queenlua | Entries tagged with lua is a lit nerd

I read Too Like The Lightning a few weeks ago and gave it a hearty, almost frothing recommendation. It's easily the most excited I've been about a book in years; the last time I remember having this feeling was probably when I was reading Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow which was, gosh, four or five years ago?

Having read the second book now, I'll explain them like so: the first book was like watching a fabulous magic trick. The second book was a little bit Magic's Biggest Secrets Revealed—satisfying, in that you finally see where Palmer's going with all of this. Less satisfying, in that some of these tricks are revealed to be rather unmagical smoke & mirrors rather than the hoped-for super-clever-solution.

In particular, the ultimate aim + incredible success of a certain character's scheming is a bit hard to swallow. Plots that rely on folks holding the idiot ball is not great in the best of circumstances, but it becomes intolerable when some of the holders are implied to be the most powerful, most intelligent, best-educated persons in the whole world. Also a lot of the plot seems to rely on a rather dubious interpretation of World War I history, which I'm willing to swallow for a bit to see where things are going, but are still rather awkward.

The world, however, remains very rich and exciting and weird, and in particular the religious/miraculous aspects are still as fascinating as ever.

That's all I can say without spoilers. Someone please read these so I can scream about them with you endlessly plz

So recently I read Math Girls and Lauren Ipsum, two books that would be termed "edutainment" if they were video games, and they were interesting both in-and-of-themselves and also in how they tackled the question of "how do you relate a large quantity of technical information in novel form" so I'm-a blab about them here a bit.

( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/61460.html

Sometimes I wonder why I write prose when I am entirely too fond of language that calls attention to itself. Or too fond of snatches of handfuls of words, rather than whole paragraphs/sentences. Or something.

Let me explain.

So I dug up this old bit from a Jack Vance novel today, because little snatches of it were echoing around in my head, and because it was driving me batty that I couldn't remember the character's name (Navarth, my dear friend, how could I forget you?):

"See me! I am Navarth, called the mad poet! But is not every poet mad? It is inevitable. His nerves are conductive and transport uncontainable gushes of energy. He fears—how he fears! He feels the movement of time; between his fingers it is a warm pulsing, as if he grasped an exposed artery. At a sound—a distant laugh, a ripple of water, a gust of wind—he becomes sick and faints, because never in all the extent of time can this sound, this ripple, this gust recur. Here is the deafening tragedy of the journey which we all undertake!"

That is such a glorious introduction. I mean it's great in part because of its subject matter, but I think so much of it has to do with its form—the way the words are chosen. Read it again now, notice those words—conductive nerves, which make us think at once of electricity—but then we get uncontainable, which is striking because ordinarily we don't think of nerves as containing anything—but here they contain, they contain the electric-life force, and just as we feel that rushing through his nerves we feel ourselves rushing through his words, a stuttering staticky ecstatic rush. Not a dash or an exclamation or a comma is misplaced. Read it aloud; feel it.

Like, I also have this pile of "writing prompts" on my computer, only that's a lie, sort of. Only rarely do they actually prompt me to write anything directly. Mostly it's just a magpie's collection of little phrases and word-snatches I hear and I particularly like and want to save forever because they are beautiful.

I'm scrolling through the list of prompts for examples...

( This turned into lengthy incoherent fangirling. Seriously. )

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/49114.html

According to I Write Like...

"Wings Dancing in the Darkness" reads like Margaret Atwood
"Every Little Thing" reads like Chuck Palahniuk
"Delicately, Madly" reads like Charles Dickens
"White Like Bone" reads like Anne Rice
"Pyre" reads like Raymond Chandler
"Dog in the Vineyard" reads like Dan Brown (...yuck)
"Crush" reads like Chuck Palahniuk
annnnd Remnants of Restoration reads like Kurt Vonnegut

Conclusion: either my writing is wildly inconsistent or the website's algorithm is, and I strongly suspected the latter...

...but then I discovered the source code for IWL is available online (eee) so I decided to poke at its innards for a bit and see what's what

( Lua sets up a local instance and installs shit: the liveblog! (terribly boring do not read) )

Once I had a local instance running, I decided to do some experiments for teh lulz (and perhaps tangentially teh science).

