More Things, October 11, 2012
When a publisher prints a paper book, that’s it. If the book has errors, the publisher can fix them for the next edition, but the existing copies are out there forever. The Kindle ecosystem is an all-digital, almost-always-connected world, yet it has been designed as if those E Ink bits were made of real ink. That’s bad for more-timely material that might benefit from updates, and it’s especially bad when a fresh ebook edition is rife with errors.
While rehearsing for the film, Andre’s thick French accent made many of his lines hard to understand. It’s reported that Mandy Patinkin often slapped André in the face to get him to concentrate harder on pronouncing his words.
Learning CAD to do inexpensive, independent 3D printing is going to become the new “learning word processing to do independent desktop publishing,” and it’s going to happen fast.
First of all, yes, Canadians do talk funny, and in a less dignified manner than in any American region. But this is because Canadians are not accustomed to talking. Canadians generally communicate by means of the McQuiggan, a long strip made of bear hide.
I see slang as the counter-language. At its heart it’s down, it’s dirty, it’s grubby, it’s tart, it’s essentially subversive. It questions and deals with themes like sex, drugs, violence, rudeness, abuse, racism and so on and so forth. Slang is primarily concrete, but the one abstract that underpins it is that of doubt. It seems to me that slang is always doubting.
People can’t be stopped from wanting to change their looks in order to correct what they perceive to be deficiencies in their appearance, but we can do better at laying bare the fallacy of these deficiencies and the social forces behind the aspirations.
In general, James Wood writes about fiction as if it were a boat or a tree house instead of a medium of limitless potential, where words can deform, defy, and reinvigorate space.