To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.
-Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
Arts v Humanity One Stone Survivor
A young man voices his family's collective terror as regret, regret for a lack of effort, for a banal sense of privilege and safety.
Confronted by one horror after another, Szpilman is a startlingly original film protagonist. Unable to rage visibly or fight back in any coherent way, he grieves, seethes and agonizes. At the same time, he is also unable to fathom the hugeness of the events taking place around him, and so his survival is not the result of strategy and foresight, but of persistence. He must learn to repress his rage and fear, repress himself into a state of wrenching and profound quiet. As inspirational as his survival might seem in hindsight, the film reveals that it was a function of his capacity to disappear, to hide away so deeply and so determinedly that he remained undetected, for years.
· Internal Anquish [Poppolitics]
Literature - Profile Cinderella Story: Looking at Glass
For novelists over 40, recent surprise NBA fiction winner Julia Glass is profiled in this week's New York Magazine. Her editor at Pantheon Deb Garrison says, Julia is incredibly brave. To be a first novelist in your forties, writing without a book contract and no steady income, to just say, 'This is what I have to be doing.'
And it was a long time coming: ‘Glass wrote the first part of Three Junes as a short story in 1984, stuck it in a drawer, then kept revising it into the mid-nineties. Magazines turned it down for publication, but in 1999, the story Collies won a Faulkner Society medal for best novella. After she kept whining that agents seemed interested only in a novel, a friend told her to stop complaining and try a longer form, a tough-love speech that shocked her into expanding the story.’
· Life Begins @ 40, Literary [New York Magazine]
· Agent of Hope [BookPage]
· Magnificent richness (of) disciplined clutter [CNN]
Plagiarism
Is plagiarism a moral and ethical crime or just a naughty no-no? A career-killing blunder or a forgivable lapse? Even the professors continue to scratch their heads
· A naughty no-no? [Chicago Tribune]
