Category: literary life
I’ve been following media coverage of the Writers’ Guild strike, and it’s really unsettling to see how the writers are being portrayed as greedy bastards who don’t care that TV crew-members will be losing their jobs soon. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Damon Lindelof, who writes for Lost–a show I watched on TV here and streamed online when I was in Morocco on my Fulbright–explains why the strike is necessary:
The motivation for this drastic action — and a strike is drastic, a fact I grow more aware of every passing day — is the guild’s desire for a portion of revenues derived from the Internet. This is nothing new: for more than 50 years, writers have been entitled to a small cut of the studios’ profits from the reuse of our shows or movies; whenever something we created ends up in syndication or is sold on DVD, we receive royalties. But the studios refuse to apply the same rules to the Internet.
My show, “Lost,” has been streamed hundreds of millions of times since it was made available on ABC’s Web site. The downloads require the viewer to first watch an advertisement, from which the network obviously generates some income. The writers of the episodes get nothing. We’re also a hit on iTunes (where shows are sold for $1.99 each). Again, we get nothing.
Read it all here. You can send a message of support through this website.
As you no doubt have heard, Norman Mailer died on Saturday, at the age of 84. I have read too little of his work to contribute anything personal in this space, but there are articles and remembrances in the NY Times, the Washington Post, the SF Chronicle, the Nation, the New Yorker, TEV, Critical Mass, and many, many other newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Here in Los Angeles, the Times had a front-page obit yesterday, a long article that covered Mailer’s entire literary career and included photos from key moments.
Critical Mass, the blog of the National Books Critics Circle, has a fairly regular feature called “The Critical Library,” which, as the title suggests, asks critics to name their favorite volumes on criticism. Today, J. M. Coetzee contributes his list, so take a look.
You want to know what my own critical library–for the English language anyway–would look like?
The Complete Review‘s Michael Orthofer leads a book club discussion of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins for Words Without Borders. I haven’t read anything by Akutagawa, not even Rashomon, upon which Kurosawa’s famed film is based, so the background information that Michael offers is really helpful. I’m looking forward to reading the book along with the group.
The Los Angeles Times has a sneak peek at Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronneaud’s film adaptation of Persepolis. I was fortunate enough to see the movie at the Internazionale Festival in Ferrara last month, and it was beautiful. It opens here on December 25.
Cartoonist Khalil Bendib has published a new collection of cartoons, which he presented in Los Angeles a few days ago.
The cartoon above shows a colony of Dick Cheney lookalikes, carrying bags labeled “Fraud,” “No Bid Contracts,” “Food Services Overcharges,” and “Gasoline Overcharges.” The caption says: “Hallibaba and the Forty Thieves.”
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This one shows two Al-Saud family members fast asleep while their answering machine responds to an incoming call: “Hello. You have reached the House of Saud. We’re busy at the moment. If this is an emergency and thousands of pilgrims are dying due to our incompetence, at the sound of the beep please leave us alone. Thank you.”
Bendib’s new collection is called Mission Accomplished: Wicked Cartoons by America’s Most Wanted Political Cartoonist. You can view many of Bendib’s cartoons on his website. Enjoy.