Talk about burying the lede. This article about Alec Baldwin’s return to television acting, and how he’ll be playing “a Rob Ford-type mayor of New York,” doesn’t make a big deal out of the show’s pilot writer. But it should. Because his name is Wells Tower.
Wells Tower on Your TV Screen
Would a softer sort of blackmail be called graymail?
Over at Melville House, editor Ellie Robbins has discovered an App that might help you finish your novel: it involves your Facebook friends, one compromising picture, and some, um, lighthearted blackmail.
A Sense of Danger
Recommended Listening: Renata Adler’s Longform podcast on writing routines and the need for acquiring a sense of danger.
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What’s In the Trunk?
Recommended Viewing: Alejandro Cartagena’s photo series, “The Car Poolers.”
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A Slumbering Rooster Begins to Twitch
2010 is soon to be over. That means that The Morning News Tournament of Books is almost upon us. Two excellent developments this year: 1) the folks behind the Rooster have released the longlist of titles under consideration to make the final 16 (including The Singer's Gun by our own Emily St. John Mandel) and 2) they have left one judging spot open that you (you!) can apply to fill.
Twitter’s Poetics, Twitter’s Bots
As Teju Cole demonstrated with his real-time ghazals (one, two, and three) this past week, Twitter is a medium ripe for linguistic experimentation. And far from being the exclusive domain of human beings, the social network can also produce “found poetry” at the behest of computer programs – a practice I recently wrote about for The Bygone Bureau. But who’s behind these Twitter bots? Over at The Boston Globe, they check in with Darius Kazemi, the 30-year-old programmer who’s made some of the most-loved accounts out there.
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On Sailing the Sea of Story
Recommended Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin talks with host David Naimon about her classic book Steering the Craft and argues that issues of class, race, gender, and morality cannot be separate from grammar. Pair with Paul Morton’s Millions interview with the author.
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No, that’s really not burying the lede. Almost everyone has heard of Alec Baldwin, but hardly anyone outside of the small world of literary fiction has heard of Wells Tower. If the article lead off with a reference to Tower, most Deadline Hollywood readers would probably skip it. Baldwin is the story, not Tower.
Good morning to you, too, Pete.
In retrospect, that last sentence should have been, “To Deadline Hollywood readers, Baldwin is the story, not Tower.” It all depends on the audience. If the story was in a literary publication then, yes, that would have been burying the lede. I didn’t at all intend to denigrate Wells Tower – though I haven’t read his work, I’ve heard great things about him.