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lawsuits
Court Victory for Dunne, Reckless Speculation Everywhere
Fantastic news, America—our constitutional right to repeatedly call a man a murderer has been upheld! Former congressmen Gary Condit, who allegedly caused 9/11 (j/k Gary!) sued Vanity Fair scribe Dominick Dunne for defamation, because Dunne kept claiming he knew that Condit knew stuff he wasn't telling about the murder of former Condit intern/paramour Chandra Levy (which Condit is totally responsible for, allegedly). Dunne went on the tee-vee and said "I think he knows more about what did happen than he has ever said," so the judge dismissed the suit becuz "I think" means it was a constitutionally protected statement of opinion, not assertion of fact. Or, as the judge put it, "Dunne does not suggest that his opinion statements are based on any additional facts not known to the public." This is terrible news for everyone, as now we all actually do have to be careful to use those stupid weasel words. Like "allegedly"! More »
journalismism
AP Stylebook No Longer "Mentally Retarded"
Journo-nerds rejoice: the AP Stylebook has been updated! It's the Bible of all that is considered acceptable in middle American newsrooms, and, like middle America itself, is consistently several years behind the times. So what changes can you look forward to in tomorrow's edition of the Mattoon Journal Gazette? More text messaging, less malarkey, and no more retarded people!More »
Copy Editing Cliches
A media company identifying itself as "Cond Nast Publications" is in need of a copy editor. Specifically, the ad says, "TheAssociate Copy Editorreviews copyedited text." Urgent, please apply now! Click through for a screengrab of thisjobopportunity.
writers writing
Method Writer Takes Steroids For Authenticity
Craig Davidson is a Canadian novelist. He got all bulked up on steroids because, well, the character for the novel he was writing took steroids, he explains in The Guardian. "My character goes down dark roads. For the sake of the book, I thought I'd travel those roads with him. He begins to work out obsessively. I began to work out obsessively... He takes steroids. I took steroids." Method writing at work! It turns out that gearing up, however, is not so simple. It made his life an utter, living hell. By the fourth day: "I appeared to have breasts. Pendulous, malformed breasts." Other bad things happened. To his testicles. To his... prostate. More »
the critics
How to Deal With Critics Without Looking Like an Idiot
Writing is hard, lonely work. At least that's what all the great writers say, so that's the line to stick to at dinner parties. But when your Great American Novel is complete, there's loads of self-congratulations. And after that, praise from friends and family. But then strangers who went to better colleges than you, the critics, come in to eviscerate you in 600 words. How is a writer to a respond? Violence? Sex? Passive-aggressive letters?More »
writing
Best Paragraph? More Like Third Quartile!
Freaknomics author Stephen Dubner says this is "The Best Paragraph You'll Read All Week." Really, Stephen Dubner? Perhaps you could use some more varied reading materials. Am I missing the genius in this standard-issue "I used to be a geek" narrative? Click to enlarge the graf (an intro to a column in the FT), which the superstar economist says is amazing and I, who took six years to finish my bachelor's degree, say is rather pedestrian. [Freakonomics]
judgment
Neal Pollack: Just Not Much Of A Writer
The preponderance of outstanding evidence has finally and inexorably built up to the point that no reasonable person can avoid coming to the conclusion that "Alternadad" author Neal Pollack, who enjoys both chronicling and defending his decision to chronicle his young child, is just not much of a writer at all. Despite his background as a professional writer with the Chicago Reader, McSweeney's, Vanity Fair, GQ, and other respected outlets—as well as his ability to convince publishing houses to pay him money in order to write books—it is now impossible to deny the fact that Pollack is just not cut out for this whole writing thing. The scale-tipping work is his new Men's Journal profile of Woody Harrelson, in which the sheer lack of insight, or even cleverly redeeming turns of phrase, has us vowing never to read anything by this fucker again. More »
a bridge too far
Moving To Brooklyn Won't Turn You Into Jonathan Safran Foer (Thank God)
No matter what borough you live in, how much you pay in rent or who your neighbors are, being a writer still sucks. Nouns and verbs are hard to come up with. Even Brooklyn, with all its just-as-good-as-Manhattan verve, can't change that for you. If anything, as Colson Whitehead, author of the revered Apex Hides the Hurt, reports in the Sunday Book Review, it's harder. All the shrinks are still in Manhattan and reading friends' unpublished books is boring. And even a dip in the Gowanus Canal can't cure writers block. Of course, Brooklyn writers hating the Brooklyn writers' scene is a trend as old as metrosexuals. More »
the writing life
Great Movies About Writers
