Today is Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day. To celebrate, employees at Sealed Air, which manufactures $4 billion of the stuff annually, get their own sheets to play with at their desks.

Milton Babbitt, the American composer who believed that those in his line of work, if serious, shouldn’t concern themselves with the average listener, has died. There is perhaps some truth to Babbitt’s thinking, which, like his music, followed Schoenberg’s dictum that “if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.”

Book report: The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters, is sublime. Part ghost story, part social history, part English period piece, it also manages to be both a great work of literature and a gripping page-turner of a novel. Highly recommended.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Turns out Vladimir Nabokov—author of Bend Sinister, Lolita, and Pale Fire, among others—was right all along when he hypothesized that butterflies came to the New World from Asia.

Nabokov, an amateur, self-taught lepidopterist, came up with his theory in 1945. Then, the experts blew him off; nearly seven decades later, the old man is vindicated. Put that in your pipes and smoke ’em, you over-credentialed hacks.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts the writing life  |  make a comment

Descending into the bowels* of the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture this afternoon, I happened to notice, hanging on the wall, an old sign for what was once a stationery company. I can’t remember the name of the business, but the tagline on the sign read something like, “If its made of paper, we sell it.”

Did you catch the error? No? I’m not surprised. The question of whether to use “its” or “it’s” manages to confound even the most diligent of writers. Good thing I’m here to set things straight:

• “its” is a possessive pronoun, like “his,” “hers,” or “theirs”
• “it’s” is a contraction that always means either “it is” or “it has”

See? That’s not so hard, is it? The tagline should therefore read, “If it’s made of paper, we sell it.”

*It was pretty disappointing, actually. Seems to me that a museum basement ought to be musty, dirty, dark, cobwebbed, and, well…spooky. The MAC’s? More like an operating room.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

In honor of Gary Burton‘s birthday—which is this Sunday—I’m a-gonna treat you to a funky little blues number of his called “Walter L.” It’s from 2009’s Quartet Live, and features, in addition to Burton on vibes, Pat Metheny (guitar), bassist Steve Swallow, and Antonio Sanchez on drums.

Take it away, Gary:

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

The decline and fall of Western Civilization continues apace, courtesy of some weenies busybodies up north:

The Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing” was ruled by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council to be “extremely offensive” and thus inappropriate for airing on radio or television because it uses an anti-gay slur.

Do there exist people so thin-skinned as to take umbrage at a single word in a 26-year-old pop song? Really?

Anyway, the song’s banned—and the decision cannot be appealed. Coming so soon after the news that Huckleberry Finn is about to be bowdlerized, one can’t help but wonder if certain individuals have far too much time on their hands.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

In my capacity as a professional writer and editor, I’ve learned that, for the most part, the rest of the world can be divided thus: (1) those who don’t particularly care about writing fundamentals, and (2) those who care just enough to cling tenaciously to fallacies such as the never-start-a-sentence-with-a-conjunction rule, which we’ve dealt with here and here.

For the latter group, Farhad Manjoo explains why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

While he’s Spokane’s best-known fine artist, Harold Balazs’s finest contribution to society may very well be “Transcend the Bullshit,” his mantra-turned-typographical treatment that has become synonymous with the artist’s life and work. Today, it can be found on all kinds of merchandise at our very own Boo Radley’s. In fact, I’m a proud owner of one of the T-shirts as well as a fine belt buckle—the latter a recent gift from my staff.

My oldest daughter Haley decided to put a new twist on Harold’s notion, perhaps recognizing that transcendence from all the bullshit surrounding us is aspirational at best, and that we’re more often than not doomed to wallow in it. Like Velcro, it seems some form of BS is always holding us back. So with deep (and I mean deep) humility, I submit that there are now two ways to ponder our own existence: one to give us hope, the other to keep us grounded.

Harold’s is on the left; Haley’s is on the right:

posted by: CK Anderson  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Over at More Intelligent Life, Anthony Gardner has some thoughts on “verbing”—that most deplorable of language trends. My theory is that it’s the result of ignorance rather than the natural order of things. And since, as a species, we appear to be getting stupider, it’s going to get a lot worse.

Just finished White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America’s Deadliest Avalanche. It’s about the massive storm of 1910 that shut down the rail lines in Stevens Pass just west of Leavenworth, and the resulting avalanche that swept two trains and a hundred people into the canyon below Wellington. The author, Gary Krist, is a novelist, and that makes a huge difference: instead of a dry historical account, you get a beautifully crafted story, with characters, plot, and a climactic chapter that is simply breathtaking. And not a word of invented dialogue, either.

Took the family to see Tron: Legacy over the weekend. It was just what one wants from a Sunday afternoon at the theater: pure escapism, with impressive effects and, it must be said, an effective soundtrack. The whole idea behind it is patently ridiculous, of course (and the original’s worth is directly proportional to your age in 1982), but who cares? It was fun.

Finally, a nod to the EWU football team, crowned FCS national champions (!) Friday night after an improbable come-from-behind victory over Delaware. Who’d a thunk it? Now, if only people in Spokane would stop obsessing over WSU and Gonzaga long enough to notice…

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment