“Soliciting quotes for the jackets of books ahead of publication is an increasingly important part of the way books are now published. The novel, micro-history or popular science book which arrives on the shelf pre-approved by another writer established in the field stands a considerably stronger chance than the one which does not.”
Tag: 07.14.03
In Search Of… Masterpiece Theatre Funding
PBS’ Materpiece Theatre is looking for funding (and it’s not proving easy). “ExxonMobil Corp. had provided sole funding for the program since its 1971 debut until deciding to drop its support. The series is funded by ExxonMobil through 2004.”
Why Black Actors Make Less Money?
Whjy does TV pay black performers less than white ones, even when ratings for the former are higher? “Advertisers pay lower rates for programs that attract black audiences because they reason that blacks are among TV’s more loyal customers, and it’s easy to reach them across the TV dial.”
Moving Forward
“US Poet Laureate Billy Collins leads the nominees for the UK’s richest annual poetry award, the Forward Prize. Collins joins Ciaran Carson, Ian Duhig, Lavinia Greenlaw and Paul Muldoon on the shortlist for the £10,000 prize for the best published poetry collection.”
Pair Sentenced For Burning Down Venice Opera House
Two Venetian electricians have been sentenced to six- and seven-year prison terms for negligence in starting the fire that burned down Venice’s La Fenice Opera House seven years ago (it still hasn’t reopened). “A court last year decided that the two electricians had negligently laid electric cables, which short-circuited, and the two were found guilty of arson. A number of high-ranking city officials, and the director of the opera house, were acquitted by the same court on charges of negligence.”
Turner Online
The Tate Museum has put an enormous collection of JMW Turner images online. “The vast Internet resource includes color images and descriptions of more than 2,000 works by Turner, held in private and public collections in countries including Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan and Greece. The catalog also has 30,000 works bequeathed to the British nation on the artist’s death in 1851.”
We© Sue® You© – Get It?
Artists have long borrowed trademarked imagery from corporations, holding them up in an effort to critique consumer culture. But today artists say that such commentary has been increasingly hard to pursue as corporations are quick to sue for infringements of their copyrights…
Lights, Camera, Theorize…
A generation ago, going to film school meant picking up a camera and making movies. Now it’s learning words such as “diegetic,” “heterogeneity,” “narratology,” “narrativity,” “symptomology,” “scopophilia,” “signifier,” “syntagmatic,” “synecdoche,” “temporality.” “Is there a hidden method to these film theorists’ apparent madness? Or is film theory, as movie critic Roger Ebert said as I interviewed him weeks later, ‘a cruel hoax for students, essentially the academic equivalent of a New Age cult, in which a new language has been invented that only the adept can communicate in’?”
E-Book Piracy Comes Of Age
Book piracy hasn’t been a huge issue up til now. But the new Harry Potter book is being scanned, electronically published and downloaded all over the internet. “Last week, enthusiastic readers put unofficially translated portions of ‘Order of the Phoenix’ on the Web in German and Czech, only to remove them after the publishers that own the rights in their respective countries threatened legal action.”
Nothing But The Best (Seller?)
What books really make the British best sller lists? One reporter reads the top ten to see if he had discern a common thread. “The idea, if I remember it rightly – it seems so very long ago – was really two ideas. First, why these particular books, these particular, very big books, out of the thousand or so new novels available, have risen to the top of the pile. And, second, what it might say about the great British reading public that these are the fictions we most want to escape into in the middle of July 2003. One of the things about reading many different books sequentially, many long and different books, is that they all come to seem a little like chapters in the same story.”