Of Oscars and invisible writers
Are you, like David Kipen, a Netflix subscriber with “the cockeyed notion that the screenwriter may have been partly responsible for your enjoyment” of a film? If so, you’re shit out of luck searching for more by the same writer to fill out your queue.
Alas, Netflix has never heard of Jeffrey Caine. “Michael Caine?,” [...]
Tuesday morning miscellany
R.I.P., Wendy Wasserstein.
As the BBC’s Bleak House airs on PBS stations, Lance Mannion quotes from the Dickens novel.
A hotel in Desert Hot Springs, CA, hosts a month-long birthday celebration for William S. Burroughs this month. (Thanks, Lauren.)
The very private Harper Lee signs books.
My so-called literary life
It’s not your imagination. This site’s all but driven itself lately.
I’ve been very busy with edifying writerly matters such as finding the cheapest beer that’s still potable, watching Crime Story, and trying to master the art of traversing the Pulaski Bridge in the morning without having to stop reading Dubravka Ugresic’s The Ministry [...]
Book tournament
The Morning News editors have announced the sixteen novels selected for the Second Annual Tournament of Books. And they’ve broken their own rules.
For instance, the TMN/Powells.com ToB constitution explicitly states “only books published in the U.S. between January 1 and December 1, 2005 will be eligible.” The Accidental wasn’t published until January 2006, but [...]
Never mind the stars and stripes
“[N]o country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.” — Mark Twain
NASA’s top climate scientist says the Bush administration has tried to censor his comments [...]
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that appears Mondays and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please submit details to lauren@maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the date of the [...]
Monday morning fragments
It’s not just the NSA. The FBI and Department of Defense could be spying on you, too.
Publishers claim fact-checking non-fiction would be prohibitively expensive.
Forty years after that last celebratory brandy finished him off, Julian Maclaren-Ross will get a headstone
Novelist/comedian A.L. Kennedy: “If I’m doing political jokes I tend to be more obscene, just to [...]
Translation trouble: when there’s no word for “fuck”
In the current Quill & Quire (print only), Mary Soderstrom asks, “What do you do when you’re translating Leonard Cohen’s raunchy novel Beautiful Losers into a language that doesn’t have profanity?”
Just to give you a sense of what we’re talking about, here’s one of Cohen’s characters describing to his friend what happened before [...]
Sakebombed
That’s Just the Booze Talking responds to Bookforum’s “5,300-word exegesis on why no one reads Harold Brodkey anymore.”
Our guess is that no one sees the value in his narcissistic and masturbatory self-regard, which informs every syllable of his prose and makes even a cursory reading of his fiction like taking a muddy trudge through the [...]
Signing off
That’s all for me, for now. Maud returns on Monday, dear ones.
Books, lost to the past or doomed in the future?
If you’re in an elegiac mood, there’s lots to mourn out there: the books destroyed in the past, burnt by maids or tossed off moving trains (Via the Literary Saloon); and the books of now, doomed to obscurity and possibly helped there, suggests Teresa Nielsen Hayden, by the extension of copyright.
Remains of the day
Curiously, in the wake of Frey and JT Leroy, this guy gets all sniffed out for labelling his book fiction.
The Guardian Book Club is podcasting. Listen to Hilary Mantel discuss her acclaimed Beyond Black. (I haven’t read it yet, because hardbacks here in Canada cost about half a month’s salary, but some Maud love is [...]
Steal this post
Scott McLemee, over at Inside Higher Ed, wonders why people continue to plagiarize, notes the rising study of plagiarism as its own academic concern (pointing us to the new journal Plagiary, and the entertaining and occasionally shocking Famous Plagiarists), and wonders where that might leave the deliberately referential:
At the same time, scholarship on plagiarism [...]
More media
The Utne Reader has started a new online feature, From the Stacks. It’s a weekly review, highlighting some of the alternative and independent media they receive each month. Every Friday, lauching today.
The Great American Zombie Novel, part two
As though part one were not enough, really. Good taste demands a modicum of restraint. But restraint would belong to another blog, at least on Fridays. Readers suggest more names for the Great American Zombie Novel (Try it yourself. You too will discover – it’s quite hard to stop once you begin to indulge yourself): [...]
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