~Guy Clark
Australian Aboriginal literature, once relegated to the margins of Australian literary studies, now receives both national and international attention. Not only has the number of published texts by contemporary Australian Aboriginals risen sharply, but scholars and publishers have also recently begun recovering earlier published and unpublished Indigenous works Indigenous Literature Week coming up soon (July 3-10)
Learn from the word craft of ‘Hamilton’ and make your stories sing
"Write write write till your fingers break!” And Anton Chekhov did: 700 novellas, short stories, plays, even autopsy reports, all crammed into 23 years ... Read Read Read
“The silence caught you by the throat, made sadness press into your thoughts."
MEdiaDragon Spoiler alert: We live in a recap media culture. Here’s how to write a good one.
“If thought and culture aren’t why some languages pile it on while others take it light, then what is the reason? Part of the answer is unsatisfying but powerful: chance. Time and repetition wear words out, and what wears away is often a nugget of meaning. This happens in some languages more than others.” The Atlantic
Library porn: The Cincinnati Public Library, circa 1874
“If you are an emerging writer now, there are more channels for you to get in front of the eyeballs of a publisher but you have to do a lot of the work yourself. There’s less work done by editors and publishers – they wait for writers to come to them with manuscripts that are fully formed.” The Guardian (UK): Emerging writers seek out room to shine amid the gloom of arts cuts
“The female writers, for whatever reason (men?), don’t much believe in heroes, which makes their kind of storytelling perhaps a better fit for these cynical times. Their books are light on gunplay, heavy on emotional violence. Murder is de rigueur in the genre, so people die at the hands of others—lovers, neighbors, obsessive strangers—but the body counts tend to be on the low side.” Nema Muzov ...
The Atlantic: A New Generation Of Women Crime Writers - AMEN
Via LLRX.com – Journalism Resources on the Internet 2016 – Marcus Zillman’s new comprehensive guide is focused on journalism resources and sites of ongoing value in your process to refine topical and subject matter research and deliver actionable work product. This guide is a value added discovery tool that includes a wide range of reliable, comprehensive and actionable government, academic, corporate, news, training and business resources.
Some of my readers might remember that back in 2012 I reviewed a book which argued that The untold story of Australian art is the story of dogs and how they came to inspire and shape the art of a nation. Dog lovers have always known this, of course, and naturally we were very pleased to see that at last dogs were being given their proper place in our cultural history. God and Art
Following on from my previous post about A Brief Take on the Australian Novel, by Jean-Francois Vernay – Lisa Hill has now finished reading the book, and "I’m ready to chat about other aspects of the book that interest me." *Australian Novel II
Lisa Hill and Her Zola Project links
“I’m mildly obsessed with the modular story because I like not having to tell a linear story all the time. I also love white space, and jumping around in time, place, or character point of view.”
The Rumpus
“I
suppose I could count Reading as my hobby, but I read so much, it is so
central to my existence, that, were I to do so, I might as well add
Breathing as another of my hobbies.”Joseph Epstein, “It’s Only a Hobby,” The Weekly Standard, June 30, 2008 (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)
Anxiety over not having enough to read has haunted me since I was a boy.
Writing is hard. There’s the beginning — pitching a story, getting ideas, reaching out to sources, getting information, facing the blank page — but there’s a lot of tricky parts that don't have to do with typing. Women reporters and writers of coloroften face a disproportionate amount of harassment or criticism online by virtue of being public figures. They face pushback for writing about topics deemed controversial. Or, they get mentally and emotionally drained by covering stressful beats, such as local crime How journalists practice self care while working in news
Writing is hard. There’s the beginning — pitching a story, getting ideas, reaching out to sources, getting information, facing the blank page — but there’s a lot of tricky parts that don't have to do with typing. Women reporters and writers of coloroften face a disproportionate amount of harassment or criticism online by virtue of being public figures. They face pushback for writing about topics deemed controversial. Or, they get mentally and emotionally drained by covering stressful beats, such as local crime How journalists practice self care while working in news
The Washington Post has published Walter Olson letter to the editor responding to an editorial that had depicted the Internal Revenue Service targeting episode as merely the “thoughtless” result of “carelessness” and “incompetence.” Yet the scandal wasn’t just the flagging of right-of-center (c)(4) groups for challenge not faced by their left-of-center counterparts, but the outrageous information demands placed on many of those groups, including copies of all literature distributed, transcripts of speeches and radio guest appearances, printouts of all social media output, names of both donors and family members, and more.
