“Those of us who love dance are sometimes haunted by the memory of a particular face on stage. What force is it that, without close-ups to simulate intimacy or words to aid communication, imprints the dancers’ personalities into our consciousness? Do the thousands of hours of sweat and self-criticism that mold the dancer’s body also mold the face? Or is there an essential presence that is inborn? One thing sure is that the charismatic dance face is not achieved through a deliberate effort but mysteriously springs from some deep connection between mind and body.” The New York Times 01/13/02
Month: January 2002
TURNING POINTE
TURNING POINTE: “The Association of Blacks in Dance meets later this month in Brooklyn. The association is a service organization that has helped bring dance by black choreographers and performers to new public prominence in the 15 years since its formation. Founded by three savvy matriarchs of black American modern dance, the association faces a turning point typical in the histories of successful grass-roots organizations.” The New York Times 01/13/02
THE NEW DANCE THEATRE OF HARLEM
Dance Theatre of Harlem has a new name: “Arthut Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem.” “And no one was more surprised by the announcement than Mitchell, artistic director and founder of the company.” Los Angeles Times 01/13/02
PHILADELPHIA – DANCE MAGNET?
“With more than two dozen dance companies, Philadelphia has become a dance magnet, drawing performers from other states and building a reputation as one of the top five dance cities in the country. Yet many people in the area are not aware of this.” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/11/02
DANCE MAKES A SOFT LANDING IN SF
A little more than two years ago, at the height of the Dotcom real estate craze in the Bay Area, The San Francisco Dance Center found out it had to find a new home. The Center is “a major artery if not the pulsing heart of the Bay Area dance scene, offering more than 400 classes to 8,000 adult students a month. Much like the larger-scale Steps on Broadway in Manhattan, SFDC brings together aspiring young choreographers, established dance figures and weekend amateurs in drop-in sessions on everything from jazz to flamenco.” Now the Center has a brand new home and some big challenges in trying to support itself in a new space. San Francisco Examiner 01/07/02
NEW NEW NEW
“True to its founding fathers, George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, New York City Ballet remains the foremost creative ballet troupe in the world. No other classical dance company presents as many new works. One reason is the number of ballets produced by the Diamond Project festivals in the last 10 years with 6 to 12 choreographers commissioned at a time. More important, the company has developed choreographers within its ranks.” The New York Times 01/08/02
BUILDING A DANCE COMPANY
“Over the last 15 years, fed by the elegant choreography of its artistic director José Mateo’s Ballet Theater has cultivated a distinctive ballet style, a critically acclaimed repertory of original work, a school and 20-member company. With performances of this season’s Nutcracker, which ended on Sunday, the troupe has opened this erudite Cambridge’s first home for professional ballet.” The New York Times 01/01/02
Issues: January 2002
Thursday January 31
ART & MORALITY: Recently, a Canadian critic blasted a production of Richard Strauss’s Salome, and seemed to be as upset with the content of the opera as with the director’s vision. The controversy brings up an interesting conumdrum for critics: since art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, shouldn’t critics be allowed to dislike art that offends modern sensibilities? “You can’t just denounce a play because you dislike its characters and are disappointed that they aren’t being punished for their crimes. Or can you?” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 01/31/02
HOW ARTISTS MAKE A LIVING: The Urban Institute has announced plans to study the support structure for artists in nine major American cities. According to the Institute, there has never been a scientific investigation into what types and amounts of support are available to assist artists, and the information found in the study will be used to compile a national database for artist use. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 01/31/02
SLOW TALKING: Does the ease of e-mail and instant messaging and cell phones degrade our ability to communicate eloquently? “I have witnessed a manifest decline in the grammar, literary style, and civility of communication. People are less likely these days to stroll down the hall or across campus to converse. Our conversations, thought patterns, and institutional clockspeed are increasingly shaped to fit the imperatives of technology. It is time to consider the possibility that—for the most part—communication ought to be somewhat slower, more difficult, and more expensive than it is now.” Utne Reader 01/30/02
Wednesday January 30
NEW NEA CHIEF DEAD: Michael Hammond, who became the chairman of America’s National Endowment for the Arts only a week ago, was found dead in Washington Tuesday. “Hammond, 69, a composer and former dean of Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, had told his staff on Monday that he was sick, and stayed home that day. Monday night he attended a dinner and cocktail party at the Shakespeare Theatre but left halfway through. When Hammond didn’t show up for meetings Tuesday morning, several members of the staff went to the house he had borrowed in the American University Park neighborhood. When no one answered the door, they called the police.” Washington Post 01/30/02
- ACCOMPLISHED ADVOCATE: “He was still in the process of charting a course for the federal arts agency. But he had made it known that getting children interested in the arts early in life and building a wider audience for the arts among the general public were among his top interests.” Dallas Morning News 01/30/02
LANGUAGE OF ART AND SCIENCE: Science, like art, helps explain the world around us. And yet the language of science, the words used to explain it, are often not easy to understand. Likewise, art has not often helped us to learn about science. But there are signs that art is taking new interest in expressions of science. National Post (Canada) 01/30/02
ARTS LOSSES SINCE 9-11: The numbers are starting to come in for arts losses since September 11. “Nearly $30 million was lost between September 11 and October 31, based on 419 responses from arts groups in the five New York City boroughs. Box office income at the reporting institutions was down $11.6 million in that period, and they received $3 million less than anticipated from foundations.” Village Voice 01/29/02
BETTING ON BELFAST: What city will be chosen Europe’s Capital of Culture for 2008? Of the 13 cities in the running, Belfast is the oddsmakers’ favorite “because of its venues, the reputation of its council, but above all because Prime Minister Tony Blair stands most to gain politically by selecting it.” The Guardian (UK) 01/30/02
ARGENTINE CRISIS HITS THE ARTS: “Argentina’s artists and institutions learned long ago to live with small budgets. During the last few years the State has barely been able to keep its museums open, with most of the shows underwritten by foreign institutions, embassies and corporate sponsors. But devaluation and its concomitant loss of revenue, along with decreased consumption, seems certain to affect the privatised utilities’ support of the arts.” The Art Newspaper 01/30/02
Tuesday January 29
THE LINCOLN CENTRE MESS: “Lincoln Center is a community in deep distress, riven by conflict over a grandiose $1 billion redevelopment plan that was supposed to repair its deteriorating buildings and bring the cultural jewel of New York into the twenty-first century. But instead of uniting the center’s constituent arts organizations behind a common goal, the project has pitted them against one another in open warfare more reminiscent of the shoot-out at the OK Corral than of a night at the opera.” New York Magazine 01/28/02
SO NO ARRESTING SALLY MANN, GOT IT? “Massachusetts’ highest court has overturned the child pornography conviction of an art student who photographed a 15-year-old girl with her breasts exposed. The Supreme Judicial Court said Monday that John C. Bean, who was taking courses at the Worcester Art Museum, ‘had no lascivious intent’ and the pictures were ‘neither obscene nor pornographic.’ A judge had sentenced Bean to six months’ probation on a charge of ‘posing a child in the nude.’ Bean also faced having to register as a sex offender.” Nando Times (AP) 01/28/02
Monday January 28
ARTIST SUES CATHOLICS: A California artist is suing the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and its president for $100 million for comments the group made in protesting an art exhibition in Napa. The Catholic League had protested Catalan artist Antoni Miralda’s exhibit of the pope, some nuns and Fidel Castro defecating. Catholic League president derided the exhibit and asked: “Now I get it: To show his appreciation of Mother Earth, Miralda had to show the pope and nuns defecating. But why couldn’t he have chosen the Lone Ranger and Tonto instead? Or better yet, just Tonto and a few of his Indian buddies?” Jon Howard, a part Cherokee artist who lives in Santa Rosa is suing, claiming the remarks were libelous. San Francisco Chronicle 01/25/02
- Previously: PROTESTING A DEFECATING POPE: An exhibition at the Copia Museum in California features “defecating ceramic figurines of the pope, nuns and angels.” Catholic groups are protesting. The museum says the figures are “caganers” or “figurines are part of Spain’s Catalonian peasant tradition dating back to the 18th century.” But a Catholic spokesman says: “When it’s degrading, everybody knows it except the spin doctors who run the museums.” Nando Times (AP) 01/06/02
IS OXFORD FALLING BEHIND? Oxford is one of the world’s great universities. It is “a byword for Britain’s ancient scholarly traditions and still one of the country’s best-known cultural symbols, finds itself having to prove that it has an equally meaningful future – or else risk the fate described by a onetime professor of economics here, of ‘sliding gradually into mediocrity’. Unthinkable as it might once have been, too, Oxford has seen its academic reputation successfully challenged by other British institutions of higher learning that, until recently, were not even considered fully fledged universities.” Chronicle of Higher Education 01/25/02
Sunday January 27
ARTISTIC OUTPOURING: “Immediately after Sept. 11, thousands of people in New York and around the world set out to capture the meaning of those events through artistic expression. In the intervening months, thousands more have joined the effort, resulting in what may turn out to be the largest creative response in history to a single day’s event. Poetry, prose, dance, architecture, photography, soundscapes, TV, popular music, theatre, comic books, film, painting and sculpture: They have all grappled with the attacks and their aftermath, in the process provoking questions about the nature of art, its practical usefulness, and the legitimacy of artistic aspirations by non-artists.” But while such art may be therapeutic, is it good? “With art that is made in response to an immediate situation, it is rare that that kind of work is able to go beyond commemorating or documenting in the most straightforward manner.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/26/02
- RUSH TO MEMORY: Why rush to produce memorials for the events of September 11? There are so many proposals and ideas. “This is partly because America’s hurry-up, need-it-now culture can’t spare the time to let consensus develop organically. We’re too impatient to let historical perspective determine what is sufficiently important to cast in bronze. Still we insist on public memorials, even though interest-group politics complicates the process considerably. No public monument can satisfy everyone, but today, it seems, it’s difficult for a monument to satisfy anyone.” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/27/02
GAY FUND PLAYS IT STRAIGHT: Colorado Springs is not exactly a tolerant place for gays and lesbians (the city is famous for an anti-gay rights initiative passed in the early 1990s). But today Colorado Springs is home to the Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado, which “since its inception in 1997 has become part of the fourth-largest foundation in Colorado. It has awarded more than $7.3 million, including $2.9 million to arts and culture organizations.” The fund has an agenda – it “provides money only to nongay-specific organizations and productions.” Denver Post 01/27/02
