WTF-Beta

@DougG said:

I like to think of it musical context of what is an oldie?

The first Beatles album came out about 63 years ago.

When you were listening to that first Beatles album ,what was an oldie that was 63 years old? Well, that’s about when John Philip Sousa wrote “the stars and stripes forever” and Scott Joplin wrote “the entertainer.” The biggest pop song hits were by Al Jolson..

Yes. You can absolutely hear Sousa and Joplin in some Beatles songs.

Also, Joplin had quite a moment shortly after the Beatles broke up.

I rather like this kind of recursion. The artist reaches back in time for something that many people loved and reintroduces it to a new audience, sometimes but not always (Joplin), reinterpreting it for a new generation.

I'm late to this thread. I'm so sorry to read about Mr. wtg's troubles, but I love the gift of being back in touch with his friend. And I'm so glad he's got encouraging observations to offer!

I'm sending up all the vibes, prayers, and thoughts possible for his continued recovery and also for you.

@dolmansaxlil Muffin, when teaching kindergarten and first grade, reported the same anecdotal observations as you.

As for short stories, my thoughts on short stories as both a writer and a reader are also anecdotal and subjective. I think science fiction works very well in short forms. I read a ton of science fiction anthologies when I was a kid. Some science fiction stories really are about a very cool idea that's best told in a succinct, straightforward way. Expanding them beyond that idea feels like padding, and the extra material detracts from the punch that comes from delivering the answer to the story question and quitting.

To me, fantasy requires worldbuilding that doesn't work as well in a short work.

Romance can work, but you lose the ups and downs ot several rounds of will-they-or-won't-they and/or they-did-but-was-it-a-bad-idea?

I have to believe that mystery short stories can work, since I write them. Editors give a lot of latitude for mystery shorts, generally requiring that the story involve a crime without requiring that it be a play-fair mystery that gives the reader all the clues. I, however, prefer my stories to have clues and a logical structure, so that's what I write. I find that it's hard to pull that off in less than 5000 words (~20 manuscript pages) and I prefer to have at least 6000 words.(~24 manuscript pages.)

Literary short stories are their own thing. When I like them, I really like them. When I don't, they feel plotless and self-indulgent. I really admire George Saunders and Elizabeth McCullough when it comes to literary stories. When it comes to (sometimes fairly weird) flash stories, Lydia Davis more or less made that arena her own.

Re: the album vs. single question, only for reading fiction

I'm not sure there has ever been a hugely popular reading analog to the album. Anthologies of short stories by a number of authors have always been, and they still are, published, but not as a significant portion of the market. Collections by a single author have been, and are still, published, although this generally true only for authors who are very popular in novel form, and their short story collections do not sell anything close to the volume that their novels do.

I think the pulp era may have been the only times that short stories were a significant portion of many authors' incomes. Come to think of it, people like Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Poe published frequently in magazines, so that probably extends back to the 1800s and ends around the time of WWII. Even then, I feel sure that it was only due to the popularity of magazines.

Even Agatha Christie, the bestselling novelist of all time, received the bulk of her income in her early years from short stories and serializations of her novels in the pulps. They paid very well. Actually, magazine rates aren't a lot different now than they were then, which means their real value is a small fraction of what it was a century ago.

I was talking to a book group last week about short stories. Our book for the meeting had been a short story collection, and everybody was saying that, though they enjoyed them, they hardly ever read short stories.

I might have thought that short stories would have made a comeback by now, due to shortened attention spans. A hundred years ago, when they were a huge part of reading culture, it was because of the popularity of magazines. There were many outlets at that time for pulp, serious, and middlebrow fiction, and many writers depended more for their income on sales to magazines than on book sales. For them to become popular again, I think there would need to be a move toward distributing them as single stories through subscriptions like Spotify and Audible, rather than in print. (They're available in those formats, but they don't sell a lot and the royalties are abysmal. Few well-known authors write for publication in that format and few people read them.)

I don't think I'm wrong about the shortened attention spans changing the market, though, because flash fiction (less than 1000 words) has exploded in popularity during the smartphone era. It's easy to read something that length on a phone. One of the early outlets for flash pieces is called Smokelong Quarterly, because you can smoke a cigarette while you read one...they're one smoke long. Again, the problem is that flash fiction outlets usually don't pay, so they don't attract writers who attract readers.

That's a long bit of thread drift, but so it goes...

I've been away from teaching for a year. I was teaching writing, so I didn't test for reading comprehension. I thought I gave them a reasonable amount of reading to do, considering the time required for the significant volume of writing that I and my colleagues assigned. We all felt it was important for them to read, too, because writers have to read. How else will you know if your ideas are original? And, of course, people who don't are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to the mechanics of writing. I never did figure out why people who didn't like to read even wanted to write.

I'd say that a significant portion of them were able to read the assignments just fine, and they included sophisticated texts--Hamlet, the Brontës, Frankenstein. Some of them surely skipped the reading and sat out the class discussions as best they could. I'm pretty sure I could tell who they were.

Toward the end, I observed some things that I thought were shocking. I had a graduate student tried to use AI to outline his novel, and the result didn't even resemble the assignment I'd given.

I also noticed that a number of students didn't seem to grasp how a novel is laid out on the page, because they were clueless about what I meant by "scene breaks" until I projected a published page on the screen and showed them the white space that breaks a fictional narrative when there's a change in POV character, time, or place. I finally realized it was because they were listening to audiobooks. I had to change my syllabus to specify that, although audiobooks are a completely legitimate way to consume text for other purposes, they needed to read printed books (paper or ebook were both fine) for my class. And, of course, I explained the reason for this change.

In short, written word is competing with a lot of other kinds of media these days. (Movies, TV, games, the internet--all the usual suspects.) Games, in particular, are a huge part of young people's lives these days. I privately thought that many of my students really wanted to write video games, but that wasn't what our program taught.

I'm speaking up late to second the opinions about wool rugs. Quirt had quite a few nice wool Turkish-style rugs. (Not hand-tufted, I don't think.) When we bought a house together, we had three elderly incontinent animals. We had wood and tile floors and we needed them completely bare for the frequent cleanups. The rugs went in the garage. They stayed there for about seven years with no climate control, until we moved here.

Now we have young animals, and the rugs are the perfect colors and style for this house. I was nervous to see what condition they were in, but they were perfect. No stains. No fading. The pads were in bad shape, and that may be what protected the rugs from the elements, but the rugs were awesome.

@ShiroKuro, I have two quilts my grandmother made. They're too fragile to use now, but they meant a lot to my mother, because her mother died when she was two, and the quilts are almost the only memento of her that Mama had.

It's really extraordinary to hold something made by someone who's been gone so long and think of them cutting the fabric, stitching it together, and doing all the creative work it takes to complete a big project.

@bernard, thank you!

I'm in awe of your carding, spinning, etc., etc.!

Oh, and the choir rehearses at a church right across the street from my house. I can walk out my front door five minutes before rehearsal and be there with time to spare.

I was doing tai chi last year that met in the same place, but I dropped it because of a lot of travel and haven't picked it up yet. I only have so much time and energy for weekly evening commitments, but I did really enjoy it, and the location could only be more convenient if the instructor showed up at my front door.

I can't remember if I've mentioned it here, but I joined the community chorus in January. It's a big group of nice people and the director is wonderful. It's a no-audition group, and yet she had us singing fairly difficult music that was really interesting. Muffin came to our concert last month. It's lovely to be doing music with people again, and it's especially lovely to live where I can see one of my kids as easily as one of us hopping on public transportation.

There's a smaller group with the same director that opened for the choir. Their performance was really stunning. That [i]is[/i] an audition situation that involves attending summer rehearsals that serve as auditions. I'm going to go to those rehearsals and see if I can be part of that, too.

I've been crocheting a lot lately.

This was a graduation gift for Muffin's Sister's firstborn. I'm now starting one for Muffin's brother's firstborn. I have three years to finish it, which should be doable, but the next three graduations are four, five, and six years from now, so I'll be crocheting graduation afghans for the foreseeable future. If Muffin reproduces, I'll be crocheting until the end of my days.

As for hobbies, these days I'm trying not to let my writing become one.

My hydroponic gardens are the hobby where I'm most consistent, because otherwise the plants will die.

I've been playing the piano more this year, though not too much lately.

I still like to cook, although lately, it has mostly taken the form of, "Here's a cool-looking thing at the farmer's market. I'm going to take it home and see what I can do with it!"

When we were house-shopping here in suburban New York, it was surprising to see how many houses had second kitchens. Many older houses here have been divided into multi-family rentals, sometimes being reconfigured more than once over the years, so sometimes you could tell the extra kitchen was left over from a previous configuration. Our house was built as a single-family home, but it had been converted into a two-family sometime before 1925. When we converted it back into a single home, we made the second kitchen into a master bath.

