“Throughout his over 70-year reign, the French king directed a self-portrait campaign in medals – the petite propaganda that spread his image and victories across the continent. However, that didn’t stop his enemies from mocking his grandeur in the same medium.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Here Are The Finalists For This Year’s National Book Awards
“Among the books that have survived the second round of cuts, a few clear favorites are beginning to emerge – while others have been displaced by less familiar names.”
Speaking In Tongues: The Remarkable Boom In Invented Languages
Elvish, Klingon, Na’vi, Dothraki – they’re all “conlangs” (constructed languages), and there are many, many more. “The story of conlanging is, as with so many other bodies of knowledge, the story of old-fashioned research inflated to surreal proportions by the internet’s bellows. Yes, you can be a professional conlanger, but the competition is stiff.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 10.14.15
Marketing and Development Terminology
This is part of a series of blog posts in conjunction with TRG Arts on the interrelationships among marketing, development, fundraising, and community engagement. The point of the series is that they are all rooted in relationship building and maintenance. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2015-10-13
Worth 1,000 Words: An Illustrated Companion to My WSJ Review of the Wadsworth Atheneum
My article in today’s Wall Street Journal on the gloriously transformed Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford paints many verbal pictures of what I enjoyed during my visit. But “verbal” is often a poor substitute for “visual.” To help you see what I saw, here’s my illustrated tour of what I described in the WSJ … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-10-14
Snapshot: Deborah Kerr and Paul Scofield in Noël Coward’s A Song at Twilight
An excerpt from BBC2’s 1982 TV production of Noël Coward’s A Song at Twilight, directed by Cedric Messina and featuring Deborah Kerr and Paul Scofield. The role played by Scofield is a fictionalized portrayal of Somerset Maugham. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-10-14
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Why Are Critics These Days So Defensive?
“People who enjoyed what were once known as guilty pleasures have absolved themselves of guilt. Arguments that people should be ashamed of lower-order tastes – like Ruth Graham’s attack on adults who read young-adult books – are actually quite rare. Yet anxiety about all this is pervasive, as if everyone’s high-school English teacher were lurking around the corner, ready to scold us for skipping Middlemarch on the summer reading list.”
Playboy To Stop Publishing Pictures Of Naked Ladies
As of next March, the rest of us really can read Playboy for the articles – which the editors plan to beef up, harking back to the glory days of the 1960s and ’70s, when the magazine published stories by the likes of Gore Vidal and Margaret Atwood and interviews with Martin Luther King Jr., Jimmy Carter, and John and Yoko. Says company CEO Scott Flanders, “The difference between us and Vice is that we’re going after the guy with a job.”
Playboy In Popular Culture (A Brief History)
The Times business section takes “look back at what made the publication and its lifestyle so prominent.”
Hating Renoir Is Just A Phase
Peter Schjeldahl: “On the merits of the case, I would have identified with the R.S.A.P. people at a time – a long time; decades – when I had left the first class of people who like Renoir and had yet to join the second. … In the second class of people who like Renoir are those who have stopped fortifying their self-esteem with pride in their sophistication.”
Why Do We Keep Making And Consuming Movies And Books About Steve Jobs?
Laura Miller: “When people feel compelled to tell each other the same story over and over again, there’s usually something about it they can’t quite work out. Each iteration promises, yet fails, to finally make sense of it. The life and work of Steve Jobs is that kind of story, and our preoccupation with telling and retelling it points to some sizable cracks in the American psyche.”
Kenneth Branagh’s Theatre Company – Can He Succeed Where Olivier Foundered?
Michael Billington: “Olivier, for all his genius as an actor, had a strange capacity for picking duds. … The case with Branagh is totally different. Even at the start of his career, he successfully created and co-ran the Renaissance Theatre Company. He is shrewd enough to know the public craves stars.”