Here is the etymology the Oxford English Dictionary provides for the word genius, imported to English straight from the Latin: “male spirit of a family, existing in the head of the family and subsequently in the divine or spiritual part of each individual, personification of a person’s natural appetites, spirit or personality of an emperor regarded as an object of worship, spirit of a place, spirit of a corporation, (in literature) talent, inspiration, person endowed with talent, also demon or spiritual being in general.” There’s more, but there’s already so much: genius, by definition a male condition. Genius, a male condition that inflects its maleness on the individual soul. Genius, an object of worship. Genius, perhaps slightly demonic.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Five Cities Whose Art Scenes Are On The Rise
Not only do these worldwide sites offer unique art experiences, but they are also being credited with pushing the international contemporary art scene in new directions.
How A Controversial Fan-Driven Convention Collapsed
Universal FanCon — the pop culture convention that crashed and burned late last month — was supposed to build on this momentum, bringing together legions of geeks who had always been relegated to the lonely margins of geekdom. Which helps explain why people were so outraged and heartbroken by its abrupt collapse.
How A Threatened Sale Is Killing Westminster Choir College
The uncertainty has already chilled interest in Westminster, where annual tuition is $37,650: the incoming class of freshmen and graduate students is expected to be half the normal size of roughly 110, faculty members estimate.
Why A Nobel Prize For Literature Is A Bad Idea Anyway…
“Literature is not tennis or football, where international competition makes sense. It is intimately tied to the language and culture from which it emerges. Literary style distinguishes itself by its distance from the other styles that surround it, implying a community of readers with a shared knowledge of other literary works, of standard language usage and cultural context. What sense does it make for a group from one culture — be it Swedish, American, Nigerian or Japanese — to seek to compare a Bolivian poet with a Korean novelist, an American singer-songwriter with a Russian playwright, and so on? Why would we even want them to do that?”
Total Entertainment And Real Perpetual War Have Melded Into One
It’s a cliché of aristocratic military lore that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton—but like many clichés, it contains more than a kernel of truth. In our frenetically digitized mass society, meanwhile, we casually understand that combat presented as harmless fun in the guise of sports, video games, and television probably goes a long way in softening the military’s image.
The End Of Theory?
In the United States, theory has become a utopian experiment and experience: it exists alongside increasingly historicist literary studies as a site of mixture and reprieve; it promises, for example, to help literary scholars moonlight as media theorists and art historians, while reminding them to consider the horrors of colonialism and the errors of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, it makes the rounds online, on social media, in popular music, in art world press releases, and in the New York Times, decontextualized and meme-like, sometimes the stuff of conspiracy and outrage and at others the balm of empathy.
How Jack Benny Became A Template For Comedians
In May 1932, with vaudeville in a death spiral due to the Great Depression, Benny turned to the growing entertainment medium of broadcast radio. It was Benny’s understanding of radio’s unique challenges—and his ingenious solutions to them—that helped him become the number one comedian in radio history, forging a template that many imitators and competitors would follow.
How The Rockefellers Helped Shape The Modern Art Market
The Rockefellers entered the Modern art market in its earliest days, and the manner in which they collected reflects, perhaps influenced, its dramatic growth through the 20th century.
An Intellectual “Dark Web”?
It is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.