Tongue-tied

From: P.A.P. Blog, Human Rights etc. 

"An extraordinary coalition of global literary figures including the Nobel literature laureates JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Tomas Tranströmer and Mario Vargas Llosa have come together to call on China to respect its population's right to freedom of expression, and to release those writers 'unjustly imprisoned for exercising this most fundamental right.'

     Over a hundred writers and artists from around the world – also including Ian McEwan, Tracey Emin, Edward Albee, Salman Rushdie, EL Doctorow and Don DeLillo – have put their names to a letter highlighting the plight of the imprisoned 2010 Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo and his wife, Liu Xia, who lives under house arrest, along with 'more than 40 other writers and journalists currently jailed for their work.'
     'We cannot ... listen to China's great and emerging creative voices without hearing the silence of those whose voices are forcibly restrained,' they write."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"Like in America, Chinese citizens can post their thoughts to the internet and communicate with other citizens. But unlike in America, anything that gets too political will be taken down by the hosting company. Through various cyber laws and regulations it is these internet companies – like Baidu and Alibaba – that carry out the government’s censorship of the internet.
     If these companies don’t follow the weekly guidance on what content must be taken down, their licenses to run an internet company could be revoked, putting them out of business. Thus, under Chinese law, the government outsources its censorship: it issues directives but the internet companies are the ones that are liable if specific content makes it through.
     Those companies who do their job well don’t just stay in business, but are rewarded for their vigilant censorship. Every year, the Chinese government awards those internet companies who did the best job censoring a 'Self Discipline Award.'”
— Elizabeth M. Lynch, China Law & Policy
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"a family without gravity"

"Before you get to page one of this book there is a noisy overture. The author [Taiye Selasi] has been mentored by Toni Morrison and endorsed by Salman Rushdie. She is Yale- and Oxford-educated, half-Nigerian and half-Ghanaian, born in London, raised in Boston, living in Rome. Her 2005 essay 'What Is An Afropolitan?' gave a face to a class of sophisticated, cosmopolitan young Africans who defy downtrodden stereotypes. Her short fiction The Sex Lives of African Girls was published in The Best American Short Stories last year. She has also adapted a screenplay for Alicia Keys. Ghana Must Go – named after the Nigerian phrase directed at incoming Ghanaian refugees during political unrest in the 80s – is one of the most hyped debuts of recent times.

     It stands up to the hype. Taiye Selasi writes with glittering poetic command, a sense of daring, and a deep emotional investment in the lives and transformations of her characters. There is a lot of crying in this novel, lots of corporeal observations of the pain inflicted by social experience and the ties of love. But the tears flow lightly through passages of gorgeous description and psychological investigation, leaving behind a powerful portrait of a broken family – 'a family without gravity' – in the throes of piecing itself back together."
— Diana Evans, The Guardian
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The Full Treatment

From: DIY Gadgets

"The news last week that HBO had optioned the works of William Faulkner for adaptation by Deadwood creator David Milch was treated in some press reports as incongruous. It shouldn’t have been. The mindless take on Deadwood is that it had a lot of swearing in it (which it did, but so what? — get over it, for cryin’ out loud!), yet viewers not mesmerized by the four-letter words noticed the Shakespearean and King Jamesian cadences of Milch’s dialogue from the start. Those influences are evident in Faulkner’s fiction, as well. (Also, let’s not forget we’re talking about a man who wrote a novel in which a woman is raped with a corncob — this isn’t Merchant-Ivory territory.) Milch and Faulkner is, in fact, an inspired pairing. [...]
     Television and the novel, while not exactly soul mates, have a lot more in common than the novel and theatrical film. Yet any novelist can testify that the second most common question he or she hears from readers (after 'Where do you get your ideas?') is 'Who would you like to see playing [main character] in the movie?' Fantasizing about the film version of a favorite book seems to be very common, but you have to wonder why. Rarely are a book’s most devoted admirers satisfied by the film, although when they are — as with the Harry Potter, Twilight and The Lord of the Rings franchises — popular enthusiasm can certainly be enormous.
     Far more often, however, the results are disappointing — let the recent adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go stand as a case in point. Much of a novel has to be cut to fit a 90- to 120-minute dramatization, and this can mean more than just the loss of supporting characters or scenes. Most movies conform to a three-act structure (some screenwriters will insist that it’s actually a four-act structure), a form with a proven ability to hold audiences’ interest through a single viewing. Novels, meant to be read over multiple sittings, have more freedom. Trimming a novel like Bleak House to fit the three-act format alters the fundamental shape of the work, often subtracting from the novel the very roominess and complication that made you love it in the first place.
     A television series, however, has the time to spread out and explore the byways and textures of a novel’s imagined world. Furthermore, while theatrical film is a medium in which the director reigns, in television, as Rushdie told the Observer, 'the writer is the primary creative artist. You have control in a way that you never have in the cinema. The Sopranos was David Chase, The West Wing was Aaron Sorkin.' "
— Laura Miller, Salon
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