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July 06, 2004

KEEP WRITING

The WGA has advised its membership to keep writing even "though the guild is working under an expired contract, negotiations may not resume for months and at least three other guilds are waiting in the wings to start hammering out new deals with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers."

"Uncertainty makes all parties uncomfortable and nervous," Furia and McLean said in an e-mail. "Waiting is always difficult and frustrating, but it's an inevitable part of the process. We are convinced that, over time, our chances for an acceptable contract improve. Summer will be over before you know it. Continue working and accepting writing assignments."

Negotiations between the WGA and the AMPTP broke down one month after the current Minimum Basic Agreement expired May 2. The WGA said it found the AMPTP's final offer unacceptable on such key issues as health-care contributions, DVD residuals and Internet-based movie sales.

At the same time, the AMPTP rejected a proposal by the writers to sidestep those thorny issues by granting a bare-bones, one-year contract similar to the one the producers' gave SAG this year in order to postpone a showdown over many of the same issues, particularly DVD residuals.

No new talks are scheduled and the WGA is willing to let the matter drag on for months, with no desire to strike.

Posted at 12:03 AM |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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