I had a fantastic time at BookCamp Toronto. Was honored and pleased to meet most of the organizers the night before, and to mingle with publishers, software developers, XMLers, and others. Also pleased to add quite a few book/tech nerds to my twitter feed and greader.
I’ve organized my toots and some other background info from the (un)conference in a google doc, for general consumption. Go see my notes.
On Friday morning I’ll be traveling with a colleague to parts north to attend BookCampToronto on Saturday. Sessions are being held at the UT iSchool, with the requisite happy hours and meetups. The organizers have appeared to have done an amazing job dealing with high demand, sponsorships, and venue updates. I’m excited to talk to other book and web nerds about the future of publishing, writing, and books in the DigitalAge™. Sounds like things should be well wired/wireless, so I look forward to tooting the events of the day.
After the conference I’m going to stay on for a couple days to visit a friend, then take the train most of the way home on Monday evening. I like trains.
(Speaking of trains, I bought another Kid Acne Rollin’ Stock toy today. I got a shark.)
Thanks to a tip from @shanakimball*, I’ve registered for BookCamp Toronto in June. It’s a free day-long unconference on digital publishing.
Fun fact: In high school I voraciously read Ploughshares and Iowa Review. Almost applied to publishing programs for college. But I got a writing degree instead.
*This is @shanakimball shout-out #2. Clearly, you should be following her on twitter. Really, you should just see who I follow and follow them.
I’ve been reading an excellent book by Rosalind Williams called Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination. I’m a sucker for anything that involves sci fi and horror tropes, particularly 19th century sci fi, which forms the core of her thesis.
Much literature and folklore paints the underground as either hell or some sort of hidden fairy cave paradise. Much sci fi writing and film examines what it would mean to live underground, after a nuclear holocaust, for example. The book discusses the place of “the underground” as a concept in the human imagination, and how attempts to explore (physically or figuratively) the underground tends to result in some measure of technical innovation, as well as sometimes high doses of moral questioning and fear. Williams takes the idea of treating a piece of technology not as an object to manipulated, but an environment.
In college I took a class called “London Underground,” the purpose of which was to look at 19th century London, the quintessential Western modern city, through the lens of its metaphorical underground: crime, disease, immorality, etc. We read social criticism and literature that exemplified the palimpsest effect of the city—physically and figuratively. (The paper I wrote for the course ended up being on Victorian museum culture and the view that an empire is a kind of collection. The main works I used were The Picture of Dorian Gray and “The Wasteland” (which was almost cheating). Lots of death and decay and tragedy.) I got a bit obsessed. If I ever go back to school, a thesis on such a topic might be an option.
Anyway, one of the works discussed in the Williams book is L’Eve future, a French novel written in the 1880s. The grad library had a couple copies, and the one that was available is a 1957 clothbound edition with a beautiful clear overlay and a good deal of historical material. The book is in French, and I’m actually looking forward to exercising that again.
The purpose of this post, before I nerded out, was to show you the overlays. I’d like to get some good quality photos of them at some point, but for now here’s the idea:
This past winter I helped copy edit a forthcoming O’Reilly book by local web optimization guru Andy King. It’s now available for pre-order.
I hadn’t done much editing since college, so it was a nice change of pace for my freelancing gigs. I’ve been doing more editing and writing for the web since.
Even with the full-time job, I’m still doing small projects here and there, mostly content development and small design overhauls for existing contracts, and projects for friends. So, feel free to ask.
And working a lot. And editing some chapters of a book. And stuff. And crocheting. And book clubbing. Rereading The Beekeeper’s Apprentice.
That said, I have been reading a lot. If I were to add a “What VP is reading” feature in the sidebar, would anyone care?
Update: Book widget added.
Weather is stupid this winter.
I have completed my first crocheted stuffed creature, with a pattern from Mr. Funky’s Super Crochet Wonderful, a gift from my ORG Secret Santa, enchiladaplate.
This evening, the ladies of Fans of Intelligent Fiction (FoIF) will be meeting at my place to discuss Andrea Barrett’s Voyage of the Narwhal, eat hummus, and drink wine. I have to admit I’m only halfway through the book, but it’s quite a good read. A mid-19th century voyage to the arctic seemed appropriate for the time of year.
Have you read the book? What did you think?
Have any suggestions for our next book? We read any kind of fiction: Past books include The Big Sleep, The Diamond Age, Persepolis parts one and two, and most recently The Sound and the Fury.
For the Awesome Ladies Bookclub, this month’s book is Voyage of the Narwhal. It’s quite good so far. But anytime I read a book about ships, I always zone back in on one of my favorite books of all time: True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, by Avi. Well-to-do girl falls in with pirates on a voyage from Britain to America in the late 1800s. My dream as an 11-year-old.
I haven’t read this book since I was at least that age, and while I still have a copy, I’m kind of afraid to go back. I know the writing won’t be as good as I remember it, the situations as harrowing as I recall. I’m content to keep the memory of it, I think.
What books did/do you love and are afraid to reread for fear of being disappointed?
Norman Mailer is dead. Crazy, brilliant, egotistical, brilliant. Gone.
If you haven’t, and you are an American, you should read Armies of the Night.