After a brief, yet eventful, hiatus, the AntiBlog is back and ready for some hot blog-on-blog action.

Publishers Group West, which owns distributes such varied imprints as Darkhorse, Gallup, and Soft Skull Press, has declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A full list of imprints is available on their website.

Twist endings, the bane of my reading experience. Ever since I read The Gift of the Magi as a child, I have hated the twist ending. It’s one of the reasons I could never get into the Twilight Zone, or enjoy so much 19th-century literature.
Of course, professional curmudgeon Nick Mamatas weighs in:

The problem with twist ending stories tends to be threefold: either the twist is too transparent (repetition of a 19th century story) too contrived (…and the haunted house was a giant tongue the whole time!) or simply too loud (They’ll never know how transparent this is if I shout!). Despite the three problems, there is generally one solution that would make these sorts of stories better: put the twist in the middle.
…
If the twist is in the middle, we have a renewed chance to engage with the characters. So the monster in the woods was really a lost little boy. Then what? The “then what” is the interesting part.

The twist in the middle was frequently used in The X-Files, to great effect. If you ever get to watch the episode “War of the Coprophages,” you’ll actually witness multiple mid-plot twists.

From 101 Reasons to Stop Writing:

Every sex scene is gratuitous.

For every sexual sequence in a novel that imparts some insight into the characters, let alone the human condition, there are thousands which exist solely because the author got to page 180 and realised the main characters hadn’t fscked yet. Almost all of them could be edited down to “And then they did it,” without losing anything original.

I’m all for sex in novels, and on novels. I’m being prudent here, not prudish. If I wanted to get an erection on the bus ride to work, I’d bring my PSP and a 1 gig memory card loaded with eroticism of a more visual nature.

Even though his latest book is being heavily criticized, Thomas Pynchon still commands interest. From the London Telegraph:

“It seems a fitting conclusion to a game of hide-and-seek played by a man whose work is obsessed with the dangers of living in a world where rampant technological progress threatens to overwhelm everything and everyone. His novels imagine all sorts of strange scientific marvels that the world must learn to live with, but even Thomas Pynchon’s fertile brain couldn’t have predicted that one day he would be unmasked by something bearing the wonderfully weird title of YouTube.”

In elementary school, high school, and even a freshman college English course, I diagrammed sentences. It was a logical, almost mathematical approach to sentence structure and grammar, and it was one of the few useful exercises thrust upon unwitting students by the public school system. Unfortunately, the sentence diagram is going the way of cursive writing classes and phonics.

Lucky for us dinosaurs, there’s a new book out about the dying practice. Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences written by Kitty Burns Florey, explores the world of diagramming with a nostalgic eye. NPR reviews.

From the Village Voice:

In 1918, the New Orleans Times-Picayune declared jazz “an atrocity in polite society,” and fulminated that “we should make it a point of civic honor to suppress it. Its musical value is nil, and its possibilities of harm are great.”

But jazz went on to become an international language, surviving even in dictatorships that banned it. Nazi Germany condemned the music as a disgusting “Negro-Jewish” mongrelization. And in the years jazz was still prohibited in the U.S.S.R., a Moscow tenor saxophonist wrote me that he had translated my John Coltrane liner notes and covertly distributed them to other musicians in unlawful samizdats.

But as the years went on, and more sidemen and leaders grew ill or fell out of fashion, few of the music’s admirers here or around the world were aware of the barren last years of these musicians. Jazz musicians do not have pensions, and very few have medical plans or other resources. Pianist Wynton Kelly, for example—a vital sideman for Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie—died penniless. I was at the first recording session of pianist Phineas Newborn, whose mastery of the instrument was astonishing. As jazz musicians say, he told a story. His ended in a pauper’s grave in Memphis.

Via Ananova:

A collection of witty and eccentric lonely hearts ads from the London Review of Books have been brought together for a new book.

It features some of the most brilliant and often absurd ads from what’s been billed as the world’s funniest - and most erudite - lonely-hearts column.

Here’s a selection of the funniest:

‘I’ve divorced better men than you. And worn more expensive shoes than these. So don’t think placing this ad is the biggest comedown I’ve ever had to make. Sensitive F, 34.’

‘List your ten favourite albums… I just want to know if there’s anything worth keeping when we finally break up. Practical, forward thinking man, 35.’

‘Employed in publishing? Me too. Stay the hell away. Man on the inside seeks woman on the outside who likes milling around hospitals guessing the illnesses of out-patients. 30-35. Leeds.’

First world birth rates have been dropping since the 20th century, but that may change thanks to good old Darwinian evolution. From David Friedman’s blog:

 The theoretical argument is simple and persuasive. Humans vary in, among other things, their taste for having children. It seems likely that some of that variation is genetic. …So people with more of a taste for having children, those who are more phyloprogenitive, will out-reproduce those who are less, increasing the share of their descendants in the population and, eventually, bringing average birth rates back up.

It is a persuasive argument, but I have one problem with it. Human generations are long, so human evolution is slow. … We live in a time of very rapid change, driven by technological progress. That makes all long term predictions highly uncertain.

So, people who are genetically predisposed to have lots of kids will give birth to children with the same disposition, ad infinitum. Darwin in action, baby.

I never knew so much work went into the Microsoft Windows system sounds. From MSNBC:

Redmond-based Microsoft seriously debated several other sounds before settling on the final startup sound about three weeks ago. The rejects included a longer, lusher clip and a quick, techno-sounding piece. While many people liked an upbeat ditty with a clapping rhythm, it was eventually nixed for sounding too much like a commercial. Ball said the hand-clapping also seemed like too “human” a sound when paired with the new graphic for Vista.

…

The short startup clip that was eventually chosen is meant to evoke the rhythm of the words “Win-dows Vis-ta!” and Ball hopes the sound will serve as a calling card for the operating system. It also consists of four chords — one for every color in the new Windows graphic that appears as the sound plays. It’s no coincidence that it’s also four seconds long.

There are a total of 45 Vista sounds that Microsoft has spent the last year and a half perfecting, including the dings you hear when you get a new e-mail, receive an error message, or log off your computer. Generally, these are more muted, less jarring variations of the prompts familiar to Windows XP users.