The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

So this afternoon I stumbled across the beginning of an essay by Jonathan Franzen that I really wanted to read in full.
The academy as nursing home for terminally ill arts: better that the novel die with honor in the gutter than enter those gates, where candy-striped theorists will offer it the illusion of warmth as [...]

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Book Publisher Suspends New Acquisitions – NYTimes.com

The publishing biz is in major trouble. I think the days of ‘big publishing’ by corporate media behemoths are coming to an end.

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As publishing moves into the digital future, Jonathan Karp sees the end of disposable books:
Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction [...]

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My friend John e-mailed me this link about ‘misery lit,’ a.k.a. ‘grief porn.’ While I’ve certainly been aware of it, mainly via supermarket and Target book sections that inevitably include copies of A Child Called ‘It’ and it’s sequels, this is the first I’ve seen about a specific genre or special bookstore section. Does Borders [...]

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So goes the jab from Nelson on the Simpsons toward a print journalist sitting on a discussion panel. It’s pretty funny.
But the trials and travails of print journalism – specifically newspapers – are quite real. This New Yorker article examines the issue in depth. Eric Alterman has written a broad review of print journalism’s difficulties [...]

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Here’s a fun(ny) piece on young writers and writing workshops from Slate.com.
I’ve thought periodically about the value of writing workshops, and I keep coming to the conclusion that the workshops try to simplify what should be a difficult process. Writing good books should be hard. Getting published should be hard. Workshops, to me, seem like [...]

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[T]he key point in the business is that the investment is made in the wrong areas in the business, and I think that quality—which is more valuable over time—has been undervalued, and quantity—which is less valuable over time—has been overvalued. And I think this is a reaction to the dominance of the influence of the [...]

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I certainly noticed a lack of excitement and energy in 2007 with regard to fiction. According to Los Angeles Times article, the trouble wasn’t limited to fiction.
The hard pill for publishing to swallow may have its origins in a parenthetical statistic from the article:
Roughly 200,000 titles were published this year.
Is the publishing industry’s attempt to [...]

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According to this article the future of music is Prince. More broadly, the future of music is to give the music away.
The story is remarkable because Prince gave away actual copies of the compact disc identical to those available in record stores. Other artists who have given their music away have done so by allowing [...]

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Someone mentioned to me the other day that there is no literature about the life of a military spouse written from the masculine perspective. That’s because there are so few ‘military husbands’ out there. The labels are all feminine — even the pronouns. In the introduction to Today’s Military Wife, fifth edition, Lydia Sloan Cline [...]

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