Author: ArtsJournal2

The Blogosphere Is Shrinking Again

And not just any blog is closing, but Feministing, one of the only remaining feminist blogs from the heyday of the 2000s. One of the site’s former editors says, “It was unclear how we could have such a ferocious audience and not be onto something. … Many of us involved in the feminist blogosphere are now in mainstream media, and that’s exciting. That said, we need independent media because they’re an important check.” – The New York Times

How Should Writers Create Literary Community For (And With) Parents?

Pen Parentis has lasted for more than a decade in a literary world that is decidedly unfriendly to working parents. “‘The way you hear it is in the people who don’t have kids and when you say, ‘We run this thing for parents,’ they say, ‘I’m too dedicated to my career; I could never have kids.’ … And that, to me, as a parent, makes me feel like someone who’s not as dedicated to my career because I decided to have kids, which is wrong.” – Literary Hub

Great Britain Has Fantastic Public Spaces, And A Kitschy Retail Christmas Market Doesn’t Fill Them Will

Architecture critic Rowan Moore is not thrilled with the thoughtless, crass commercialism filling Trafalgar Square. “It is not the presence of the market, precisely, that’s the problem, so much as the cluelessness with which it and other temporary elements are jammed in among the stonework. These include a crib housed in something like a bus shelter and a makeshift health-and-safety skirt of crush barriers and green tarpaulin around the 25-metre Christmas tree, donated every year by Norway in thanks for British help during the Second World War. If the Norwegians are kind enough to give us a tree … we should at least put a tiny bit of thought into whatever goes around its base.” – The Guardian (UK)

A Grudging Defense Of That Rather Expensive Banana Idea

Let’s go deep: “You are not a hopeless philistine if you find this all a bit foolish. Foolishness, and the deflating sensation that a culture that once encouraged sublime beauty now only permits dopey jokes, is Mr. Cattelan’s stock in trade. But perhaps you will find more to appreciate in Mr. Cattelan’s work if you take note of two points: one formal, one social.” – The New York Times

Little Women, The Book, Was Radical And Feminist In Its Day

And Greta Gerwig’s new movie version of it makes an attempt to reflect that. “We may these days … be surrounded by books containing extraordinary girls – Lyra, Hermione, Katniss – but it is striking that they are exceptions, and often alone; groups of girls in, say, the Gossip Girl books are toxic and destructive. Little Women is about ‘a world of women, of value in and of itself.’ It is also, Gerwig has said, ‘one of the few books about childhood that isn’t about escape. There is bravery, but it’s a hero’s journey contained inside the home.'” – The Guardian (UK)

René Auberjonois, ‘Star Trek’ and ‘MASH’ and ‘Benson’ Actor, Has Died At 79

Auberjonois – Father Mulcahy in the 1970 movie M.A.S.H., iconic chief of staff in the 1980s sitcom Benson, and Odo in the 1990s show Star Trek: Deep Space 9 – was also a stage star who earned a Tony for best actor, playing opposite Katherine Hepburn. “Much of his later career was spent doing voice-overs for animation, most memorably as the French chef who sings the love song to fish-killing, “Les Poissons” in Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989)- The Washington Post