THE GREAT VANILLA MIDDLE: How’s this for a definition of the middle class – “pacific, tolerant, secular, preferring prudence and profits to glory, conscious of itself as a group and, crucially, inward-looking to the point of neurosis.” A new book charts how “throughout the 19th century, this minority – just 12 per cent of western populations – grew in influence until it ruled cultural and political life. ‘The lower orders can feel but not speak, the aristocracy can speak but has nothing to say; only the bourgeoisie interpret and express the national will,’ the French critic Emile Faguet wrote in 1890. What was it like to belong to this elite?” Financial Times 01/25/02
Friday January 25
MARKERS: What is an appropriate memorial for the destruction of the World Trade Center? New York is full of memorials to other tragedies. “Those commemorating large-scale tragedy assume an astonishing variety of forms, from a 148-foot Doric column to a pocketful of blackened dimes and nickels. But each embodies the notion that even the most appalling catastrophe is part of a living continuum.” The New York Times 01/25/02
- INSTA-ART: A flood of new artwork coming out responds to the events of September 11. But “can good art can really be summoned up on demand like that, even in response to cataclysm?” Some of the best, most enduring artistic responses to tragedy haven’t appeared until years after the events. Public Arts 01/24/02
MADE TO ORDER: This year’s Adelaide Festival is showing films. But unlike most festivals that collect up films to showcase, Adelaide has commissioned artists to make movies just for the festival. The Age (Melbourne) 01/25/02
Thursday January 24
AT THE MERCY OF THE DONOR LIST: The collapse of Houston-based Enron Corporation has sent shock waves through Wall Street and Washington, and launched a whole new slew of late-night TV jokes. But the wholesale disappearance of such a massive company is having a potentially devastating effect on Houston’s already shaky arts scene. Replacing a donor who regularly drops tens of thousands of dollars on local ballets, symphonies, and playhouses is a herculean task. Andante 01/24/02
HELPING MANHATTAN ARTISTS: The Andy Warhol Foundation has given $600,000 to help artists in Lower Manhattan. “The grants of $15,000 to $25,000 will go to 29 small to midsize visual arts organizations in Lower Manhattan that have financial hardships. ‘We really feel strongly that these groups are just vital to the city’.” The New York Times 01/24/02
Wednesday January 23
TAKING A NATIONAL VIEW: The Scottish Arts Council’s new chairman has a reputation for being tough. He’s set himself a big task. “The arts council must match the significance of the circumstances. It’s got to take a national view, to lift its head from administrative purposes and say: ‘Look what can we do to push Scotland on’. It has to make far more impact, so it’s got to be riskier as well.” The Scotsman 01/23/02
Monday January 21
ENGLISH AS AN ENCROACHING LANGUAGE: English is turning up more and more in German speech and writing. “The unhostile takeover of English in trade journals, at conventions and in scientists’ and economists’ ‘speechlessness’ with regard to German have fostered a dilution of democratic discourse.” Will the Germans follow the French and set up a national council to “protect” German from the encroachment of English? Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 01/21/02
Sunday January 20
OBVIOUSLY A SOCIALIST-ELITIST PLOT: “As American schools struggle to beef up test scores and lift attendance and graduation rates, millions of dollars are being spent to send squadrons of unlikely heroes — musicians, dancers, poets and painters — into classrooms. Minnesota is helping to lead this massive educational experiment, even as critics point out that no concrete evidence supports this approach as either cost-effective or beneficial to children.” Minneapolis Star Tribune 01/20/02
RANKING THE EGGHEADS: A new book purports to examine the top intellectuals in America, quantifying their importance largely by how widespread their reputation is. A high number of Lexis-Nexis hits counts for more than a substantive idea, making for a predictably controversial list. Is Dinesh D’Souza washed up? Was Lionel Trilling overrated? And what the hell is Sidney Blumenthal doing anywhere near a list of intellectuals? The New York Times 01/19/02 (one-time registration required for access)
Friday January 18
REINSTATING AN OLD ART FORM: Soviet communists, in their zeal to stamp out religious influences, stripped their nation’s churches. Almost the first things to go were the bells: they were melted down to make power cables and tractor parts. Now, with a resurgence of religion, there’s a demand for replacements. So Russian metal-workers are trying to relearn the old art of casting bells. The Moscow Times (AP) 01/18/02
Thursday January 17
BAD SIGN FOR THE THEATRE? “In a new survey of 1,002 adults ages 18 and older, the Gallup Organization found that the overwhelming majority of Americans prefer home-based activities to a night on the town. In fact, only 10 percent said they’d go out.” Christian Science Monitor 01/16/02
THE AESTHETICS OF ART: Artists tend to be repelled by aesthetics, for a number of reasons. Many are suspicious that too much analyzing of their art will harm their creativity; it will encourage them to develop their rational ego at the expense of their creative unconscious. Or they suspect that aesthetic analysis will have no effect on them, that thinking about art in this way is simply useless. Aesthetics-online 01/02
Wednesday January 16
GERMANY’S CULTURAL STATESMAN: “The Goethe Institute is responsible for Germany’s cultural policies on the international front. And lately the institute has not enjoyed many opportunities for relaxed cheerfulness – though perhaps this is about to change” as a new president is chosen. “The job of president of the Goethe Institute has the cachet of statesmanship – after all, this most prestigious instrument of Germany’s foreign cultural policy has roughly 3,500 employees in 128 cultural institutes in 76 countries, and the presidency is an internationally visible position. But it is also an almost volunteer position, which is why other candidates of retirement age, who prefer better remuneration in their declining years, have indicated their lack of interest.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 01/16/02
NY CUTTING BACK CULTURAL SPENDING: New York’s cultural institutions are preparing for big cutbacks in funding from the city. City departments have been asked to plan for budget cutbacks of 25 percent. “Since no one wants to go back to the days when they didn’t paint the bridges, cultural projects will be at the bottom of the list. And when they get to the bottom of the list, there’s going to be nothing left.” The New York Times 01/16/02
WHO WILL HEAD NYT SUNDAY ARTS? Who will succeed John Rockwell as editor of the New York Times Sunday arts section? “Since last month, the name of Kurt Andersen has landed on lists of those believed to have spoken with [executive editor] Howell Raines about the job. But Andersen — former editor of New York magazine, co-founder of Inside.com and host of an arts program on National Public Radio — said he’s had no talks and doesn’t want the job.” Raines is believed to want the section to take on more popular culture. New York Daily News 01/15/02
- Previously: NYT CHANGING ARTS COVERAGE? New York Times Arts & Leisure editor John Rockwell has announced he’s stepping down from the job. Rockwell says Howell Raines, the Times new editor, wants to change the paper’s cultural coverage. “I found out Howell Raines wanted to take this section in a new direction – which, I might add, is perfectly within his rights as executive editor. Howell wants to take it more in a populist direction, more popular culture’.” New York Observer 12/19/01
Tuesday January 15
MAYOR LEAVES ART TO CRITICS: New York’s Jewish Museum is opening a show in March that looks at the growing artistic use of symbols from the Nazi era. But while religious leaders are bound to protest, don’t look for coercion from the city’s new mayor Unlike previous mayor Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg plans to stay out of debates over art: “I am opposed to government censorship of any kind. I don’t think the government should be in the business of telling museums what is art or what they should exhibit.” The New York Times 01/14/02
THE EDUCATION PRESIDENT: That’s what George Bush wants to be. “This year’s reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is widely regarded as the most ambitious federal overhaul of public schools since the 1960s. States will now test all students annually from third to eighth grade, while launching a federally guided drive for universal literacy among schoolchildren. Perhaps more strikingly, a political party that once called for the abolition of the Education Department has radically enhanced the federal presence in public schools. After repeating the mantra of local control and states’ rights for a generation, the GOP now intrudes on both. What has happened?” The Nation 01/14/02
REDUCED FOR NOISE: The Sydney Fringe Festival begins this week. There are 73 events in the 16-day program, “yet this year’s Fringe has suffered a massive budget set-back” because the “noise police” have clamped down on one of the more popular large events. Sydney Morning Herald 01/15/02
Monday January 14
WE LOVE L.A.: While many arts groups across America have had tough times since September 11 (falling attendance, donations and revenues, causing layoffs and a scaling back of activity) Los Angeles arts groups seem to have done fine. “Their income for 2001 may be flat or down slightly, but top officials say they know of no layoffs at major Southern California cultural organizations and only a few cancellations in this year’s schedules.” Los Angeles Times 01/14/02
EDUCATION SPENDING CONTINUES TO RISE: As the economy has slowed in the US, so has spending on higher education. A survey of states says that appropriations for higher education are up this year by 4.6 percent, the “smallest such increase in five years.” Still, adjusted for inflation, state spending on higher education rose by 2.7 percent going into 2001-2. Chronicle of Higher Education 01/14/02
Friday January 11
THE WHY’S WHY OF SMART: Even people who made the “top intellectual” list are skeptical about it. After all, why consider Thomas Friedman but not Maureen Dowd? Why say you don’t count novelists (who have an iffy claim on intellectual status anyway) if you then include Toni Morrison and Aldous Huxley? The New Republic 12/31/01
- WHAT’S IT TAKE? “Let us now stipulate that it is a goddamned outrage that [your name here] and/or [your friends’ names here] were not included, and that [your enemies’ names here] were. Restitution can and must be sought in the courts.” Slate 01/07/02
- Previously: WHO’S WHO OF SMART: A new book attempts to determine who America’s leading intellectuals are by counting media mentions. Dumb methodology but great fun. “The top public intellectual by media mentions in the last five years turns out to be Henry Kissinger, followed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Sidney Blumenthal comes in seventh, which of course undermines the entire enterprise.” New York Observer 01/02/02
Thursday January 10
CANADA’S FAILING ARTS: A Canada Council report studying Canada’s largest arts institutions comes to a depressing conclusion: “that the big arts groups have reached the limits of their growth in a society that increasingly can find no more public nor private money to pay for them.” Attendance is static or falling, public funding has dropped, and private fundraising hasn’t kept up. “Do we need the debt-laden Toronto Symphony? Should we tell the Stratford Festival that, with a $2-million surplus to its credit, it no longer requires public subsidy? Will the National Ballet still be worthy of the name when it has only 35 dancers and never tours?” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/10/02
ARTS CLUB RAIDED: New York’s venerable 104-year-old National Arts Club was raided by police last Friday. Police “arrived at the crack of dawn with a search warrant and orders to raid the club’s administrative offices as part of an investigation into possible grand larceny and tax evasion. The club has been rocked by controversies in recent years, and some members fear that “some of the club’s sizable art collection, which the 1997 audit said had an appraised value of $4.9 million, could be sacrificed to pay for the club’s legal bills.” New York Observer 01/09/02
CAUGHT IN THE CULTURE WAR: Performance artist William Pope.L was one of two artists whose grants from the National Endowment for the Arts were held up by the then acting head of the NEA last month. Though money was later approved for a production of Tony Kushner’s Kabul play was later approved, Pope.L’s grant has not been released. Says the artist: “The NEA has an institutional responsibility not to bring besmirchment to or blacken, if I may, their character by valuing work that can possibly bring criticism on them. But in limiting themselves, they encourage a particular way of looking at American culture, don’t they?” Village Voice 01/09/02
