cranky pants

In which I confess to a terrible weakness.

I have a real weakness for fonts. Sometimes I’ll look at a font face demo and go all squishy. Why? Why? Telling myself I don’t need the font is silly. I know I don’t need it. It would be wasteful and self indulgent to buy this font: Sigmund Freud’s handwriting. 

Oh, but look at it.

Sigmund Freud, oh my

Sigmund Freud, oh my

Money is tight and will get tighter, so $55 for the Sigmund Freud font set: Nope. Really not.  

The question is, other women lust after shoes. Not me. I own four pairs of shoes and two purses, and I’m fine with those numbers. But these fonts? 

Sigmund is relatively inexpensive, compared to Dear Sarah who would put me back $119. But look at her. Just look at the trembling extended arms, like a gently aging prima ballerina. 

Dear Sarah font.

Thus my confession, but please know: I have not bought any of these fonts. Self discipline and financial stability are my watchwords.  I will also confess that I stopped at admitting to two font-crushes. There are more. And there are some that cost many, many more times what even Sarah demands for her presence in your digital life. 

 

The Typewriter Girl: review

typewritergirl-coverThis is Alison Atlee’s first novel, a historical. And a romance. It came out in 2013 but just recently worked its way to the top of my tbr pile. The cover description:

ALL BETSEY DOBSON HAS EVER ASKED IS THE CHANCE TO BE VIEWED ON HER OWN MERITS, BUT IN A MAN’S WORLD, THAT IS THE UNFORGIVABLE SIN

When Betsey disembarks from the London train in the seaside resort of Idensea, all she owns is a small valise and a canary in a cage. After attempting to forge a letter of reference she knew would be denied her, Betsey has been fired from the typing pool of her previous employer. Her vigorous protest left one man wounded, another jilted, and her character permanently besmirched. Now, without money or a reference for her promised job, the future looks even bleaker than the debacle behind her. But her life is about to change . . . because a young Welshman on the railroad quay, waiting for another woman, is the one man willing to believe in her.

On the surface this looks like a fairly typical historical romance. Young woman at the end of her rope, handsome man gives her what she needs to get back on her feet, conflict, conflict, conflict, happy ending.

It always irritates me when a review starts with “predictable” because hey, if you pick up an espionage novel, you can predict who the main players and what the stakes will be; if you pick up a novel with a vampire on the cover, you can predict the nature of the beast within. If you’ve never read Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, let me give you a hint: people fall in love in Austen’s novels; social injustice is revealed and dealt with in novels written by Dickens. If you decide to read Romeo & Juliet and you don’t bother to read any blurbs or see any movies before hand, you might be surprised to find out that it’s a tragedy, which means (predictably) that all the main characters die. 

So if you read the blurb on this book, you know it’s a romance. Two people will fall in love, that’s a given.  But you don’t know the characters, how they’ll interact, what kind of conflicts will come their way. You know the destination, but the journey will be new to you.

I would like to see the word predictable used a lot less in reviews of novels. It’s a lazy way to say the novel didn’t work for you, or you didn’t want to put work into the novel. If you’re going to review a novel, review it, gotdammit.

Now that’s out of my system.

This is a great novel. The characters are complex (very complex), nothing like the  run-of-the-mill historical romance characters (and such characters and novels do exist, hundreds of them – which is why a novel like this stands out). Betsey is all too aware of the way men think about sex and she’s not above using it to her advantage because, to be fair, she’s got so few tools and next to no advantages in the time and place where she finds herself. She’s a realist. She’s pragmatic. She’d like to eat, and have a safe place to live, but she would also like to make something of herself, and that is the challenge. 

She takes steps to find a way out of the life she’s destined for. Things conspire against her. She doesn’t give up. No fairy godmother comes to bail her out. She could end up a street walker, she knows this, but she’s not willing to sit back and let life happen to her. So she takes chances. Big ones.

I really like this Betsey.  Quite a few Amazon reviewers don’t like her because (shock) she thinks of sex as fucking. That’s the word that comes to her mind. In her time and place, what else would you expect? This is not a sheltered earl’s daughter. But some readers won’t credit historical fiction that falls outside very narrow boundaries. They want a historical fiction universe in which the verb to fuck does not exist. How boring, say I.

