Sunday, December 18, 2022

While the novelist is creating a novel, he is simultaneously being created by the novel

I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.


Bondi iceberg repeated


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Haruki Murakami: “While the novelist is creating a novel, he is simultaneously being created by the novel” Haruki  »


Few things generate more powerful legends than martyrdom and massacre, and that is certainly true of the Paris Commune   Commune »


“This vile thin paper is my abhorrence. It is characteristic of the age.” For 19th-century bibliophiles, literary culture was already in  decline  »



No merger after all between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. For now, the Big Five of publishing will remain the Big Five. - Five  »


ANDOR SHOWRUNNER ADMITS SHOW IS “CHASING THE AUDIENCE” AFTER EXPECTING TO HAVE A “GIGANTIC INSTANTANEOUS AUDIENCE:”

Tony Gilroy, the showrunner and creator for the most recent Star Wars series, Andor, recently admitted the show is “chasing the audience.”

Gilroy recently spoke about the show to Variety, where he was asked how he felt the show had been presented to the world.

After getting some brief clarification about the question, he answered, “I’m very pleased with what they did. The materials are great. I think I was surprised. I thought the show would go the other way, that we would have this gigantic, instantaneous audience that would just be everywhere, but that it would take forever for non-“Star Wars” people or critics or my cohort of friends to get involved in the show.”

“The opposite happened. We ended up with all this critical praise, all this deep appreciation and understanding from really surprising number of sources, and we’re chasing the audience,” he admitted.

A couple of years ago, John Nolte explored: 11 Ways Kathleen Kennedy Killed the Star WarsGolden Goose.

Had you told me in 2015 that as a film franchise Star Wars would be dead in five years, that it would survive only as a television show, I would have called you crazy. I would have said, Lucas couldn’t kill Star Wars with those still-born prequels! TeeeVeee? You must be out of your mind!

I also would have said, Do you know who’s in charge of Star Wars now? Disney, you dolt. You know, Marvel’s Disney? Pixar’s Disney? Fifty-percent of the American box office Disney? The same Disney that’s been dry-humping the same 25 movies for the last 35 years into gold Disney? Disney is Disney. Disney bats a thousand. Disney does everything right.

But here we are, it’s 2020, and as a film franchise Star Wars is dead.

And in 2022, after the damp squibs of The Book of Boba Fett and Kenobi,the streaming franchise is looking dead as well. Which is too bad for Andor. As the Critical Drinker recently noted, it’s “The Best Show At The Worst Time:”



New Books

Did Jewish agents, editors, and writers mostly promote other Jews? Hardly. They were too busy tearing each other  down  »


Essays & Opinions

Readers of literary biography, beware: Authors can be so much smaller, so much less interesting than their  fiction »