Sunday, December 24, 2017

Circa MMXVIII: The Rejection Rosary of History begins all over again

WINE GLASSES ARE ALMOST SEVEN TIMES BIGGER THAN THEY WERE 300 YEARS AGO Quartz




Australian Authors Start Online Marketplace
The Australian Society of Authors has launched a digital marketplace, showcasing and selling the work of writers to publishers, agents, and literary scouts throughout the world. 
MORE »


 “Congratulations, you were rejected:”


They say love hurts , but rejection is soul crushing.Rejection Man
Having your idea, your script, your passion project turned down is a  unique kind of pain. It’s personal. This is your baby. And someone just said, “It’s ugly.” Ouch.

Alan Moore: why I turned my back on Hollywood | Books | The Guardian

Why You Shouldn't Care About Getting Rejected From Film Festivals (and Some Tips on How to Get Accepted) | IndieWire

The 5 Best and 5 Worst Patricia Highsmith Film Adaptations | IndieWire

How Star Wars Began: As an Indie Film No Studio Wanted to Make | Vanity Fair


Stephen King, Carrie: 30 rejections from publishers.
Things were looking grim for King’s first novel until Bill Thompson at Doubleday finally sent this telegram:
“CONGRATULATIONS. CARRIE OFFICIALLY A DOUBLEDAY BOOK. IS $2500 ADVANCE OKAY? THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD. LOVE, BILL.”
The paperback rights went for 16 times as much, and more importantly: the biggest literary career of modern times was officially launched.
The Most-Rejected Books of All Time | Literary Hub


Lionel Shriver talks about Kevin | Books | The Guardian

 Learning from 'Silence': Rejection and Success Often Go Together - Sputnik


Child prodigies fascinate because they are auguries. What do they reveal? All children flout both our best and our worst intentions 



Paisley Livingston (Uppsala and Copenhagen) reviews The Messages We Send: Social Signals and Storytelling


The Big Corporations Using Orchestras As Staff Development Tools  




MEdia Dragon round-up:  

1. New Yorker short story triggers 'record-breaking' response
2. PRH signs lease for new London office
3. The Bookseller 100: 2017 (£)
4. Foley's first crime novel pre-empted in six-figure deal
5. World Book Night titles focus on mental health
6. Haig, Underdown, Hunter make Richard and Judy book club picks
7. Cover design round-up: the best of 2017
8. 'Scottish hygge' to be the new trend, says B&W Publishing
9. Latest CIPFA figures reveal 'catastrophic' scale of library closures
10. Tina Turner's memoir goes to Century for six figures


P.D. Magnus collects fallacies, but not just any fallacies. He collects idiosyncratic fallacies, or “one-offs”. He explains:


Rather than regurgitating all of the usual ones that one can find elaborated in critical thinking textbooks, I collect fallacies which an author names for just one occasion. These one-offs don’t appear on the usual lists. Authors usually do this to condemn some specific target, one who has committed not some generic error in reasoning but the specific if newly-named fallacy of such-and-so.


He also notes that some so-called fallacies, “climb beyond fame into infamy, like the naturalistic fallacy which may not be a fallacy at all.”


Here are a few examples from the list of one-off fallacies he has found:



  • fallacy ex homine (alternately, fallacy ab homuncule): The opposite of ad hominem. A sense of decorum stops anyone from making accusations of some particular dark motive, such as racism, while charges of other dark motives are still hurled around. The result is that the unspeakable dark motive gets a free pass. (John Holbo, March 25, 2010)
  • fallacies of functional localization: Because an animal can perform a distinct function, it is supposed there is a distinct place in the animal’s body where that function is carried out. (Bill Wimsatt in a public lecture on generative entrenchment, 1998)
  • the linguist’s fallacy: A scholar’s error in “imputing his own sophisticated attitudes to the speakers he is studying.” (Max Black in Linguistic Relativity: the Views of Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1956)
  • the fallacy of selective emphasis: After abstracting from raw experience, the resultant abstraction is treated as primary and more real than the experience from which it was abstracted. (John Dewey in Experience and Nature)
  • the Wittgenstein fallacy: Inferring “that the profession of philosophy as currently practiced is somehow flawed, because a modern day Wittgenstein would not receive recognition or employment.” (Jason Stanley, 2007)


The rest are here. Reports of your related discoveries welcome.

DO TREES FALL IN CYBERSPACE? War on the Rocks

How Long Is Writing Supposed to Take?: Some books take years to write, others months. Can we learn to accept the inefficiency and unpredictability of writing?


  Writing Versus The Writer
     from Irish Times   


  Cultural Appropriation Versus Censorship
     from New York Review of Books
   

  Has Book Reviewing Degenerated Into A Kind Of Thought Police?
     from The Spectaor  


  Why We Can Talk About Books We’ve Never Read
     from Paris Review
   

  Are You A Romance Audiobook Listener Who Just Wants To ‘Skip To The Good Stuff’?
     from NPR