MEMBER BLOG TAG: public
| Tuesday, April 26, 2011 3:27PM | | | | PUBLIC INTELLECT & CORPORATE STATE | Tags: Public Intellectual. Emerson * Edward Said. Opening Eve: World Voices 2011. Global Corporate State, Writer's Imagination. Salmon Rushdie, nuclear disaster, writing in the 21st century, Mid-East Oil Wars, Writers as Planetary Citizens
| | | | WHERE WAS EMERSON'S & EWARD SAID's "PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL" in the OPENING EVENING: "Written on Water" of WORLD VOICES, 2011?
The opening night of PEN’s 2011 WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL of International Literature began with a call to speak out as writers, since those of us present were not as censored from Freedom of Speech as many are around the globe. A list of great books that have been censored was screened from Milton's Paradise Lost to Voltaire's Candide. The seventh annual festival was designed to celebrate the power of the writer’s voice to revitalize public debate on critical world issues, but the opening night’s event at the Lighthouse, Chelsea Piers on the Hudson, didn’t adhere well... | | | | | | | Thursday, January 21, 2010 4:13PM | | | | Interview: Lynn Nottage, "Ruined" | Tags: lynn nottage, ruined, human rights, democratic republic of the congo, pulitzer prize, 2010
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Playwright Lynn Nottage has received numerous awards for her groundbreaking work on the stage, including the MacArthur 'Genius' Award. A Brooklyn native, she regularly champions social justice issues in her plays. She was recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her play Ruined, a hard-hitting tale of a group of women set in a brothel in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The women flee the ravages of internecine war and the scars of brutal, mutilating rapes. Yet the characters -- even the men -- offer touching moments of real warmth, all while united by a lilting soundtrack of Congolese music. Ruined will be staged at the Almeida Theatre in London in March 2010.
Nottage... | | | | | | | Friday, August 14, 2009 11:14AM | | | | The writer is 'branded' | Tags: marketing, publicity, book tours, book selling
| | | Publishers and agents will sometimes ask a writer about his or her branding. They want to know what the marketability of the writer is. What the backstory is. They want to know what the publicity angle will be for a book. And, more often than not, they want the writer to provide this information, if not to develop the entire plan.
Publishers expect writers to develop their presence in the marketplace. Facebook and Twitter have become, in some cases, as much advertising spaces as social networking sites. The vast majority of writers have blogs. Obviously, I'm one of them.
Let's be clear, I enjoy blogging. For me, it's a way of publishing 'essays' without a middleman and a way of connecting with readers.... | | | | | | | Wednesday, March 18, 2009 12:24PM | | | | Voyeuring Up | Tags: Prayer, public schools, Christianity, Quakers, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos
| | | | Matthew 6:1-8
Jesus was pretty clear: don’t pray to be seen, don’t do good works to be seen, charity should be secret, and God will openly reward you. Well, maybe God will. But God’s rewards have a tendency to be delayed in shipping.
Jesus’ followers have a hard time believing Jesus meant what he said. Criminal suspects lawyer up. Religious suspects voyeur up. We want spectators, crowds gaping at us in wonder and admiration. We pray for paparazzi to catch images of us doing good things. We want to be heard when we pray. We announce with pride and satisfaction that we are doing these good deeds in the name of our church. We don’t have time to wait for God to reward us; let the... | | | | | | | Saturday, March 7, 2009 10:15PM | | | | NYPL talk about Eternal Treblinka | Tags: animal rights, Holocaust, publishing, animals, Nazis, New York Public Library
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Charles Patterson will talk about his book "Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust" (ISBN 1-930051-99-9) on Wednesday, March 11. The Mid-Manhattan Library (NYPL) is located at 40th Street and Fifth Avenue. The talk begins at 6:30.
Eternal Treblinka (soon to be in 14 languages) shows the common roots of Nazi genocide and modern society's enslavement and slaughter of animals. The title comes from Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote, "For the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."
The first part of the book describes the emergence of humans as the "master species" and how we came to dominate the earth and its other inhabitants. The second part examines the industrialization of slaughter of both animals and... | | | | | | | Thursday, October 16, 2008 7:06PM | | | | China Diary: September 7, 2008 | Tags: Chinese literature, Modernism, Republican China, Publishing in China
| | | September 7, 2008
In my first week in Shanghai, a busboy told me that he wanted to go to America. “Why,” I asked. “To get the human rights.”
I was invited to China in early September to give some talks about my book, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China, recently translated into Chinese. I was initially amazed that there was an interest, expressed no less, by a government press, Shanghai Bookstore Publishing Company. China, now more engaged now in following international trends, purchased the rights to my book as many others these days from my US publisher The book is a study of the relationship between the literary and intellectual circles of Bloomsbury and the Crescent Moon group, an Anglophone literary... | | | | | | | Friday, May 2, 2008 4:03PM | | | | Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah | Tags: Camorra, Mafia, Public lives, Private lives, Gattopardo, Camus, Don Peppino Diana, citazioni
| | | La Elebash Recital Hall al Cuny Graduate Center in pieno centro a New York era stracolma, con molta gente in piedi nonostante le rigide misure di sicurezza lo vietassero.
