Author: Matthew Westphal

How Did The Cloud Atlas Filmmakers Come Up With The Music For That Sextet?

“The book’s title is a reference to the Cloud Atlas Sextet, written by a fictional, young 1930s composer named Robert Frobisher, the protagonist of one of six loosely connected narratives that make up the novel.” In the book, author David Mitchell describes the piece in some detail – but director Tom Tykwer (himself a msuician) and his colleagues couldn’t both follow the description and make the music “satisfying for the film.”

What Would The Sextet In Cloud Atlas – As Described In The Novel – Sound Like?

The piece is scored for violin, cello, flute, oboe, clarinet, and piano; the composer in the novel describes his inspiration this way: “Echoes of Scriabin’s White Mass, Stravinsky’s lost footprints, chromatics of the more lunar Debussy, but truth is I don’t know where it came from.” J. Bryan Lowder unpacks all those references.

Why The Short Story Fell Off The Zeitgeist’s Radar

Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, suggests that the answer lies with technology. It’s not just that the ways people consumed entertainment changed (“short stories [in popular magazines] lost out to M*A*S*H* and Banana Republic”); it’s that changes in the way we work (and think) tend to lead us to a related but rather different genre.

Ian McEwan On The Novella: ‘The Perfect Form Of Prose Fiction’

“It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who’s a genius on his best days). And this child is the means by which many first know our greatest writers. Readers come to Thomas Mann by way of Death in Venice, Henry James by The Turn of the Screw, Kafka by Metamorphosis, Joseph Conrad by Heart of Darkness.”

Follow The Red Line To Find Amsterdam’s Homeless Van Goghs

If visitors to the city’s Museumplein “look up they will then see a red line in the sky and if they follow that down narrow streets, across crowded junctions, over bridges, under a grim 1960s office block, and through pretty squares – they will arrive at the Van Gogh museum’s new home for the next six months, the Amsterdam branch of the Hermitage.”

Remember When Including Slang In Dictionaries Was Considered Outrageous?

These days the OED can list “bootylicious” and people barely blink. (Maybe they snicker.) “A half-century ago, when G. & C. Merriam Co. announced its new dictionary, Webster’s Third, there was an incredible outcry. It became known as ‘the permissive dictionary’ and provoked what was probably the greatest language controversy in American history.”