Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Dizzies Press Release — Brooklyn Book Festival

Though I don't live in Brooklyn, I'll be on a panel at next Sunday's Brooklyn Book Festival, with Chuck Klosterman and Rob Sheffield! It's at 5 p.m., on the main stage at Borough Hall Plaza. (OK, I have no idea where that is...) Lots of good stuff going on—more info here....

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In other news...Restricted View on For Better or For Worse..............Does one italicize comic strip names?................Speaking of copy-editing mysteries: Molls on Pilates—or is that pilates?.............................New Psychic Envelopes single is out..........(more info here).................................Slate says no to exclamation points (via Dizzyhead Jen)...but Jenny D is on a quest to reclaim them! So am I!.............Jonathan Franzen: "It sat in a drawer for twenty years".............Jonathan Lethem: "the hapless and poignant Julian Lennon"..........Thought: My favorite humor site might actually be Cracked, when they do their musical lists........Thought: This lyric (from Cream) has always bugged me:

I told you not to wander 'round in the dark
I told you 'bout the swans, that they live in the park
Then I told you 'bout our kid, now he's married to Mabel

...........................Mabel?...This also doesn't sound so great, alas (via Dizzyhead Brent):

Across the Universe takes place in a ‘60s England and America in which there are no Beatles, only Beatles songs. Jude, a Liverpool dockworker, jumps off a steamer in America to find his father; at Princeton, he meets up with happy-go-lucky soon-to-be-dropout Max and his ethereally beautiful sister Lucy.

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9 Comments:

Blogger Mollie said...

My inclination was to put comic-strip titles in quotation marks, but once I was lucky enough to be a comment-of-the-week runner-up at the Curmudgeon and I noticed that Josh reformatted my quotation marks into itals. I figure, if there's an authority on the subject, it is he, so now I go for the itals.

As for Mabel, I bet she's no peasant!

8:54 AM  
Blogger Ed Park said...

Interesting! Back at the PTSNBN, I think the style was no itals, no quote marks, no nothin'...based, I think, on Chicago, though possibly an outdated edition...Itals make sense to me. It's a long-running episodic project, like a television show. Individual episodes can get their titles in quotes (if they have them)....

9:28 AM  
Blogger Levi Stahl said...

Hmm. I'll have to consult the Manual. My instinct is italics, because in its being an overarching name for a continuing project, it most closely resembles a TV show. If individual strips were named--"The one where the dog drowns," "The one where Snoopy catches a baseball in his mouth," "The one where Andy Capp gets drunk again"--those would be in quotes.

10:14 AM  
Blogger Ed Park said...

Are there daily strips besides Zippy the Pinhead that are individually named? (I think some Sunday strips are, or used to be...maybe not anymore.)

10:36 AM  
Blogger Jenny Davidson said...

The previous edition of Chicago definitely had some slightly counterintuitive stuff re: titles that fit better with academic books than with non-. I too vote for italics.

5:20 PM  
Blogger Ed Park said...

But: Riddle me this! Couldn't a comic strip be compared more aptly to a column in a newspaper (which is closer as a "medium") than to a TV show? (I realize I brought up the TV comparison.)

If so...I *believe* that a newspaper column, when written about (i.e., by someone else, somewhere else), gets initial caps (and no quote marks). As in, "Did you read the latest On Language?"

(Quickly checking my Astral Weeks column in the L.A. *Times*, the tagline reads: "Astral Weeks appears monthly at latimes.com/books." No special treatment given to the title.)

What say you, Dizzyheads??

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And: We should write a song using all the worst characters/similes/etc.

5:54 PM  
Blogger Jenny Davidson said...

But what proportion of columns are actually referred to by On Language-type name as opposed to the columnist's name? Seems to me that these questions are actually confusing partly b/c of great transitional stuff going on re: newspapers and how we read 'em...

7:00 AM  
Blogger Ed Park said...

On Language is maybe a bad example. But how about The Ethicist? Surely we say, "Did you read last Sunday's Ethicist?" rather than "Did you read Randy Cohen this week?"...

Then do we write: "I loved last week's 'Ethicist.'" ?

(This should be spun off into a full-fledged post!)

8:05 AM  
Blogger SEO said...

I went in Brooklyn for a Brooklyn New York tours but i haven't the possibiliy to see this festival. This year in turin there's an importan book festival. I will go there :)!

8:06 AM  

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