General TBB Chat/questions thread - I'm on Earth in 2023.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > General TBB Chat/questions thread - I'm on Earth in 2023.

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

Paragon8 posted:

The worst is when the book you have to buy is written by your own professor.

If someone's making a killing on textbooks it's generally safe to assume it's not the writers. More than a couple I've talked to receive negative royalty statements on a regular basis and whoring the thing out is the only way to keep the publishers from pulping it.

I think the prices are mostly just driven up by the publishers' generous returns policies, which in turn are usually the only reason campus bookstores can afford to keep supplying the books in the face of unpredictable demand. It's a bit of a no-win choice between inflated prices or being told they've sold out of the book you desperately need on a much more regular basis.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2010 22:26

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 18:27

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

A dab of Eucalyptus oil on a rag - works like a charm. You can get a little bottle of it from most pharmacies last time I looked.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2010 08:30

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

Countdown to trophies being implemented for the Kindle begins now.

# ¿ May 23, 2010 17:45

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

World Literature Forum is one of the best, especially for European lit. They can't hold a candle to the squalid human drama of your average Book Barn thread, but the breadth of coverage is great (even 4 pages of threads on translation alone).

# ¿ May 25, 2010 15:20

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

David Markson, postmodern master, dead at age 82

Completely unexpected. Even less so was finding out through the Yahoo entertainment ticker of all places.

He did call his last book The Last Novel, so in retrospect there may have been signs.

quote:

Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke. All of which obviously means that this is the last book Novelist is going to write.

Quite clear signs, really.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2010 17:02

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

LooseChanj posted:

There has to be a freebie version somewhere, someone find it.

Published in 1923, so maybe it falls under the same extension of copyright that's keeping the last volumes of Penguin's new Proust off the shelves in the US. Something about copyright being extended to 95 years after the artist's death, that being 2018 in this case.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2010 17:30

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

I remember one of the major chain bookstores on the main street sticking an author outside on a wooden folding table in the middle of all the foot traffic, like some sort of terribly lonely sausage sizzle. All through the middle of the day the guy just sat there quietly as thousands of people brushed past with complete indifference with nary a staff member in sight. Can only assume it was just too much bother to have him inside, cluttering up the merchandising floor-plan.

Said bookstore closed about a year or so after that.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2010 11:51

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

The Nobel announcement is set for next Thursday - time to start brushing up on your dissident authors. I am 100% certain that it will be Ko Un this year*, so I'll just go ahead and call it now.

_{*I say that every year, but it's going to look really impressive if he ever actually gets it. I mean, c'mon Nobel committee, he's a poet, a democratic activist, and his devout Buddhism is thrillingly exotic; you guys should be lapping this poo poo up.}

# ¿ Oct 1, 2010 19:11

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

Nothing from Africa then? Kourouma, Tutuola and Achebe are all black people. Is Machado de Assis black enough?

# ¿ Oct 16, 2010 19:48

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

I think opting for more modern translations (1950 onwards to take a somewhat arbitrary point of reference) isn't a terrible general rule. A lot of translations in the first half of the century are pretty wretched just due to a lack of respect for the act of translation ('fixing' the books based on their own tastes, etc).

Not a foolproof philosophy by any means, but it cuts out a lot of rubbish.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2010 21:09

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

In honour of Hewhay, January should be an entire month of mentally unbalanced narrators.

edit: committed the heresy of overpunctuating His name.

inktvis fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Dec 13, 2010

# ¿ Dec 13, 2010 16:29

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

Robert Montgomery Bird - Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself

# ¿ Jan 21, 2011 21:53

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

They're probably trying to figure out a way to return every book in Australia without destroying the publishing industry.

I think in most cases you can only return like 30% of an invoice though, so there's still a good chance you'll see big sales.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2011 14:56

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

That'd be Kashtanka, his attempt at a children's story. A free translation is available here, but it's worth tracking down the edition illustrated by Gennady Spirin. Might have to resort to abebooks for it, though.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2011 09:48

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

Quad posted:

What are the best ways to find "what's new"each month? Goodreads' lists are almost entirely self published fantasy porn, going into a Barnes & Noble is just tables full of severly bland looking lit. Is there a good blog for this, sorta like how Pitchfork used to be with music, or RT with film?

The Millions is one of the bigger sites. Can't say I read it myself (a little US-centric), but it's a place to start.

In print, Bookforum is worth a look.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2012 11:06

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

Archetype? If it's drawn from ancient Greek, the chances of it starting with an f are a bit slim.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2012 18:02

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

It's not really worth anything. It's just an omnibus of campaign material from that election; Hathi Trust describes it as '27 pamphlets in 1'.

Resetting the type into a consistent format and correcting mistakes would've taken a lot of time and money, and I doubt they imagined anyone'd hold onto it after the election was done with, which would explain the slapdash quality. Plus a number of libraries have copies stowed away which they haven't even bothered to catalogue properly.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2013 13:27

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

Brady posted:

she states that the grief felt when losing a loved one comes from a feeling of guilt

This is pretty much the party line coming from a psychiatrist.

quote:

How does this theory hold up when you apply it to a non-religious person?

There doesn't seem to be an explicitly relgious dimension to this statement, so probably much the same.

quote:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is she literally saying that the denial of life after death is entirely purposeless and results in increased aggressiveness and destructiveness in a society?

She seems to be defending the denial of death in a relgious sense as striving on a purely personal scale, whereas denial of death in the secular sense is achieved through helping to build the biggest, eternal-est world system. The implication seems to me to be that you'd be more likely to be agressive and destructive if you shackled the meaning of your life to perpetuating an external thing (ie the British Empire), than in the case of an internalised struggle.

quote:

Sounds like the same load of crap fear-mongering Christians feed to others in an attempt to make atheists look bad.

Actually, it's a defence against Ernest Becker's claim, in his classic The Denial of Death, that religion is just as negative a way of staving off dealing with death as anything else. So did Becker think we should totally, like, get over it and face the reality of our own death? No, no psychologist would argue that - all he wanted was a more convincing excuse to put off thinking about it.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2013 12:58

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 18:27

inktvis: Dec 11, 2005; What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor, is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.

It's usually referred to as an odd couple.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 13:29

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > General TBB Chat/questions thread - I'm on Earth in 2023.