1956-1980

Today marks 32 years since Ian Curtis, the singer of Joy Division, hung himself, ending his life and the band. They were an influence on a lot of the bands I love to listen to, and ultimately on me too. I've been spinning them since last night to mark the occasion.

Rest in peace, Mr. Curtis.

Olde timey comix

Since The Avengers came out, I've seen it twice now, and I've purchased anew or revisited some of the comic books I still have lying around. Notably, I got some of the Masterworks editions of The Avengers and Thor, because I grew up on Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, and X-Men, and never really read the other big titles.

Despite some massive instances of suspended disbelief, laughing at hokey dialogue, huge jumps in story logic, and rampant sexism, I'm enjoying getting to know these early adventures. However, there was one particular story that I wanted to focus on, and it ended up becoming the rest of this blog post. Excelsior!

~ * ~

Evidence that Stan Lee was spread a little thin in the 60s: the plot of Journey Into Mystery #86 (starring Thor) revolves around the villain "The Tomorrow Man," a guy who lives in a future with peace and no weapons. This "Tomorrow Man," Zarrko, not content to live in peace, decides to conquer his fellow man. How? By building a time machine to steal a bomb from 1962.

Because, you know, building his own bomb would be far more complicated than building, as he describes it, "Earth's only time machine."

Perfect! Because there are two problems with this guy deciding to build his own bomb: 1) it makes too damn sense much sense, and 2) it wouldn't allow Thor to get involved.

Stan Lee's greatest plot this is not, true believers. And it seems he knows it, because he admits in the intro to the collection I'm pulling this story from* that he was too busy writing Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spider-Man, "plus an assortment of other strips" to write Thor until around issue 97. He was, however, in charge of the plot.

I probably wouldn't be ragging on this so much if it weren't only Thor's fourth adventure. His fourth. This smacks of Stan the Man losing his touch! Especially since A) it comes a single issue after his awesome first battle with Loki, which I imagine was hard to top without having yet another Loki issue immediately, and B) the issue that follows this one has him fighting The Reds. Again. (He'd already basically fought communism in the form of a Castro-esque dictator called The Executioner in his second adventure). It makes me wonder how the rest of the stories are going to be until Thor gets a dedicated writer who isn't spread too thin.

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* Marvel Masterworks The Mighty Thor (collecting Journey Into Mystery #83-100), true believers!

The carbon footprint of eReading

This morning The Millions posted a comparison of the carbon footprint between reading paper books and reading books on an iPad. Here's the link. I think it's a pretty fair study, and certainly a good starting point for a discussion of these things.

There are a few points of data missing, though, that I'd like to see in another study: factoring in the consumption of used books, rather than buying new every single time;  factoring in the people who use e-Ink readers, such as the original Kindle and the Nook; and factoring in the percentage of people who don't upgrade their tech every year.

I want to see this data, even though I know that it's in the vast minority. (Side note: as a not-poor, straight, white male, the only times I ever feel like a minority are walking around downtown San Francisco and whenever I read articles about tech like this one.) I want to see this data because, duh, eReaders aren't going to be green. Sophisticated consumer electronics rarely are. But it's this kind of data that would give us a better overall picture about eReaders versus themselves (rather than versus books), and would separate the data points that come closer together in some of those calculations. Focusing on one piece of technology like the iPad doesn't give a full picture of the footprint from eReaders, because even though Apple is a highly popular choice, it's not the only reader out there. The first comment on the piece notes that e-Ink devices like the first Nook and Kindle draw less power because they don't have LCD screens like the latest tech. That is a very important distinction to make when you're trying to study the impact of eReaders versus books on the environment.

Rather than a strict comparison between paperbacks and one brand of eReader, I'd rather see a study that allows consumers to make better choices between brands. The general suggestions at the end of the article are great reminders for people who care about the environment (i.e. use the eReader until it's dead, or sell it to someone else if you aren't going to use it), but they don't necessarily apply to a person who's getting into ebooks now, or who's looking to replace a dead reader with a more eco-friendly one. A wider analysis would make it easier to choose which eReader to buy if you want to be at least a little more conscious about its effect on the environment.

Ebooks and poetry

I have an ebook copy of a collection of T.S. Eliot's poetry, featuring The Waste Land, etc. I bought it because, hey, it's a Barnes & Noble release, and it should be okay, formatting-wise.

It is, and it isn't. See, on my computer, I use a program called Calibre to sort my ebook library and read ebooks. It allows me to read stuff from both B&N and Amazon. (It also allows me to strip the DRM, but that's another story...) Calibre has a pretty no-nonsense parser, so if something is wrong with the source of an ebook, it makes it pretty obvious.