Because let me tell you: Alison Atlee has done her research, and she’s not going to pull punches. If you want a fairy tale, this is not the story for you. Here’s another thing Atlee knows how to do that many cannot pull off, even after many years of writing: she can write a sex scene that goes wrong. It’s not all orgasms and sweet talk. Sometimes it’s hey you’re kneeling on my hair. That’s hard to write, and more than that: it’s hard for characters to recover from. But Atlee handles all that with aplomb. 

So we have here a couple fantastic characters who are not (cough) predictable, who will (predictably) fall in love, but who find interesting ways to get to that conclusion. There’s wonderful scene setting in awful London and a quirky seaside resort. There are moments of panic where you might think, oh no, this is never going to work out.[1. Anybody who re-reads Jane Austen knows, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve worked your way through Persuasion or Pride and Prejudice, you still get panicky at a certain point and wonder if maybe somehow you imagined all those previous readings in which Love Works. And you’re relieved when that ending comes along. Every time, you’re relieved. It’s magic.]

So go read this novel. I highly recommend it. I hope Atlee is writing another one, because I anticipate great things from her. And I wish her millions of thoughtful, open minded, willing-to-be-surprised readers.

 

Pig in a Poke, revisited: Amazon Shenanigans

The first version of this post went up in January 2013. I’m revising and reposting it because Amazon is bungling editions, in a rather deceptive and (to me) infuriating way. The update is followed by the original post.


Amazon has a newish feature I actually like, called Kindle Match. If you bought a hard copy of a book from them in the past — and it can be way, way past, fifteen years ago even, you may be able to get the Kindle edition for anywhere between nothing and ten bucks. Most of the titles seem to be at $2.99 or less. 

So I was looking through this list and I come across the fact that I bought the Norton Critical Edition of Price and Prejudice in 2006. Why I did that is a different question — I can’t remember why I wanted yet another copy. But as you see here  I did indeed buy it in 2006: 

Kindle Match

Kindle Match

A critical edition is the queen of all editions for any book that is considered classic, and the subject of study by academics and scholars. Wikipedia provides a concise description of how critical editions come to be: 

Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in texts, both manuscripts and printed books. Ancient scribes made errors or alterations when copying manuscripts by hand.[1] Given a manuscript copy, several or many copies, but not the original document, the textual critic seeks to reconstruct the original text (the archetype or autograph) as closely as possible. The same processes can be used to attempt to reconstruct intermediate editions, or recensions, of a document’s transcription history.[2] The ultimate objective of the textual critic’s work is the production of a “critical edition” containing a text most closely approximating the original.

Critical editions almost always have additional materials: essays by the editors and/or other scholars, about the book and its history, the author, the time period, and anything else you can think of.  There will also be footnotes to clarify terms that may not be familiar to a current day reader.  Given all this, it probably won’t surprise you that a critical edition costs more than the run-of-the-mill edition.

To clarify what I mean by ‘run-of-the-mill’ edition (or see this post, in which I was totally cranky, but still on target):

Because P&P is long out of print and copyright, anybody can put out a new edition without paying the author or the author’s estate anything. The result is many, many hundreds of editions of P&P put out on cheap paper, with little or no attention to the quality or accuracy of the text, all in the hope of a bit of a profit. You can find new copies of this novel for a buck, and then used copies of that same edition for a penny. 

Do I want the Norton edition as a Kindle book? Need you ask? So I click on the “Get Kindle Edition” button  you see, and this is what comes up:

Not the Norton Critical Edition

Not the Norton Critical Edition

Here is what the page for the critical edition actually looks like:

This is the real Norton Critical Edition

This is the real Norton Critical Edition

 

You see that the critical edition has an editor (Donald J. Gray) and also that I bought it in 2006. But what I was offered as a part of Kindle Match was a crappy movie-tie in edition, one I never bought in soft cover. 

To take this one step further (because it gets worse), if I click on the “Kindle Edition” tab on the Norton edition page, this is what I get:

Still not the critical edition

Still not the critical edition

Note that this was not published by Norton, but by “Top Five Classics” — one of the many companies that specialize in run-of-the-mill cheap editions.  At this point it occurs to me that there may not  even be a Kindle version of the Norton Critical Edition, so I pop over to the Norton website and have a look at the P&P page. And in fact, it’s only put out in trade paper format.  (Click on the link if you want to see what all goes into a critical edition.) 

