January 31, 2014

"I for one welcome our new insect overlords . . ."


The Grub Street writing center has gone live with its new website – slicker, more up-to-date, more corporate-looking. There’s a new face, too, among their Board of Directors; make sure you read her bio all the way to the end:

Catch that last line? “She and her husband, Scott Nathan, and their two children live in Boston (in the literary cultural district)”. Now, according to the report that was published in the Boston Globe, the literary cultural district’s proponents “don’t know exactly where its borders will lie.” That’s because it’s going to take a couple of years and thousands of taxpayer bucks just to . . . come up with the map. But wherever the district might eventually land, someone on the Board of the coalition’s flagship organization already knows that it includes their home address! Perhaps their nest is built on a well-established literary landmark that’s a shoo-in for the walking tour, or maybe it’s that attitude of imperial privilege spilling over from Ms DeBonis’s work at Google, where the goal is a private monopoly over digital access to every book ever.

Maybe I’m being unfair – she and her husband, hedge fund manager Scott Nathan of the billion-dollar Baupost Group, do sit on an awful lot of local boards and donate tons and tons and tons of dollars to all sorts of worthy causes – including even Grub Street itself, where they (along with six other wealthy members of the Grub Street board of directors) belong to the “Patrons” circle of $5OOO-$9999 givers. So when it comes to the virgin territory of the Literary Cultural District, maybe it’s just a little droit du seigneur to go with all that noblesse oblige . . . 


More on the Literary Cultural District initiative & Boston's so-called "literary renaissance":