Entertainment Weekly ran a feature today showing 14 of their favorite films about writers, in honor of the WGA strike ending. It's a pretty good sampling we think, and have decided to go one step further and dredge up some clips. We were able to find 12 of the 14 films listed, so we've included two bonuses: a clip from Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys, and a touching video of aspiring poet Vada Sultenfuss reciting a sad poem in the groundbreaking 1991 film My Girl. (We tried to find the ice cream poem, but alas were foiled.) What films did they miss? More »
predation programming
More Death, Less Cuddling on the New Meaner 'Animal Planet'
One doesn't need to look far to see that we prefer seeing things fall apart, tear up, tear asunder and eventually decay leaving only a bleached carcass lying on the windswept beach of what was once a lush forrest of our malevolent interest. (woah! Wha?) I mean, we like watching pain! It took E!, OK! and Tolstoy! about two seconds to realize this but it took Animal Planet nearly 11 years. More »
rich people with dreams
Phil Knight Partying, Growing With Stanford Coeds
The one creepy old dude in your undergrad creative writing course? Maybe it's Nike founder Phil Knight, who's secretly been attending classes at Stanford, learning to bare his soul through fiction. Knight isn't enrolled at Stanford, but $105 million donations have a way of opening doors. More »
point
The 'El Quijote' Sandwich Is As Disappointing As A Terrible Foodblogger Book Deal
Publishers Marketplace is reporting that Nosheteria.com blogger Adrienne Kane has sold her first book, to be titled 'Cooking and Screaming,' to Simon & Schuster imprint Simon Spotlight Entertainment. We'd never heard of this blog, but we like eating food, so we decided to check it out. Of a recently purchased handful of satsumas and persimmons, Adrienne writes, "Soon the fruit beckoned to me, and it told me it wanted to play with that lonely endive in the fridge. And play they did, quite beautifully, together on the chartreuse salad plate. I love a salad with fruit, not a fruit salad mind you (though they are stupendous as well), but a salad that has the mystical interplay between sweet and savory, and that is what this salad had." She's a regular Danyelle Freeman! As Josh and I ate lunch at our desks, we wondered: how hard could it be to write about food in the style of these ladies? More »
overextended metaphors
Foxy Brown Won't Leave Rikers! And Neither Will You.
It is almost the weekend, praise be! And no matter what your weekend threatens to bring, remember that it's surely gonna be better than that of imprisoned BlackBerry-hurling former rap star Foxy Brown, who is so stewed that she won't even get on the bus from Rikers Island (New York's real sixth borough!) for her arraignment. She's had it up to here! So wherever you go, remember this lone woman's spirit of resistance. Yes. Whether you rot in your own personal jail of an apartment, or venture out in the big bad City to be judged by officers of the law and those that impersonate them, you are all Foxy Brown.
Graffiti in the bathroom of the hotsy-totsy gallerist Gavin Brown's soon-to-close bar Passerby: "I make a living scraping the coke off the floor at Passerby. Thanx Gavin!"
We're adding "Ted Turner's publicist" to the list of jobs we could not be paid enough to take. Says Ted to his minder during an interview: "I DON'T NEED YOU FOR THAT! YOU'RE JUST AN OLD PUSSY! YOU'RE JUST AN OLD PUSSY! YOU'RE JUST A LITTLE MOTHER HEN. [in falsetto] "WE'VE GOTTA DO THIS! WE'VE GOTTA DO THAT!" [back to regular voice] THIS IS IMPORTANT! THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT!" Wow, he kisses Robert Olen Butler's ex-wife with that mouth? [HuffPo]
writing your own ticket
A Night Out With Me, About Me, By Me
A Drunk Finally Gets A Chance To Whine
NEW YORK
LAST night found Alex Balk, "blogger," drinking with his cock, My Cock, at Old Town, a classic tavern in the Union Square neighborhood here. Half the bar was shrouded in shadow, but Mr. Balk was illuminated by the red glow from the neon sign overhead. This seemed fitting, given that Mr. Balk had just turned red after reading a New York Times "A Night Out With" about writer Stacey Grenrock Woods, erroneously described, as the photos here show, by the paper's website as being written (in the third person) by Stacey Grenrock Woods.
best blogger book deal ever
"Hot Chicks With Douchebags" Sells
If a website with pictures of hot ladies and fug dudes in shiny shirts isn't enough to sate your appetite for that stuff, well, good news!NON-FICTION: HUMORSeriously, thank God. It's hard to appreciate insights like "I would love ambiguous Russian Minx hotties in a massive tsarist bacchanal complete with grapes, goblets and a fey lute player for bemusement while resting between bouts of coitus. Then I would feed the Doublemint Douche Twins to the lions while reading Tolstoy to the Noxema Girl Hottie and sipping from the Samovar" on the screen. The printed page is where they belong!
Jay Louis's HOT CHICKS WITH DOUCHEBAGS: Deconstructing the Unholy Wrongness of Hottie/Douchey Coupling and How to Recover from the Douchebag Plague, based on the website HotChickswithDouchebags.com, to Jeremie Ruby-Strauss at Simon Spotlight Entertainment, by Michael Harriot at Vigliano Associates (world).
