Two from the “They didn’t really say that, did they?” department:
- “Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.”
That’s Ruth Franklin, on Michael Chabon’s latest novel1, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Yet, inexplicably, it’s a positive review. Imagine what that Chabon could accomplish if he’d just write serious fiction for a change!
- “Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project,” Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year.
And that’s from the New York Times2, on a new adaptation of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. So is that the highest goal of art nowadays? To carry the white audience?
1 Via Kaleidotrope #2 contributor Daniel Ausema
2 Via Ed Champion.