Memory and Storage

Whenever I envision my dream home, it has a library in it. In my mind's eye, it always had two levels with a rolling ladder and great windows targeting the light on a couple of overstuffed chairs accompanied by an ottoman. I didn't really need a fireplace, though I suppose it could be kinda keen. And then I made my first trip to the Biltmore House in Asheville, and I found the library I wanted….(http://www.beautiful-libraries.com/library%20photos/home%20libraries%20grand/3041a.jpg). Granted, as I got older, I realized I would never have enough books to fill that magnificent space, but it was a target. Now I see something a little more modest but still downright comfortable as being more practical (http://www.beautiful-libraries.com/library%20photos/home%20libraries%20modest/1001.jpg - how cool is this Beautiful Libraries Web site??).

But in the past 18 months or so, I've been thinking really hard about technology and libraries. It's a cold hard fact—though I have hundreds of books now (and more than thirty long boxes of comics), unless a miracle happens, I will not have an heir to inherit them and enjoy them as I have. Instead, they will become a discouraging weight that will have to be boxed up and moved when I move, eventually becoming a burden to whomever has to make final decisions about their disposition.

And so I'm pondering the unthinkable, moving to an electronic format for my books and comics. It's been a big hurdle for me, in good part because I really like the sensations that go with reading—the smell of aged paper and the feel of it against my fingertips as I turn actual pages. But there have been other issues that I've been considering as well. For instance, just how good are the graphics on whatever tool I would be using? It seemed to me to defeat the purpose of putting comics on a device if I couldn't appreciate the art. And related to that, I also read books about art, and how would those look on an e-reader of some kind? But I recently had a friend with in iPad install Comixology, the most popular comics reader, and we did some tests. I'll be honest—the art was fantastically reproduced, and I really liked that I could zoom in on panels and images to get a better feel for them. So that concern was set aside and I had visions of saving a chunk of money a month by being able to get rid of my storage unit where my back issues of comics sit. Or at the very least, perhaps not continuing to add to what is already in there.

Another issue I had to consider is that I don't only buy and read books that are coming out, but also books that have been out for some time, even decades. And while buying new books in an e-format would address some of my storage concerns, I might never be able to find a lot of books that I enjoy now, that I get from Web sites like Paperback Swap and used bookstores. And then, there was an announcement last summer that just excited me no end. Hachette UK, under their Orion Publishing Group imprint, was going to open a Web site they named SF Gateway, in which they would make available not only their excellent series of Science Fiction and Fantasy Masterworks but attempt to recover out-of-print books as well. As they say themselves:

The SF Gateway was established specifically to rescue classic SF & Fantasy titles from their mostly-out-of-print status and make them available again to a wider audience. Their are [sic] many sites and publishers whose raison d'être is to facilitate the eBook publication of new and/or self-published authors, and it is not in our plans to join them. (http://sfgateway.com/)

How awesome is that? A sort of back library of books, available in e-format! While it would not meet all of my needs, it was a fantastic start. As soon as the Web site officially opened, I went and poked around. They already have a great list of titles, and their plans to go deeper and broader just thrilled me. And then, I dug just a smidge deeper—trying to see what the prices were like, I clicked on a book, only to find that it wasn't available to the US. I tried a few more with the same result. And then I poked around on their Web site some more and found this:

We have acquired rights to the SF Gateway titles from the authors or their estates, and in many cases the rights they were willing or able to grant us were only for the UK and Commonwealth countries (excluding Canada, which is usually bundled with USA rights). It's not that we don't want to allow you to buy the books; it's outside the terms of our contracts.

However, there are many titles - approximately one-third - in which we have World English Rights, and these will be available everywhere, subject to retailers' ability to sell them.

And so my enthusiasm has been tempered somewhat as I hope that someone in the US has thought to do the same kind of thing, but it seems that the technology has begun the process that will allay my concern. So the only thing left is the part of the process that will take me the longest, figuring out what tool to use. And even though I am huge fan of science fiction, with its emphasis on gadgets, I'm still astounded at the kind of decision I am about to make. To top it off, I read this week where SD cards, those little things I put in my first digital cameras, are likely to have a 1 terabyte (1000GB or 1000000MB) capacity by 2014. A library in a piece of plastic small enough to get lost in the palm of my hand! And yet, no one is offering me a jet pack yet.

New name!

I haven't posted in the past couple of weeks, for some fairly diverse reasons. I started reading a Hugo award-winning novel and after 50 pages of drudgery, had to set it aside. Maybe I just wasn't in the right head space for it, because it was supposed to be funny and I couldn't find anything so much funny as trying really hard to be funny. I put it back in the reading stack, so I'll end up giving it another shot eventually.

Then I read the Nebula-winning Slow River, which was quite good but has caused all sorts of conflicting ideas about why it's good, so I haven't been able to pull together a review yet. And now I am about 50 pages short of finishing a novel that I see described as a masterpiece, and my ideas about its value are getting mixed in with my thoughts about Slow River such that…well, it's hard to write. I was talking with a regular reader last evening, and I realized that in a lot of cases, I sometimes clarify my own thoughts by writing and perhaps I should sit down and try to bang it out. So that's what I'll probably end up doing in the next couple of days.

