“Seven bookshop groups are to launch their first pilot marketing campaign to black and ethnic minority readerships. Starting on Saturday, 70 of their stores will give prominent displays to books by more than 200 authors in these categories.” The companies “are working with the Arts Council of England’s diversity initiative, decibel.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Invisible Discus, Anyone? Artists Protest Funding Cuts
“The recent cut of 35% in Grants for the Arts – down from £83m to £54m for the year 2007-08 – has been no laughing matter. But a group of artists are getting together on Saturday May 26 on Hackney Marshes to draw attention to the ways artists will be affected at a grass-roots level by the redirection of lottery money to fund the 2012 Olympics. … Grunts for the Arts brings together live artists, theatre-makers, designers, fine artists and sculptors for what is being described as an artists’ sports day that will include events such as handbag hurling, durational knitting, the invisible discus and the high-heel 100m sprint.”
Crappy Book For Jukebox Musical Is Not Required
Here’s a question that ought to have been raised earlier, potentially saving untold thousands from misery: “Why do back catalogue-based musicals have such stupid plots?”
Hytner And Billington Duke It Out In The Car Park
Well, duke it out verbally, anyway, over Nicholas Hytner’s “allegation that too many critics are ageing misogynists cut from the same cloth,” Michael Billington writes. After the two ran into each other in the car park, “a lively debate ensued. To his credit, Hytner gave some ground and admitted, particularly over the accusation of entrenched misogyny, that he may have overstated the case. But he stuck fiercely to his line that daily drama criticism was dominated by men of a certain generation….”
Traditional Music, Reinvented, On The Rise In Bosnia
“Sevdah – the word is Turkish and suggests desire, yearning, thwarted love – has existed for hundreds of years in this region, often composed of just a voice and a saz (a Turkish lute). Yet it took Bosnia’s suffering to focus the world’s attention on this small nation’s music. Sevdah bears comparison to Portuguese fado and Spanish flamenco; all three are vocal arts rooted in Arabic courtly love songs from a millennium ago.”
Cornwell Testifies In Suit Against Her Cyberstalker
“The point of her work, the best-selling writer Patricia Cornwell recently told an interviewer, is to speak up for victims of crime. This week a Virginia courtroom heard the 50-year-old writer speak up for herself, as she described how another, less celebrated author, had stalked her on the internet, causing emotional distress and damaging her reputation.”
Art-Buying Frenzy Doesn’t Extend To Pooh
“A rare drawing of Winnie The Pooh and Tigger has sold for £21,600 at auction in London. The crayon picture by Ernest H Shepard, Tiggers Don’t Like Honey, was drawn for the 1958 edition of AA Milne’s The World of Pooh, but never published. It had been expected to raise up to £30,000 at Bonhams in London.”
On Elgar’s Genius, And Why His Critics Are Wrong
“If we taught music better in schools, we would understand Elgar more, for a case can be made that he and his music are central to that most crucial of understandings: of ourselves, and where we come from. … When you hear Elgar at his greatest – in the Second Symphony, in the Violin Concerto, above all in Falstaff – you hear an English spirit released from the confinement of social and critical disdain. He is proving his detractors – present and future – wrong in the extreme.”
The Latest In Decadence: A Rockefeller Rothko
“Everyone knew that David Rockefeller’s Rothko would fetch a very high price. Sotheby’s, our eBay for billionaires, had guaranteed a figure of $46 million to keep the painting away from its archrival auction house, Christie’s. … The gaudy winning bid of $72.8 million, the highest ever paid for a work of contemporary art at auction, confirmed Sotheby’s confidence that a Rockefeller Rothko is now the ultimate luxury object.”
Mr. Keillor’s Tips For Writers On Deadline
“Writers get obsessed with a project and lock the doors and sit and work at it, like animals in a leg trap trying to chew through the leg, which is not good strategy. My advice is to get out of the house and take a walk, a good first cure for the depression that hits after you’ve been working for a year and it dawns on you that your book is not ‘Huckleberry Finn’ but you must finish it anyway….”