We have incentivized a safe, cloying storytelling rooted in domestic perspectives and intimate conflicts. These novels generally feature a personal issue (abandonment by a parent, bereavement, breakup) processed through or alongside a traumatic historical incident (say, the clearing of the Newfoundland outports) with some vague connection to the protagonist (typically a university professor, historical researcher, or some other middle-class intellectual with enough time to visit archives). Before the story wraps up, there is certain to be a tepid love affair, several flashbacks, and a well-timed lyrical riff affirming the human spirit or the redemptive power of art. Moral questions will lend the story a patina of gravitas, but there will be no attempt to reckon with the complex roots of social or political problems.
Tag: 10.22.18
Man Checks Out And Burns LGBTQ Children’s Books From Library, Streams It On Facebook Live
On the day of the second-ever Gay Pride celebration in Orange City, Iowa, Paul Dorr, director of a “crisis center and pro-life, pro-family movement” called Rescue the Perishing read from a blog post titled “May God And The Homosexuals of OC Pride Please Forgive Us!” and threw the library books into a burning trash can. The public library and local police department are discussing legal action.
New Program Offers Low-Interest Loans To Arts Groups For ‘Social Impact’
The UK nonprofit Nesta “has launched a new £3.7m fund that will make small repayable loans to English arts, cultural and creative organisations … to help [them] ‘articulate, monitor and evaluate their social impact’. Recipients of longer term loans that can demonstrate they are achieving their goals will be rewarded with lower interest rates.”
Why Ursula Le Guin Resisted The Science Fiction Label
Although Le Guin was a vocal defender of science fiction and fantasy who argued that those genres had as valid a claim to literature as the best realist or mimetic fiction, she also saw her writing in broader terms. “Where I can get prickly and combative is if I’m just called a sci-fi writer,” Le Guin said. “I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.”
Canadian Writers See Steep Income Drop
Canadian writers are making less money than ever — with incomes from writing dropping 78 per cent from 1998, according to a report released Monday by the Writers’ Union of Canada. The numbers, accounting for inflation, have been undergoing a steady drop. According to the report, writers made $9,380 in 2017, down from $12,879 in 2014 — a 27 per cent drop in just three years.
Some Fields Seem More Difficult Than Others. But Maybe…
Perhaps there is no such thing as an easy or hard discipline. Maybe there are only easy and hard questions. Biology only seems so hard because it has been defined by a set of very hard questions. Physics only seems easy because centuries of effort by deeply insightful thinkers have produced a set of answerable questions.
How Fantasy Novelists Create Maps Of The Worlds They Dream Up
Anyone who’s flipped back and forth between the texts and the maps in books by J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert Louis Stevenson knows how much help they can be to the reader. But authors themselves find their maps to be a tremendous help, too.
A Visit To The Bow-Makers Of Paris’s Musicians’ Row
“For musicians in Paris, the rue de Rome is a legendary place, at the same level as Tin Pan Alley or 42nd Street in New York. Sheet music shops and luthiers’ workshops are packed in like sardines. … It’s a place to inquire into these mysterious objects” — the hand-crafted bows for string instruments — “whose secrets are unknown even to most musicians.”
David Lynch Is Creating A Virtual Reality Version Of ‘Twin Peaks’
“Last weekend in downtown Los Angeles, [Lynch and] Showtime previewed [the] first Twin Peaks VR experience, which will be available for fans to buy on Steam for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift sometime in 2019. … However, the full experience will eventually be a one-hour production created by Showtime and Collider, with guidance from Lynch himself.”
It’s Often The Simplest Prose That’s The Most Difficult To Translate
“It’s the challenge of the seemingly unadorned sentence or expression that passes so naturally it seems to ‘write itself.’ While the translation of these sentences can sometimes occur just as naturally, more often than not it requires vast amounts of hairpulling. Few things are as difficult as ease.” Mark Polizzotti offers some examples from his work translating the Nobel winner Patrick Modiano.