Sunday, February 20, 2005



In Clint Eastwood's 1985 Pale Rider, the unnamed preacher played by Eastwood says, "Yeah, well, the spirit ain't worth spit without a little exercise." The Observer looks at the "anthology orgy" following the success of THE BITCH IN THE HOUSE, subcategorizing every aspect of the feminine (and the odd masculine) experience. They say a particular sort of female writer-one plugged into the appropriate social network, with multiple glossy magazine features on her C.V. and a few novels or a memoir in the can, is especially in demand for contributions. Collecting Anthologies

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Guns for Hire
Just how many liberties do biographical filmmakers take to strike the right balance between truth and engrossing cinema?

Somebody's spreading rumours in Los Angeles that J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, was a pedophile. The answer to why anyone in 2005 would bother telling unsubstantiated tales about a man who died 68 years ago is this: it's Oscar season.


Tall True Tales [Didn't think it would happen to you? Think again. A computer crash is just around the corner Unnatural disaster; Successful comedy is no laughing matter ]
• · Gone to the Dogs is a new British comedy film. It's a surreal comedy about the trials of canine metamorphosis. On this site you can find out more about the film but I wanted to point your attention to the 'What Dog Are You?' quiz. It's not only very well done but it's also very accurate. At least in my case it is What Bessie, dog, are you; Icy Hot Cold River Hotel
• · · Czech at the Salon ; No word yet what odds the bookies are giving Booker ; A mother who drowned her son when trying to commit suicide in the Parramatta River had "suffered a tragedy" and was not guilty of his murder Son's death tragedy enough, judge rules
• · · · As the Web keeps growing, tracking the latest information related to our jobs and interests gets harder every day. We need a butler to surf the Web for us, find the headlines we crave and hand them to us on a silver platter. That butler is RSS Art of rSS; As an editor I spend more time on an opening paragraph than any other. If it doesn’t grab readers, holding their attention and sparking their curiosity, a good percentage won’t continue. From a purely editorial perspective the first few sentences, and especially the first sentence, matter more than any other The art of the opening line ; First Lines
• · · · · Sometimes people send us links to the steady stream of Judith Regan placements on Page Six and the NYDN gossip columns; just for the record, we generally ignore these items, based on the fundamental judgment that Judith Regan appearing in a gossip column saying something incendiary is not news. Today's is a little more absurd than usual, though ... Nothing Says B.C. Like A Judith Regan Item; Could a book be called deadpan or button-down? Bob Newhart writing memoirs with stories and anecdotes from career
• · · · · · Louis Boussard has hired a professional to abduct his son. On a late evening in early March, Rick Strawn of Strawn Support Services flew from Atlanta to Tampa, Fla. WANT YOUR KID TO DISAPPEAR?; SMH reviews Kafka on the Shore