Reading Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. It’s a wild ride so far! Capt. Beefheart liked her hat!
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In trying to go through the backlog of Humble Bundle books. Currently Sister Emily’s Lightship by Jane Yolen. It is a bunch of alternate takes on folklore, fairy tales or other old stories. I laughed out loud at the Snow White story. She knows it is her evil stepmom in disguise and beans her upside the head with a cast iron pan killing her and the dwarfs help bury the body
Not all the stories have happy endings but they all are interesting reworkings of the material.
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Good news everyone!
The last time he retreated like this, the manuscript for A Dance of Dragons was finished a month later.
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Could he not have gone on retreat a couple years ago. When I still cared.
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GRRM is not your bitch
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Just finished John Scalzi’s The Consuming Fire, 2nd in the series started with The Collapsing Empire. Just as good as the first. Terrific world building, great characters with lots of personality (good and bad). My only complaint is that I have no idea what any of the characters look like! But that’s just his style.
And the humor is just fabulous.
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just finished
the author speaks at Google
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I’m really enjoying this. It’s a bit YA in nature I suppose but a lot of fun. It doesn’t seem to be a Cosmere novel, but I wouldn’t put it past Sanderson to tie it in in a plot twist later.
A lot more fun than the last couple of things I read.
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…okay, it has some grim bits too. I should have expected that given the author.
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I’m almost finished A Life in Parts, Bryan Cranston’s memoir. Interesting and he seems to be a lovely, genuine guy. But, if you haven’t seen Breaking Bad (as I haven’t), be warned: spoiler alert. He writes in detail about Walter’s motivations, what kind of things informed the character, etc etc… including what @Melizmatic specifically wrote about in the wotcha watching thread the other day.
Oh, and did you know he has an adult daughter who’s an actor? Apparently she goes by a different name (which he doesn’t provide - no spoilers there!). Gonna have to do some snooping and see if I can find out who she is.
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Never heard of her
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I’ve heard good things about Sweet/Vicious, but that it was cancelled too early.
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I’d never heard of the show either, but I love the concept
I’m reading and enjoying Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee, a kind of history/quadruple biography of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, and John Campbell, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and Isaac Asimov. It’s revealing, almost disturbingly so.
Summary
The book paints a pretty sorry picture of Hubbard, as a pathological liar, narcissist, obsessive, delusional and psychopathic, but it doesn’t make Campbell look particularly good either. Both really went down the garden path as far as reality was concerned. Campbell seemed to think science fiction, and later (along with Hubbard) mental studies of one sort or another could change the world, prevent war, etc. Campbell at least comes off as sincere, but Hubbard seems to shift fluidly from con-man to wannabe-messiah and back again. Both men wanted to be more than they were, never satisfied.
Alas my opinion of Campbell, not good anyway, has sadly decreased. I didn’t think my opinion of Hubbard could get any worse, but somehow he managed.
Heinlein seems rather tame in comparison, though I wonder why he was so close to Hubbard, given how his stories of sea adventures and being wounded in WWII were obvious lies. I guess he was fun to be with?? It’s interesting to see his politics deteriorate from a socially-conscious liberal to some kind of mix of conservative and libertarian. The whole idea of the “competent man,” who could do anything is just so ridiculous.
Asimov is one of my heroes, but I’ve always known he was, frankly, a molester of women. I can’t help it; my love for his writing (starting probably two decades befor my awareness of his faults) transcends that. It’s really hard to ignore a writer who seems to be in the room with me, talking to me personally, a friend.
My one concern with the book is that paragraphs of detail about Asimov seemed to have been lifted directly from his autobiography. I believe the Nevala-Lee has a large bibliography at the end of the book, but I’m not enough of an expert to know whether it represents fair use or not.
This is fascinating look at the Golden Age of science fiction and beyond.
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The book has a huge, impressive bibliography! I withdraw my concern.
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That sounds like an interesting book, although not necessarily a fun read.
I think Heinlein is one of those authors who’s fairly easy to outgrow. I read a pretty good chunk of his stuff (other than the early YA books) when I was young, but haven’t had the urge to read him in a long time.
I don’t know much about Heinlein’s life or the context of the quote, but I’ve always loved the sentiment behind “specialization is for insects,” at least as I interpret it. To me, it wasn’t about being able to do anything, per se, but about cultivating a variety of interests and skills. Sort of like getting a “well-rounded education” as an undergrad – it’s the difference between the College of Engineering and the College of Arts & Sciences.
But maybe that’s because I’m the type of person who’s generally curious but also easily bored. I used to start a lot of “projects” with great enthusiasm but rarely finish them. 
That’s a bummer about Asimov, though. I agree he’s easily the best of the four, and I can remember deliberately seeking out everything I could find by him after stumbling across one of the Empire or Foundation books (I can’t recall which). One of my high-school English teachers even let me do a book report on Foundation.
Have you ever read Psychohistorical Crisis, by Donald Kingsbury? It’s not authorized canon, but it’s set in the Foundation universe, and explored some of it’s themes in quite a bit of detail (it was a looong book). It was also a mystery novel of a sort, but the main thing I remember was a pretty involved sub-plot about figuring out the origins and historical length of the meter (or maybe it wasn’t the meter specifically, but it was a unit of measurement, roughly analogous to the question “how long is a cubit?” but with a much longer time span of history). Anyway, if you’re into Asimov’s Foundation stuff, you might enjoy that book.
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I’d been thinking about that line, and it’s interesting, it can cut so far on either edge. On one, like you said, specialization sounds so limiting. An ant becomes a soldier or a forager or a honeypot, and that task is her life. No wonder at the love for leaving that to them. People should be free to try many things, to be many things, instead of reduced to one.
But on the other, talking about Heinlein it is hard not to consider market ideology, where everything is about competing for the top spot. The competent man who masters everything asks for a single height, and to me this goes for how society treats a few Zuckerburgs and Bezoi as better than everyone else. If you were as good, you’d win that same status. Anything less is for little people. You know. Bugs.
Meanwhile specialization is why the world is amazingly full of insects. No one sort is best, and instead each has its own niche. Some live in forests, some deserts; some eat anything, and some are tuned to a single food; some hide and some soar in the open. And in this way the exclusion that comes about through competition is escaped, and an unfathomable diversity manage to coexist.
I think that vision is much more inspiring. I want society to have room for different sorts of craftsmen and artists, scientists and historians, doctors and mediators, manufacturers and repairers, architects and conservationists, to all be accepted as valuable. The sentiment that people should be more than a singe role is good, but only works if we recognize a well-rounded world takes many kinds.
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Oh, I so love your post.
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