Month: October 2000

THE ‘OTHER’ ONLINE PUBLISHING

Negotiating book rights is “a time- and labor-consuming, long winded, costly and inefficient business; heavy manuscripts have to be expensively shipped often over long distances, and there is a huge amount of copying, and faxing and phoning at international rates, with often only a comparatively small reward. Why not, indeed, work it all out online: post catalogues, properties, partial manuscripts on the Web, e-mail pitch letters and offers, conduct auctions? – Publishers Weekly

RESCUING MARTHA GRAHAM

Finally, maybe a plan to rescue the Martha Graham Dance Company, which went out of business in May. The company “is poised to reopen in temporary quarters as soon as January with a fresh infusion of private contributions and a promise of a $750,000 capital grant from the state senator from its home district. The state contribution comes with strings; the dance center cannot get the money unless it raises $750,000 in private donations for operating expenses. – New York Times

TWO APPROACHES TO WRITING A LIFE STORY

  • Recent biographies of John Updike and Saul Bellow take two very different approaches to their subjects. James Atlas “meditates on Bellow’s controversial role as a public intellectual, maintaining a remarkable level of objectivity,” while “William H. Pritchard, on the other hand, shies away from the personal details of Updike’s life, openly deriding ‘talk show revelations and displays’. He argues that ‘such events pale in interest when put next to [Updike’s] writings, products of all those hours sitting at the desk with pencil or typewriter or computer’.” – Chronicle of Higher Education

A MATTER OF LABELS?

“Article after article about this most vilified and most lauded pasty-faced pimply ‘rapper of the year’ have made the same error, referring to Eminem as a ‘white rapper’ too many times to list here. A crossover artist. Crossing over from what? While we should all pay attention to the vile lyrics of Eminem’s work, we should also pay close attention to the equally vile way the media have focused so much on this one offensive rapper out of hundreds, constantly reminding the public of his whiteness.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)

SEARCHING FOR SHOSTAKOVICH

The debate over Shostakovich’s reputation raged on at this weekend’s international Shostakovich symposium in Glasgow, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the composer’s death. A memoir supposedly dictated by the composer himself and smuggled out to the west has “purportedly revealed the composer to have been a secret dissident through Stalin’s reign of terror, and to have encoded that dissidence within his music. The essence of the argument has always been this: one camp thinks it’s authentic, the other believes it to be a monstrous fraud.” – The Herald (Scotland)

RE-EVALUATING LEONARD BERNSTEIN (AGAIN)

It’s been ten years “since chain-smoking, emphysema and pleural tumors ended that neck-and-neck race between Bernstein and “the odds,” he’s still – in a strange way – on the scene, though without his provocative politics, podium gyrations, capes and cigarette holders. So can we finally get to the truth behind the best-documented musician in Western Civilization?” – Philadelphia Inquirer

POWER BROKER

“His name is Costa Pilavachi, and he is president of the Decca Music Group in London. At 49, he happens to be just about the most powerful person in the classical-music business – the man who produces not only Bartoli’s albums but those of Luciano Pavarotti, Renée Fleming, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Andrea Bocelli and Jessye Norman.” – Toronto Star

PLAY IS TOO HOT FOR SINGAPORE

Singapore’s Public Entertainment Licensing Unit has turned down a permit to stage a play. “Written by Indian playwright Elangovan, the play is about an Indian-Muslim woman’s experiences of marital violence and rape. Staged three times in Tamil in 1998 and last year, it had triggered strong protests from some members of the Indian-Muslim community who thought it blasphemous and some religious groups wanted it banned.” – The Straits Times (Singapore)