Here's how the first chunk of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" looks in the Nook PC software.

OK. Not too bad. Spacing between stanzas is a bit large, but hey.

Here's how it looks in Calibre.

That... sucks.

I tried doing stylesheets to remove the spacing. I figured they were using paragaph tags, and the Nook had different default settings for displaying them. But that didn't work. So I inspected the source in Calibre to figure out how to tackle it. This is the first thing I saw.

"Oh," I thought, "each stanza is a DIV (smart), but whoever formatted this inserted two breaks after each line. That's why it looks weird."

Then out of morbid curiosity I went looking at the resources in the source inspector, and I saw this. This is the raw HTML behind the ebook.

Do you see that? My face went >:O


It wasn't that the person (or software, but I'm guessing person) who coded the book inserted two breaks after each line; it was that they thought every break needed to be closed. In HTML, the <br> tag does not get closed. It stands alone. (In fact, strictly speaking, the proper way to code it is <br />.) But here there are two tags, one of which isn't really valid. And Calibre, because it has a stricter parser and isn't built to be accustomed to nonsense like this like the Nook apparently is, parses it as two break tags. Any competent HTML parser (i.e. your Web browser) does the same thing.

Which isn't to even mention that none of the indentation is right, and a bunch of lines are broken where they shouldn't be, presumably because they designed it for a certain page width and that's where they wrapped.

Shit like this is why ebooks aren't ready for poetry; or maybe it's that publishers of poetry just can't cut it when it comes to formatting for ebooks. Either way, I don't imagine I'll be reading much poetry on my Nook OR in Calibre any time soon.

~ * ~

Furthermore, I tweeted at Random House earlier, because I downloaded a couple sample Billy Collins books to see how the poems were formatted.

The sample consisted of nothing but the front matter.

Why bother offering samples if they aren't going to give the reader any idea what they're spending their money on? I'd rather purchase the format that I know is going to display the poems the way they were laid out by the poet on the page. Which in this case is the paper book.

Some links to share

I've been reading more on my Nook lately, thanks in part to Calibre (and the ability to strip the DRM and make the books I pay for mine). This NYRB post about ebooks is interesting, in that is supports ebooks by arguing that it strips away the physical aspect that tends to get fetishized and brings the reader closer to the text itself, which is what matters in literature.

I like that argument a lot, but I disagree that it applies to poetry, mostly because I have yet to see an ebook that formats the poems properly. Space between lines is just as important as where the line breaks, and the vast majority of ebooks I've sampled use basic HTML formatting where each line is a paragraph, and those paragraphs have space between them. It drives me nuts. I spend a lot of time formatting the poems on my own website to make sure that the presentation is the way I wrote the poem and meant it to be viewed. Why can't people making ebooks make that same consideration?

(Aside: I've complained about people taking public domain poems and selling them individually on B&N and Amazon for a buck a pop, but seriously: it'd be worth it to buy them over a real publisher's version of the same if you'd be considerate enough to retain the goddamn formatting of the poem.)

Anyway, the ebook post is mostly good, until you get to this: "the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups."

That's insulting. And because it comes so close to the end of the post, with nothing said to expand on or defend that thought, it pretty much destroys the entire argument. I like ebooks, but this is not the way to champion them.

~ * ~

And then there's this post from Wondermark that I just love, talking about the etymologies (some real, some fake) of common words. Really brought out the linguistics nerd in me that until recently must have been taking a bit of a nap.

Also, today is Record Store Day. By the time you read this, it's probably too late to get any of the awesome stuff. Hell, I was there when the store opened and I still missed out on most of the things I wanted to get. I still scored an Iggy and the Stooges LP and the PiL live album. Oh well.

I realized as I was digging through some of my other poetry files that I forgot to upload the winner I submitted to the 2009 GSRF sonnet contest. So, here it is:

• On the first date I found out he wasn't exactly as advertised

And, ostensibly related to the Totogasm that was yesterday's post, this post by R.J. Wheaton about his experience writing a proposal and a book for a 33 1/3 book (on Portishead's Dummy) makes me kind of want to think about writing a proposal and subsequent 33 1/3 book about Toto IV.

Meet you all the way

1982 was a pretty great year for music. This is a fact. Just look at the top 40 hits.

It was also the year I was born. I think this is no coincidence.

What's really important about 1982, though, is that the greatest album in the history of bands made up of session musicians was released: Toto IV. You know, the album that looks like this:

The album that sounds like this:



The album that contains what might just be the greatest song released in 1982:



Well that album just got a limited edition re-release on vinyl.

And it's playing for me right now while I work.

Today I was supposed to be recording audio for a project. I guess it's just going to have to wait until those rains are blessed.