Month: September 2004

  • Artists No Longer Need Copyright

    We are getting close to a Senate vote on the Induce Act, a bill that makes hardware manufacturers subject to lawsuits when people who buy the hardware use it to infringe on copyright. Besides being a crazy idea (and one that overturns the Betamax decision- shielding from the 1970’s), the bill has certain pernicious effects…

  • Every Four Year’s Journalism

    Jay Rosen’s Every Four Years Journalism We should be seeing top ten lists from major news organizations identifying the most dubious claims currently being made by or about the candidates. If one side in the struggle owns nine out of ten spots on the dirty list for the week– so be it. A lot of…

  • Lavishly Praising Bloodbaths (Without the Ads)

    Litblogger Robert Nagle vents about the cult of violence in American movies like Kill Bill.

  • Houston PR

    Houston: Come for the Cockroaches, Stay for the Flooding. Actually the site they are talking about is here (watch out–there’s sound! But it’s fun to listen to). To quote myself from my maligned Austin Sucks essay, I don’t mean to convince people that Houston is somehow superior to Austin. It is not. It is an…

  • My elevator pitch

    The elevator pitch for my literary community project: a literary community site with city-specific literary event calendars, cash prizes for writing (assuming I get some paying members and advertising), interactive storytelling, guest bloggers, audio stories/music and coverage of Print on Demand books and online stories/music/vids released under Creative Commons licenses or in the public domain.…

  • Funding Old Institutions

    A very interesting article by Diana Nelson Jones about the decline of litmags. It gives the astonishing statistic: “Cliff Becker, literature director for the NEA, said 40 to 50 percent of the NEA’s publishing budget goes to literary journals and presses.” This is an astonishing fact, considering that a bunch of self-publishers on the web…

  • Firing the Wrong People

    Matt Yglesius on why historical comparisons don’t work for George W. Bush. Yglesius argues that even though Bush vigorously defended Rumsfeld and Cheney and Feith, men with the most visible accountability for Iraq policy, Bush has fired a few: General Eric Shinseki, who correctly estimated that Bush’s plans for Iraq involved too few troops, was…

  • Bad Writing and Aleksandar Hemon

    Aleksandar Hemon skewers a made-for-film book. Wagner wrote his thing in English, not his native language, but that cannot possibly be an excuse for the calamity of this book. His writing is riddled with clich?s that are daily struck down by conscientious high-school teachers. The characters always think “for a moment,” as if a sustained…

  • Frivolity

    (Thanks, Jordanna).

  • World Opinion and Bush

    According to a Wikopedia article on George W. Bush, which quotes a Globescan survey A July and August 2004 survey by the University of Maryland and GlobeScan, Inc. of 34,330 people in 35 nations found that, in 30 out of 35 countries polled, a majority or plurality would prefer to see Democratic presidential candidate John…

  • Disclaimers & Conflicts of Interest 101

    This page addresses the question of whether, when and how a blogger should disclose personal biases/relationships that might compromise his or her objectivity in reviewing creative works. (See this disclaimer). 4 Tips for Handling Disclaimers & Literary Conflicts of Interest (Recommended)In the first or second sentence, the reviewer or blogger should include a parenthetical statement…

  • Selena Jardine’s Population

    Lovely short story, Population by erotic writer Selena Jardine. I quote it in full here because her webhost is blocked by many corporate domains. Sometimes when I look at something perfectly ordinary like my grocery list, I think of the whole population, all of us making grocery lists, forty thousand grocery lists at any one…

  • Demonstration Elections

    Rahul Mahajan writes: There is a deplorable tendency in this country to use words like ?freedom? and ?democracy? in a purely talismanic manner, without attaching any actual meaning to them ? only thus could the coups in Guatemala in 1954 or in Haiti in 2004 be hailed as advances for democracy. But the current administration,…

  • Website Guy

    Some guy with a website has it all. These two song mixes of George W. Bush‘s voice are great. Dick is a Killer (not worksafe, put on those headphones!), and Imagine: Walk on the Wild Side. Also: Rocked by Rape (More samples here)

  • Authors Shouldn’t Blog?

    A slightly ridiculous and fallacious AP article (which deleted the writer’s byline) about why authors don’t blog. I wonder, why would authors with established reputations and contacts in the publishing industry and no day jobs tend to think that blogging is bad/unnecessary/pointless? And why would unknown writers try to do surreptitious blogging when at their…

  • Poor Bloggers

    Ellen Simon writes about how most bloggers make no money from blogging. I have deeper thoughts about this, but for now, let’s just say that when the barriers for entry are low, we find that mainstream media (and its stable of writers) don’t possess any magical advantage in producing and presenting content.