Okay, so everybody’s piling on James Frey for his sins. But “amid the quite legitimate furor over author James Frey’s fibs and flourishes, amid the high-decibel debates about the murky rules of memoir and the primacy of fact, one fact has been routinely overlooked: The guy can write.”
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Today’s Publishing – The MIA Editors
Where were James Frey’s editors? Where are the editors, period? “Publishing has become the land of the nonreturned phone call. Editors are either in a pre-sales conference, a sales conference, a post-sales conference, or at the Frankfurt Book Fair. They have no time for editing. Greater pressure on book publishers may come, in fact, from literary journalists, if they decide to emulate the Smoking Gun instead of turning out puffy author profiles.”
Publisher Pulls Book Before Publication (Kids’ Book Similar To Another)
After discovering that renowned children’s-book author and publisher Harriet Ziefert’s latest book, A Snake Is Totally Tail, is strikingly similar to Judi Barrett’s 1983 book of the same name, publisher Blue Apple has announced that it will not be releasing the version authored by Ziefert, originally set for release in April.
Publishers: We Don’t Check Facts On What We Publish
“Unlike journalists, publishers have never seen it as their purview to verify that the information in nonfiction books is true. Editors and publishers say the profit-margins in publishing don’t allow for hiring fact-checkers. Instead, they rely on authors to be honest, and on their legal staffs to avoid libels suits. But now there is a growing chorus both inside and outside the industry calling for publishers to take more steps to validate the authenticity of works that are marketed as nonfiction.”
Can Orchestras Survive The 21st Century?
UK orchestras are debating their own survival. “We are at the tail end of a very, very long cycle of decline. This is really the critical point of whether they can engage with new technologies and make new technologies work for the art that they present – or whether they go out of business.”
Judges, Audience Agree On Sundance Top Prizes
“For the first time in the festival’s 22 years, Sundance jurors and audience members gave the same two films grand prizes in the documentary and dramatic competitions. “God Grew Tired of Us,” a look at the so-called lost boys of the Sudan and their relocation to the United States, swept both documentary awards, and “Quinceañera,” the coming-of-age story of a Hispanic girl in a gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood, won the dramatic prizes.”
Religious Hate Bill Worries Artists
Britain is considering a bill that would make it illegal to insult religions. “I am deeply concerned for all performers and entertainers, because the climate in which we work will be very different if the government gets its way. If the wording of the revised bill is read carefully, it can be seen that the new freedoms the government provides with one hand it deftly removes with the other.”
Sticking Up For Modernism
We’ve done post-modernism. So does that mean modernism is dead? Well, critics have been trying to club modernism to death for decades. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t still wreak enormous influence…
iPod As Learning Machine
Apple is teaming up with universities to offer college lectures for iPods. “Internet access to college lectures is nothing new, but listening to them on portable gadgets is a more recent phenomenon of the digital age, spurred in part by the popularity of podcasts, or downloadable audio files.”
Oscars – Year Of The Gays?
Several of the leading movies for Oscar honors this year have gay themes. “It could end up being the all-gay Oscars. We could have every major category won by gay-themed pictures. Needless to say, that would be a first. No gay-themed film has ever been named best picture. For all the right wing’s blather about Hollywood’s liberal agenda, the big studios are actually conservative, concerned not so much about politics as about their bottom line.”