had it for weeks now, and I’m only two essays deep. This is, truly, a book about writing for science fiction writers: something that, while one of my latest stories is about a girl and her robot, I am not. It is also a book by a man who seems to be a science fiction machine:

I wrote the title “The Lake” on the first page of a story that finished itself two hours later.

and

Discovery of the larynx! My God, how beautiful! I trotted home, feeling my throat, and then my ribs, and then my medulla oblongata, and my kneecaps. Holy Moses! Why not write a story about a man who is terrified to discover that under his skin, inside his flesh, hidden, is a symbol of all the Gothic horrors in history–a skeleton!

The story wrote itself in a few hours. Read more »

Finally, a decent movie from Spokane–The Knights of Badassdom.

I can’t believe Tyrian Lanister (Game of Thrones) is friends with Jason Stackhouse (True Blood), Liam McPoyle (Always Sunny), River Tem (Firefly),  Abed (Community), and Steve Zahn. They summon a demon during a heated bout of live-action role-playing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gTT59NibGw

Marilyn Hacker Has a Speculative Poem in this Issue

If you had six weeks to teach twentieth century literature, which works would you include? I’m thinking of sticking with stories, essays, and poems in order to maximize the ground we can cover.

I want to focus on the ways in which editors of literary journals helped in the formation and invigoration of literary movements. The class is called Critical Perspectives on Twentieth Century Literature, and, while I don’t want to examine literary criticism, I do want to explore ways in which other sorts of critics have affected literary movements and literary camaraderie.

I’m interested in exploring the following editors and literary journals and their impact on literary landscapes of the 20^th century:

• Harriet Monroe, founded Poetry in 1912, where she promoted the work of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D., W.C. Williams, Wallace Stevens, and others.
• John Crowe Ransom, founded a group of poets called Fugitives, which included Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate. Together they started the literary journal The Fugitive in 1922. Ransom also created the literary theory, New Criticism.
• Charles S. Johnson, was the editor of Opportunity: Journal Of Negro Life, which started in 1923 and was a publication during the Harlem Renaissance that featured the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen.
• Andre Breton, a surrealist, founded the review La Révolution surréaliste in 1924, which he and his friends formatted like a scientific review of Breton’s time called La Nature. Breton wrote a Surrealist Manifesto and had a pivotal role in the surrealism movement. Read more »

Funeral of Soviet cosmonaut Komarov, 1967

NPR recently aired an extraordinary report on the sacrifice that lead to the death of Vladimir Komarov. In 1967 Komorov and national hero Yuri Gagarin were assigned to the same mission in a craft: a vessel that the two men identified as having hundreds of errors and was in effect unflyable. Nonetheless, because of the USSR’s blind rush to win the space race, one of the two men would essentially be forced to fly in a death trap.

Komarov, knowing that if he refused to fly, the back up pilot (Gagarin) would be sent in his place. On his decision to go instead of his friend, Komarov said, “He’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him,” before bursting into tears. Read more »

That little asshole on the far left is the reason unhappiness exists.

The first time I consciously became aroused by a member of the opposite sex was in fourth grade, during Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, an afternoon cartoon in which four rodents and a fly engender a detective agency inside a tree, in light of emerging crimes and mysteries too small in scale for humans to wrap their heads or hands around. The show stars classic Walt Disney chipmunks Chip & Dale, and introduces Zipper, a green housefly with globular yellow eyes, Monterey Jack, a morbidly obese Austrailian mouse with a mustache and an overwhelming addiction to cheese, and…sigh…sexy female mouse, Gadget Hackwrench.

Gadget is the voluptuous chief engineer of the Ranger Wing, the ballooned vehicle in which the five detectives fly across the world, meeting their objectives with cute and hilarious results. While Gadget is mostly an anthropomorphic ambassador of 1980s over-saturated sex appeal – long blonde hair, blue-eyes, a purple suit revealing her curves, known to say “golly!” at moments she deems appropriate – she’s also deft, intelligent. Unlike, say, the derivative and hapless Princess Toadstool of Super Mario Bros fame, forever captured and locked in King Koopa’s fiery World 8 castle, Gadget is instrumental in the Rescue Rangers’ pursuits of foiling chief antagonist Fat Cat’s schemes. Her father, Geegaw Hackwrench, a deceased inventor, passed his trade and strong will onto Gadget before he perished. The Rescue Rangers could not function as a unit without Gadget’s systematic acumen, not to mention her beauty, which fuels the motivation and tension between Chip & Dale.

