The Bread Loaf Ethnic?

from "How to be a Writer: What goes on at America's most competitive literary conference?" by Rebecca Mead, published in The New Yorker (issue of 10/15/2001)

Many Bread Loafers spoke of the compulsion to write as a kind of calling, though one that they hoped to channel in a direction that might appeal to a publisher. A number of agents and editors are invited to Bread Loaf to give seminars on the publishing business; the question they are most commonly asked is, "Will you read my manuscript?" Each year a small number of participants do get discovered this way, though they tend to be plucked from the select ranks of waiters and scholars rather than from the fee-paying crowd. But there is hope even for them. One evening, Sandra Benitez introduced her own reading by describing how she had published her first novel at the age of fifty two, having come to Bread Loaf as a paying contributor eighteen years earlier only to be told that the book she was working on was garbage. "I went home to my husband, to my writing group, and I went off to bed for two weeks in my little flannel pajamas and moose-head slippers," she said. "The awful thing is that he was right. I knew it would never be published. So I gave it a proper burial. I bought a filiing box and lit a candle, and I said a prayer and I thanked the book for teaching me what it is to write a novel. And I put the box under my bed, where I sleep over it still." Several members of the audience were in tears at this story, although perhaps not many of them would have had the resourcefulness to do what Benitez did after that reversal, which was to take her mother's Puerto Rican maiden name--she had been writing as Sarah Ables--and start writing on Latin American themes instead of about the Missouri in which she'd grown up.

DVR usage shifts prime time (a bit)

from Brian Stelter's NYT article "Jay Leno's Move..."

...Mr. Leno’s show...as the Monday-through-Friday “strip”...defuses the risk of Mr. Leno’s move to another network...saves untold millions of dollars a year. But it also reflects the increasing irrelevance of the network schedule.

The irrelevance is partly [due to] digital video recorders, the bane of many a television executive....Of the 10 prime-time programs that gained the biggest audience from DVR usage this year, none were on at 10 p.m.

The biggest gainers from DVR viewership were dramas...the NBC series “Heroes”....[t]he new Fox drama “Fringe”....the ABC series “Lost”....[etc.]

...But the downside is evident to anyone who measures the gradual ratings declines for an ever-more-fragmented TV landscape. Advertisers pay for air time using ratings that include only the first three days of DVR playback...under the assumption that the ads become less relevant over time [&] that most viewers will watch shows by then. As a result, networks are looking to schedule programming that can encourage live viewing.

...On Tuesday, Ben Silverman...co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, called “The Jay Leno Show” a “killer app,” not only because of the comedian’s talents, but because “you want to watch it that night, and you want to watch it the next....”

...Mr. Silverman predicted that the program would be “totally DVR-proof.”

[But] “[t]here’s no way to schedule around DVR viewing,” said Dawn Ostroff, CW’s president of entertainment.

...Due in part to time-shifting, many viewers, especially...younger ones who are prized by advertisers, do not know what is on at 10 p.m....they increasingly do not care. There is a simple test of this scheduling shift: ...ask a friend what time “Dateline NBC” is broadcast. The hard-to-remember answer is Friday nights at 10.

CBS and ABC are expected to [both] counter-program NBC’s 10 p.m. talk show with dramas....[and continue to win the time slot}

Globalization

from John Gray's September 28 column in the Observer of London

Many in the United States have cherished the illusion that globalization means Americanization. Outside the United States most people have long understood that the actual result of globalization is quite different: a continuous decline in American power. The development of new economies was always going to rob the United States of its pole position in the world.

Jeb Bush to Newsmax

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush tells Newsmax that the GOP must broaden its appeal to avoid becoming "the old white-guy party," and recommends that Republicans create a "shadow government" to engage Democrats on important issues as the incoming Obama administration seeks to enact its agenda.

In a wide-ranging interview with Newsmax, the popular former governor...said the 2008 election was neither "transformational" nor a landslide. For example, he noted that Barack Obama's significant fundraising advantage over John McCain played a key role in Democratic success this year.

Bush urged Republicans not to abandon their core conservative principles in favor of a "Democratic-lite" agenda....

...Bush said: The United States remains "basically a center-right country." He cited President-elect Barack Obama's stance on taxes as an example.

Alex Kuczynski on the Phrase "Meant to Be"

"I suppose I could have decided that it was my destiny to remain childless, that it was somehow meant to be. But I hate the phrase "meant to be," loaded with its small, smug assumptions, its apathy and fake stoicism. I believe that where things can be fixed, they should be fixed."

