Washington Post: “‘You get into shades of gray,’ Hernandez said. ‘The kids say, “If he can high-five, then I can do this.”‘
Category / Uncategorized
Katherine Taylor Disses Howard Junker!
Howard Junker reports: “Chapter Nine, ‘Traveling with Mother,’ appeared in ZYZZYVA Fall 2001, in somewhat different form; in fact, it was considered her ‘first nonfiction in print.’ It was also included in our anthology AutoBioDiversity (Heyday Books, 2005). The copyright page of Rules does not acknowledge either appearance.”
Now to be fair to Taylor, the copyright page of Rules for Saying Goodbye doesn’t list any previous appearances that this material appeared in. But when you snub the only literary editor in America brave enough to imbibe Pabst Blue Ribbon, while also dishing dirt on celebrities who fail to tip, is this not something of a double standard?
Junker, however, will have the last laugh when he questions Taylor at a Cody’s reading on Tuesday, June 26.
Needless Quasi-Mandarin Acrobatics
Scott McLemee offers an excellent column in response to the Encyclopedia Brittanica brouhaha, pointing out:
But no such ambiguity colors the scenario we find in Gorman’s commentary.For the digital boosters, the problems will all repair themselves over time. For the neo-Luddite quasi-Mandarins, by contrast, the new-media matrix is a catastrophic force so devastating that its effects may well contaminate human consciousness for centuries to come.
Starving Hysterical Journalists
Ron Rosenbaum: “But does anybody ever read this stuff? Does anybody take it seriously? Does the writer? It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes of prose. There’s a certain sadness to it, as well. To paraphrase that line in “Howl”: I saw some of the best writers of my generation destroyed by celebrity profiling.”
And Rosenbaum is just getting started.
(via Tingle Alley)
Idle Speculation
The Independent: “There is a rule in America that states employers must make up the difference in pay if any member of their staff earns below the minimum wage when their pay is added to their tips. This might mean customers in the US fear people will lose jobs if they don’t tip heavily.”
Mr. Welch, we tip because we know how little those working in the service sector actually make. We tip because they often don’t have health care and we know that they might be working a second job to make ends meet. We tip because the government’s answer to providing for the unemployed is welfare-to-work.
Instead of silly speculation, why not simply ask us why? Is this not, after all, what a journalist does?