[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Charlie Stross mourns fellow and recently passed Scottish writer Iain (M.) Banks.
• Crooked Timber, Lawyers, Guns and Money, and New APPS all take a look at the disgusting self-justifying behaviour of philosopher Colin McGinn towards a female grad student of his.
• Daniel Drezner wonders about the extent to which ideology will become important in upcoming seasons of Game of Thrones.
• Language Hat wonders if Dutch spelling reforms have cut off contemporary speakers of Dutch from easy access to Dutch literature predating the mid-19th century.
• Marginal Revolution wonders if European Union Internet privacy and security regulations will make things worse for American firms.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw writes about the continuing mystique of the monarchy in Australia.
• Registan’s Reid Standish talks about the marginal improvements in law and order in Kyrgyzstan.
• Strange Maps’ Frank Jacobs talks about the recent map reimagining the countries of the world on a reunified Pangaea as a rhetorical ploy.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little charts the ways in which life for Chinese has improved over the past four decades, asnd the ways in which things are still lacking.
• Window on Eurasia quotes from alarmists worrying about the “de-Russification” of Tatarstan, demographically and otherwise.

[URBAN NOTE] “Glad Day’s new owners celebrate one year in the book business”

Xtra!‘s Michael Lyons writes about the ongoing success of Glad Day, run for a year by a well-financed group of community investors.

[F]or local teacher and activist Michael Erickson, who, along with 21 other community members, purchased the iconic Yonge Street bookshop one year ago, the opportunity to buy the store was a dream waiting to happen. “When we did the call-out for who’d be interested, I think a lot of the owners had always secretly wished that one day they could own a bookstore,” Erickson says. “I think a lot of us fantasized about this.”

Following the closure of New York City’s Oscar Wilde Bookshop in 2009, Glad Day became the world’s oldest queer bookstore, Erickson says. “We spent the past year focusing on sustainability of the store, which I think we’ve done a good job at, but in order for us to survive we have to move to build.”

The next step, he says, is turning Glad Day into an online brand. “We would like to create our own platform to sell books on,” he says. “It would also have a space to list our events coming up. We have some ideas for a community memory project we’d like to post and house on there as well. We also have a book review blog in the works.

“Ideally, it’s the sort of site where people could go on a regular basis, get reviews on books, get connected with the past and hopefully even propose visions and ideas for the future for our community. And buy books.”

There’s online fundraising for this brand at IndieGogo. So far, $792 of a goal of 15 thousand Canadian dollars have been raised. (No, I’ve not yet contributed. Yes, I probably should.)

[LINK] Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster on the genesis of Arthur C. Clarke, writer

Writing at Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster had a trio of thoughtful posts examining the development of Arthur C. Clarke (1, 2, 3). The first post, “The Vision of Arthur C. Clarke”, points to an interesting-looking new biography about the writer.

Neil McAleer’s new book on Clarke is called Visionary: The Odyssey of Sir Arthur C. Clarke (Clarke Project, 2012). It’s the place to go for the background on this period, and on any period, in Clarke’s life. I call the book ‘new,’ but it’s actually a major revision and update of McAleer’s 1993 biography that adds extensive coverage of Clarke’s last fifteen years, covering a lot of material that was new to me, including insights into Clarke’s synergistic relationship with Stanley Kubrick, his reaction to the tsunami of 2004, and the almost playful way he fielded questions about his private life until a newspaper scandal based on nothing more than innuendo delayed the ceremony conferring his knighthood for two years. Throughout, McAleer’s research is exhaustive, drawing on memoirs, interviews and letters from Clarke’s many friends.

The second, “Arthur C. Clarke: On Cities and Stars”, draws from McAleer’s biography to look at the influences and experiences of the young writer, leading up to his The City and the Stars.

By the time Clarke moved from Somerset to London in 1936 he was already suffused with science fiction and in particular enraptured with Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, not to mention the second-hand copies of American science fiction magazines that were then available in England. He spoke of the ‘ravenous addiction’ these magazines inspired and the effect that Stapledon’s novel, with a time scale spanning five billion years, had upon his imagination. He was twelve years old when he first read Last and First Men, awed by its cosmic reach and its placement of the evolution of humanity against the broader backdrop of the cosmos.