L'entrata di Roberto Saviano( http://www.robertosaviano.it/ ), presentato da Antonio Monda, è stata accolta dall’ ovazione di molti giovani, per la gran parte italiani, studenti a New York, ma anche molti americani, in piedi a rendergli omaggio. Si percepiva uno stato di eccitazione insolito per un’intervista ad un autore.
Ma qui tutti sapevano, compreso lui stesso, che l’autore di “Gomorra” è diventato il simbolo di una Italia che non vuole arrendersi ad un destino di corruzione e illegalità.
Due splendide... | | | | | | | Friday, May 2, 2008 1:18PM | | | | Personal narrative and public.... | Tags: Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, South of the Border, Brooklyn, nomads, private, public, marginal, autobiography, imagination, women writers.
| | | Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa and Honduras/El Salvador author Horacio Castallanos novelist and journalists both read a passage from a novel in English, and then sat down for a talk with playwright Nathalie Handal.
Nathalie Handal kicked off the exchange with a funny and revealing anecdote: Carmen Boullosa had just published a novel that was getting a lot of attention, and one of Mexico City famous critics called her up and said, you have to send me a new copy of your book immediately. I am missing five pages, and I can't wait to finish your book. By the way I really enjoyed when your mother made love to a priest! Boullosa was stunned: "it's a novel," she said. "I's not about my mother. My... | | | | | | | Thursday, May 1, 2008 12:31PM | | | | Public Lives/Private lives | Tags: Public, Lives, Private, Libertà, Politico, Privato, Creativo,
Individualità, Diversità, democrazia,
| | | Ho sempre pensato che la vita privata di un artista, nel nostro caso di uno scrittore di poesia e/o di fiction in generale,( in italiano diremmo poeti e scrittori di narrativa, o scrittori senz’altro,) non dovrebbe essere oggetto di interesse, se l’obiettivo è quello di capire la sua scrittura, esserne stimolati, amarla oppure odiarla (perché ritenere che ogni autore debba essere amato da tutti? Non credo sia auspicabile). Pensavo che nella vita privata di ciascuno di noi ci siano, ci debbano essere segreti o santuari da proteggere dagli sguardi indiscreti: se sono scrittore e voglio aprirmi ad un pubblico di lettori che credo possa essere interessato alla mia vita privata, allora scriverò deliberatamente un libro di memorie, trascriverò le mie confessioni... | | | | | | | Sunday, March 30, 2008 1:57PM | | | | the devil naked in the kleig light | Tags: sadi ranson-polizzotti, anna wintour, vogue, conde-nast, conde-nast publications, sadi ranson, vogue magazine, assistant, rover, conde nast rover, weisberger, devil wears prada, meisel, elgort, photography, fashion, fashion shoots, magazines, international magazines, american vogue
| | | As a sometime professor of book editing and writing a very fine graduate program in publishing, I should be so lucky, as I am, to have such thoughtful students who are interested in interning, actively seeking work, volunteering, etc. once the class is over and it is my promise to them, just as someone once gave me a leg up, to help them out as best I can through recommendations, by sending them to publishers and agents that I know well and that perhaps will take my recommendation about this or that student under advisement. This is the hope.
So far, I have become a mentor to two students - asked quite literally to "mentor" and I cannot begin to express what a... | | | | | | | Wednesday, March 12, 2008 9:34AM | | | | losing steven florio | Tags: steven t. florio, steven florio, sadi ranson, sadi ranson-polizzotti, advance publications, the new yorker, gq, esquire, gentleman's quarterly, publishing, ceos, ceo, mentor, friend, dear friend, vogue, american vogue, vogue magazine, united states, new york, manhattan, mentor, mentoring, sarah heleina ranson-polizzotti, oyster bay, conde nast, conde nast publications, death, obit, memories, eulogy, rememberance,
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 It is a lonely feeling to lose anyone - lovers, friends, family and in any way, however you lose someone is a death. To lose a mentor tho, how does one begin to express what this feels like?
Were it not for Steven T. Florio I would not be in book publishing or publishing in any way. I always knew I would be a writer, but I never for a minute believed I could succeed as a publisher, as an editor, editorial director, acquisitions editor, etc - the myriad jobs I have held so far in my career - and I never thought that I would see to publish my work with some fair measure... | | | | | | | Thursday, October 11, 2007 2:21PM | | | | Banned Books | Tags: banned books, public schools, education, Supreme Court
| | | | I read recently a list of titles of children's books and young adult books that had been banned, and I wonder what country I'm living in. Gay penguins are too dangerous to read about? Books that contain words that in a different context would be harmful but between their covers give me the power to understand where racism came from historically?
I remember rather fondly reading all sorts of wondrously devious and perhaps deviant books and short stories when I was in elementary school in the 70s and junior high in the 1980s. What would have become of me if I hadn't been allowed to read these books? Is sexual content so dangerous in the age of AIDS that... | | | | | |
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