Timely And Relevant (To Me, At Least)

The Guardian asks writers: Is writing fun?

Al Kennedy

I wouldn't be the first writer to point out that doing something so deeply personal does become less jolly when you have to keep on at it, day after cash-generating day. To use a not ridiculous analogy: Sex = nice thing. Sex For Cash = probably less fun, perhaps morally uncomfy and psychologically unwise.

Will Self

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. The immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seductive of all: the buying of stationery.

The comments of John Banville and Joyce Carol Oates are also worth reading.

I love Jonathan Rosenberg!

Unlike some people, I don't necessarily believe that Jon Rosenberg really knows where he's going with his webcomic, Goats, but today's is precious.

"Existince, she iz cyclical! Ein multiverse begets ze next, her corpse becomes the Turing machine upon vhich her children's code runs. Time goes by. Zere are maybe a few billion iterations, you get compresison artifacts. Bugs crop up. Ze registry gets littered vith orphans. Real flesh and blood oprhans, mind you. I imagine zey must resort to cannibalism eventually."

"So... we're bloatware?"

"I'm surpised ve don't haff banner ads on our foreheads."

I kinda miss the days of Jon, Toothgnip, and Diablo, but Rosenberg manages to throw out a good one now and then.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.

Certainly, there's been a lot of brouhaha over a report that appeared in New Scientis article stating that, in the US, porn's biggest consumers are conservatives. Henry over at Crooked Timber ran the numbers and concluded that the report doesn't really say what the New Scientist says it does. At best, New Scientist oversold the conclusions (which is hardly new; New Scientist is the shock magazine of the science journal set). The consumption data is gathered from anonymized credit card records, but the voting and religiousity patterns are all derived from regional statistics, so making a one-to-one correlation is impossible. The summary of the article itself points out that so-called "blue" voting districts tend to use escort service websites more often, while "wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism" were more popular with "red" ones. All in all, the actual consumption patterns are mostly a wash, and as one friend of mine pointed out, the outlier pattern of Utah buying the most porn over the Internet is consistent with porn being difficult to acquire any other way in Utah.

But reading the American Family Network's take has its own entertainments. Their reporter points out, if Utah has a 1.69 subscribers per thousand and there are 2.7 million people there, that means that Utah has 5,000 people buying porn. "That means Utah is hardly full of 'moralistic deviants.'"

What reporter Taranto fails to note is that the number is only small because the population is small; what matters is the extent. If 1.69 permille (yes, that's a real word) is a dismissible number for 2.7 million people, it is a dismissable number for 270 million.

I can only conclude from the AFA's article that they would not think it noteworthy if porn consumption across the rest of the nation went up to match Utah's numbers.

Somehow, I doubt that's the conclusion they wanted their readers to reach.