Hollywood & the Net

from "Obama Win Helps Tech, Could Hurt Hollywood," by Art Brodsky at The Huffington Post

Hollywood is at a crossroads in the policy world as it decides how to leverage its usual influence within a Democratic administration. In one direction is the traditional path of taking the offensive on perceived copyright wrongs...The alternative path is to look toward the future of the industry...Dan Glickman, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), earlier this year came out squarely against Net Neutrality. He called it "regulating the Internet"...Hollywood's other major initiative is to search for copywrighted material online by having AT&T and other willing Internet Service Providers peek at everyone's data packets...

How You Know it's Freedom: You Feel like You've Been Released, Apparently

from Werner Herzog's Wheel of Time

Herzog: And why do you release a bird here?

Monk: Because all the living beings are equal. All creatures have a right to become a Buddha, but to become a Buddha, you have to be free.

The Netflix Prize & The "Napoleon Dynamite" Problem

from The Netflix Prize Rules:

We're quite curious, really. To the tune of one million dollars.

Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we've developed our world-class movie recommendation system: Cinematch. Its job is to predict whether someone will enjoy a movie based on how much they liked or disliked other movies. We use those predictions to make personal movie recommendations based on each customer's unique tastes. And while Cinematch is doing pretty well, it can always be made better.

Now there are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to how Cinematch works that we haven't tried. Some are discussed in the literature, some aren't. We're curious whether any of these can beat Cinematch by making better predictions. Because, frankly, if there is a much better approach it could make a big difference to our customers and our business.


from "If You Liked This, You're Sure to Love That" in November 23rd's The NYT Magazine

The more Bertoni improved upon Netflix, the harder it became to move his number forward. This wasn't just his problem, though; the other competitors say that their progress is stalling, too, as they edge toward 10 percent. Why?

Bertoni says it's partly because of "Napoleon Dynamite," an indie comedy from 2004 that achieved cult status and went on to become extremely popular on Netflix. It is, Bertoni and others have discovered, maddeningly hard to determine how much people will like it. When Bertoni runs his algorithms on regular hits like "Lethal Weapon" or "Miss Congeniality" and tries to predict how any given Netflix user will rate them, he's usually within eight-tenths of a star. But with films like "Napoleon Dynamite," he's off by an average of 1.2 stars.

The reason, Bertoni says, is that "Napoleon Dynamite" is very weird and very polarizing. It contains a lot of arch, ironic humor, including a famously kooky dance performed by the titular teenage character to help his hapless friend win a student-council election. It's the type of quirky entertainment that tends to be either loved or despised. The movie has been rated more than two million times in the Netflix database, and the ratings are disproportionately one or five stars.

Worse, close friends who normally share similar film aesthetics often heatedly disagree about whether "Napoleon Dynamite" is a masterpiece or an annoying bit of hipster self-indulgence.

Jody Rosen on Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak

"With Kanye largely abandoning rapping in favor of digitally altered crooning, his fourth album represents a cultural high-water mark for Auto-Tune, that now ubiquitous pitch-correction technology...Kanye can't really sing in the classic sense, but he's not trying to. T-Pain taught the world that Auto-Tune doesn't just sharpen flat notes: It's a painterly device for enhancing vocal expressiveness, and upping the pathos. In "Bad News," Kanye's digitized vocals are the sound of a man so stupefied by grief, he's become less than human."

From Rolling Stone

Will 2009 Be the Year of the Werewolf?
by Logan Hill

[File under creatures]

In the eternal battle between werewolves and vampires, the latter will look back and say, "2008 vas vonderful! Twilight! True Blood! Ah! Ah! Ah!" But there are signs of a werewolf rebellion. Book critics are howling over Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth, a werewolf noir written entirely in free verse (it's brilliant). Hollywood will kick off 2009 with Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, in which werewolves fight vampire slave masters. Then the already lupine Benicio Del Toro will star in a reimagining of Universal's 1941 classic The Wolf Man - and do multiplex battle with Hugh Jackman's X-Men Origins: Wolverine (not technically a lycanthrope, but still more wolfman than large weasel). Then maybe we'll see the lesbian werewolf teen flick Jack and Diane, long rumored to star Ellen Page. Why the hairy surge? Vampires are decadent, boom-economy monsters who live off the blood of others. In other words, stockbrokers. Werewolves, by contrast, are hairy blue-collar loners, contemptuous of civilization, motivated by hunger and bitterness. When society gets too corrupt, werewolves bite rich bastards in the ass.