eveninghawk’s links

Today I was adding along to a post over at domynoes.network forums and found that what I posted there about my favorite authors was worth bringing up over here.

Let’s see… people who move me and make me drop things to read their stuff….

That’s actually a tough question since a lot of people I like to read are dead… makes it hard for them to put something out I want to get a hand on…

Caryl Phillips
Julian Barnes
Jeanette Winterson
Neil Gaiman
Zadie Smith who has written a great bit about the American book tour
Mark Kurlansky… a man who I see as the best researched writer, something i admire and aspire to.
Ha Jin… someone who reminded me that you could be a good writer, and even write about the Cultural Revolution in China and still write about people.

People who I read, but feel less of a need to drop the phone:
Mercedes Lackey
Stephen King
Douglas Whynott (i loved his book on the bluefin… though I didn’t realize he was a Mt Holyoke professor when I had the time to go say hello)
Kate Christiansen
Orson Scott Card

Also, if you find tight harmonies and writers to be your thing, you should check out the song “My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors” by moxy fruvous.

I like biology, I like bugs, and anyone who met me at Hampshire knows that I am a big fan of interdisciplinary studies. This means I was all jazzed up by ethnomusicology, very excited by studying socioeconomic impacts of environmental change, and very jazzed up by human ecology. Things link together and interact and this is enough to send me jumping up and down and telling everyone al kinds of information that they don’t want to know.

Well, today Dev (a friend from NL), pointed me to something that will have me pointing and clicking and reading for a while because, to me, it’s exciting. Yay interdisciplinary happiness, and it’s bugs. I’ve been thinking about cute and interesting bugs all semester because kids get so into it, so I’ve had bugs on the brain. You too can read bug bios.

As an aside, I have always been a firm believer as personal experience as the way to really build people’s interest in things. This is why zoos, though often poorly executed, are a good idea. When in college I was able to play with a Tanzanian millipede. Let’s just say it’s a millipede that is about 8 inches long and 3/4 of an inch thick. It was a great experience, and gave a whole new level of indentification to me whenever I looked at the Nine Inch Nails album cover.

五月天 is one of my more favorite bands here in China. They’re actually Taiwanese, but they listen to everyone here, be they from Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, or mainland China. Their newest music kinda saps out and attempts to sound like any of the “boy bands” out there, but I like a lot of their older songs, including my song of the moment: 温柔 (tenderness)

Actually, I found a pretty neat listing of the lyrics and a fairly rough translation, and if you’re interested in a band that always sings about a poor broken hearted guy, this is certainly the band for you!

I love comics. I really do. Ever since I was a little kid, regardless of whether it was my brother’s comic books or the Sunday funnies, I have always loved comics. I wish more people loved comics because I think it’s a medium with so many possibilities if not mainly attractive to pre-teen boys.

Other people feel the same way, to be sure. I was really pleased to read Neil Cohn’s Dissolving Comics’ Boundaries because he deals with those issues. I really like the idea of comics being integrated in a bookstore into their various genres. Really, though, with my preferral for online browsing, I think that this kind of thing could be easily integrated into searches that one uses at Amazon. While comics certainly can be searched in and of themselves, it would be nice to have relevant comics integrated throughout their various genres, so that Sandman would come up anytime I was searching for things related to Morpheus (the same way that, for example, greek drama and the Matrix should as well).

Then again, I prefer to do lots of info-sifting on the Internet before I make purchases. Lets me spend as little time in stores as possible, unless you think of the Internet as one big store.