publishing

Monday various

Sunday various

  • True Tales of Conversational Vengeance. I think the closest my own job has brought me to anyone famous is talking on the phone with someone who worked with Fred Rogers, and e-mailing Desmond Tutu’s assistant, trying unsuccessfully to get a book endorsement. [via]

  • I can’t say I’ve never used any of these “lies from a publisher’s argot,” but we try to keep the out-of-control superlatives to a minimum. [via]

  • Domestic violence as a “pre-existing condition”. Seriously, how can anyone not think health care is fundamentally broken in this country? This is just nauseating.

  • Meanwhile, on a lighter note, Chuck Klosterman’s tongue-firmly-in-cheek look at the Beatles:

    Pop archivists might be intrigued by this strange parallel between the Beatles and the Stones catalogue—it often seems as if every interesting thing The Rolling Stones ever did was directly preceded by something the Beatles had already accomplished, and it almost feels like the Stones completely stopped evolving once the Beatles broke up in 1970. But this, of course, is simply a coincidence. I mean, what kind of bozo would compare the Beatles to The Rolling Stones?

  • And finally, a game: Canabalt. It’s like a pixelated parkour. [via]

Saturday various

  • Proof again that parasites are the scariest damn things out there. [via]
  • Speaking, sort of, of parasitic mouth-breathers, you have read the single worst sports column ever written, right? The fact that Mark Whicker doesn’t seem to understand how his column trivialized Jaycee Dugard’s horrific 18-year ordeal — and is lousy journalism to boot — is just disgusting. Joe Wilson gave a more sincere apology.
  • Speaking of Wilson, via Twitter Kurt Andersen writes:

    Nobody who applauded the dude in Baghdad who threw his shoe at Bush really has any standing to accuse Joe Wilson of incivility. Right?

    It’s an interesting point, but I do think it’s wrong and maybe over-simplifies. For starters, this is at least partly about context. Shoe-thrower Muntazer al-Zaidi was a journalist attending a press conference, whereas Joe Wilson was a Congressman attending the President’s address to that legislative body. There are different levels of decorum expected, if only by tradition, in those two very different settings. Also Bush is obviously not Iraqi, whereas both Wilson and Obama are Americans, and Iraq was/is a more hostile battleground than health care. (Although you maybe wouldn’t know it, from some of the “debate” and hysteria surrounding the latter.) Both the thrown shoe and presidential heckling were uncivil acts, neither the best solution at the time, but the shoe is more defensible, if only because it was born out of a shared desperation instead of politics. That Wilson was demonstrably wrong about Obama’s so-called lie, and yet has continued to spread his own lies about the proposed governmental health care… Well, it’s tough to continue drawing parallels between the two outbursts.

  • James Patterson signs a 17-book deal “that will keep him with publisher Hachette through 2012.” Do the math: even if the deal goes into effect immediately, that’s 17 books in just over two years, about eight books a year. I guess it’s a good thing James Patterson doesn’t actually have to write well, huh? [via]
  • And finally, this proposed Plan 9 from Outer Space remake…is a joke, right?

    Plan 9 Teaser Trailer from Darkstone Entertainment on Vimeo.

Wednesday various

  • Patton Oswalt on the joy of failure:

    I never want to get to a point where I feel like I’m done. Or like I got it. You always want to have that, “Oh shit, this wall just collapsed, and there’s a whole room behind it to explore.”

    I posted a quote from the interview just the other day, but I think the whole thing’s worth checking out, even if you’re not immediately familiar with Oswalt’s comedy or acting. I also like what he says about the internet:

    We haven’t seen it yet, but there’s going to be a generation that comes up where the new trend will be complete anonymity. It’ll be cool to have never posted anything online, never commented, never opened a webpage or a MySpace, never Twittered. I think everyone in the future is going to be allowed to be obscure for 15 minutes. You’ll have 15 minutes where no one is watching you, and then you’ll be shoved back onto your reality show. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong.

    I’ve read mixed reviews of Oswalt’s new movie, Big Fan, but I’ve heard a couple of really intelligent interviews with him and director Robert D. Siegel, so I’m eager to check it out.

  • Fox rebooting Fantastic Four. This seems to be the new thinking in Hollywood: if your last attempt was a financial or critical failure — and the 2007 Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer movie was arguably a little of both — don’t even wait, just re-boot the whole thing. Studios used to wait a respectable few years, time enough to slink away and let the shame and stink of failure dissipate, but that’s happening less and less. Eight years separate the abject failure of Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin and Christopher Nolan’s reboot of the franchise with Batman Begins, for instance, while only five years separate Ang Lee’s Hulk and Edward Norton’s (not so incredible) version. The gap is narrowing — and with the recently proposed Battlestar Galatica re-reboot and this Fantastic Four news, the gap seems to be disappearing altogether. As Gerry Canavan jokes, “In the future franchises will be rebooted before the first film even comes out.”

    Still, I guess one way of looking at this is that Hollywood is now committed to remaking movie franchises over and over again, no matter how many times it takes, until, finally, they don’t suck.

    Although, as the AV Club points out, this may just be fallout from the recent Disney acquisition of Marvel:

    Before Marvel settled down with Disney, it had tumultuous affairs with several other studios. With Sony, for instance, it had a baby called the Spider-Man series. And Marvel’s time with Fox produced several offspring, including film series based around the X-Men, Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four. By the terms of that arrangement, Fox has the rights to make movies around those characters (plus Fantastic Four hanger-on the Silver Surfer) in perpetuity so long as it doesn’t stop making them.

    This too-soon reboot, then, might not go anywhere or even be expected to go anywhere. It may just be a ploy to hold on to some rights that would otherwise revert to the Mouse.

  • Speaking of the Disney/Marvel merger, while I think it’s too soon to know for sure what (if anything) this will mean for the future of Marvel, I tend to agree with Mark Evanier’s take:

    This isn’t about publishing. Disney didn’t say, “Gee, it would be great to own a comic book company!” They could have started fifty comic book companies for four billion clams. This is about characters and properties which can be exploited in many forms. The publishing of comic books may or may not always be one of them…..[T]he future of Spider-Man has very little to do with the Spider-Man comic book. That hasn’t mattered for a long time.

    And while I tried my own hand at some Marvel/Disney mashups two days ago, I think I prefer these more artistic ones. [via]

  • I worry that some future journalism students will see this story and wonder, “what’s the big deal with paying your sources?” [via]

  • And finally, some terrific photographs of the same spots in New York City, composited into a single shot based on similarity. It’s a neat trick. [via]

Tuesday various

  • Keith Phipps on Jeremy Piven:

    When did it go wrong? When did the caustic character actor guaranteed to liven up even the dullest movie turn into a walking black hole of smarm from which no joy can escape?

    I’m guessing sometime around the beginning of Entourage.

  • I am strangely unimpressed by this LEGO dreamhouse. [via] Much less with recent news of a planned LEGO movie. I didn’t have an issue with their decision to prohibit a short film from appearing on the new Spinal Tap DVD, but that was mostly because they didn’t have an issue with it’s staying put on YouTube. Maybe it’s time to admit that, while I played with LEGO as a child, it holds no real special place in my heart. (I was much more fond of Construx, actually.)

  • A newspaper printed on a shopping bag is an interesting experiment, but did it have to be on a plastic shopping bag? I don’t think the way to save a dying industry is by helping to kill the planet. Besides, just try do the crossword puzzle on one of those things! [via]

  • I wonder how handwriting as lie detection method will fare in light of the news (reported here just yesterday) that handwriting is dying. [via]

  • And finally, why not take a minute and add your name to the 2011 Mars mission? [via]