I cleaned out the authors included with the IWL download and used some fanfic authors instead: arbitrarily I chose myself,

amielleon, and

mark_asphodel (hello, unwitting volunteers! :D;;; ). I used the three latest fics by these three authors for training data, then took a few of the other works by each author to see how accurately IWL could guess the true author of a work:

( Data! )

...okay wow, based on that data, IWL seems to suck. Badly. As in, a-random-number-generator-could-do-a-better-job-for-anyone-not-named-Mark¹.

Time to look at the code and see what the methodology at play is...

Analysis seems to be based on both "tokens" and "readability"

The readability metric is just the Flesch Reading Ease score, which has been discussed here before as being a somewhat problematic and inconsistent metric

Tokens is more unclear to me on this quick skim, but what I'm pretty sure is going on is: they're basically making a giant table of "words appearing in the text plus their frequencies," and based on that, they calculate a "rating" based on how the relative probability of those words is distributed (i.e. if A and B both use the words "obnoxious" and "teetotaler" a lot, the algorithm will notice that and assume A and B are more similar)

...so yeah, while the metrics IWL uses are better than a random number generator, they're still pretty unrigorous/underwhelming (quite possibly by design—I know I've seen this website pop up in my friends' circles more than once, and it does make a fun little two-minute time-waster when you first stumble upon it—it doesn't really need to be The Greatest Algorithm Evar ^TM to accomplish that).

( Footnote )

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/36738.html

So I was just reading this review of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, and there was this lovely bit that reminded me why I love that man's writing so much:

Dick thrived in SF, of course, because it's a genre whose readers prize evocative ideas over fine prose and detailed characterisation, and as far as really exciting concepts go Dick was a powerhouse. Whilst other authors were sat around cranking out innumerable variations on pet themes such as "what if a space ship got into trouble X miles from a black hole?" or "if we program robots with these axioms, how can we trick them into committing murder?" or "how do we exterminate all those beastly ~~Commies brown people~~ aliens?", Dick would burst in wild-eyed and short of breath and yell "What if God was disguised as a Communist dictator and was out to conquer the world and eat us all? What if the only difference between being human and being a robot was giving a fuck about your fellow creatures? What if salvation were sold in a spray can? What if the world were taken apart every night while you slept and rebuilt very slightly differently? If the Nazis and Japanese won World War II, what sort of souvenirs would they buy from America? If the cops knew you were going to murder someone in the future would it be right for them to arrest you now? What if we're all police informers but we don't know it? If aliens caught you murdering a cat, how would they punish you? What if autistic people can travel in time? HOW DO DOGS PERCEIVE GARBAGE DAY?!?!?!?" Often you'd get a whole heap of such ideas in the same novel. If SF is the genre which asks "what if?", Dick was asking "what ifs" which were simultaneously too brilliant and too goofy for anyone else to consider.

Salvation spray cans. Alternate history post-WWII souvenirs. Autistic time travelers. Dude's done it all.

When you look at his personal writings, you know the dude had to be a little batty—the Exegesis is literally several thousand pages of stream-of-consciousness semi-philosophical babblings. Based on that, it's surprising that he managed to write novels at all—and flat-out astonishing that those novels manage to be both coherent and engrossing. But he does it.

(Aside: It seems like a lot of famous writers have issues with some form of substance abuse or another—Dick was a speed addict, Faulkner was an alcoholic, etc. I wonder if this is just observation bias or indicative of some trend? Like, it's very hard to imagine that Dick's work wasn't heavily influenced by his experiments with amphetamines and psychedelics, for better or for worse—and quite possibly for the better, in this case.)

Anyway, if you haven't read any Dick before, I highly recommend both Ubik and The Man in the High Castle. Ubik feels more like a "typical" Dick novel, featuring hinjinks with psychic powers, moon travel, cryogenics, talking to dead people, spray-can salvation, etc. The Man in the High Castle feels a bit quieter and more character-centric than most of his work—there's very few sci-fi-y hijinks, beyond the whole alternate history thing, and it's very strong. (You could also do a lot worse than The Lathe of Heaven, which is by Ursula K. Le Guin, but is a pretty blatant Dick tribute & very much resembles his style.)

