The Mumpsimus

I got caught up in the hype, got curious, and found a way to watch True Detective . It's my kind of thing: a dark crime story/police procedural/serial killer whatzit. Also, apparently the writer of the show, Nic Pizzolatto, is aware of some writers I like, and even one I know, Laird Barron . (Hi Laird! You rock!) What struck me right from the beginning was the marvelous music, selected and produced by the great T-Bone Burnett , and the cinematography by Adam Arkapaw , who shot one of my favorite movies of recent decades, Snowtown , and also the very good film Animal Kingdom and the marvelous Jane Campion TV show Top of the Lake . Something about Arkapaw's sensitivity to color, light, and framing is pure mainlined heroin to my aesthetic pleasure centers. If I found out he'd shot a Ron Howard movie, I'd even watch that. So many other people have discussed the show that there are now, I'm sure, nearly as many words written about it as there are words in Wikiped...

One day I happened to overhear a student talking about Star Wars novels, and I told him that Del Rey Books has sent me some over the years, and that usually I donate them to libraries, since I rarely read series fiction or media tie-in novels (rarely, but not never ; heck, I used Jeff VanderMeer's Predator novel in a class once). I asked him if he'd like the ones that were currently sitting in a pile somewhere in my house, and he said sure. I had recently done a big library donation, so didn't have much more than a few advanced copies, but I brought them in anyway. When I gave them to him, at first I thought he was disappointed that they were ARCs without finished artwork, but it turned out his silence and immobility were the behaviors of a die-hard fan in bliss, as I had given him a novel that was hugely anticipated and not due to be released for at least another month. It was then that I hit upon an idea: Here was a thoughtful, articulate, well-read student who wa...

Of course, most of my reading time is spent in my wood-panelled library, smoking my Meerschaum pipe and contemplating the imbrication of hegemonic discourses. Over the past two days, however, I decided to set aside some light reading I was doing (Wittgenstein's Tractatus , which I tend to think of as the Goodnight Moon of philosophical texts) and instead plunge into two books someone at Del Rey had sent to me: G.I. Joe: Above & Beyond and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra , both written by one Max Allan Collins . The two novels are media tie-ins -- the second is a novelization of the screenplay for the upcoming film of the same title, and the first is a prequel to that. I haven't read too many media tie-ins (the only other that comes to mind is the novelization of Batman , which I read when I was about 13), but I am open to new experiences, and the fact that these two are about G.I. Joe sealed the deal. Before I inhabited a wood-panelled library and smoked a Meerschaum and ...

Cheryl noted that some new studies are best read in conjunction with Ekaterina Sedia's recent analysis of some older, similar studies . Now a post by Mark Liberman at Language Log takes a look at not only the stats in the new studies, but the way those studies have been reported: If we do the same calculations for the means and standard deviations reported for the other categories, we get predictions that might have been presented as follows: Rightward hemispheric asymmetry was found in the brains of 14 of 25 heterosexual males and 11 of 20 homosexual females, but in only 13 of 25 heterosexual females and 10 of 20 homosexual males. How much media play do you think the study would have gotten, if the results had been spun like that? Or to put it another way, how many readers of the media descriptions do you think understood the story in those terms? I've just begun reading Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender, and the Social Order by Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, which is a similar ...