Bookish

22 August 2002

Days left to deadline: 9.

Days left to final draft goal date: 7.

Pages of The World Builders written (total): 132. (Edits handwritten but not yet typed on half the draft.)

So. More good work on the book progresses. I have half of it to read and pick at this morning, and then I'll start the typing of the smaller stuff and the implementation of the larger stuff. Mark and Timprov and I sat around talking about the virtual reality aspects of the whole thing last night and got some things figured out that should be generally beneficial. Also, Philip and Scott and Avi finished reading it, and Philip and Scott offered me their comments. (Avi and I are still working out how we're going to do that.) Thanks, guys! Much appreciated.

I woke up this morning ready to edit. Always a good sign when I'm excited about edits. Also something of a scary sign.

I finished reading Alan Dundes' Interpreting Folklore yesterday afternoon, and it was not at all what I wanted for the Not The Moose Book's folklorist. Back to the library again. (Well, after I've finished a few more books. Like Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice, which I'm reading now.) I got frustrated with Dundes several times in the course of the book because he had made an interpretation based on the universality of a use or format of a verse or story, and I'd always heard it in such a way that that interpretation was totally backwards. Not universal at all. And there were a few points where he was casting about for exotic and symbolic motives when very plain, common sense ones would do. It wasn't without interest, but it was something of a disappointment.

It was published in 1980, so it didn't seem that the American folklore could really have shifted that much between the writing of the book and my first exposure to some of it, around my kindergarten year, 1983. If it did, that'd be something amazing to study in itself. I don't know...I agreed with the guy that it was good not to treat folklore as if it existed in a vacuum, but many of his citations and interpretations seemed to assume their conclusion as a starting point. I would consider it appropriate scholarly practice to cite something like my great-grandmother's belief that deaths come in threes. I don't really consider it responsible for the folklorist himself to immediately stop counting and start over every time he reached three.

Aaaaanyway. I've got editing to do, and the house needs cleaning, and so on. Busy day, long day. Thursdays are the longest, on our current schedule. Not always the worst. Just the longest. I'm feeling quite bookish today. I think that'll be a good thing.

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