(Also, random fun fact: Le Guin and Dick were actually in the same graduating class in the same high school. But while Le Guin did well in her classes, went to Radcliffe for college, got an M.A. and a Fullbright., etc etc, Dick dropped out of college, married five times, worked at a record store, etc etc. And yet both of them wound up being hugely famous scifi authors—kind of a cool parallel.)

also, newsflash: while googling about for Dick stuff, I discovered that evidently Harold Bloom, renowned ~~pretentious windbag / snob~~ literary critic, wrote a novel. A sci-fi novel with a pretentious title: The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy. Oh, I am going to relish reading this one.

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/15331.html

Ursula K. Le Guin recently wrote a very nice blog entry, "The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum," talking about the (uneasy) distinction between fluffy, fun-to-read, addictively readable literature, and "good" literature:

I read a book last winter that does an absolutely smashing job of story-telling, a compulsive page-turner from page 1 on. The writing is competent at best, rising above banality only in some dialogue (the author’s ear for the local working-class dialect is pitch-perfect.) Several characters are vividly or sympathetically portrayed, but they’re all stereotypes. The plot has big holes in it, though only one of them really damages credibility. The story-line: an ambitious white girl in her early twenties persuades a group of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, to tell her their experiences with their white employers past and present, so that she can make a book of their stories and share them with the world by selling it to Harper and Row, and go to New York and be rich and famous. They do, and she does. And except for a couple of uppity mean white women getting some egg on their face nobody suffers for it.

All Archimedes wanted was a solid place to put the lever he was going to move the world with.

Same with a story trajectory. You can’t throw a shotput far if you’re standing on a shaky two-inch-wide plank over a deep, dark river. You need a solid footing.

Or do you?

All this author had to stand on is a hokey, sentimental notion, and from it she threw this perfect pitch!

Seldom if ever have I seen the power of pure story over mind, emotion, and artistic integrity so clearly shown.

I don't really have much to add to the original entry, other than to say it's worth 100% worth reading (seriously, go read it now). And, if you like it, she's written a lot of really excellent entries there—Papa H, Uniforms, and The Death of the Book all come to mind.

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/9163.html

I am obsessed with death. Or, rather, I am obsessed with fiction that deals directly with the problem of death.

Like (I presume) many preteens/teenagers, at some point I went through a lengthy, stereotypical existential crisis, which involved reading a lot of Nietzsche (while understanding maybe 20% of it), fretting over various religious texts, and generally wanting to shake people and shout, "We all die in the end! What the hell's the point of it all?!"

It still shocks me that so little YA fiction (to my knowledge) directly deals with this experience—because I'm pretty sure every young adult goes through something like this. But for whatever reason, YA is content to continually grapple with Staying True To Yourself and Fighting Bad Guys, which is fine and good, but even when I was a kid I thought those were givens, and what I really wanted was something that was worried about death and wasn't some philosophical tome.

When I was going through this phase, I managed to hit on two books that really struck me: Le Guin's The Farthest Shore and Rosoff's Just In Case.

( More about those books, and excerpts. )

If anyone else knows of any other really excellent YA fiction (or, hell, just fiction in general) that is concerned directly with mortality, I'd be very happy for the recommendations.

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/8002.html

So there's this blog called Letters of Note that's been popping up on Hacker News lately (I have no idea why it keeps popping up on Hacker News, as it has nothing to do with hacking, but whatever). Basically, the blog posts various interesting letters and notes—mostly letters written by famous folks, but there's a few cute randos in there as well.

Anyway, today's letter of note is a fantastically blunt letter Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald—evidently Fitzgerald asked what he thought of Tender is the Night, and boy did he ever tell him:

[...] Goddamn it you took liberties with peoples' pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvellously faked case histories. You, who can write better than anybody can, who are so lousy with talent that you have to—the hell with it. Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but to do not make these silly compromises. You could write a fine book about Gerald and Sara for instance if you knew enough about them and they would not have any feeling, except passing, if it were true.

The full letter is here, and if this is your sort of thing I highly recommend following the blog. He posts lots of writers' letters—the most interesting ones I recall being posted recently are from Jack London, C.S. Lewis, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Crossposts: http://queenlua.livejournal.com/6727.html

Profile

Syndicate

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Lost in Lualand

Entries tagged with lua is a lit nerd

too like the lightning + seven surrenders

Edutainment Books

goddamnit do you know what's cool motherfucking words are cool

I Write Like

the three stigmata of queen lua

basically linkspam

Two Books About Death

hemingway gives the best concrit

Profile

Links

Syndicate

Expand Cut Tags