“With an easy flick of the wrist, he once and for all drew an uncrossable line that demarcated the chasm between old art and new art … In his own words, he reduced everything to the ‘zero of form.’ Zero, for some reason, turned out to be a square, and this simple discovery is one of the most frightening events in art in all of its history of existence.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
James Joyce Fascinates The Chinese
“These days, if you ask about James Joyce – or ‘Zhanmusi Qiaoyisi’, as his name is transliterated in Chinese pinyin – in a Chinese bookshop you will be led to shelves lined with relevant volumes. The vast five-floor Xinhua bookshop on Wangfujing, a crowded shopping avenue just round the corner from Tiananmen Square, currently stocks no fewer than four different editions of Ulysses.”
‘An Argument Ends’: What We Lose When A Bookstore Closes
Adam Gopnik: “It is rarely the book you came to seek, but the book next to that book, which changes your mind and heart.” But, more than that, “restaurants, bookstores, cafés – on a grander scale railway stations, on a lesser one chessboards near park benches – are the sinews of civil society.”
Remember The Notorious ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’? It Didn’t Necessarily Tell Us What Everyone Thought It Did
Back in 1971, a group of Stanford students participated in a role-playing experiment, with some taking the role of guards in a make-believe prison and others playing inmates. The latter became so passive, and the former so abusive, that the experiment was called off halfway through. Most people concluded that the project demonstrated the darker sides of human nature, but Maria Konnikova suggests that the results were more about institutions and rules.
Nobody Bought Harper Lee’s Letters At Auction
“Christie’s had estimated a sale price of between $150,000 and $250,000, but bidding started at $80,000 and ended at $90,000, far short of the reserve price.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 06.15.15
Cherchez Les Femmes: Mysterious Role of “Party with a Financial Interest” in the $179.37-Million Picasso
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-06-15
Where to Start with Ornette Coleman
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2015-06-15
Rethinking Multimovement Form
AJBlog: PostClassic Published 2015-06-15
Road movie
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2015-06-15
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What It’s Like To Perform Clandestine Theatre Under A Harsh Dictatorship
“The cloak and dagger nature of trying to see a play in one of Europe’s most authoritarian nations is to be mirrored in the UK as part of Belarus Free Theatre’s 10th anniversary celebrations. Audiences will have no idea where they are going to see performances and post-show discussions being staged in a festival scheduled over two weeks in November.”
Unknown Poems By Katherine Mansfield Found In Chicago Library
In the collections of the Newberry Library, a researcher discovered nearly 30 poems from the years 1909 to 1911, “the writer’s most painful and difficult period, the evidence for which she had later destroyed.”
No, Ursula K. LeGuin, Amazon Is Not Turning Literature Into Junk Food
Stephen L. Carter: “But now, according to Le Guin, Amazon’s quest for short-term sales is destroying serious literature. … I think Le Guin is half right – or, more to the point, she has identified the correct problem but chosen the wrong villain.”
This 93-Year-Old Ballet Legend Created A New Form Of Dance Therapy
“After she retired from the stage, María Fux, Argentina’s prima ballerina assoluta during the 1940s and ’50s, began teaching classes of blind and disabled students to dance, getting their bodies to do far more than had been thought possible.”