“Who has an opera made of their life? Roman gods, doomed lovers, Nixon, and now, to our great surprise, my wife Jessie and I. … In popular usage, the words ‘operatic’ and ‘tragic’ are roughly synonymous, the required minimum bet of misery much greater for opera than memoir. So how should you take it if professionals think your life was awful enough to qualify? The war was bad, I admit, but I didn’t know my war was Wagner bad.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Couple Who Are Finally Bringing Us The Real Dostoevsky (Eat Your Heart Out, Constance Garnett)
“When we first told [this old Russian émigré lady] we were translating The Brothers Karamazov, she said, Oh, Dostoevsky, I hope you correct his awful style. I said, No, that is precisely what we’re going to keep.” A conversation with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 06.24.15
“Of” the Community
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2015-06-24
Cash-Cow Art Loans in Abu Dhabi: What “Commercial Interests” of British Museum Would Be Harmed by Disclosure?
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-06-24
Reemerging
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2015-06-24
Tweets in search of a context: saying farewell to the Confederate battle flag
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-06-24
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How The Talmud Became A Bestseller In South Korea
“Each Korean family has at least one copy of the Talmud. Korean mothers want to know how so many Jewish people became geniuses. Twenty-three per cent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish people. Korean women want to know the secret. They found the secret in this book.”
MoMA Averts Strike As Employees Approve New Contract
The three-year labor agreement “was ratified by 95% of the roughly 280 MoMA employees who are members of Local 2110.”
Uprooting The Confederate Flag From American Pop Culture Ain’t Gonna Be Easy
It’s not just all the bumper stickers and belt buckles and shower curtains and other merch: it’s motorcycle clubs and Lynyrd Skynyrd albums and Dukes of Hazzard reruns. “How do you deal with a symbol that means so many different things, to so many different people? How do you ‘take down’ a flag that has ceased to be a flag at all?”
Cause And Effect: The Way The Universe Works, Or Naïve Illusion? (Yes, It’s A Real Question)
“In short, a working knowledge of the way in which causes and effects relate to one another seems indispensible to our ability to make our way in the world. Yet there is a long and venerable tradition in philosophy, dating back at least to David Hume in the 18th century, that finds the notions of causality to be dubious. And that might be putting it kindly.”
Bill T. Jones Grapples With The Holocaust In Dance
“Taking testimony from a Holocaust survivor and turning it into a dance is an intriguing but risky proposition, especially if you’re not a Jew. How do you do justice to the words and the truths they contain while still creating something new from them? How do art and life, imagination and reality, coexist?”
A Liberal Arts Education? Not Worth A Dime (And That’s Okay)
“Even the shrinking pool of champions of liberal education try to argue for its workplace utility, pointing out that employers actually do want their employees to ‘write clearly,’ ‘argue persuasively,’ and ‘possess critical thinking skills,’ … It has not compelled anyone. … This tactic may win some battles, but it will ultimately lose the war.”
What’s Happening In Your Brain When You Keep Nodding Off And Can’t Stay Awake
It’s all about the thalamus and the group of cerebral regions sometimes nicknamed “the oh shit circuit.”