Category: today’s top story

The talks scheduled for next Monday between striking writers and Hollywood studios will likely mean the difference between a quick settlement and a months-long siege. “A protracted war, much like the sides fought during a five-month strike in 1988, would pose a particular threat for writers.”

“Music is often manhandled in our society: we abuse its power and manipulate its virtue. I write as a reformed addict. As a teenager, I gobbled music up indiscriminately. I craved it all day long, as a creative stimulus and numbing background to every activity, from sex to shopping. Now I need it very little.”

“From spring, Picador will use paperbacks to launch new books from all of its literary fiction writers, unless they have a guaranteed profitable hardback market. It estimates that 80% of its literary fiction will be published in this way.”

He’s 76 and says next December he will step off te stage. “This season will be his final concerts. After that, he’s not going to be doing anything that directly involves playing. So he says.”

The Jacksonville Symphony has locked out its musicians and canceled performances after contract talks broke down earlier this week. JSO management is looking for wage freezes and benefit cuts from musicians, who say that they’ve already taken cuts to stabilize the organization.

“The producers’ league and the stagehands’ union have agreed to meet on Saturday for negotiations for the first time since talks ended last Thursday and the stagehands then went on strike… There was no indication that the meeting would mean an end to the stagehands’ strike.”

“Where is the Great American Novel to be found today? Does anyone still care enough about writing an unprecedented masterpiece, to amaze and dismay his or her rival scribes, and offer the world a metaphor of America that will stick?”

The 2,600 participants in “the month-long World Radiocommunication Conference, due to wrap up on Friday, were wrapping up a deal sharing out the spectrum used in wireless and satellite signals, a finite resource worth billions of dollars.”

“It turns out that — just as there are conservatives, liberals and moderates — there are people with red, blue and purple taste.”

Books in Canada carry two prices on their covers – an American price and a Canadian price (always higher). “Book rage, anyone? As the Canadian dollar hit the $1.10 mark earlier this week, booksellers and publishers began to circulate stories of customers going beyond simply venting their dismay at hapless clerks and turning books into projectiles, sometimes to the point of drawing blood.”