It’s an honor to be a finalist for the prestigious Whitbread Award. Less interesting is to be shortlisted for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist has been named for both prizes. “The aim of the [Bad Sex] prize is ‘to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it’.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Adrift On A Sea Of Styles
It used to be that music followed some sort of stylistic order of the day. Listeners might not agree with it, but at least there was some sort of guiding aesthetic at work. Today, there’s no sense of direction. “A decade of hard listening has produced little evidence of a shared culture, let alone a common trajectory. What is disorienting is the smorgasbord of opposites – past and future, tonal and atonal, control and freedom – that these and other contemporary works collectively represent.”
Anti-Piracy Measures Futile Say Engineers
A group of Microsoft software engineers has concluded that digital anti-piracy measures are ultimately futile. They presented a paper this weekend that states that “the steady spread of file-swapping systems and improvements in their organisation will eventually make them impossible to shut down. They also conclude that the gradual spread of CD and DVD burners will help thwart any attempts to control what the public can do with the music they buy.”
Met Opera Attacks Web Fan
Metropolitan Opera fan John Patterson started a website called Metmaniac.com to “celebrate and annotate nearly 70 years of Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. It featured nearly complete lists of broadcasts from the 1930s to the present, but the lists were not linked to anything. It also provided a message board for opera lovers to discuss shows and buy, sell and trade tickets.” But last week, the Met sent Patterson a cease-and-desist order, which shut the site down. The company claims “the name MetManiac and the contents of the site violated their trademarks and copyrights.”
Still Wild About Winnie
After a month of debate, a BBC poll names Winston Churchill the greatest Briton of all time. “Participants in the survey voted the second World War leader top of the list of the country’s 100 most significant individuals, with 447,423 votes. He beat his nearest rival, engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, by more than 56,000 votes.”
Battle of the TV Music Networks
Is MTV in trouble in the UK? “After enjoying 15 years as a near monopoly, the network is in the biggest competitive fight of its life. In less than 18 months Emap – the magazine and radio group formerly known as East Midland and Allied Press – has been able to launch and grow six rival channels which, together, are now watched by almost as many people as MTV’s.” And there are more competitors coming…
I’m Just Writing To Say Fuhggedaboutit
You can’t be a writer without getting rejection letters. But, as any writer knows, it’s how you’re rejected by that publisher that really counts…
The Art Of Getting Elected
In American elections, arts policy hardly even rates a mention. But Australia’s Victorian government is up for election, and the major parties are scrapping to differentiate their arts policies from one another. If campaign promises are to be believed, the arts are in for soime funding increases.
Why Can’t Public Buildings Be Art?
Richard MacCormac’s design for a London Tube station has attracted hrodes of fans. “The station manager enjoys its obvious theatricality and musicians have responded to its magic. There isn’t even any graffiti on the wall. It is a lovely thing, a happy surprise as the jaded tube traveller emerges from the fetid heat of an underground train into the regenerative joys of born-again Southwark.” The station design was inspired by music and theatre, says MacCormac. So why can’t more public buildings be this way?
Finally – Watch What You Want
“After years of failed promises, unripe business plans and half-baked technology, the cable industry is finally beginning to deliver reliable and economical video-on-demand services. Despite the omnipotence that the label implies, video on demand does not allow users to watch any program or movie under the sun. No database is yet infinite. But in New York City, for instance, Time Warner Cable plans to have 1,300 hours of programming available at any one time — the equivalent of almost two months of TV watching.”