Friday, December 17, 2010

Rounding Up 2010

Friday round up with Laura:

Happy Friday, friends and foes. It's the week before Christmas (you know, the celebration of American consumerism, as imagined by Coca-Cola), which means this is your last round up of 2010. Sad faces! Happy faces! Slightly confused faces! On to the all important linkings.

This year in marginalia is super awesome. And, actually, if anyone knows where there's more, please link in the comments—I friggin' love marginalia. You may be tempted to write your own marginalia about the abundance of cliches in writing, but there's a reason we love cliches. There's also a reason we love authors, especially authors as celebrities (as opposed to celebrities as authors—JWoww, looking at you). Jane Austen is such a big celebrity she got her own Google doodle for her birthday. Dream: acquired.

Despite the abundance of doodles, sometimes we don't understand classics as well as we think we do. Some are crapping all over Oprah's understanding of Dickens, for example. They better not crap all over my interpretation of the classic series Animorphs, which is being relaunched. But since English is the next Latin, and is apparently going to die out, does it really matter? Just keep the politics out of your poetry and the pee off your library books, and you'll make it through fine.

So even though our e-books are spying on us, Amazon might accidentally pull down your self-pubbed incest book, literary agents are charging huge amounts for feedback, and Derek Jeter has a book deal, chins up—vacation time is just around the corner. Until 2011!

4 comments:

  1. i loved animorphs, but never finished the series.

    also, i can't wait for a real vacay, probably spent at home because i'm poor :D

    Happy holidays, Eric!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Love the marginalia on Franzen...hee hee hee...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ms Trite says:
    Though Cliché is my first name, I seldom graffiti my writing with it. Its purpose, like connecting dots, with ties that bind, gets the point across, so to speak…oops, I did it again.
    Laura, you had me at cliche.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I can't tell you how excited I am about Animorphs coming back out! I read them to the end (though I was a senior in high school by the time the series ended) and I did cry on the last book.

    Just today I re-found a letter I wrote (but never sent) to K.A. Applegate dated September 6, 1997 (I was 12 and had just finished #11). The first five lines are an all-caps, multiple-exclamation point-with-hearts-instead-of-dots-at-the-bottom exclamation of love for the series.

    ReplyDelete