Chip, based on Indiana Jones, is the alpha chipmunk, known for parading around in a fedora and a bomber jacket, often seen swinging across perilous gaps on a rope that he locks onto tree branches and clothes hangers with stunning accuracy. Chip takes himself too seriously, often hitting and yelling at Dale in tinny, discordant rage whenever the latter mucks about too much. Dale is sweet and laid back. He wears a red and yellow Hawaiian shirt and spends his free time reading comics, eating candy, and playing video games. Dale was the kind of chipmunk I could relate to, a lazy hedonist who leaves the hard work to others, but takes partial credit nonetheless. While neither chipmunk spends much time actively courting Gadget throughout the series’ two season run, as there is always crime and intrigue afoot, both long to win her over. I mean, who wouldn’t?

Read more »

On New Year’s Eve, 5,000 blackbirds fell dead from the sky and hit the Arkansan soil. Here’s the latest theory of their mysterious deaths: the BP spill settled a tectonic plate, causing the New Madrid fault line to release a subsonic groan. The birds heard the fault line and were startled to death, midair.

Starlings, robins, grackles, and blackbirds also “rained” mass carcasses in Kentucky, where, yes, the fault line extends.

And I was worried about what? The future of print in the digital age?

When the World Trade Towers collapsed, the structures turned to dust. Let me rephrase: the weight and the force of gravity left nothing but dust where once buildings stood. The computers died, too. But papers, regular old twenty pound brite white—filled with data entry, time sheets, e-mail print-outs, Farside cartoons—didn’t turn to dust. Sheets of paper had floated through the skyline. Paper is light, like that feather you hear about in contrast with the brick when you learn about gravity. Paper gets caught in the wind.

Men and birds and monuments disappear, but bureaucracy remains. I’ve read Lewis Mumford, and I’ve always thought stone to be the strongest, most everlasting medium for the written word. I would reconsider if our new papyrus will carry a word along better when hit by a plane.

Two hundred cows just last week dropped dead in Wisconsin, near Stevens Point. Millions of dead fish fetched up the Chesapeake coast. Forty thousand crabs rolled up in the surf off Kent, in Britain. Something’s up. NASA released some very frightening diagrams on global warming. My friends in the Southeast are all freaked from getting an Iowa-style winter with persistent snow and ice.

It’s 2011. Go ahead and write as much as you can this year. Print it out, and save hard copies. Let’s see what survives.

An article in New York Magazine called  “James Frey’s Fiction Factory,” portrays Frey as “interested in conceiving commercial ideas that would sell extremely well. He was in the process of hiring writers—he said he’d already been to Princeton and was planning on recruiting from the other New York M.F.A. programs as well. We had probably heard of Jobie Hughes? Hughes was a former Columbia M.F.A. student who had graduated the previous spring. Frey told us that he and Hughes had sold the rights to an alien book they had co-written to Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay. Before he left the classroom, Frey spelled out his e-mail and told us to get in touch if we had a good idea.”

Here are the terms, as reported in New York:

In exchange for delivering a finished book within a set number of months, the writer would receive $250 (some contracts allowed for another $250 upon completion), along with a percentage of all revenue generated by the project, including television, film, and merchandise rights—30 percent if the idea was originally Frey’s, 40 percent if it was originally the writer’s. The writer would be financially responsible for any legal action brought against the book but would not own its copyright. Full Fathom Five could use the writer’s name or a pseudonym without his or her permission, even if the writer was no longer involved with the series, and the company could substitute the writer’s full name for a pseudonym at any point in the future. The writer was forbidden from signing contracts that would “conflict” with the project; what that might be wasn’t specified. The writer would not have approval over his or her publicity, pictures, or biographical materials. There was a $50,000 penalty if the writer publicly admitted to working with Full Fathom Five without permission.

You really have to read the whole thing to believe it. And maybe not even then.