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perfect_sonnet
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Name: Kym
Country: United States
State: Pennsylvania
Metro: Philadelphia
Birthday: 12/30/1982
Gender: Female
Interests: Music: The Beatles, Radiohead, Muse, Coldplay, Supergrass, Snow Patrol, the Shins. Blur, the Juliana Theory, Piebald, Oasis, Jimmy Eat World, Kaiser Chiefs, Pete Yorn, Third Eye Blind, Keane, Bright Eyes, Elliott Smith, Air, Phish, Something Corporate, Mae, Koufax, Kent, Nick Drake, Bob Dylan, the Offspring, etc.
Also, Kappa Kappa Psi, being a crazy liberal, making music, reading, and traveling.
Expertise: The UK, educational publishing, Red Sox trivia, napping, Guinness consumption, music, and so on...
Occupation: Editor
Industry: Educational Publishing
Message: message me
AIM:  Stargazertwenty
Member Since:
5/29/2003
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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| This article made me slightly nauseous, especially considering I opened my bonus check last week to find that approximately 46% of my hard-earned bonus money went to the government.
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| Slate has a great overview of some of the problems with No Child Left Behind and some concrete (if not a bit idealistic) solutions. If you aren't all that familiar with NCLB, this is a good place to start:
http://www.slate.com/id/2187680/
I'm really interested to see what the next president does with this.
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| Attendance at weekly mass is down, priests are still being implicated in heinous crimes against children, and popular opinion seems to indicate that the Catholic Church is more outdated and irrelevant than ever before. So what does the Vatican do? Release an updated list of sins, that's what! Just in time for all of your Lenten confessions...
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| Over the past few years, with books like James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, the question of authorship and authenticity has emerged as a serious issue in the publishing world. These works are roughly based in truth, but are highly embellished to make a more interesting read. Despite this, authors market them as "memoirs" and they are subsequently sold in the "nonfiction" section of bookstores. This Slate article discusses what publishers are doing to address claims of inauthenticity and prevent future authors from contributing to the trend of writing fiction and labeling it as nonfiction.
At the end of the article, the author suggests a new genre for books like James Frey's called "Reality Fiction," comparing it to the (sickeningly) popular reality TV we are all so familiar with. Perhaps this wouldn't be such a bad idea, but it would require someone to go through the entire canon of memoirs and autobiographies to make sure that nothing was fabricated -- a herculean task that could alter literature as we know it (For example, did Anne Frank "make up" parts of her diary? Some fact checkers would have to get on that, and perhaps we wouldn't like the answer!)
This got me thinking: most TV producers aren't being tied to the tracks for staging and scripting so-called "reality" shows. We accept that these shows are not actually "real" and we allow them to continue with the ridculous label of "reality." So is it a double-standard to require that publishers make their "reality" works "real," while TV gets to go on shooting shows like "The Hills" under the guise of "reality" TV? I don't think that's fair... on the other hand, I don't believe that authors like Frey should be allowed to market their books as truth when they are mostly fiction. Why not just call the book "fiction"? A good book is a good book, regardless of genre. But don't lie to the people who support your livelihood! That's just not nice. Instead, why don't we remove the label of "reality" altogether, letting it exist solely in our personal, everyday lives? I don't need to come home and watch a "reality" TV show and read a "reality" book -- I have enough "reality" as it is, thanks.
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| I think this site has been floating around for a while, but it's very entertaining. It's a bunch of graphic representations of popular songs. Here are a few of my favorites:
And this one is not actually a chart, but is still hilarious:
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