Year: 2013

STD Triage is a particularly novel advancement in medical apps:

If you’re worried that one-night stand left you with more than just an empty bed in the morning, you can fire up the STD Triage app, snap one overview photo and one close-up, include a few notes about your symptoms, and send a report off to iDoc24′s dermatologists, who are currently practicing in different parts of Europe. The first doctor to respond will evaluate your symptoms and photos and send back a few possible diagnoses and recommendations for treatment. You pay $10 to get their answer. “We give about 70 percent of the patients pharmaceutical treatment advice,” says Börve. “But we also always tell them if their symptoms don’t change or get worse to see their doctor.” The other 30 percent are told to see a doctor, and the app shows a map of STD clinics nearby.

Previous Dish on medical apps here.

John Fram abandoned his “very gay, very avant-garde debut novel” to write a werewolf romance thriller:

I have learned the meaning of self-loathing and it is writing a sentence that you know is sloppy and starting another sentence. I feel like I am harming not just my (future) reputation but also harming the English language as a whole. I am contributing to the white noise of publishing. I am pouring out more words to distract readers from the things that are actually worth reading. What am I doing? Some day I will die. Some day every day reader will die and I will have on my last conscience the fact that there are readers out there who wasted what little time they had on this awful book.

And the fruits of that soul-sucking labor?

The Last of His Kind made me $42.49 in the U.S. (and India) and $20.80 in Europe. After the $19.99 for my virtual book tour (which led to no noticeable increase in sales), the book made me a total of $43.40. If we are to estimate that I worked on LoHK for at least 10 hours a week—and doesn’t that seem low? Don’t you remember, John, those mornings when you would wake up at 5:00 a.m. and work until you had to go to your day job at one in the afternoon?—that means I invested about 240 hours into the book. According to the free market, I am worth $0.18 an hour as a writer.

Amit Majmudar argues that, in contemporary literature, nothing is held back as much as sentimentality:

“Good” artists instinctively exclude elements of what they know to be part of real life if they feel it may be “bad,” artistically speaking. The prudish Victorians regarded sexual language in fiction that way. Charles Dickens, obviously, knew that people have sex, but he would never spell such a thing out in a novel, even though he knew dirty language was part of real life (especially among the lowlifes he sometimes wrote about, like Fagin and company). It was “bad.” It may have been “bad” in a different sense—as in indecent, improper—but it was “bad” artistically as well, in that his sense of his audience kept him from being too graphic or explicit, either in scenes or dialogue. Meanwhile, Dickens was at liberty to engineer a scene in which, say, a tuberculosis-stricken orphan switches places at the guillotine with a virginal seamstress…Today, you can put all sorts of explicit sexual references in fiction, and the average critic won’t chide you for immorality or indecency; sentimentality will get you panned every time.

The critical temperament of an age shapes an age’s creativity not just in the supply-demand way, motivating writers to produce what is praised and valued by critics and readers. The critical temperament actually blocks off areas of life to create a portrayal of the world that fits its idea of the world. So a prudish era like the Victorian will target immorality—and a cynical or ironic era like ours will target sentimentality.

And other obscure words you probably don’t know:

Relatedly, Carmel Lobello compiled a list of “uncommon or obsolete words that we think may have died early.” For example:

Lunting: Walking while smoking a pipe

Groak: To silently watch someone while they are eating, hoping to be invited to join them

Jirble: To pour out (a liquid) with an unsteady hand: as, he jirbles out a dram

“Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper,” – W.H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (1967).

After this week’s freelancing dust-up, Mark Oppenheimer offers tips for negotiating a good rate:

A little while back, I was contributing a piece to a publication that I was thrilled to be writing for: high prestige, high visibility, great roster of fellow contributors. I was honored to be asked. And when the editor mentioned my fee, I was initially eager to say yes. But something told me to hold back (for once—I am usually a very poor negotiator). I thought about who else was contributing, what demands they or their agents might have made, the fact that there’s probably always wiggle room … and I typed this into an e-mail: “I’ll do it for whatever you pay Sam Lipsyte.”

And the editor wrote back promptly to say that sure, yes, that was fine—and he doubled his offer.

The Lipsyte choice, you should know, was not entirely arbitrary on my part. He’s not a superstar in the Michael Lewis or Malcolm Gladwell sense; it would be arrogant for me to think I can demand what such best-selling authors, true celebrities, can demand. But he is high-prestige, a writer’s writer, the kind of person who adds luster to a table of contents (he also happens to be very good; I’m really enjoying his new book of short stories). He’s not the kind of writer a New York editor would want to lowball. What’s more, he has a full-time job teaching at Columbia, and probably is plenty busy, so he wouldn’t say yes to a trivial fee. I figured he commanded more than editors were offering me—but not stratospherically more. As it turned out, I was right.

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Simon Akam mourns the distinctly American transformation of a butchered pun, “replaced by something grosser, dumber, uglier”:

Examples abound: Take one of the most read websites in the world, Wikipedia, a “pun” on encyclopedia that shares nothing but its suffix. Or techpreneur, the loathsome fusion of technology and entrepreneur. Likewise mansplain, a coinage popular with Internet feminists that adroitly glosses a man addressing a woman in a condescending fashion (e.g., “Akam mansplains that mansplain is not a functioning pun.”) but is still not a functioning pun. Manscaping, the removal of all or part of male body hair, is better—there is at least assonance between the vowel sounds in man and land—but as a pun it remains perilously borderline. …

One erudite friend of mine suggests that the current crisis in American wordplay can be traced back to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s and the subsequent tendency to append any scandal-related noun with the suffix -gate. Before Nixon fell, my friend suggests, “All American puns rhymed perfectly and snappily, as if the whole country were a Cole Porter musical.”

Kottke tried to sit through the entire 2012 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship but found it too, um, “PUNishing”. Above is a clip from the “Farms & Ranches” portion of the competition. Update from a reader:

The author seems to suffer from an inability to distinguish puns (where words are manipulated for wit and pleasure by playing on sound, meaning, and even spelling) and portmanteaus (where words are combined into one for brevity or concision). Wikipedia is not a pun; it is simply a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia. Ditto techpreneur, mansplain, and the -gate scandals. None of these are puns, because none of them are intended to be. They are just meant to make communication faster and simpler by combining words so that they do not have to be fully expanded every time.