Wednesday January 9
DECLINE IN ARTS FUNDING FROM UK LOTTERY? The arts’ tremendous building boom in the UK in the past seven years has been largely the result of big slugs of cash from the National Lottery. But the lottery’s take in the past six months is down five percent, falling to £668 million for the half year, down from £708 million in a similar period the year before. The arts stand to get about 16 percent of the total, and this is the third year in a row that lottery revenues are declining. The Art Newspaper 01/08/02
TRYING FOR A RETURN TO BEAUTY AND LIGHT: It’s a tough time for newspaper columnists. There is a lingering sense that to write about anything but the aftereffects of September 11 would be disrespectful, or at least ignorant of current priorities, and yet life has moved on, and many writers are desperate to return to the days when, if they felt like sitting down at the keyboard and banging out 1200 words on narrative form, they could do so. But how to ignore the daily barrage of war news? The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 01/09/02
Monday January 7
ADELAIDE MAKEOVER: Having purged Peter Sellars as director of this year’s Adelaide Festival, the festival has revealed a new lineup that keeps some of the Sellars fare and adds new performers. Still at the heart of the festival is John Adams’ El Nino directed by Sellars. The Age (Melbourne) 01/07/02
Sunday January 6
PROTECTING IDEAS TO DEATH: “Lawrence Lessig’s passionate new book, ‘The Future of Ideas, argues that America’s concern with protecting intellectual property has become an oppressive obsession. ”The distinctive feature of modern American copyright law,’ he writes, ‘is its almost limitless bloating.’ As Lessig sees it, a system originally designed to provide incentives for innovation has increasingly become a weapon for attacking cutting-edge creativity. Why, Lessig asks, does American law increasingly protect the interests of the old guard over those of the vanguard?” The New York Times 01/06/02
THE IDEA OF GENIUS: “Do any artists deserve a transcendent label? At one time such questions would have seemed somewhat strange. Philosophers have argued about how to define genius, not about whether it exists. But challenges to the idea’s validity have become commonplace in recent years. Genius has been judged to be little more than a product of good marketing or good politicking.” The New York Times 01/05/02
CHANGE OF VENUE: In the past decade new performing arts venues have sprung up all over Atlanta. But some have not lived up to their extravagant ambitions. “Now, facing serious deficits, an unforgiving economy and a loss of creative leadership, two of the biggest halls are confronting their greatest challenges. The question is not whether they can survive, but whether, in a newly competitive market, the venues can continue to be as experimental in their programming.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 01/06/02
OF INTELLIGENCE AND MORALITY: A new book looks at the politics of intelligent people. “It is now a commonplace – but for all that still unnerving – that it was very often not merely the stupid but the highly intelligent who gave their support to the Hitlers and the Stalins of the last century. Anyone in search of an explanation for this fact might therefore think it better to look not to the quality of mind of these devotees but rather to their character, their moral psychology. This is an intricate, treacherous field of inquiry, and one for which we have no particularly powerful philosophical idiom: since at least the 18th century, philosophers have given over the matter to novelists, and the older vocabularies – of corruptibility, of akrasia, or weakness of will – no longer have broad intellectual resonance.” The New York Times 01/06/02
ART TO THE RESCUE: Like many charities, the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund has seen contributions decline since September 11. So the paper has decided to hold an auction of art to try to make up the shortfall. Artists donating work include Ross Bleckner, Louise Bourgeois, Larry Clark, Chuck Close, Gregory Crewdson, Jenny Holzer, William Kentridge, Sol LeWitt, Shirin Nashat, Nam June Paik, Doug and Cindy Sherman, Mike Starn and Christopher Wool. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has also contributed a painting by the late Pop artist.” The New York Times 01/05/02
Friday January 4
THE FUTURIST’S TOMORROW: “The future is coming up faster than ever, and it will not be long now before we drive our even bigger cars, fitted with instant e-mail communications, from the high-rise office built behind the façade of a fine old structure — façadism will be the architectural style of the era — to our exurban homes decorated with the odd Old Master leased by the year from the local museum in a curators’ brainwave we will call Rent-a-Rembrandt.” Or so says Faith Popcorn, who has something of an impressive record with such predictions. National Post (Canada) 01/04/02
Thursday January 3
LINCOLN CENTER SUFFERS MORE HITS: Lincoln Center’s controversial $1.2 billion refurbishment plans got a double hit Wednesday when new New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg “suggested that the project would have to be delayed” and that the city might have difficulty in following through with a promised $240 million contribution. Meanwhile, Lincoln Center’s interim executive director said she was leaving to head Philadelphia’s new Kimmel Performing Arts Center. The New York Times 01/03/02
HELPING ARTISTS, NOT CORPORATIONS: There are countless organizations devoted to funding art, and millions of dollars are spent every year by philanthropists doing their part to bring new works to the world. But most of the available cash comes in the form of grants that can only be applied for by incorporated non-profits, leaving independent artists out in the cold. But in Pennsylvania, a familiar foundation has begun devoting a good-sized chunk of change to helping out the proverbial “starving artist.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 01/03/02
Wednesday January 2
OLYMPICS CULTURAL CHIEF RESIGNS: The director of the Athens Cultural Olympics has resigned. The cultural event is to be held in conjunction with the 2004 Athens Olympics. “The resignation was the newest head-on blow to the 2004 Games organizers, who had been dogged by infighting, bureaucracy and delays. The International Olympic Committee has repeatedly warned Athens to quicken its work if it wants to host good Games. The Cultural Olympics, initially envisioned as similar to the ancient Greek poetry and art contests that were held along with sports competitions in Ancient Olympia, were one of Greece’s strong points in winning the bid for the 2004 Games.” Andante (Xinhua) 01/02/02
GOING FORWARD: Most novels are told in the past tense. But great art, great thinking happens in the present dreaming of the future. That’s really the essence of modernism – using the past to build a future rather than declaring the past and future as cause-and-effect. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/02/02
THIS YEAR’s CULTURAL CAPITALS: In promoting culture, the European Union has been choosing a “Cultural Capital” each year. The idea promotes the arts in those chosen cities and has spurred greater investment in the arts. “For 2002, there are two Cultural Capitals, both small, historic cities: Salamanca, in western-central Spain, and Brugge, near the coast of Belgium.” Chicago Tribune 01/01/02
Media: January 2002
Friday February 1
SEE KOREAN: Since 1967, Korea has had a film quota that requires local theaters to screen Korean films at least 146 days a year. The local film industry has been doing well, so now the government wants to drastically reduce the quota. Filmmakers are protesting. Korea Herald 02/01/02
BBC RADIO AT RECORD LISTENERSHIP: BBC Radio listenership is up, beating out all commercial radio stations. “The number of people listening to BBC Radio each week has risen by 300,000 since September, taking the total to 32.7 million – a record since new monitoring methods were introduced in 1999.” BBC 02/01/02
Thursday January 31
POOH FIGHT: Disney has helped turn Winnie the Pooh into a merchandising juggernaut. But the family of the literary agent who “bought the rights to Pooh from author AA Milne in 1929, have filed a suit to terminate Disney’s licence and to claim damages for ‘hundreds of millions’ of dollars.” The Guardian (UK) 01/30/02
THE BATTLE FOR WNYC: When New York public radio station WNYC lost its FM tower on the World Trade Center, its classical music programming got compressed to late night hours on its sister AM band. Now that FM is up and broadcasting again, the classical music hasn’t expanded to its former proportions again. Changes at the station signal a rift between WNYC’s ambitious corporate-style managers and more traditional staff. New York Observer 01/30/02
Wednesday January 30
LACK OF DIVERSITY: A new report chides the television industry once again for its white-maleness. “The report, which examined the 40 most popular series of the 2000-2001 season, reported that about 80% of drama and comedy episodes—or 663 of the 826 installments—were directed by white males. Black males directed 27 episodes, or about 3% of the total, while Latino males directed 15 episodes, or about 2%. Asian American males directed nine episodes. White females directed 87—or 11%—of the episodes.” Los Angeles Times 01/30/02
ARGENTINA – THE FUTURE IN FILM: Could anyone have predicted the collapse of Argentina? Bankers maybe. Also filmmakers: “The 1990s were a very false period. There was a lot of money around in a country that wasn’t growing. This feeling of menace that was coming was very clear many years ago. All these films are of course related to the situation.” The Guardian (UK) 01/30/02
VOTING WITH YOUR FEET: The ultimate, definitive criticism of a movie is simple and direct, and it’s available to anyone. Get up and walk out; if it’s really bad, demand your money back. People do it all the time. Well, some of the time. “The movie doesn’t even have to be a bomb. The films people leave the most are frequently also the most admired.” Los Angeles Times 01/30/02
Tuesday January 29
BAFTA NOMINEES: The British Bafta Award nominations are out. Nominated for best fim are: The Lord Of The Rings and Moulin Rouge (each picked up 12 nominations), the French-language hit Amelie, A Beautiful Mind, the animated adventure Shrek. Winners are announced Feruary 24. BBC 01/29/02
HOW TO WIN AN OSCAR: “It is Oscar season, when the great and the good of California’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gather, ponder the relative merits of the year’s best actors and films, and finally, amid great fanfare and weird interpretative dance numbers, give the Oscar to someone else.” So, if making a great film doesn’t get it done, what rules must be followed to take home the little gold man? Hmmm, where to begin? National Post (Daily Telegraph) 01/28/02
Monday January 28
HARD STUFF/HARD DECISIONS: “Last month, NBC began accepting ads for Smirnoff vodka, marking the first time such ads are appearing on broadcast networks since the programmers adopted a voluntary ban on the products shortly after the Second World War. Almost immediately after NBC’s announcement, an avalanche of attacks came crashing down onto NBC’s peacock tail, sending the billion-dollar network into a fetal position.” But the policy about hard liquor ads and TV is deeply conflicted… The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/28/02
Sunday January 27
DANGEROUS TO BE SO BIG? Clear Channel Communications now has its fingers in more and more of the average American’s entertainment choices. The company “garnered relatively little attention as it evolved during the 1990s from a family owned San Antonio radio chain into an international conglomerate that is now the size of NBC. Today it is the nation’s largest radio owner, and a world leader in outdoor advertising. And it is the largest promoter and presenter of live entertainment on the planet; CCE promotes and/or produces 26,000 events a year, drawing 62 million people to its 135 theaters, arenas, and amphitheaters around the globe, the company says.” Boston Globe 01/27/02
THE OSCAR SECRETS: Want to win an Oscar? Here’s how: “We all know that the Oscars bear scant relation to the merits of the films in question. So what do they bear relation to? In order to answer this question, we processed the winners and losers of the past 20 years into a computer and asked it to come up with a set of rules as to how you win an Oscar.” Some hints – it helps to be disabled and have a rousing end to your film. The Telegraph (UK) 01/26/02
Friday January 25
