August 3, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:What the $*%! has Jane been up to?
You may be wondering why I've disappeared. Well, I've been awful busy . . . a girl's gotta eat, you know. Plus I hooked up my Tivo, perfected my mastery of Rose Birnbaum Levy's surprisingly excellent cream cheese pie crust (it's only got a little cream cheese, and somehow that makes it amazingly flaky, tender and tasty), and cooked dinner for one of my oldest friends and her adorable new baby.
I've also been working on an alternative blog project, which I will now (ta-dum!) unveil here.
Many of you probably know that older books used to be released in serial form before they were compiled into novels. Writers back then must have had some serious . . . er . . . pluck, because many of them used to send off a few chapters of a serial, and commit to meeting deadlines that were horrifyingly regular and distressingly unflexible, without having the faintest idea how the whole thing was going to turn out. Now that I think of it, writing a novel that way would make a pretty cool weblog . . .
But that's not the project I'm working on. What I wanted to do was give readers a place to read novels in serial. I got the idea from a service (now defunct) that used to email me sections of a great work every day, so you could read (for example) The Arabian Nights in five-minute chunks. When the service expired, it occurred to me that something like that would make a neat idea for a weblog. With the comments feature, I thought it would be kind of cool if it eventually turned into something like an online book club. But even if not, I think it's still pretty neat to have somewhere where you can go to spend a relaxing ten minutes reading a great classic work.
And for webloggers, all it takes is a dollar and a dream . . . thanks to a friend who bought me the domain and some hosting for my (long past) birthday, I now have the weblog. Gentlemen, I give you: Unpopular Culture!
It's still kind of a work in progress. I did in in WordPress, which I don't know very well yet, but which other bloggers have spoken of highly. The dates bear no resemblance to when I posted the items, and the archives aren't quite there yet . . . but otherwise, I'm very happy with it. I know that y'all come to me for economics and political commentary, mostly, but I'm hoping that some of you might also be interested in a little good literature.
The first book I chose is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain, which has the triple advantages of being a) literature b) accessible to the modern reader and c) hilarious. You'll make this girl very happy if you check it out.
Posted by Jane Galt at August 3, 2004 1:15 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linkswow, great idea. I used to love that 5 minute chunks of book service and then i completely lost track of it after i left college. It subsequently completely escaped my memory. Three cheers for your better memory.
Excellent! We spend more time in front of our computers than on the couch reading (as we should be).
Think of it, a gigantic cyberspace "family" (together) individually gathered round the (radio listening to) monitor reading the adventures of...
and d) in the public domain.
Make sure everything you put up on that site is public domain or you're going to have problems.
Way ahead of you, Kate -- everything I put up will be from 1923 or earlier, never fear.
Are you going to be posting chunks daily?
Reading classic books? What are you - some kind of English major?
100% agreed, and I'll be back there daily. Thanks!
Wonderful! I've been on a Jane Austen kick lately myself. Love me some classics.
An excellent idea. You might need to work on the presentation a bit; I found the font and color to be harsh, and it seemed difficult to follow a novel presented in reverse order (for those who weren't in from the start).
Not criticism to be mean, but because I like the idea and want to make it better.
I like the site/domain-name choice, sounds appropriately Lileksesque.
I also like the first book choice -- I was one of those wackos who read the thing, purely for pleasure, back in high school. A wonderful spoof, it is.
Great idea, Jane. But do please take some advice on your stylesheet.
Don't specify font sizes at all, if you can help it -- especially not for the main sections. Let the user's browser preference set the font size the user likes to read with. If you must specify font sizes, use points instead of pixels, i.e. 12pt instead of 12px. As it is, the text is too small on a monitor at 1280x1024 resolution. Specifying points will help with this.
Don't use style elements which cause a change in font size on mouse-over, such as a:hover { font-size 110% } as it makes the text re-flow whenever readers move the mouse pointer over such an element (or at least that's what happens on my machine).
That's what I see from a quick look at your wp-layout.css stylesheet.
It looks like maybe there's a banner ad from amazon that's either hidden or overlapping your main entries. It flickers into/out of view as I mouse over links.
My dear Jane,
Your taste in authors has set you upon a new and lofty perch in my estimation of your character. Here, you shall enjoy the rarified air of those whose fine taste and sound judgement are ably demonstrated for all to see. Next thing you know you will say you not actually know about, but have read (and daresay...even enjoyed?!) the Mysterious Stranger and other obscure works of Twain. If this proves to be the case I will have to fetch a glass of water to calm my excited nerves or risk fainting on the spot in a most unseemly manner over my keyboard.
Good luck with your project.
SDAI-Tech1
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