HSU IT Department

...you will soon be able to sell it! Also some Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers (!), William Carlos Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Aldous Huxley, and Marcel Proust, thanks to copyright law. Wikipedia has a fairly complete list of titles.

So there you go. Get busy :)

...because a Certain Someone (::waves at teddyradiator::) likes keys and I found these on Etsy and had to share:

Keys of Azhar
Keys to Atlantis

I devoutly hope to be back on LJ more regularly in another week or so. I have been so busy with freelance work, regular work, co-mod duties for my writing group, prepping for teaching a workshop in a couple of weeks, and getting everything settled for my upcoming two weeks of vacation that I have had zero time for anything else. Not only have I not posted here, I have not even had time to read and so have no idea what's going on with y'all (though I did catch shiv5468's post about the hoo-ha fairy which made me laugh immoderately). I hope everyone is well and happy.

In other news, it's actually really truly finally spring here!!!!!!

The back cover of this book praises "Gaitskill's...brainy lyricism...acid shot through with grace" and uses words like "maturity, depth, and dazzling insight." Like the Camel, I say "Humph." She does have some sparks of brilliance, for example: "She wished she could grab the happiness and mash it into a ball and hoard it and gloat over it, but she couldn't. It just ran around all over the place, disrupting everything." I know exactly what she's talking about and I laughed out loud. Or this one:

She didn't think his languor was drug-induced. It seemed more the product of an unusual distribution of self, as if, by some crafty manipulation of internal circuitry, he'd concentrated himself in certain key psychic posts and abandoned the vast regions he didn't want to be in.

That's top-notch: lively, unusual, specific, vivid. For the rest, it's a lot of sad, disappointed, unlikable people. (And sex, which if I were in college I might find daring and bold, but now? Ho-hum.) She makes heavy use of analogies but frequently phrases them as "She felt like x" or "It was like x" or "It reminded her of x" -- read enough of those and you start to feel your teeth jarring with the bouncing. Some of them are just plain Not Useful. For example, a man on an airplane notices the woman next to him: "She smiled a tight, rueful smile that he associated with women who'd been fucked too many times." Um...huh? How many is too many? Would all women look the same? Doubtful, so how are we supposed to translate this into a visual image? Vague, so the reader has to expend a lot of effort to puzzle out what the writer ought to have made vivid and clear.

Oh, and the lack of endings. The stories just trail off and nothing's resolved -- no one changes, no one grows, no one comes to any realization, no one learns anything about themselves. They are in fact the most self-absorbed bunch of characters I've encountered in ages.

Granted this was ten years ago; maybe her newer stuff is better. But I won't go looking for it.

Interesting article here about what makes a good story and why modern literary fiction is such utter shit, and another in the same vein here. I don't understand the whole post-modernist movement. On the whole it strikes me as a very lazy approach: claiming that there are no absolutes and that everything is relative releases one from any obligation to produce something of quality, or even to make sense. They rabbit on about how nothing can be known for sure and yet they live their lives every day depending on knowing quite a lot of things -- that their eyes do not deceive them when they see that 18-wheeler heading towards them at 90mph, for example, or that stepping in dog poo will make you stinky. It's just pretentious nonsense, so far as I can tell.