Think for a moment of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Has any film ever covered a wider swath of time, from the beginnings of tool making to the apotheosis of the species in an extraterrestrial encounter? This was Clarke’s stage, but the other great discovery of his youth, David Lasser’s The Conquest of Space (1931) gave him the technology he would spend a life examining. Lasser was the founder of the American Interplanetary Society (which became the American Rocket Society and, eventually, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). He was also, for a time, the editor of Hugo Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories. If Stapledon brought Clarke the cosmos, Lasser gave the boy a focus on the attainable, the idea of space as a reachable frontier.

[. . .]

I came across The City and the Stars just a few years after it was published and was mesmerized by its setting in much the way Clarke was taken with Stapledon’s Last and First Men. Here was Diaspar, the city of the far future, the only city on planet Earth, whose inhabitants moved through a high-tech monument to stasis. Nothing changes in Diaspar even as the world around it loses its oceans and becomes desert. Clarke would have much to say about the kind of inward thinking that his characters have to overcome, but the unmistakable fact about Diaspar is that the city at the end of time is also achingly, eerily beautiful.

The third and final (so far?), “Clarke: The Rocket Man Emerges”, considers the beginning of his viable writing career and his genius as a science writer and predictors.

As his stint in the Royal Air Force drew to a close in 1945, Clarke developed the notion of geostationary satellites providing global communications. During the war he had worked on microwaves and radar, while his passion for rocketry provided the means of deployment. McAleer points to George O. Smith as a possible influence, the latter having published a series of stories in Astounding during the war years that became known as the Venus Equilateral series. Clarke even wrote an introduction to a 1976 reprint of these stories saying that they might well have influenced him subconsciously in his work.

The article “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” whatever its sources, would appear in Wireless World in October of 1945. Worldwide coverage by radio and television would be implemented by a series of spacecraft with an orbital period of 24 hours at a distance of 42,000 kilometers from Earth center. Clarke went on to describe the equatorial orbits that would place space stations into ‘fixed’ spots in the sky (as seen by people on Earth). The predictions were bold, valid and, yes, visionary, but remained unheralded at the time except by the US Navy. Many believe the article was influential in the development of early space satellites.

Clarke’s $40 from Wireless World offered him plenty of opportunity later in life to joke about the real monetary value of the communications satellite concept, and McAleer notes that he never showed any regrets about what might have been. In any case, being a visionary was already becoming a habit for the writer, one that seemed to outweigh financial considerations. While still in the RAF and working as an instructor at a radio school in Wiltshire, Clarke often broke into soliloquies on rocket science, describing at one late night session how multistage rockets would get us to the Moon. When asked how big the rocket would be, he described it as the height of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which turns out to be within a few feet of the height of the Saturn V.

Read all three; they’re good.

[URBAN NOTE] On the closing of Fab magazine

This morning I was saddened to discover, via Towleroad then blogTO, that biweekly GLBT magazine Fab is set to cease publication. Editor Phil Villeneuve described what happened for the magazine’s readers.

It’s with a very heavy, but hopeful, heart that I announce Fab magazine will cease publication this spring. Our final issue will be released April 24 and will be in boxes until May 7.

The first issue of Toronto’s little gay-party-animal diary came out Pride weekend 1994, and it has been a relentless pop-culture beast ever since. Aimed knowingly and directly at a gay male audience, Fab has been on the streets of this fine city for 19 years, covering everything from politics, to social issues, to underwear trends, to fascinating new lube flavours. It’s overseen the evolution of Toronto gay men and covered every type of party, play and festival.

Always with its glittering finger on the pulse, Fab has been guided by a juicy handful of editors and supported by a talented army of columnists, freelance writers, photographers and designers — each and every one committed to having a good time and letting boys across the city, and for a time across the country, know how great it is to be gay.

The realities of the print publication world have finally taken their toll on our free glossy. Pink Triangle Press has had to make some difficult decisions over the years, including closing The Body Politic back in the day. Today, the press simply can’t afford to keep the magazine running. Despite the contributors, content and the amazing people that fill its pages, it’s time to say farewell.

