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Your New BEAU: The Aristocracy of the Award Givers

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

The scandal is all over the news. The Pulitzer Board did not award a prize for fiction this year. For the first time in 35 years.

Well, this certainly is unexpected news. You would think, with the abundance of fiction oriented in a year, and with a jury that’s already weeded the pool down to three extraordinary candidates, “no award” should not be an option.

The three novels passed over by the Board are David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! and Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams.

There’s been some backlash. Fiction writer Jane Smiley (1992 Fiction Pulitzer Prize winner for A Thousand Acres) can’t believe there wasn’t a worthy book. Fiction Juror Susan Larson has expressed some anger that a choice could not be made after all of the work (reading up and weeding down the entrants) she and her two fellow jurors, Maureen Corrigan and Michael Cunningham, did.

And so we are left somewhat at a loss. And who is to blame? Who makes these kinds of decisions anyway?

Well, I always like to know just who the authority in any matter is and just what they’re credentials are, so I did a little googling to learn just how the Pulitzer Prize really works and how makes the decisions on this stuff. Here’s what I found.

The short version: There are the entrants, submitted for consideration by artists, authors, papers and publishers for the price of $50. There are the Pulitzer jurors, who slog through all of the entrants and select a handful of finalists, and there are the Pulitzer board members, who deliberate over the finalists and choose the 21 winners. 20 of the winners receive $10,000 dollars each, and one winner (the Public Service award in the Journalism category) receives a gold medal.

Each year, jurors (“The jurors are distinguished in their fields and include past Pulitzer winners.” Rich Oppel) are chosen and divided into groups of 3-7 people and assigned to one of the 21 categories.  The jurors will spend anywhere from a few days to a few months (depending upon the category) to select their finalists to submit to the Board. The Board, sequestered and sworn to utter secrecy, keeping all debate behind closed doors, deliberate and decide upon the most worthy ones.  One of their options, should they be unable to reach a majority decision, is to decide upon “no award.”

And the question of who the board members and jurors are? Who chooses them? Well, not much to be found on that, but the Prizes are based at Columbia University and the president of the University presides over the Board. So, there’s your answer? Here’s a bit more info on service terms for board members and jurors.

So, are you mad about this year’s Board’s indecision?

Well, it has been 35 years since a “no award” decision has afflicted us. Since then, we have invented the internet. And the Huffington Post wants to award the Prize by popular vote, so go here and weigh in.

If the silly Board can’t decide, then we’ll just have to decide for them!

 

Your New Beau.

Your New BEAU: When the Internet Explodes

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

 

In my first blog post, I made a [partially] joking reference to the day when “the internet explodes.”

“Besides, I always wonder about how the ever-growing ether of the internet has given rise to this mass transfer of our whole lives into an intangible sphere, and what happens when the internet just explodes? Where do our whole internet lives go? This is why I love paper. Remember when everyone stocked up on food and supplies in fear of Y2K? That was funny.”  (January 13, 2012)

Well, I’m not the only one who is terrified by the notion of “the cloud” and, quite literally, a virtual reality. I love Flavorwire’s interesting tidbits and there I came across the endeavor of one Brewster Kahle. Kahle has put over $3 million dollars into creating The Physical Archive of the Internet Archive. You can read the full article on the Physical Archive in the NYTimes here

Kahle wants to collect one copy of every book from the twentieth century—a huge endeavor! When the internet apocalypse comes, Kahle hopes to be ready. As you can read in the Times, some critics think the idea is lame; I mean, what could ever possibly happen to the internet? We know exactly what we’re doing with all of our technology, so that just won’t happen!

Well, to each her or his own, but everything in this world is ephemeral. Yes, this goes for the bound book and the brilliance of the computer and the internet. One day, all will fade (sorry to be such a downer). I suppose it’s just a matter of what will go first. Will the cord of the interwebs be cut or will the world’s largest book-bonfire occur first? Hmm, let’s see, archeologists can find texts written thousands of years ago…maybe the ancient Greeks had the internet too and there’s just no record of it because the internet is its own record of itself…yeah, okay, definitely not.