PRODUCE THIS: Movies and TV shows seem to be overrun with various types of ‘producers’ in some form or another. “Who are these people? What do they do? Do they get paid? Why do they need so many of them? These are legitimate questions. For while there are thousands of people roaming the streets of Los Angeles claiming to be producers, it takes more than a business card and an ugly sports jacket to truly merit the title. Moreover, even real producers carry less weight now that a few giant companies have swallowed Hollywood.” Los Angeles Times 01/24/02
THE SAD SACKS AT THE GOLDEN GLOBES: Why does anyone care about the Golden Globe Awards. They’re voted by the foreign press – “which is comprised of 80 journalists about whom movie folk could not care less during the other 11 months of the year. I have lived in Hollywood; I have seen the foreign press, and a more motley consortium of lumpy, hard-boiled, cocktail-happy flacks you could never meet. Agents, publicists and stars, do their best to avoid them (except during awards season), meeting them only in strictly supervised round-table interviews, chuckling behind their backs at their softball questions.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/25/02
TALK ABOUT REALITY: A Russian “reality TV” program shows a dozen young men and women living together in a single apartment. Cameras record their every action, and one-way mirrors let passers-by in the street watch as well. And it continues, regardless of the fact that the channel which used to broadcast it has been shut down. Moscow Times 01/24/02
Thursday January 24
MINORITY RECRUITING: Two years ago the major American TV networks came under fire for their lack of minority actors on programs. Now the networks are hosting “talent workshops” in an effort to recruit more minority actors. Critics say it’s about time: “We expect to see real change in the new shows, or else we’re going to have a real problem. The new shows will be announced in May, and we see it as a make or break time for the networks.” Toronto Star 01/23/02
Wednesday January 23
AMÉLIE OVERTAKES LA CAGE: “Amélie, the little French movie that could, has broken a longstanding record to become the highest-grossing French-language film to be released in the United States. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s whimsical tale has grossed $20.9 million, breaking the previous record, $20.4 million, held by La Cage Aux Folles since 1979. Last week Amélie crossed the $100 million mark for worldwide box-office receipts.” New York Post 01/23/02
BRITISH FILM INDUSTRY SAGS: According to the British Film Commission, “British film production dropped sharply in 2001, largely because of the threat of a strike by members of the U.S. film actors’ union; overall Britain’s film industry was worth about $602-million last year, compared with $1.1-billion in 2000.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/22/02
AUSSIE ASSAULT: With Australian movie folk cleaning up awards at the Golden Globes this week, “the Aussie assault was the main topic of conversation at the Globes’ after parties and on entertainment shows this morning.” The Age (Melbourne) 01/23/02
- AUSSIE HOTBED: Everyone’s talking about the film talent coming from Down Under right now. Says Steven Spielberg: “Australia has produced the most amazing new wave of talent since, probably, Britain in the 1940s.” The Age (Melbourne) 01/23/02
MORE THAN EVER, ART IS GROUNDED IN SCIENCE: “Increasingly, science, math and technology have emerged as serious themes in creative endeavors such as the current film A Beautiful Mind, recent plays such as Proof, Copenhagen, Arcadia and Q.E.D., the novels of writers Richard Powers and Andrea Barrett, and the visual artwork of Eduardo Kac. You cannot hope to understand contemporary life without a hard look at the ways that science and technology have overhauled every aspect of material existence.” Chicago Tribune 01/20/02
THE BBC AND ARTS: The BBC has come under fire recently for its arts programming. Some charge the corporation is lessening its commitment to the arts and plans to “ghettoize” the arts on the BBC’s new digital service. But BBC head Greg Dyke denies the charges: “Arts programmes would continue to take up a minimum of 230 hours a year across BBC One and BBC Two, he said, instead of being shifted to new digital channel BBC Four when it launches in March.” BBC 01/23/02
- SIGNAL TO NOISE: Has the BBC been reducing the quality of its digital audio bitrate signal? The music hasn’t been as crisp… Gramophone 01/23/02
Tuesday January 22
NOT MUCH OF A STRIKE, THEN, IS IT? The UK film industry is reeling from the effects of an actors’ strike that has been going on since December. Or is it? Despite calls for British actors to refuse all work until a settlement is reached, the union has allowed some studios to cross the picket line and sign individual deals with stars so current big-budget Hollywood productions are not halted. BBC 01/22/02
RECORD YEAR FOR AUSTRALIAN MOVIES: The Australian movie business did well last year. “Australian box office takings leapt to a record $812 million from $689.5 million in 2000. However, the news for locally made films was not entirely positive, with their market share slipping marginally from 7.9 to 7.8 per cent in 2001.” Sydney Morning Herald 01/22/02
Monday January 21
MOULIN ROUGE/BEAUTIFUL MIND BIG WINNERS AT GLOBES: Golden Globes, as chosen by the Hollywood foreign press, are given out. Best movies awards go to A Beautiful Mind and Moulin Rouge, which can be considered front-runners for the Academy Awards. Los Angeles Times 01/21/02
- COMING OUT PARTY: For many, the frivolity seemed to mark a psychic turning point for the industry. Hollywood was not only buffeted by the terrorist attacks, but also a slowdown in production due in part to a flood of activity in the first part of 2001 spurred by the threat of strikes. “The Hollywood movie business was completely stalled out for very good reason after 9/11. Now that there’s becoming enough distance between that tragic event and today, people are feeling very eager to work. Los Angeles Times 01/21/02
- TEDIOUS EXERCISE: The “59th Annual Golden Globe Awards, which anointed Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind as the flick to beat at the Oscars in March, was about as tedious as the longest Academy Award show. Ever.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 01/21/02
SUNDANCE FINISHES STRONG: Expectations were definitely not high for this year’s Sundance Festival. But then, “the dark and innovative films that made up much of this year’s roster began to create a stir, and suddenly the odor of infirmity drifted away. Movies were selling left and right last week for more money than anyone would have predicted before the festival began on Jan. 10.” The New York Times 01/21/02
- THE MOST-HATED FILM AT SUNDANCE: Director Gus Van Sant used to be an art-film director. Then, after a breakout hit, he wasn’t. At this year’s Sundance he was back in high-art form again. “His feature Gerry may be one of the most hated movies in American film-festival history.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/21/02
Sunday January 20
AND THE WINNER IS… “Personal Velocity, a movie trilogy about three women confronted with momentous life crises, won the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize Saturday, taking top dramatic honors at the 11-day independent cinema showcase. Sundance jurors gave the documentary grand jury prize to Daughter From Danang, which follows an Amerasian child of a Vietnamese woman and U.S. soldier who searches for her natural mother years after she was adopted by an American woman.” Nando Times (AP) 01/19/02
- SUNDANCE DOOR OPENS A LITTLE WIDER: The Sundance Film Festival is arguably the most successful showcase of independent film in the U.S. But for an event that purports to give voice to those normally shunned by major studios, Sundance has a fairly spotty record when it comes to screeing films by racial minorities. This year, however, the tide may be turning. Washington Post 01/19/02
LET’S HEAR IT FOR VOLTRON! “Japanese film has probably never been as popular internationally as it is right now. Its popularity, though, is not grounded in live action films, but in the animated features and television series that have come to be known as anime. It has been estimated that anime now account for 60 percent of Japanese film production.” The New York Times 01/20/02 (one-time registration required for access)
Friday January 18
THE GLORIES OF NEPOTISM: How do you get a job of have a movie made in Hollywood? You gotta know someone. “In fact, Hollywood happens to be one of the more democratic places to make it, so eager are they for the next big thing, so willing to believe that you could be It, or you, or you. It’s standard practice in L.A. that no phone call goes unreturned (even if it means rolling calls, deliberately returning them when they know you’ll be out), because everybody could end up working with anybody at any time.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/18/02
Thursday January 17
GOING TO PRAGUE: Where are all the movies going? To Prague. “A multi-million-dollar film industry has made Prague, the Czech capital, a European moviemaking mecca, second only to London. Since the fall of communism 11 years ago, hundreds of foreign productions have come here to take advantage of its extraordinarily low costs, highly skilled technicians, and stunning locations.” Christian Science Monitor 01/16/02
Wednesday January 16
THE DECLINE OF DISNEY? “After a renaissance in the mid-80s and for much of the 90s, Disney has been sliding. Its movie business is scoring fewer hits, attendance at theme parks has been disappointing of late. The company had its fingers severely burnt online and was forced to close an ambitious internet portal early last year and dissolved what was a separate new-media division.” The Guardian (UK) 01/15/02
Tuesday January 15
CLAIMS FOR FLOP INSURANCE: Banks financing Hollywood movies are going to court to try to collect on insurance claims worth more than $1 billion for movies that were flops. “Hundreds of cases are stacked up on both sides of the Atlantic, as London’s insurance market resists paying out on a slew of cinematic turkeys. Banks had lent money for productions with “shortfall insurance” – “policies that pay up if a film fails to make its projected revenue within (typically) two to three years.” Financial Times 01/14/02
CLOUDS AT SUNDANCE: The Sundance Festival is in full bloom, and there’s lots of good fare. But “the combination of several factors has shaped feelings about the festival beyond this. There is the important anniversary for an event that has visibly altered the shape of filmmaking, and there is the residue of the slumping economy. Though Main Street was a scramble of visitors dashing from one party to the next, as it was last year, a bit of a cloud hangs over the festival.” The New York Times 01/15/02
- A SERIOUS FOCUS: The opening festivities at Sundance this year have been dominated by films with extremely sober subjects. One focuses on the murder of Matthew Shephard, beaten to death in Wyoming because he was gay. Another, a documentary, examines the brutal dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas. Throw in a dark comedy about a sorority girl in love with a handicapped discus-thrower, and the festival is looking awfully edgy, even for independent film. Dallas Morning News 01/15/02 (one-time registration required for access)
SCORE ONE FOR THE CLASSICS: Okay, so country music may not exactly be Mozart. But in Nashville, and indeed across much of America, country is as classic as it gets, and “regular folks” are as loyal to it as opera fans. So when a legendary Nashville AM station (flagship of the Grand Ole Opry) announced it would be moving to a talk format, the listeners revolted. None of this, of course, is unusual in an age of huge broadcasting conglomerates. What is unusual is that the effort worked, and WSM will stay country, and stay unique in a sea of generic radio blather. Nashville Tennessean 01/15/02
RIPPING OFF EGYPTIAN MOVIES: Video piracy isn’t only a problem for American movies. Egyptian filmmakers estimate they lose $15 million in revenues a year due to video pirates. “Pirates manage to get a copy of a movie as soon as it is released, either on video cassette (mostly from Saudi Arabia) or on imported laser discs, sometimes recording them from the cinemas directly using a camcorder. These are then duplicated and distributed to the 2,000-odd video rental stores and clubs that specialize in selling pirated cassettes.” Middle East Times 01/11/02
INDEPENDENT FROM WHAT, EXACTLY? “Independent film companies Intermedia and Spyglass Entertainment Group on Monday announced a merger agreement that will form one of the world’s largest independent film companies. The merger is expected to be completed by the end of February.” Dallas Morning News (AP) 01/15/02 (one-time registration required for access)
Monday January 14
