Saturday Links
• Home of Baggott & Asher & Bode: Glenda Baggott Tries to be a Tiger Grandma.
Her advice going off to grad school was this, “Don’t fall in love with a poet.” (I did so immediately.)
• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: An Open Letter to Madeleine L’Engle.
Please let me sit at your table in writer heaven, if I make it in. I’ll bring tea—we’ll read Henry Vaughan together, and I’ll catch you up on all the scientific discoveries you missed. I’ll show you where my novel gives a big shout-out to you, Ms. L’Engle.
• Betty Boop decision: Copyright trumps trademark | The Beat.
“This is actually pretty major. In recent years, Warner has used the active trademarks on Looney Tunes characters to quash third parties’ reissues of PD 1930s/40s Looney Tunes content (of which there is a lot). If the Betty decision is not reversed on appeal, then Warner is stripped of its strongest weapon against the public domain. ”
• Swati Avasthi on Getting the Male Voice Right
The power of imagination has been losing value on the stock market of ideas in this post-modern, post James-Frey, reality TV, search-for-credible-information age, where we focus on the writer’s background. We ask, “What standing does the writer have to write their fiction?”
An actor once told me that when he used his imagination to get into his character, he would think of a piano: We all have the same 88 keys. The variations are infinite, but the notes are all the same. You just have to think about what notes this person plays loudest in their lives.
We use our imaginations, our ability to empathize, in order to bridge the gap between the known and the unknown. We find the notes in ourselves that we don’t use and explore them.
• Another Princess Story — Knitting the Wind
She moved into the magician’s castle, and they grew a beautiful garden, and used magic and courage and fiestiness to heal the ills of the kingdom as much as they could, and the princess would say later, in all honesty, that the magician was not handsome, and he had a terrible singing voice, and she’d had to do a lot of work on his communication skills – talk to me, don’t just loom a black cloud over me, for heaven’s sake – but all in all he was thank goodness interesting.
Terrible news.
Gratuitous morning walk photo:
