Mr. Harold Has a Paw
I woke at 5:30 a.m. to a terrific thunderstorm and lay awake listening, listening, listening to the thunder, watching the lightning at the windows, not getting back to sleep. I gave up and got out of bed at six. There was torrential rain. And now there is sun. And I did not sleep enough. Our high was 71˚F.
I did not get even a quarter of the work done today I hoped to do. Tomorrow, I'm gonna double down and try again. The work for Nat Goldin is due on the 11th, so that gets top priority. And I desperately want to make some good headway on the mosasaur papers.
I spoke with Bill at SubPress about Bradbury Weather. My total word count based on the ToC was off and I had to recalculate that. It was only a few thousand words. In a book that long, a few thousand words hardly seem to matter. I emailed with a few paleo' folks, including Mike Polcyn, with whom I will be speaking on Thursday (when I hope to also be heading back into McWane). I have a metric buttload of measurements to take on the Yale specimen. I'm considering approaching the problem of delineating russellosaurine genera (the Russellosaurina is a major branch of the Mosasauridae) using a quantitative analysis known as morphometrics...but that might be biting off more than I have time to chew right now.
Some things I said on Twitter (honest things, that I no doubt will one day regret having said):
When you use the term "Eurocentric," you're referring to vastly different cultures. Lumping, say, England & Transylvania, Spain & Greece & Russia, you've created a *wildly* artificial, meaningless category (rather like the arbitrary geographic divide between Europe & Asia).
~ and ~
And, as I just said to someone, colonization is not even remotely unique to European nations.
I will likely come back to this later. But, for fuck's sake people, without intellectual rigor your would-be revolution is twaddle (it might be twaddle regardless, but...). Define your terms - frequently - and have the arguments to back them up, or all you have is lazy, sloppy scholarship in the service of politics, another shade of jingoism, more interested in drawing an inviolable line between Us and Them than understanding the truth of things.
Spooky has added a couple of new things to the Big Cartel shop, including the audiobook of Two Worlds and In Between and the bound, uncorrected ARCs of Comes a Pale Rider.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
4:20 p.m.
I did not get even a quarter of the work done today I hoped to do. Tomorrow, I'm gonna double down and try again. The work for Nat Goldin is due on the 11th, so that gets top priority. And I desperately want to make some good headway on the mosasaur papers.
I spoke with Bill at SubPress about Bradbury Weather. My total word count based on the ToC was off and I had to recalculate that. It was only a few thousand words. In a book that long, a few thousand words hardly seem to matter. I emailed with a few paleo' folks, including Mike Polcyn, with whom I will be speaking on Thursday (when I hope to also be heading back into McWane). I have a metric buttload of measurements to take on the Yale specimen. I'm considering approaching the problem of delineating russellosaurine genera (the Russellosaurina is a major branch of the Mosasauridae) using a quantitative analysis known as morphometrics...but that might be biting off more than I have time to chew right now.
Some things I said on Twitter (honest things, that I no doubt will one day regret having said):
When you use the term "Eurocentric," you're referring to vastly different cultures. Lumping, say, England & Transylvania, Spain & Greece & Russia, you've created a *wildly* artificial, meaningless category (rather like the arbitrary geographic divide between Europe & Asia).
~ and ~
And, as I just said to someone, colonization is not even remotely unique to European nations.
I will likely come back to this later. But, for fuck's sake people, without intellectual rigor your would-be revolution is twaddle (it might be twaddle regardless, but...). Define your terms - frequently - and have the arguments to back them up, or all you have is lazy, sloppy scholarship in the service of politics, another shade of jingoism, more interested in drawing an inviolable line between Us and Them than understanding the truth of things.
Spooky has added a couple of new things to the Big Cartel shop, including the audiobook of Two Worlds and In Between and the bound, uncorrected ARCs of Comes a Pale Rider.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
4:20 p.m.