“I watched slack-jawed in horror as they threw one of the 20th century’s most iconic fictional heroes, Atticus Finch, under the bus.” (audio with transcript)
Month: October 2015
A Building You Want To Fondle: Burntwood School Wins Stirling Prize
“It’s not very often you want to rush up and stroke a school, but it’s hard to resist fondling the sharply chamfered concrete facade of Burntwood school in south London, winner of this year’s Riba Stirling prize for the UK’s best building. A 1950s timewarp in the best possible sense, the £41m comprehensive girls’ school recalls the values of another, more generous era.”
Allegedly Fake Joan Mirós Trigger Complicated Trials in Turkey
In late 2013, an exhibition titled Miró in Istanbul was shut down halfway through its run when the artworks on view were denounced as fakes. The management company that staged the show, the university that hosted the exhibition, and the Joan Miró Foundation (which was never told about the show) all sued the gallerist who owns the works and rented then out. The trials are now beginning.
Playboy’s Abandonment of Nudity Was A Historical Necessity
“The disappearance of nudity from Playboy says more about the persistence of ticklish attitudes about nudity than it does about Playboy. Insofar as Hugh Hefner was somewhat correct to view himself as an agent of sexual liberation, this development resembles a kind of planned obsolescence. The Playboy nude was a stage to be passed through, like puberty or, in Marx’s theory of history, capitalism.”
‘Come On Up, Sweetheart’: James Baldwin’s Letters To His Brother
“Between the late 1940s and the mid-1980s, he carried on an increasingly dense and complex correspondence with his youngest brother, David. Many of these letters survive – some 120 of them, amounting to about 70,000 words. They give an unprecedented picture of his life and work, an epistolary autobiography: they bristle and crackle with the trials, dangers, errors, mistakes, and triumphs of one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century.”
Could Korean Lit Be The Next Big Thing?
Ed Park takes a look at a new series of fiction in translation – “in all its strangeness and variety, from the nineteen-thirties to the present” – from Dalkey Archive Press.
Thieves In The Archives: America’s Literary History, Stolen And Sold On Ebay
The tale of how Flannery O’Connor’s purloined letters – purloined by one David Breithaupt from the Kenyon College library – were pinched and fenced is an example of just how easy it can be for us to lose crucial pieces of the historical record.
‘Why We’re Translating Shakespeare’ – Oregon Festival Director Defends Controversial Project
Bill Rauch: “The Play on! translations are not being commissioned because we despair that people will never understand the original language … Instead, the translation project is about creating a new body of work … By commissioning 36 playwrights and pairing them with dramaturgs to examine each of Shakespeare’s plays, we have the opportunity to delve more deeply into the language of the texts and to create companion pieces (not replacements) to the original texts.”
‘My Soul’s Sweet Editor’: Leon Wieseltier’s Eulogy For Carol Brown Janeway
“I sent her everything I wrote, not so much because I wanted to be published by her, though I resolved almost immediately that I never wanted to be published by anyone else, but because I wanted her to know the contents of my mind and my heart, and I wanted her to admire them. Carol’s admiration was a very high attainment.”
Paris Opera Ballet Hires First Chinese Dancer In Its 346-Year History
“Lam Chun-wing, a 19-year-old from a working-class Hong Kong suburb, is an unlikely addition to the world’s oldest ballet company – a state institution steeped in French tradition.”