“If books are not the most perishable products of human civilization, they have, throughout recorded history, attracted the homicidal attentions of every conquering army. In large-scale versions of the penalty the Romans called damnatio memoriae, a punishment for individuals found guilty of committing crimes against the state which involved erasing every reference—whether on stone, in a monument or on parchment— to the person in question, invaders have settled not just for mass murder of the local citizenry, but have indulged in the wholesale disappearance of every written trace of a culture (as the Taliban did to non-fundamentalist Afghans), a language (as the Normans did to the Saxons), a people (as the Romans did to the Etruscans).”
Month: December 2003
Barnes Hearing Concludes – Pew makes Pitch For Move
The Pew Charitable Trust s is unlikely to continue supporting the Barnes Collection if it is unable to move to downtown Philadelphia. Pew preseident Rebecca Rimel testified at a hearing to determine whether the Barnes should be allowed to break its founder’s trust to move.
San Jose Opera – Dreading A Move To A New Home
Opera San Jose is supposed to move in September into a theatre renovated for $75 million. But the finances of getting into the building and living there scare the company. “We are running frightened,” general manager Irene Dalis said. For 20 years, she has looked forward to moving the company from the 515-seat Montgomery Theater to the California Fox, she said, “and now I dread it.”
Rings Wins “Big Read”
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings has won the BBC’s Big Read poll for the UK’s most popular book. “The trilogy won 174,000 votes, 23% of the poll. The other main contender going into Saturday night was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which won 135,000 votes. Philip Pullman’s metaphysical trilogy of children’s books, His Dark Materials, came third with 63,000.”
Orchestras – Back To The Past (And Stuck There)
Why must orchestras present such a formal presence? “No wonder young people find this museum approach such a turn-off. Linked to the earthen rigidity of most mainstream concert programming, and the general predictability of the repertoire, the majority of weekly orchestral offerings in the Usher Hall or the Royal Concert Hall can have as much pull as a traditional Church of Scotland service. Come to think of it, the audience profile in both cases is about the same – elderly and growing thin on the ground. Surely it’s time to freshen things up, bring our orchestras into the modern age and apply the creative touch to more than just the sound of the music.”
Dismissing The Hobbit (But He’s Still Around)
Some critics are hailing the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy as a great masterpiece. But as books, the Tolkien project failed to impress literary critics of the time. “The Lord of the Rings must be one of the most comprehensively dismissed trilogies ever written. Critics have queued up since its publication nearly 50 years ago to denounce it. But JRR Tolkien’s story has outlived one generation of critics, and will certainly outlive another.”
Library Riles Patrons Over Plans To Sell Treasure
The Providence Athenaeum library in Rhode Island is 250 years old, “a vestige of the days when America’s settlers created private lending libraries because public ones had yet to be invented.” But the Athenaeum has often spent more money than it has taken in, and “with a drop in stock market returns, the board decided to sell off the prize of its collection, a complete poster-size folio of Audubon’s ‘Birds of America,’ valued at as much as $7 million. Now the birds are at the center of a raucous battle between the people who run the library and the people who use it.”
NY City Opera Leadership Changes Horses
The 80-year-old chairman of New York City Opera, Irwin Schneiderman, is stepping down from the job. He’s “leaving at a crucial moment for City Opera, which desperately wants a home of its own, having shared the New York State Theater for 38 years with the New York City Ballet. The company has long complained that the theater was acoustically unfit for opera.”
In Search Of Old Baghdad
“Few cities in the world occupy as strong a hold over the collective imagination as Baghdad. Set at the crossroads between East and West, the city was one of the first great power centers of the Islamic world. Its name still conjures up a mix of images, from the rich intellectual heritage depicted in its ancient texts to the exotic fantasies scattered through the pages of the “Arabian Nights.” Its emergence as a world capital marked the beginning of centuries of cultural dominance by the Middle East at a time when Europe was floundering through the Dark Ages. Today that legacy has understandably been pushed to the background.”
When Baghdad Aspired To Modern Greatness
There was a brief time in the mid-20th Century when Baghdad aspired to being rebuilt as an international city. “More construction took place in Baghdad during the second half of the 20th century than at any time since the Golden Age of the Abbasid dynasty came to a close nearly 750 years ago. Most of this new work was Modern in spirit and represented a radical break with Baghdad’s past. Among the international architects with major projects here were Frank Lloyd Wright, then nearing the end of his career; Walter Gropius, a founder of the Bauhaus; and the Italian Modernist Gio Ponti. They were soon followed by a rising generation of Iraqi talents who sought to infuse Western architectural forms with a more local sensibility. Together, such architects transformed Baghdad into a modern city — one whose defining urban features were rooted in the cultural traditions of the West.”