In a nutshell: if I pay for the critical edition, I want it. I want it for all the reasons touched on above.  If another reader doesn’t care about the edition, s/he won’t even notice the switch. But people should care, because the practice is (a) deceptive and (b) wasteful. I hate to think of all the paper that has gone into crappy editions of this particular novel, one of many.  My guess is that you could repeat this process I’m showing you for everything from Gulliver’s Travels to A Room with a View.

Here’s the question: Is Amazon just tremendously sloppy and unwilling to pay attention to something as simple as an ISBN, or is this a way to lure in less-than-attentive buyers?  

One of the first things you learn in graduate school is to never walk into a seminar where a particular novel is going to be discussed  holding a movie-tie in edition rather than the critical edition. You will not be treated kindly. Also, it’s disrespectful to the editors who put in years of work to make sure the edition is as authentic and error free as possible.

So I’m done venting. I doubt anybody at Amazon will pay attention to my squeaking, but I’m going to keep an eye on this. 

January 2013 Post:

I love all things electronic, but when it comes to buying and selling books on the internet I see room for improvement. To be fair, that improvement is coming along nicely. In most areas.

Don't make Jane angry. You wouldn't like her when she's angry.

Don’t make Jane angry. You wouldn’t like her when she’s angry.

I’ll demonstrate with (what else?) Pride & Prejudice. There must be a couple hundred editions of P&P in English alone. Poorly done editions, leather-bound editions (and sometimes those two things aren’t mutually exclusive), editions on paper so cheap it makes your fingers itch just to turn the page, critical editions (put together by academics with special care to detail and authenticity), abbreviated and illustrated and annotated editions. Most people don’t realize how different editions can be, or that one might be better than another. If you’ve read one copy of Pride & Prejudice you’ve read them all, is the general belief. This is a widely held misconception, and one that technology is not doing anything to rectify. Just the opposite. Continue reading…

The least interesting question about Edna Ferber

I generally avoid the Grammarly blog because … well, if you’ve followed me for any amount of time, you probably know that I have a PhD in linguistics and I find nothing helpful or amusing in endless debates about where to put commas, and titles like this one:  5 Verb Mistakes You Should Stop Making Today make me break out in hives. Academic linguists are not prescriptive. We study language as it exists.  

This is not to say that Grammarly is without merit. It created a lucrative niche by coming up with software that evaluates written language and “corrects contextual spelling mistakes, checks for more than 250 common grammar errors, enhances vocabulary usage and provides citation suggestions.” It is a for-profit subscription service with a lot of subscribers. But they also post about language and writing more generally, and that’s the subject here.

There’s a post dated yesterday with the title 5 Authors Who Died Old Maids.

I am disturbed by this post for a whole slew of reasons. “Old Maid” strikes me as demeaning, to start, but the bigger problem is the premise. 

There is no real way to know about the personal lives of most 19th century women writers unless they made a public statement — and even then, there’s lots of room for debate. (And let me pose a question: do we need to know or is this garden-variety nosiness about famous people?)

Five authors, none of whom married. Should we assume that they would have liked to marry? That they were unhappy about never marrying?  That’s a leap I’m not prepared to take, primarily because there are unstated options. Today or in the 19th century a woman might marry for a lot of reasons — economics, family pressures, love — and she might never marry for even more. Unrequited love, certainly. But it should be obvious that some women aren’t (and were not) interested in marriage in the traditional sense. 

There’s no clear evidence regarding Edna Ferber’s sexuality, but Louisa May Alcott was pretty open about her attraction to women. From the introduction to Little Women (Penguin Classic edition) “… Alcott later commented with pre-Freudian candor on her own feelings: ‘I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body … Because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.'”  

The post author states:

…plenty of female writers chose to stay single their entire lives. For these women, marital status had no bearing on their creativity.  

I’m not sure how to read that. Does she mean “For these women, staying single had no bearing on their creativity” ? If so, is the underlying assumption that married women are more (or less) free to pursue creative impulse? 

The bottom line is, I need to stay away from Grammarly. But I had to point out for my own peace of mind that women writers in the 19th century were just as complicated as women are today. Whether or not they married is possibly the least interesting thing about them as individuals.