But seriously, why rain on Kahle’s parade? He’s really just making the world’s largest and most comprehensive time capsule. I like the idea (of course). One day all will fade, but we can try to preserve these things for as long as we can, you know, for posterity.  Just think, Euripides is believed to have written over 90 plays, and we only have 18 of them in full. I know a number of frustrated classicists who bewail this fact. Maybe someday people will want to read what we wrote. Isn’t that what most authors like to think? Certainly James Joyce did:

“Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara…When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…” [Ulysses])

So, really, what do you think would happen if the internet died? Here are some funnies depicting “If the internet disappeared today.”

I mean, really? Just hypothetically. I’m really not a crazy internet fatalist (yea, I think I just made that term up now).

Your New Beau.

BEAUstie Boy – Gary Shapiro, You Changed My Life

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

It’s me, the other intern, and the only boy Beaufort has seen for many many internship moons.  It only took a few hours for the past interns, yet seven weeks to the day later here I am also tossing my hat into the blogosphere.  I can blame it on all the amazing project opportunities that have gotten thrown my way but in reality we all know that I have continually failed to come up with a compelling topic and a crafty moniker (which we definitely now know that I have still failed to do…Beaustie Boy? Really?)  Just when I thought, “Aha, I’m ready to write my blog about Pulitzer Book predictions and book lists!” Word Press blacked out before I could say “The Marriage Plot.”

One of the daily tasks that I have been performing for the past month and change is to track marketing updates for most of our authors.  One name that floods into my inbox morning after morning is Gary Shapiro, CEO of CEA (hehe).  For weeks now I have been perusing and filing away news articles Gary has written about SOPA and PIPA, which at first simply had my Spanish speaking mind thinking of soups and pipes.  After about 50 more articles over the course of a month I figured I should know what I was reading about and, evidently, what everyone else was talking about.

The Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act have elicited some strong responses from Senators and Congressmen to bloggers and your everyday Google searcher.  On Wednesday, major websites like Wikipedia and Word Press shut their digital doors.  Google even prompted visitors with a petition to send to Congress.  The day of darkness forced everyone to imagine a world without Internet (or a trip down memory lane to the pre-Apple days).  While most are against intellectual property theft and multimedia piracy, both acts just do not provide enough protection against false accusations with potential for abuse of the legislation to become out of control.  In one of his most recent articles for Fox, Gary even declares victory for the American people, whose collective voice was too resounding to ignore.  Essentially, we all told Congress to put that in their PIPA and smoke it.

Now that most of us are breathing a collective sigh of relief, we undoubtedly have spent some since this bill hit the floor thinking about how the Internet has become a crutch for contemporary society.  Increase of social networking has also increased our desire for anonymity and arguably decreased our interpersonal social networking.  I’m not saying we should regress to the days of carrier pigeons – but remember when we didn’t text?  Remember I invited you to my birthday over the phone instead of a Facebook event?  Now thanks to the Internet, I no longer have to trek down to Tompkins Square Park to check out my books from the library I can just get them online and have them delivered to my Kindle in seconds! Cool, but sad.  The Internet has proven how malleable we are by consistently changing the way we communicate with each other and by the toll it is has taken on many businesses, not just publishing.

For now, the Internet still remains as powerful as the public chooses to make it.  We have avoided possibly catastrophic consequences by preventing SOPA and PIPA.  Instead of wiping our brows and muttering thanks to the Congress gods before moving on to the next best thing, we should start remembering how we survived without the Internet in ye olde days.  I know I still go to the library, still buy physical books, and still call you to invite you to my birthday party.

George may have been a few decades off, but maybe it’s a matter of time until Big Brother really is watching you.

Just a thought, albeit a creepy one.