Earlier coverage here
TLS summer reading recommendations
“If I know what I shall find, I do not want to find it. Uncertainty is the salt of life.”
With
varying results, many scholars and commentators have focused their
attention on judging the quality of law professors, as measured by their
scholarly output. First, this Article explains the methods respectively
developed by Brian Leiter and Roger Williams University School of Law
for top-tier and second-tier law schools, and it considers other works
of scholarship that measure academic publication. Then, this Article
explicates a protocol (the “Protocol”) for measuring all of the
scholarly output of any law school faculty member. Building on the
Leiter and Roger Williams methods, the expanded Protocol accounts for a
wider breadth of faculty publications and includes weighting factors
based on law-journal rankings. Finally, this Article concludes by
applying the Protocol to its Author and his colleagues. In sum, the
Protocol that this Article develops and applies will provide a
significantly more objective set of data with which to evaluate the
scholarly performance of legal academics.
Herman Melville, known in his day as a sexual adventurer, had an attractive, literary neighbor, Sarah Morewood. Was she the muse of Moby-Dick? ... Shades of Grey
How important are book superstores anyway?
The Really Old Take:
Book superstores such as Barnes & Noble cause risk-averse publishers to double down on celebrity authors and surefire hits.
The new take:
In a world without Barnes & Noble, risk-averse publishers will double down on celebrity authors and surefire hits.
The first of the two is my memory, the latter of the two is a quotation. I found this claim, by author Alex Shephard, interesting:
Big-name authors, like Malcolm Gladwell or James Patterson, will probably be fine. So too will writers who specialize in romance, science fiction, manga, and commercial fiction—genres with devoted audiences, who have already gravitated to Amazon’s low prices. But Barnes & Noble is essential to publishers of literary fiction—the so-called “serious” works that get nominated for Pulitzers and National Book Awards. Without the initial orders Barnes & Noble places, and the visibility its shelves provide, breakout hits by relative unknowns—books like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven—will suffer.
RIP, MICHAEL HERR. Author of Vietnam-era classic Dispatches, the co-screenwriter of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and the man who wrote the narration for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was 76.
Herr’s biography of Stanley Kubrick, focusing primarily on the period the two men worked on Full Metal Jacket is a quick 112 pages, but one of the best portraits of the director I’ve read
Herr’s biography of Stanley Kubrick, focusing primarily on the period the two men worked on Full Metal Jacket is a quick 112 pages, but one of the best portraits of the director I’ve read
The star of ‘Trapped’, the Icelandic drama that came to a thrilling conclusion this weekend on BBC Four, has hinted there may be a sequel in the mix. “Nothing’s been confirmed,” says Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, who plays beleaguered police chief Andri in the series. “But given the reception, I’m thinking it will happen. I really hope we’ll be allowed to do another season. I’d like to meet Andri again.” Trapped ...
The darker side of French politics:
‘Baron Noir’ is a French political thriller series starring Kad Merad and Niels Arestrup as two backstabbing friends embroiled in the world of politics. The show provides a fast paced insight into the dirtier side of politics, where people act all in the name of revenge and, ultimately, success. From the beginning, viewers are swept into the darker side of the French primary elections as Rickwaert (Merad), the socialist mayor, attempts to clean his hands and protect Presidential candidate, Francis (Arestrup) from involvement in a large-scale housing fraud BaronNoir
Adnan Syed, the convicted murderer whose case was central to the storyline of the hit podcast "Serial," is getting another trial 16 years after being imprisoned for killing a Baltimore-area teenager. Earlier Thursday, Maryland judge Martin Welch granted the retrial on the grounds that Adnan's trial lawyer, Cristina Gutierrez, "rendered ineffective assistance when she failed to cross-examine the state's expert regarding the reliability of cell tower location evidence," according to The Baltimore Sun
Adnan Syed, the convicted murderer whose case was central to the storyline of the hit podcast "Serial," is getting another trial 16 years after being imprisoned for killing a Baltimore-area teenager. Earlier Thursday, Maryland judge Martin Welch granted the retrial on the grounds that Adnan's trial lawyer, Cristina Gutierrez, "rendered ineffective assistance when she failed to cross-examine the state's expert regarding the reliability of cell tower location evidence," according to The Baltimore Sun