Too Beautiful, the blog

Too Beautiful

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Sunday, February 07, 2010

Netflix, may I kindly say 'Fuck off'?

Mark, based on your interest in "3:10 to Yuma" ...

We think you'll enjoy "Spartacus: Blood and Sand"

Is this kind of shit supposed to endear Netflix to me? Did they really award somebody one million dollars to improve their recommendations? Can I turn it off somehow?

Does anybody at Netflix know the meaning of the verb "to patronize"?

Labels: films, the internets

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Change is a-comin'

I recently received an email from Google's Blogger service, which powers this blog, that they are doing away with support for blogs which publish using FTP, of which this is one. They said that fewer than half of one percent of their users' blogs were of this type, and though it was the state of the art when I began it in 2001, time has obviously passed me by.

So I'll be trying to figure out a way forward for the site. Since I've been blogging per se less and less, maybe the blogging function is no longer the most important, I dunno. We'll see.

Meanwhile, what have I been doing lately? I went to L.A. with VonCookie last weekend. When I came back I got the flu. This week I'm going on my trip to the Midwest to research part of the novel I'm working on. And I finished bringing out my novel Make Nice through the Lulu self-publishing site, so if you've been dying to read that book which I worked on from 1997 to 2003, and which I almost got published fer reals, but didn't, you can pick it up there. I'll have a more formal launch of sorts later.

Labels: blogger, blogging

Friday, January 22, 2010

Narcissism and literature

The new New Yorker has a review of a book titled "Memoir, a History," in which author Ben Yagoda looks at the history of memoirs starting with St. Augustine and coming down to our present era, in which a a desperate search by readers and the entertainment industry for authenticity and stories of redemption and triumph led to a spate of faked memoirs. (A couple years ago the NYT took notice of this phenomenon.) The writer of the review, Daniel Mendelsohn, names most of the recent flaming scandals except for the J.T. LeRoy hoax, but the LeRoy books weren't actually supposed to be memoirs. That particular flim-flam was more elaborate than a single (or series of) fabricated memoir.

For several years I've taken great pleasure in blogging about these cases, collected on my blog with the labels hoaxes and fakes (applied somewhat inconsistently, but do I look like a librarian?).

technorati: hoaxes, literary hoaxes, memoirs

Labels: closet cases, fakes, hoaxes, writers

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Praise the Lord and pass the sniper scopes

Trijicon, a Wixom-based supplier that has a $660 million multi-year contract with the Marine Corps and additional contracts with the U.S. Army, inscribes coded references to New Testament Bible verses on its ACOG high-powered rifle sights sold to the military.

-- news stories

Labels: crypto-fascists, Focus on the Fundies, religious right, zeitgeist

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Outlining your novel using Post-Its

Trying to finish the first long section of the novel I've been working on since around April, I had to resort to the technique of writing scenes or bits of conversation on post-it notes and moving them around. It's nice to have a surface like a mirror, a window, or a whiteboard for this exercise.

Readers may recall a previous post from 2.5 years ago when I showed the results of using the same technique for a different book.

technorati: writing, post-its

Labels: novel writing, writing techniques

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Dream of Acker

I had a dream that they were making a biopic about Kathy Acker and she was being played by Mary Woronov.

Labels: films, Kathy Acker

Monday, January 11, 2010

Hubris repaid

A Canadian man who won a lengthy legal battle for the right to keep "exotic" pets was mauled to death by his pet Siberian tiger yesterday.

Previously:

Michael Jackson's tigers telepathically informed of his death
SF Zoo tiger attack nearly a classic SF story

Labels: cats

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Uh, happy new year

I didn't mean to stop blogging. I've just been paying as much attention as possible to the novel I'm working on. But something occurred to me over the holidays, as I became aware, in the back of my mind, that it had been a long time since I last made a blog entry. I realized that I'm just not paying attention to pop culture the way I had been, in the period from 2002 to 2007, when I would put up as many as five or six posts a day about politics, pop, and the "bad behavior" I used to take such pleasure in recording and making snarky comments about.

I'm no less sarcastic. I'm just not paying as close attention anymore, because I'm putting as much attention and energy and thought as possible into my novel. Writing a novel doesn't give you as much instant gratification, but it's the only possible thing I'll ever be remembered for writing, so I'm giving it my best shot. Not that there's anything wrong with blogging, which I'll still do. In fact I'll probably do it twenty times this month. Or two. Whatever.

Labels: blogging

Friday, December 25, 2009

David Aaron Clark, writer

A man I knew very tangentally during the heyday of Frighten the Horses and my erotica writing career, David Aaron Clark, died last month, I just noticed. In addition to being an erotica writer and editor, he was involved with the adult movie scene, writing screenplays and covering the industry in reviews and news articles. No newspapers seem to have published obituaries, but here is a tribute by Amelia G, a fellow traveler.

technorati: erotica writers

Labels: pornography, writers

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Punctuation is important

I really laughed when I saw this mispunctuated news story from the website of the Clear Lake Citizen, which reports news from the Clear Lake area of suburban Houston, Texas, where I went to high school. Emphasis mine.

A long-running feud between El Jardin neighbors is being blamed in a triple shooting that resulted in the death of one woman and sent two men to the hospital Saturday night. ...

Curtis Shaw said he was in his house when he heard gunshots. "It was just unbelieveable." He knew the two couples were feuding "but you never would have thought it would come to this," he said.

"I am shocked I've been living here 12 years," said neighbor Julie Karanik.

Yes, it took a triple shooting for her to wake up and realize what a dump she was living in.

technorati: Clear Lake

Labels: Clear Lake

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Uncovering a mysterious blogger

This article on Streetsblog, a progressive pro-bicycle and transit website, is fascinating. The lengthy piece, worth reading in its entirety, explains how Streetsblog staff uncovered the identity of a hyperactive negative commenter with his own website, Commuter Outrage. Evidently the man behind Commuter Outrage, a twenty-something conservative who works in a civilian job at the Pentagon, was digging up material for his screeds during work hours using his employer's (and the government's) resources, and Streetsblog's questions about these practices quickly led the secretive fellow to disappear the entire Commuter Outrage website.

Instructive were the easy-to-understand steps taken by Streetsblog staff to uncover the man's identity, along with evidence that suggested he was blogging on his employer's time. Also interesting was the fact that the attacks by Commuter Outrage and its putative staff (really just this one fellow, apparently) were not some right-wing conspiracy, but just some really energetic (if error-prone) work by one angry little man. It's amazing how much one angry, energetic little guy can do on the internet.

technorati: bloggers, privacy, identity

Labels: blogging, closet cases, crypto-fascists, privacy, Republicans, the internets

Sunday, December 13, 2009

A friend reviews my novel How They Scored

My friend Lisa B wrote a very nice review of HOW THEY SCORED. An excerpt:

After the men gather, the plot picks up steam and their interactions increase, with Pritchard quietly portraying a shifting dance of male alliance and competition. Their picaresque sex tales start to cast a subtler light on their characters. The story of the Serbian fashion model ends poignantly. A tale of a threesome takes an unexpected turn, with the storyteller unable to perform, feeling both sentimental about an old girlfriend and ambivalent about the suddenly aggressive behavior of his current one. In short, the scorekeeping of these men becomes less about tallying up sexual conquests and more about assessing their own strengths and weaknesses -- and the elusiveness of their desires.

Wow, thanks Lisa!

Labels: books, heterosexuality, maleness, pornography