Good news first, or bad news?Bad news? You sick freak.
JT Leroy defrauded the movie company, a federal court said today. Why is this bad news? Well one, because finding out JT Leroy wasn't real in the first place was, as David Segal said in the Washington Post, "like finding out John Updike is a robot." If that didn't make 2005 bad enough, finding out two years later that the courts now get to decide when fiction is business fraud, is way worse. It's a sad day for creativity and a sad end to a really interesting tale.
Also in the sad news department, indie publishers took a hit, well a while ago, but it's all flooding back with the sort of fire sale over at McSweeney's. Real quick, the distributer for McSweeney's and 130 other indie publishers, Advanced Marketing Services (AMS) went bankrupt back in December. What's so indie about having a distributer anyway? Well Priya Jain puts it simply in Salon."You can't sell a book if no one knows where to find it, and in helping [indie pubs] overcome that problem , PWG [who was bought by AMS] had become indie publishers' most indespensible partner." It's a valuable lesson for anyone looking to expand their audience/market, and we suppose it's the only sunny side to the story; stay indie, stay self reliant, and stay strong. See it as a big lesson on corporate accounting and take a page from Richard Nash, publisher of Soft Skull, who states, "the independents got fucked by the Enron of publishing."
So what could possibly be the good news? Aside from the rather somber lessons to be learned? Well Marimello enjoys a good celebrity sighting as much the next Angeleno, so not to get all Crafty TMZ on you all, but did any one check out the cover of Woodturning Basics? That's right William H. Macy is coming out crafty. How sweet it is.
No comments:
Post a Comment