Tod “Thirteen Hawks” Goldberg has the last word on The Traveler:
What the bio fails to mention and what the publisher might have failed to note was that, “John Twelve Hawks doesn’t know how to write dialog.” In addition, “John Twelve Hawks never was told that pages and pages of expositional dialog broken up with meaningless secondary action isn’t engaging.”
A Books by the Bay report with photos will be posted here sometime over the weekend. Needless to say, there are a good deal of notes to sift through.
In the meantime, I was grateful to be in close proxmiity to the Paul Reubens Day pub crawl/procession. Below are some photos and here’s a video of the various Pee Wees congregating near the waterfall at Yerba Buena Gardens. Needless to say, whoever concocted this idea is a strange genius.
It’s a remarkably sunny day here in the City. I got to Yerba Buena Gardens a little later than expected, but fortunately with enough time to chat a bit with Kevin Smokler just before he had to rush from the end of his panel to an autograph signing. Adam Johnson, mysteriously enough, was nowhere to be found.
So far, I’ve taken some notes for a panel and a half and I’ve chatted a bit with some of my favorite independent booksellers, who are hawking their goods under the tent. Unfortunately, turnout here wasn’t nearly as large as I had expected (and certainly not as gargantuan as previous years). We’re talking somewhere in the area of a few hundred. But the afternoon is only just starting and I haven’t yet ventured into the Yerba Buena theatre to see what the crowd’s like in there.
Interestingly enough, I saw a man who looked suspiciously like William T. Vollmann from far away. I approached him, hoping to interview him on the fly about the recent bombings in Egypt and London. But sadly when approaching him ten or fifteen feet away, I saw that he was not, in fact, William T. Vollmann, but a solitary thirtysomething dressed in a Hawaiian shirt. And really, would Vollmann be the type who wore Hawaiian shirts?
In any event, I will try for another update later in the day. But this laptop is dying, even though there are copious wireless connections around. (I’m typing right now from the lawn.)
If you want to say hello, I’m wearing a green striped shirt and (believe it or not) shorts. Look for the guy with the buzz cut, glasses, and technology strapped to his body.
The next version of Windows has been given an official name: Windows Vista.
This is, of course, a preposterous appellation.
I’m guessing that Microsoft intends to connote the following definition of vista within the minds of PC users
“An awareness of a range of time, events, or subjects; a broad mental view.”
But a vista is also “a distant view or prospect, especially one seen through an opening, as between rows of buildings or trees.” The question in this case is who has that view: the Windows user or Microsoft. “Longhorn” was bad enough, suggesting “long shot” — as in Microsoft trying to encourage PC users to upgrade their OSes when most are wedded to Windows 2000. But is it entirely a good idea for Microsoft to use a word that insinuates distant results rather than functionality? This is a bit like conjuring up an image of a beautiful mountain that one cannot climb — which has been, for the most part, my experience with Microsoft products.
Who were the marketing geniuses who came up with this?