But don’t think we’re going out with a whisper. Fab is a unique publication and an iconic one for our community. We plan to celebrate it with a final goodbye issue, as well as a great big party. So stay tuned for details, because we’ll want to see you all there — and be sure to get your hands on that final issue, ’cause those bitches will be collectors’ items by Pride.

Here’s hoping that the new website dailyxtra.com, which will apparently incorporate a lot of content from Fab, will do well.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Crooked Timber’s Maria Farrell writes about Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, institutions she sees as product of Irish misogyny and Roman Catholicism.
• Daniel Drezner took note of the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and argues that the main people arguing about a currency war are (among others) developing countries and a Bundesbank that doesn’t want to lose power to the European Central Bank.
• Eastern Approaches points out that cohabitation in Georgia between President Saakashvili and the governing opposition is not going well.
• Far Outliers’ Joel points out that the dialect of African-Americans in the Japanese translation of Gone With The Wind is that of the marginalized Tohoku region in northern Honshu, visited two years by disaster.
• Geocurrents maps the results of a referendum on conscription in Austria, noting that the largely rural state of Burgenland–once part of Hungary, and still a frontier region–voted strongly in favour.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Dave Brockington notes that the American states with the longest voting lines tend to have Republican governments and relatively large African-American and Latino populations.
• Progressived Download’s John Farrell points out that private labs offering adult stem cell treatments very often inflict terrible, novel illnesses on their clients.
• Registan’s Mitchell Polman points out that Central Asia is hardly likely to prosper if foreign influence is seen as a zero-sum game. All kinds of powers need to take part.
• Window on Eurasia quotes from a Russian Eurasianist thinker, Rustem Vakhitov, who argues that separatist tendencies in Russia overall are strongest in Russian regions. Why single out the ethnic republics and risk triggering something?
• Zero Geography’s Mark Graham maps Twitter usage in different African cities.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bruce Sterling, at Beyond the Beyond, takes a look at the applications of statistical analysis to the study of literature. (Apparently Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott were hugely influential.)
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster describes the latest on the nascent planetary system of TW Hydrae, a very young orange dwarf two hundred light-years away.
• Daniel Drezner thinks that the current informal global structures charged with managing international finances are actually working well.
• Eastern Approaches argues that anti-Americanism specifically, and xenophobia more commonly, is becoming normative in Russia, as demonstrated by recent laws passed covering everything from adoption to the mass media.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s Scott Lemieux notes the irony of torture advocate Alan Dershowitz criticizing a conference on the Israeli occupation held in a New York City college as immoral.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen notes ads funded by the British government in Bulgaria and Romania actively trying to discourage potential migrants.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín points out the problems with the evangelical Christian campaigns against the sex trade, suggesting that they often fail to pick up on vital nuances (like, say, what the women involved actually want).
• At New APPS Blog, the threats against the conference mentioned at Lawyers, Guns and Money above–held at Brooklyn College–are detailed, and a call to support the college made.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that the plan by Uzbekistan’s government to shift the official script from Cyrillic to Latin will discourage reading generally and hit the provinces hard.

[LINK] “A third of Barnes & Noble stores may close in next decade, report says”

This Los Angeles Times report disturbs me, but is unsurprising. The only bookstores that seem likely to survive, in my opinion, are bookstores that can carve out niches for themselves, somehow, whether for particular interest groups (Toronto’s Glad Day Bookstore comes to mind) or neighbourhoods. Might chain bookstores find it more difficult to master these niches than smaller ones?

Barnes & Noble will shut up to a third of its brick-and-mortar bookstores over the next decade as reading habits change and digital publications evolve, according to a new report.

The chain will end up with 450 to 500 stores in 10 years, down from the 689 physical stores it has now, according to Mitchell Klipper, chief executive of Barnes & Noble’s retail group.

That evens out to about 20 stores shuttered yearly over the period, Klipper said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Over the last decade, Barnes & Noble has balanced an average annual closing rate of 15 stores with 30 openings each year through 2009.

“Of that number, some of the stores are unprofitable while others are relocations to better properties,” spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating said of the closures.

