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Joyce Carol Oates Apologizes
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Joyce Carol Oates has apologized to those who were upset after reading her short story "Landfill," which recently appeared in The New Yorker. The story is based on the tragic death of a real student and many were shocked at the realistic details used in the story. The story greatly upset the family of the victim and many felt that Oates' story was tactless at best, and perhaps even cruel.

"I'm certainly feeling very apologetic and deeply sorry that I inadvertently ... hurt the feelings of these people and just feel sorry about that," Oates said in an interview with The Times of Trenton. "Landfill," which was published in the Oct. 9 issue of The New Yorker, tells the story of Michigan State University student Hector Campos, Jr., who goes missing for weeks before his remains are found in a Michigan landfill.

The controversy arose after a retired professor at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) noticed similarities between Oates' story and an incident that rocked the Ewing campus last spring, in which TCNJ freshman John Fiocco, Jr., went missing and was found dead weeks later in a landfill in Bucks County, Pa. A few professors and students at TCNJ condemned Oates' use of the incident as inspiration for her fictional piece.

Regina Kenen, the professor who ignited the controversy, was so angered by the story that she wrote Oates an email and copied it to her dean and the college's president and provost. "It was basically that it was so close to the truth and that the family and the college and the students had gone through such trauma," Kenen, who teaches a seminar at TCNJ, said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. "It was the only case that I know about that someone went through the garbage chute. It could not do anything but bring back horrible memories."

In her email to Oates, Kenen said, "You so flimsily disguised the true College of New Jersey story upon which your fictionalized account is based, and used your imagination so cruelly, that it can only add to the overwhelming pain the [Fiocco] family has already suffered."

"I am very glad and honoured. I am very pleased," the Turkish writer told Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet newspaper when asked how he felt about winning the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.36 million) prize. "I will try to recover from this shock."

The Swedish Academy declared Pamuk the winner on a day when, to Turkey's fury, the French lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. In a what was seen as a test case for freedom of speech in Turkey, Pamuk was tried for insulting "Turkishness" after telling a Swiss paper last year that 1 million Armenians had died in Turkey during World War One and 30,000 Kurds had perished in recent decades. Though the court dismissed the charges on a technicality, other writers and journalists are still being prosecuted under the article and can face a jail sentence of up to three years.

"With all due respect to Orhan Pamuk, whose books I read and like, I believe his comments on the Armenian genocide have been influential in his winning this prize," said Suat Kiniklioglu, an Ankara-based political analyst. "There is a political dimension to all this. I do not believe he was chosen purely on the basis of his artistic capacity," Kiniklioglu said. Pamuk, 54, shot to fame with novels that explore Turkey's complex identity through its rich imperial past.

But his criticism of modern Turkey's failure to confront darker episodes of that past has turned him more recently into a symbol of free thought both for the literary world and for the European Union, which Ankara wants to join. "What I said is not an insult, it is the truth. But what if it is wrong? Right or wrong, do people not have the right to express their ideas peacefully?" Pamuk asked during the trial. EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn celebrated Pamuk's award as a triumph for free speech. "Today's Nobel Prize is good news for world literature, but also good news for artistic freedom and for freedom of expression," he said in a statement.

"I wanted to do a workplace comedy because my work has always been an enormous part of my life," she says. "As much as I loved Sex and the City, that was not my life, I couldn't even imagine writing that because I never, well, dated anybody."

"All I know about is going to work and how do you get along with the people at work." Fey's so into working, in fact, that despite being the mother of a year-old daughter, she briefly considered doing "30 Rock" and the popular "Weekend Update" segment on "Saturday Night Live." But motherhood has provided her with a "priority adjustment," and she decided against entering into full-fledged work-aholism.

Instead, she says, she's concentrating on "30 Rock" and is working on a draft of a new movie for Paramount as a followup to the successful "Mean Girls," the 2004 Lindsay Lohan movie that Fey wrote and co-starred in - meaning that even if "30 Rock" doesn't work out, she's likely to remain a comedy force to be reckoned with for some time.

"I am open to all offers if they are extremely lucrative," Fey says with a laugh.

Damon Lindelof: How does it feel to be leaving the relative safety of a self-contained crime drama [Crossing Jordan] (Jordan finds body, Jordan solves murder) to enter the fun world of serialization... in which many of the questions you pose will not be answered for many, many episodes? You had always wanted to take Jordan more in this direction, but were forced to abandon it by the network powers that be... is it sweet that the same network is now embracing stories with much longer arcs?

Tim Kring: It's very exciting to challenge myself in a new way after being confined by a "closed-ended" type of storytelling. Having had a long career though, I've gotten used to trying to reinvent myself over and over again. The strange thing is that I find myself coming full circle sometimes. When I first started writing TV movies, I was known as the "horror" guy, then the "thriller" guy, then the "teen comedy" guy, etc. But in reality, having just written a new episode of HEROES, the muscles used in facing a blank page are remarkably similar no matter what genre you're in. I still struggle over crafting a scene one line at a time.

And I still look for truth and reality in every emotion. Where it is really a different animal is in the writers' room ? the breaking of the stories. It has to be much more diligently planned out because every beat of the story has a domino effect. Pulling one thread can really make the whole house of cards come crashing down. It is certainly "interesting" (read "sweet") that the network is now embracing the very type of storytelling that was off limits less than two years ago.

"It is something good for Turkey," said Mr. Dink, though he faces the prospect of three years in jail. "It is good for the dynamism. There is a strong movement from inside, and I can say for the first time we are seeing a real democratic movement."

*****

[P]eople like Mr. Dink and Ms. [Elif] Shafak argue that the legal challenges may be backfiring, under the glare not only of Europe but also among Turks themselves, so that in their view, a law used to stifle debate may be encouraging it.

Judges have not hesitated to throw out cases they deem without merit. While there have been convictions under Article 301, no one has actually gone to jail. And the very government that drafted the law now says it needs to be changed, though it is not clear exactly how or when.

During Ms. Shafak?s case, she received phone calls from two of the most powerful people in Turkey: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who himself had been jailed briefly years ago under the old version of the law, and his foreign minister, Abdullah Gul. Her interpretation is that nationalist groups are filing a growing number of cases under Article 301 "not because nothing has been changing here in Turkey but because things are changing."

The Los Angeles Daily News has launched valleynews.com - a new citizen journalism site covering 40 city neighbourhoods.

Valleynews is a series of interlinked sites that serve the San Fernando Valley, Burbank, Glendale, Santa Clarita and Antelope Valley areas with neighbourhood specific pages that allow users to upload photos, stories, events, blog and search for information.

The Daily News - part of the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, which runs half-a-dozen dailies in the city and surrounding area - is trying to tap in to some of the 17.5 million people in the LA news market by engaging them in neighbourhood affairs.

The new service searches hundreds of different news sources to answer a user's query. The exact number of sources is confidential.

Results are presented in similar fashion to a Google News search, with "related" articles about the same event grouped together. Free and charged-for articles are displayed side by side.

With pages from commercial websites, the cost of viewing them is also shown. Google says search results are based on relevance, not partnerships with companies.

Users can also view articles using a timeline that displays key dates associated with a story.

So the first Moon landing would highlight 1969 as a key date, but also identify other years when lunar landings took place or when the topic was in the news.