Contrary to an earlier Wednesday, it’s been very loud here this week.
Month: August 2013
I am reading a book. One of the characters studied physics, which makes me wonder about him, but his focus is astronomy, which is a useless as my pure math degrees, so I warmed to him somewhat.
So character (his name is Nick) thinks about math. Nick thinks about equations. The author decides to write these equations out for us, and we get
Perhaps one is thinking that I do not have $latex \LaTeX$ installed in wordpress and am typing out what the math should be. All that is wrong. Of course I have $latex \LaTeX$ installed with wordpress. In fact, $latex \LaTeX$ comes pre-installed with more versions of wordpress. Secondly, I would have put the slashes, underbars, carots, etc, probably a text box for the for. No, this is, verbatim, what was written on the page, assuming I transcribed the brackets correctly.
Maybe Nick thinks in $latex \LaTeX$-esque thoughts? The book is set in the early eighties, so we’ll reduce that to TeX thoughts? But he isn’t attached to a university, so is that likely? Moreover, in thinking, would someone think sqrt instead of $latex \sqrt{\,}$? I wouldn’t.
So I come to the conclusion that the typesetter and the copy-readers don’t really know how equations work, how equation-thinking people think of equations. I assume this is a real astronomy equation. I assume that the author copied it down from a textbook or paper, where it was written, I assume as:
Perhaps not exactly that (I haven’t taken physics since high school, a class in which a ninety percent of our work was determining what a Newton scale would read while it held a variety of weights while going up and down at certain speeds on an elevator) but something similar. But I cannot imagine that the author found an equation written as it ended up in her book in a scientific setting. Instead, somehow, via editors and typesetters and copy-readers, we got from the second equation to the first one, probably either under the assumption that the first is more palatable for a non-science audience or via a typesetter who had never seen how to typeset mathematics before.
Either way, this made me unhappy or angry or something in between.
I read the following books:
- The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan: reading it for my Humber course starting in September.
- All My Friends by Marie NDaiye
- Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua
- Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose: I get angry reading books lecturing me on how I should write. This person doesn’t know me so how can generic advice apply universally? You know what I need to do to write: write. I did take some pointers on dialogue and pauses though, and I’m going to copy out her reading list. And she’s writing a book about writing prose, which is her last name, so I was tickled a bit.
- No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July: Once someone told me that a short story should end with something irrevocable happening and nothing being the same again otherwise all you have is description, etiher of people or of an event. These were all description. That isn’t bad, but it is different.
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
- Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu
- The Western Light by Suan Swan: which is sort of a prequel, but in an alternate universe to The Wives of Bath.
- The Meaning of Children by Beverly Akerman
- Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman
Best book: Sorry Please Thank You. If I could write sci-fi that was better than sci-fi like Charles Yu does, I would. I am jealous, which was my overwhelming feeling for most of the month anyway.
I watched:
- Mad Men: but then I stopped somewhere in Season 4 during the first week of July and haven’t gone back.
- My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: with Tesfa
- Orange is the New Black: One of the few times when the adaptation is better than the book. I started watching the show, then I read the book, and the show is so much more nuanced and funny, neither of which was the goal of the book, so I suppose this is like comparing apples to screwdrivers.
- The Secret of Nimh: Almost the exact opposite of Orange is the New Black, an adaptation so poorly done that the entire experience is cringing while remembering how much better (and with no bizarre paranormal stone-of-levitation) the book was. At least having watched the film, Tesfa is now sitting down with me while we read the book together.
- Sandbaggers
- How I Met Your Mother: On in the background while I replaced all the brass-with-big-white-bulb-in-the-center kitchen cabinets with basic, skinny, black ones.
I wrote: Worked on faerie story. Wow. That is all I did this month.
And I joined an online writing group too, which should help keep me more on track.
July’s are hard months for me. Generally, I bottom out twice a year – February and July. But today is August and sunny and the turkeys no longer seem to be standing in the middle of the road causing traffic worries, so everything should be great from now on (until February).