TAX BREAKS FOR HOLLYWOOD: California governor Gray Davis proposes tax breaks for movie companies shooting their productions in California. “Hollywood’s unions have pushed for years for state and federal incentives to fight runaway production. Canada’s weak dollar, combined with government incentives, make shooting there about 25% cheaper. Roughly one in four U.S.-developed productions shoot in foreign countries, mostly Canada. Los Angeles Times 01/13/02
Sunday January 13
THE RE/SELF-EDITED MOVIE: Fans are editing commercial movies on their own computers. A new artform, as some claim? Nope. “Digital technology may make it easier to appropriate and reinterpret existing art. But the tendency itself, the urge to do so, is a psychologically crucial element of contemporary thinking, and has more to do with zeitgeist than with technology. Quite simply, reappropriation is what we do these days, in high art and mass media: It’s part of postmodernity.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/12/02
GETTING TO THE THEATRE ON TIME: It has a script, then it doesn’t have a script. It has a $20 million budget, then it has a $6 million budget… how do movies ever get made? Here’s the chronicle of one movie-making experience. The Guardian (UK) 01/12/02
Friday January 11
DIGITAL IS YESTERDAY’S NEWS: The past two years, “digital” was the word at the Sundance Festival. “But the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, which opens here Thursday, looks to be relatively free of new-tech buzz. Press releases trumpeting the latest digital video innovations – a fax-jamming feature of Sundances past – have slowed to a trickle, and the Sundance press office seems to be barely keeping track of which films are digital and which aren’t.” Wired 01/10/02
PLAY ME AGAIN SAM: Now there’s no need for old actors to die on screen when they die in real life – they can just be digitized and live forever. The practice is growing in movies and in TV commercials. “With technology being where it is, hearse-loads of dead people could get in on the act. Computer graphics imaging (CGI) can create very convincing replicas of specific human beings. At the same time speech generation software replicates voices so successfully that to our merely human ears the sound is an exact duplicate.” Sydney Morning Herald 01/11/02
UNFRIENDLY? A Canadian conservation officer shut down an expensive film shoot in the Canadian Rockies for an American TV commercial this week because the crew didn’t have a required $57 permit. The incident has become very public and critics are charging that the government isn’t being helpful enough in helping American productions that want to film in Canada. “It’s just bad public relations. It’s an embarrassment to the Alberta tourism and film industry.” National Post 01/11/02
Thursday January 10
BACKING AWAY FROM THE FAMILY: Family-friendly programs been a centerpiece of TV programming since day one. But no more, at least not at NBC. “We don’t see them as really the kinds of shows that are in our wheelhouse,” says the network’s west coast president. As for those successful family shows on Fox and ABC, “They don’t have the upscale demos that we want that would allow us to keep them on the air.” Nando Times 01/09/02
Wednesday January 9
SAGGING SPIRITS: “Hollywood’s actors union, The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) has announced plans to re-run its hotly disputed presidential contest. Former Little House on the Prairie star Melissa Gilbert was elected president last November by a large majority over rival actress Valerie Harper, who starred in Rhoda. However it has since emerged that the vote violated the union’s constitution.” BBC 01/09/02
Tuesday January 8
BUILDING A CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE: The Canadian government wants to invest in the “construction of a Canadian cultural infrastructure on the web.” But how to build it? “This is the medium that will be the chief means to reach people now in the 13-17 age group.” One group of multimedia artists thinks they have the answer. Toronto Star 01/07/02
JUST WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS: “Leni Riefenstahl, who produced masterful propaganda films for the Nazis, plans her first movie release in nearly 50 years to coincide with her 100th birthday this summer. Impressions Under Water, a 45-minute film about the underwater world of the Indian Ocean, is the result of dives between 1974 and 2000, Riefenstahl told Germany’s Die Welt newspaper in a rare interview.” Toronto Star (AP) 01/08/02
Monday January 7
DVD’S ARE HOT: “The number of films sold on DVD more than doubled last year, to more than 37 million, according to industry figures. Almost 2.4 million DVD players were also bought in the past year, 550,000 of them in the run-up to Christmas, the British Video Association (BVA) says.” BBC 01/06/02
DIGITAL RADIO: Will people pay for radio? Apparently: Digital radio is hot. “Since its national debut in mid- November, XM Satellite Radio has sold 25,000 to 30,000 subscriptions to its new national radio service, XM Radio. In the same period, consumer electronics stores sold nearly an equal number of the specialized radios necessary to receive the signals, making national satellite radio one of the fastest-growing new products the audio industry has seen in years.” The New York Times 01/07/02
BEST FILM OF 2001: The National Society of Film Critics voted Mulholland Drive as the best movie of 2001. “Robert Altman’s satirical Gosford Park came in second as best picture, while the fantasy hit The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was third.” Nando Times (AP) 01/06/02
SELF-CENSORSHIP IN SPADES: Don’t like a scene in a movie you’d like to watch at home? Three companies in Utah “have developed technology that allows DVDs to be manipulated and cleaned up.” You can edit out that offensive sex scene or clean up the violence. “Wouldn’t it have been easier, perhaps, to skip the movie? Why not say to young Jimmy, ‘Son, The Matrix is too violent. We’re not going to buy that DVD for you. But here, have this Lassie movie instead. Now, let’s go get some hot cocoa.” San Francisco Chronicle 01/06/02
THE VALUES THING: The White House is encouraging filmmakers to make movies with “American values.” But “what would a film bursting with ‘American values’ actually look like? Probably what the president and his advisors had in mind are films that celebrate patriotism or wholesome attributes such as family togetherness, self-sacrifice and courage under fire. But are any of these upright virtues inherently American?” Los Angeles Times 01/06/02
FEEDING ON ITSELF: The FBI’s famous internet surveillance program has become inspiration for a group of new-media artists. “In a collaborative art project called, creatively enough, Carnivore, Flash guru Joshua Davis and digital artist Mark Napier, along with other artists, have crafted programs that create audiovisual representations of data traffic that’s observed and hijacked from a local area network.” Wired 01/06/02
Sunday January 6 RINGS PICKS UP FIRST AWARDS: The American Film Institute kicks off the awards season by naming the best of the big and little screens Saturday night. AFI decides Lord of the Rings is the best movie of 2001. Chicago Sun-Times 01/06/02
- WHAT WAS THE YEAR’S BEST MOVIE? There seems to be no consensus “best movie” of the year among American film critics. Here’s a list of critics’ Top 10 lists for 2001. Chicago Tribune 01/06/02
SUNDANCE TURNS 20: “Sundance used to be shorthand for artistic legitimacy, a way for filmmakers to place themselves firmly outside the corrupt commercial imperatives of the studio system. Then the studios jumped atop the bandwagon. As the Sundance Institute celebrates its 20th anniversary with the start of its annual film festival on Thursday, organizers are grappling with how to maintain the fest’s indie appeal and credibility, while accepting the fact that the 10-day event has been co-opted by many of the major studios as just another way to grab attention for a movie.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/05/02
THE CAMERA LIES: When Michael Jackson appeared on a TV special last fall, producers thought he looked too white compared to his brothers, so they “color corrected” him on the screen. Then they thought Whitney Houston looked too skinny, so they added a little weight to her in post-production. “Over the past two decades, the advent of digital technology and the increasing sophistication of CGI (computer graphics interface) software has radically transformed production of everything from feature films and television shows to music videos and advertising spots. Now, virtually anything is possible. ‘If you can think it or dream it, you can do it’.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/05/02
Friday January 4
SAVE OUR SHOWS: A lifeguard frustrated that TV networks canceled some of his favorite shows has started a website (www.SaveThatShow.com) to allow viewers to vote for retaining their favorites. “The site allows viewers to voice their opinions about their favourite shows, before they’re yanked off the air, by using an on-line form. The poll results and suggestions for change are also sent to network executives by e-mail on a monthly basis (although he has yet to hear back from anyone).” Toronto Star 01/04/02
Thursday January 3
REVISIONISTS UNDER ATTACK: “The real Mao Tse-tung hounded critics to death. But in the latest version of history according to China’s state film industry, Mao treasures free speech and criticism of his regime.” Like most state films featuring such blatant revisionist history, the movie bombed in China. But the widow of an American journalist portrayed in the film is furious over the inaccuracies, and is creating quite a stir. Cleveland Plain Dealer (AP) 01/03/02
GETTING BACK TO WORK: “Afghan filmmakers are shooting their first movie in 10 years following the fall of the Taleban regime. The film, The Speculator, is being specially made for screening on Afghan television because the station is short of material.” BBC 01/03/02
Wednesday January 2
RECORD MOVIE YEAR: The movie industry ended 2001 with its best year ever. “Movie-ticket sales for 2001 will total an estimated $8.35 billion by the end of New Year’s Eve, up from last year’s record of $7.7 billion, according to box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations. Factoring in an estimated 4 percent rise in average ticket prices, admissions were up about 5 percent, the first increase since 1998.” Nando Times (AP) 01/01/02
THE END OF CLASSICAL RADIO: When Miami classical radio station WTMI was sold last year for $100 million, it was inevitable the classical format was doomed, no matter what the new owners said. Classical can’t hope to produce the kind of revenues a $100 million purchase demands. Sure enough, this week the station abandoned classical for dance music. Miami Herald 01/01/02
BALKING AT THE BONUSES: Fans of DVD’s have been attracted to the new format in part because of “bonus” material often included on the discs – interviews with cast and crew, and behind-the-scenes scenes. But the “extra material could start to disappear thanks to escalating costs and demands by talent and guilds. Studios are balking at new fees for script use and star participation, even as overall DVD sales surge and consumers embrace “special edition” packages.” Toronto Star 01/01/02
UNDERSTANDING NIELSEN: The Nielsen Company has a new leader. In the US, “from a commercial and perhaps even cultural perspective, few enterprises may be more influential, and less understood, than Nielsen, which provides the television ratings that networks and media buyers rely upon to negotiate advertising rates. Beyond governing more than $50 billion in annual spending on TV ads, the information serves as a cultural touchstone, a tool people use to gauge the prevailing public mood and tastes.” Los Angeles Times 01/02/02
BBC SURGES: For the first time, the BBC1 TV channel has scored higher ratings for the year than chief competitior ITV1. “Ratings show BBC One with an audience share of 26.8% compared to 26.7% for ITV1.” BBC 01/01/02
Publishing: January 2002
Thursday January 31
STICKING TO THE TRAIL: How to have a successful career as a writer? Novelist/playwright Michael Frayn says: “The only advice that I could think of giving to a young writer is to write the same thing over and over again, changing things very slightly and going on delivering it until people accept it. Very simply, people want reliability and continuity in a writer. If you buy cornflakes you want cornflakes.” The Guardian (UK) 01/31/02
ANTI-THEFT: After the rash of high profile authors recently caught plagiarizing, one critic wonders how to stop plagiarism. Shame, that’s how. Letting authors make financial settlements with those they have stolen from doesn’t help the reader. Slate 01/30/02
