Egocentrism

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Brookline, MA, United States
I'll post rants here, and musings; articles and thoughts about articles. I'll keep it quite complex and yet astoundingly simple: whatever it is I am interested in at any given moment.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Are Writers Really Underappreciated? or "Just" a Newscycle Casualty?

There was an historic election going on, but Michael Crichton's early and surprising death got very little press coverage last week, which makes me wonder:

Does being a massively popular writer and novelist, and helping to create nothing less than two of the great popular culture phenomena of the 1990s (ER and Jurassic Park) mean nothing? Or did Crichton's late-career right-wing preposterousity knock him out of the public's eye? I hope that Stephen King lives a long and productive life, but don't we think more will be made of King's legacy when he dies? Or was Crichton just not that good? Or not that productive?

The other option, of course, is that the lack of attention Crichton's death received is emblematic of the phenomenon of being swallowed up in a newscycle that only has so much room, especially one as gargantuan as Obama's election to the Presidency, coupled with gazillions of other races that also mattered.

Hmmm.

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