Martin Nisenholtz, the Times senior vice president for digital operations, has a hard-on you wouldn’t believe. Not only is the man gushing more rapidly than a newly hatched guppy (Internet revenue up, with 190,000 TimesSelect yearly subscribers and a good chunk of the income coming through the purchase of About.com), but it looks like Nisenholtz has offered a MySpace-like offering called MyTimes. Whether any of this translates into substantial literary coverage in the NYTBR is anybody’s guess. But this may just represent the beginnings of the inevitable fusion of online and print journalism.
Year / 2006
J.T. LeRoy Fabricator Sued?
Leah Garchik is reporting that Laura Albert, the woman behind J.T. LeRoy is being sued, along with Judi Farkas by Antidote Films, the production company who obtained the rights to the “LeRoy” novel Sarah. They’re hoping to get back $45,000 in options and $60,000 in development costs. The suit has allegedly been filed in New York. Garchik claims she got the tip from the New York Times, but there’s nothing online at the Gray Lady’s site yet (unless it’s behind the TimesSelect wall). And I haven’t found any case information in the New York State Unified Court System. Does anybody have any info on this? (via the SFist)
Come for the Streep, Stay for the Kline?
New Yorker: “While it is no shock that Streep and Wolfe are faithful to Brecht’s theatrical philosophy, it comes as a pleasant surprise to see Kevin Kline invest himself to a similar degree. Kline—who was the terrifying Nathan in ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ and Trigorin to Streep’s Arkadina in Mike Nichols’s 2001 production of ‘The Seagull’—is, quite possibly, the best partner Streep has had onstage or onscreen.”
Watch Out! They’re All Out To Get Amy DeZellar!
In a Spokesman-Review article profiling bloggers who transmuted their twitchy typing into book deals, Amy DeZellar notes, “The bloggers who are giving the rest of us a bad name are those who weren’t really writers in the first place and just sort of became writers by virtue of getting published. A popular blog can get you a book, but not necessarily the talent to write one.”
I’m not certain which bloggers are giving DeZellar and company “a bad name.” And it’s difficult for me to qualify the merits of Dating Amy, seeing as how the book’s only apparent review coverage consists of gushing testimonies from Dating Amy fans on Amazon. But this is the sort of statement one expects not from an emerging author, but from a quarterback fearful of his younger and more robust counterparts — the guys fresh out of college who will inevitably replace him.
Quills Lack Thrills
Publishers Weekly reports that Al Roker, about as literary a man as Keanu Reeves, revealed the Quills nominees on NBC’s Weekend Today show. Aside from the troubling notion that nobody in the Today office has bothered to read any of these titles (least of all Roker), I’m wondering just what point this particular awards ceremony serves. The winners are “feted at a gala event on October 10.” But with voting open to anyone, this is nothing less than the People’s Choice Awards of literature — a waste of everybody’s time, a way to give Joan Didion yet another award, and a method to ensure that books are business as usual. You may as well throw Doctorow and Mitchell into an open pit and have them punch each other for the title.