THE OFFICIAL POET “The official poet laureate, appointed by the British royal family for over 300 years and rewarded with a ‘butt of canary wine, to be paid annually,’ is an object of mild scorn for literary skeptics and antimonarchists alike. But at a time when published opinion is much regulated by professional spin doctors, this institution can be used to promote a reexamination of the role played by poets and poetry in public life.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 01/31/02
MAKE IT STOP: “Another complaint against Stephen Ambrose has emerged. This one dates back to 1970, when fellow historian Cornelius Ryan accused him of a ‘rather graceless falsification’ in Ambrose’s book, The Supreme Commander. The allegations were first reported Tuesday on Forbes.com.” The Plain Dealer (AP) 01/31/02
SOME VERY UNPOETIC SOUR GRAPES: “Winning the coveted T.S. Eliot Prize last week has confirmed Anne Carson’s status as one of the most celebrated and controversial of contemporary poets. Soon after the prize was announced, Carson, who teaches classics at McGill University in Montreal, was denounced in Britain’s Guardian newspaper by eminent poetry critic Robert Potts for writing ‘doggerel’ that mixes ‘an occasional (and occasionally cliched) lyricism, some fashionable philosophizing and an almost artless grafting-on of academic materials.'” National Post (Canada) 01/31/02
Wednesday January 30
STEPHEN KING SAYS NO MORE NOVELS: Stephen King has a new novel coming out. So what? He publishes so many books in a year that he even made up a pseudonym so publishers could handle the overflow. So it may be his last. “You get to a point where you … basically recycle stuff,” he says. “I’ve seen it in my own work. People when they read Buick Eight are going to think Christine. It’s about a car that’s not normal, OK?” A couple more projects, “Then that’s it. I’m done. Done writing books.” CNN 01/29/02
Tuesday January 29
LITERARY NOMINATIONS: The National Book Critics Circle announces its award nominees. Heading up the fiction list is Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Other nominees include WG Sebald’s Austerlitz, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days, and Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Evidently Franzen’s dustup with Oprah earlier this winter hasn’t hurt The Corrections. The book already won the National Book Award, and sales have almost reached the 1 million mark – an impressive number for a work of literary fiction. Nando Times (AP) 01/28/02
PLAGIARISM AND TECHNOLOGY: In the last month, two prominent American historians have faced charges of plagiarism, and lately, it seems that not a month goes by without some well-known author or other standing accused. It’s not that the problem of plagiarism has become appreciably more widespread than it used to be – it’s that new computer programs can compare texts far more efficiently than ever before. San Francisco Chronicle 01/29/02
STANDARDS OF FAIRNESS: A new copyright law has been passed in Germany that mandates that publishers must pay freelance writers a “fair” compensation that is “standard in the trade.” The big question is how this will be enacted. What is fair? and if “standard” practice is unreasonably low, will it be fair? Perhaps predictably, publishers are unhappy with the new law. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 01/29/02
PIPPI LONGSTOCKING CREATOR DIES: Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish writer whose ‘Pippi Longstocking’ books won the hearts of children and adults the world over, has died at her home in Stockholm at the age of 94. “Lindgren’s works were translated into dozens of languages, ranging from Azerbaijani to Zulu, and sold more than 130 million copies worldwide.” Dallas Morning News (AP) 01/28/02 (one-time registration required for access)
Monday January 28
LISTEN UP: MP3 books are becoming popular – whole books can be downloaded onto tiny devices that can be reloaded over and over again. The format is especially popular with “with commuters, foreign students learning English and the visually impaired.” The Independent (UK) 01/26/02
IT’S NOT PLAGIARISM, IT’S A TRIBUTE: Olaf Olafsson is “vice chairman of Time Warner Digital Media, father of the Sony PlayStation and an acclaimed novelist.” But his latest book contains numerous passages stolen word for word from “the late, great Bay Area food writer M.F.K. Fisher.” Contacted about the copying, Olafsson says what he did wasn’t copy but pay “tribute.” He says that “readers familiar with Fisher, who died in 1992, will recognize the borrowed passages and understand he’s paying homage.” Siliconvalley.com 01/27/02
HOW/WHY TO READ: Who needs a book to tell them how to read? “Professorial how-to-read books have always struck me as eminently avoidable, in part because such lamentations are wearisome, even if not altogether untrue. If the lay reader knows enough to know that she needs to pick up a book on reading, why must her self-knowledge be met with a harangue against philistinism? Besides, all criticism teaches us how to read; literary essays instruct best when they are not overtly instructive. Or so I thought.” The New York Times 01/27/02
THE AUTHOR, NOT THE PERSON: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis canceled his book tour last week. Last year it was revealed that Ellis had lied about having served in Vietnam during the war, and Ellis was sure to be questioned about this on the tour. In Seattle, there have also been objections to Ellis speaking at an author series at the Seattle Public Library. But hosts of the event have decided to go ahead with the appearance in February. “It seemed to us that Ellis’ personal life – what he did or didn’t do as a teacher – really has nothing to do with the scholarship that went into his books about Jefferson and the founding brothers.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer 01/28/02
Sunday January 27
RENOVATING OUT THE LIBRARY EXPERIENCE: The New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center has a great collection. It recently reopened after an extensive renovation. “But — a sign of the times? — the research division is no longer a pleasurable place in which to read a book or listen to a recording.” The New York Times 01/27/02
Friday January 25
CALL IT BURNSDAY: Today’s the birthday of Scottish poet Robert Burns (he’d be 243), and in his home, “Fuelled by haggis and whisky, revellers recite Rabbie’s verses in celebration of his life, work and love of Scotland.” Find out how much you know about Scottish writers (including at least one of the awful ones). The Guardian (UK) 01/25/02
THE BEST BOOK REVIEW? “The Times Literary Supplement – known universally as the TLS – is a hundred years old this month. From its first densely printed, eight-page edition of Jan. 17, 1902, to its special bumper 48-page centenary issue currently on newsstands, it has carved out a unique position in the world of papers and journals as the reviewer of all that is best and most important in new books, from novels and poetry to academic studies and biographies.” Los Angeles Times 01/24/02
E-TEXTS: University presses and libraries at 12 American universities have teamed up on an e-publishing plan for scholarly books. ” The hope is that university presses in the consortium might one day offer all of their books in electronic form in a version that could be linked to a joint online library catalog that the group already operates. It could quickly become be a sizable collection: The university presses publish about 1,000 new books each year.” Chronicle of Higher Education 01/24/02
TRANSLATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE: The poet Czeslaw Milosz once wrote that “exile is the worst fate that may befall a poet, since poetry cannot live without its roots in native speech,” and another poet, Robert Frost, wrote that “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Still, translators continue trying to wrestle the poetry of one language into another, and sometimes bring it off. The Economist 01/24/02
Thursday January 24
WHO’S “BORROWING” FROM WHOM? The issue of plagiarism is more complex than black-and-white. “On the one hand, formal rules against plagiarism grow ever more abundant and ever more stringent (even if no more original), and Op-Ed columnists wax furious in their condemnation of plagiarism by public officials. On the other hand, many Op-Ed columns are written by individuals other than the one whose name appears on the byline, and for that matter many newspaper stories are more-or-less verbatim versions of press releases sent out by political organizations, trade associations, or other interest groups.” The Idler 01/23/02
AND THIS AFFECTS LAW ENFORCEMENT HOW? Okay, follow closely: The police department of Penryn, Pennsylvania, is boycotting this year’s YMCA triathlon, refusing to direct traffic and stand around looking important. Why? The YMCA apparently reads Harry Potter books to children. So? Well, the wee wizard is all satanic and stuff, y’know. Nando Times (AP) 01/24/02
Wednesday January 23
BLACK HOLES: “Six months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that publishers don’t own the rights to online freelance articles. The publishers have responded by purging freelance articles – sometimes entire newspaper archives – from online databases. Almost 20 years’ worth of newspaper history, a vital source of information for those studying history, politics, society, the media, and other subjects, is shot through with more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. Scholars worry that they might find holes in their research. No one in academe seems to know how many articles, and which ones, are missing from the databases. After all, online databases, with their ethereal form, aren’t like broadsheets of newsprint – you can’t open them like you would a morning paper and see the holes cut out.” Chronicle of Higher Education 01/21/02
GOODWIN CHARGED WITH COPYING: Now it’s historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s turn to be accused of plagiarism. A letter to The Weekly Standard (the publication which revealed historian Stephen Ambrose’s plagiarism two weeks ago) pointed out that “Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys borrowed with insufficient attribution from three earlier works by other authors.” The magazine’s “examination of the works in question confirmed the correspondent’s allegation.” The Weekly Standard 01/28/02
- BY WAY OF EXPLANATION: ”All that really happened was she sent me a letter saying not all the passages that relied on her work had been as fully footnoted as she would have liked,” said Goodwin. ”I agreed with her.” A monetary settlement was paid. Boston Globe 01/22/02
- WHAT’S THE STANDARD? “Goodwin has not only committed plagiarism, but lied about whether it was plagiarism (and, incidentally, paid hush money to one of the people she plagiarized).” Slate 01/22/02
- A SIMPLE TRUTH: Whew – it’s tough to defend those who “borrowed” the words of others without the proper credit. But the principle stands: “If you didn’t write it, you need to put quote marks around it. It really is that simple.” MobyLives 01/22/02
THE TRADITION OF POETRY IN ARABIA: “Poets from all over Arabia would recite their poems in front of judges. Each year the festival’s winning poem would be transcribed in golden letters and hung on the door of Ka’bah in Mecca for the whole year. It was like the Nobel Prize of ancient Arabia. In every Arab country every day, poets appear on television, on the radio, or in the newspaper. Every single newspaper in the Arab world every day has poetry. Poetry is the essence of Arab culture.” Humanities January-February 2002
NOVELS – AND NOVELISTS – BURIED IN THE PAST: What’s happened to our novelists lately? They’re so busy robbing the grave, as it were – writing about characters from the past, instead of focusing on our present world. And the problem seems to be worst of all in Australia. The Age (Melbourne) 01/21/02
Tuesday January 22
CANADIAN WINS ELIOT PRIZE: “Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson has been named the winner of the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry for 2001. Ms Carson’s ‘poignant’ and ‘unique’ collection The Beauty of the Husband was the best work of new poetry published in the UK and Ireland last year, a panel of poets has decided.” BBC 01/21/02
KIDS’ CORNER: “The story of an orphan living under a bridge in 12th century Korea won top honors in children’s literature Monday from the American Library Association. “A Single Shard,” by Linda Sue Park, won the Newbery Medal, awarded annually to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children… David Wiesner, illustrator and author of “The Three Pigs,” won the Randolph Caldecott Medal, awarded each year to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children.” Orlando Sentinel 01/21/02
THE CLASSICS, ONLINE: “Project Gutenberg, named after the inventor of the printing press, Johann Gutenberg, is an online, worldwide database of books in electronic form – and it’s free. Since 1971, volunteers have transposed or scanned more than 4000 books on to the US site.” The Age (Melbourne) 01/22/02