On the home front, Mrs. Speculator has gone back to college, and the first couple of weeks have been exhilarating. She's doing awesome, as her grades will attest, but the shared office has changed its tone a little—it's more of a personal study space for her than before and, through no action on her own, I feel like my being there while she is working might be something of a distraction. And since it's hard to post a blog without a computer, I'm not writing as much. An interesting repercussion of her return to school is that, of course, thoughts of doing the same flit about in my head. There's just something awesome about college; if I could win the lottery, I would be a lifelong student. I spent…oh my (going to check the resume)…the better part of 12 years pursuing degrees with mixed success. I jokingly talked with a friend about chasing a degree in film studies, but then in an attempt to take a break from work and think about something else, found that I might be just 12 hours shy of an actual B.A in English with a concentration on film, with those 12 hours all being devoted to actual film classes. It's so very tempting, and Mrs. Speculator is being a lovely partner when she chimes in with the well-reasoned thought: "Go for it!" At the same time, I am reminded how much I loved teaching, as Mrs. Speculator asks for input on her assignments and I find myself falling into the pattern of Socratic discourse and evaluating rhetorical skills. Not to mention reviewing papers beyond what my job currently calls for: discussing how to more effectively make an argument rather than pleading with a subject matter expert to please answer my question. So, when I'm not thinking about what aspects of a book make it literarily "great", I'm pondering little things like going back to college. Not really good for writing.

And then, given Mrs. Speculator's studies, we've been hard pressed to take time to see any movies. I had some interest in Surrogates (and not just because of the song in the soundtrack from Breaking Benjamin), and it was so bad that it might even be out of the theatres now. I have a lot of interest in Where the Wild Things Are (and a lot of that is in fact because of the trailers that include music from Arcade Fire) but finding time to see it is not coming easy. And the Netflix copy of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has been sitting on the TV stand for probably two months now. So no movies to review. Also, we're also hard-pressed to watch TV, and the DVR is filling up. Though I do have some thoughts on the new season of Big Bang Theory, so there's a blog post there also.

And, finally, it's college football season! This is what the fall is all about and being a season ticket holder, it is incumbent upon me to practice fiduciary responsibility by using the tickets I have already purchased, and then I should probably watch the away games on TV, and some games featuring teams that the Wolfpack are going to play, and some games of national importance, and then some other games that aren't so important, and then some other games that are interesting because it's college football for heaven's sake. As I was reading comics last night, I had the TV jumping back and forth between the classic rock music channel and the Tulsa-UTEP football game (why am I watching Tulsa and UTEP??). Yeah, I got it bad when it comes to college football. And Mrs. Speculator, being the brilliant wife she is, just permits it to consume me for the fall months.

Did I mention comics? DC has really turned things around in the past months, due in no small part to Blackest Night, so there's stuff to write about there also.

All these potential blog entries and what do I do? Write about things I can write about and, oh yeah, change the name of the blog.

If you haven't noticed, I've removed my nom de plume/de guerre and attached my real name to the profile. I decided if I wanted to try to do this seriously, seriously enough that I could use it as a reference for potential side jobs or a career change, I had to identify myself. And then, I also figured I needed a more accessible name, something that would not only roll off the tongue, but paradoxically, stick in the reader's mind. And while "Perrynomasia" made me chuckle and my wife giggle, it was awful esoteric and, you know, hard to say or remember (see it's a pun about punning, a metapun…). I've remembered the first rule of punning, the rule that everyone knows: if you have to explain it, the pun is ruined. And frankly punning by inventing a word that inserts a very Anglo-Saxon name into a technical Greek term…no fun any more (okay, it still makes me chuckle).

So I've been racking my brain for the past 10 days or so for a new name. I actually tried to find the name of the medical scanner in Star Trek—you know the little whirly thing that transmits to the tricorder so that Bones or Dr. Crusher can read the results. I thought it was called a "Fimbrini device" or something like that, based on memories of my old Star Trek Technical Manual, but that's clearly not it since a Google search returns no hits (and who took my Star Trek Technical Manual?). Anyway, I could recently be spotted at intersections, waiting for the light to change with a glazed look as I tried to think of something witty for a title. So of course it hit me last night while I was reading comics and either listening to Journey and The Outlaws or the Golden Hurricanes take the lead over the Miners (oh, look at that: UTEP came back to win). There's no telling where inspiration comes from.

Plus, you know, it's sort of a pun, and it makes me chuckle.

So I got a new name, and with it a promise to buckle down and get some writing done. You know me; it's not like I'm reluctant to talk about my opinion….

Some random thoughts

At my mainstream job where I have achieved some sort of notoriety as an expert on comics when the company did a small blurb about my interests, I was approached a number of times about the merger of Disney and Marvel. The merger was all over the airwaves and friendly people wanted to know my take on it ("not a very big deal at the moment, but let's see what happens in two or three years if Marvel isn't making as much money as Disney imagined"). I have to say I am not looking forward to the potential appearance of Marvel characters at sporting events that ESPN is covering, or Michael Wilbon going up against Dazzler on Pardon the Interruption. But other than that kind of cross-pollination, I don't expect any big changes.

