Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch
Anthony Lane, in a crackerjack piece for The New Yorker on the writing and work of Elmore Leonard:
So, when does Leonard become himself? Is it possible to specify the moment, or the season, when he crosses the border? I would nominate “The Big Bounce,” from 1969 — which, by no coincidence, is the first novel of his to be set in the modern age. As the prose calms down, something quickens in the air, and the plainest words and deeds make easy music: “They discussed whether beer was better in bottles or cans, and then which was better, bottled or draft, and both agreed, finally, that it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. Long as it was cold.”
What matters here is what isn’t there. Grammatically, by rights, we ought to have an “As” or a “So” before “long.” If the beer drinkers were talking among themselves, however, or to themselves, they wouldn’t bother with such nicety, and Leonard heeds their example; he does them the honor of flavoring his registration of their chatter with that perfect hint of them. The technical term for this trick, as weary students of literature will recall, is style indirect libre, or free indirect discourse. It has a noble track record, with Jane Austen and Flaubert as front-runners, but seldom has it proved so democratically wide-ranging — not just libre but liberating, too, as Leonard tunes in to regular citizens. He gets into their heads, their palates, and their plans for the evening. Listen to a guy named Moran, in “Cat Chaser” (1982), watching Monday-night football and trying to decide “whether he should have another beer and fry a steak or go to Vesuvio’s on Federal Highway for spaghetti marinara and eat the crisp breadsticks with hard butter, Jesus, and have a bottle of red with it, the house salad ... or get the chicken cacciatore and slock the bread around in the gravy ...”
The ellipses are Leonard’s, or, rather, they are Moran’s musings, reproduced by Leonard as a kind of Morse code. We join in with the dots. But it’s the “Jesus” that does the work, yielding up a microsecond of salivation, and inviting us to slock around in the juice of the character’s brain.
The genius in the second example is the verb choice: slock. There are dozens of verbs that could have worked there, but none better.
Leonard is probably tops on the list of authors whose work I love, but of which I haven’t read nearly as much as I should. There are novelists who are good at creating (and voicing) original vivid characters, novelists who are good at plot, and novelists who are just great at writing. Leonard hits the trifecta.
Experts Said This Was a Damn Clever Post by Jason Kottke
Jason Kottke:
Large media companies, and the NY Times in particular these days, like to use the phrase “experts said” instead of simply stating facts. The thing is, many other statements of plain truth in that brief Times post lack the confirmation of expertise. To aid the paper in steering their readers away from notions of objective truth, here’s a suggested rewrite of that Bluesky post.
Reborn Commodore Is Taking Pre-Orders for New Commodore 64 Models
Last year, retro computing YouTuber Christian “Peri Fractic” Simpson bought licensed the branding rights and some of the IP belonging to Commodore (which rights have been transferred five times since the original company went bankrupt in 1994). Last week they launched their first product:
This is the first real Commodore computer in over 30 years, and it’s picked up a few new tricks.
Not an emulator. Not a PC. Retrogaming heaven in three dimensions: silicon, nostalgia, and light. Powered by a FPGA recreation of the original motherboard, wrapped in glowing game-reactive LEDs (or classic beige of course).
Via Ernie Smith, who has been following this saga thoughtfully.
This is, no question, a fun and cool project, and I hope it succeeds wildly. But personally, the Commodore 64 holds almost no nostalgic value for me. The Commodore 64 — which came out in 1982, when I was 9 — always struck me as cheap-feeling and inelegant. Like using some weird computer from the Soviet Union. Just look at its keyboard. It’s got a bunch of odd keys, like “Run Stop” and “Restore”, and all sorts of drawing-related glyphs (used when programming) printed on the sides of the keycaps. Now compare that to the keyboards from the Apple II Plus (1979), which has just one weird key, “REPT” (for Repeat — you needed to press and hold REPT to get other keys to repeat, which, admittedly, seems inexplicable in hindsight), and to the Apple IIe (1983), which has no weird keys and whose keyboard looks remarkably modern lo these 42 intervening years.
That said, while both systems came with 64 kilobytes of RAM, the Apple IIe cost $1,400 when it debuted (~$4,600 today, inflation adjusted); the Commodore 64 cost $600 (~$2,000 today). Some things haven’t changed about the computer industry in my lifetime.
The most interesting computers Commodore ever made, by far, were the Amigas. The Amiga brand and IP were cleaved from Commodore long ago, and alas, the new Commodore doesn’t have them. But they’ve expressed interest in buying them. Something like this Commodore 64 Ultimate but for an Amiga — now that might get me to reach for my credit card.