SPN beta sought, and nonfiction reviews

[rivkat]

mahaliem, I am actively working on your SV story! But in the meantime, anyone available to beta a 70-page het (Sam/Dean subtext friendly, if by friendly you mean drunkenly hanging all over the story and mumbling "I love you, man") story with a lot of mythology in it?

Cory Doctorow, (c)ontent: Only about 1/3 about digital copyright, but definitely about digital life generally, including the appropriate models for feeding artists in the new world order. His basic message: very few people were ever going to make a “stephenkingload” of money in the first place, so your best bet as an online artist is making your audience into friends who are happy to pay you. My favorite piece was the first, a talk given to Microsoft about why digital rights management technology is a bad idea. Talk about the belly of the beast. Best phrase, which he borrowed from someone else: trying to make bits less copyable is like trying to make water less wet. The full book is available as a free download at his site.

Steve Cone, Powerlines: Words that Sell Brands, Grip Fans, & Sometimes Change History: I think this was a free LibraryThing review book. Not a very good one: a bunch of observations about famous taglines, from poems to presidential slogans, with a chapter about state slogans and how bad they tend to be. Other than the basic principles that music is good to go along with your tagline and that your tagline should be prominent and repeated, there’s little here but anecdote. Cone talks a lot about making specific and truthful promises, but his own analysis can undermine that: he criticizes “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men, and Fremont” as too long (which it is) and suggests “Free Speech, Free Men, Fremont” without a moment’s consideration of whether those were the three key terms there. I’m sure this makes an engaging two-hour presentation, but it’s not a useful marketing book.

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit: A Princeton philosopher defines bullshit in 67 tiny (3x5) pages, which may lead you to think that the production of this book fits into the definition. His argument is that bullshit is a special kind of statement, one fundamentally unconcerned with truth value, and thus in many ways more destructive to public discourse than lies, which at least respect the idea that there is a truth. I think he captures something of importance, but it’s not a book.

Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss: This is a memoir of the author’s childhood—raised by a love-withholding mother and rigid grandparents—and her affair, in her early twenties, with her father, who she’d only seen twice before she was twenty. As you might guess, the fact that the sex was “consensual” doesn’t do much to keep it from being horrifying and devastating to her, though it’s also clear that the incest mapped onto her existing problems. The writing is metaphor-dense and language-rich, the kind of writing that makes people praise the writing, and while I’m not as sure as the blurbers that this raises it above a tawdry true story, it did have the appropriately Southern gothic feel to it.

Comments

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I know you love your Stella Dallas!Dean, and god knows I do as well. But I like it even better as the Gift of the Magi, or Stella Dallas all around.