Nothing here until Monday. This weekend, I’m busy shepherding the Oscar 2007 blog (with concomitant canape preparation), conducting two more podcast interviews (and that’s just this weekend; there’s two more next week), and trying to make freelancing deadlines. (Which has meant no new podcasts for a while, I know. But I hope to atone for this soon. I’m juggling as fast and as skillfully as I can.)
Month / February 2007
LATBR in Danger of Being Marginalized?
LA Observed reports that drastic change is in store for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Top brass is planning to take the stand-alone Sunday Book Review section and fold it in with a new opinion section that will appear in Saturday papers. Even more preposterous, the plan is to print this new section so that the reader will have to flip the section 180 degrees around to read each side of the foldout: with one section devoted to books and the other section devoted to op-ed pieces.
This is a great disservice. (Full disclosure: I have contributed reviews to the LATBR.) I am unsure if this move is intended to generate more Saturday subscribers or an effort to cut down on production costs, but, given that the L.A. Times Festival of Books is one of the newspaper’s most vigorously attended community events, it seems a terribly wrong-headed move to treat readership as if it is sloppy seconds.
Roundup
- Terry Teachout fell hard for San Francisco.
- Still believe that comics are trivial? PW reports that graphic novel sales increased 12% from 2006 to 2005. Comics aren’t going away anytime soon. And if you haven’t embraced them, or at least investigated them, by now, you may as well be using a Telex instead of a fax machine.
- Several early Hitchcock films have been released to DVD.
- RIP Fons Rademakers.
- RIP Lothar-Guenther Buchheim.
- RIP Sham Lal.
- In a recent “state of the union” address, Random House CEO Gail Rebuck declares just how hard the market is for all publishers. Talk of digitization and e-books is now in the air.
- Is Martin Amis Britain’s greatest living author? (via Bookninja)
- The Gray Lady has opened its wedding pages to user-generated videos. Of course, the only way to make these even remotely interesting is to open the floodgates for honeymoon night footage.
- Apparently, Ohio is good for something.
- Goodness, you people need to get laid more.
- David Denby: “‘Syriana’ made sense in the end, but you practically needed a database to sort out the story elements; the movie became a weird formal experiment, testing the audience’s endurance and patience.” Speak for yourself, Denby. If Denby is advocating an end to nontraditional cinematic narratives (and I suspect that he is), I don’t know why this man continues to review movies. Denby’s hostility towards multilayered narratives seems less predicated upon aesthetics and more rooted in intellectual indolence. The New Yorker editors should demand better, posthaste.
- Ron Silliman: “The Departed is a more complex, more compelling film than either Babel or The Queen, even if it lacks the social importance of the former or the challenge of making a film where so little happens on the surface of things.”
- DFW name-checked on The Office. (Thanks also to Tito for alerting me to this, but the damn East Coasters beat us to the punch.)
What You Didn’t Know is That the Bloggies Are As Worthless as Bloated Ceremonies Hosted by Ellen DeGeneres
Max on the Bloggies: “The omission of ‘literary bloggers’ from this long list of nominees naturally seemed glaring to me, having had a front row seat for the last four or so years as an amorphous and very loosely affiliated movement of bloggers has greatly expanded the realm of literary discourse in the U.S. and elsewhere. And though there has sometimes been an unhealthy ‘us against them’ mentality between bloggers and professional critics, in many ways this friction has melted away as critics have become bloggers themselves and as a number of talented bloggers have begun to invade the book pages, providing a pool of talent and a new voice to book review sections that were shrinking and stultified.”
Who Knew That Carbs Were So Controversial?
It’s not even Friday and already the Oscar blog has generated controversy over the oddest of subjects.