- SPEAKING OF GUTENBERG: Not much is known about the life of the man who invented the printing press. “It is unclear exactly when Gutenberg was born, how he was schooled or whether he married. The date of his death, 1468, is known only from an uncorroborated note casually scribbled by an acquaintance on a printed book’s flyleaf. The circumstances under which he arrived at his two most important ideas – the notion of movable type itself and the hand-mould technology needed for the rapid mass-casting of the letters – have gone unrecorded.” Financial Times 01/22/02
HOW TO CREATE AWKWARDNESS: Few things in life are as deadly as a close friend’s book recommendation. The enjoyment of literature is an intensely personal activity, and one person’s life-changing page-turner may be another’s deadly bore. And the walls of friendship come tumbling down… National Post (Canada) 01/22/02
Monday January 21
STUCK IN THE PAST: Why are so many of Australia’s best contemporary novels set in the past? It’s the rare story that reflects life that is familiar to us today. Is it that “we’re not the most powerful nation on earth and so do not find, like the Americans do, power and significance dwelling in our most ordinary things?” The Age (Melbourne) 01/21/02
SO WHAT’S A LITTLE PLAGIARISM…: Historian Stephen Ambrose may be scorned for his plagiarism revealed in the past few weeks. But in his hometown of New Orleans, few seem to care. The Times-Picayune wrote in an editorial Jan. 11: “He has been ‘a great friend to this community … No one wants to see Mr. Ambrose’s numerous achievements diminished by the present allegations.” Others wonder: “So what if he plagiarized? Everyone plagiarizes to some extent. He has raised awareness of history among a whole new population of Americans.” Nando Times (AP) 01/21/02
Sunday January 20
TO CATCH A PLAGIARIST: Why did it take so long for historian-plagiarist Stephen Ambrose to get caught? More importantly, why did it take a conservative magazine editor to expose the wrongdoing of one of right-wing America’s biggest intellectual apologists? “Could it be that the left is too indifferent to American military history to bother catching one of its best-selling mythologizers with his pants down? Or does resentment of blockbuster book sales cut across party lines, afflicting conservatism’s detractors and its supporters alike with touching bipartisanship?” San Francisco Chronicle 01/19/02
THE WORST SEX EVER: “Writing a sex scene with authenticity of emotion is the literary equivalent to the struggle visual artists have in painting hands and feet. As with the act itself, performance anxiety can lead to overwriting in an author who is trying too hard, or limpness in a writer unable to rise above self-consciousness.” Herein, the best examples of such literary impotence, as judged by a panel of Canadian publishers, and featuring such gems as “Ride my stallion, Morag.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 01/19/02
Friday January 18
MORE AMBROSE: Yet another book has been added to the Stephen Ambrose plagiarism list. “Despite Ambrose’s continued dominance of the bestseller lists, 2002 is shaping up as a year to forget for America’s favorite celebrity historian. He apologized immediately for not putting quotation marks around the purloined Wild Blue passages; since then, as the other five books have been identified one or two at a time, he generally has declined to comment.” Forbes.com 01/17/02
- CAREER EFFECT? Some book world people doubt that publicity about Ambrose’s plagiarism, though embarrassing for Ambrose, would hurt sales of his bestselling history books. Indeed, it “might actually end up boosting sales by attracting more attention to his books. In any case, the best-selling historian will remain a hot literary property. ‘Any agent or publisher would be glad to grab him’.” Forbes.com 01/11/02
PLAGIARISM, CHINESE EDITION: Wang Mingming, an elite professor at Beijing University, and credited in China with reviving interest in sociology, has been “accused of using parts of a 1987 edition of Cultural Anthropology, a widely used textbook by William A. Haviland of the University of Vermont, in his own 1998 book. Wang translated Haviland’s book into Chinese in 1987 with his permission. The official Xinhua News Agency says Wang has been stripped of his teaching posts.” Nando Times (AP) 01/17/02
S’BETTER TO LOOK GOOD? “Why are so many people paying hard-earned cash for books they can barely begin to understand? Part of the answer, surely, is vanity. A Hawking or Greene sitting on the coffee table–preferably with a few pages conspicuously bent back at the corners–sends a powerful message to visiting friends, prospective dates, and (above all) to oneself, that an intellect is present in the house. Whether or not you read them, possession alone looks good. Intellectual vanity is as potent a force as the sartorial variety.” Los Angeles Times 01/13/02
MAKING RARE BOOKS ACCESSIBLE: “Octavo Corp. and its staff of eight have revolutionized the conservation and accessibility of rare books, using technology in the service of history. This month they’re starting work on the most famous book in the U.S., the Library of Congress’ pristine copy of the Gutenberg Bible. Through a combination of hardware – lights, cameras, and a lot of servers – and software, the company produces digital reproductions of rare books, which it then sells to consumers.” SFWeekly 01/17/02
Thursday January 17
ART OF THE NOVEL: There’s been a rash of novels lately in which writers have found the inspiration for their story, or their characters, in famous (or not-so-famous) paintings. “For a writer, an intriguing picture hot-wires the storytelling engine. Before committing word one to paper, you already know the time, place and setting. You not only see what your main character looks like, you know her class.” Washington Post 01/17/02
CHILDERS ON AMBROSE: Historian Thomas Childers speaks out on Stephen Ambrose’s plagiarism of his work: “I was surprised and disappointed. I was bewildered, at first, as to how he would have the chutzpah to do this. He didn’t have to do this, and I wasn’t flattered. My wife, Kristin, was angry enough for the both of us.” But Childers decided to say nothing: “Do I really want to be the scholarly guy rapping the famous guy on the knuckles in a schoolmarmish way?” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/16/02
- GETTING IT VERY WRONG: World War II vets aren’t as upset about the copying as they are about all the mistakes about the war in Ambrose’s books. “The real problem is that Ambrose gets key things about World War II wrong all by himself. That Ambrose, America’s most popular war historian, has published eight books in five years is seen by them as not so much an excuse for the alleged errors as the reason.” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/15/02
NOBELIST CAMILO CELA, 85: “Spanish writer Camilo Jose Cela, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for literature, has died in Madrid from respiratory and coronary failure. With his first novel, published in 1946, Cela became a leader of a straightforward style of writing, called tremendismo, which clashed with the lyricism that had characterised writers of the previous generation in Spain.” BBC 01/17/02
Wednesday January 16
WHY STEALING’S ALWAYS BAD: Historian Stephen Ambrose has been caught plagiarizing in at least four of his books. This is a very serious offense, so it’s off to the penalty box for him. The media has made a big deal of this, but historians haven’t condemned him with the vehemence one would expect. Why? Several reasons, but “a comparison of the Ambrose and Monaghan books found that, despite picking up sentences here and there, Ambrose wasn’t wedded to Monaghan’s work. He had synthesized material from many sources and was producing his own version of Custer’s life.” Chicago Tribune 01/16/02
THE PROBLEM BEQUEST: A small library in Massachusetts gets a million-dollar bequest from a letter carrier who died in 1940 to buy books. But the library is stuffed full and has no room to put any new volumes. What it really needs is to expand – but should the terms of the bequest be broken? National Post (AP) 01/16/02
Tuesday January 15
STARTING OVER: “In late September, Phyllis Grann shocked the book world by announcing she would leave Penguin Putnam, the $750 million publishing empire she assembled over 25 years and could not have dominated more completely if her name were on the building. Most executives with her career would have simply retired. She was the first woman CEO in publishing, and the head of an imprint that’s reputed to be 50 percent more profitable than any of its peers. Instead of bowing out, however, Grann trotted out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crack about American lives’ having no second acts, vowed to have one of her own, then sat back to watch the frenzy of speculation about her next move.” Then she joined Random House. New York Magazine 01/14/02
LARKIN’S MONEY GOES TO CHURCH: Poet Philip Larkin, who “declined the poet laureateship a year before he died in 1985, remains best known for his reverently agnostic poem Churchgoing. He also said: ‘The Bible is a load of balls of course – but very beautiful’.” So his friends and fans were amused recently when £1 million of his legacy was willed to the Church of England. The Guardian (UK) 01/12/02
Monday January 14
WHY PLAGIARISM MATTERS: The charges of plagiarism are mounting against historian Stephen Ambrose. ” Ambrose’s patriots can’t fall back on the factory defense anymore: Two of the cases occurred when Ambrose was an obscure professor, before he became Stephen Ambrose Industries. Ambrose is more defiant than apologetic. Ambrose’s assertion that he’s not a thief is ludicrous. One plagiarism is careless. Two is a pattern. Four, five, or more is pathology. You can bet that historians jealous of Ambrose (that is, all historians) are this minute combing the rest of his corpus for more evidence of sticky fingers.” Slate 01/11/02
AND THE BOOK BUSINESS IS INTELLECTUAL, RIGHT? Lest anyone forget, the book business is run by individuals – people who can be as petty, self-serving, obtuse and wrong-headed as the rest of us. MobyLives nominates 2001’s most misguided figures. MobyLives 01/14/02
WHAT’S LEFT OVER: Most books at some point get remaindered. “The common misconception is that remainders are ‘bad’ books. Some may be, but the reality is almost every author – Booker and Giller winners, and names like Atwood and Urquhart – have titles that have been thrown into the bins. And they’re the gems that voracious readers eagerly forage for.Remainders are an important part of our business, accounting for at least 10 per cent of overall sales ” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/11/02
A LESSON IN HUMILITY: “To write The Best Book Ever Written is not a ridiculous aspiration. Ridiculous would be to aspire to write a ‘flawed, two-dimensional and structurally awkward’ novel. ‘Pretentious twaddle’ is not the kind of star to which a wagon can be very usefully hitched. Mid-list leaves something to be desired as a career goal. There is much to be gained by setting out to write The Best Book Ever Written, not the least of which is that once every millennium, somebody might actually do it. However, as commendable as it is to aim high, and as useful a motivator as unreasonable ambition may prove to be, the kind of literary pride that makes writers think that readers will drop everything to read them is rarely helpful once a book is published. For all but the rare exceptions, publication is a crash course in humility.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/11/02
Sunday January 13
THE WANDERING PRIZE: “In the starry firmament of literary prizes, from the distant twinkling of Somerset Maugham to the intergalactic majesty of Orange, to the autumn brilliance of Booker, Whitbread is the wandering planet: wreathed in vapour, beyond radio contact and thrillingly weird, the object of fascinated annual terrestrial speculation.” The Observer (UK) 01/13/02
PUTTING MARK TWAIN IN HIS PLACE: Was Mark Twain America’s greatest writer? Ken Burns’ new documentary forces the question. “Here’s a guy who wrote such classics as Tom Sawyer, such politically charged novels as Pudd’nhead Wilson and such eye-opening travelogues as The Innocents Abroad. He also had the kind of grand tragedies in his personal life that we expect from great writers: losing loved ones at a young age, going broke by investing in one silly invention after another, struggling with clinical depression. But there’s a problem in putting Twain at the head of the class. He was funny. Too funny.” Minneapolis Star Tribune 01/13/02
Friday January 11
