“At the core of the beautiful soul is the idea that the individual possesses an innate cognitive potential. Subject to the right environmental and educational conditions, this latent potential can be developed to reach a more perfect state of intellect, morality, character and conduct. The beautiful soul is an aesthetic concept focused on developing human capacities and advancing knowledge and culture. It entails the pursuit of personal cultivation to create a convergence of the individual aesthetic impulse with a collective ethical ideal.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
How Parents Can Spark A Life Of The Mind
“Explaining all the way, my father introduced his children to Shakespeare, play by play, as well as to classic Westerns. He explained each and every joke in each and every Gilbert and Sullivan operetta (“You shall sit, if he sees reason, through the grouse and salmon season!”). He read aloud an astonishing number of the works of P.G. Wodehouse, explaining the jokes, however inappropriate.”
The Great Essay Is Rarely About What It Says It’s About
The essay, in Brian Dillon’s account, is both erotic and absent, lapidary and profuse, and is at its best when always concerned with its own realisation of its inherent sense of failure. Before this discussion of etymology, though, comes a bravura cadenza of topics, placed to make us realise the essay is never about what it claims to be at all.
How Cool Became “Cool”
“The history of post-war cool is both a history of these strange convergences – between French intellectuals, African American musicians and white working-class Hollywood heroes – and of the continuing conflicts between and within them.”
Are Pricey University Fine Arts Degree Programs On The Verge Of A Crash?
“In recent days, it was announced that a graduate program in theater at Harvard would suspend admissions for the next three years after receiving a so-called failing grade from the Department of Education that could result in a loss of access to federal student loans. The finding, which I first read about in the Boston Globe, should be a shot across the bow for elitist arts programs with high tuitions, programs that long have ignored the realistic economic prospects of their graduates.”
Has Classical Music “Recovered” From Atonality?
“The tyranny is now gone and tonality is back. But the restoration of reality has not taken place all at once. What began emerging from under the rubble of 12-tone music back in the 1960s was minimalism. In it, tonality returned with a vengeance but was, at first, more like a patient from a trauma ward gradually recovering consciousness. The traumatized patient slowly comes out of a coma, only gradually recovering motor skills, coordination, movement, and coherent speech. The musical movement known as minimalism is the sometimes painfully slow rediscovery of the basic vocabulary of music: rhythm, melody, and harmony.”
Librettists Get More Prominence In The New, Evolving Opera Landscape
“Although the status of librettists has waxed and waned over the centuries, it’s time to recognize their importance again, particularly in the creation of contemporary opera. The resurgence of storytelling, along with the heightened media attention accorded premieres, has helped fuel the commissioning of a plethora of new operas in the U.S. in recent years. And the seemingly insatiable appetite of presenters for “celebrity” operas, as well as adaptations of well-known films and books, has put leading librettists like Mark Campbell, Gene Scheer and Royce Vavrek in great demand.”
Addressing The Gender Imbalance In The Non-Profit Sector
“In the non-profit sector, 75 percent of all workers and volunteers are women. Yet somehow only 45 percent of women will go on to secure a top position at any of these organizations, and only 21 percent of these CEOs will have access to budgets of $25 million or more. So what gives?”
It’s A Noisy Cacophonous World. Here’s How Eight Top Curators Try To Make Sense Of The World
Dickens’s characters are cardboard cutouts, even in their names: Inspector Bucket, the Brothers Cheeryble, Jerry Cruncher. They are mechanicals. His prose is turgid and, less forgivable, tortured. Here’s his rendition, in “Dombey and Son,” of a sea-captain’s dialect: “It’s an almighty element. There’s wonders in the deep, my pretty. Think on it when the winds is roaring and the waves is rowling.” What a load of bosh.
A Dying Venice Turns On Tourists
“Around 2,000 people leave each year. If we go on this way, in a few years’ time Venice will only be populated by tourists. This would be a social, anthropological and historical disaster.” Whether irritated by selfie sticks, noisy wheelie suitcases or people snacking on one of the 391 bridges, Venetians’ contempt towards the 28 million visitors who flood the city each year has reached alarming levels.