Month: December 2003

Our Expanding Shelves (Too Many Books?)

Are too many books being published? Well, that depends whether you’re a reader or a publisher. “The most recent figures show that in 2002, total output of new titles and editions in the U.S. grew by nearly 6 percent, to 150,000. General adult fiction exceeded 17,000 – the single strongest category. Juvenile titles topped 10,000, the highest total ever recorded. And there were more than 10,300 new publishers, mostly small or self-publishers. No wonder we’re all running out of shelf space.”

Andrew Davis To Pittsburgh?

Is Chicago Lyric Opera director Andrew Davis shopping for a new job? “Last weekend, the 59-year-old Davis squeezed Friday night and Sunday afternoon performances with the Pittsburgh Symphony into a schedule that included conducting Wagner’s five-hour “Siegfried” in Chicago Saturday night. Pittsburgh’s music director, Mariss Jansons, will be leaving his post at the close of this season after seven years, and last week in an interview with a Pittsburgh newspaper before the concerts, Davis candidly admitted being interested in the position.”

Books On Sale In London

London book stores are slashing prices as Christmas approaches. “The stores usually try to restrict discounting to slower-selling books, keeping chart-toppers at the full price, particularly in the peak month of December. But this year they have been forced by competition from supermarkets to slash prices of their most popular titles.”

David Lynch: $1 Billion For World Peace Center

Filmmaker David Lynch has “lent his famous name and idiosyncratic hairstyle to a project to raise $1 billion on behalf of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru of transcendental meditation who once entranced the Beatles, and who has for the past few decades been striving to build an earthly paradise. The $1 billion is for a meditation centre big enough to hold 8,000 skilled practitioners. Lynch explains that such a critical mass of positive thinking ‘broadcast’ from one spot will be enough to pacify the world.”

US, France Compete For Afghan Gold

Competing groups from France and the US are proposing to tour Afghanistan’s greatest treasure – the Bactrian gold. “The finds from Tillya Tepe, in northern Afghanistan, date from a 2,000-year-old tomb which was discovered in 1978, but they have never been on display for security reasons. The gold alone numbers 20,000 items. Afghanistan still has nowhere with sufficient security to exhibit the material, since the bombed and looted Kabul Museum on the outskirts of town is an extremely damaged building. A touring exhibition would raise money, at least part of which would go to rebuild the museum or establish a new purpose-built museum in the city centre.”

In Praise Of JM

JM Coetzee is the kind of author you can feel good about being enthusiastic, writes Lynne Coady. “This is an author whose work one can celebrate unreservedly, who refuses to be anyone’s public platypus, whose recent winning of the Nobel Prize for literature is the kind of thing that makes readers feel really, really good about whoever’s keeping shop over there in Stockholm, and really, really contemptuous toward the Man Booker Prize judges, who neglected to shortlist Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.”

Maryinsky Theatre Warehouse Damage More Extensive Than Reported

A September fire at the Maryinsky Theatre’s warehouse in St. Petersburg, Russia was said to have caused only $225,000 damage. But the cost is evidently much higher. Some 30 productions were affected by the fire, and it will take about $15 million to replace what was damaged. The company’s 2003-04 season are imperiled as well as tours to Germany, Japan and the United States.

Power(Point) To The People!

Former Talking Heads musician David Byrne has turned to PowerPoint as his latest artistic medium. “His art presentations make babble of business-speak, and question whether the form of what we communicate can affect its truth: Rebellious flow charts stream backward, screens overflow with clip art gone wild, deliverables and leave-behinds assume surreal new roles, and renegade bullet points assault the viewer in a rapid-fire barrage.”