Software Soapbox

Buy one of my books in Czech!

My co-author Rocky Oliver received his copies last week; I just received mine last night.  Now we have editions in Chinese, Czech, and English....That's all I know about so far....any more?

Tom Wolfe Lacks 'The Right Stuff' to Describe Sex?

Well, I was dubious about this book when I heard about and wrote about it here - but it looks like it's a prize winner!

American author and journalist Tom Wolfe won one of the world's most dreaded literary accolades on Monday -- the British prize for bad sex in fiction.

 

The prize is awarded each year "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel."

Wolfe won it for a couple of purple passages from his latest novel "I am Charlotte Simmons," a tale of campus life at an exclusive U.S. university.

"Slither slither slither slither went the tongue," one of his winning sentences begins.

NPR : Tom Wolfe Goes to College with 'Charlotte Simmons'

Yeah, Tom. Research.  Sure.

Link: Tom Wolfe Goes to College with 'Charlotte Simmons'.

Wolfe traveled to universities across the country to research contemporary campus life for I Am Charlotte Simmons, which depicts college as a hedonistic playground of non-stop drinking and rampant casual sex.

Anger: Now available on bookshelves everywhere!

The latest installment of the excellent Oxford University Press' Seven Deadly Sins series is out now.  Anger is written by Robert Thurman, a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University's School of Religion, the first westerner to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and, yes, Uma Thurman's father  (Uma was named after a Hindu goddess).

Previous releases have been tied to appropriate dates, like Valentines day for lust.  This one was apparently coincidental....

Anger: The Seven Deadly Sins.

Thurman, professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia University and author of Inner Revolution, contributes to Oxford's outstanding series on the seven deadly sins with this brief meditation on anger. Thurman identifies two extreme positions on the subject: on the one side are the people who believe that anger is a healthy, constructive force that can right wrongs and overturn social injustice. On the other side are those who would like to see anger be entirely eradicated, because playing with fire means we'll only get burned. Not surprisingly, Thurman draws upon Buddhist precepts to navigate a more nuanced "middle way" between those extremes. "Our goal surely is to conquer anger, but not destroy the fire it has misappropriated," he writes. "We will wield that fire with wisdom and turn it to creative ends."