In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation.
-Stéphane Mallarmé
It's one of the most difficult to get into -- it publishes under 1 percent of what's submitted. Poetry Magazine, November 2005The Poetry Foundation opened its new home in Chicago last weekend. As it celebrates this achievement, we decided it would be fun to ask for people's stories about being rejected from the foundation's time-honored literary journal, Poetry magazine. If you're a writer and you've sent out work to journals, you know the feeling
Cold River of Screenwriting Resources
Reading Chinese Corruption as Literature or as Cold River Where Corrupt Chinese Hide Their Cash…and Themselves
Investigation by People's Bank of China finds more than $120bn has been smuggled out of country since mid-1990s. Corrupt Chinese officials and executives absconded overseas with roughly $120 billion from the mid-1990s to 2008, and the United States was the most popular destination, according to a report from China's central bank. Where Corrupt Chinese Hide Their Cash…and Themselves Dev Kar, Lead Economist, Global Financial Integrity wrote:
Nice article. It could have noted that according to several studies at Global Financial integrity, China ranks number one in terms of the volume of illicit financial flows from developing countries. According to our most recent study, China lost US$344 billion through illicit outflows in 2008–mostly through trade mispricing (which includes abusive transfer pricing by multinationals).
A transfer price is what one part of a company charges another part of the same company for goods or services. In the excerpt from Casablanca, Rick Blaine apparently loaned Signor Ferrari 100 cartons of cigarettes for which he was never repaid. Now that Ferrari owns both the Blue Parrot and Rick’s Café, he jokes about the fact that what was previously a debt that he owed to Rick, is now a “debt” from one nightclub that he owns to another nightclub that he owns. If Ferrari continues to transfer cartons of cigarettes between the two clubs, he might wish to establish a “transfer price” for cigarettes, but knowing Ferrari, he won’t bother. (Eventually, Rick helped an idealistic Czech resistance fighter escape with the woman Rick loved - Rick helped his former lover, Lois Meredith, flee to safety with the Czech refugee Victor Lazlo being pursued by the German agent Strasser. - Trivia Everybody Comes to Rick's is an unpublished play which was the basis for the movie Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. )
• Report reveals huge scale of corruption among Chinese government officials; Forbes [The reports said the study was posted to the website of China’s central bank. While the PDF document remains widely available in Chinese cyberspace, the report – dated June 2008 and identified as “confidential” – no longer appears on the People’s Bank of China website. The 67-page report from China’s central bank looks at where corrupt officials go and how they get their money out. Wall Street Blog: Corrupt Chinese Officials Take $123 Billion Overseas; Report corruption, collect commission – Who says crime doesn’t pay? ; Offshore Watch ]
• · Bill Keller, New York Times Boss, Still Not Loving WikiLeaks, Twitter ; The author of The Cult Of The Amateur argues that if we lose our privacy we sacrifice a fundamental part of our humanity Privacy is passé - if not dead. Confessional tweets, narcissistic status updates: We are the Wikileakers of our own lives Your Life Torn Open, essay 1: Sharing is a trap
• · · Julian Assange and his controversial whistle-blower forum, WikiLeaks, have received support from the majority of voters who participated in an online poll conducted by Essential Research and published by Crikey in December last year. The poll discovered that 80 per cent of Greens voters unreservedly approved of WikiLeaks with only 30 per cent of voters across the political spectrum saying they were against the organisation. Popularity of WikiLeaks boosted by News Corp's sloppy journalism; The WikiLeaks cables read like good literature. Both diplomacy and fiction, after all, feature plots, moral ambiguity, and casual deception Reading WikiLeaks as literature ; Wikileaks represents a new type of (h)activism, which shifts the source of potential threat from a few, dangerous hackers and a larger group of mostly harmless activists – both outsiders to an organization – to those who are on the inside. For insiders trying to smuggle information out, anonymity is a necessary condition for participation. Wikileaks has demonstrated that the access to anonymity can be democratized, made simple and user friendly. You Have No Sovereignty Where We Gather – Wikileaks and Freedom, Autonomy and Sovereignty in the Cloud; Glencore in vow to come clean on details of tax payments around the world;
• · · · Maligned as a gold digger, Wallis Simpson in fact never wanted Edward VIII to abdicate the throne. She wasn’t even in love with him The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science; Pity modern man. College-graduation rates, sperm counts, and testosterone levels are all down. “Emasculation is a national blood sport” n Pity modern man. It's Raining on Men: Balls Deep at the Conference on Male Studies
• · · · · What used to be seen as a last resort is fast becoming the most successful trend in writing. Alison Flood talks to the authors doing it themselves How self-publishing came of age - Self-Publishing Takes Off ; It used to be the rare judge who would go for rim shots from the bench Court Jesting: These Sentences Don't Get Judged Too Harshly ;
• · · · · · It’s quite hard to know where to begin, reviewing The Stranger’s Child. As I finished it, and was heard making bloody-hell-this-is-good noises, two people asked me: ‘What’s it about?’ That, as it turns out, is a very good question Golden lads and girls ; Non-writers who have bailed on novels and short stories often say they've exhausted their patience for flagrantly 'untrue' narratives. One blogger explained it thus: 'I put it down to having experienced enough real life narrative and drama such that made-up stories no longer appeal I've stopped reading fiction; The Kafka that many of us read for the first time was in part a construction of Edwin and Willa Muir. Readers on the whole worry little about it, being grateful for access to foreign goods. Nevertheless, I often wonder what people mean when they say they like the way that, for example, Haruki Murakami writes. Or Imrich