Why we should never joke about Twitter

Let us pause, for a moment, to consider the wisdom we might glean from Twitter. Or, as Mark Sample puts it:

The new 7th edition of the MLA Handbook *still* does not know how to cite videogames.

No, really, that’s actually someone’s real tweet. But here’s the thing: It’s not crazy. One of my favorite dialogues on freedom takes place between a nano-enhanced supercop and a black Australian bartender named Isaac at a Triad-operated nightclub in Hong Kong amid a nanotechnological plague, in the video game Deux Ex.

Tear it off

So, hey, like, just for kicks: Joe Queenan with a primer on wrecking your books:

… I simply could never get physically comfortable with the book. The problem was the packaging. My copy, which I’d picked up at a rummage sale, was a traditional Bantam Classic, but the cover was a doctored photo from the 1993 Walt Disney film version of the novel. It was typically nauseating Disney iconography, depicting a promiscuously cute little Huck, played by a very young Elijah Wood, and a surprisingly dapper Jim (Courtney B. Vance) sashaying through the woods into a gorgeous synthetic sunset. Tucked inside were pictures of Huck sucking on a corncob pipe, dickering with the Duke and the Dauphin, posing as an English valet. Every time I picked up the book, my eyes were lured back to those fulsome photos of Sugarplum Huck. I do not know what Huck looked like as Twain imagined him, any more than I know how F. Scott Fitzgerald envisioned Jay Gatsby. But Gatsby cannot look like Robert Redford, and the most memorable character in American fiction cannot look like the diabolically cuddly Elijah Wood. Cannot, cannot, cannot.

I ditched the Bantam edition of “Huck Finn” and when I returned home fished out a second copy I owned. But the experience was exactly the same. The cover of the Signet Classic was a drawing of a ruddy-cheeked scamp, buck teeth prominent, clutching an apple, with a perky little newsboy tam cocked at a saucy Depression-era angle. Here Huck bore an alarming similarity to both Jerry Mathers of “Leave It to Beaver” and Britney Spears. Revolting. So once again my efforts to polish off this peerless classic were stymied. I could never get more than a few pages into the book before the illustration on the cover made me sick.

Or, as the caption reads:

What to do about an ugly cover: 1. Brown bag it; 2. Reverse it; 3. Try spandex; 4. Use house paint; 5. Duct tape it; 6. Tear it off

Ah, the Sunday Book Review.

-bd

Why wait until the end?

A lot of screenwriters believe selling their first screenplay is the hard part. It’s not. Selling that second script, then being able to sell or be hired to deliver another time and again, year after year is where they real hurt lies.

Knowing what it takes to launch and sustain a successful screenwriting career is what the professional screenwriter knows.

Which brings me to, “Why do you wait until the very end of the movie to identify the screenwriters appearing throughout?” – possibly the question I’m asked more than any other about WE, THE SCREENWRITER. It’s a good and valid question, too.

Here’s my answer…

Desperately seeking debut novelists

From Alan Rinzler’s blog, The Book Deal: An Insider’s View of Publishing, come’s this little piece that is a welcomed reprieve for emerging authors…

Publishers desperately seeking insanely great debut novelists

“Everybody’s looking for the next big thing — a work of great literary fiction from an unknown writer who’s never been published.”

That’s according to Jay Schaefer, an editor-at-large at Workman Publishers in New York City and its subsidiary, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Schaefer, a publishing veteran best known for producing the huge best seller Under the Tuscan Sun during his long tenure at Chronicle Books, spoke with me the other day after making the rounds at two writers conferences out here on the West Coast.

“Every editor I saw was prowling the workshops and the grassy slope outside the conference, searching high and low for the next undiscovered debut novelist,” Schaefer said.

“No question, good debut novels are getting snapped up and published.”

Read entire article

–msg

Punctuation

Sometimes even writers run out of words. Nothing I say will … um … yeah.