I can see the logic in not tearing out something that's expensive and could be useful, but sometimes you might want to use the space differently. My son and DIL were looking at houses with the thought of perhaps moving here someday, and my DIL said plaintively, "I'd really like a house that has more bathrooms than kitchens." I could see her point.

In other cases, you could tell the second kitchen was built for "overflow" cooking. Our realtor said this was common in Italian families. There was a time when I routinely cooked in my single solitary kitchen for ten and sometimes more, and I never thought, "If I only had another kitchen...." You'd have to have a second cook to keep you from constantly running up and down stairs, burning things on both floors.

People from earlier generations in the South had huge families and managed with one kitchen, even when they had big gardens and had to can and pickle a ton of stuff. I guess even basic household work flow is cultural to a degree.

@shirokuro, I'm working on a Faye novella, because it's a small story, but it's one I never told. Faye and Joe got married between Books 5 and 6, so I'm writing a novella that fills in that gap.

I'm calling it [i]Something Old[/i], because that seems right for two archaeologists getting married.

Thank you, @shirokuro !
@wtg, I went out to look at my seedlings, and something has been rooting around out there. And it's brassy enough to do it in the broad daylight. There was an uprooted okra seedling that hadn't even wilted yet. I put it back in the ground, but sigh.

There are still some things bravely hanging in there. I planted a ton of onions, green onions, and chives, because they're supposed to repel animal pests. If they'll just come up and start being smelly, maybe the other things will have a chance!

The best-looking part of the bed is in the heaviest shade. The arugula have come up in full force, and I guess they're smelly enough to scare the critters away, but they need at least some sun. I'll be shocked if they produce much. I keep telling myself, "It's all an experiment."

Oh, and yes, the house is Victorian. The only question is when in Victoria's reign it was built and whether it was all built at the same time. The front door is off-center, as if about half the house is an addition that isn't quite the same size as the original house. We are pretty sure it was built without electricity, water, gas, or a sewer connection. Some of that history is visible. There's a huge fireplace in the basement where we think the servants cooked, and there are flues for potbelly stoves that make us think they also lived down there. The house itself would have been heated by fireplaces in the four chimneys on all floors. There's an added room that's just out-of-frame in the pic above of the front of the house, and I feel sure it was built when they got indoor bathrooms. We're told that somebody ran a boarding house here at some point, and there are five rooms on the top floor that are finished, but not luxuriously, that are probably where the boarders lived. I guess with all that history, it should feel haunted, but it really doesn't. It's very bright and sunny and has good vibes.

Awwwww, Cosmo looks so sweet! Loki, Muffin/Amanda, and Rogue say hey!

Quirt does securities law, so he's working with people who want to get their businesses listed on the stock market. On the whole, they are very anxious for him to do things yesterday, and they wish he weren't so persnickety about following all the rules and regulations. However, it's very challenging and interesting work for him, and I'm glad as a person who owns stocks that he's on the job, keeping the people who issue it on the straight and narrow.

I think I'll leave the thumbnails for now. Every time I start to post pictures, I fall down into a rabbithole of user error. lol

wtg, I haven't done any serious gardening, because there are a lot of deer in the neighborhood (plus voles, squirrels, bunnies, and there have been bears seen elsewhere in town) and I'm afraid of investing a lot of time and effort, only to get my heart broken. Also, we have a lot of shade.

So I've been getting my gardening yayas out with my indoor hydroponic gardens. Right now, I've growing tomatoes, eggplants, jalapeños, cucumbers, and lettuce in quantities large enough to use (now and then), and I'm experimenting with collards, mustard greens, banana peppers, snow peas, fenugreek, and squash.

However, I noticed that one flower bed, which had nothing planted in it, gets more sun than I thought, so I threw a few seeds out there to see what happens. We had a very cool spring, so I'm only now seeing seedlings, and I really don't know whether anything will survive the shade and animals. But seeds are cheap! It's a big experiment. I've got a few plants each of okra, trombocino squash, carrots, garlic chives, lettuce, and peas, and I've got quite a number of tiny seedlings of arugula, mustards, and swiss chard. And one potato plant. If they continue to survive, I'll post pics of my experiment in gardening in the north under pressure from predators.