“The government is preparing to announce a review into ebook lending following calls from the opposition to move libraries ‘into the 21st century’. Although some of the UK’s library authorities do offer ebook lending, many do not, and many publishers have been wary of making their digital titles available for lending, meaning the range of ebooks in libraries is often restricted.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Are Shakespeare’s Women Second-Class Citizens? Janet Suzman Thinks So
“What I am struck by … is that none of the women are awarded interiority in nearly the same measure as the male characters. No soliloquies of any note, although Cleopatra comes nearest, achieving a Lear-like clarity about her place in the world after the death of Antony. And none of them earn the lengthy scholarly analysis accorded the eponymous heroes of the canon.”
Arrests Have Beijing’s Art World On Edge
“The frothy contemporary-art scene here has lost some of its ebullience in the three and a half months since a German art handler and a Chinese associate were detained on charges that they undervalued imported art to avoid customs duties.”
The Power Of Disgust
A growing body of research shows “that this emotion is a much more potent trigger for our behaviour and choices than we ever thought. The results play out in all sorts of unexpected areas, such as politics, the judicial system and our spending habits.”
Sure, Ted Shawn Founded Jacob’s Pillow, But He’s A Problematic Icon
“In his 1926 treatise The American Ballet, for instance, Shawn denigrated women (who greatly outnumbered men in the field), African Americans (he saw popular dances rooted in African American traditions, like the Charleston, as a threat to dance as an art-with-a-capital-A), and any immigrant without claim to an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ heritage (he was interested in creating a purely ‘American’ art form), in the service of his own mission.”
Video Valentines To Mr. B
Author and former New York City Ballet dancer Toni Bentley writes of coming across YouTube tributes (which include some very rare images) to George Balanchine and to one of his first ballerinas, Tamara Toumanova – made by the latter’s first cousin thrice removed, a teenaged pianist in Tbilisi.
1962, The Year Modern American Culture Was Born
“[This was] the year when Bob Dylan cut his first album. Andy Warhol’s first solo show, an exhibition of Campbell’s Soup cans, opened in Los Angeles in 1962, and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway. As dissimilar as these now-venerable objets d’art may seem to us now, they all had in common the iron determination of their creators to break decisively with the earnest, self-confident tone of postwar culture.”
Roman Polanski Gets A Marshall-McLuhan-In-Annie-Hall Moment
Blogger and aspect ratio obsessive Jeffrey Wells posted a rant this week slamming the Criterion Collection’s new remastering of Rosemary’s Baby for using what Wells sees as the wrong screen width-to-height proportion. And who should turn up at the tail end of the reader comments?
Ottawa’s Mayor Campaigns For Its Opera Company
“Opera Lyra, like a tragic heroine of the stage, is fighting to overcome the forces that oppose it. The Ottawa company has financial troubles … The company is going on the marketing offensive with a new series of promotional videos, each featuring one of ‘our city’s most recognizable names and faces,’ … The first ‘champion’ is Mayor Jim Watson.”
Who Was Edmund Burke? (Besides Statesman, Author And Orator)
“Everyone claims Edmund Burke as his patron saint, political forefather, lodestar and compass point, ancestral bulwark against the tide of whatever seething modern ill he despises. … But Edmund Burke the actual man is faded away – the man his wife called Ned, fond of vulgar puns and lewd jokes, an ample man, thin as a lad and then never again; the chatterbox ‘never unwilling to begin to talk, nor in haste to leave off,’ as Samuel Johnson said.”