“The immediate question is whether Sedaris’s stories are, strictly speaking, true – an important consideration for journalistic organizations such as NPR and programs such as This American Life. … Then there’s this: Does it matter whether a humorous writer, working on a news or nonfiction program, makes stuff up?”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Australian Nat’l University Drops Plan To Sack All Music Staff And Make Them Reapply
“ANU management has backed down over its plans to ‘spill’ the positions of 32 of its tenured and permanent academic and administrative staff at the School of Music today … While this does not change its plans to eliminate 10 of the 32 positions, it gives staff a greater chance to fight for their jobs or a chance at redeployment – as well as access to full redundancy provisions.
Evoking Monet’s Giverny With Real Plants
“Scott Pask made his entrance and spoke his first line: ‘The green needs to be a bit more blue’.” The Tony Award-winning set designer was at work at the New York Botanical Garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, helping create the new exhibit “Monet’s Garden.” “The task: evoking Giverny, the Normandy estate that was manse and muse to one of Impressionism’s founding fathers.”
What A Difference Some Props Make
“We get that Shakespeare wouldn’t be Shakespeare – and unimaginative programme designers the world over would be up the proverbial creek – without Desdemona’s handkerchief or Macbeth’s dagger. … But what about the impact prop choice can have within a production? What creative freedoms, extended by the playwright to the props person, can affect the outcome of a show?
Elaine Stritch Does Not Have Influences, Thank You
“I am not influenced by other human beings. But I am inspired. If I see a great performance on television, onstage, in the movies, I go to work the next day with a renewed energy and less fear. These great artists take me out of my life and make me want to go there. But I never imitated anyone. I walk out onstage and I’m my own performer.”
Reinvigorating Russian Orthodox Sacred Music
The St. Romanos International Composers Competition, launched this year as part of the state-run St. Petersburg International Choir Festival, aims to bring the church’s music (more central to worship than in the West) out of the powerful shadow of Russian Romanticism and into the 21st century. Roughly 300 scores were submitted; large, enthusiastic crowds turned out to hear the winning works.
Turkish ‘Shout Police’ Try To Make Istanbul’s Raucous Bazaar Vendors Pipe Down
“For centuries, traders in Turkey’s covered-market bazaars have been perfecting their pitch – famously hollering, singing or otherwise trumpeting their wares. But now an obscure provision of a new law is seeking to turn down the volume.”
Carlos Fuentes, 83
“[The] politically engaged Mexican novelist and irrepressible bon vivant … stood at the forefront of Latin American letters for more than half a century … In addition to his career as a novelist, Mr. Fuentes led an intellectually restless life as a political provocateur, an essayist, a screenwriter and playwright, an editor, an ambassador and a cultural historian.”
Twelve Russian Writers Organize Protest March, Thousands Join In
“There were no opposition leaders at the head of the vast column of people that peacefully wound its way through central Moscow on Sunday. There was, instead, a corpulent poet … A bespectacled detective novelist was autographing everything at hand … People mobbed a diminutive grandmother who has won many of Russia’s literary prizes.”
When Characters Are Already Onstage As The Audience Comes In
“The main reason for these pre-textual prologues, which blur the start time advertised in the papers, is presumably the pursuit of greater realism: a sense that the performance is joining a story that has begun some time before, rather than requiring a sudden suspension of disbelief. However, the strategy is risky because it creates unease in an auditorium.”