- Bush and Alberto Gonzales have now come out for greater coyright laws. Gonzales wants serious jail time for intellectual property offenders. But what he isn’t telling you is that, in light of the fact that he advocates torture, he wants to throw all teenagers who downloaded last week’s episode of The O.C. into a CIA-funded gulag. We all know who the real criminals are, don’t we?
- A.L. Kennedy didn’t exactly kill at the comedy club. (via ElegVar)
- For fuck’s sake, please stop giving Danielle Steel money.
- So are these folks in Reno really turning to self-publishing because they can’t wait two years? Or because they are amateurs who fear rejection?
- Chinua Achebe has called for Nigeria to speak in its mother tongue, preaching against “language colonialism.”
- Proving that the Welsh often come up with batshit crazy ideas, there is now a 3D talking head of Dylan Thomas reading “Do not go gentle into that good night” on loop. It was employed during the Dylan Thomas Festival. The idea apparently was that a bigass talking head would somehow get young people more excited about poetry. However, great attention was paid to Thomas’s facial niceties. Too bad that there isn’t any video online.
Roundup
– November 11, 2005Posted in: Roundup
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
Haha I actually saw Danielle Steel at Mollie Stone’s – or should I say, I saw her in the back of her Bentley while her driver went into the store for whatever nourishment multimillionaire novelists require on a Tuesday evening.