Since then, however, the growth rate has shriveled, with the company opening just two stores this fiscal year. Klipper told the Journal that the smaller physical footprint is “a good business model.”

“You have to adjust your overhead, and get smart with smart systems,” he said. “Is it what it used to be when you were opening 80 stores a year and dropping stores everywhere? Probably not. It’s different. But every business evolves.”

[LINK] “I Want Your Job: Vicki Essex, Romance Writer”

Torontoist’s Kelli Korducki has a great interview up with Toronto-based Harlequin novelist Vicki Essex. In the interview, Essex talks at (helpful?) length about the writing and publishing process in one of the more popular genres of literature out there.

There’s a temptation to revert to cliché when discussing pulp romance. Harlequin Superromance author Vicki Essex says this makes writers of the genre cringe.

“‘Bodice-rippers.’ We hate that term! It’s a throwback from the ’70s and ’80s, when historicals were the big thing,” she says. “But today, romance—and contemporary romance especially—isn’t like that. There are so many genres and sub-genres.”

Essex is part of a new generation of young, smart, romance writers who are using the medium to tell compelling, well-written stories that just happen to feature boy-meets-girl scenarios with fleshly pursuits. She stresses that these books are hardly recycled, drop-in-the-detail plot scenarios.

“Another thing people hate is the idea that there are formulas in romance writing,” she says. “If you have to use an ‘F’ word, use ‘framework.’ All stories use a framework.”

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Beyond the Beyond’s Bruce Sterling links to a review of a book highlighting the prominent role played by the nearly one million Chinese migrants in Africa.
• James Bow examines the Southridge Mall, a mall in Iowa’s Des Moines that engaged in a suicidally bad redesign.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster summarizes a recent study by astronomers of the different layers of the atmosphere of brown dwarf 2MASSJ22282889-431026.
• Daniel Drezner is skeptical of the idea that American military deployments abroad give the United States an economic edge, pointing to the example of South Korea.
• Eastern Approaches examines the political mood in Serbia, finding an odd optimism that–if unsatisfied–could turn badly on the incumbents.
• The Global Sociology Blog shares a chart showing the relationships, ideological and even dynastic, between the most powerful factions in China.
• Razib Khan at GNXP deconstructs the myth of “Mitochondrial Eve” as the only woman who left descendants.
• The Planetary Society Blog’s Emily Lakdawalla sums up the ongoing American Astronomical Society conference. Plenty of news about exoplanets!
• The Signal describes the efforts of oral historian Doug Boyd to come up with a suitable file format for oral histories.
• Torontoist highlights the Sherlock Holmes collection of the Toronto Reference Library.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling considers the grim future of e-book readers. Why a dedicated reader when a generalist tablet would do just as well?
• Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams summarizes a paper by one Duncan Horgan examining the efficiencies of different propulsion methods for interstellar probes.
• Far Outliers’ Joel compares early modern English and Spanish expansion, arguing that each imperial power began by colonizing an adjacent area (Ireland in the case of England, al-Andalus and the Canaries in the case of Spain).
• The Global Sociology Blog argues that the political concept of “traditional family” should die a quick death in the face of the diversity of real families.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen suggests that German hostility to American-style immigration policies favouring low-skilled workers explains why robotic mowers are more successful on the German market–capital substitutes for labour.
• At The Power and the Money, Doug Muir makes predictions about the future of Syria. He expects Assad’s defeat after a long drawn-out battle, and bad things happening thereafter.
• Registan’s Nathan Hamm is unimpressed by the quality of the PR consultants hired by the fame-seeking daughter of Uzbekistan’s dictator, Gulmara Karimova.
• Torontoist describes how, in 1993, a lawyer on the 24th story of a Bay Street tower ran into a window panel and fell out, to his death. True story.
• Understanding Society examines what assumptions underlying talking about the “social sciences” as the “human sciences”. (Emphasizing the importance of history and the interpretive nature of human sciences as contrasted to the empiricism of natural sciences is key.)
• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Kontorovich contrasts and compares Israel settlement policies on the West Bank with Turkish settlement policies in North Cyprus, making a case that Turkish settlement is a more substantial effort.