AMBROSE – TOO PROLIFIC TO BE ORIGINAL? As accusations about plagiarism mount against popular historian/author Stephen Ambrose, checking out Ambrose’s books has become a cottage industry. He’s written a lot of books – too many too quickly, say some critics, to be reliable. “In seven years, Ambrose has published nine books of history, plus the eighth edition of a co-authored survey of American foreign policy. In the last two years alone, he’s published four books, including The Wild Blue and Nothing Like It in the World. Many of his books have become bestsellers.” Washington Post 01/11/02
THE HALLMARK POET: Poet Maya Angelou has a new job – writing greeting cards for Hallmark. “If I’m America’s poet, or one of them, then I want to be in people’s hands. All people’s hands, people who would never buy a book.” Some samples? “Life is a glorious banquet, a limitless and delicious buffet.” Or how about: “The wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy, the wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.” USAToday 01/10/02
BOOKS ON THE HALF SHELL: You see them everywhere now, these little half-efforts meant to be taken in during a pedicure or while in a holding pattern over Providence, from The One Minute Manager (111 pages, $20) to Who Moved My Cheese? – 77 glorious pages for $19.95. There is also the very successful Penguin Lives series, which allows the reader to congratulate him- or herself on having read a biography of Woodrow Wilson when in reality the mark has absorbed a lovely, but brief, essay by Louis Auchincloss and paid $20 for the privilege.” Boston Globe 01/10/02
AND ‘TWAS EVER THUS: James Boswell, perhaps the best-known-ever biographer, was “a rash and impulsive soul, easily foxed, fuzzy-brained, vastly bipolar and a martyr to booze, gambling and rabid fornication.” On a winter evening in 1774, he noted in his diary, “Much intoxicated. Found myself bouncing down an almost perpendicular stone stair. Could not stop but when I came to the bottom of it, fell with a good deal of violence, which sobered me much.” So he went home to write. The Irish Times 01/08/02
Thursday January 10
THOSE OTHER SHOES KEEP DROPPING: Poor Stephen Ambrose. People keep accusing him of lifting material from other sources for his own books, but not giving credit. Charges three and four complain that his book, “Citizen Soldier, and Part 3 of his Richard Nixon trilogy, contain passages similar to those in other texts.” Ambrose was reported to be unsure whether any of his other books – he’s published more than 20 – have similar problems. Washington Post 01/10/02
- Previously: MORE AMBROSE ALLEGATIONS: “A second book by best-selling historian Stephen Ambrose is being cited for having material that was allegedly copied from another text. Forbes.com is reporting that Ambrose’s Crazy Horse and Custer contains sections similar to Jay Monaghan’s Custer. A representative for Ambrose said Tuesday there would be no immediate comment. Anchor Books, which publishes the paperback edition of Crazy Horse and Custer, also declined immediate comment.” Philadelphia Inquirer (AP) 01/09/02
NY’S DISAPPEARING BOOKSTORES: What’s happening to Manhattan’s independent book stores? They’re closing, that’s what. “Whatever the factors—rent spikes, chain domination, reading-allergic citizenry, publishers’ high price tags—it was hard for a bookstore lover not to notice all the closings in 2001.” Village Voice 01/09/02
IN THE CROSSHAIRS: “Biography is not a pretty business, and biographers, by and large, are a devious, unscrupulous bunch. I would not trust any of us, were I unlucky enough to be the hunted rather than the hunter.” The Age (Melbourne) 01/10/02
Wednesday January 9
LIBRARIANS TO THE RESCUE: Publisher HarperCollins was ready to pulp Michael Moore’s new book for its criticisms of George Bush (among other things) and never release it. But a librarian heard about Moore’s plight and rallied other librarians to the cause, and now the book is finally getting into stores. Salon 01/07/02
MOVEABLE SLUSH PILE: Publishers are inundated with thousands of manuscripts each year. Of those, only a few ever see their way into print. More and more the onus on filtering out manuscripts is falling not on publishers but on agents. “Formerly, writers toiled in garrets and sent their work to publishers, who eventually gave the thumbs up or down. As publishers’ resources have shrunk and been redirected, they have abdicated that crucial gatekeeper’s task to others: agents, mainly, a small number of award judges, and manuscript assessment services.” Sydney Morning Herald 01/09/02
HECK, JUST READ ‘EM ALL: Last year, the Chicago Public Library initiated a campaign to get everyone in the city (a good percentage of them, anyway) to read the same book over the same summer in order to promote reading and literature in general. The book was Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Now, it’s time to select a book for the second year of the program, and public response could not be more enthusiastic. And therein lies the problem – no one can agree on one book. Chicago Tribune 01/09/02
MORE AMBROSE ALLEGATIONS: “A second book by best-selling historian Stephen Ambrose is being cited for having material that was allegedly copied from another text. Forbes.com is reporting that Ambrose’s Crazy Horse and Custer contains sections similar to Jay Monaghan’s Custer. A representative for Ambrose said Tuesday there would be no immediate comment. Anchor Books, which publishes the paperback edition of Crazy Horse and Custer, also declined immediate comment.” Philadelphia Inquirer (AP) 01/09/02
Tuesday January 8
A SUBJECTIVE CRIME: Plagiarism has always been hard to define, and the case of Stephen Ambrose emphasizes the point. Ambrose reprinted unattributed passages from another book in his latest tome, for which he has apologized. But the New York Times reprinted nearly verbatim the allegations against Ambrose from the magazine they first appeared in, also without attribution. Is that plagiarism? Does context matter? And for good measure, is Ambrose’s apology and promise to correct later editions even remotely enough to make things right? Philadelphia Inquirer 01/08/02
NEWSFLASH – PEOPLE LIKE THEIR BOOKS TO INCLUDE PAPER: It would be nice to say that it seemed like a good idea at the time, but in truth, the “e-books” phenomenon has been one of the economic downturn’s most predictable casualties. Dozens of companies, from global publishers to internet-based startups, leaped into the e-book fray a couple of years ago, with all the usual pronouncements about how the new tehnology would change everything about the way we read. These days, the small companies are gone, the big ones are downsizing, and e-books are considered a vast money pit. Publishers Weekly 01/07/02
THE SLUR THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME: “Regardless of spelling, pronunciation, or intention, arguably no word in the American lexicon conjures more incendiary emotion and history than ‘nigger.’ Considered so barbed and venomous it is widely referred to as ‘the n-word,’ in many corners uttering its two syllables aloud is tantamount to yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. Still, it’s the only title Randall Kennedy considered for his latest book. Both informative and infuriating, ‘Nigger’ is an anatomy of an epithet, which, through four centuries, has lost none of its potency to enrage and fuel fierce debate.” Boston Globe 01/08/02
Monday January 7
AMBROSE ADMITS COPYING WORK: Over the weekend Stephen Ambrose admitted lifting passages from Thomas Childers’ book for his best-selling history of World War II The Wild Blue. “I made a mistake for which I am sorry. It will be corrected in future editions of the book.” The New York Times 01/06/02
- DID HISTORIAN AMBROSE STEAL SOMEONE ELSE’S WORK? Stephen Ambrose is “perhaps America’s most popular historian and one of its most prolific.” His most recent book, climbing the New York Times’ Bestseller list, focuses on a B-24 crew in World War II. Weedkly Standard columnist Fred Barnes contends Ambrose copied passages of the book from a 1995 book by Thomas Childers. Weekly Standard 01/04/02
- THE CASE AGAINST AMBROSE: “In an interview, Professor Childers, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, said he, too, had concluded that Mr. Ambrose borrowed excessively. ‘I felt sort of disappointed,’ he said.” The New York Times 01/05/02
Sunday January 6
CLUES TO THE FRENCH MIND: A French poll listing of the 50 greatest books of the 20th Century says some important things about the French. First, about half of the books on the list aren’t French. Second – none of the English books were written before World War II. And there are no important contemporary American authors represented. “They still have a rather Francophone understanding of English and American literature. As nothing, of course, to American and British parochialism in respect of foreign literature. But also I detect a kind of eagerness to be part of a wider world. Many French people think that France must engage more fully with the outside world: they are alarmed that the Anglophone world is leaving them behind. This world of hundreds of millions of English speakers seems in its unstoppable immensity to them to be consigning France to a sort of museum culture.” The Guardian (UK) 01/05/02
Friday January 4SURPRISE WHITBREAD WINNER: “Patrick Neate has won the Whitbread novel award with his second book, Twelve Bar Blues, beating strong favourite Ian McEwan. The surprise winner receives £5,000 in prize money and goes on to compete for the Whitbread Book of the Year – worth £25,000 – alongside the other Whitbread winners and the winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year.” BBC 01/04/02
- NEATE SURPRISE: “When my book was published it did not make the barest ripple on the surface of the nation’s literature, so to win an award beating Ian McEwan and Helen Dunmore is just absurd.” BBC 01/04/02
BULLISH ON PUBLISHING: The Dow Jones might have had an off year in 2001 (the index fell 7.1 percent), but publishing companies did well with their stock prices. The Publishers Weekly index tracking stock prices of 22 publishing companies rose by 10.3 percent. Book manufacturers and book retailers had a very strong year while e-publishing struggled. Publishers Weekly 01/02/02
POETIC PALLOR: What’s going on with the American Academy of Poets? Last fall it laid off employees and fired William Wadsworth, its longtime director. “During Wadsworth’s 12-year tenure, the Academy launched an array of new programs: National Poetry Month; the Poetry Book Club; a Web site; and the Online Poetry Classroom, which encourages poetry education in secondary schools. Wadsworth also oversaw the addition of five awards to the Academy’s distinguished series, as well as the establishment of the Atlas/Greenwall Fund, which provides support to noncommercial poetry publishers. Under Wadsworth’s leadership the Academy’s annual income increased from $400,000 to $3 million, and its total assets grew from $2 million to $10 million.” Poets & Writers 01/02
Thursday January 3
MUGGLES GOT NO SENSE OF HUMOR: Time was when a cultural phenomenon knew it had hit the big time when a parody showed up in Mad Magazine. These days, the modern equivalent seems to be when some aspiring satirist finds his/her work shot down in court, or declined by publishers fearful of the wrath of their corporate peers. A Harry Potter parody is the latest victim of the publishing/merchandising brand-protection conspiracy, and its author is not happy. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 01/02/02
COWBOY COUPLETS: It gets lonely out there on the prairie, ridin’ the range with nothin’ but the tumbleweed and the herd to keep you company on those long, cold, Midwest nights. At least we assume it does: how else to explain the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, going on this month in Elko, Nevada? “Started 18 years ago, the annual event, which now lasts a week, is attended by more than 8,000 people. The schedule features workshops, exhibitions, panel discussions, films, and performances by some of today’s finest cowboy poets, musicians, and craftsmen.” Christian Science Monitor 01/02/02
Wednesday January 2
SAVING BOOKS: The Library of Congress has begun plans to de-acidify a million books in its collection. “More than 150 years ago, papermakers started using chemicals that made their product acidic and thus more susceptible to decay.” The Library has a “plan to de-cidify about 8.5 million of the library’s 18.7 million books, a move that is intended to add hundreds of years to the life of the books.” The New York Times 01/01/02
PUBLISHING THE ARTWORLD: As the artworld gets more complex, sprawling and difficult to sort through, a tiny magazine called Border Crossings produced in central Canada makes a pretty good guide. “Writers in Border Crossings accomplish, better than most, the critic’s most difficult task: communicating art ideas to non-artists and artists alike, explaining what matters to the first group without boring or appalling the second. For the most part, they avoid artspeak, the private language that disfigures many magazines.” National Post 01/02/02