“It’s scratchy, lasts only 78 seconds and features the world’s first recorded blooper. The modern masses can now listen to what experts say is the oldest playable recording of an American voice and the first-ever capturing of a musical performance, thanks to digital advances that allowed the sound to be transferred from flimsy tinfoil to computer.” (Audio here)
Author: Matthew Westphal
How Do We Know How Words Were Pronounced Pre-Recording Era?
“Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have restored an 1878 recording of a political reporter reciting ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and ‘Old Mother Hubbard.’ It is the oldest recording of an American voice. The discovery has one Explainer reader wondering: How do we know how people pronounced words before the recording age?”
Seeing Anna Pavlova On Film
“Though a number of big-time ballet figures – Frederick Ashton, Agnes de Mille – have said that Anna Pavlova was their inspiration, their thunderbolt, some people still regard her as a chocolate-box ballerina … But in 1916, [she] starred in a feature film, The Dumb Girl of Portici, … and it shows a very different side of Pavlova.”
A Mo Yan Theme Park: China Has Plans For Nobel Laureate’s Hometown
“One week after Mo Yan became the first Chinese author to win the Nobel prize, proud local officials rushed out a £70 million plan to transform his sleepy village into a ‘Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone’.” An official told Mo’s father, “Your son is no longer your son, and the house is no longer your house. It does not really matter if you agree or not.”
Pay-What-You-Want E-Book Bundle Makes $1M In Two Weeks
“An experiment from major authors including Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow, which allows readers to pay the price of their choice for a collection of ebooks, has shattered all expectations, racking up sales of more than $1.1m (£700,000) in under two weeks.”
Japan Abolishes Literature Translation Program – Based On Faulty Numbers
The defunct program “is called the JLPP, or Japanese Literature Publishing Project, a service launched in 2002 … to promote the translation of modern Japanese literature into four languages, English, French, German and Russian.” The decision to end JLPP was based, it turns out, on a badly botched report.
Protecting Didi, Gogo and Willy Loman
Arthur Miller’s estate just cracked down on an Australian production’s revision of Death of a Salesman (no epilogue, and Willy gasses himself rather than dying in an auto accident). The Beckett estate is notorious for its insistence on no deviations whatsoever from the script. Terry Teachout considers the limits of such protectiveness.
A Picasso Palimpsest
“For years conservators and art historians have known that hidden beneath the surface of Woman Ironing, long considered an example of his Blue Period, is the upside-down ghost of another painting – a three-quarter-length portrait of a man with a mustache that was first seen in images taken with an infrared camera in 1989.” Newer technology and conservation techniques have revealed far more about the painting than anyone expected.
It Worked, Damn It: Houston Picasso Vandal Lands Solo Gallery Show, Thanks To All The Attention
“A Houston, Texas, art gallery has raised the ire of the local art community by staging a show of works by a 22-year-old who’s been on the lam since being charged with spray-painting a Pablo Picasso painting. Despite the uproar, Cueto James Art Gallery owner James Perez expects a full house for Friday’s opening of 12 works by Uriel Landeros.”
A Ballet About Genocide
“The abstract scene with its single spotlight could represent a church in Rwanda, a labor camp in Cambodia or a gas chamber in Europe. Choreographer Stephen Mills said his ballet, entitled Light/The Holocaust and Humanity Project, is about all of those places – and any place – where intolerance turns into violence and genocide.”