Tag: 05.21.20

What Will Post-COVID Novels Be Like? For Possible Answers, Look To Post-9/11 Fiction

Chris Bohjalian: “If 9/11 is a literary precedent, it could be years before we will see our first rush of novels about the coronavirus pandemic.” (The first such major titles, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, appeared in 2005.) “Some will no doubt take place in the innermost ring of Dante’s Inferno that has been New York City’s emergency rooms, and some will be about the chaos of home schooling twin 8-year-olds while your toddler crashes your corporate Zoom meeting. Some will be about claustrophobia and the idea that hell really is other people. Or jigsaw puzzles.” – The Washington Post

Watching ABT’s Virtual Ballet Class

Marina Harss: “A masked dancer in a studio, which is empty but for a pianist, peers into her computer’s camera, calling out a cheerful ‘Hi, everyone! So good to see you!’ In another frame, a toddler ambles by, prompting a dancer to joke,’Hey, guys, I had a baby!’ (The toddler actually belongs to the dancer’s sister, with whom she is staying.) More and more squares appear, revealing living rooms, kitchens where family members prepare sandwiches, a nursery, and something that looks like an airplane hangar. Almost all of the dancers are solo, with just a few lucky couples thrown in. The truly fortunate are outside, somewhere beautiful.” – The New Yorker

Well, Here’s One Way To Give A Coronavirus-Safe Live Dance Performance

“On Saturday night, about 35 cars converged at the Santa Monica Airport parking lot. Inside each vehicle, the passengers had 12 pages of instructions: Arrive exactly at 7:50 pm; stay inside your car with the windows rolled up; when you see a flashing light, turn on your headlights; wear a mask. They had come to see PARKED, an invitation-only, drive-in dance performance put on by Jacob Jonas The Company.” – Dance Magazine

Facebook And YouTube Copyright-Police Bots Are Blocking Classical Musicians’ Concert Streams, Sometimes Mid-Performance

And the music at issue is almost always in the public domain. The bots, developed and trained on popular music, are finding performance videos of, Bach, Mozart, Chopin and so on to be too similar to existing commercial recordings by other musicians and automatically blocking them. Then the appeal process with these enormous corporations is frustrating and way too slow. – The Washington Post

U.S. Copyright Office Says Digital Millennium Copyright Act Should Be ‘Fine-Tuned’

The issue discussed in a report just released by the Copyright Office is the DMCA’s Section 512, which lays out what social media companies and Online Service Providers (e.g., Spotify, YouTube) must do to remove pirated material and police copyright infringement. The Office says that the balance has shifted too far toward the OSPs, leaving creators whose material has been posted without permission to play “whack-a-mole.” – The Hollywood Reporter

Hollywood Studios And Craft Unions Struggle Over How To Restart Production

“The industry task force that was assembled last month to address the safety issues has generated a 30-page draft of a white paper that is designed to convince governmental officials to give Hollywood the greenlight to resume production. … But the white paper is not complete and has not been signed off by all of the participants in the task force, which has spurred anger and finger-pointing among union and studio officials and … the labor negotiating body for the major studios.” – Variety

Jürgen Ploog, R.I.P.

“Jay,” the name he went by among close friends, was widely regarded as one of Germany’s premiere second-generation Beat writers. But his narrative fiction — like that of William S. Burroughs, a mentor with whom he was associated — was more experimental and closer to Brion Gysin’s or J.G. Ballard’s than to Jack Kerouac’s or Allen Ginsberg’s. – Jan Herman