Category / Roundup

by Edward Champion

Mini-Roundup

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Lee Goldberg reports some potential legerdemain pertaining to Simon & Schuster’s new indentured servitude policy. The Authors Guild claims that S&S is more interested in a “revenue-based threshold” as opposed to a reversion of rights. The problem with such language is that this is precisely how Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons were screwed over by DC Comics regarding The Watchmen. As the famous story goes, Moore and Gibbons agreed to let DC Comics keep the rights to The Watchmen once it went out of print. Alas, DC Comics has never permitted The Watchmen to go out of print. Thus, Moore and Gibbons have not seen royalties. If “revenue-based threshold” is a replay of such diabolical tactics, then the Authors Guild (and any writer striking a deal with S&S) should probably pay serious attention. Writers may be little more than prostitutes to some moneymen, but even whores should stick up for themselves. I will look into this story later in the week and try to clarify these questions.
  • Another reason why technology is fun: You can track down the subjects of Dorothea Lange photos if you want to. (via Bill Peschel)
  • Ron Hogan has a detailed report on the Crisis in Book Reviewing panel, including a few minutes I missed. And it’s even more absurd than I reported: “When National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman finally got the show moving, he started off by announcing that the NBCC had decided to create a new award honoring book review sections as a class. (As Hail Mary conciliatory gestures to the newspaper industry go, I have to say I was rather underwhelmed, but I imagine section editors who are also Circle members will strive keenly to earn the shelf decorations.)” Take that, you corporate vultures! Self-aggrandizement from the inner circle! This is too close to some of Mailer’s stunts to be taken seriously.
  • I seem to have the same crap cough that Maud has. Can someone explain this respiratory perdition to a sudden East Coast transplant? I hope Maud gets well. She will be reading on Sunday, June 10, at 5:00 PM.
  • Cormac McCarthy isn’t the only one on TV this week.
  • Slushpile interviews Mark McNay.
  • More grim news at the Baltimore Sun.
  • Terry Brooks is heading for the big screen.
  • Again, Reuters gets it wrong about Andrew Keen. Various people have been rightly lambasting this decidedly unkeen specimen of the monkeys because he is decidedly not an intellectual. Keen is, as I observed a few months ago with considerable supportive examples, an indolent and idiotic thinker who wouldn’t know a nuanced argument even if James Wood holed up with him in a motel room for a week to “deprogram” him of his sophist tendencies. The only reason he gets column inches is because there is nobody else out there attempting a civil argument and because many print journalists have a vested interest in protecting their turf from the online upstarts. The real gonzo come lately is Keen himself.
  • Happy Antipodean observes that more books are being banned in Malaysia.
by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • The Rake contemplates the Franzen factor in relation to Cormac McCarthy’s upcoming appearance on Oprah.
  • Deborah Moggach: “I went to meet Spielberg and he’s very casual, all latte-drinking, Navaho rugs and adobe walls. But it’s still a studio and he’s still the boss and all the people who work for him are desperate not to say the wrong thing and lose their job, so they agree with everything he says. He referred to the Danish all the way through the meeting – the book is about the Dutch but nobody corrected him. He said, ‘I think it’s a comedy about poverty’, which it isn’t but everyone just agreed.” I’m not certain what Moggach was expecting. This is, after all, a man responsible for the film adaptations of not one, but two Michael Crichton books. This is also a man who lacked the cojones to follow through with the lesbian relationship between Shug and Celie in his version of The Color Purple. To claim Spielberg as any serious friend of the literary or a careful reader is to likewise suggest that any garden-variety house painter was capable of painting a Diego Rivera mural. Spielberg is a skilled cinematic manipulator who knows how to find good scripts and knows how to make money. I do not necessarily think this is a bad thing. But he is decidedly not a literary man.
  • Doris Lessing has said that women are as violent than men, suggesting that some of the worst crimes in history have been committed by women. Personally, I think that some of the worst crimes in history have been committed by monsters and the gender as a whole doesn’t matter. But that’s just me.
  • Roxana Robinson appears baffled that cab drivers from Bangladesh would be interested in literature. I’m mystified that such borderline racism (“I wasn’t sure there would be any writers from Bangladesh”) would be permitted in a 21st century newspaper.
  • Why am I concerned about such cultural depictions? This article should explain why. The proposed immigration bill will dramatically effect New York’s feel and character.
  • This month, Reading the World begins in earnest for the third time. There is, as I mentioned yesterday, much on this subject over at Scott’s, perhaps with additional assists, coverage-wise, by Joshua Glenn in the future.
  • Dan Quayle, book reviewer. (via Amy’s Robot)
by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • If cursory glances at MSNBC headline tickers on the flight over are anything to go by, the Judeo-Christian world seems to be up in arms with Rosie O’Donnell and Cindy Sheehan. Given the relatively ridiculous nature of both figures, I hope you’ll pardon my own similarly pedantic concerns with Giants pitcher Armando Benitez, who deserves a serious reaming for last night’s abysmal performance. The man blew a potential twelfth inning victory over the Mets by serving up not one, but two balks. I watched this game, wondering if I might be easily converted from the Giants to the Mets through this rather uncanny propinquity of two teams playing for two towns I’m currently more or less in between. Alas, I learned that a Giants partisanship is a difficult personal persuasion to shake. The median arrogance expressed by certain Mets players, which outdid even Barry Bonds’ strut and swagger, dissuaded me, as did the Giants’ fantastic field work. If one is to choose a relatively trivial topic to become obsessed with, well then I choose baseball. Bluster from the likes of Rosie O’Donnell is predictably and unfathomably one-note. When one considers that Rosie O’Donnell’s career has essentially been predicated upon a shaky talent for chatting and bluster, one wonders why anyone would pay millions of dollars to provide such “entertainment” to the masses. It’s almost as bad as paying out a few million to a hothead kid who wants to play ball.
  • Carolyn Kellogg cracks the LATBR.
  • The Best Novels You’ve Never Read. My own picks (if we’re talking the last ten years) is Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish and Rupert Thomson’s The Book of Revelation.
  • If you can get past Silverblatt, he’s talked with John Banville.
  • Speaking of literary interview craziness, the Segundo backlog stands at around fourteen, including a special two-parter and all the APE nonsense. And I haven’t even started with BEA. Please bear with me. I sent off the last of about thirty boxes to FedEx yesterday.
  • I guess nobody told Gabriel Garcia Marquez that you can’t go home again.
  • I could care less whether Peter Carey’s Theft is a thinly veiled attack on his wife or not. Shouldn’t the bigger question be whether or not it’s a good book?
  • Lots of Pessl discussion at Callie’s.
  • Also, far too much information for me to sort through. Will try for another roundup later. BEA reports are forthcoming tomorrow!