Just click the link. Recent surgical patients who have yet to remove the sutures, high school English teachers, and those with multiple heart bypasses should proceed with caution.

-bd

eRights and Wrong for Publishers

From The New York Times…

Legal Battles Rage Over E-Book Rights to Old Books
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: December 12, 2009

William Styron may have been one of the leading literary lions of recent decades, but his books are not selling much these days. Now his family has a plan to lure digital-age readers with e-book versions of titles like “Sophie’s Choice,” “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and Mr. Styron’s memoir of depression, “Darkness Visible.”

But the question of exactly who owns the electronic rights to such older titles is in dispute, making it a rising source of conflict in one of the publishing industry’s last remaining areas of growth.

Mr. Styron’s family believes it retains the rights, since the books were first published before e-books existed. Random House, Mr. Styron’s longtime publisher, says it owns those rights, and it is determined to secure its place — and continuing profits — in the Kindle era.

>>Read full article

–msg

Monday notes

In case your Monday passing slowly, and you need something to help pass the time:

• Kim Stanley Robinson explains why dystopia is easy.
• James White offers insights into the films of Terry Gilliam.
• Ben Schott’s readers had fun with drunks.
• Stephen King on Raymond Carver.
• David Jolly brings us a morbid moment from France.
• WNYC’s Studio 360 brings us Darwin in verse, Denis Dutton on The Art Instinct, murder and drama among chimpanzees, and original fiction from Lydia Millet (read by Martha Plimpton).

And as I’m having a hard time coming up with anything else, how about a Totoro bus?

National Book Awards

Motoko Rich brings us the winners of the National Book Awards:

Colum McCann won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night for “Let the Great World Spin,” a novel featuring a sprawling cast of characters in 1970s New York City whose lives are ineluctably touched by the mysterious tightrope walker who traverses a wire suspended between the Twin Towers one morning.

In accepting the award, the Irish-born Mr. McCann, now a teacher of creative writing at Hunter College, said, “As fiction writers and people who believe in the word, we have to enter the anonymous corners of human experience to make that little corner right.” The book was published by Random House.

In the nonfiction category, T. J. Stiles won for “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” a biography of the man who fathered a dynasty, presided over a railroad empire and, in the words of the judging panel, “all but invented unbridled American capitalism” ….

…. Perhaps the most moving moment of the night came with the presentation of the award for Young People’s Literature, which went to Phillip Hoose for “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” a biography of Ms. Colvin, who as an African-American teenager in 1950s Montgomery, Ala., refused to give up her seat on a bus nine months before Rosa Parks took the same stand.

Mr. Hoose brought Ms. Colvin onto the stage to accept the award. “My job was to pull someone who was about to disappear under history’s rug,” he said. The book was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Additionally, Keith Waldrop snagged the poetry award for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (Univ. of California Press); Dave Eggers took home the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, which recognized his efforts for 826 National, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping young writers. Gore Vidal received the award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and apparently gave a cryptic acceptance speech.

-bd

Hard Times

Take it from the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist without a newspaper:

David Horsey, SeattlePI.com, November 16, 2009

-bd

For the love of the words?

Sometimes you look at something and the first thing to strike you simply isn’t the obvious. Or maybe it is. To wit. Or witless. Folks who actually enjoy words might be aware of Ben Schott, over at The New York Times with the Schott’s Vocab blog.

Anyway, Schott’s Almanac 2010 is apparently available now. Call it a plug if you want, but here is what struck me:

Described by The Sunday Times as “a social barometer of genuine historical value,” “Schott’s Almanac” explores high art and pop culture, geopolitics and gossip, scientific discovery and sporting achievement. Above all, Schott’s is an almanac written to be read.

(Sadly, there is no U.S. version of the almanac this year ….

First thing to mind is that the market just doesn’t warrant an American printing of SA 2010. Really, how many copies could a publisher hope to sell?

Second thing to mind: Isn’t that kind of sad?

-bd