Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Want to see something unbelievably asinine? Check out what an anonymous Kirkus reviewer wrote in response to Poppy's very polite letter correcting factual errors in his review. I don't know what's worse, that the editors of Kirkus don't take more care with what they publish, that they publish anonymous reviews, or that they actually forwarded this hysterical, illiterate crackpot's letter to Poppy. Someone has a very large chip on his or her shoulder.
Reading the reviewer's reply to Poppy, it occurred to me how paradoxical is our concern for what's published about our work in magazines like Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus. Sure, on occasion, a reviewer might have something insightful to say, and that's cool, but the truth is that our readers scarcely even know that these publications exist. How many of you have ever read a single issue of Kirkus? How many of you choose your book purchases based on the opinions of its reviewers? Of the thousands of you who read this blog, a tiny handful, at best. Sadly, though, libraries do make decisions about which books to buy based, in part, on these reviews and library sales are very important. And publishers quote the positive reviews on the covers of our books. Otherwise, we'd be free to disregard them completely.
Meanwhile...
I think the worse thing about dealing with CEMs is that they force me to consider grammar. English grammar is such a contradictory and sloppy affair that it hardly warrants any consideration beyond the most superficial sort. One's time would be better spent watching grass grow. I have a big stack of grammar texts, all perfectly respectable, and they contradict each other with alarming regularity. Beyond the OED, which really has little to do with grammar, I see very little evidence that standardized grammar is actually standard. But, regardless, I have to do this thing, undoing most of the ce's "corrections," because I might not be William Faulkner but at least I have the sense to know that The Chicago Manual of Style has nothing to do with writing fiction.
The vacation is officially over. Truthfully, it ended with the "lull." It was only a false lull.
Yesterday, Spooky and I braved the cold and fog and misting rain to drive up to the Fernbank Science Center (the sister institution to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History). It's a quaint little museum, somewhat reminiscent of the old Red Mountain Museum. A bit of a hodgepodge, taxidermied examples of the local fauna, a cast of Barnum Brown's Tyrannosaurus rex skull, the Apollo 6 capsule, lots of meteorites, a globe of Mars, a few interactive physics exhibits. There's also a planetarium and observatory, which I believe we will start frequenting. The coolest thing, though, is that they have one of Paul Jonas' life-sized Struthiomimus sculptures, from Sinclair's Dinoland exhibit at the 1964-1965 World's Fair. The big stegosaur sculpture at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History is another of Jonas' Dinoland creations. I'm heartened to see that they survived all these decades.
Oh. I didn't go to Alabama, but I suppose that's obvious. I just didn't feel like making a blogger entry yesterday. I may go to Alabama tomorrow evening. The weather was just too yucky to frell around with I-20.
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