- Because of other deadlines and ancillary technological healing, I won’t be covering the New York Anime Festival today. But I will be there on Saturday and Sunday. In the meantime, Heidi McDonald has assembled a crazed journalistic army. So you can no doubt find coverage over at The Beat. Making sense of the daunting schedule does indeed require a strategy. So I have decided to simply throw myself on the floor with full gusto and see what happens. This always seems to be the best policy under such circumstances. Podcasts and reports are forthcoming.
- It’s that time of the year again when Congress devotes its energies issuing ridiculously draconian Internet policies instead of showing a little backbone in relation to larger matters of war and corruption. CNETs Declan McCullagh reports on a bill known as the SAFE Act — not to be confused with the efforts a few years ago to curtail the PATRIOT Act — that seeks to punish anyone running a Wi-Fi network with a $300,000 fine if they do not report on someone downloading an “obscene” image. And The Nation‘s Larisa Mann reports on a House Resolution that threatens to do away with a school’s federal funding in toto if the school allows even one illegally downloaded song. Democrats in large part supported both of these bills. In fact, for the first bill, the only two people who voted against it were Republicans — including Ron Paul. These two pieces of legislation suggest that the Democrats have special interests in mind more than the First Amendment. And if you want to do something about both of these bills, Public Knowledge has an action page for the school bill. Meanwhile, the SAFE Act has now been received by the Senate and is being referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. Contact the Senate Judiciary Committee and let them know that asking a wi-fi network operator to consistently be on the lookout for an image that is “obscene” or “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” (the bill as passed by the House specifies U.S.C. Section 1466A as well as child pornography) places an undue hardship on coffee shop owners trying to attract customers and runs contrary to the First Amendment.
- Three Percent lists the Best Translations of 2007.
- On a related note, Scott observes that the book he voted for — Enrique Vila-Mata’s Montano’s Malady — didn’t make the longlist. I likewise think this is disheartening. And as NBCC Board Member, I hope to draw greater attention to translated titles. It’s bad enough that newspapers frequently ignore non-English titles for review, but the time has come to draw greater attention to the fact that not all books are written in English and that there are translators regularly doing hard and often thankless work, sometimes denied even a mention in book reviews! (For instance, in all the celebration of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, how many of you are aware that Natasha Wimmer translated the book? Wimmer’s name isn’t even on the cover. Thankfully, Scott interviewed Wimmer a few months ago.) For more insights into translation, see the Segundo interviews with translators Betsy Wing and Jordan Stump. And I hope to feature more translators in future Segundo shows.
- Is Joshua Henkin a manly writer or not?
- Why isn’t there more hypertext fiction? (via Maud)
- Sign of the times? The Sacramento Bee has outsourced some of its advertising production work to India.
- $3 million for Karl Rove’s memoirs? (via Quill and Quire)
Roundup
– December 7, 2007Posted 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. (
yeah, bring on those translator interviews. Those will be most welcome.
Please interview Chris Andrews soon. Aside from him also translating Bolano, he translated Cesar Aira’s How I Became a Nun. Until i saw it listed on Three Percent the other day, i completely forgot that came out in English in 2007. It flowed beautifully.
David Bellos seems highly approachable as well. I’ll always be fond of him for dropping in to post comments back over Kadare’s status as a “dissident writer.”
The unfortunate provision regarding downloading and school funding in the bill — not, as you call it, a resolution — acted upon by the House Education and Labor Committee — is a tiny provision in the massive 700-plus page bill that would reauthorize the Higher Education Act and provide needed funding and other necessary provisions for American colleges and universities.
The expectation is that the bill will either be amended to remove the offending position in a House roll call vote or it will be eliminated during a conference committee with the Senate.
Ron Paul voted against it because he believes government should not fund higher education at all. The Arizona Congressman, Jeff Flake (AZ-06) who I am running against, is also a Club-for-Greed laissez-faire anti-government radical who often routinely votes with Paul and a handful of other rightwing extremists against funding of any social programs.
For example, they were 2 of the minority on Wednesday when the House voted 408-3 to increase funding for the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. (I posted something about the Protecting Children Comes First Act on my campaign blog, http://grayson-for-congress.blogspot.com, yesterday.)
The Democrats and Republicans on the committee, including those opposed to the downloading provision, had no choice but to vote for the entire Higher Education Authorization Act refunding bill or vote against it. Given that, I too would have voted the bill out of committee.
Hi Ed,
re: Audio interviews with Translators
Your audience might be interested in an interview I conducted with Lydia Davis recently. We talk about the role of the translator, her Swann’s Way, measuring rooms three inches at a time, becoming Proust as an actor might a character, dialogue being more of a translation challenge than description because speech is born of environment and times, and the goal of creating living language that’s timeless.
You can listen here: http://nigelbeale.com/?p=526