“Reading, getting to know great poets and great prose was enormously helpful … It’s taught me a lot about the music of language … It behooves you to read as much poetry as you can – and to have a musical ear (which I fortunately have) – to know exactly where the climaxes are and where the codas are in your work.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Mysterious Buyer Of Munch’s Scream Revealed
“New York financier Leon Black paid Sotheby’s nearly $120 million for The Scream, Edvard Munch’s 1895 pastel of a terrified man holding his head, according to several people close to the collector.”
Are Bad Moods Contagious? Yup.
“Psychologists call this phenomenon emotional contagion, a three-step process through which one person’s feelings transfer to another person.”
Why Do We Wear Pants?
“It turns out the answer is inexplicably bound up with the Roman Empire, the unification of China, gender studies, and the rather uncomfortable positioning of man atop horse.”
‘I Was An A-List Writer Of B-List Productions’: Confessions Of A Made-For-TV Movie Scriptwriter
The beginner’s luck. The “in development” limbo. The meetings. The re-writing of your work. The meetings. The thrill of seeing the setting you imagined actually built. The excitement of penning an OJ Simpson project at high speed. The reviews (“This is another of television’s scavenger productions”). The brilliant work that never got produced. The residual checks.
Sopranos Live Longer Than Altos: Study
“[A] recent study compared the lifespans of 286 sopranos, altos, and mezzo-sopranos (the latter two were combined into one unit), born between 1850 and 1930. … [C]ontrolling for birth year (people born in 1850 were at a disadvantage!), sopranos lived about five years longer than the lower-voiced female singers.” The key? Higher estrogen levels, apparently.
Remember When ‘Satanic’ Heavy Metal Rockers Went After Christianity? Now Some Are Attacking Islam
“‘Burn the Quran! Burn the fucking Quran!’ [an Iraqi] woman screams hoarsely, over and over again. Tinny guitars course beneath her howls, sawing away at any semblance of melody. Sampled snippets of fundamentalist Islamic rhetoric filter through, and muffled voices exhort their unseen audience to praise Allah and to destroy the infidel.”
Singapore Airport Unveils ‘The World’s Largest Kinetic Art Sculpture’
“The seemingly alive installation, composed of 1,216 bronze droplets attached to individual motorized pulleys, bobs and weaves in Terminal 1’s departure hall at Changi Airport.”
Pulitzer Fiction Juror Tells What Happened In This Year Without A Prize
Michael Cunningham: “On April 16, 2012, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced that it would award no Pulitzer for fiction in 2012. This was, to say the least, surprising and upsetting to any number of people, prominent among them the three fiction jurors, who’d read over three hundred novels and short-story collections, and finally submitted three finalists, each remarkable (or so we believed) in its own way.”
Peter O’Toole Retires From Acting
The eight-time Oscar nominee, who turns 80 next month, said in a statement, “It is time for me to chuck in the sponge. The heart for it has gone out of me; it won’t come back.”