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| Hearsay: |
Coming in this weekend’s NYT is this essay on a bailout plan for the scribbling set.
A little while back my daughter told me the following depressing joke:
Woman: What do you do?
Man: Me? Oh, I write books.
Woman: How interesting! Have you sold anything recently?
Man: Why, yes. My couch, my car and my flat-screen television.
A snarkier writer-father might have added, “and I sold those things to pay for your private school tuition!” But instead it got me thinking that there was a real problem here. Not just a small problem involving issues of respect between one writer and one teenager, but rather a national problem of respect where being a writer has become so widely associated with being a loser that we have become the stuff of common jokes.
My friends (as the nation’s most famous loser, John McCain, likes to begin his appeals), in these times of plummeting consumer confidence and evaporating labor markets, it is time to address the problem head on. We must now go boldly forward and bail out the writers.
January 2006
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December 10th, 2008 at 11:50 am
I’m all for it! When I was accepted to the University of Montana’s creative writing program, Larry Colton told my mother to clear out the basement–I’d need a place to live! At the time it was funny, but now I’m older and wiser, and I’ve completely lost my sense of humor.
December 10th, 2008 at 11:51 am
“96 percent said they would write as much as or more than they do now”
Absolutely. If decreasing the surplus material were really the point of this article, I’d suggest charging writers to publish instead of offering them a bailout. The money could go toward paying off the national debt. The way to get writers out of writing is to increase their poverty, not alleviate it. Of course, then you’d end up with only well-to-do authors publishing their own fluff. Oh, wait…
December 10th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
The joke is funny, but what I’d like to know is where did he get the flat screen TV in the first place?
December 10th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
It’s that bit about the private school that gets me. I know very feew writers who can afford anything like that for their kids unless they have partners with good day jobs and/or parents who can shell out for the grandkids’ future.
We shouldn’t forget, though, that Canada offers more grants etc. to writers than the US does. Hard to think that it might be even worse for your average mid-list writer down there. No Canada Council, no free health insurance, George Murray…
Mary