I feel like answering questions, and since Miriam Jones asked a bunch, here you go.

1. Do you compose on the computer? Why or why not?

Yes, always. Paper and pen are so slow and clumsy, and then at some point if I'm going to do something with it I have to transcribe it back into a computer, anyway.

2. Does carbon paper make you nostalgic?

No. It was a pain in the butt.

3. Do you have a stationary and/or a pen fetish?

No. I have a text editor fetish.

4. Do you remember the first “grown-up” book that you ever read?

Yes. It was painful, but the memory is vivid.

I lived down the street from the library, and I hung out there all the time, back in the late 60s. It was a segregated library; if you were young, and wandered over to the adult books, a librarian would scurry out and shoo you away. I had to ask special permission to go into that side of the library, and then I was always escorted. When I first worked up the courage to ask to browse the adult section, they asked what I was looking for…and I said that I wanted to look in the biology section. The librarian's eyebrows shot up: you could tell she was suspicious.

She led me to the section, and hovered over me while I looked around. Finally, she reached up, handed me a book, and told me I was done.

It was this one: The Great Chain of Being, by Lovejoy. An antique in the philosophy of biology. I was 12 years old. I actually struggled through the whole thing, despite not understanding nine tenths of it, under the fearful impression that if I didn't, they'd never let me back in the adult section. I remember being vaguely dazzled with all the big words (I had a scary vocabulary even back then, so I was able to follow most of it) and deep concepts (which soared right over my head), and thinking this must be important stuff. I did get to go back into the adult section, and from then on I picked out my own books, which were always more applied and much more comprehensible.

Years later I took another look at Lovejoy. What a godawful load of crap. I'm lucky I wasn't scarred for life.

Also, the library lightened up by the mid-70s. Just in time for mid-adolescence, they started putting Playboy out on the magazine racks for general browsing.

5. What embarrassing book from the distant past brings back a flood of recognition?

The Great Chain of Being, obviously. I cringe to think that I once thought it was what I could look forward to in biology.

6. Are you a scholar, or a critic? Or neither?

Neither. I'm a biologist.

7. When did you decide to become a scholar/critic/neither? Did you decide?

I don't know if I decided. One of my earliest memories is of my mother showing me how to use a toy microscope. My grandmother had a collection of my childhood drawings, and I'd doodle animals all the time—and they'd all have a cloud of scribbles over their heads. Apparently, I explained to her that they were their brains. And then, of course, I loved to go fishing with my dad, and my favorite part was the cleaning afterwards, when we'd poke around and identify all the guts. I used to abscond to the basement with kitchen scraps—I recall getting a chicken heart to twitch with a battery, but that livers were sadly unresponsive. And I thought my grandma was the coolest person ever when she visited the slaughterhouse and came back with a bucket of organ meats, and we got to wash and chop and cook them together, and then eat them.

It's nothing to compare with Dr Evil's childhood, but I was warped early.

8. Has blog writing affected the way you write in other venues? The way you read?

Definitely. I use it to organize my thoughts a bit, and I find myself reading papers and considering how to extract some of the material in less technical form for the weblog. And that also leads into more readily tying it into my classes.

9. Do you still read blogs or other webpages even if the design/print is unappealing or difficult to read?

Yes, sort of…really hideous sites are read through my newsreader, and I don't go to them directly. If the site is ugly and doesn't offer full rss access, though, I will abandon it. It's not as if there is a shortage of weblogs out there.

10. Have you ever bought a book because of the cover/design? Which book(s)?

No, but I've avoided books because of their covers. Anything with those oiled, bronzed, extravagantly nubile fantasy figures by Boris Vallejo, or those dead-eyed hokey-posed over-painted photographs by the Brothers Hildebrandt, I steer away from. It's like a bold announcement that "Here Be Cliches", something bad fantasy writing has in excess.

11. Do you think these questions are irrelevant?

Relevance can only be assessed with respect to something else. You'll need to specify your referents before I can answer this.

Another traumatic library tale. When I was a wee young thing, one of my favorite books was a cheap little field guide titled Mammals, by Herbert S. Zim, who had a series of these little books that were thin on details but full of pictures. They were the right size to fit in a pocket, too. I checked it out repeatedly, and would carry it around as I tromped about in the woods and fields and swamps of the Green River Valley, figuring out how to tell a vole from a mouse and looking up the range of rabbits.

One day I lost it. This was a major disaster, because with our financial situation at that time we couldn't afford to replace it. The library notices came pouring in, fines piling on fines, and one time I remember the fines hit something like $50…on top of the cost of replacing the book. My father was furious. I was tearing up the house looking for it. I was in terror of the library, which at that time and with my devotion to it was like being afraid of sex. Those were among the most anxious months of my childhood. Seriously. I was all guilt and tremors and cringing before my cruel, cruel taskmistress, the library.

Finally, my dad gave up and negotiated with the library and paid up something, and freed me from the shackles of my fears. Some months later the book turned up somewhere when we were packing up to move, and it was all mine free and clear. Except for one problem.

I can't stand Herbert S. Zim.

Even now the sight of one of his books (which are old and grossly outdated, and thus rarely seen anymore, fortunately), tetanizes my costals and makes my vision all blurry and sends me reeling back. I definitely can't actually open one up and read it. It's like a crucifix to a vampire.

Herbert S. Zim. My nemesis.