Author: ArtsJournal2

Instagram Seduces Booklovers With The ‘Seven Day Cover Challenge’

Bookstagram – that is, reviewers and other book people on Instagram – are addicted to book covers, and book cover posting challenges. One fashionista/book lover: “I got out all the books I had in closets. … I got the boxes out and found myself surrounded by books and thinking about all the feelings I have around books, that visceral connection to them, and not listening to Rachel Maddow for a change.” – The New York Times

It’s National Poetry Month in The U.S., And Poet Laureate Tracy Smith Has Some Things To Say

First of all, she has a daily podcast called The Slowdown (which honestly sounds perfect for a poet). She says that poems “remind us of what we feel. They bring language that may not have existed for us before that can be applied to … what’s going on inside. I also really like the way that when you read a poem with someone else, those feelings and thoughts become part of a conversation. And so, in my mind, poems are really great at bringing us into what feels like a real and meaningful kind of engagement with other people.” – NPR

How Did The Matrix, Which Was Super Weird For Its Day, Ever Get Made?

Truly, Hollywood is risk-averse, or at least its funders are. But “The Matrix was a mash-up of the Wachowskis’ many interests, blending their love of anime, martial-arts movies, cyberpunk literature, electronic music, and post-structuralist philosophy into a mainstream action flick. The siblings, still relatively unknown at the time, managed to do all of that on a moderate budget of $63 million, leaning on perfectly pre-visualized action sequences that helped define the next decade of cinema.” – The Atlantic

Not Only Aren’t Books Dead, But Cookbooks Sell Like Hotcakes

Cookbooks not only didn’t die, but one in the UK is selling as fast as J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown. What? “The future that Leith and Smith feared – where we do all our cooking from online searches on our tablets – simply hasn’t materialised. Or at least hasn’t caught on to anything like the scale of the apocalyptic projections. Many of us simply love cooking from cookbooks and, even in the Marie Kondo age, don’t want to give them up.” – The Observer (UK)

Thirty Years Ago, Winona Ryder’s Agent Begged Her Not To Star In ‘Heathers’

The cult classic turns 30 in a world where it could never get made again – and a world where Ryder became the representative for a certain section of her generation. Screenwriter Daniel Waters: “The triumph of the film is that Winona brings so much to the role. It’s so endearing. So, any rewrites I did, I ended up, I wouldn’t say softening her, but making her more real. Here I am trying to make a Stanley Kubrick teen film, a cold clinical dissection of teen films and I’ve got this pulsing heartbeat through Winona.” – Variety

Books Make Money, And Anyone Who Says They Don’t Is Lying In Order To Stiff Employees

Or at least that’s the claim a book editor is making: “In publishing circles, you often hear the phrase ‘I put up with it because I love my job so much’ – we accept the shortcomings and remind ourselves to be grateful for the privilege of working in an industry so seemingly fragile. However, contrary to popular belief, the industry is not at risk of dying – far from it.” – The Guardian (UK)

The Artist Whose Dying Wish Turned Her Neighbors Into Curators

Life-altering: “It was a week after the funeral of textile artist and teacher Joan Charnley, who died, at 84, in the summer of 2016, that her solicitor got in touch with her neighbours, Julian Bovis and Nigel Durkan, to tell them she had left them her house – a tall, listed Georgian building in Uppermill, on the edge of Saddleworth moor outside Manchester – and that she would like, although she understood it might not be possible, for it to be turned into what she quaintly called an ‘art house.'” (They did it.) – The Observer (UK)