However, no one is asking anything me about the far more important change at DC, with Warner Brothers exerting control and changing DC Comics to DC Entertainment. This one seems a lot more troublesome to me, especially since it appears (important word choice there) to be a reaction to the Disney/Marvel merger. DC has long been the second-place comic company and some would argue way behind Marvel in the development of their properties for media. Such an argument would have to be based on quantity of movies, because frankly DC has long kicked Marvel's butt in the development of TV shows (Smallville or the groundbreaking Batman: The Animated Series, anyone?) and in the quality of their movies recently. But since Marvel has announced a schedule for the next two or three years, the perception is that Marvel is leading the race to make a movie buck. And I suppose they are, since four decent movies will generally outdraw just one great one. And of course, creating great movies is not an easily reproducible task.

I doubt that the change is a reaction to Disney/Marvel, since I would think it would take more than a couple of weeks to make such a change—I suspect this has been in talks for some time. Nonetheless, it has already had some serious repercussion with the resignation of Paul Levitz, a guiding hand at DC for some decades. While Levitz will return to writing, whether for good or ill remains to be seen, it is his role as publisher and final decision-maker that is going to be missed. Unlike the Disney/Marvel merger, where Disney was quick to say that nothing will change with the comics, no one is saying similar things about DC and Warner Brothers; in fact, such a move seems designed to force change since DC has been owned by Warner Brothers for years and there was no organizational shake-up.

I've read some interesting analyses of Levitz's tenure as publisher. Most of the industry has only great things to say about him (see, for example, http://busiek.com/site/2009/09/paul_levitz.php), but the fans seem somehow really angry at him. They blame a lot of interesting decisions about censorship on him without taking into account how important he has been on the larger movements of the comics industry. I think that such a view of his work neglects that comics may have no bigger fan than Paul Levitz, and every decision he made has come from the primal love. They may not have been the right decisions but they were grounded in the joy of going to the store on Wednesday and finding out what was new this week.

And if the result is non-comics people injecting themselves into decisions with an immediate goal of boosting the bottom line, I fear a lot of the creative energy at DC will get misplaced. DC has been very good of late giving comics a good run to find their audience, and with some success. I wonder how short the leash will be for new series. And I worry that more effort will be spent in aligning the comics with the other media representations, something that has already happened at DC, with an upcoming origin series for Superman being his third or fourth in a few years. Having a different viewpoint is not a bad thing and, of course, the long-term health of DC Comics has got to be more important than the career paths of my favorite characters. But it all just feels sort of ominous; perhaps I'm not worried about Disney and Marvel because I really don't read their comics and only am concerned with Marvel's health as it is necessary for DC's continued survival. But when someone starts messing with DC, my hackles may be up and I'm not even aware of it.

We certainly do live in interesting times.

*****

Alex Bledsoe has written a nice opinion piece about the latest Star Trek movie. I've already made my feelings known about it, and Bledsoe has put another nail in the coffin for me, adding to my concern about the movie missing out on what distinguishes Star Trek from random space opera. Check it out at http://downinluckytown.blogspot.com/2009/09/core-problem-with-jj-abrams-star-trek.html. It's a really good point and one that I overlooked in my general unease about what the franchise is trying to become.

Interestingly, Mrs. Speculator was lately talking about the same thing in recent fantasy reading we've been doing. The whole "chosen one" meme seems ripped from mainstream high fantasy, and I've been more and more getting into fantasy that breaks away from the clichés. Mrs. Speculator has bravely gone along on the ride (I imagine she would say she had very little choice in the matter) and so we have read Mieville and Lynch and Rothfuss and Mr. Bledsoe himself. When you go back to the clichés after being in the company of such freethinking folks, it can feel a little ham-handed, and she noticed. Sadly, now that she is about to go back to school, I don't see how she is going to have time to read Abercrombie and Gilman.

*****

A woman's college in the city I have spent my life in just changed their mascot from Angels to Avenging Angels. That strikes me as a little odd, since I would not expect young Methodist women to have much to avenge. It also seems to speak to not having a history of success in athletics, thus requiring the school to spend a great deal of time avenging historic ignominious defeat.

And to show what a geek I really am, I'm reminded of a train of thought I've long held, originating with my firmly held belief that DC comics are superior to Marvel. In 1963, Iron Man, Ant-Man, The Wasp, Hulk, and Thor came together to fight Thor's nemesis, Loki, and then stuck together because they felt they worked well as a team. They named themselves the Avengers, and they worked so well together that after the second issue Hulk was gone. But to my point—the event that brought them together. Loki was just being villainous; he didn't attack Thor or any of his friends, nor any of the others or their friends. Loki causes Hulk to rip up a railroad track. So what exactly is it that the Avengers are avenging? And wouldn't you think after more than 45 years, they would have achieved vengeance?

Note that DC's primary hero team seeks only justice, not vengeance….