Archive for May, 2007

A library’s shifting stock

Sacramento library staffers protest management’s “departure from amassing a rich research collection to pandering to the whims of the YouTube generation.”

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The quotable (and formidable) Flannery O’Connor

I’ve been looking back over Flannery O’Connor’s previously collected correspondence while awaiting more excerpts from her letters to Betty Hester. Many of her comments about writing are shrewd — and of course I can’t heap enough praise on her fiction. Still, rereading the letters, I have the feeling that O’Connor’s belief in the Absolute Correctness of Catholicism must have made . . .

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Against perpetual copyright, a Q&A at Gawker

Mark Helprin rendered me temporarily silent with apoplexy when “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” appeared in Sunday’s Times. But the paralysis abated as the week progressed, and today I answer questions from Gawker’s Alex Balk. Balk admires Helprin’s fiction, but is “extremely wary of his political views, which can be found frequently on the op-ed page of . . .

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